A talk on the topic by Jonathan Blow: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
151–160 of 250 posts
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I hear this line of reasoning constantly from people who have had the system work for them. What they don't realize is that there is a huge portion of this country where the system is not working and thats where this discontent is coming from. Their misinformation campaigns wouldn't work if there weren't real core issues with the society. The internet has empowered a generation the sees whats behind the curtain. AOC…
>Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced.
This exaggerated view is unfortunately quite common. It completely ignores the crises that previous generations had to go through, from WWII and the Korean War, to Vietnam, to depopulation of rural areas, to the Oil Crisis, to massive pollution in modern cities, to the mass lay-off of industrial workers starting in the 1980s, to inflation rates of 15-20%, etc, etc.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life. You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive. It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms. Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of…
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Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#154The correct answer to every news headline that ends with a question-mark is: no.
Except for those where the answer is provably yes.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
>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. so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"
GP is objectively correct. 200 years ago, ~95% of humans lived in extreme poverty. 100 years ago it was ~85%. Today only ~10% live in extreme poverty, and the number continues to fall.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#156I'm an amateur historian at best, but I'm not aware of any era that has not expected the world to end soon. The Christians have done it for 20 centuries now, as one example. During my life, it has always been a common expectation, though the expected cause has shifted a few times. My hunch is that maybe we're hard wired to expect the world to end, for some undiscovered reason. Again, I remind you of my amateur status…
What is scary about these days isn't that we follow some book that says the world will end, but that we can measure the world ending empirically.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. ... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc). E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapid…
> in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.
Well, CO2 in the atmosphere (and amount of carbon above ground in general, a lot has been brought up from below in the last 100 years) and plastic pollution come to mind. Ocean pollution. Bio-diversity. Less or no weapons of mass destructions. No climate change yet, e.g. in the western US water from rivers was less of an issue and could be distributed more freely.
There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part.
I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#158Perhaps 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…
There are also these data points [0], that show that the newer generations have fewer and fewer wealth. [0] https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/143127950480736666...
That graph is misleading (to say the least) because it is not per capita.
The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 respecte…
Ironically, the market is the biggest division force in the US right now. CCP/Russia/elites propaganda machines are strong but they have never been a match for the US market.
Is it an inherent flaw of capitalism or there’re different market structure to incentivize union.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The bond market famously did not see WWI coming. And WWI was arguably much more catastrophic that WWII.
>WWI was arguably much more catastrophic that WWII.
For the Europe, probably.
Worldwide wise, not even close.