Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

One reason is changing geopolitics. USA is not the sole superpower that it was in the 60s. Other countries are also doing a lot better now. A lot of the jobs in manufacturing have been outsourced to China, in service industry to India. This has led to shift of wealth from US to these countries. The days of American exceptionalism are probably ending. It's only going to get tougher from here.

I really believe that this is what happens when you go so long without a substantial recession coupled with an easy money regime.

There's apathy because no one has been scared in a long time. Landlords haven't been scared of not finding renters and not being able to pay their mortgages. Workers haven't been really scared of not finding jobs. Businesses have not really been scared of not being able to raise money.

Awful behavior in general comes from an absence of fear. Recessions were the natural force that brought fear and its ensuing product, sanity, to markets. Remove that and you get our current state of things.

This is the problem generally known as liberalism. Hobbes said the foundation of the state was the arbitrary Will of the individuals in the state. Modern states are thus founded on caprice. The solution is as JFK said: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

entropy of the object or the observer

Little things I've noticed decay in my 40 plus years.

I noticed credit card machines fail a lot more. Like 5 or 10 years ago credit card machines very rarely failed. Like you didn't even think about it. Now it's like a 25% chance the credit card machine I'm using will not work properly. This is not a new technology.

No one lets you in in traffic anymore. you used to be able to put your blinker on and people would wave you in. Now people are actively hostile and try to stop you from getting over.

There's a lot more scammy activity. Things like if you forget your tracking number or if you don't get documentation then that transaction will be gone.

Customer service has gotten terrible. You used to be able to call up and relatively quickly speak with someone knowledgeable and competent in many support phone lines but now it's a mostly hopeless endeavor that you wait online for an extremely long time to speak with the super friendly but clueless incompetent person.