I think one of those things that’s not sufficiently mentioned about the decline of civilization is that you don’t need some freak disaster or some unavoidable hard physical limit. Sure, a tsunami, a nuclear meltdown, a climate change fueled mega-hurricane, all of these would speed things up. But with the way things are currently standing, we simply can’t rebuild our infrastructure faster than it decays or grows obsolete.
The Netherlands currently manages to build 88,000 houses per year. And yet, because of the increase in the population, the shortage grew by 10,300. This is a problem that has been known for years, we don’t know how to solve it. We simply never trained enough construction personnel, we imagined we would have a “knowledge economy”.
Meanwhile, in countries like Italy, France and Bulgaria, there are villages where only a handful of elderly people live, in those villages the houses are simply naturally slowly reduced to ruins. The same problem exists in other countries of course. In the United States you have villages where people can buy a house for nothing, but can’t find employment. And you have cities where all the jobs are found, but where people can not find a place to live.
This is a problem with many different causes, but one of the most notable I think is that societal and technological change has simply been too fast. Have a look at the share of farmworkers in the United States:
These are simply changes that happened too fast. The elites sought to “accelerate” societal changes. The general public did not ask for this. In fact, most people tend to be resistant to societal change. There’s this video on Youtube that keeps being deleted, where they ask Dutch people in the 90’s whether they want to have a mobile phone. They universally give the same answer: “No, I don’t want a mobile phone. I don’t want people to be able to bother me at any moment during the day. It’s good enough for me to have a phone at home.”
But why are all the jobs in San Francisco? Why is there nothing in South Korea, except Seoul? Because everyone now has a smartphone in their pocket. And you can try to resist these changes as an individual, I know I did, I was basically forced by classmates to get a phone in university for group project bullshit, but the general tendency has been for very rapid social changes, that harm human well-being and are ultimately unsustainable.
When you have half your young men writing code for the Internet, then you don’t have any people available to take care of the elderly or to build and repair houses, bridges, elevators, tunnels, sewage canals and other infrastructure. This is the fault of elites and dumbass boomers, who insisted on settling on maximally rapid technological change and economic growth.
Just look for example at all the AI bullshit. I think we have five thousand different websites right now, all offering you the ability to type words and make them sound like Donald Trump or Michael Jackson or some other dude said those words. And all those five thousand different websites expect you to first register an account and then they expect you to let them charge you ten dollar a month on your credit card (which Dutch people don’t have).
It’s clear this is unsustainable. Most of these websites are going to fail, because there’s simply no source of revenue and funding will have to dry up at some point. If you worked at an AI startup, your work will probably have been in vain, but it will take a few years until this is obvious. It’s like the blockchain bubble that we had before the AI bubble.
If you worked on a blockchain project, it was a total waste of time, your government should have helped you spend your days taking care of the elderly in the nursing homes, building houses, growing food or doing something else that actually benefits society. But your government offers you subsidized college loans and then after graduating you find out that history is lots of fun to read about, but it doesn’t prepare you for any specific sort of career path.
But the code-monkey ai/blockchain/bullshit casino-capitalist industry doesn’t care whether you went to college and what you studied, they will take anyone they can get. The real world is now suffocating, under the collective weight of a bunch of bullshit apps and services that depend on getting you to sign up for ten dollar monthly subscription that you subsequently forget to unsubscribe from after your free trial period is over.
In Europe, we try to slowly regulate this bullshit out of existence. American billionaires and the more generic also-ran techbros with .io websites and X profiles are white-hot with rage about it. The whole e/acc thing is extremely astroturfed. Normal people don’t really yearn for rapid technological change, they yearn for stability and predictability in their world.
Consider for example, how long Mr. Musk has been promising the world self-driving cars. He can’t do it. He has been out there for over a decade now, promising these cars will show up next year, but they’re nowhere to be seen. These are the same people pushing this gospel of AI inevitability. I kind of accepted the idea there would be self-driving cars by now, I’m honestly surprised by the degree to which they bullshit us.
The techbros will tell you AI is some kind of inevitability that we have to make sure we get right. And yet, they have Trump announce some 500 billion dollar AI initiative. Well let me tell you, anything that costs 500 billion dollar is not an inevitability, but a choice. The ideology of inevitability is used in an effort to engineer a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But things are not working out for them.
Even software development jobs have dried up. Software job market is worse than in May 2020, at the depth of the lockdowns:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
Not sure whether there even is a hot new thing to soak up the labor force. AI is “autocomplete on steroids” and seems to have run into limits. The fake-fash muskian cult failed to ignite the “animal spirits” of capitalism, and is running us into a recession instead.
LP.8.1 is becoming dominant ( https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions ), and I do notice a lot of people with persistent cold/cough symptoms. Maybe that will do the needful, and fix the supply side of the job market?
>LP.8.1 is becoming dominant ( https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions ), and I do notice a lot of people with persistent cold/cough symptoms.
Yeah I’ve noticed it too. Also started hearing of people dying suddenly of massive lung cancer everywhere, which is what you would expect the IgG4 to start doing eventually.
The persistent could/cough is everywhere now, along with lingering fevers and assorted stuff.
But frankly it’s all so horrifying, I’m not sure I want to look at it much more.
The boomers signed up for the Trumpshot and now their immune system just learned to passively let this virus disseminate everywhere, while unvaccinated young people’s bodies continue trying to desperately purge it, damaging endothelial cells in the process.
As a virus it tends to come associated with a whole cocktail of superimposed bacterial pathogens in the respiratory tract, which you get exposed to when you get exposed to the boomers too.
It has the RBD and the NTD neatly covered now in a bunch of glycans that make the antibodies effectively useless, but it remains to be seen whether it needs to start adding glycans for S2 and the C-Terminal Domain, I’m not sure about that.
“Also started hearing of people dying suddenly of massive lung cancer everywhere. . .”
You wouldn’t know it here, my local health authorities stopped updating/publishing population data on deaths from lung cancer in 2020, stopped publishing data on all-cause deaths in 2021.
There’s data for every year up to then, then nada.
“But frankly it’s all so horrifying, I’m not sure I want to look at it much more.”
My local health authorities appear to feel the same.
I’m visiting New England and I am not hearing coughing and not hearing of lung cancer (God willing). Here it is dementia. Everyone is getting dementia all at once. Okay, I am exaggerating a little, but not much. And everyone except for the youngest people looks sick. And the young people here all have had the vax multiple times.
Yeah dementia is another big one. Could be at least in part due to the microplastics in everyone’s brains, in which case we’re all kind of screwed.
We have a massive shortfall of housing in Oz.
Our economy is essentially a giant Ponzi scheme. The housing shortage helps drive up the price for the Ponzi Lords.
We had a massive influx of migrants after Covid. The argument goes that this was pent up demand that had been inhibited by travel restrictions, but I don’t buy it. I have seen grown men who are working multiple jobs but cannot afford a house/rent getting angry and frustrated on TV, and the response they are getting from the politicians looks like gaslighting.
The truth is that to keep the Ponzi going the Ponzi Lords opened the floodgates right up to further inflate the Ponzi.
All the Ponzi Lords know is more Ponzi. The economy grows, the Ponzi Grows, but it is the sickly uniform growth of the cancer cell – our economy is now less complex than Uganda, being comprised almost entirely of open pit mines and the housing Ponzi.
It wouldn’t matter if more houses were built, the Ponzi Lords would just open the gates to increase demand and the price of homes.
Instead of building homes, we should take on the Ponzi directly. Start by taxing the rich elites and lowering taxes on the working class/poor, net zero immigration, removal of parasitic tax incentives to speculate in the Ponzi.
Otherwise, we will end up like a third world country, which are actually more economically complex than us already!
Which brings me to the lack of will to take on the Ponzi among the elites. The politicians are all Ponzi Lords. Homeowners think it is in their best interests for the price to keep rising (it isn’t), and so, vast numbers of immigrants continue to arrive to inflate the Ponzi, ironically converting this place into Delhi, or whatever other hellhole third world city they’ve fled from. The compliant population here doesn’t seem to have any appetite for revolution, so they don’t resist either. Until recently it was unheard of to even hear anyone complain about it – that would be “”racist”” don’t you know. . .
And so now the inequality that drove the migrants here is out of control here now too. It will end with third world cities ruled over by a numerically small class of parasitic, rent seeking, Ponzi Slum Lords and rich elites at the top, and nothing but a vast impoverished population under them.
One of the consequences of letting Ponzi Lords accumulate vast amounts of grasping capital is that they start robbing capital from any productive part of the economy. You end up infested with unproductive rent-seeking parasites, who get ever richer on un-earned gains, while the productive workers end up in the slum, economic complexity falls, everything decays. . .
So, tax the rich and lower taxes on the poor!
But there’s no appetite for this, so it will get worse.
This seems like another manifestation of how bad humans are at understanding the arithmetic of exponential growth. On this score, we are no smarter than yeast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvFG543mlK8
Unchecked, undesirable, cancerous growth, then overshoot, and then. . .
The pace of change problem you mention seems like another manifestation.
Same kind of problems seem to be happening across the west.
A plague to take the numbers down seems like the least bad option.
More restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate as well.
Whatever it takes really to stake the vampiric Ponzi Lords right through the heart before they bleed us all white.
>>The politicians are all Ponzi Lords.
Yes. Biggest scam in the world today.
Yeah, and it just makes life miserable.
Jesus, we’re ready when you are. . .
“One of the consequences of letting Ponzi Lords accumulate vast amounts of grasping capital is that they start robbing capital from any productive part of the economy. You end up infested with unproductive rent-seeking parasites, who get ever richer on un-earned gains, while the productive workers end up in the slum, economic complexity falls, everything decays. . .”
Yes, so many areas need regulation, trust-busting, and really just aggressive clearance of all the waste, fraud, and bullshit that’s been allowed to build up for the past 40 years.
This is especially true when it comes to implementing the solutions to the problems we have. Assuming we don’t flush the money down the drain, or spend it on some useless war, I’m not sure I trust the gov’t or the private sector to build anything that’s high-quality these days.
Take houses. Building more houses would be great, we need to build more houses, let’s build more houses. OK. But how many of those new houses are well-built, solid, and likely to make it through the next 50-100 yrs? And how many of them are made out of the cheapest junk, feature outrageous cost-cutting, and will saddle their poor owners with endless problems (ultimately proving far more expensive than they thought). It’s the same for the infrastructure.
>because of the increase in the population, the shortage grew by 10,300. This is a problem that has been known for years, we don’t know how to solve it.
You could stop importing blacks
>But your government offers you subsidized college loans and then after graduating you find out that history is lots of fun to read about, but it doesn’t prepare you for any specific sort of career path.
Indeed, government should not be involved in any level of education, especially higher education.
But you explicitly support Government intervention, and this is exactly the kind of thing you want. If the US government did the correct thing and stopped backing student loans, you would be screeching about how stupid Americans are compared to the marvellously kind EU which hands money to young people to waste their best years on bullshit no one cares about. So why are you complaining about it?
“If you worked on a blockchain project, it was a total waste of time, your government should have helped you spend your days taking care of the elderly in the nursing homes, building houses, growing food or doing something else that actually benefits society. But your government offers you subsidized college loans and then after graduating you find out that history is lots of fun to read about, but it doesn’t prepare you for any specific sort of career path.”
Speak for yourself, at least your gov’t doesn’t just let you become a debt-serf.
Even the students in a lot of useful majors will not wind up better off than the ones majoring in weird subjects. Sending 10,000 people to college does not create 10,000 white-collar jobs, it just creates more candidates for those jobs. Due to mergers, acquisitions, offshoring and all other kinds of wonderful trends, many of those jobs just don’t exist anymore or have been filled up ages ago. Then there’s bubble jobs, like the high-tech / AI stuff, wholly dependent on the gov’t funneling money into Ponzi schemes, but I doubt that stuff will survive the next recession and anyways it’s insulting to work as a scammer.
Sending more and more people to college also changes their residential pattern, from small towns and suburbs and medium-sized cities to huge, hyper-competitive, global cities. Most colleges prepare you for jobs which are really only very common in those areas. So along with the debt, you get a much higher cost of living. Whereas blue-collar jobs can be done pretty much anywhere, allowing you to minimize expenses for things like rent & groceries. Plus, living a less hectic and stressful lifestyle.
Go visit L.A or San Francisco and order yourself a Waymo One instead of an Uber. Its fully self- driving. The tech is here.
True. Apollo Go, in China, does even better and cheaper. Waabi looks promising also.
Individuals and private companies are just trying to make money and only a couple megafirms like DB or BoA have ever played around with directing the flow of people. The changes to the flow of people have come from political groups like the security think tanks, chambers of commerce and economics departments.
As far as I can tell, the drive to accelerate keeps propagating because there’s a constant supply of new people proposing it as a solution. They see that all of the countries (and parties/regions within countries) are locked in a battle to shift unemployment on to each other and figure that the best way out of it is through.
The purpose of services like GitHub, which upload and manage source code online, is thought to be to collect samples for AI machine learning. That’s why I think system engineers and programmers will lose their jobs while using these convenient services.
The image recognition required for autonomous driving is vulnerable to noise, and due to the nature of neural networks, it will output unpredictable results. Since a solution to this seems impossible in principle, I think completion will be postponed forever.
Getting foreigners to buy land would be a great way to earn foreign currency. If it becomes inconvenient, laws can be made to force the sale, and if they complain, they can be deported. lol
Now see, this is the high quality Radagast content that keeps me hanging around.