Is everything falling apart? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#631

Post by TimPC » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #409

liketochill wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the retirement age I think is not fair. Asking guys in their 60’s to do the same work as guys in their 40’s is not fair if the job is at all a hands on doing job. Anything as simple as a big flight of stairs can become a major obstacle. If all you do is go up and down elevators, talk, and use a computer then you can go as long as your mind stays sharp and you have the drive. Not everyone loves their job after…

In the UK the retirement age of 65 (for men) was set when life expectancy was 64. Now life expectancy is 81, and the retirement age is only 66. Completely untenable when the generation retiring has also taken the lions share of property wealth, imposed student debt upon and consistently voted against the interests of the generation paying for their retirement.

These figures are highly misleading though because life expectancy includes significant outliers dragging the number down from infant mortality rates which declined over the same period. It is not the case that your life expectancy given reaching age 60 has increased by anywhere near as much as 17 years over the same time period.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#632

Post by Animats » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

Those aren't the big problems. These are the big problems the US faces:

* Putin wants to conquer Eastern Europe. It's been over 75 years since a major nation in Europe had comparable territorial ambitions, and that didn't end well. Nuclear war at some scale is a very real possibility, especially if Russia starts losing in a big way.

* Coronavirus. It's not over. 988,690 US deaths to date. Case rates are headed up again.

* Global warming. It's just getting started.

* Supply insecurity. Between troubles with Russia and China, and coronavirus, there are far more shortages.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#633

Post by kristjansson » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

2ion wrote: post #323

karpierz wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production. > The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. Hello from a V…

>> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. > >Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production. Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are…

Economic and biological growth curves look exponential right up until they don't. Both are limited by energy consumption, and nothing with limits can exceed the growth rate of its constraint.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#634

Post by zdragnar » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

guessbest wrote: post #241

zdragnar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all pensions are well managed; some have needed bailing out from public coffers. Other companies have shuttered completely, and the lack of incoming money to the pension funds made them insolvent (again, not especially well managed).

Its doesn't have to be public bailouts. There is something for Americans where the pension funds have been seized by the federal government to be managed. I worked for a company where the executives were using pension funds to give themselves annual bonuses until the federal government stepped in around 2009. There wasn't much money left over, so I'll be receiving very little, but at least the executives could raid t…

It's a shame that you got screwed out of what you'd been promised. I'm guessing yours wasn't in the $86 billion bailout (maybe because it only went to multi-employer union plans?)

> https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-relief-bill-gives-86-b...

Unfortunately, it's not just the private sector pensions that have been mismanaged (or raided, as you pointed out) which are in dire straits. California, in particular, has a lot of public pension headaches that will be coming to a head (and in some cases already have):

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/19/why...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#635

Post by noplsbecivil » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #580

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...

It isn’t obvious from your link… what % of current grads are “business majors” who don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy and justify it with fancy PowerPoint slide decks? The number of grads may have gone way up, but I think the education itself had slid down the slippery slope to create too many administrators and bureaucrats.

"don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy" - this is a pretty bad faith take, and also simply not true. In the US at least, business grads typically take accounting courses, marketing courses, even statistics courses. All of those skills lead to jobs that can provide both societal and economic value.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#636

Post by giraffe_lady » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #607

giraffe_lady wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see that there's a moral way for people exit the solar system boundary out "into the stars." No one making that choice can arrive there, or even experience an appreciable part of the trip in one life. It's committing generations to be born, live and die for no purpose except to exist and to breed for some future goal of some past people. I believe this to be wicked. People have always migrated into the unknow…

The idea of going multiplanetary is not to abandon Earth out of necessity, but out of precaution. When you make a backup of your hard disk, it's usually not because you intend to go use your other one for target practice. Waiting to leave Earth when problems become clearly insurmountable is akin to waiting to backup your HDD until you notice it's failing. Indeed the very first thing we should start doing once we begi…

Human lives aren't data to be stored against future need. These "backups" aren't redundant; they will have worth, and demands, and dreams, and rights of their own. Are we adequately accounting for that when we imagine this interstellar future? Are we able to meet our responsibility to them with the dignity they deserve? I strongly do not think we are.

It's chilling but correct that so much of the language around this concept talks of colonies, because that is what we're discussing. Other lives, kept far away, for some benefit to ourselves, but not to them.

Until we can present a plausible vision for "the good life" in space, away from the earth that birthed us, we should not be pursuing this goal. If we end then so be it. We have many other means to reduce that possibility, much more accessible, that we're refusing to use right now. Let's pick up that shovel and see how far we can get first.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#637

Post by formerkrogemp » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

buscoquadnary wrote: post #478

newbamboo wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?

Well the USSR isn't around anymore and they had quite a few nukes so....

But the nukes are still around. Except Ukraine gave theirs up. It's not like they had a choice.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#638

Post by Izkata » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

mikkergp wrote: post #30

lbj wrote: post #6

Quoted post unavailable.

> For millennia every human has known what a woman and a man is, now even supreme court justices in American don't know. What does this mean? Are you talking about gender or sex?

It's one specific justice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtGzJxiONU

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#639

Post by scollet » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

dnate wrote: post #141

goatlover wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there can't be any civilizations in the universe which exist indefinitely? For the past millions or even billions of years? If humans get past the next couple of centuries and start spreading out into the solar system and possibly beyond, what would cause us to have a last generation?

At some point, the heat death of the universe [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

Dad said I could stay up late!

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#640

Post by throwaway15908 » Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #593

throwaway15908 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to write "The Problem we both have is mislabeling" but then i realized that we dont have the same problem. From my perspective, conservatives/rights often stand out with blatant and harmful falsehoods. Even in your last post is a central self contradiction. >movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated >If I go around telling people "anti-racis…

"Anti-racism is bad" is meant to be negated. It would be totally reasonable for someone to respond by saying "well, I actually think anti-racism is good, and here's why". There's a risk of labels getting in the way, no doubt. But there's a lot of things that seem straightforwardly impossible to reason about without labels. How could we discuss what the abstract principles of race relations in the US should be without…

Black people were discriminated in the US from the beginning. This discrimination continued long after civil rights reforms in public and private institutions.

Even if you could magically eliminate racism in every human brain on earth with a snap of your fingers, the socio-econimic factors, inherited from the beginning would continue to be disadvantageous for blacks. So the racism back then, even when not present in minds today, would persist. This is called systemic racism, because we discriminate indirectly, not by skin color but by education, vocabulary, human capital in general. And on top, racism will of course prevail in minds.

From that, you can easily advocate for some sort of compensation, some kind of counter discrimination, anti-racism.

I find that term troublesome too, because you actually asking for support for all poor people, not just blacks, but i would never call it a ideological label and bad, because i can see the reason behind it. Using it as a label and associating it with (group) identity is unfortunate but not my mistake.