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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#751

Post by jaegerpicker »

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?

Because someone has to know how to grow the potato or raise the cow or plant the corn. Right now we (modern first world countries) export that to fragile processes far away. Generally at great cost, environmentally and to the people/countries we export form. See the Amazon rainforest, slave labor in China or Africa, or un-controlled overfishing.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#752

Post by TimPC »

Manuel_D wrote: post #727
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…

Building taller, denser housing doesn't pop the real-estate bubble. As cities grow denser, the land gets more expensive because land is finite. The solution to housing shortages is to build more, denser housing. The existing homeowners aren't getting a bad deal - they'll still be able to sell their houses at an immense gain. It's just that the same plot of land would occupy more units of housing. This is largely how…

Density is not a panacea though. Density reduces revenue per capita as you end up with property tax from the cheaper housing so as you build it you see declines in services. Most notably education, if you ever wondered why suburbs tend to have much better schools than urban areas a big factor in any jurisdiction where schools are paid for in part through property tax is that the suburbs have more property tax per student.

Roads are also an issue as it is seldom viable to build more of them and there is limited ability to widen the ones we do have. The net result is a substantial worsening of transit infrastructure to levels far worse than ever intended for those neighbourhoods.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#753

Post by rank0 »

namelessoracle wrote: post #577
rank0 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if shit gets bad enough for the general population, they go after the elites in full force. This is why we have constant revolution throughout human history.

Whats scary to me is that before the elites needed other non elites to be bodyguards/administrators/army/muscle for them to help avoid that, and they at least had to trickle down to their henchmen to keep in power. What happens when they have automation for that?

Honestly good point idk. I like to think that a fully self sustaining autonomous defense system will never exist

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#754

Post by throwaheyy »

shadowgovt wrote: post #485
AutumnCurtain wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that I suspect it's because the major politicians of one of the two major parties overwhelmingly tell them it was. Trump says so, the Republicans who follow him say so, and the alternative is to…

The fact that the leadership of a major party has chosen to not show restraint is certainly part of it. But there is a reason that their message is resonating instead of the voters just turning away in disgust and the party replacing those pressing that narrative with someone else in the party as leadership. Instead, the party is bending towards that messaging because it is resonating with voters.

Is it about the messaging though?

Maybe it's instead about classic American entitlement?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#755

Post by hn_version_0023 »

noplsbecivil wrote: post #635
hn_version_0023 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My personal experience says otherwise, but I’ll concede that accounting does have value.

Marketing? Well, we can disagree there — to me marketing is making a science out of “parting fools with their money”, so to speak. It’s always felt fundamentally dishonest and a little dirty. But again, thats me and I am definitely biased.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#756

Post by jaqalopes »

basisword wrote: post #423
jaqalopes wrote: post #7

I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point…

While I agree that buying property has become very difficult, what has changed in 2022 that prevents you from getting a stable white collar job or finding a partner? If you have the requisite skillset (which can be acquired more easily than ever thanks to the internet) getting a stable white collar job is very possible. And in the age of dating apps, so much friction has been removed when it comes to finding a partne…

While I know you inteded this as a direct question, I'm actually going to give a meta-response. It seems to me that you think that the problem I'm outlining in my "train" analogy is that I personally am not on the train. To the contrary, the problem is that there is a train at all. Even if/when I manage to climb safely aboard, I'll have left behind an entire class of people who weren't so lucky. Smart, capable people who just wanted to do something respectable and beneficial for the world, like teaching or journalism or home health aide. I understand that all those people could just give up on what they're doing and "learn 2 code" but I think it should be obvious that (a) not everyone wants to code (or can do it to a high level), and (2) a society made up entirely of coders is not desirable.

More broadly though, I suspect you and I just have totally different worldviews. You correctly point out that there are straightforward steps to escape the crushing hopelessness of life in the modern underclass. What I'm saying is that it should be made possible and in fact easy for people to carry on a dignified, non-hopeless existence without being coerced into chasing the absolute highest-paying job available. I suspect this comes down to personality. If you're satisfied living "defensively," putting aside what you most crave or are actually best at in favor of the thing that will keep you protected while the rest of society atrophies, well that's lucky for you. But not everyone is wired that way. If we were, I doubt things like good food or art or music would exist.

As for the dating thing, if you're not on the dating market right now you might not be aware that COVID massively messed things up. People now (myself included) are weirder than pre-2020. Human connection is harder. In fact, I'm going on IRL dates from apps most weekends now, but it's still a struggle compared to how things used to be, for me at least.

I doubt anyone is still reading by this point but I will say this: my original post was not about how my life is falling apart. I suspect I'll be fine; I'm doing more or less exactly what I want to do, all day, every day. The issue is, net net, lots of people are struggling. If people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps was a viable solution, we'd live in a utopia by now.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#757

Post by epolanski »

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…

> But much of our society is built on real estate growth

As an italian, I don't get that.

I bought a 240k euros home for 25k in advance and 550 €s month of mortgage for the next 30 years. And in 30 years I will pay nothing, neither rent nor mortgage. That's why I did that.

Real estate growth wasn't even in the back of my mind. I bought a home to have MY place, and to stop paying 750€ plus rent to some landlord. Rent will also go up with inflation, mortgage payment will get smaller and smaller meanwhile thanks to inflation.

I just don't understand the whole estate growth thing at all.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#758

Post by pianoben »

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…

> Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming.

I really don't see it that way - this isn't at all a new phenomenon. What feels different to me is the intensity and pervasiveness of division, but then again that could be attributed to being more generally aware of things thanks to the Internet.

I'm 39 and have lived in America all my life. In my childhood, I dimly recall bitter rows over whatever Regan was doing - my parents lost friends over their opposition to him. In the 90s, Clinton scandals were all people could talk about for a good while. George W, of course, took social division to new heights - or, at least, I was finally old enough to appreciate just how far-ranging the dividing effects of ideology can be.

I remember in my first job in the mid-2000s, my team was already socially-clustered based on political/religious identity - "Libs" weren't invited to some parties, and vice-versa.

Of course, Obama's election really triggered a certain section of society, there's no denying that, but all that is to say that none of this is really new. In my view, our "tribes" broadly descend from pro- vs. anti-slavery camps, and the different geographic targets of migration from different parts of England and Europe. (I highly recommend the book Albion's Seed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed), which explores the influence of regional cultures of 18th-century Britain on American cultures).

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#759

Post by [deleted] »

rotexo wrote: post #717
uejfiweun wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you sue these people? This situation sounds pretty ridiculous.

I was advised by multiple sources not to try. The initial people took down the info pretty immediately, but now it persists over a lot of forums, blog posts, etc., so I imagine it would be a game of whack-a-mole that would require significant legal resources, and it would draw a lot of attention, which would be unpleasant.

[deleted]

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#760

Post by treis »

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.

Still more debt free graduates today than total graduates in the 50s/60s.
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