Most of my early 30 year old friends are very pessimistic about the future. I am pessimistic but less so. I think (and hope) that the republic will still be standing. But what I see and expect is that Trump will spend his time doing performative actions. He is narcissistic and he conflates the deference he receives when flying around the world negotiating trade deals with deference to the US. The reality is that telling him he deserves the Nobel peace prize is easy pickings for politicians who don't want to tank their economies while they realign with Russia.
Ultimately I think where we end up after his second term is he leaves, he says he did a great job and his supporters believe him. But we have problems. And he has this fantastic blessing of controlling all 3 branches of government, which he is wasting by grabbing power and solving NONE of them. So really we just wasted 4 years. And where the world is right now it's probably the worst 4 years we could ever waste.
It is fascinating how there are two current opinions about Donald Trump and that one is that he is a serial liar and the other is that he tells it how it is.
I'm sympathetic to the latter because he manages to talk without a filter, but the things he lies about are much more serious and much more obvious and much more dangerous. But it gets him very far because people seem to think that "owning the libs" is the success condition for domestic and foreign policy.
I agree though, the next 3 years are going to be him insisting things are great. China will probably try for Taiwan after he leaves and he'll just continue to say things like they wouldn't have done it if he was in office. And sure that's partly true, because why not just wait a year until he's gone, then China can really split the electorate on what we should do.
there are also many species on the ocean floor that do not get their energy from the sun, but from vents of heat from the earth. maybe they dont photosynthesise, they use heat instead
iirc folding spacetime was a separate (and unexplained) piece of magic; what the spice did was to let you navigate a ship through folded space, which unenhanced human perception could not do.
but specifics apart, the main point is just because readers accept hyperspace and extrasensory perception as part of your fictional universe, doesn't mean they will not expect the laws of thermodynamics, or planetary ecology, or other related fields, to also be suspended.
there is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, but my understanding is that the still suit recycles the body's water. It's not just that you pee in a tube, it absorbs the sweat and recycles that too
Sweating works by phase change. Water going from liquid to gas takes lot of energy. Thus removing it from body. On other hand if you then collect that steam and make it liquid again well you have to dump that energy back to the body. Or conduct or radiate it away... But those are inefficient thus we sweat.
well dumber people are getting into politics because gerrymandering is getting worse. the case where politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around leads to worse overall outcomes because the seats are "safe" from the other party and competition. without competition quality falls
Gerrymandering is only possible to such an extent now because everyone now has such strong partisan affiliation that their voting patterns are easily predictable. 95% of the population as soon as they see R or D by the name look no further. That’s also why we don’t have many centrist candidates anymore, they lost the ability to pull from the other side and they have a disadvantage within their own party.
Mamdani was largely propelled by disillusionment of the young who then voted for him. They listen to the headline political message and they don't understand the underlying principles, his policies will not make them better off. But he'll try and fail, and then they'll just increasingly think the system is broken. If they read more they would understand that. It's the same thing that propelled Trump into office
Mamdani ran against Cuomo, a disgraced sex offender, and the incumbent Adams, whose corruption scandal was so bad that Trump pardoned him to sow chaos among the Democratic party. If I were a NYC resident I'd vote for a sack of potatoes over these two.
How someone gets "young people don't read" from this is beyond me.
the fact that the candidates are worse than sacks of potatoes is a separate fact from the enthusiasm that young people have for the socialist candidate. if it were normal they would do what young people normally do, which is to not vote.
Humor me - concisely, what's so blatantly bad and failure prone about hos policies? Self evident enough that had the youngsters "read past the outline" they would have had to have got?
Not OP, and I'm actually voting for him, but I think a lot of people are critical of the taxes that will be required to fund all his social programs, including:
Raising property taxes while freezing rents (meaning your shitty NYC apt will never be repaired again), $30 min wage and corporate tax increase and 0.1% tax of stock and options trades (driving jobs away)
rent control just limits supply. city owned grocery stores is a huge capital and organization outlay just to save 2% margin with a huge opportunity cost. at least he backed down from defunding the police. the socialist democratic organization he belongs to hasnt though
I think you're exaggerating his policies. He's not proposing "rent control", he's saying he won't raise the rent on existing rent-stabilized apartments. To conclude that limits supply assumes that all the extra money would be invested into new construction.
Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.
That's kind of a joke right? it's a pilot program for 5 grocery stores? he wins votes off something that is something you admit is so inconsequential, while spending political capital to do it instead of other things? 2% margins baby
Those apartments are already under rent control, and they'd be just as rent controlled if he allowed a rent increase. So, if "rent control limits supply", the supply will be limited no matter what he does.
My mistake, I thought you meant financial capital. I disagree. It seems like grocery prices are a real problem in New York, and the existing subsidy program isn't working. Ensuring people can afford food seems like an excellent use use of political capital, and if it works it can be scaled up.
Man those are not real issues, a 5 grocery store pilot program and a rent freeze (which only applies to less than half of appartments in NYC and less than 30% or total housing in the city)
Can you point me to any major socialist success stories? I was going to ask that rhetorically but i would actually be happy if you could educate me. Certainly running an entire country on socialism almost always ends really badly, but maybe that's not the same on a city level? Or maybe mamdani has discovered the perfect set of policies to make it work.
> Can you point me to any major socialist success stories?
The ongoing Socialist Evolution starting with the migration of pretty much the entire developed world over the middle part of the 20th Century from relatively pure capitalism to modern mixed economies that been a pretty big success story in terms of human welfare, despite some periods of widespread or more local backsliding.
They kind of abandoned socialism in the 80s and 90s precisely because it's awful. Thatcher pointed out that no other political experiment has been carried on for so long as socialism despite it's spectacular failure. She thoroughly destroyed the socialist system in Britain and probably saved the country. I'm not sure what happened in the rest of europe.
Isn't it interesting that the most capitalist country in the world is also the most successful, while the similarly sized and more socialist leaning eu is lagging behind?
Also there's a difference between economic socialism, and the capitalist liberal democracies that run on some social principles like the eu and uk.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
Before technology, even if things were slow, people didn’t have time to do anything with the slowness anyway. I think you’re thinking of some past utopia that never existed. Or maybe you’re thinking of the 90s, idk.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
> so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it?
Personally, I don't want growth to reduce, exactly. I'd prefer it if there were tighter restrictions on the direction of growth, and we spent more time finding creative ways to return to smaller communities where the efforts are spent less on pure money and more on people helping each other. And more time restoring nature. So growth, but not purely in an economic sense.
It only seems like a degrowth thing when you look at from a purely fiscal angle.
There is nothing stopping you from moving to a smaller community, and in the west there's tons of them around. And if you're willing to take the (very low) wages that go with that, you can live there for the rest of your life easily.
Hell, I know people who've done this. Several actually. Well, only one that's still alive (they retired there, wanted to grow old and die there ... and did), but still.
But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
> But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
Well, first I already have, so I don't know where you got "never accept doing so yourself", which is something you made up. Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature, which in my opinion is on the same level as actively targeting people. So I do want that to stop.
If nature was not being destroyed and it was just people messing up their own little world, then that would be different.
> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature
Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).
Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.
Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.
So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.
Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.
Okay, so we are not destroying all of nature, only enough nature that it will get seriously uncomfortable for us. Great! Your second argument is even stranger. It would be unnatural to stop polluting the environment? Where are you going with this?
Ultimately I think where we end up after his second term is he leaves, he says he did a great job and his supporters believe him. But we have problems. And he has this fantastic blessing of controlling all 3 branches of government, which he is wasting by grabbing power and solving NONE of them. So really we just wasted 4 years. And where the world is right now it's probably the worst 4 years we could ever waste.
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