Is everything falling apart? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#941

Post by judahmeek » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

swat535 wrote: post #925

BEEdwards wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why they are constantly trying to kill each other...

That's a false dilemma, you are corroborating the actions of extremists with the entire concept of religion. This sounds more like Hitchen's kind of an argument, which is fine for entertainment purposes but it is reductive and prevents us from having interesting philosophical discussions regarding God and religion.

Philosophy has no practical value, except for contrarians who don't want to admit being wrong.

History does though & the history of religion is that extremists who are religiously exclusive are much more likely to affect someone else's life due to their zealotry.

That why there are so many wars & crimes linked to religious exclusion.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#942

Post by judahmeek » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #694

judahmeek wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider basing my worldview on emotion-based fantasies mentally robust. Is it possible that believing a lie increases ones chances of being happy & less depressed? Sure, but that doesn't make it worthwhile.

“ but that doesn't make it worthwhile “ From where cometh this objective truth? :)

There's nothing objective about "worth" & you obviously know that.

This subjective truth, however, comes from my value for integrity, which you apparently lack.

If you have no moral qualms about having a worldview based on lies, then more power to you.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#943

Post by maccolgan » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:07 PM UTC

quesera wrote: post #319

lucasyvas wrote: post #233

I've had some thoughts lately that these issues are closely linked with physical borders. In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations. In today's world, it is trivial to find people who share similar values - but they might be on the opposite side of the world. We are doing nation building in a virtual space, but we are unable to r…

> In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations. I can't think of any nation in history which was formed by such a rational and reasonable process, but I'd love to be informed otherwise. In my estimation, nations were formed by force, usually by individuals with a functional balance of ruthlessness and charisma. Sometimes by confeder…

Funnily enough, the first few colonies of the US.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#944

Post by dwighttk » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:07 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #935

dwighttk wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2nd law of thermodynamics

Indefinitely doesn't mean forever. I think hundreds of billions of years would suffice.

Sure… would still have a last generation though.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#945

Post by juanjmanfredi » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:17 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #513

juanjmanfredi wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your first two paragraphs. To the extent that our present time is at all unique, I subscribe to Robert Putnam's thesis that much of what we see today can be explained by the drop in social capital in American life over the past several decades. Less socialization means less trust in other Americans or in the government, fewer norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, and increased polarization. There are…

> There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example. I tend to agree with the Putnam thesis, but I don't think you can lay this all on television. Until the 80s there were really only 3 viable TV/radio networks (CBS, NBC and later, ABC). If you watched the nightly news on any of those networks you got pretty much the same vision of reality. There was more variation in newspapers, but people wat…

Putnam ascribes ~25% of the drop in social capital over the past 70ish years to television's rise, but not because of fragmentation of visions of reality as you suggest. Rather, it is due to TV soaking up time that might be used to build community and social cohesion. See below for an example quote and corresponding link that goes into more detail.

"Even though there are only 24 hours in everyone's day, most forms of social and media participation are positively correlated. People who listen to lots of classical music are more likely, not less likely, than others to attend Cubs games. Television is the principal exception to this generalization--the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home. TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations. TV viewers are homebodies."

https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/assoc/putnmtv4.html

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#946

Post by _0ffh » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #361

leereeves wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian system with regulated commerce rather than direct state control That's the clearest definition of fascism I've ever heard. Where's it from?

I’m paraphrasing what the fascists said their goals were. If you read about fascism, their proponents viewed it as “Marxism 2.0” — where they could leverage the socialist ideas of collectivist authoritarianism without the problems encountered by the original Marxist revolutionaries with total state control of commerce. A unified populace where “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the S…

Quite, one of the biggest influences on fascism was the nationalist wing of the corporatist syndicalists.

Mussolini himself said "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power".

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#947

Post by remarkEon » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #912

remarkEon wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis). It's two fundam…

This makes a great deal of sense. Coupling it with the classic American entitlement thought in a peer thread, I think I can even see why it's only manifesting as a problem recently in the United States (I would say mostly within the past decade or so, whereas the technology to enable cheap long-distance cross-national cultural and economic flow is decades older)... Americans hadn't had this problem previously because…

The "global" vs "local" dynamic also maps pretty well to those other issues you referred to - class dynamics, cosmopolitanism, tech savviness ... all of these make a strong inference where, if you fall into the category where you are upper class and cosmopolitan and are optimistic about technology, you are very likely to be in favor of a more global approach to managing civilization. Hell, it even maps (though less cleanly) to things that at first glance you'd assume are completely unrelated, like thinking the pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan.

It is worth noting, however, that there is strong push back in the broader west against the more aggressive American cosmopolitan ideas that half of the country here finds alien. Macron in particular seems to recognize this trend[1]. He seems like a genuine outlier, though, and his skepticism may be an artifact of the general weakness of the French left. This is to say, that while these ideas look and feel alien to ~50% or more of each country in question, they still did, in fact, emerge and gain prominence in America first and were then exported.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#948

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

oktroomer wrote: post #919

throwaway602ee wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender identity is more like an improper set of body-drivers in the brain. To use a comparison from computers, if you put AMD hardware in your computer, but install an nVidia driver, the video card likely will not work as intended since your computer is missing some of the information needed to use all its features. Similarly, the brains of trans people tend to have the wrong "drivers" for their body, which causes dy…

That analogy just comes across as trans propaganda. The brain is not separate from the body, it is part of the body. There's not any hardware/software divide like we have in computing, that could have this 'body drivers' concept make any biological sense.

[deleted]

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#949

Post by bryanlarsen » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #732

mellavora wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your framework, but I do question your dismissal of raw materials. The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre), but it isn't clear if that increase can be sustained for the next 100 years-- the massive amounts of chemicals we put on the land are killing the soil. That's before we get to climate-change threats to food production. Or species diversity threats to food prod…

There is this agrotech thing called no till farming and combined with proper crop rotation and carefully selected cover crops and soil management your soil will improve every single year instead of degrading. I have seen a lot of hackernews comments that think they can just chemically or genetically engineer their way out of this. Just spray compound X and Y on crop Z and you are ready to go. It may look technologica…

You're totally right, no-till farming is the best way to preserve the soil. The problem is that no-till farming uses a lot of chemicals, and consumers think that organic farming is the solution. But organic farming uses tillage for weed control, so it destroys the soil.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#950

Post by scrubs » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #818

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…

> We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. > Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. 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.

You're right - cannot be outsourced. Then it'll fall to US labor which is more expensive.

Now, on the other hand, if I was running Congress or the Executive branch I'd do a Consumer reports on steroids for "eds, meds, and beds" (a nice rhyme BTW - borrowing it) which would,

* publish medical costs (now mandated to be available I believe) and ranking them

* publish costs of 4 year education by basic degree category vs. expected income and ranked so student loans are NOT forgiven while students are helped and advised to not spend stupid amounts of money on dumb degrees with no ROI.

* While theoretically government student loans help the borrower not the school, there may be a perverse incentive for some schools to raise tuition and board if they think students can afford with loans

* And good lord, would it kill us for the Fed to negotiate prices down on pills? Not it would not! I'm annoyed that private companies threaten the public with higher prices and/or less innovation. I say, let's see where it goes!

* Maybe the federal government should make generics. I mean if the private sector doesn't play nice, take competition to them.

The larger point is that in meds the consumer has fundamentally less control than say a customer purchasing a service. In a typical setting the consumer knows more about the price and price spectrum going into the sale, and the servicer needs the client to pay. So they both gotta get along. In meds the billing prices are less clear and the paperwork for billing goes between the servicer and insurance company. I do not like that. I want the medical provider to know I have the money, and if I don't know or like what's going on, prompt payment is a question.