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Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

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Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#121

Post by mercy_dude »

dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #56
eplanit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever les…

Yea that's not a conspiracy theory at all. CCP/Russia most definitely have heavily targeted campaigns to sow disunity via the whole "USA is a dumpster fire" and "we're so divided" nonsense all over social media sites like FB/Twitter and Reddit. Of course Reddit being Reddit and so forth you get regular Americans gobbling it up and amplifying. Even worse when late-night hosts with big audiences do it. The strength of…

You mention FB/Twitter but forget how much of a shit show our corporate media is. So much so that FB/Twitter uses them as the so called “fact checker” and act as proxy. If anyone has followed the media in last 5yrs, you know how dysfunctional and opposite to ideals of free press our so called mainstream news organizations have gone. A large portion of the country rightfully have zero trust on these once much respected media outlets. Just watch an hour of CNN or MSNBC or NYTimes or Fox coverage and you would know you don’t need CCP do divide us. Our elites running the media outlets and choosing which narrative to push on a given day will happily do t themselves.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#122

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ralph84 wrote: post #115
dane-pgp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the pattern they used to name pandemics. What pattern is that, exactly? Looking at the Wikipedia list of worldwide pandemics with more than 1 million deaths[0], only two were named after places, and one of those ("Spanish flu") was the result of wartime misinformation and/or racism. Admittedly the other example on that list is "Hong Kong flu" from 1968–1969, but there are other recent outbreaks which are not includ…

Here are the viruses targeted by this year's flu vaccine. Since the flu hasn't been politicized yet they're still using places in the names. A/Victoria/2570/2019 or A/Wisconsin/588/2019 A/Cambodia/e0826360/2020 B/Washington/02/2019 B/Phuket/3073/2013

None of those are pandemics (parent's phrase) or "new human infectious diseases" (WHO term).

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#123

Post by muzani »

smnplk wrote: post #112
Swizec wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Habsburg Empire also fell in 1918. British Empire collapsed over the 20th century, and what happened to the Holy Roman Empire? Oh and don’t forget the French Empire fell in the 1700’s. But does that count or did thet just evolve into a new form?

That's just the collapse of social structures, not civilizations.

To quote from Wikipedia,

> Civilizations are organized densely-populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade.

Arguably a social structure is a prerequisite for a civilization. For example, you can have a village of 50 intact and trading with another village and that's not a proper civilization. There has to be the idea of a state, governance, someone entrusted to pay taxes to and perhaps some form of currency.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#124

Post by LeonB »

enriquto wrote: post #103
eplanit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever les…

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot. How is this a conspiracy theory and how is this a bad thing? The so-called Cold War (i.e., WWIII) was won by the USA "without ever firing a shot", by exactly the same method: sowing division within the socialist bloc. Do you think that the U.S.-influenced divisi…

Re “without firing a shot” - the US fought several proxy wars as part of the “Cold” War and fired a lot of shots.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#125

Post by Isinlor »

no_wizard wrote: post #8

Perhaps not entire civilization collapse, pending nuclear arsenals unleashed, but I think we are edging ever closer to massive social upheaval, what shape of this I am unsure about. To quote an adjacent article that was mentioned in this one: How Western Civilization Could Collapse > Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the e…

The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars.

But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West.

Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#126

Post by NL807 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #44
quickthrower2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it’s the opposite - everyone expects things to go on as they are. At least in stable countries. We are hard wired not to expect the world to end.

Agreed. By the way, is there any sort of memoirs from ordinary people before WW2? Like did people at the time see it coming 1 years, 5 years etc. before?

Interesting question. Would be good to study such data.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#127

Post by nl »

no_wizard wrote: post #59
vkou wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) the largest of the economies rising in Asia, being China, is funded in large part by state subsidies to this day. That won’t last forever. The power of a sovereign to directly tax, and indirectly inflate its currency says otherwise. You also need to quantify what it means for the economy to 'run off state subsidies'. There are particular sectors of the economy that are subsidized in China. The rest stand on thei…

The 51% ownership clause is a subsidy. Chinese government still subsidies construction industry and the manufacturing sector, as well as tech[0] At least 3% of the entire state budget is dedicated just to subsidies, this does not include tax breaks or other special incentives and this has been growing steadily[1][2] [0]: https://www.uscc.gov/files/000566 [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/initial-us…

Do you happen to know what the US equivalent is?

Reading [1] it said the company that received the most was Sinopec, with US$450M. But according to [2], Boeing has received over $15B in subsidies since 2000, so roughly comparable. And that doesn't count tax breaks[3] and doesn't seem to include agricultural subsidies which are huge in the US/

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/China-corporate-su...

[2] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents

[3] https://taxbreaktracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?detail=st...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#128

Post by derriz »

rogue7 wrote: post #85
noahtallen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do really like that video and the book Factfulness. However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted. Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is…

At first I really liked Hans Rosling's book. But afterwards I read some very valid criticism [0]. > We see that while per capita income has indeed increased in the global South, the global North has captured the vast majority of new income generated by global growth since 1960. As a result, the income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going…

Jason Hickel's criticism is either disingenuous or demonstrates basic innumeracy. The criticism uses absolute differences to "prove" that divergence is increasing.

This does not make sense. If A and B went from earning 30k and 45k respectively to earning 70k and 90k respectively, Hickel would claim this was "divergence" - because the gap between them has risen from 15k to 20k.

But it simply isn't - A is converging with B (the gap has narrowed from 50% to 28.5%). If this trend continued linearly, A's income would surpass that of B within about 3 more periods of such "divergence".

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#129

Post by robotresearcher »

xsquared2 wrote: post #82
runarberg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, This is not only a terrible American exceptionalism thing to say, but also probably wrong if you look at history of failing states. The Russian emipre was it the brink of collapse before WW1, participation in that war lead to its collapse sooner then it probably would have. From an outside view much…

> However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers). Pardon my assumption, but are you a software engineer in america? How would the downfall of American hegemony and union of transnational labor favor you?

Just maybe they aren't thinking primarily of their own advantage.
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