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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#581

Post by deltarholamda »

boh wrote: post #243

Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality. Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War e…

All fair points. The change, as I see it, is the speed at which information flows. The old saying about how a lie can circle the world before the truth gets its trousers on applies. Only now, the lie can travel at the speed of light.

Narratives have a very strong early-mover bias.

The OPs point about things starting to crack in the Obama years rings true. For all of his positive points, there is nothing in Obama's resume that suggests he was qualified to be President. He was the first President to be memed into office. The press loved to talk about how adept the campaign was in utilizing the Internet to mobilize and motivate supporters.

Everybody took notice, and now the narrative battle happens online, at Internet speeds. This is a terrible, terrible idea. Unless you're some kind of otherworldly genius, taking in all of the input and coming to a rational opinion weighing all the pros and cons is impossible. So, like a black-box AI algorithm, people come up with opinions based on odd things like who has a more insulting neologism for their opponent, or whatever.

The "collective amnesia" you mention also occurs at Internet speeds. What was major news on Tuesday is fishwrap by Thursday, replaced with something else. There's no value in revisiting it, so whatever narrative gets entrenched is it.

I don't think there's a solution for any of this, short of a CME wiping out everything more technological than a shovel.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#582

Post by namelessoracle »

throwaway15908 wrote: post #528
namelessoracle wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is our unsustainable system, which is independent from any population count I mean it's just science that the planet can only sustain X people at Y life style (you can swap out "life style" for "level of consumption"). Like there is hard rules of physics about quantity of water, minerals, et cetra. So you can either lower X, lower Y, or try to side step the problem entirely by going to other planet…

A system is either sustainable or not, this is independent of population. The sustainable level of consumption is dependent on population.

What?

A glass can hold X amount of water. You add X plus 1 and water spills out. "Guess the glass couldn't sustain X water!" is what you are claiming?

Systems can only be sustained within certain parameters. There is no magical system that is always sustainable regardless of parameters. But it sounds like we are saying basically the same thing in any case.

Consumption can go down and more population can be supported. Or consumption can continue at current levels but population will have to go down. (and that level it would have to go down might be truly horrific)

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#583

Post by dwater »

nradov wrote: post #425
mrits wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a much different experience. I have a dozen family members that were part of the auto industry in Michigan. They were on top of the world for decades. It ended with most of them thinking society has collapsed in the 80s and doubting they'd actually get their pension. My grandfather spent the last 30 years of his life in retirement collecting a pay check that he thought might be his last.

This is why defined benefit pension plans are so risky for retirees, employers, and taxpayers. We need to completely eliminate them and use defined contribution plans such as 401(k) instead. That way retirees actually own the assets in individual named accounts and those can't be taken away if the employer is sold or goes bankrupt.

Pensions do have risk, but you act as if 401(k) style plans don’t. Imagine how difficult it would be to plan fastidiously for your retirement and then have the stock market collapse and wipe out 1/4 or 1/2 of your savings. Yes, you should diversify your investments to reduce your exposure, but in this instance the risk and responsibility is on you the individual. Isn’t it strange how two different systems that on paper have totally different risk profiles both have a huge risk of low and middle net worth individuals getting wiped out?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#584

Post by [deleted] »

ravenstine wrote: post #111

Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…

[deleted]

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#585

Post by rotexo »

YATA1 wrote: post #555
rotexo wrote: post #385

Hits close to home. Several years ago, people from one end of the political spectrum mistook me for another person on the opposite end of the political spectrum and doxxed me. I haven’t been able to correct the record to any real extent, and I basically live in fear that the whole situation will flare up again, and all it will take is for one crazy person with a lethal weapon to find me and make me pay, and that’ll b…

And some people laugh at the notion of staying anonymous online.

Bingo. Like many in my generation, I used to not worry about it at all. Now I am a bit obsessive—constantly checking my name, number, and address on people finder sites and sending takedown requests when they pop back up, and currently trying to transition all my online accounts to use e-mail addresses provided by Hide My E-mail on iCloud (which is quite the project). Seems like changing my e-mail on different accounts could be useful, since people would be less likely to connect those different accounts. I keep reporting the links to the doxxed info on pastebin, Twitter, and google (pro-tip: you can ask google to remove doxxed information from their search results). I know I will never be able to ask the actual extremists to take down my name when I am mid-identified as that other person, which sucks. And it still feels like there might be some other exposure that’s just waiting to blow up in my face. Open to suggestions on the subject if anyone has any.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#586

Post by techsupporter »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #541
treis wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder about people that post things so divorced from reality. We have five times as many college grads today as we did in 1960: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...

I added the clause: "With no student loan debt to worry about!" above. That's an important aspect, I think. They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example) where as now people have to consider how they're going to pay back that debt and choose degrees in fields that will enable them to do so.

> They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example)

I also wonder how much of that growth is from high school students being told to go to college above all else, and how this graduation increase corresponds to enrollment and graduation from vocational schools.

I do think your point is the big one: people could go into college and come out with knowledge in the so-called soft skills, like philosophy or literature (areas that don't pay well but are vital for a society to understand itself, if nothing else). Why society doesn't value teaching and similar jobs as much as it does other industries is left as a debate for another time.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#587

Post by spaniard89277 »

Clubber wrote: post #482
sleepdreamy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? It's truly laughable if you don't think boomers had a clear advantage in comparison to Millennials, Gen X, etc; I'm sorry you didn't reap the benefits of the most benevolent time in America's history but plenty of your Boomer counter-parts sure as hell did. I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally ga…

>You might not like it, but Boomers took their hoard and pulled the ladder up behind them. It is what it is. And what mechanism did they use to do this exactly? >I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally gave up and resort to 'UNFAIR MEH WON'T TRY NOW'. Am in that camp? No. I don't get upset when people generalize bec…

Housing in almost all the west is a huge rent extraction scheme made possible by politicians catering to boomers and run by boomer savings allocated in real state + NIMBYism from boomers that prevent the market to adjust.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#588

Post by judahmeek »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #526
Melatonic wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those very much do not sound like "things are falling apart" to me

It’s interesting, even if you don’t believe in a higher power, people that believe in God have far lower rates of depression and suicide, so if you try to optimize your life for happiness and mental robustness, it’s then logical to believe in a higher power. This is an interesting manifestation of the incompleteness theorem. :)

I don't consider basing my worldview on emotion-based fantasies mentally robust.

Is it possible that believing a lie increases ones chances of being happy & less depressed?

Sure, but that doesn't make it worthwhile.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#589

Post by freebuju »

I concur with everything the author says here. If you want to visualize this for yourself, just take yourself back to the whole science/anti-vaxx debate we've had the past 2 years. That was a pretty accurate picture of the biblical tower of babel. Social media as a tool keeps sowing more division than ever because that's the growth incentive and we are too afraid to kill the golden goose. Once the metaverse becomes a thing, we will have better bricks to build the tower even higher.

China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. This disruption will have devastating effects. The accelerated move to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be even more disruptive, unlike anything we as humans have ever known. We keep on ignoring the global warming threat because we think our survival will be under threat if we go cold turkey on fossil energy and the creature comforts necessary to forestall the climate disaster. The covid pandemic gave us all a unique opportunity to recalibrate our collective lives. Today, we go about our daily lives as if the past 3 years was just a bad dream. I very much doubt we can make it through another global pandemic on a scale as or bigger than covid was in the near future.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#590

Post by RubberMullet »

ajross wrote: post #367
RubberMullet wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you consider good journalism these days? And is the right wing news industry bigger or smaller than the left wing side of things?

I understand the fight your picking, but really this isn't that much of an argument. "Mainstream media" makes mistakes. It has perspectives that leak through into interpretation. It has blindspots in coverage. But mainstream journalists almost to a fault genuinely view their job as bringing important facts to their audience, and they care about getting things right. That's just not true of the partisan press on the r…

>But mainstream journalists almost to a fault genuinely view their job as bringing important facts to their audience, and they care about getting things right.

What you call "mainstream media" I call "corporate media". And some journalists may feel that way however clicks, eyeballs, and stickiness take priority over their views. There’s too much competition for traditional media outlets to survive without adopting techniques that were once unthinkable. Corrections are rarely issued these days and edits are done in an almost stealthy manner. I had to stop following the Twitter accounts that tracked these changes because it became an endless stream of tweets.

The days of Tim Russert, David Broder, Jim Lehrer, Ted Koppel etc. are long gone. I would consider Matt Taibbi[1] one of the last journalists that followed in their footsteps but he is definitely not corporate and barely mainstream. Taibbi left Rolling Stone and uses Substack which has been attacked by the NYT, and others, as alt-right and misinformation which I find ironic coming from the paper that published Judith Miller’s WMDs propaganda. Even Jason Calacanis referred to Taibbi as a “right guy” on one of the recent All-In podcasts even though Matt is an ardent Sanders supporter. The Blob doesn’t like it when you don’t toe the line.

Corporate media is dead to me even though the vast majority of it is "Left".

>I understand the fight your picking, but really this isn't that much of an argument.

Really? I don't watch Fox News or any corporate media and you assumed I did. You might be shocked to learn that I worked in the Clinton administration and voted for Obama!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrlHnhnmB1A

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