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Is everything falling apart?

nonzero.substack.com

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#651

Post by kergonath »

kristjansson wrote: post #633
2ion wrote: post #323

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. 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.

Yeah, and if the study of populations has shown us anything, exponentials can also turn quickly into gaussians when a tipping point is passed. Not all of them end up as nice (if you are not afraid of the end of growth anyway) logistic curves.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#652

Post by weakfish »

rabuse wrote: post #383
epicureanideal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want a standard of living that requires competitiveness globally, but in this country, we no longer want to work for it. That’s not what I see at all. Most working people in the current generation are working more hours, at more skilled jobs, with more education than their parents, and yet the lifestyle they can afford (aside from tech gadgets) is worse and less secure than their parents. I’m pessimistic about…

This just doesn't seem to be the case with the peers I know, and covid made everything worse for morale. Nobody really wants to work anymore, service speed has fallen off a cliff in my area (South Florida), staff shortages are still in effect, nobody wants to have kids/get married, etc.

Nobody wants to work because no human feels that the abuse service workers receive is worth a wage fundamentally too low to live on.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#653

Post by JKCalhoun »

Tepix wrote: post #560
oicU00 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forec…

> ...and some numbers are wacky. > I guess teaching kids to trust in science and not in imaginary friends is slowly paying off.

OP didn't say kids trust science though. It could be they reject everything. :-(

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#654

Post by kansface »

NationalPark wrote: post #140
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…

We have some relatively recent public polling data on this phenomenon: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/20/republicans... For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well.

Looking at that data, Republicans trust the institutions they control and Democrats trust the institutions they control, with the trends following the direction the institutions are themselves moving. Our institutions continue to polarize and cleave society as a consequence.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#655

Post by Aunche »

epicureanideal wrote: post #295
ozzythecat wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s something more fundamental going on in the US. First, I’d want to say that we as humans love to simplify complex things. There are large macroeconomic trends at play that are boring or hard to explain, and it’s easier to blame immigrants, social media, or blame because that gives us an outlet to make sense out of complexity. For politicians, depending on their political leanings, it gives them a way t…

> They want a standard of living that requires competitiveness globally, but in this country, we no longer want to work for it. That’s not what I see at all. Most working people in the current generation are working more hours, at more skilled jobs, with more education than their parents, and yet the lifestyle they can afford (aside from tech gadgets) is worse and less secure than their parents. I’m pessimistic about…

> Most working people in the current generation are working more hours

This is just completely false. Both average working hours (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG) and labor force participation (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...) has been trending downwards. I think more revealing than our hours of work is our attitudes towards work. Watch American Factory and observe the difference between Chinese and American workers. The Chinese workers simply care a lot more about getting their jobs done. I do think it's a good thing that we can afford to have higher standards for ourselves, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking this doesn't come with any downsides.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#656

Post by relaxing »

treis wrote: post #504
UncleOxidant wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century And it wasn't just journalism. After WWII many veterans took advantage of the free education offered by the GI Bill. That gave us a lot of highly educated people (with no student loan debt to worry about!) who then went on to use that education to improve things. Couple thi…

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...

But the claim wasnt that there aren’t more college grads now, and there’s no need for the ad hominem first sentence.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#657

Post by I-M-S »

bsenftner wrote: post #347
xen2xen1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of folks think the world already ended, and we're just waiting on the collapse. That now both on the right and left.

I used to work in film, and every once in a while I get a script to read, passed around because it is "too good to be made". One such script I read about 2 years ago had the premise of an archeological discovery, rapidly verified and with duplicates found all over the world proving "the rapture" happened back in the year 1000 AD. The modern world realizes we're in the 2nd century of the 10,000 year reign of Satan. Al…

You probably meant 2nd millennium (VS century). Is this script available on the Black List?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#658

Post by lampshades »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #36

I remember watching the universal disdain Americans shared for high finance after 2008 and even movements like Occupy Wall Street resonated with a lot more people than one would have predicted. Then, all of the sudden, a whole new field of social engineering algorithms are unleashed on the populace, convincing everyone that their neighbor is the true enemy.

And now we're even teaching children which "group" they belong in, from the time they're in kindergarten, to further divide the populace so that we can be at war with each other instead of them.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#659

Post by jdkee »

“ As I emphasized in Nonzero, the digital revolution—even before the internet age dawned, and certainly after that—did what the printing press did: It made promulgating information cheaper and easier.”

The author clearly underestimates how many orders of magnitude greater the Internet’s impact is over printed words.

EDIT: for clarity.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#660

Post by krapp »

throwaway15908 wrote: post #212
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to necessarily defend "woke" as a term, but if you pinned me down, I'd say the difference between woke and left is that Noam Chomsky isn't woke. He thinks free speech is very important and signed onto a famous letter on the topic of "cancel culture" and why it's bad. I don't think he has or would identify as anti-woke, but the general phenomenon of ideological capture in mass communications is something…

So you agree with me, that left and woke is not the same thing. Whats odd thou is, (1) there is no clear definition of wokeism, like its an arbitrary stereotype used by demagogues and (2), that woke is often displayed on the other side of right/conservative. This makes it a strong indicator of propaganda. A surface, people can project their negative emotions to, which is another red flag in terms of populism. Even yo…

"woke" has a clear definition and origin in black activism. Like a lot of concepts from black activism, it became co-opted by well meaning white liberals, encompassing many other forms of progressive activism and eventually became more about virtue signalling than productive activism, much less black allyship.

Then, like so many other progressive and left-activist terms, it got co-opted again and inverted by the right into a general pejorative, indicating nothing other than mockery and caricature of the left. But it definitely came from somewhere and it at least used to mean something.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

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