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Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#61

Post by sebzim4500 »

RGamma wrote: post #12

The behavioral degradation of the US is very easy to see from the outside. It's when you reduce all human existence to economy. But turns out money chasing is a bad substitute for morals, principles and social connection (the true version and not the shallow caricature that is sold online these days).

>The behavioral degradation of the US is very easy to see from the outside.

How could this possibly be seen from the outside the US? All I can see from the UK is a significant increase in the amount of whining coming out of the US, but that's just social media.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#62

Post by z5h »

Read “Denial of Death”. Ideas here are based on that book.

The plain reality of existence is that there is no inherent meaning and we will all die. That is too much for anyone to bear.

We can live “normal” lives only so far as we can distract and deceive ourselves from the base reality with our own constructed meanings.

Truth, science, knowledge, are inevitable and unstoppable. They eventually expose the deceptions and distractions we create.

We don’t have a good next collective deception.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#63

Post by maerF0x0 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #10

I'm not saying that I agree with all of your points (the air and water were far worse in the mid-20th century in many areas, for example), but let's take it as given and advance an hypothesis: decreasing time horizon. The ever-increasing (because self-feeding) pace of technological change, means that there is less and less predictability about the situation in the future, so timescales over which people plan are shor…

To be clear I'm not trying to say "lets use waterfall to preplan the software"

I'm more saying things like "Does design, modularization, organization, or things like SOLID principles" matter at all? When i've had projects that I've had near total control over I've been able to get to a place where many product asks were trivial. Or the obvious extensions were. Things like "Can you add a new permission to the sytsem, or cover a new resource type with permission constraints?" I built a system where the other proposal would have taking a large constant amount of time to add each new resource permission (each permission was a bool column on the user table) . Whereas my design I simply added a couple string consts and a wrapped the resource's ORM portions in a decorator. Basically done in the time it took to have the meeting where the product person asked.

But these kinds of future value software seems to be denigrated because the opinion seems to be that its going to take far too long to implement, but in my experience the "good" solution and the crap ones (accounting for marginally excess bugs) are at most 10% longer to implement. Sometimes the crap implementation appears 50% faster to do, but then an observant person would note that it has pernicious bugs for months or years that destroys the team's velocity.

Also just an anecdote and hypothesis.

But here's an appeal to an expert who I agree with https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#64

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

>the water is poison

Putting aside the tons of pollution in lakes and oceans, what strikes me the most now is the abject failure and neglect in cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan. How are people so powerless, governments so weakened, and politicians so detestable that something as basic as clean drinking water in cities is no longer functioning?

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#65

Post by throwaway1a1 »

you can find safeheaven in China/Russia if you commit crimes in the west and vice-versa.

Its become easy and shameless to commit crime. You have Britain gets $100 Billon dirty money every year and its a champion of free world.

My country spent a lot of money to bring back a human trafficker from Britain but failed. Its neo colonism.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#66

Post by Tool_of_Society »

nickdothutton wrote: post #52

> Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time… From the instant the idea to do something pops into management’s heads, or is explained to them by sales (who heard it from a customer), the clock is ticking. Actually developing the software necessary is just an irritating overhead. Something to be reduced to near zero. A one-dimensional “scalar”…

Indeed none of this is new. The extra complexity of modern software and hardware causes issues to pop up far more often than in the past.

I mean for fck's sake remember when the early Pentium CPUs had dividing issues (Pentium FDIV bug) back in the mid 90s? That was a bug that should of been easy to catch but wasn't because of the corporate/stockholder demand for more short term profits. No time to fix or test things because that costs money and we might not be the first to market.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#67

Post by Zircom »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #25

> People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained. > Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly danger…

>being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public

I'm with you about all the other things but people wearing whatever clothes they want to affects you in literally no way shape or form.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#68

Post by autotune »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #39
autotune wrote: post #19

You should strongly consider seeing a therapist, in all honesty. Read some books on mindfulness, consider putting the phone down and staying away from news headlines for a while.

That can be good advice for OP (I suspect it is), but also OP can have a point: things can largely be getting worse, not staying the same or getting better. > General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go I have noticed a major increase in this in my day-to-day interactions

Most workers I've hung out around recently, at least in the service industry, seem cheerful and friendly as ever. Most of my remote coworkers in the current gig are some of the friendliest, most intelligent working people I have had the pleasure of working with.

But again, I've stopped looking LinkedIn, disabled or deleted and stopped engaging on the majority of social media platforms (HN remains as a final crutch), and have taken up meditation, therapy, and art as well, so it's not just empty words.

The only thing I have really noticed that's different on a multi-year scale is some companies went fully remote that weren't prepared for it or didn't really want to, which made 2021-2022 my own personal hell with career stability.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#69

Post by RGamma »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #61
RGamma wrote: post #12

The behavioral degradation of the US is very easy to see from the outside. It's when you reduce all human existence to economy. But turns out money chasing is a bad substitute for morals, principles and social connection (the true version and not the shallow caricature that is sold online these days).

>The behavioral degradation of the US is very easy to see from the outside. How could this possibly be seen from the outside the US? All I can see from the UK is a significant increase in the amount of whining coming out of the US, but that's just social media.

For example that mass/school shootings are just taken for granted, Trump becoming president, fentanyl epidemic, suicide trends. People in distress...

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#70

Post by ryan93 »

Heston wrote: post #24

How do you expect a society that thrives on the exploitation and murder of other life forms to have peace and joy? There's a spiritual crisis happening right now and if you don't change the way you treat other life, yours will continue to get worse.

Talking about animals? That has always been a thing
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