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Many commenters here are older than me and have older parents. I forget because many are also younger than me and my parents are now grandparents. I'll be more

by advael 3y ago

Many commenters here are older than me and have older parents. I forget because many are also younger than me and my parents are now grandparents. I'll be more specific: The post-WW2 economic boom (That is, roughly 75-80 years ago) was full of promise and prosperity for a growing middle class. We got a lot of technological progress and even political will toward egalitarian attitudes out of that, but the economic situation has taken a turn toward oligarchy since about the 70s (That is, 50ish years ago), and this has essentially destroyed this middle-class prosperity, while also capturing technological progress and grinding a lot of it to a crawl, focusing mostly on dystopian applications. That's why the crowd at sxsw boos at tech people talking about AI

skrebbel 3y ago
You said “smoking ruins” and you said “world”. Actually you meant “in my super rich country, the middle class used to have better future prospects than now”. Meanwhile, most of the world has substantially better prospects now than in the 60s. And, depending on where you live, the same may well hold for a large lower class as well (eg black people in the US, who now get to pick any bus seat they want). Things only got worse if you exclude everybody who didn’t already have it super good.
- advael 3y ago
  Yea, "world" is often used in pretty drastically different senses, like we might mean an everett branch, the continuity of a fictional universe, or, as here, the experiential reality of a person or group of people. Their context. I have little granular information about the economic and political policies of most of the world, and will not claim to. I can mostly only talk about the US, where I live, though to be fair, this article is about a US festival wherein US industries got booed. Also, while it's great that we have ended the most obvious forms of nominal discrimination against racial minorities, there are a lot of thinly-veiled ways in which discrimination is still rampant, and trends like the decline of labor power and the automation of various decisions actually exacerbate these

by advael 3y ago

skrebbel 3y ago

You said “smoking ruins” and you said “world”. Actually you meant “in my super rich country, the middle class used to have better future prospects than now”. Meanwhile, most of the world has substantially better prospects now than in the 60s. And, depending on where you live, the same may well hold for a large lower class as well (eg black people in the US, who now get to pick any bus seat they want). Things only got worse if you exclude everybody who didn’t already have it super good.

advael 3y ago
Yea, "world" is often used in pretty drastically different senses, like we might mean an everett branch, the continuity of a fictional universe, or, as here, the experiential reality of a person or group of people. Their context. I have little granular information about the economic and political policies of most of the world, and will not claim to. I can mostly only talk about the US, where I live, though to be fair, this article is about a US festival wherein US industries got booed. Also, while it's great that we have ended the most obvious forms of nominal discrimination against racial minorities, there are a lot of thinly-veiled ways in which discrimination is still rampant, and trends like the decline of labor power and the automation of various decisions actually exacerbate these