4 ms·

We (society) can sometimes get mired in the minutia and miss the big picture. With present-day, proven technology, we can physically create ample prosperity fo

We (society) can sometimes get mired in the minutia and miss the big picture. With present-day, proven technology, we can physically create ample prosperity for every human on Earth today. Energy is abundant, arable land is abundant, minerals are abundant. It turns out that the hardest part is organizing the effort to do so, which is fundamentally a mechanism design problem. The incentives of the influential are clearly an emergent phenomenon, so it’s silly to point the finger at a political party or individual. The fact remains that the incentives that obtain are driving an inequality situation that is trivially unsustainable. If history is our guide: the guillotines are coming out, too late to prevent it. One hopes that we are not doomed to repeat history, having learned something, and rich people can sort of get together and do the math and realize that it’s not even in their interest to walk and talk and quack like a bunch of sociopaths.

sjwalter 5y ago
I think if you read World Economic Forum's writings and know a little history (Tragedy & Hope by Quigley is a good place to start), the coming chaos which will possibly impact the mere 1%ers--with highly-paid doctors and lawyers getting possibly mistakenly mixed into the targets of rage--is all part of the plan. WEF & Klaus Schwab's Great Reset intend to weaken the USA, because it is too independent and a bulwark against the unified world government, controlled by wealthy banking families & the true elite, they desire--they even state they desire. If this sounds all too conspiratorial to you, please, read Quigley. He was a member of Team Elite, and while his history only goes to the ~60s, his book is credible enough to be taught in poly sci courses all across the world, and it details how a small group of international, rootless bankers have made strides over time to increase their control. If you want to know what their agenda is, you can actually witness it being wrought in realtime. The overarching theme is that important concerns (specifically: economic issues) are to become within the control of this cretinous cabal. There is no room for national sovereignty in this. Social concerns are not just left to the individual nations, they are highlighted ad nauseum and hyped to the extreme, such that all the democratic nations in the world subsume themselves with vicious, divisive national arguments about relatively immaterial social concerns. Their medias endlessly stoke all manner of social problems--racial disparity, the rights of sexual minorities, the problems of religion--ensuring that nobody ever has a vote that can be cast for or against any particular economic choice or other, but rather, just a jumbled mass of nations all internally squabbling about relatively minor and divisive concerns. I mean, it's a strategy as old as time. And it's playing out right here in the USA. Election 2020 was about what? Racism! (The USA meanwhile is one of the least racist places on earth.) What else was it about? LGBTQ rights! Conspiracy theories! What else was it about? COVID! None of the debate was about the rise of China. About reshoring jobs and stifling the rise of a threatening and vile superpower. None of it was about actually cementing some kind of economic win for the 90%.
- atentaten 5y ago
  The same Team Elite is directly responsible for the rise and direction of China. Transpose the domestic squabbling to international squabbling and you will recognize the strategy that is old as as time.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  Trump was anti China since the beginning, he put sanctions on China that put us into a pseudo trade war. There’s one side of the political aisle that is hyper focused on immaterial things like LGBTQ rights and racism, and I think everyone reading this knows which side that is.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    It is unbelivable to me that many educated people on HN cannot put themselves in the shoes of the other person and simply sit down and imagine the narratives flip. It's like a rotating doll illusion. Sometimes it looks like its revolving left, sometimes the opposite. It shows the grip of politicians on their followers. It is impossible to imagine someone switching sides today. Ever want to embarrass someone? Ask them to name a couple of things their party does wrong. Or ask them if they can praise one thing about the other party. We're in the deepest delusion in the history. It is time to put down the pitch forks and listen to reason, rationality, logic, kindness and openmindedness. Worse is that they'll attack me for raising these questions (how dare you to be centrist?). These people need help.
    - benreesman 5y ago
      To both the parent and GP: I posted a comment that explicitly pointed out that blaming this or that political party is worse than useless. Of all the places on the Internet to woof for “red” or “blue” this seems like an especially weird one. It’s a fact of life that there’s a bunch of tribal instinct wired into Homo Sapiens, anyone who’s ever been to a professional sporting event knows that. But handling critical, complicated, delicate issues around the governance of the human race with all the subtlety and nuance of a drunk Chelsea supporter in a pub is uh, not the move. I don’t know how many times humanity needs to go through this tiresome exercise where the prosperous just can’t keep their hand out of the cookie jar, distract the body politic with deliberately inflamed tribal identification, and push it until the plebs epater les bourgeoisie, and we get a new set of assholes owning the damned water every needs to drink before we get to some kind of semi-stable Nash equilibrium, but if I never heard a politician’s name or some appeal to identity politics ever again: it would be too soon.
chii 5y ago
> we can physically create ample prosperity for every human on Earth today or you imagine it is possible, because you have it. It is not likely that every human can live the wealthy life style of americans. Current day technology can barely withstand the lack of gas and fossil fuel for a few weeks. Until the day star trek replicators exist, it won't be possible.
- benreesman 5y ago
  Photovoltaics alone are efficient at levels that would have sounded preposterous when I was a kid. This is over and above the fact that we’ve known how to build safe, reliable fission reactors for decades now. I want to believe that there’s a reason we don’t better than “nuclear reactor” shares a word with “nuclear weapon”, but when the planet you live on is substantially built out of raw fuel that doesn’t poison the skies, and you keep burning the kind that does? I don’t know what your background is, it sort of sounds like you can tell I’m a US passport holder and are coming from a different POV. A little inside baseball: during the entire 20th century and bleeding into the 21st, Americans did in fact enjoy a quality of life that most of the world did not. In some limited ways that’s even true today. But in the ways that matter, it’s getting really rough for the average family here these days. Something like 70% of American households could be forced into the red over a broken car needed for work, and basically everyone here is either paying (one way or another) much/most of what they earn on artificially expensive healthcare that the rest of the civilized world takes for granted. People use the term “opioid crisis” because even that is easier to say than: “people are killing themselves at a rate we refuse to even print”. There was an implied contract: on the one hand the US citizen got to burn a bunch more carbon and have a bigger TV, on the other hand that person was paying for the invention of everything from the transistor to the Internet, paying for the R&D on most important pharmaceuticals, policing the seas via the US Navy so all those container ships make it to their destination, keeping India and Pakistan’s nuclear aspirations in their lane, containing the only super states more authoritarian than the USA (e.g. you can buy a 5nm phone from foundries that you couldn’t absent wars my family members have fought and died in). Ceteris paribus it’s still more advantageous to be born in Santa Barbara than Kinsasha. But this “clueless, spoiled American” trope is wearing thin. It was the British Empire that did most of the ugly colonial stuff that we somehow got blamed for, and when the median person in a country is choosing between healthcare and heating oil: words like “wealthy” might not be the best to generalize with.

sjwalter 5y ago

I think if you read World Economic Forum's writings and know a little history (Tragedy & Hope by Quigley is a good place to start), the coming chaos which will possibly impact the mere 1%ers--with highly-paid doctors and lawyers getting possibly mistakenly mixed into the targets of rage--is all part of the plan. WEF & Klaus Schwab's Great Reset intend to weaken the USA, because it is too independent and a bulwark against the unified world government, controlled by wealthy banking families & the true elite, they desire--they even state they desire. If this sounds all too conspiratorial to you, please, read Quigley. He was a member of Team Elite, and while his history only goes to the ~60s, his book is credible enough to be taught in poly sci courses all across the world, and it details how a small group of international, rootless bankers have made strides over time to increase their control. If you want to know what their agenda is, you can actually witness it being wrought in realtime. The overarching theme is that important concerns (specifically: economic issues) are to become within the control of this cretinous cabal. There is no room for national sovereignty in this. Social concerns are not just left to the individual nations, they are highlighted ad nauseum and hyped to the extreme, such that all the democratic nations in the world subsume themselves with vicious, divisive national arguments about relatively immaterial social concerns. Their medias endlessly stoke all manner of social problems--racial disparity, the rights of sexual minorities, the problems of religion--ensuring that nobody ever has a vote that can be cast for or against any particular economic choice or other, but rather, just a jumbled mass of nations all internally squabbling about relatively minor and divisive concerns. I mean, it's a strategy as old as time. And it's playing out right here in the USA. Election 2020 was about what? Racism! (The USA meanwhile is one of the least racist places on earth.) What else was it about? LGBTQ rights! Conspiracy theories! What else was it about? COVID! None of the debate was about the rise of China. About reshoring jobs and stifling the rise of a threatening and vile superpower. None of it was about actually cementing some kind of economic win for the 90%.

atentaten 5y ago
The same Team Elite is directly responsible for the rise and direction of China. Transpose the domestic squabbling to international squabbling and you will recognize the strategy that is old as as time.
symlinkk 5y ago
Trump was anti China since the beginning, he put sanctions on China that put us into a pseudo trade war. There’s one side of the political aisle that is hyper focused on immaterial things like LGBTQ rights and racism, and I think everyone reading this knows which side that is.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  It is unbelivable to me that many educated people on HN cannot put themselves in the shoes of the other person and simply sit down and imagine the narratives flip. It's like a rotating doll illusion. Sometimes it looks like its revolving left, sometimes the opposite. It shows the grip of politicians on their followers. It is impossible to imagine someone switching sides today. Ever want to embarrass someone? Ask them to name a couple of things their party does wrong. Or ask them if they can praise one thing about the other party. We're in the deepest delusion in the history. It is time to put down the pitch forks and listen to reason, rationality, logic, kindness and openmindedness. Worse is that they'll attack me for raising these questions (how dare you to be centrist?). These people need help.
  - benreesman 5y ago
    To both the parent and GP: I posted a comment that explicitly pointed out that blaming this or that political party is worse than useless. Of all the places on the Internet to woof for “red” or “blue” this seems like an especially weird one. It’s a fact of life that there’s a bunch of tribal instinct wired into Homo Sapiens, anyone who’s ever been to a professional sporting event knows that. But handling critical, complicated, delicate issues around the governance of the human race with all the subtlety and nuance of a drunk Chelsea supporter in a pub is uh, not the move. I don’t know how many times humanity needs to go through this tiresome exercise where the prosperous just can’t keep their hand out of the cookie jar, distract the body politic with deliberately inflamed tribal identification, and push it until the plebs epater les bourgeoisie, and we get a new set of assholes owning the damned water every needs to drink before we get to some kind of semi-stable Nash equilibrium, but if I never heard a politician’s name or some appeal to identity politics ever again: it would be too soon.

chii 5y ago

> we can physically create ample prosperity for every human on Earth today or you imagine it is possible, because you have it. It is not likely that every human can live the wealthy life style of americans. Current day technology can barely withstand the lack of gas and fossil fuel for a few weeks. Until the day star trek replicators exist, it won't be possible.

benreesman 5y ago
Photovoltaics alone are efficient at levels that would have sounded preposterous when I was a kid. This is over and above the fact that we’ve known how to build safe, reliable fission reactors for decades now. I want to believe that there’s a reason we don’t better than “nuclear reactor” shares a word with “nuclear weapon”, but when the planet you live on is substantially built out of raw fuel that doesn’t poison the skies, and you keep burning the kind that does? I don’t know what your background is, it sort of sounds like you can tell I’m a US passport holder and are coming from a different POV. A little inside baseball: during the entire 20th century and bleeding into the 21st, Americans did in fact enjoy a quality of life that most of the world did not. In some limited ways that’s even true today. But in the ways that matter, it’s getting really rough for the average family here these days. Something like 70% of American households could be forced into the red over a broken car needed for work, and basically everyone here is either paying (one way or another) much/most of what they earn on artificially expensive healthcare that the rest of the civilized world takes for granted. People use the term “opioid crisis” because even that is easier to say than: “people are killing themselves at a rate we refuse to even print”. There was an implied contract: on the one hand the US citizen got to burn a bunch more carbon and have a bigger TV, on the other hand that person was paying for the invention of everything from the transistor to the Internet, paying for the R&D on most important pharmaceuticals, policing the seas via the US Navy so all those container ships make it to their destination, keeping India and Pakistan’s nuclear aspirations in their lane, containing the only super states more authoritarian than the USA (e.g. you can buy a 5nm phone from foundries that you couldn’t absent wars my family members have fought and died in). Ceteris paribus it’s still more advantageous to be born in Santa Barbara than Kinsasha. But this “clueless, spoiled American” trope is wearing thin. It was the British Empire that did most of the ugly colonial stuff that we somehow got blamed for, and when the median person in a country is choosing between healthcare and heating oil: words like “wealthy” might not be the best to generalize with.