If (big if) the world was ending, how would you know? | Hacker News Reader

If (big if) the world was ending, how would you know?

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4 pointsmooseburger8 comments

That writer is a kind of a jerk (more in the replies than in the original post). "I know, you don't, I'm smarter than you, you have to prove that you follow what I'm talking about (and I'm talking as obscurely as I can) before you're worthy of me having a real conversation with you." Yeah, spare me; you aren't so amazingly, uniquely insightful that it's worth it for me to jump through your hoops.

That said, there's an interesting question in there. If our society were starting into a technological collapse, what would it look like? And how would it look different than what our current world looks like?

I'm not sure I buy that this is what's happening. But looking around, I see enough that might be evidence that I can't rule it out...

Definitely kind of a jerk but I genuinely believe it's a big issue especially in technology. Technology and science isn't self-improving, we improve processes because it's passed on throughout generations. The core of software itself in the past 20 years hasn't really changed much from the 80s. Sure we have new languages and processes but it's just the same stuff repeated over again but each time bits are lost.

Basically we wouldn't know that an ongoing collapse is happening but everything would get slightly shitter and shitter with older legacy processes being unfixable once they break because none of that knowledge is being passed down.

Great video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OCFfDStgM

Nice! You're pretty smart. But you think me being a jerk is somehow relevant to anything? Hmm. A-.

It does not matter that I am a jerk. I guess Dyatlov would have thought Akimov was a jerk if Akimov had just beat him up instead of following his orders.

And Akimov would have taken the morally correct decision if he had beaten him up.

Being a jerk matters if you want to actually communicate with people. If you want to be a jerk more than you want to communicate something, then you're going to be ignored. But if you want to actually talk to us, you'd do better without the attitude.

Decline (99 times out of a hundred) is so slow and steady that the only way to discover that it's happening is to compare things NOW with things THEN.

So: Can a single-earner family today buy a house, a car, and send their kids through a good education system?

Is the US still capable of launching men into space, let alone sending several at a time to the Moon and back safely?

Can a normal wage-earner still afford several weeks of hospital care?

50 years ago, we would be answering 'Yes' to all three of these questions.

But the US is Trantor. Trantor is the last place the decline starts to hit. The decline is already hitting me on Terminus.

Where's a Mule when you need him?

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