And the higher prices of food mean more poor people will starve to death.
Oil is not only an input in creating fertilizer, but just about everything else that goes into getting calories on to your plate.
For a great summary of all of this I'd highly recommend reading "how the world really works"
Sometimes I’m fried by Thursday evening. I don’t think I’m ever “sick” from this in a physical sense but definitely all cylinders in my brain don’t seem to be firing properly.
I get the feeling that this is people over hyping their field to boost their own status. It's amazing technology, but I doubt there's any emergency here.
In another way this reminds me of Roark's court room speech in the fountainhead
"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world. "
Look at the way these people lived. The way the dressed. The way the carried themselves. The culture. The customs. The traditions.
It was a thriving high-trust society.
The line has gone up orders of magnitude in the past 100 years, but are the people thriving? Is their nation something to be proud of? Do they have any herritage left to pass on to their children? Is there any optimism in the future we have chosen?
I don't think so.
Can we ever return to the past? - no, but the future we have chosen is a bad one.
The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now. I'm actually from n Ireland but live in the Scotland. The class system is definitely a lot more noticeable here than home. I suspect it was way worse back then.
I have some sympathy for your point of view. I'm very much pro union but when I go to England I think I'm glad I don't live there. So crowded. Most of the countryside fenced off. Unlike Scotland were it's possible to escape to the wilderness. Compared to Ireland I think people in England seem depressed.
On the high trust thing, I think part of it may be partly the mass immigration of the 1950s. As an outside observer I think that may have divided the country a bit. To me there doesn't seem to be much integration.
All I'm hoping is that the UK gets over brexit and doesn't stay in terminal decline. The current Tory leadership only seem interested in managing that decline. At least Boris was optimistic and believed Britain was a great place to be.
> The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now.
There are plenty of other videos from the 1900s era.
And sure, we are more comfortable now, and it would be hard to go back to those times, but I'm not really focused on their material comforts.
My point is that the English - as a people - were thriving in those days, and most of their thriving has since been destroyed by modernity.
I want to attack the Whig Historiography concept that a bright future will just spontaneously emerge, when all the indicators are that England is in a state of steep decline in comparison to where it was 100 years ago - even though the GDP has never been higher!
It’s kind of funny, we today regard the world wars as being in our somewhat distant past, but if this same trajectory continues I think that in 1000 years we may simply say that the war permanently destroyed Europe. The effects just took several generations to play out. And would it be surprising for such an unprecedentedly massive war to permanently destroy a place?
Or it's a way to increase your status while not doing your actual job. "Look at how moral I am!". I'm wondering how long this crap will continue. I'm hoping it becomes a cliche and embarrassing soon.
The elaborate and nonsensical (and costly) virtue/fitness-signaling will only continue to escalate, because just like with clothing fashions, the difficulty and cost of staying in the trendy vanguard is the entire point. Scott Alexander (and probably others) had a pretty good analysis of the phenomenon.
Let's see how economy will do... If things get very tight I think there might be hope that corporations will focus on more important things. Like good products and making profit.
I'm in RCIA classes to convert to Catholicism. I'm skipping this Easter's big confirmation event to give it some more time. I'm chiming in to reply to this comment. Catholicism is a practical way to deal with the guilt you (should?) already feel.
Religion has had that role of support and counsel for millennia. Therapy is a newcomer on the scene, with generally little evidence for its efficacy above and beyond what talking to a religious leader would provide; so much so that there is a growing movement for "evidence-based therapy", whose existence might imply that the other kind is evidence-free.
I think you're misrepresenting the efficacy of psychotherapy, and I don't think you'll have a lot of success pitching religion as an evidence-based alternative.
This makes sense, but none of it supports an argument that religious observance is a reasonable alternative to acute mental health care. Religious people are healthier than non-religious people, but when their appendices burst, they still need a doctor, not a deacon.
I didn’t say it was an alternative to acute mental health care. But like physical health, mental health has a large component that’s just about supporting people in their daily lives. My parents are aging secular humanists. They’re now dealing with friends and siblings dying off. They’re handling it normally, and they don’t need acute medical intervention. But they’d probably be happier if they had set foot in a mosque every once in awhile and had a faith community to lean on through these completely normal live events that happen to everyone.
This comment is gross in a whole variety of ways, but the practical thing I'll rebut here is: Catholics don't tithe, and indulgences are a concept from the 15th century.
"...suggests that if the world invested in a “Giant Leap” to reduce poverty and inequality, the world population would peak at around 8.5 billion people in 2040 and decline to 6 billion by the end of the century."
Like a great leap forward?
Or maybe focus on the things that actually lift people out of poverty, free markets and rule of law.
Pretty much the same as me. Windows hardware support is really great, Linux is always a hassle for me. I've tried and tried with Linux, but I've given up on it as my primary desktop
That magical Nordic system is called "social democracy", it's of course rooted in socialism, and it's so old that one of the first dark memes amongst left-wing groups ("You killed Rose Luxemburg!) is about them.
It's strange how those who say the Nordics aren't really socialist will be the first to dismiss their policies as socialist when they're suggested for the US.
Neither does communism. Communism implies ownership and control of the economy by the people at large, but the presence of a state is, supposedly, a transitional phase.
For a great summary of all of this I'd highly recommend reading "how the world really works"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-World-Really-Works-Scientists/d...