Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

Only problem is that most politicians will tell you that their money is in a blind "trust". The real issue is deregulation of banking and the incentivization of how debt was repackaged into new "investment" vehicles along with the reality that credit/financial risk assessment never became institutionalized.

Remember, all the sub-prime mortgages were given high marks in being safe risks once they were packaged vehicles of debt because banks could bully their way into giving them assessments that were less than factual due to business pressures put upon them from the competition.

The real current crime is that all the debt from 2008 never was written off in any way. This in turn has had a cascading effect on the economy globally.

Attention is the Cash Value of Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRwNnHjAo3k

> But generally there is a feeling that we are hurtling towards catastrophe and everyone is trying to profit before it's too late.

Personally, I feel that if we can get through this moment of transition without self-destruction of humanity as we know it (such as the Ukraine/China conflicts not going nuclear), we will have entered an age of our next Renaissance where we would be much closer to some sort of "Star Trek" like utopia for mankind.

I do see this however being the bell tolling of White Anglo-Saxon heredity being removed from the throne and replaced with people with more melanin in their skin. This may not sit well with those who subscribe to racially ethnic purity ideals as what Hitler envisioned as a superior race is biologically reversed to be inferior until genetic mutations bring them back to a norm again.

But people, in general, focus too much on the actionable/measurable in time spans way to narrow to really appreciate how special it is to be: anything at all.

Generations have lived and died without being famous, being associated or related to anyone of any historical record let alone making any difference to the human condition.

However, this time - this collection of people and generations spanning over 75-100 years have seen man at both it's worse and it's best. Even better, the trend of it getting better is rising.

And the trend, is growing faster. As we've never been more connected to one another. Real information has never been more accessible.

And our connections have both deepened with one another as well as been eroded in other ways as what we value and how we approached it has changed. For some it can be scary. For others, it can't happen soon enough.

The only problem that we always have is that we'll never get to see the moment past when we die. But if the body is just a container for the soul, that shouldn't matter.

For those who don't subscribe to that, it appears in recent news that could be changing as well. Or we evolve into singularity. Or we destroy ourselves another way. The fact is that what we know is that we're not whole without others.

For us to be whole requires us to allow for it else to be everything and everywhere. And that to me sounds like reverting to being nothing at all or a return to the before life existed... and that was a long f'n time ago.

Birth rate in the US has been in a decline for a while now - both in the US and globally. In the US, the last uptick was in 2021 but it's been dropping since 1983. It's already has caused China to reverse their one child per couple law and Japan population numbers are going to force that country to reconsider what it means to be Japanese that will have long lasting repercussions to it's society.

People are also leaving California in droves too - to Texas where they were lured by people chasing after HGTV "Property Hunters" home prices - just to end up in another ticky-tacky neighborhood being pressured to keep up with the jones.

If the trend of telecommute is allowed to be the norm, then there is a much higher likelihood of population distribution which will bring it back to a more stoic level. But this will impact global trade which we've seen needs to be rebalanced anyhow due to the supply chain issues presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scale that globally, then maybe there will be better ground to discuss "nationality" in a different light compared to our current political borders. Especially when it comes to law and powers given to a person that is allowed by a society.

Because even the UN can use some improvement.

The reality is that we need to think about how a population of people will survive when it's more efficient and easier to mechanize a job.

We saw it during the pandemic as we see more of it now. They're finding ways of mechanizing agriculture to make more food with less labor input. They are finding ways of improving health by improving the cognition of machines to find black and white problems within the data deluge. They're even finding ways of making burger flippers and package delivery people obsolete by building machines to do the tasks.

Because when you push a business to try to solve labor problems, they will look for ways of growth that may not include people in general.

That has nothing to do with nationalistic ideals but with simple Capitalism. If you legislate the requirement of it, then what changes how we evolve?

It seems immoral to force people to do something they may not want to do at the same time people will complain that the value of one person shouldn't be held to be lower than another.

Basic income so far has been showing the best way to address this issue - and we've all seen a form of it during the pandemic. What needs to happen is to get society as a whole to make it permanent.