3 ms·

Instead of doing the whole hell thing, which God decided was kind of harsh, they just moved us into a shitty timeline run by hack writers. It's kind of like wha

• eru 3y ago
  Wider your horizon a bit. By and large, the world is getting better and better for more and more people. To take your first example: American political theatre is small fry compared to billions lifting themselves out of abject poverty.
  • api 3y ago
    The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. I have this hypothesis that the weirdness and craziness is a symptom of early stage post-scarcity. Scarcity constrains things. Without it we will just spread out across the state space of possibilities like an oil slick, doing all kinds of insane and crazy things for increasingly complex and bizarre reasons. The more resources we have the more the question ceases to be "why" and becomes "why not?" I call this the singLOLarity hypothesis. A real post-scarcity future won't look like Star Trek. It'll look a little more like Lexx. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx If we are ever visited by super-advanced aliens, they will be really weird. Maybe they really are flying around in pimped-out spaceships with multi-color neon running lights mutilating our cattle for the lulz. The question is not "why?" It's "why not?"
    • eru 3y ago
      > The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true. Yes, that is true. I was taking your use of 'shitty timeline' to mean 'worse'. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about post-scarcity as a monolith. To give an example: Lamborghinis are still very much scarce; but drinking water out of the tap is so cheap in developed countries that we are living in a post-scarcity society for that resource. (I specify 'drinking water', because for industrial or agricultural applications water is still very much a constrained resource.) Another example is Internet bandwidth for text-only browsing of eg Wikipedia: it's too cheap to matter. Internet bandwidth for watching Netflix isn't quite there yet.
  • waboremo 3y ago
    I would argue that it's imperative you should also widen your horizon and recognize you are viewing human history in too narrow of a lens (mostly post-victorian era). The poverty statistic is one that gets thrown around a lot, but it's abysmally low still, and due to how our modern societies place far greater importance on money than any civilization before, this paints a much darker picture of our current timeline. This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation. One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't. Those that were restricted by land had far greater levels of inequality than those by labor[1]. This is crucial because we have created a modern hell, in which no amount of labor will give you wealth, you need land to accumulate wealth and most people do not have that when we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25". We make ourselves feel better about our modern life, but have we really advanced past dancing for our superiors' entertainment? Sometimes when this is discussed, people might feel this is an ungrateful perspective, but I argue the opposite: you can more vividly appreciate our ancestors and their lives for what you do not know of them, and to demand better of our lives instead of settling for these abysmal statistics. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/farminginequality-nexus-new-insights-from-ancient-western-eurasia/8EFE3B8F5AFA07450F87E4E9B553A43E https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ab...
    • eru 3y ago
      > This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation. Taken up by a sovereign nation state, you mean? They are pervasive. Corporations are a drop in the bucket by comparison. And not all countries even have corporations. > One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't. Why do you bring up inequality? Who cares about that? Let's care about the absolute well-being of people, especially those in lower income percentiles. For them it's scant consolation in their poverty, if other people are also in poverty. (Ie equality is no consolation.) > [...] we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25". I didn't mention any of that. You can measure poverty by that metric, and we made huge strides. But you can also look at other indicators. Like life expectancy, or child mortality or access to the Internet, or access to AC, or access to food and clean water, etc. Almost any metric you can think of has gotten better. And you might quibble with 1.25 1990-dollars as an absolute threshold for poverty, sure. But you can't quibble with it as one marker of relative progress amongst many. Or in other words: 1.25 dollar a day is a low bar, but the number of people who clear that low bar used to be much, much lower in the past than today. That's progress! Let's hope people's incomes will keep clearing higher and higher bars in the future!
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    While that's definitely the long-term trend, the last few years have been, ah, not great there either.
    • eru 3y ago
      The Covid shutdowns were a damper on the global economy, but otherwise it has still been going upwards. Or are you talking about something else?
      • rsynnott 3y ago
        The invasion of Ukraine resulted in a fairly significant increase in food poverty for much of the world; prices went up a _lot_. I think it has been moderating lately, but it has not been good.
• irrational 3y ago
  You forgot about climate change, rampant shootings, the rerise of fascism and white supremacy, the refugee crisis, the pandemic, etc.