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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#901

Post by Melting_Harps »

underlying1941 wrote: post #872
Melting_Harps wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow. Education has been forcefully disrupted, by the institutions themselves no less: Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along, most institutions are just costly degree mills with little to no emphasis on truly educated their students. I personally attend…

3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners. See also: Shipping container houses.

> 3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners.

I think it's part of the problem, consider the massive boom/bust cycles and material shortages that occur in this Industry. I used to do framing in the off-season of my farming apprenticeship and I can tell you cost of construction and labour is a MASSIVE cost because things always run longer than expected.

I think that 3D printing can achieve several things, but you're right the latter issues are a major problem in major cities in SV, but honestly that place is such a cesspool that I don't even put it into my calculus anymore.

As Starlink gets rolled out more and more, I think development in more rural areas will seem more favorable than major cities.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#902

Post by Raptor22 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #892
scrubs wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like these points: * We engineered away stability for JIT Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked wh…

> I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Cars are a lot safer now and last longer. I think houses are bigger. The Internet is new. Most consumer electronics are new, and TV's are way better.

Who captures most of the profit from these better devices?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#903

Post by rsanek »

oicU00 wrote: post #252
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…

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…

> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid

Do you have a source for this? From what I could find, participation has been roughly flat for the last ~20 years.

https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Yout...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#904

Post by pasabagi »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #810
pasabagi wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, first world countries produce a lot of food. Farming is generally heavily mechanized. Nobody needs to have their 'hands in the dirt'. In fact, I expect most potatoes will not be touched by a single human hand until they reach the person who actually cooks and eats it.

That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.

I used to be sympathetic to this line of argument, but I'm no longer so sure. Organic farming has lower yields, so to feed the same number of people, you'd have to bring more land under cultivation. That would presumably outweigh any environmental advantages you get from using less chemical pest control.

Second, the extra people you employ, aside from the obvious mind-numbing drudgery and hard labour you're ruining their lives with, would have a carbon cost.

Third, I can see that some pest-control chemicals are bad for the environment. However, it seems also clear that the demarcation line between eco and non-eco is not the same as the line between organic, and non-organic. In fact, it seems like there is no relation at all. There are many chemical pesticides that are not environmentally damaging, and many traditional farming techniques are environmentally damaging.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#905

Post by zo1 »

travisjungroth wrote: post #803
imapeopleperson wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my view, our "tribes" broadly descend from pro- vs. anti-slavery camps Fact: George Floyd wouldn’t have died if he didn’t resist arrest. I’m certainly not pro-slavery, and agree people can be racist, but there is certainly something wrong if people can’t openly discuss taboo truths without being slighted as a racist themselves, utterly dismissed, or censored.

> there is certainly something wrong if people can’t openly discuss taboo truths without being slighted as a racist themselves, utterly dismissed, or censored. There are things that are true and impactful and worth talking about, and some of those conversations get shut down because they make people feel uncomfortable. Your statement is not in that group. There are statements that, while technically true, are mislead…

I flat out dislike most of current "black" culture, especially the american one, and think it's detrimental to black people and anyone that follows it. Racist or not?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#907

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #851
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.

things became quite, i think the main reason was that they fixed the economy, for a while. However you have a point, media is very potent factor; You see that in Russia, where the state has a monopoly on the press, and old TV managed to persuade a majority in necessity of this senseless war, which is going on right now. The new media thing is creating a kind of monopoly on information for your own tribe, because it t…

... actually you can escape the filter bubble: On twitter they have the 'list' feature, you can define your list of sources and switch between lists, however most users are probably not using this feature. You had a similar feature on google+, but that was a long time ago.

Here is the documentation of the list feature on twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

They should advertise this feature and make it easier to use, if you ask me...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#909

Post by sazz »

acuozzo wrote: post #786
sazz wrote: post #772

Humans just tends to repeat themselves every 50 to 100 years. But the good thing is - with each iteration we are learning. It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty. And no - the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. It's not a simple graph showing where we are heading to. Especially not an exponential graph. And we are still…

> the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. When most collapse-aware persons write about "the end of the world" they mean "the end of complex human civilization", not the total destruction of the planet or even the end of humanity. > It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty. You're asserting that we'll solve the phosphorus pr…

If you look back 150 years or so the "complex human civilization" which existed back then don't exist anymore. Maybe only in a museum or some buildings here or there.

We can now label that replacement by being "evolved" or "transformed" - but the way people thought back then, were dressed, behaved in a social environment, worked or lived is now totally different.

Some of those aspects are better now, some aspects got worse.

What I want to say is that we can already say good bye to the current way of life because it won't exist in 150 years anymore. Maybe we have found a way that people are not triggered anymore by advertisement to consume things because they are bored with their life.

And yes - a lot of things will hit us hard. Maybe we are going to solve it, maybe we will being forced to adapt. A lot of people will die, a lot of people will be born. If we can reach space, then the possibility of 10+ billion people is rather good. But even if we shrink to 500 million it won't be the end of complex human civilization.

And to be honest - are you proud of the current form of "complex human civilization" and would it be such a bad thing if it would being replace with something else?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#910

Post by leto_ii »

cnelsenmilt wrote: post #793
scrubs wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like these points: * We engineered away stability for JIT Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked wh…

It's funny, because this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right. Basic nationalism on the one hand, "Buy Local" on the other. They all want the same thing, or close to it. The potential for alliance on economic topics like this is so blindingly obvious, and it's so frustrating that it gets derailed by "cultural" sideshows so that no one can talk to each other or realize they have the sam…

> this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right

There are people who are trying to bridge that divide. I recommend Breaking Points and the whole ecosystem they're trying to build around themselves.

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