exoverito

The guy I was responding to was literally a nihilist and didn't see the point in humanity persisting.

While it may be true primitive tribes sometimes had satisfying lifestyles with relatively little wealth, we are far beyond the carrying capacity of hunter gatherer modalities, and modern people have the expectation that their lives will generally improve. If it becomes harder to save wealth, own a home, and start a family, then people will defect from the current system. It will be a serious risk factor for societal instability, as we can already observe.

It's hard to enjoy the beauty of Earth if you're poor, destitute, and only see worsening economic prospects.

Innovations like fusion and asteroid mining would arguably do far more to preserve the environment than degrowth. People generally don't accept declining standards of living lightly. The Germans turned to Hitler and Nazism after a decade of hyperinflation and economic depression.

I also sense a certain level of hypocrisy to complain about technological baubles when you're on Hacker News. We all enjoy the benefits of modern technology in a myriad of ways like transportation, medicine, abundant food, fruit any time of year, etc.

I make no such assumption, only pointing out the obvious fact that a world of no innovation, declining living standards, and a dying population will only exacerbate bleakness. It's essentially the dystopian setting for Children of Men.

If there is no innovation then standards of living will not improve, and the future will look bleak for many people. Nihilism is incredibly dangerous and desperate people often turn to totalitarian ideologies which promise meaning and purpose.

Overdose deaths have been increasing significantly, particularly due to fentanyl. There were 20k deaths in 2000, and more than 100k in 2021.

The root causes for homelessness and drug abuse are in large part due to trauma and bad childhood. Soft White Underbelly has interviewed thousands of people from Skid Row, and invariably they suffered major abuses and instability as kids. I guess you could go full historical materialist and say that was caused by economics too, though historically most people were far more impoverished as subsistence farmers, yet still managed to maintain dignity and stability through culture and community.

It should also be noted that other countries with fewer homeless also have higher rates of involuntary hospitalization, e.g. Japan. De-institutionalization of the mentally ill has directly led to the rise in homelessness. Portugal is routinely cited as a success story of decriminalization, yet they force treatment upon addicts as an alternative to jail. Progressives use all carrot and no stick, which is not going to work with people who have become mentally ill addicts.

This perspective seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Bribery isn't illegal for Congress, it's just called lobbying. Insider trading isn't illegal either.

Loose immigration policy and the lack of border enforcement obviously exerts downward pressure on wages for low skill workers. It also bids up rents since illegal immigrants are willing to pile into a 1 bedroom apartment. The elite own businesses and real estate, both of which benefit from illegal immigration reducing wages and increasing demand for rent. If you take a minute to think about the incentives, then see the effects in the world around you, it's pretty obvious what's going on.

>But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall.

This seems like a very dogmatic statement to make. Especially when weighed with benefits of cheap energy and economic growth. A wealthier world can build the infrastructure to handle potentially negative effects of climate change.

The more extreme environmentalists and marxists say we should be engaging in degrowth, which would just result in a kind of feudal and static society, even more vulnerable to climate change. It should also be noted that the Little Ice Age in Europe was associated with scarcity and famine, while the Roman Warm Period was associated with golden ages of several civilizations across the world.

In large part because of constantly shifting requirements, obstructionism, and various forms of lawfare. The US has become terribly inefficient at large infrastructural projects, see the CA HSR project which is massively delayed and over budget. China does not have this problem, and has been rapidly expanding their nuclear capacity.

A standardized reactor design and regulatory certainty would enable the economies of scale and accrual of institutional knowledge to efficiently build new power plants. In response to the 1973 oil crisis, France massively expanded their fleet of nuclear reactors which were producing more than 70% of their electricity in about 15 years. If the political will is there, it can be done.

It's not solving if they can turn it back on, it's a subscription. The elite want renters, 'you will own nothing and be happy'.

It should give people pause that with all the push for more renewables in California and Germany, they now have among the most expensive electricity on Earth.

And countries which use reliable sources of energy like nuclear would be unaffected. How curious...

Perhaps building unreliable energy infrastructure dependent on favorable climatic conditions is not the greatest idea. Especially if there's going to be major climate change. How's Germany doing again with all its solar lol.

It's a dystopia either way. I'd prefer the one with fewer diabetics on scooters.

Research shows students admitted based on affirmative action have higher drop out rates due to the academic mismatch effect. Giving preferential treatment based on class may be better than based on race, but such students may still be under prepared for the rigors of an elite university's program. After all, middle class families generally choose the best schools they can afford under the assumption that it has a material effect on the human capital of their children.

I also don't see the problem with students from poor families simply going to community college for a couple years then transferring to a state school. It's far cheaper and the curriculum is largely the same for most undergraduate courses.

The major problem that progressive don't want to recognize is the role of culture and family structure, e.g. lower class Blacks and Whites who view education negatively, and who tend to be raised by single mothers. Asians generally don't have this problem and have the highest SAT scores even when you control for family income.

If current rates continue, which is a big assumption, then Japan will have 106M people by 2050 and 75M by 2100, which was roughly the population before WW2. Japan is already one of the most densely populated areas in the world, so further population growth may not be the greatest idea. They already have good standards of living, great infrastructure, high societal trust, low crime, a competent government, etc. Europe's strategy of importing millions of low skill foreigners who are mostly dependent on welfare and have destabilized their societies is also probably not a great idea either.

These population projections also ignore the many factors that may change. As the population declines, more opportunities may open for young people, leading to increased family formation. The culture may evolve in response the lopsided demographic pyramid, causing increases in the fertility rate. People are already predicting AGI in the next couple decades, which will render most people unnecessary anyway. These classical analyses around demographics will probably become increasingly obsolete.

The unprecedented surge in money printing which pushed nearly all asset prices higher, causing major inflation. The mandated vaccines, paid for by taxpayers. Lockdown policies which effectively forced most people under house arrest, sending tech stocks like Amazon, Google, Facebook to all time highs. There was also a clear conflict of interest between companies like Google which benefited from lockdowns, and their content policies which censored criticism of the response to covid. Needless to say it's creepy to have the vast majority of information controlled by a handful of companies.

The whole social phenomenon surrounding George Floyd's veneration and martyrdom is very interesting. He was literally a convicted felon for multiple crimes, one of which was home invasion where he held a gun up to a pregnant woman's stomach. The day of the incident he was passing counterfeit bills and acting erratic which prompted the call. The toxicology report showed he had fentanyl and meth in his system. The body cam footage started with him in the driver's seat of an SUV without ID, acting erratic and resisting arrest, and when first put into the back seat of the police car Floyd said he couldn't breath. Odds are he was probably already having a heart attack from the drugs, and then Chauvin's maximum restraint technique pushed him over the edge.

Objectively speaking, Floyd was a miscreant at best and almost certainly a net-negative in terms of benefiting society. A fair trial would have classified the incident as manslaughter, but since cities were literally burning and the jurors were publicly known, they were not at liberty to judge the case impartially. The transformation of Floyd into a martyr and the violent quasi-religious movement that followed will be a good case study for future historians.

CO2 levels were between 1500 and 3000 ppm during the Carboniferous era, a time of vast forests and thriving life. We are never going to end up like Venus, since its atmosphere is 100 times as dense as Earth's and 96.5% CO2. Since Earth is only 0.04% CO2 we would need to increase the amount of CO2 by more than 200,000X.

Pretty sure that's because of flaring excess gas.

Meanwhile the Chinese are rapidly building out their fleet of nuclear reactors because they're an actually practical people.

Anecdotes are the material for new hypotheses, so they are very much part of the scientific process.

This reminds me of the debate around monosodium glutamate (MSG) causing headaches. There were early scientific reports which found no real link and that it was probably psychosomatic nonsense. However more recent studies found that some people have a heightened sensitivity to glutamate, and since it is a literal neurotransmitter there is a promising pathway for the mechanism of action.

Biology is stupendously complex, it's difficult to make hard and fast rules about something being categorically effective or ineffective.

Some of your points reiterate a framing I often hear from the establishment, which misleads people from understanding the more accurate causes.

Lockdown policies had much to do with supply chain disruption. Many businesses were willing to stay open but were forced to shut down, which obviously drove prices up due to lack of supply. The lockdowns were an unprecedented level of authoritarianism over what was a bad flu, very creepy and weirdly timed since it was a re-election year, but I digress.

Real wages haven't really increased given the level of inflation and economic distortions. If anything, real wages for average workers were steadily increasing during the Trump administration. According to the Fed analysis using CPI adjusted dollars, so take that with a grain of salt, we can see median weekly real earnings had previously peaked at 345 in Q1 of 2009, remained low during most of the Obama administration, finally returning to 345 in Q4 2015. This level steadily increased until Q1 of 2020 when it was 367. After some major distortions from stimulus checks, unemployment payouts, it spiked to 393 in Q2 of 2020, but is now back down to 365, slightly below where we were before the lockdowns. Except now there's less labor force participation, more homelessness, more crime, etc.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Gas had been increasing since Biden took office, so it's not accurate to entirely blame it on the Russia-Ukraine war. As we all know gas was very cheap in the US during the Trump administration, at $2.63 per gallon in January of 2020, 2.42 in Jan of 2021 before Biden formally took office, then had increased 3.413 in Jan of 2022 right before the war started.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...

Much of the cause for high energy prices are due to green energy policies which subsidize inefficient sources like solar and wind, while penalizing reliable sources like natural gas and nuclear. I know that in California electricity prices have increased significantly, where the Electric Utility Retail Price was already high at 0.164 in January of 2020, and is now at 0.270. This is deceptively low, as I have to pay a connection base rate and peak usage pricing, so it's actually closer to 0.75 / kwH in the evening.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/california_electric_utility_r....

Of all the antagonisms for young adults, I would say an easy method to buy cryptocurrency and hedge against inflation is not one of them. The much more significant antagonist for financially vulnerable young adults is the Federal Reserve and its inflationary monetary policy that has priced many out of ever owning a home. Furthermore, the elite's industrial policy of offshoring manufacturing to China, deindustrializing the West, and high energy prices has done much more harm to the middle and working class than the volatility of crypto.

As Feynman once remarked, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Archaeology is a soft science at best and highly dependent on interpretation. Given the replication crises afflicting even hard sciences like medicine, we should be skeptical about the claims of any given researcher. And while a domain expert may be more likely to be correct than a layman, their overall probability of being correct may be less than chance, as in the case of pre-industrial doctors.

Not that guy, but this mostly comes down to who you view as more just in a war. How many Germans died vs Americans in WW2? If we're going by ratio more than 100 German civilians were killed for every American civilian.

As a pragmatist, I see Israel as a relatively liberal democracy with Arab Muslims in their parliament, women and gays have civil rights, the society is open and innovative. Many Arab nations do not have these properties, and their ideologies often oppose them in principle.

That said, I do not think Israel should be defended to the inordinate degree it has, which is due to American imperial interests, the military industrial complex, and many elite Jews which have disproportionate influence in American society. Look at the major CEOs of corporations in tech, finance, media, etc.

It's also harsh and dark to imagine, but sometimes we benefit from being the inheritors of evil actions that finalized a blood feud or enforced homogeneity. China is unified in large part because of the repression of their totalitarian state. Roughly 92% of China is ethnically Han, which is mostly just a bunch of Chinese ethnicities that were culturally assimilated into being called Han after the Han dynasty. America doesn't have to deal with an insurgency of Comanches because they're utterly out numbered by American citizens and weaponry. Israelis do not have these advantages, and would be at major risk of being conquered by the many more numerous Arab Muslims, who too were the result of oppressive and evil military campaigns of Mohammad and subsequent Muslim warriors.

Regarding your unorthodox opinion on gender, I think the net effect of such a parenting strategy will simply be more confusion and identity crises, and the increased likelihood of sterilizing the genetic line. The number of people who have suffered gender dysphoria is vanishingly small, especially in older generations, so this policy would benefit few children. Moreover, we can see that gender dysphoria rates increase depending on peer group and culture, suggesting it is not simply a genetic idiosyncrasy and can spread as a social contagion.

There is also a philosophical assumption that removing all social impositions frees someone to be their authentic self, but the question is what is authenticity? There are many branching paths our lives take that shape how we evolve. If you had parents that took great interest in instilling good values and education, you would end up authentically different than if they had taken a laissez-faire approach and told you to figure it out yourself. The left seems to take the contradictory perspective that humans are generally blank slates shaped by their environment, yet also pushes a kind of genetic determinism on gender and sexuality.

It should be trivial to observe luxury beliefs in today's culture. Among many examples, are those advocating for defunding the police, while living in gated communities out in the suburbs. Or the wealthy elite who support open borders, insulated from the pressures of mass migration. Post-modernism in academia acts as a form of prestige through its obfuscatory language games, yet it distracts intellectuals from focusing on real problems, as remarked by Noam Chomsky.

This framing shifts responsibility to an abstract virus, rather than the human response.

Early statistics showed the overwhelming majority of people would be fine if exposed to the virus, given that at least half of people were asymptomatic. Older people with comorbidities were at higher risk, though survival was still the order of 98%+. The overall mortality was on the order of the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which most people have forgotten. Children especially were never at significant risk. The choice to lock down and do Zoom schooling was at the cost of the youth, which have seen marked declines in academic performance and increases in mental illness. We can see that nations like Sweden which never locked down turned out fine.

The virus emerged from Wuhan, where there was the virology lab working on gain of function for coronaviruses. The NIH had funded such research while Fauci was leading the organization. A revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA helped lead to the suspiciously rushed vaccines, while restricting the release of Pfizer's trial data until 2096. The mandates did not make sense since the vaccines were shown to not limit transmission. Given how many boosters some people are on now, they are probably some of the least effective vaccines of all time, compared to the actual good ones for smallpox and polio.

Supply chains shattered, or in other words, the trade war that Trump initiated against China had escalated. The virus was the compelling justification to shut down factories, causing supply shocks across the world, demonstrating the foolishness Neoliberal globalist economic policy and just how dependent the West had become on manufacturing based in a hostile totalitarian state. Monetary policy in response to the supply shocks caused widespread inflation and reduced living standards for young Americans with little wealth.

Authoritarianism, surveillance, and censorship expanded, which was already the long term trend in the West as its elites seek to emulate the strengths of the Chinese state.

Still, there's no free lunch. You can see this clearly with smaller nations that try those strategies. If the US government has to do those things then there are negative repercussions in the form of distorted interest rates, inflation, capital misallocation, etc. All else equal it's obviously beneficial to have a balanced budget, low debt, and organic economic growth from dynamic markets. The federal government still has the exorbitant privilege of the USD as the global reserve currency, so can export much of its inflation across the world. Though at the end of the day these trends matter, and the long term debt cycle, coupled with worsening domestic issues, does not bode well with increasingly powerful strategic rivals and proxy wars.

I would imagine it's less about any given statue and more about it being indicative of a kind of cultural revolution. It's not necessarily a bad tactic, though imagine asking people if they knew George Floyd existed before the video. If people followed that heuristic and didn't get worked up into a frenzy then we wouldn't have had the riots and largest YoY increase in homicides in US history. Though I think the video was more a catalyst for unleashing the pent up frustrations of a populace forced under house arrest, living in fear of a virus, economic uncertainty, etc.