A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.
I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth.
That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in.
Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
We only have left, the problems we can't solve.
It's a bit like saying, I found my keys so I solved my problem of getting to work whilst the battery is also still dead.
And the issue I take with the framing of “it encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub problem” is that if you use that excuse, a lot of things can be framed as unsolvable, including the ones that have been already solved. Going to the moon is a solved problem. But if you say we can no longer go to the moon because it would mean solving the conflict between people don’t want to spend on the project and people who do, then going to the moon becomes an unsolvable problem.
I don't really know what the point here is. These are all solvable problems. Not by an individual, but it doesn't take as many key individuals to influence as you'd expect. Likewise, forming a treaty doesn't take as many key individuals as you'd think, but the political roadblocks and other internal incentives block a lot of this progress.
From what I'm gathering, people consider a problem solved if the engineering problems are solvable. The point that I'm making is that social, political, and financial problems, if impediments, remain unsolved, because in fact one cannot "go to the moon" without solving them.
Only considering a problem real if it's in the engineering path is counterproductive to accomplishing the goal.
sadly there's at least a few more decades minimum, pending sudden turns of health or an abrupt event. 20 years is a lot of time to destabilize a nation.
I see what the author suggests play out routinely on a smaller scale though.
If you grew up with a narcissist, you can spot it in other people, when you see them taking over organizations if you speak up about it you're always the bad guy. Nobody wants to listen to it. Then everyone is surprised when it turns out badly in the end.