Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is everything falling apart?

nonzero.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 970 posts

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#741

Post by kkfx »

Our society is in a big change phase so anything need to fall apart while the new emerge. So far we see the decline, still too early to see the new.

Beware a thing: while things changes, an old model disappear a new one is gestating human needs do not change that much in fundamental terms. Our eating, sleeping and sexual needs are still the same. So not "all" fall apart but something at a time, something will remain, something grow, something change, something disappear etc.

We have electrical lights since "much" time, but we still have stearic candles on sale. In the past they was a big industry, now is marginal, but it's still there. Civil construction techniques have changed much, but we still have the concept of construction companies. Dress have changed much, but not that much. We still have pants, skirts, jackets, hats in new shapes, different tissues but essentially the same since hundreds of years.

What's really falling apart is the present paradigm, the economy-centric society of neoliberal capitalism that it's about to overthought itself to remain in power.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#742

Post by korse »

nvr22aat wrote: post #575
asdff wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace potato with any old piece of handy info, like home or car maintenance. A lot of younger Americans (myself included) have little practical knowledge, so everything needing knowhow in this generation must be outsourced. Compare this to my grandfather's generation, he knew how to frame houses, plumb, electric work, auto work, gardening, etc, and he was not alone. If he needed something done you'd get four of you…

This sounds a little rose tinted to me. I personally think for simpler tasks, much more information is available these days compared to older times. There's many resources on how to grow a potato (and other things) on the Internet. For other tasks, some things have simply become a lot more complicated to work on. Electronics were a lot simpler in older times, for instance; swapping out a surface mount quad flat packa…

Information about 'how to grow a potato' and a season or two of experience working out the kinks of growing a small crop of potatoes on available land near you are two very different things.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#743

Post by 22122 »

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. :)

Corelation does not imply causation. Maybe its that people who are prone to depression have some factors that make them less likely to believe in religion.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#744

Post by guessbest »

zdragnar wrote: post #634
guessbest wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, this was a telecom company where the Canadian executives were siphoning money from the American work force, which was net profitable. The Canadian side was losing money by the billions. The pensions were down to a mid sixty percent reduction before the American government stepped in to stop the transfers. It was in all the papers.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#745

Post by oicU00 »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #470
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…

>We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. This is hyperbolic. The US is not a banana republic. Why would you expect the average person to need to know how to grow a potato?

The average person actually exists. They should have reality based skills and knowledge in self sufficiency.

Low effort consumerism, freedom to, takes freedom from others.

Freedom to be yourself cannot cost others freedom from the same. We’re a caste system that uses concepts like net worth as the measure instead of religious sigils and totems.

Freedom to sit at home on a laptop takes freedom from others in measurable ways; making less for work laptoppers want to avoid but need is kind of a joke system.

Remember millions of real people are being pinched harder and harder. That’s never ended well in human history. You can’t simply point at a philosophy and demand well understood biology to deal with it forever.

What’s hyperbolic is a defense squishy meat bags very much like passed squishy meat bags aren’t just larping the same old. That somehow magically it’s all different.

Keeping stats in the right place just makes truism out of political bias.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#746

Post by jaegerpicker »

drugstorecowboy wrote: post #334
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…

> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where i…

This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#747

Post by kelseyfrog »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #520
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…

Efficiency is always at odds with robustness, it’s unfortunate that people forget…

It seems obvious, but I'll accept disagreements as a way to learn. While we aspire to build anti-fragile systems, there are real sort term incentives to building efficient fragile systems. Capitalistic incentives exactly like evolutionary pressures, have no responsibility to provide solutions which match our views on how the way the world should work, what's fair, and what's just. I find it personally difficult to assume that a business owner when faced with the a series of micro-choices each of which impacts profit could not choose to maximize profit the majority of the time even at the expense of robustness or anti-fragility. It's this garden path optimization that leads to catastrophic outcomes like supply chain paralysis or bankruptcy.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#748

Post by [deleted] »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #697
judahmeek wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every religion states that the other religions are lies, which means that, at the very least, the majority of religious people believe a lie as a fundamental aspect of their worldview. Thus, you apparently can be genuinely happier if your worldview is based on a lie. Still not worth it.

“ Every religion states that the other religions are lies “ Almost no religions state this, it might be an interesting thought experiment to steel-man your arguments :)

[deleted]

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#749

Post by TimPC »

justin66 wrote: post #591
TimPC wrote: post #211

I'd argue that the greater risk of things falling apart is economic rather than political. We've built our society on two near-ponzi schemes that are in danger of falling apart. The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from t…

> This literally meets the definition of a ponzi scheme It absolutely does not. Investors in a Ponzi scheme do not have the information needed to allow them to be aware of the fraud involved. In contrast, at any given point in time you can extrapolate when the Social Security system (for example - the same principle applies to any pension that isn't literally cooking the books) will need to start drawing on the gener…

This is splitting hairs. You are forcibly invested in social security so you have to pay it even if the numbers indicate you won't be able to get anything back out from it. If the distinction between this and a Ponzi scheme is having the information it's a mighty fine distinction when you have zero ability to act on the information you have.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#750

Post by imtringued »

kbelder wrote: post #424
tyingq wrote: post #377

I have noticed a pretty strong trend of "falling apart" in specific niche. It seems related to the combination of inflation and people being fed up with low wages. It's hard to get workers for low paying jobs, and the things those places are selling have gotten more expensive. So we're paying quite a lot more for services and goods, but the quality of those things are declining at the same time. Declining quality bot…

{I'll be savaged for this comment} but I think that'll be fixed by the free market, if we let it. The trouble is that it doesn't happen instantly; there'll be a lot of reluctance to raise wages, a lot of reluctance to value unpleasant jobs more, it'll take a while for the wage gain/inflation feedback loop to settle down... and in the mean time, there's a lot of suffering. To make things worse, attempts to shortcut th…

That sounds like a non-solution. Especially the reference to "the" free market, such a thing does not exist. You can't just take whatever market we have, with all its imperfections and then slap the label "free market" on it, it doesn't work that way.

If something is unfair, you shouldn't call it fair because of ideology.

For example, my primary objection to the idea that we have a free market is that we are mortal and are born with basic needs that must partially be acquired from the last generation. If people need land to live on, and land is owned by old people, then the young must appeal to the old to be allowed to exist on this planet. At that point, any attempt to call the market we have "free" becomes completely absurd because the term "free" now refers to the freedom of letting someone else take your freedom away.

In fact, most "free market" attempts are entirely about sweeping the problem under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist, which only makes it worse due to negligence. Just drop the damn "free", in Germany people just talk about the "market" in general. They just say "market economy". In fact one of the most common sarcastic phrases is "Der Markt regelt das", "the market is going to fix that" when talking about market failures.

In theory I agree that a free(=freedom) market would be good for everyone, but the amount of people that want a free(=freedom) market is incredibly small. Capitalists don't want a free(=freedom) market for example, because that would be the end of capitalism. They want a free(=without cost to capitalists) market, which is inherently against the idea of maximizing freedom and self determination.

Take Say's Law for example. If we postulate that Say's Law is correct and involuntary unemployment is impossible, then for our market to be "free(=freedom)", we should make it impossible to let the economy reach states that make involuntary unemployment possible. That means the ability to indefinitely defer spending shouldn't exist beyond the point that people agree to let someone defer spending. That would immediately break the idea of endless capital accumulation. Capital accumulation would have to stop at some point and that means the end of capitalism.

Who here is ready for the end of capitalism? Does anyone want to live in a market economy that isn't capitalism? Just a regular market? I doubt anyone is.

Post reply on HN