Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–168 of 168 posts

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#161

Post by rsp1984 »

pousada wrote: post #85
rsp1984 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that. In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually d…

IMO the 5% rule is pretty good. Otherwise we would have loonies like the Grey Panthers (old people party), the “Spiritual Party”, or the extreme right-wing “Republicans” (AFD is moderate compared to those) being able to vote on laws etc. Of course that also cuts out some parties that I have supported in the past, but the system allows a lot of parties to participate that aren’t _that_ populist (e.g. the Greens, the L…

The obvious problem with the 5% rule is that voters who don't like any of the established parties are faced with the decision between voting for something they don't like or most likely throwing away their vote.

As someone who writes algorithms for a living I can think of ~ 100 ways to resolve this bug without limiting the original intent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with one. However the fact that this %5 rule hasn't been changed tells you everything you need to know about the legislators.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#162

Post by ramraj07 »

dash2 wrote: post #160
ramraj07 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of humanity will be sure. But what about the rest? Climate change will not kill humanity off, but its likely to cause suffering we haven’t seen since WWII (or worse). Unfortunately I've seen a glimpse of how the bottom 50% of people (not in a developed country but globally) get by today. If one doesnt care for their suffering and their lives, its easy to confirm that the society on average (not on median) will b…

I don't know of any serious climate scientist who believes that climate change will cause billions of deaths. Can you point to one? As another comment pointed out, if you care for the bottom 50%, you should be extremely happy about progress over the past 50 (or 100 or 200) years.

The bottom 50% has indeed gotten better (kinda sure but not everywhere) but technological progress is not guaranteeing they'll save everyone _anymore_. Fewer nations care about climate change and taking care of the poorer parts of the world (hope you dont expect me to show why too).

The billion is my number. Almost all scientists and officials underestimate deliberately and naively death tolls. I have a metric that whatever number the new york times publishes for an earthquake on day one, you should multiply it by 100 for the eventual total count. No one estimated a million plus deaths from covid in the US. The moment I read the first comprehensive report from China I assumed 1% of the population will die. Unfortunately in places like India that actually was true. So yeah I do think at the minimum a billion people will die due to climate change in the next 50 years, and billions more will suffer in unthinkable ways. Thats _my_ estimate.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#163

Post by starryex »

grunder_advice wrote: post #9

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns. You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That b…

I think one think we can do as engineers is refuse to build these propaganda machines. All the tools used to infect people with the propaganda are built by us. Refuse to work for the biggest offenders - Google, Meta, Twitter, etc. Engineers lust after these jobs and then complain about the fall of democracy. This is the biggest thing we can do. Refuse to build the tools of misinformation.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#164

Post by jonjacky »

See also Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptographic Work[0], which is a more technical talk for an audience of cryptography researchers. It's been noted several times on HN, most recently in 2023 with 56 comments [1] and in 2015 with 93 comments [2].

0. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#165

Post by DoctorOetker »

haizhung wrote: post #131
cycomanic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one thing that I don't understand, take for example Germany, the population barely grew over the last 20 years [1], at the same time there has been a building boom that building costs have risen dramatically (more than doubled between 2010 and 2024). Compare that to the 60s and 70s where population was rising much faster in combination with the rebuilding effort. So is the growth of housing stock lower than t…

This apparent conundrum breaks away if you consider who holds the wealth now vs. in the 60s. In the 60s-70s, there was a wealth tax in Germany. Shortly after WW2, a law was drafted to redistribute wealth: All individuals and companies whose assets remained largely intact were required to pay 50% of their net wealth (as assessed on the day of the 1948 currency reform). This means that the working class had immense wea…

do you have some sources or references for

1) the 50% net wealth tax vis-a-vis 1948 currency reform?

2) which 2 richest families in Germany hold more wealth than the bottom 50% combined?

3) most wealth distribution plots I have seen show a significant negative start (people in debt) then a large number of people with effectively 0 net wealth (what is earned is spent) and then a rise towards the haves. From such plots for different nations I am not surprised that the lower 2 digit percentages effectively have net 0 (with those in debt balancing those having a mediocre surplus), so it would seem trivial for this factoid to be true in many nations (with a slight change of the 50% number or a slight change of the exact number of richest families)

The perspective you give is certainly remarkable in the sense that the Nazi rise was basically a counterreaction to the rising popularity of communist ideas, with the end result... a redistribution of wealth after all, not even a holocaust could stop the wealth redistribution.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#166

Post by kurige »

abraxas wrote: post #125
tomaytotomato wrote: post #4

I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow". Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor…

> The apocalypse is delayed, permanently That is your survivorship bias. There are societies that collapsed never to rebuild or became mere shadows of themselves. I'm not just talking complete collapses like the Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. In very recent past we witnessed the cultural collapse of Japan after their bubbles of the 1980s burst and derailed their economy. But the most spectacular collapse ha…

You're talking about the "cultural collapse" of both Japan and Russia as if it was common knowledge. What exactly do you mean by this? Is this your personal opinion, or a reference to some quantifiable metric?

Japan is currently one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world. First because of the strength of the dollar vs the yen, but also because of their culture.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#167

Post by haizhung »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #165
haizhung wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This apparent conundrum breaks away if you consider who holds the wealth now vs. in the 60s. In the 60s-70s, there was a wealth tax in Germany. Shortly after WW2, a law was drafted to redistribute wealth: All individuals and companies whose assets remained largely intact were required to pay 50% of their net wealth (as assessed on the day of the 1948 currency reform). This means that the working class had immense wea…

do you have some sources or references for 1) the 50% net wealth tax vis-a-vis 1948 currency reform? 2) which 2 richest families in Germany hold more wealth than the bottom 50% combined? 3) most wealth distribution plots I have seen show a significant negative start (people in debt) then a large number of people with effectively 0 net wealth (what is earned is spent) and then a rise towards the haves. From such plots…

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lastenausgleich#:~:text=The%20...

2) https://www.die-linke.de/fileadmin/user_upload/20230530-PK-A...

3) theoretically people could own via the state: if the state has resources (eg. hospital buildings, schools) that benefits all people ~uniformly. However, due to privatization more and more government wealth is also sold off.

Wealth redistribution is the only way the living standards of ordinary families will improve. I’m just hoping we can skip the war part, this time. I think its possible.

Re: On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

#168

Post by zavec »

GardenLetter27 wrote: post #14
grunder_advice wrote: post #9

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns. You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That b…

IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed. Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc. And this all creates a hug…

> IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. There can be real problems, and propaganda can magnify those and lead people to decisions that are for the benefit of the propagandist rather than things that will actually solve the problem.

Post reply on HN