9 ms·

Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this. That said, what the current administration is doin

Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this. That said, what the current administration is doing is almost like they're following a manual other countries followed on their road to nationalistic decline and all the right people in places of power seem to know this. I wonder if they're ready for it? My observation is that the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't, which tells me there is really no stopping what is to come. The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear. On the other hand, I like to think that if things turn sour and gruesome very fast, the American public might react to that well enough to make a u-turn.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.
- hparadiz 1y ago
  Living in LA is so great. The only thing I regret in my life is not getting here sooner.
  - jaoane 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - hparadiz 1y ago
      I have to work to live here.
  - b2fel 1y ago
    I can imagine but wait until you visit a walkable city!
    - kulahan 1y ago
      Man this is America. If people had any interest in walking, our national health picture would look very different. Even huge swathes of people voting for public transit in the US are doing so because they want everyone ELSE off the highway.
      - 0xAFFFF 1y ago
        It's not just about a lack of interest in walking. If your infrastructure is extremely hostile to walking, it's outright dangerous and unreliable and force people out of it.
      - hnthrow90348765 1y ago
        >our national health picture would look very different. It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.
        kulahan 1y ago
        No, consistent exercise is more than enough to make a significant difference. I didn’t say it would be fixed, I said it would be very different.
        johnnyanmac 1y ago
        you know what they say: you can't outrun a bad diet.
      - Marsymars 1y ago
        I’ll take that still. It’s bananas to me that more people aren’t in favour of public transit only for that reason.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
  - vips7L 1y ago
    Contrary, I couldn’t wait to leave LA. I regretted moving there as soon as I did and I’m much happier now that I left.
  - garbawarb 1y ago
    I love seeing when someone finds the right place for them. Why is LA so great for you?
peterbecich 1y ago
GOP and Dems have been nearly evenly matched for years in Congress now. There was no prospect of dramatic legal overhaul i.m.o., let alone any new Constitutional amendments. Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses#/media/File:Combined--Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
- intended 1y ago
  This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship. Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems. This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Dems have oddly bad party discipline. Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled, and yet this doesn't happen. They've not yet got serious.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.
      - nemomarx 1y ago
        The question is whether you have more of them in addition to the rest of the party, or instead of some members of the rest of the party. 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
marcus_holmes 1y ago
> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear. Yeah, the decline of the British Empire is starting to look sedate and well-managed compared to this. I'm sure because the USA was there to pick up any slack that Britain dropped, in a way that China is not doing with the USA.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dragochat 1y ago
> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries Maybe bc americans WON'T and SHOULDN'T settle for a decline - they should violently rebel against this mindset and claw they way UPWARDS - there's more room for more growth, even if you lose #1 status and have to settle for #2 for a while you can still catch up etc. It's good that at least the US and China are NOT infected with this degrowth and "cyclical history" mindvirus that seems to be doing the rounds in Europe and elsewhere... keep being a bastion of endless progress brothers, fight the good fight! There's a whole light cone to eat/infect (if not for us the for the successors we'll build)! Whoop, whoop! Jokes aside though, most of the open world we live in today owes its existence to ideas, mindsets, $$$ and tech exported from the US, and I'm sure there's way more cool stuff to come from you once you properly clean up the parasitic individuals and institutions that have infected your society. Purge on and keep growing, fight for a deservedly big chunk of the Dyson sphere and beyond!
- beyondHelp 1y ago
  Nah, Everything has beginning and end and USA and others are very much near their end. You can't build anything new without destroying old. It is painful to live in "interesting times", but it is part of natural processes when corruption eats away society that is falling apart only this time it is very global. The signs are there, that this is global situation before WW1 or WW2 - status quo has to change, balance of power has to change - USA does not want to start to implement any of those changes and those who are way smarter than me think that USA should stay away from epicenter of anything and join for the spoils only part.
  - dragochat 1y ago
    > Everything has beginning and end Most things of real interest do not tbh. The point should be to learn how to play infinite games. Sure, there's hard-to-impossible prices to pay, and/or to force others into paying. But what if it can be made to work, won't any price be worth it for that... ? The epicenter is where the fun is at, even if the price might be sacrificing things of value for your average population and some unquantifiable measure of fluff like national-identity or whatever people imagine it's real nowadays. I'm an unashamed globalist, but would rather have a "world village" with the US (despite that US being maybe quite different from what most gen-pop wants) at its heart :P Imagine all the people...
1dom 1y ago
> All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear. Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1? The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress. Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen. I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  death, lots of it. wars. famine. disease outbreaks,etc.. usaid being dismantled alone will do that. economic depressions, mass unemployment and civil wars and civil unrest,etc... mid 20th century but x10. Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think. Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.
  - 1dom 1y ago
    I feel like I'm not communicating my point well and you're misunderstanding. Decline is inevitable. Not universal decline though. I believe we'll move forward as a species, but that overall progression is made up of lots of groups constantly declining and improving at different paces and times. I think you don't understand what I'm saying because you said e.g. "others like China can rise" - my point is China has already risen, and fallen, and risen and will continue to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China. Just like the US will. And the troughs will be tragic compared to the peaks. This is what long term empires do. They rise and fall and rise and fall, and that rises and falls include wars, famine, disease outbreak, advances in war, science, tech, health etc. I feel civilised societies have said exactly what you've said since the dawn of man "we're civilized, we've moved beyond incivility now" when in reality, they were just in one of the many times where their society just so happened to be leading the way. Sorry, because I know you don't believe this, and you want to believe "we the people" can stop change this natural cycling, but it's a feature of relativity. Ultimately, you're saying the same thing optimists have been saying for millenia, and here we are, war, hunger, famine is all still happening. Same stuff we've been doing for millenia, just with fancier tech.
Workaccount2 1y ago
If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals, they probably would have won in landslide victories. Even if Biden had chosen a strong leader as VP rather than go with a diversity hire to appease the twitterites, we still could have probably avoided this.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals, And Elon Musk, former presidential vizir. There's clearly power in Twitter, but it leans right as well.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  The irony is that, if they hadn't fortified (to use Time's winking term) the election in 2020 and let Trump stay in office, his second term would have been much like the first, bogged down by Pence and the rest of the establishment drones around him, including his own kids. In that timeline he doesn't spend four years defending himself against lawfare in kangaroo courts and ducking bullets, and decide to get serious in his second term. He would have gotten the full blame for Operation Warpspeed and the Covid mandates, instead of sharing it with Biden. Also, Elon doesn't buy Twitter and join forces with him, so Twitter remains a safe space for the left. Things could have been much different.
  - croisillon 1y ago
    how do you mean "let [him] stay in office" ? less people voted for trump than for his opponent, in both 2020 and 2016
    - aaronbaugher 1y ago
      Read the Time article[1] on how the US bureaucratic and corporate establishment teamed up to "fortify" the election to make sure Trump wouldn't win, which uses words like "conspiracy" and "shadow election" approvingly. He was expected to win coming into campaign season, since peacetime presidents with good economies almost never lose, so much so that the Democrats ran one of their old war-horses to let him pad his campaign chest in a losing effort, their version of a Dole or McCain. Then Covid brought on mail-in balloting and the opportunities that presented, and the establishment took advantage. However much you think that did or didn't cross the line from "fortification" to fraud isn't the point. The point is that if they hadn't done so much of it, Trump would have won the election (in the electoral college, which is what matters), and he would be a footnote now, after spending his second term building a few more miles of border wall and probably not a lot else. [1] https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-197-no-5-u-s/ https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-...
lordfrito 1y ago
> Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this. Reminds me of the old joke about California's 4 seasons: Earthquake, fire, riots, and drought.
thewileyone 1y ago
> the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't I don't think anyone anticipated how nutbag crazy things would get and the Dems didn't have the House or Senate to pass these laws anyway. Additionally the SCOTUS ruling made the president a king.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.

hparadiz 1y ago
Living in LA is so great. The only thing I regret in my life is not getting here sooner.
- jaoane 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hparadiz 1y ago
    I have to work to live here.
- b2fel 1y ago
  I can imagine but wait until you visit a walkable city!
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Man this is America. If people had any interest in walking, our national health picture would look very different. Even huge swathes of people voting for public transit in the US are doing so because they want everyone ELSE off the highway.
    - 0xAFFFF 1y ago
      It's not just about a lack of interest in walking. If your infrastructure is extremely hostile to walking, it's outright dangerous and unreliable and force people out of it.
    - hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      >our national health picture would look very different. It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.
      - kulahan 1y ago
        No, consistent exercise is more than enough to make a significant difference. I didn’t say it would be fixed, I said it would be very different.
        johnnyanmac 1y ago
        you know what they say: you can't outrun a bad diet.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      I’ll take that still. It’s bananas to me that more people aren’t in favour of public transit only for that reason.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
- vips7L 1y ago
  Contrary, I couldn’t wait to leave LA. I regretted moving there as soon as I did and I’m much happier now that I left.
- garbawarb 1y ago
  I love seeing when someone finds the right place for them. Why is LA so great for you?

peterbecich 1y ago

GOP and Dems have been nearly evenly matched for years in Congress now. There was no prospect of dramatic legal overhaul i.m.o., let alone any new Constitutional amendments. Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses#/media/File:Combined--Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

intended 1y ago
This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship. Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems. This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Dems have oddly bad party discipline. Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled, and yet this doesn't happen. They've not yet got serious.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      The question is whether you have more of them in addition to the rest of the party, or instead of some members of the rest of the party. 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago

marcus_holmes 1y ago

> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear. Yeah, the decline of the British Empire is starting to look sedate and well-managed compared to this. I'm sure because the USA was there to pick up any slack that Britain dropped, in a way that China is not doing with the USA.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dragochat 1y ago

> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries Maybe bc americans WON'T and SHOULDN'T settle for a decline - they should violently rebel against this mindset and claw they way UPWARDS - there's more room for more growth, even if you lose #1 status and have to settle for #2 for a while you can still catch up etc. It's good that at least the US and China are NOT infected with this degrowth and "cyclical history" mindvirus that seems to be doing the rounds in Europe and elsewhere... keep being a bastion of endless progress brothers, fight the good fight! There's a whole light cone to eat/infect (if not for us the for the successors we'll build)! Whoop, whoop! Jokes aside though, most of the open world we live in today owes its existence to ideas, mindsets, $$$ and tech exported from the US, and I'm sure there's way more cool stuff to come from you once you properly clean up the parasitic individuals and institutions that have infected your society. Purge on and keep growing, fight for a deservedly big chunk of the Dyson sphere and beyond!

beyondHelp 1y ago
Nah, Everything has beginning and end and USA and others are very much near their end. You can't build anything new without destroying old. It is painful to live in "interesting times", but it is part of natural processes when corruption eats away society that is falling apart only this time it is very global. The signs are there, that this is global situation before WW1 or WW2 - status quo has to change, balance of power has to change - USA does not want to start to implement any of those changes and those who are way smarter than me think that USA should stay away from epicenter of anything and join for the spoils only part.
- dragochat 1y ago
  > Everything has beginning and end Most things of real interest do not tbh. The point should be to learn how to play infinite games. Sure, there's hard-to-impossible prices to pay, and/or to force others into paying. But what if it can be made to work, won't any price be worth it for that... ? The epicenter is where the fun is at, even if the price might be sacrificing things of value for your average population and some unquantifiable measure of fluff like national-identity or whatever people imagine it's real nowadays. I'm an unashamed globalist, but would rather have a "world village" with the US (despite that US being maybe quite different from what most gen-pop wants) at its heart :P Imagine all the people...

1dom 1y ago

> All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear. Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1? The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress. Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen. I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.

notepad0x90 1y ago
death, lots of it. wars. famine. disease outbreaks,etc.. usaid being dismantled alone will do that. economic depressions, mass unemployment and civil wars and civil unrest,etc... mid 20th century but x10. Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think. Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.
- 1dom 1y ago
  I feel like I'm not communicating my point well and you're misunderstanding. Decline is inevitable. Not universal decline though. I believe we'll move forward as a species, but that overall progression is made up of lots of groups constantly declining and improving at different paces and times. I think you don't understand what I'm saying because you said e.g. "others like China can rise" - my point is China has already risen, and fallen, and risen and will continue to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China. Just like the US will. And the troughs will be tragic compared to the peaks. This is what long term empires do. They rise and fall and rise and fall, and that rises and falls include wars, famine, disease outbreak, advances in war, science, tech, health etc. I feel civilised societies have said exactly what you've said since the dawn of man "we're civilized, we've moved beyond incivility now" when in reality, they were just in one of the many times where their society just so happened to be leading the way. Sorry, because I know you don't believe this, and you want to believe "we the people" can stop change this natural cycling, but it's a feature of relativity. Ultimately, you're saying the same thing optimists have been saying for millenia, and here we are, war, hunger, famine is all still happening. Same stuff we've been doing for millenia, just with fancier tech.

Workaccount2 1y ago

If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals, they probably would have won in landslide victories. Even if Biden had chosen a strong leader as VP rather than go with a diversity hire to appease the twitterites, we still could have probably avoided this.

pjc50 1y ago
> If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals, And Elon Musk, former presidential vizir. There's clearly power in Twitter, but it leans right as well.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
The irony is that, if they hadn't fortified (to use Time's winking term) the election in 2020 and let Trump stay in office, his second term would have been much like the first, bogged down by Pence and the rest of the establishment drones around him, including his own kids. In that timeline he doesn't spend four years defending himself against lawfare in kangaroo courts and ducking bullets, and decide to get serious in his second term. He would have gotten the full blame for Operation Warpspeed and the Covid mandates, instead of sharing it with Biden. Also, Elon doesn't buy Twitter and join forces with him, so Twitter remains a safe space for the left. Things could have been much different.
- croisillon 1y ago
  how do you mean "let [him] stay in office" ? less people voted for trump than for his opponent, in both 2020 and 2016
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    Read the Time article[1] on how the US bureaucratic and corporate establishment teamed up to "fortify" the election to make sure Trump wouldn't win, which uses words like "conspiracy" and "shadow election" approvingly. He was expected to win coming into campaign season, since peacetime presidents with good economies almost never lose, so much so that the Democrats ran one of their old war-horses to let him pad his campaign chest in a losing effort, their version of a Dole or McCain. Then Covid brought on mail-in balloting and the opportunities that presented, and the establishment took advantage. However much you think that did or didn't cross the line from "fortification" to fraud isn't the point. The point is that if they hadn't done so much of it, Trump would have won the election (in the electoral college, which is what matters), and he would be a footnote now, after spending his second term building a few more miles of border wall and probably not a lot else. [1] https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-197-no-5-u-s/ https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-...

lordfrito 1y ago

> Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this. Reminds me of the old joke about California's 4 seasons: Earthquake, fire, riots, and drought.

thewileyone 1y ago

> the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't I don't think anyone anticipated how nutbag crazy things would get and the Dems didn't have the House or Senate to pass these laws anyway. Additionally the SCOTUS ruling made the president a king.