13 ms·

Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. <50% believe in

by oicU00 4y ago

Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports. “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves, while being paid minimum wage. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. Given sentiment nurses, teachers, “essential” workers just experienced from their neighbors during covid, why not tell the so called gritty masses who melted down over hair cuts to find new solutions. People who are not alive yet have no obligation to carry our sensibilities forward after we die.

Tepix 4y ago
> ...and some numbers are wacky. > <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. I guess teaching kids to trust in science and not in imaginary friends is slowly paying off.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  OP didn't say kids trust science though. It could be they reject everything. :-(
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Rejecting organized religion for any reason is a step in the right direction.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Careful...delusion comes in many forms.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Or that's a facile thought, that doesn't take into consideration second order effects and utility, only whether "god is true" or not...
      - celticninja 4y ago
        Organized religion is a different kind of societal harm, where personal religion can be good or bad, organized religion will always be a net negative.
        dukeofdoom 4y ago
        Organized religion helped to defeat Communism, and tempered dictatorial control of many despots in the middle east. So your statement is far removed from reality.
        MOUNOPANO 4y ago
        93po 4y ago
        > Organized religion helped to defeat Communism Looks like this is helping the argument that religion is a net negative
        nradov 4y ago
        How so?
        93po 4y ago
        I'm a communist sympathizer
- rhacker 4y ago
  They still have imaginary friends on facebook though. At least god has morals. We haven't replace those and the number of mass shootings seems to be going up as belief in god goes down.
  - antifa 4y ago
    It would surprise me if there were any statistics that didn't indicate the opposite of your implications.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Tepix 4y ago
    You don't need god for morals (contrary to what many believe)
    - rhacker 4y ago
      When you're talking about an individual, of course. When you're talking about a population - what is replacing that?
drugstorecowboy 4y ago
> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where it wasn't before and it's a good way to make more money. Do you honestly believe that pre-covid people worked at McDonalds because of their desire to provide food to people? > We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato. This is progress. Do you believe a world where everyone grows their own crops to feed themselves is an improvement? People don't grow potatoes because it is a waste of their time when you can buy a giant bag of them for next to nothing. Something only possible because of the modern JIT economy. What you call stability is actually inefficiency and waste in disguise.
- rabuse 4y ago
  "Waste of their time". Is binging a Netflix series more important than having survival skills?
  - heartbreak 4y ago
    Surviving a societal meltdown is not a goal of mine, so yes.
- oicU00 4y ago
  People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker. You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid. Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders. One cannot wave away reality for philosophy.
- breakfastduck 4y ago
  Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time. Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).
basisword 4y ago
>> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Is it urbanisation? I've noticed this trend in the suburbs in my country too and there seem to be a couple of reasons: 1. Driving tests have gotten progressively more difficult and more complex over the last 10-20 years. 2. The cost of learning to drive is insane and getting more expensive. Personally, I put off learning to drive and now that I'm in my 30's I'm finding it very hard to justify the cost and time investment necessary, despite wanting to get a license. Until I need it, I think I'll continue putting it off.
- svachalek 4y ago
  Hmm, I don't know what country you are in, but this doesn't sound like the US at all. There's a recent spike in the cost of driving due to gas prices and car supply, but afaik driving tests here have always been fairly trivial and still are.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Not OP, but I can confirm old country made it super hard lately. On the other hand, IL DMV seems to give away DLs like they are candy. Anecdata only; if anyone has data, I will happily retract this statement.
    - georgeecollins 4y ago
      >> IL DMV seems to give away DLs like they are candy. In the USA DLs are by far and away the most common form of identification. Many people don't have passports, just DLs.
      - ars 4y ago
        You can get a non-drivers ID in the exact same place, in the same way, just without the driving test.
        4y ago
throwaway6734 4y ago
>We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. This is hyperbolic. The US is not a banana republic. Why would you expect the average person to need to know how to grow a potato?
- asdff 4y ago
  Replace potato with any old piece of handy info, like home or car maintenance. A lot of younger Americans (myself included) have little practical knowledge, so everything needing knowhow in this generation must be outsourced. Compare this to my grandfather's generation, he knew how to frame houses, plumb, electric work, auto work, gardening, etc, and he was not alone. If he needed something done you'd get four of your buddies and work on the project for the weekend instead of hiring a contractor. In my dads generation fewer people knew these things but still, a lot of people learned from their dads. In my generation otoh it seems like no one knows any of this, and therefore any issue around the home or the car becomes this catastrophic repair since you have to hire a specialist who charges hundreds an hour because you haven't learned very much that's actually practically useful for your life.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    If you go a few generations further back, your ancestors lived in crushing rural poverty but literally hand-made most of the things in their own house, with the rest produced by local craftspeople; grew/raised or gathered/hunted most of their own food; made their own clothing starting from raw materials; etc. Your buddies today have dramatically greater material wealth due to worldwide supply chains and mass production, but don’t know how to turn an unshorn sheep into a blanket or sweater or build walls out of mud and sticks. Today it’s no longer worth even fixing most stuff because the labor costs to do anything as a one-off are prohibitive compared to buying a new one from a streamlined (capital and energy intensive) factory.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    You can still learn these skills. In fact, the wide access to knowledge should give you enough to learn these skills without ever having to ask someone else. The larger reality is a lot of these people don't need to learn these skills, so they won't, for various specific reasons. Same way you can ask a ton of people gen X and higher how to open a Word document, many of them don't know. They don't even know where to get the information besides asking family and friends, because that's their modus operandi. Tons of human support still has a job only because these people can't figure things out without another person helping them. Every generation currently alive has a large degree of learned helplessness. The areas where they are helpless just vary.
Melatonic 4y ago
A lot of those very much do not sound like "things are falling apart" to me
- oicU00 4y ago
  Reality is not unzipping in that the speed of light is different. A lot of inner monologues, sense of belonging, hope for the future, as something like covid makes the masses see a minority who do none of the “real work” as dependents who somehow have far more comfortable lives. Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!” It’s a predictable circle of life given the common and fundamentally unchanged from any past iteration over the last thousands of years, human condition.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Not a wealthy investor but would be interested in your newsletter if it’s reasonably priced.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!” It's always been an empty platitude from the SV disillusional masses: when the business model is 'grow at all costs, even if you lose money' in order to cash out on an over-inflated IPO, it was clear that it was never to disrupt anything. It was t:o build something seemingly novel, raise funds to fight a war of attrition, moat, weaken the opposition and take majority market-share and then cash out. Plan B is selling out to some megacorp/tech oligarch in order to rinse and repeat as a 'serial entrepreneur' until you eventually get to a position in which you get on a board and you can ossify something like Twitter, too!
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It’s interesting, even if you don’t believe in a higher power, people that believe in God have far lower rates of depression and suicide, so if you try to optimize your life for happiness and mental robustness, it’s then logical to believe in a higher power. This is an interesting manifestation of the incompleteness theorem. :)
scrubs 4y ago
I like these points: * We engineered away stability for JIT Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked when it'd be back in stock. They said their suppliers didn't have the stuff. We're talking car parts: aluminum rotors, metal calipers, brake pads. We're not talking chips. Apparently this US brake company is just an importer and paper-pusher. I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Seen locally or tactically year-on-year that's not per se the rich's fault. But it nevertheless needs a course correction. Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Congress is a part of the problem here too being more aligned with corporations instead of the middle class.
- cnelsenmilt 4y ago
  It's funny, because this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right. Basic nationalism on the one hand, "Buy Local" on the other. They all want the same thing, or close to it. The potential for alliance on economic topics like this is so blindingly obvious, and it's so frustrating that it gets derailed by "cultural" sideshows so that no one can talk to each other or realize they have the same interests ultimately.
  - blindmute 4y ago
    If they want the same thing, the laws will get passed. What actually happens is that each side proposes laws that are not even close to acceptable to the other side, proving that they don't actually want the same things.
  - dbingham 4y ago
    There is a framing in which they want the same thing, but each side wants to use a method to achieving that thing that is antithetical to the other. The left wants to achieve it by limiting the power of capital and corporations. The right wants to achieve it by limiting the power of democracy and restricting it to certain demographics. Each finds the other's method appalling.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Efficiency is always at odds with robustness, it’s unfortunate that people forget…
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  It seems obvious, but I'll accept disagreements as a way to learn. While we aspire to build anti-fragile systems, there are real sort term incentives to building efficient fragile systems. Capitalistic incentives exactly like evolutionary pressures, have no responsibility to provide solutions which match our views on how the way the world should work, what's fair, and what's just. I find it personally difficult to assume that a business owner when faced with the a series of micro-choices each of which impacts profit could not choose to maximize profit the majority of the time even at the expense of robustness or anti-fragility. It's this garden path optimization that leads to catastrophic outcomes like supply chain paralysis or bankruptcy.
throwawaygh 4y ago
Your observations about minimum wage work and globalized JIT supply chains are, I think, pretty valid. > <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit." > most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s. Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil. I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options. > Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it This reeks of "Bowling Alone". Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms. > leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports. Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-beliefs-among-american-adolescents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-be...
- oicU00 4y ago
  The conversations I’m in are not simply focused on brain trauma; the resource cost of hauling around teams and gear is substantial. Conversations at homes on “Main Street” are more frequently referring to multiple reasons for a decision, not reducing it to one or another. Same goes for traditions like coin and paper money; they consume a lot of stuff and energy. That’s become a repeated talking point when polling people why they are interested in crypto, which was unexpected. The data models I’m asked to build include more than just opinion polls though, as it’s felt by the folks I work with opinions are biased by media, anxiety of going against the grain, and frankly, lack of imagination and considering alternatives on the part of the public. See a quote commonly attributed to Adam Smith about extreme division of labor resulting in humans dumber than animals; there’s no exploration across contexts; a farmer is a farmer and that’s it. Proper Anglo tradition of staying in lanes dictated by aristocracy. Generational churn won’t end reality itself, or be so dramatic we stop using English. It will curve agency away from old forms of agency to new. A lot of people freak out about that.
sanderjd 4y ago
Very interesting comment, but one thing I don't get is the sports one. Why would lower participation in youth sports lead to a contraction of commercial sports? Does low youth participation in making TV shows hurt the market for consuming them?
- lampshades 4y ago
  Everyone I know that didn't grow up playing sports also doesn't watch them.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >Everyone I know that didn't grow up playing sports also doesn't watch them. An excellent point. When I was a child, we just grabbed our mitts/bats/balls/frisbees/whatever and went out to play with our peers and came home when it was dark/raining/time for dinner. Over the last 30 years or so, it seems that (not that such things didn't exist 30+ years ago) in most places it's difficult to engage in sports without an organized group/league, especially in places where greenspace isn't within walking/biking distance. As such, most kids need adults to get them to/from sports and there's not very much in the way of pick-up games[0] and the like. The lack of unstructured sport leaves many kids out of sports (given that parents need to spend time and money to get their kids involved and to/from such activities) N.B.: The above is definitely a US-centric viewpoint. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_game
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    N=1... Very few people have ever played american football, yet it has the largest audience of all US sports.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. We’re just going to ignore the trend of states eliminating general licensing for that age group and replacing it with time-, purpose-, and passenger-restricted provisional licensing that happened between the 1980s and now as a driver of that trend?
ryukafalz 4y ago
> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. > 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. As a young-ish person neither of these seems particularly “wacky”, and if places actually are re-urbanizing to any significant degree I’d say that’s a good thing given the changes we need to make to address climate change. Doesn’t feel like they are in the moment though.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  If anything, believing in God/higher being is wacky. :p (And reminder that the U.S. is the most religious highly developed Western nation by far.)
rsanek 4y ago
> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid Do you have a source for this? From what I could find, participation has been roughly flat for the last ~20 years. https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Youth_Sports_Strategy.pdf https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Yout...

by oicU00 4y ago

Tepix 4y ago

> ...and some numbers are wacky. > <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. I guess teaching kids to trust in science and not in imaginary friends is slowly paying off.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
OP didn't say kids trust science though. It could be they reject everything. :-(
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Rejecting organized religion for any reason is a step in the right direction.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Careful...delusion comes in many forms.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Or that's a facile thought, that doesn't take into consideration second order effects and utility, only whether "god is true" or not...
    - celticninja 4y ago
      Organized religion is a different kind of societal harm, where personal religion can be good or bad, organized religion will always be a net negative.
      - dukeofdoom 4y ago
        Organized religion helped to defeat Communism, and tempered dictatorial control of many despots in the middle east. So your statement is far removed from reality.
        MOUNOPANO 4y ago
        93po 4y ago
        > Organized religion helped to defeat Communism Looks like this is helping the argument that religion is a net negative
        nradov 4y ago
        How so?
        93po 4y ago
        I'm a communist sympathizer
rhacker 4y ago
They still have imaginary friends on facebook though. At least god has morals. We haven't replace those and the number of mass shootings seems to be going up as belief in god goes down.
- antifa 4y ago
  It would surprise me if there were any statistics that didn't indicate the opposite of your implications.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Tepix 4y ago
  You don't need god for morals (contrary to what many believe)
  - rhacker 4y ago
    When you're talking about an individual, of course. When you're talking about a population - what is replacing that?

drugstorecowboy 4y ago

> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on. They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where it wasn't before and it's a good way to make more money. Do you honestly believe that pre-covid people worked at McDonalds because of their desire to provide food to people? > We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato. This is progress. Do you believe a world where everyone grows their own crops to feed themselves is an improvement? People don't grow potatoes because it is a waste of their time when you can buy a giant bag of them for next to nothing. Something only possible because of the modern JIT economy. What you call stability is actually inefficiency and waste in disguise.

rabuse 4y ago
"Waste of their time". Is binging a Netflix series more important than having survival skills?
- heartbreak 4y ago
  Surviving a societal meltdown is not a goal of mine, so yes.
oicU00 4y ago
People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker. You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid. Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders. One cannot wave away reality for philosophy.
breakfastduck 4y ago
Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time. Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).

basisword 4y ago

>> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Is it urbanisation? I've noticed this trend in the suburbs in my country too and there seem to be a couple of reasons: 1. Driving tests have gotten progressively more difficult and more complex over the last 10-20 years. 2. The cost of learning to drive is insane and getting more expensive. Personally, I put off learning to drive and now that I'm in my 30's I'm finding it very hard to justify the cost and time investment necessary, despite wanting to get a license. Until I need it, I think I'll continue putting it off.

svachalek 4y ago
Hmm, I don't know what country you are in, but this doesn't sound like the US at all. There's a recent spike in the cost of driving due to gas prices and car supply, but afaik driving tests here have always been fairly trivial and still are.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Not OP, but I can confirm old country made it super hard lately. On the other hand, IL DMV seems to give away DLs like they are candy. Anecdata only; if anyone has data, I will happily retract this statement.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    >> IL DMV seems to give away DLs like they are candy. In the USA DLs are by far and away the most common form of identification. Many people don't have passports, just DLs.
    - ars 4y ago
      You can get a non-drivers ID in the exact same place, in the same way, just without the driving test.
      - 4y ago

throwaway6734 4y ago

>We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. This is hyperbolic. The US is not a banana republic. Why would you expect the average person to need to know how to grow a potato?

asdff 4y ago
Replace potato with any old piece of handy info, like home or car maintenance. A lot of younger Americans (myself included) have little practical knowledge, so everything needing knowhow in this generation must be outsourced. Compare this to my grandfather's generation, he knew how to frame houses, plumb, electric work, auto work, gardening, etc, and he was not alone. If he needed something done you'd get four of your buddies and work on the project for the weekend instead of hiring a contractor. In my dads generation fewer people knew these things but still, a lot of people learned from their dads. In my generation otoh it seems like no one knows any of this, and therefore any issue around the home or the car becomes this catastrophic repair since you have to hire a specialist who charges hundreds an hour because you haven't learned very much that's actually practically useful for your life.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  If you go a few generations further back, your ancestors lived in crushing rural poverty but literally hand-made most of the things in their own house, with the rest produced by local craftspeople; grew/raised or gathered/hunted most of their own food; made their own clothing starting from raw materials; etc. Your buddies today have dramatically greater material wealth due to worldwide supply chains and mass production, but don’t know how to turn an unshorn sheep into a blanket or sweater or build walls out of mud and sticks. Today it’s no longer worth even fixing most stuff because the labor costs to do anything as a one-off are prohibitive compared to buying a new one from a streamlined (capital and energy intensive) factory.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  You can still learn these skills. In fact, the wide access to knowledge should give you enough to learn these skills without ever having to ask someone else. The larger reality is a lot of these people don't need to learn these skills, so they won't, for various specific reasons. Same way you can ask a ton of people gen X and higher how to open a Word document, many of them don't know. They don't even know where to get the information besides asking family and friends, because that's their modus operandi. Tons of human support still has a job only because these people can't figure things out without another person helping them. Every generation currently alive has a large degree of learned helplessness. The areas where they are helpless just vary.

Melatonic 4y ago

A lot of those very much do not sound like "things are falling apart" to me

oicU00 4y ago
Reality is not unzipping in that the speed of light is different. A lot of inner monologues, sense of belonging, hope for the future, as something like covid makes the masses see a minority who do none of the “real work” as dependents who somehow have far more comfortable lives. Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!” It’s a predictable circle of life given the common and fundamentally unchanged from any past iteration over the last thousands of years, human condition.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Not a wealthy investor but would be interested in your newsletter if it’s reasonably priced.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!” It's always been an empty platitude from the SV disillusional masses: when the business model is 'grow at all costs, even if you lose money' in order to cash out on an over-inflated IPO, it was clear that it was never to disrupt anything. It was t:o build something seemingly novel, raise funds to fight a war of attrition, moat, weaken the opposition and take majority market-share and then cash out. Plan B is selling out to some megacorp/tech oligarch in order to rinse and repeat as a 'serial entrepreneur' until you eventually get to a position in which you get on a board and you can ossify something like Twitter, too!
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It’s interesting, even if you don’t believe in a higher power, people that believe in God have far lower rates of depression and suicide, so if you try to optimize your life for happiness and mental robustness, it’s then logical to believe in a higher power. This is an interesting manifestation of the incompleteness theorem. :)

scrubs 4y ago

I like these points: * We engineered away stability for JIT Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked when it'd be back in stock. They said their suppliers didn't have the stuff. We're talking car parts: aluminum rotors, metal calipers, brake pads. We're not talking chips. Apparently this US brake company is just an importer and paper-pusher. I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Seen locally or tactically year-on-year that's not per se the rich's fault. But it nevertheless needs a course correction. Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Congress is a part of the problem here too being more aligned with corporations instead of the middle class.

cnelsenmilt 4y ago
It's funny, because this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right. Basic nationalism on the one hand, "Buy Local" on the other. They all want the same thing, or close to it. The potential for alliance on economic topics like this is so blindingly obvious, and it's so frustrating that it gets derailed by "cultural" sideshows so that no one can talk to each other or realize they have the same interests ultimately.
- blindmute 4y ago
  If they want the same thing, the laws will get passed. What actually happens is that each side proposes laws that are not even close to acceptable to the other side, proving that they don't actually want the same things.
- dbingham 4y ago
  There is a framing in which they want the same thing, but each side wants to use a method to achieving that thing that is antithetical to the other. The left wants to achieve it by limiting the power of capital and corporations. The right wants to achieve it by limiting the power of democracy and restricting it to certain demographics. Each finds the other's method appalling.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Efficiency is always at odds with robustness, it’s unfortunate that people forget…

kelseyfrog 4y ago
It seems obvious, but I'll accept disagreements as a way to learn. While we aspire to build anti-fragile systems, there are real sort term incentives to building efficient fragile systems. Capitalistic incentives exactly like evolutionary pressures, have no responsibility to provide solutions which match our views on how the way the world should work, what's fair, and what's just. I find it personally difficult to assume that a business owner when faced with the a series of micro-choices each of which impacts profit could not choose to maximize profit the majority of the time even at the expense of robustness or anti-fragility. It's this garden path optimization that leads to catastrophic outcomes like supply chain paralysis or bankruptcy.

throwawaygh 4y ago

Your observations about minimum wage work and globalized JIT supply chains are, I think, pretty valid. > <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit." > most people can’t grow a potato for themselves. Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s. Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil. I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options. > Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it This reeks of "Bowling Alone". Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms. > leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports. Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-beliefs-among-american-adolescents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-be...

oicU00 4y ago
The conversations I’m in are not simply focused on brain trauma; the resource cost of hauling around teams and gear is substantial. Conversations at homes on “Main Street” are more frequently referring to multiple reasons for a decision, not reducing it to one or another. Same goes for traditions like coin and paper money; they consume a lot of stuff and energy. That’s become a repeated talking point when polling people why they are interested in crypto, which was unexpected. The data models I’m asked to build include more than just opinion polls though, as it’s felt by the folks I work with opinions are biased by media, anxiety of going against the grain, and frankly, lack of imagination and considering alternatives on the part of the public. See a quote commonly attributed to Adam Smith about extreme division of labor resulting in humans dumber than animals; there’s no exploration across contexts; a farmer is a farmer and that’s it. Proper Anglo tradition of staying in lanes dictated by aristocracy. Generational churn won’t end reality itself, or be so dramatic we stop using English. It will curve agency away from old forms of agency to new. A lot of people freak out about that.

sanderjd 4y ago

Very interesting comment, but one thing I don't get is the sports one. Why would lower participation in youth sports lead to a contraction of commercial sports? Does low youth participation in making TV shows hurt the market for consuming them?

lampshades 4y ago
Everyone I know that didn't grow up playing sports also doesn't watch them.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >Everyone I know that didn't grow up playing sports also doesn't watch them. An excellent point. When I was a child, we just grabbed our mitts/bats/balls/frisbees/whatever and went out to play with our peers and came home when it was dark/raining/time for dinner. Over the last 30 years or so, it seems that (not that such things didn't exist 30+ years ago) in most places it's difficult to engage in sports without an organized group/league, especially in places where greenspace isn't within walking/biking distance. As such, most kids need adults to get them to/from sports and there's not very much in the way of pick-up games[0] and the like. The lack of unstructured sport leaves many kids out of sports (given that parents need to spend time and money to get their kids involved and to/from such activities) N.B.: The above is definitely a US-centric viewpoint. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_game
- sanderjd 4y ago
  N=1... Very few people have ever played american football, yet it has the largest audience of all US sports.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. We’re just going to ignore the trend of states eliminating general licensing for that age group and replacing it with time-, purpose-, and passenger-restricted provisional licensing that happened between the 1980s and now as a driver of that trend?

ryukafalz 4y ago

> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s. > 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. As a young-ish person neither of these seems particularly “wacky”, and if places actually are re-urbanizing to any significant degree I’d say that’s a good thing given the changes we need to make to address climate change. Doesn’t feel like they are in the moment though.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
If anything, believing in God/higher being is wacky. :p (And reminder that the U.S. is the most religious highly developed Western nation by far.)

rsanek 4y ago

> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid Do you have a source for this? From what I could find, participation has been roughly flat for the last ~20 years. https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Youth_Sports_Strategy.pdf https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Yout...