I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There
gen.medium.com
gen.medium.com
The US has major weaknesses like high health care cost, aged infrastructure, no social safety nets to speak of, radically unequal wealth distribution, and erosion of democracy from lobbying and cash in politics, BUT it has not collapsed. However, all of these things raise the probability of collapse dramatically.
Of course, it has changed from its height, a lot of it for the worse, but a change isn't a collapse. A collapse is a collapse.
This is pretty weak reasoning, and the article's good points are unfortunately diluted by it.
* Raw deaths mean nothing: How many people has America lost -per capita- compared to Sri Lanka?
* The immediate, unexpected and shocking loss of a loved one from a bomb is vastly different from the typical Covid experience in the US. Outside of NYC, it is, typically, a nursing home illness.
* Direct homicide from a rebel military cannot be compared to succumbing to a novel and little-understood virus.
One day the bridge you used every day is closed for repair, and after a few years you realize it isn't going to get fixed.
Protection rackets appear, because the police can't get in to maintain order any more. Working around them takes a lot of thought and social connection, but life goes on.
At some point, the water stops coming through the taps. Getting water is a hassle, but life goes on. Phones stopped working a while back too, you realize. So did the street lights.
Potholes in the roads stay there and get bigger and bigger. But you can still use the road. Until one day you can't.
A few years later you look around and say, "hey, where is everybody?"
It was so strange to go from that to Canada at 12 years old.
Just yesterday, by means of example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chantaldasilva/2020/09/28/palan...
Still, talking to people is as good as it ever was, if you're determined about it. While these days it does require significant care and patience to avoid the memes and the trigger phrases, it's still more than possible to gesture at the ideas behind the noise and get something fresh going - to get minds exchanging.
I'm kidding, and I see what you mean - but I think reading more news solves big issues just as well as reading less news.
Changing the state of things now, or changing the way people approach things in the future - that's how the change thing works. Western people have had so much of the latter from the hyper-media environment that I find myself sympathising with the flouride folks - ideology may as well be in the water for how pervasive it is.
Our individual approaches toward media consumption have to be personal and pragmatic - they aren't statements of Kantian universal morals. Much like tee-totallers don't necessarily believe that everyone should give up drinking.
I know you're not quite saying this, but the idea that avoiding the news and having your head in the sand have anything to do with each other is a false equivalence. If anything, in today's world it's the other way around.
Also, I think commenting on voting activity is considered bad form here.
Whether I'm /s or not is, frankly, immaterial. My comment is true de facto. It doesn't really matter if I passively benefit from Palantir's activity while sitting pretty or while racked with moral agony. Similarly, I can't think of a life decision I've taken as a result of reading the news. Sure, I could donate my stock to charity or strive to work at the WHO, but I am almost certainly not going to.
OK, sorry if it was a personal attack.
As far as the actual commenting on downvotes - well, if such downvotes are in support/defense of obvious signs of mental illness (e.g. the exact term in this case is "learned helplessness") then I will point that out even if it is against the HN culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Medical reality trumps culture any time, at least for me.
>Whether I'm /s or not is, frankly, immaterial. My comment is true de facto.
It actually matters, a lot. If a significant portion of the population acquires "learned helplessness" that will in and of itself lead to collapse. I have to ask - does this approach work for you? Namely, being disengaged from life and trying forcing yourself to enjoy it when it is quite obvious things are pretty bad right now? So bad in fact, that 1 in 4 young Americans are seriously contemplating suicide - an "unraveling" of the social fabric?
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/the-social-fabric-of-the...
> “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/thomas-jefferson-ha...
Umm...what?
“A U.N. panel probed the last phase of the war [and] has estimated that around 40,000 died while other independent reports estimated the number of civilians dead to exceed 100,000.”
I agree he should have dedicated more space there to convince the reader.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Hundreds of thousands maybe more preventable deaths, every year, written off as "per capita" statistics, as if we're talking about a bad quarter at the office, and not human lifes. Every year maybe .5% more. That's what the author means when he's saying that you're already collapsing without even realising it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Look through the responses in this thread. At least 2-3 other people described that their approach to the impending collapse is...to ignore it...and to also make sure they enjoy the nice September weather and to ruminate on their impending richness from cashing in on stock options. I sincerely hope these comments were /s or a joke. If not...well, then maybe this is why we are in this situation now - a good portion of the public is severely lobotomized to care about anything else but frozen pizza.
Ok. For comparison, Sri Lanka has had 13 total COVID deaths (0.599/1M). The US has had ~206,000 deaths (627.67/1M).
Alternatively: assuming Sri Lanka's death rate was applied to the US population, we would have 197 total deaths.
Sad that every comment explaining how numbers work is strongly downvoted.
Per-capita is the only way comparisons are made by the intellectually honest. And that's without even getting into the author's false equivalence of homicide (rebel fighting) and illness (Covid).