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> What future, exactly? Electrified transportation, vastly improved medical imaging and diagnostics, vaccines for the most widespread and deadly diseases (like

> What future, exactly? Electrified transportation, vastly improved medical imaging and diagnostics, vaccines for the most widespread and deadly diseases (like malaria), cleaner air by replacing coal with renewables, earth-facing satellites that let us learn about the planet that our lives depend on, etc, etc, etc. If all of these things are nothing more than space toys and vroom-vrooms to you, and if the existence of wealth generated by their provision to people like us is so anathema to you, why don't you move to a country where you won't be bothered by such things? This is a serious question, not just a love-it-or-leave-it polemic. If you so hate the accommodations of the developed world and the manner in which they're provided, why stay?

maybelsyrup 5y ago
> etc, etc, etc This list ... I know this is a quick-fire web forum like any other, so I'm not expecting a doctoral dissertation on the benefits of modernity. If that's from the top of your head, more or less, that's cool, that's what HN is for (and thank god right?). But like, is that it? Is that the best you (we) can say for this "future"? If it is, you've made my point for me, in my view. > Electrified transportation We had this 100 years ago - or at least had a good crack at making this the norm - but we lost it. (Why did we lose it?) We could have electrified mass transport, too, but our betters have decided over and over again that we're not allowed. So now we're getting (some) electric cars back (maybe? Toyota doesn't seem too keen) and -- again -- we're supposed to ... applaud? Be grateful? To me, this is baseline stuff, like tap water and weekends. To applaud Elon Musk or any billionaire for being so gracious as to provide them (for a few) is to debase yourself -- it's beneath your dignity as a person. > vastly improved medical imaging and diagnostics For whom? And at what price? For HN denizens (you and me included, probably), yes (again though, maybe). And even then, it's tied for most of us to mostly meaningless employment, toiling away at TPS reports in the exact companies I'm decrying here. Let's not even get into what sort of medical imaging and diagnostics everyone else gets and what they have to do to pay. > vaccines for the most widespread and deadly diseases (like malaria) To back up a sec: the thing I'm getting at in these posts isn't an objection to modernity per se, it's to the modernity forged by the utterly unrestrained capitalism that has brought our planet to the brink of collapse. So, if you're talking medical research, you need to account for how much basic science is done by public servants in public institutions paid for by our tax dollars and whose coattails pharmaceutical firms are all too happy to ride as they run off with it to develop products. (The internet and much of modern tech followed the same model.) Take the MRNA technology present in the covid vaccines our pharmaceutical industry has given us: it was developed bit by bit, hacked away at, over 40 years, by women like Katalin Karikó, working in public universities and demoted and denied funding much of that time. (Google her, she's fascinating. I wouldn't have had the strength to do what she did.) Also, those malaria vaccines ... we're not there yet. I'll grant you happily that we may finally be there, almost, but ... not yet. > cleaner air by replacing coal with renewables Cleaner air than what? Than what the very same economic interests responsible for it have spewed into the atmostphere for the last 100 years? Again, baseline, obligatory stuff. I'm happy the air is cleaner but, like, if you spit in my face and then clean it off, I'm supposed to be grateful? "What an age we live in!!" ??? > earth-facing satellites that let us learn about the planet that our lives depend on I'm not even sure what this means. Like the satellites that detect how badly we've fucked everything up? Sure. I'm happy to give it to you. > why don't you move to a country where you won't be bothered by such things > why stay In general I don't like this line of argument when I see it used in the normal contexts (Person: "Healthcare is horrible here, and people suffer unnecessarily, let's have a universal system like everywhere else." Other person: "If you hate America so much why don't you leave?"). But you asked sincerely, so I'll answer sincerely: 1) w/r/t to the aspects of my critique that have to do with truly global or systemic problems, moving to another country makes zero sense except maybe to my little feelies: I see it as the same as, after noting that my bedroom is dirty, deciding to sleep in the cleaner living room. The house is still filthy and I've done nothing about it. It's just denial. An inbuilt human function, to be sure, but I'm not into it. 2) When I was very young, I quit something I'd cared a lot about because it frustrated me at a certain point in my progression. In the weeks and months following, it ate away at me. Sometimes it still does, tbh. I've never forgotten this and I've built it into how I live my life (tried, anyway -- but sometimes succeeding in small ways!). Simply put, I don't quit and I don't run. The things at issue in this thread aren't cereal boxes in a supermarket aisle: choosing a different box of cereal (cutting and running) isn't only cowardly, it works against what I'd like to see in the world. 3) I stay because the developed world, as you put it, is the only place where I have even a snowball's chance in hell of making changes right now. Why? Because I'm already here, right now, and I have (some) legal and political rights, fluency in the language, a community I can attempt to influence, etc. Not to mention it's the part of the world historically responsible for the most damage (of the kind I've outlined), so attempting to act here is (I hope) more bang for my buck. All told, it's my duty to stay because it's my duty to try and influence what's around me right now -- not to mention that it's all I can do to make anything better, as I don't have any power (even a sliver) anywhere else. 4) I love it here. You're maybe conflating my hating obscene wealth accumulation and billionaires and the system we've made to make them happy with hating this country or these countries or the land or (above all) the people. These critiques are made because I love it here. If it didn't, why would I bother? And if, in loving it, I show some zeal, well, have you never loved zealously?
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  Right, it wasn't meant to be a complete list. Maybe I should have added more etceteras. > We had this 100 years ago No, we had things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche. The state of art was completely dependent on lead-acid chemistry, and there was no way around it for the next hundred years. In light of that fact, it's a damn good thing electric cars were killed in the crib, because all that lead was going to be handled with the same stewardship as fossil fuels have been. Plus, they just sucked. Tell me, if not for Elon Musk, how exactly do you think we could have gotten to where we are now? Do you think the government was going to do it? Elon is disagreeable, possibly Aspergers, and both a paper billionaire and a transient. But it's possible that normal people don't do things like force open a new market against impossible odds using new and speculative technology. Exact same goes for SpaceX. If you have a plan to compete with NASA and cut the cost of launch services by ninety percent, I'd love to hear it. > [medical imaging and diagnostics] For whom? And at what price? For me. My family is on Medicaid. My daughter's life was saved this past year by state-of-the-art ultrasonography, which was provided to us for free. Some years ago my father, who's on Medicare, was saved by an MRI that found a brain tumor. The development and manufacture of those machines doubtless made a lot people wealthy. I think they deserve every penny. > To back up a sec: the thing I'm getting at in these posts isn't an objection to modernity per se I agree with everything in this paragraph. > Cleaner air than what? Cleaner than the mess made by the coal and oil that powered the industrial revolution, and that was subsequently propped up by generations of corrupt industrialists and politicians. I wish it weren't so, but photovoltaics and gigawatt scale wind power took time to develop, and in the mean time I'm glad we had things like electricity and cars, as dirty as they may have been. Regardless of how we got here, we need these breakthroughs. There's a lot of money to be made, and that's a good thing, because it means the people engaged in this fight are in a hurry to get there. > I'm not even sure what this means. Like the satellites that detect how badly we've fucked everything up? This is sort of a glass-half-empty point of view. Yes, that, but also for the endless, unpredictable rewards of discovery. All the other stuff you wrote, I think we'd find we mostly agree.
  - maybelsyrup 5y ago

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> etc, etc, etc This list ... I know this is a quick-fire web forum like any other, so I'm not expecting a doctoral dissertation on the benefits of modernity. If that's from the top of your head, more or less, that's cool, that's what HN is for (and thank god right?). But like, is that it? Is that the best you (we) can say for this "future"? If it is, you've made my point for me, in my view. > Electrified transportation We had this 100 years ago - or at least had a good crack at making this the norm - but we lost it. (Why did we lose it?) We could have electrified mass transport, too, but our betters have decided over and over again that we're not allowed. So now we're getting (some) electric cars back (maybe? Toyota doesn't seem too keen) and -- again -- we're supposed to ... applaud? Be grateful? To me, this is baseline stuff, like tap water and weekends. To applaud Elon Musk or any billionaire for being so gracious as to provide them (for a few) is to debase yourself -- it's beneath your dignity as a person. > vastly improved medical imaging and diagnostics For whom? And at what price? For HN denizens (you and me included, probably), yes (again though, maybe). And even then, it's tied for most of us to mostly meaningless employment, toiling away at TPS reports in the exact companies I'm decrying here. Let's not even get into what sort of medical imaging and diagnostics everyone else gets and what they have to do to pay. > vaccines for the most widespread and deadly diseases (like malaria) To back up a sec: the thing I'm getting at in these posts isn't an objection to modernity per se, it's to the modernity forged by the utterly unrestrained capitalism that has brought our planet to the brink of collapse. So, if you're talking medical research, you need to account for how much basic science is done by public servants in public institutions paid for by our tax dollars and whose coattails pharmaceutical firms are all too happy to ride as they run off with it to develop products. (The internet and much of modern tech followed the same model.) Take the MRNA technology present in the covid vaccines our pharmaceutical industry has given us: it was developed bit by bit, hacked away at, over 40 years, by women like Katalin Karikó, working in public universities and demoted and denied funding much of that time. (Google her, she's fascinating. I wouldn't have had the strength to do what she did.) Also, those malaria vaccines ... we're not there yet. I'll grant you happily that we may finally be there, almost, but ... not yet. > cleaner air by replacing coal with renewables Cleaner air than what? Than what the very same economic interests responsible for it have spewed into the atmostphere for the last 100 years? Again, baseline, obligatory stuff. I'm happy the air is cleaner but, like, if you spit in my face and then clean it off, I'm supposed to be grateful? "What an age we live in!!" ??? > earth-facing satellites that let us learn about the planet that our lives depend on I'm not even sure what this means. Like the satellites that detect how badly we've fucked everything up? Sure. I'm happy to give it to you. > why don't you move to a country where you won't be bothered by such things > why stay In general I don't like this line of argument when I see it used in the normal contexts (Person: "Healthcare is horrible here, and people suffer unnecessarily, let's have a universal system like everywhere else." Other person: "If you hate America so much why don't you leave?"). But you asked sincerely, so I'll answer sincerely: 1) w/r/t to the aspects of my critique that have to do with truly global or systemic problems, moving to another country makes zero sense except maybe to my little feelies: I see it as the same as, after noting that my bedroom is dirty, deciding to sleep in the cleaner living room. The house is still filthy and I've done nothing about it. It's just denial. An inbuilt human function, to be sure, but I'm not into it. 2) When I was very young, I quit something I'd cared a lot about because it frustrated me at a certain point in my progression. In the weeks and months following, it ate away at me. Sometimes it still does, tbh. I've never forgotten this and I've built it into how I live my life (tried, anyway -- but sometimes succeeding in small ways!). Simply put, I don't quit and I don't run. The things at issue in this thread aren't cereal boxes in a supermarket aisle: choosing a different box of cereal (cutting and running) isn't only cowardly, it works against what I'd like to see in the world. 3) I stay because the developed world, as you put it, is the only place where I have even a snowball's chance in hell of making changes right now. Why? Because I'm already here, right now, and I have (some) legal and political rights, fluency in the language, a community I can attempt to influence, etc. Not to mention it's the part of the world historically responsible for the most damage (of the kind I've outlined), so attempting to act here is (I hope) more bang for my buck. All told, it's my duty to stay because it's my duty to try and influence what's around me right now -- not to mention that it's all I can do to make anything better, as I don't have any power (even a sliver) anywhere else. 4) I love it here. You're maybe conflating my hating obscene wealth accumulation and billionaires and the system we've made to make them happy with hating this country or these countries or the land or (above all) the people. These critiques are made because I love it here. If it didn't, why would I bother? And if, in loving it, I show some zeal, well, have you never loved zealously?

nate_meurer 5y ago
Right, it wasn't meant to be a complete list. Maybe I should have added more etceteras. > We had this 100 years ago No, we had things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche. The state of art was completely dependent on lead-acid chemistry, and there was no way around it for the next hundred years. In light of that fact, it's a damn good thing electric cars were killed in the crib, because all that lead was going to be handled with the same stewardship as fossil fuels have been. Plus, they just sucked. Tell me, if not for Elon Musk, how exactly do you think we could have gotten to where we are now? Do you think the government was going to do it? Elon is disagreeable, possibly Aspergers, and both a paper billionaire and a transient. But it's possible that normal people don't do things like force open a new market against impossible odds using new and speculative technology. Exact same goes for SpaceX. If you have a plan to compete with NASA and cut the cost of launch services by ninety percent, I'd love to hear it. > [medical imaging and diagnostics] For whom? And at what price? For me. My family is on Medicaid. My daughter's life was saved this past year by state-of-the-art ultrasonography, which was provided to us for free. Some years ago my father, who's on Medicare, was saved by an MRI that found a brain tumor. The development and manufacture of those machines doubtless made a lot people wealthy. I think they deserve every penny. > To back up a sec: the thing I'm getting at in these posts isn't an objection to modernity per se I agree with everything in this paragraph. > Cleaner air than what? Cleaner than the mess made by the coal and oil that powered the industrial revolution, and that was subsequently propped up by generations of corrupt industrialists and politicians. I wish it weren't so, but photovoltaics and gigawatt scale wind power took time to develop, and in the mean time I'm glad we had things like electricity and cars, as dirty as they may have been. Regardless of how we got here, we need these breakthroughs. There's a lot of money to be made, and that's a good thing, because it means the people engaged in this fight are in a hurry to get there. > I'm not even sure what this means. Like the satellites that detect how badly we've fucked everything up? This is sort of a glass-half-empty point of view. Yes, that, but also for the endless, unpredictable rewards of discovery. All the other stuff you wrote, I think we'd find we mostly agree.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago