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Comment by moneycantbuy | Hacker News Reader

It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.

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Your post resonates, and yet nostalgia is a powerful force. Was life ever really good? After all, there were issues even during peak post-war Americana from civil rights unrest to Cold War "you could be nuked any day now" anxiety.

OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.

> Citizens United

I agree.

Include ranked choice or quadratic voting + repeal CU and a lot of things could improve quickly.

Terms limited to 25 years and age 65 at time of election.

I agree and support term limits, but also not certain it can fix anything.

Legislators are (with rare few exceptions) not independent from the power of their party (meaning, they either align with party line or don't stand a chance of being elected). And each party has a nearly endless supply of new corrupt people to substitute in. Even if we had single term term-limits for every role, each party will keep cycling in new corrupt party-aligned people into those roles.

What we really need is a system where legislator are in a position that it is not feasible to corrupt them. It's fun to think of ways of designing such a government, but of course it will never be allowed by the powers that be.

The problem with a term limit like that is if you kill politics as a career that mostly precludes electing anyone competent because few will want to have to start over in a new career at some point in their life.

I do agree with ranked choice.

Politics isn't supposed to be a career. It's supposed to be an act of service for a limited period.

But most fields don't let you take years off and jump back in without substantial penalty. Doing it as acts of service in a modern society doesn't work.

It doesn't have to be mid career. A mix of people retiring early to hold office and younger people that start a career later in life after being elected would be amazing. Leveraging your elected experience to create a startup is also a good path.

Yeah money in politics is most of it. It will be difficult to persuade the oligarchy that one dollar shouldn't equal one vote, but if we continue on this current trajectory they'll inevitably destroy society and the environment to such an extent that groceries won't be able to make it to their New Zealand luxury bunkers.

Personally, I'd make ownership of such bunkers illegal. Make them have some skin in the game.

Thanks, I needed a good laugh!8-))

FWIW I agree with you about Citizens United.

Oh, and "was life ever good?" Yes it was and remains so!

The American Dream is very much alive. US is still trying to fend off massive number of immigrants from pretty much all over the world. People want to be here because it is a place where there is still hope for the future.

I think even if you downgrade the "American Dream" from its popular image ("If you work hard, you can have a family and a little house and property in a nice area. If you're also smart and educated and have a little luck, you can even be wealthy.") to a more realistic modern version ("If you work hard, are smart and educated, and have a little luck, you can have a family and a little house and property in a nice area."), it's still obviously dead. Not in the sense that nobody achieves it, but in the sense that the requirements I've described are no longer a near-guarantee of the outcome I've described.

I think it requires a certain amount of willful ignorance to not recognize this.

This is exacerbated by the trend of businesses not sharing the burden of inflation with their employees, facilitated in part by imported/outsourced cultures lowering the bar described above, since they come from places with much lower expectations.

I am not disagreeing with any of this, but the dream itself is alive. It is what attracts many of the imported cultures here. Does the importing make it easier for businesses to not share burdens, yes, but it also enables fresh ideas and modes of working.

This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.

I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.

Kind of hilarious to see the downvotes without comment. Guess you got your nvidia stock early. Everything is fine!

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