shipman05

(and his approval would be the same mid 40s it always was if gas prices were reasonable)

Yet

(I could just retrain my brain, but old dogs and all that)

If you haven't met any "oppose data centers in all cases" people, I would politely and earnestly recommend expanding your circle. AI and data center construction is extremely unpopular across political lines right now. Just about every politically engaged person I know who isn't in tech is strongly opposed to both (opinions often hypocritically expressed on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc).

Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.

I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources.

Democracies don't handle nuance well.

- Disappearance of cheap new cars: You can get entry level Chevys, Kias, and Hyundais for < $25k, which is about $14k in 2001 dollars and many more of those cars will last until 200,000 miles and have safety features only available on luxury cars in 2001.

- Massive supply reduction of used cars: I actually don't have good data on this, but it seems like there's pipeline is still borked from COVID era irregularities. That said, cars these days have much better quality and last longer. A car with more than 100,000 miles in the 90s was near the end of its life. That's a typical listing Facebook marketplace these days.

- Repair costs of old cars: Repairs can be expensive, but again, cars today are much more reliable than they were in the 90s or earlier. Even simple things like recommended oil change frequency changing from 3k miles to 10k miles for most models makes a huge difference in total cost of ownership.

- Gas prices: Gas prices have certainly spiked recently (gee, I wonder why), but the cost of gas in real dollars has been higher several times in the past 25 years (see the second chart here: https://www.macrotrends.net/4453/us-gasoline-prices) It peaked in 2008 over $6 per gallon in 2026 dollars.

No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.

It feels doomed, though. Smart glasses wearers are being shamed today, but the tech will only get more inconspicuous. And HD cameras are so small and cheap that phone cameras are only one of many potential sources of surveillance.

With ubiquitous tiny cameras, quality networks (even in remote areas thanks to Starlink), cheap storage, and increased analysis capabilities thanks to AI, it feels like planet panopticon is here.

Not tying your IRL identity to online communications only solves one side of the problem. You can't use your anon accounts to communicate as yourself to family, friends, and colleagues and maintain your anonymity.

Not having accounts tied to IRL identity also allows AI bots to operate as equals to human users, which dilutes the quality of conversation in those spaces.

We've built an incredibly effective communications apparatus. It's a shame its only users are money-obsessed primates and the robots we've built in our image.

> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder

Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.

> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

RIMR says:

> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States

It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:

1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.

2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)

3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)

4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.

So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.

It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.

Some of the greatest horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries were committed by people who refuted that theology and replaced it with Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.

After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.

There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.

So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)

(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)

I prefer the exact opposite, especially when working remote.

When I was a manager, I saved non-urgent topics for a weekly 1-1 instead of pestering busy people with "Quick chat?" or "Do you have a minute?" messages. I wish others would do the same.

Which isn't to say that you're wrong about wealth inequality increasing. The share of wealth controlled by the ultra wealthy IS increasing, but the specifics of how that is playing out are nuanced and, at times, counter-intuitive.

This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).

The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.

In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...

I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.