111–120 of 142 posts
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Thank you for playing! I appreciate your kind words.
I'm old enough that Total Annihilation is my favorite game all time. Still remember the wonder of discovering that. Thank you for all the happy memories.
I very much enjoyed ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ when I read it, but in looking back while it was tremendous for middle school me, it doesn’t hold up. The whole “Fall of Rome/Dark Ages/Western Monasticism preserves civilization” narrative just isn’t true and is a misreading of Western history. That’s a post-hoc framing created in the late Renaissance/early modern era.
Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?
With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind.
Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.
People keep complaining about "The End of History" but never for good reasons. It predicted president Trump as the sort of "megalothymia" that that might come to power in the end of history! It's just about the lack of alternative credible opposing ideologies. I still found it an incredibly disappointing book but not for any of the reasons that everybody dumps on it for.
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Declining population growth is in all ways a positive. Rising population is a good thing to essentially linearly improve nominal GDP, but does little to improve per capita GDP. Other than that nominal GDP bump I struggle to see any positive associated with population growth. Most people put off having kids because, effectively, people are living much longer and it’s economically easier to have kids older. Effective c…
I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care,…
Right up until you overshoot your ecological carrying capacity and the whole society collapses, of course. That part tends to be less optimal.
In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites. A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).
Chris, why don't you write a history of how Fallout was born, from your perspective? Of course the most passionate ones among us will have already found material from Tim Cain (the speeches). We would be grateful for your stories. Already this bit of info about Canticle for Leibowitz, Road Warrior (the sequel to Mad Max, right?) and Jeunet-and-Caro's La Cité is quite precious.
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The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to k…
While I don’t disagree with the negatives here unless you’ve experienced extreme poverty saying it’s “capitalist koolaid” sounds frankly a little naive. These are billions of people who aren’t struggling to do basic things like drink water and eat, shelter themselves and their family, etc, not just at a personal level but at a national level. The change in the world from nearly everyone in that state to today where a…
If you just mean "some much smaller number of humans might survive this", then I think there's a decent chance you're right. And I suspect that number will end up being 100 million or less. I still think our current trajectory is more likely on track for 0 (or damn near it), though.
There's no way in hell the earth is going to maintain 8 billion+ people on the planet indefinitely. There's going to be a major, major drop at some point, probably spurred by war over declining resources, and it's probably going to take a good chunk of civilization down with it. We might be several decades away from that (or perhaps not, there's some disturbing signs out there), but there's just no way that "number goes up always" on a finite planet.
" Maybe being happy with the current state of things is just hard. Maybe actually maintaining a good, stable society is hard too; harder than expecting what worked yesterday to work for us now. I don’t want to minimize or ignore that there are very real problems with the current state of things, and trying to improve them is a good idea, but current political appetites feel decidedly destructive." Agreed. Things aren…
If you ever find yourself genuinely unable to understand the views of large groups of people, that's usually a good sign to take a step back and try to approach the subject more dispassionately. People are usually pretty rational on close inspection. They just operate under different premises and experiences. This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia…
As for his actual motivations, I think it had a lot more to do with wanting to make money in Russia as well as his admiration of autocrats.
> People are usually pretty rational on close inspection.
Large groups of people can be agitated and manipulated into being very irrational. Plenty of examples from history.
In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites. A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).
Chris, why don't you write a history of how Fallout was born, from your perspective? Of course the most passionate ones among us will have already found material from Tim Cain (the speeches). We would be grateful for your stories. Already this bit of info about Canticle for Leibowitz, Road Warrior (the sequel to Mad Max, right?) and Jeunet-and-Caro's La Cité is quite precious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care,…
I think you made an erroneous assumption. Here you say the declining birthdays are always aging populations that require more care and this is a net drag. First, care and health services do contribute to GDP and provide good income work for those providing care. Second, while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate…
This is absolutely wrong. The "aging population" will be larger than the "younger population" in any situation in which there is sub-replacement fertility + stable (or increasing, obviously) life expectancy. It's just that the ratio may stabilize but it will be <1.