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Comment by lordkrandel | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.

I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.

As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.

The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.

The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.

Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.

Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.

There is effectively infinite space up high, and low is bounded by death, so it never can average out.

This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.

> remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it

Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?

Yes, there have been standards for years already. It was proven in s US city some time ago when it faced a bad drought.

Las Vegas is a 100% closed loop system. All grey water is recycled back into Lake Mead fur reuse.

Modern sewage treatment is a modern miracle.

It is a modern miracle, though the miracle is in part that we can now drink poop water.

That’s not how city water works.

Correct me where I was wrong then My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.

That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?

In the vast majority of developed nation cities, drinking water comes from reservoirs and goes through whatever treatment is required to make it potable.

Anything that goes down the drain is then treated at a sewage treatment facility and is then dumped into a river/ocean/whatever. Sometimes it’s used for toilet water in large facilities like airports and they put warnings all over everything that it’s not potable because it came from sewage.

There are a few cities with cutting edge “piss to table” technology, but it’s not the norm. The closest you get normally is when an upriver city discharges into a river used downstream.

yeah lol. if only tech stopped existing we could achieve world peace and everything would be fine and dandy

In history there were countless men that promised paradise, if only we destroyed something.

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