Comment by cerealbad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cerealbad | Hacker News Reader

climate change has become an apocalyptic orthodox religion for secular pessimists, just like technology is an idealized utopia for materialistic optimists. this tends to happen when you build a world view on a single pillar and it starts sinking and tipping over, prophecies and pronouncements of certain doom or visions of heaven naturally follow.

the real issue is that modern education is not cross disciplinary so you have highly specialized people creeping into fields they don't understand and making basic errors of judgement based on pre-conceived ideas of what ought to be. you see this for example in the interplay between physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering. the physicist wants statistics over big data sets, the mathematician wants abstract tools and automatic proof theorems, the engineer wants practical numerical solutions and modelling and the computer scientist is fixated on throughput and efficiency of generative algorithms. is this even true? has anyone stopped and said, what are we actually doing? is there a bigger plan here, are we trying to work towards a common goal, or has the ladder we climbed been pulled away?

the relativistic revolution and subsequent collapse of the western world, the church, the state and the individual all dissolving into a jumbled mess of professional agitators applying some bayesian strategy of influence maximization is an unfortunate consequence of a change in world order, from west to east. being on the wrong side of the cyber curtain is a slow bleak dawn, with the intellectual and political elite always the last to realize the surrounding darkness.

globalization is an example of a desperate last gasp of a former dominant culture trying to exert control and influence over a world increasingly more alien and separate from it. the irony of course is in the conceit of the name itself. project the growth of asia and africa forwards for another half-century, then work backwards and try to understand the hysteria behind fossil fuel usage and the impact this will have on the balance of world power if 3+ billion new people become electrified and industrialized.

I'm in SE Asia at the moment, and the view is different here.

Globalisation doesn't look like the last gasp of a former dominant culture here, it looks like the way out of crushing poverty. People WANT to work in globalcorp garment factories. They get really annoyed if the factories shut down. For all our western idealism about a pastoral lifestyle, everyone who has the choice between growing food for a living and working 90 hours a week in a factory chooses the factory every time. And yes, it is their choice. They can leave whenever they want, there are 4375979 other applicants waiting at the gates.

The interesting thing is that they're skipping steps in the process. Cambodia skipped desktop/wired computing/telecoms and went straight from nothing to mobile (in about 5 years). Mobile access is hugely cheaper and generally faster than it is in either the UK or Australia.

I can see solar power doing the same in the next 5 years. Rather than waiting for the electricity authority to get round to wiring up the rural areas, they're already getting on with rigging up their own solar. In 20 years they'll be self-sufficient and the megaprojects to dam the rivers will be bankrupt.

in your observations, are consumption habits changing the same way with respect to diet? eg. will they (mostly) skip unhealthy processed snack foods and move towards something new, and if that happens how will preventable diseases that plague western countries manifest if at all, the health and drug industries, aged care (family vs business). some things are skipped others might be accelerated. globalization works as long as there is another country down the road you can kick it to, but the axis of power will eventually shift towards emergent markets and those governments will cut out western monopolies out of self-interest, or at least be very resistant to a foreign controlled corporation taking its local profits offshore. japan and south korea have a resistant corp-gov structure due to monopoly, high technology and mass employment creating huge economic leverage over the political system. are chaebols nepotistic fascism, a valid competing business structure, benevolent dictatorships?

were not having this conversation in the 1980s and most of the worlds airports and shopping malls look eerily similar today, yet older systems are more brittle and prone to fracturing and new infrastructures tend to be cheaper, deploy faster and require less maintenance. giant malls in america remind me of communist apartment blocks dotted all over eastern european capitals, permanent monuments to a big idea that proved temporary. at least the soviet model serves some present social utility. the hidden cost of solar is of course in the manufacturing and re-use process which is fossil fuel dependent, but se asia has oil and gas fit to purpose. globalization for the western leaders means controlling the development of poorer countries by creating avenues for the corporations they front to come in and build, for the poorer countries i think they correctly see it as a way to accelerate society but not necessarily at the cost of autonomy like some corporate colony of an american or german or chinese conglomerate. people may reduce consumption individually, but over the scale of the planet the food industry alone must be undergoing some giant mutation. it's really hard for me to imagine a future in asia and africa without massive increase in petroleum and it's assorted bi-products.

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