DimitriRascalov
No bio...
User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.
Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
If HlynkaCG were still here
Bro, come on ... you're not exactly making an effort to hide that he's very much still here. You have the same writing style & opinions as Hlynka, you frequently speak as if you are a long-term part of the community even though you're a relatively new user, your account was created almost immediately after Hlynka's last one was banned, you even spell "their" wrong with the same frequency as Hlynka (and TequilaMockingbird) did!
And I say this not to have the mods ban you again, since I disagree with the permaban and find your posts interesting, but if you want to pretend that you're gone you need to change up your writing, for better or worse (mostly better!) you've got a very distinct voice that is immediately clockable.
[Of course, if you aren't Hlynka then I'm ready to eat crow and apologize]
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.
Have you read a few of them? They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona, i.e. a much stronger and clearer experience compared to Savino sensing the characteristic smell of St. Pio. Unless God used to like to role-play before becoming a dad, this isn't something that you can file away as "God as seen through various cultural filters", it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.
As for the report: I can't imagine how in the world you think that this strengthens the case for the reality of miracle cures. IMO the most telling part is this:
Using all 636 medical miracles for which I have a “diagnosis,” the miracle cures before 1800 were of visible conditions detectable by any- one, laypeople and medics alike: skin disease, fevers, blindness, convul- sions, paralysis, and lameness. In the nineteenth century, the diagnoses amenable to miracle cure concentrated on specific internal organs and on specified fevers, such as tuberculosis.
Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day? Right after this the author makes the argument that stuff like diseases affecting internal organs can only start to appear once medical instruments get good enough to detect them, so it does make sense that these sorts of miracles start to get more prominent in modernity, but that shouldn't stop blind people from seeing or cripples from walking again.
In essence, it seems like all the cool cases of miracle healing have by now mostly ceased and their documentation amounts to basically hearsay, and nowadays, even though we now have good experts observing them and reliable documentation, all we get is much more mundane stuff like a cancer going into highly unexpected remission. That is still remarkable, true, but it's not something that is so outside of the realm of expected outcomes as growing an eye back is. Medicine isn't physics and there are still billions upon billions being poured into grinding away at various diseases to gain a better mechanical understanding of them, we have no equivalent of Maxwell's equations or Newtonian gravity in medicine that would allows us to confidently predict spontaneous changes in extremely complicated micro-biological processes.
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.
But that's a totally legitimate response to a highly unusual claim without much more evidence than a report by a highly biased source. Given what we know about human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory etc. it's completely reasonable to dismiss this out of hand unless a durable record of this miracle, e.g. photos of his blown off skull on the construction site and the happily healed Savino in his hospital bed the next day after, exist. If it weren't, on what grounds do you (presumably, given its pagan association) dismiss this list of ancient miracle healings performed by the gods Asklepios and Apollo at the sanctuary at Epidauros?
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.
DimitriRascalov
2mo ago
Most federal states in Germany have or used to have a three-track model. When it was designed back during the Kaiser's time the idea was that track one ought to take like 60% of the student population and instill mostly the basics, track 2 should take 30% and give the foundations for becoming a low-to-mid-level engineer, skilled tradesman, competent basic white collar worker etc., and track 3 the elite rest destined to go to the top of society.
Nowadays, due to the exact drift you describe, track 1 is for the dumbest of the dumb, track 2 for the ever so slightly less dumb, and everyone else crams into track 3. Some states have recognized this reality and simply abolished the formal distinction between the three types and have allowed every school, even those from the former track 1, to hand out the necessary certification for tertiary education, which they of course eagerly give to basically everyone (the average grades for this Abitur exam, the German equivalent to the French Baccalauréat or the UK's A-Levels, have skyrocketed over the past decades, even as a bigger percentage of the population takes it and overall scores in more objective tests like PISA have declined pretty badly).
The only way a tracked system works out is if the people maintaining it are willing to accurately filter students. Since there are about a trillion arguments that move typical Western minds, particularly those attracted to the education system, to immediately stop doing this ("it's too early set someone's life in stone!", "the only reason I sucked in school is because my teachers were mean/racist/sexist" etc. pp.), no institutional (re)form will fix this unless the overall culture moves back to being fine with distinguishing people very clearly on their revealed cognitive abilities.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed ad nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.
Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Gays have lower fertility than straights, so surely we will have no gays at all within a few generations!
Why is that implausible? Until fairly recently, if you were (marginally) gay, you were unlikely to act on it, because the social environment heavily discouraged you. This meant that carrying a hypothetical gay gene wouldn't depress your fertility all that much, since the overwhelming influence of the default social script would still push you towards having the standard 1-3 children surviving into adulthood.
That social script has now expanded to include being openly gay and significantly decreased the pressure to have children, so many more people that in earlier times would have just kept their romantic thoughts about their same-sex neighbor to themselves can now actually live out their preferences. Consequently, the fertility of people with genes that make them gay, after having survived centuries of open repression, now crashes close to 0. A similar argument can be made for other formerly oppressed behaviors that are associated with low fertility, e.g. being trans or queerness in general.
Note that I don't have any clue as to whether a gay gene really exists or how much it eventually influences the expression of sexuality, but our environment changed so much w.r.t. to gay rights that it's not impossible that the selection pressures at play here have changed massively as well.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
That's true, but it's not like it's impossible to broadly survey the alignment and publicly held ideological stances of feminists in general and to notice that the average feminist holds views that would put them into the center-left at least, if not further to the left. Notably, in modern times this part of the political spectrum is strongly correlated with stances on migration that directly imply that the West, particularly Europe, will become much more Muslim towards the end of the century. How e.g. 35% Muslim France is going to be compatible with the ostensibly central ideological tenets typically held by feminists is, to put it mildly, an open question.
Blaming specific negative consequences of (Muslim) migration like the rape gangs on feminists directly is unfair, in that I agree, but it's quite clear that the average feminist is pretty much all-aboard with the political program that brought those rape gangs here, is in fact quite likely to advocate for accelerating that program, and has no plausible, pragmatic & politically viable plan to ensure that it's not going to get worse as the prominence of Islam increases as the direct consequence of that program. For that, I think it is fair to blame feminists.
DimitriRascalov
6mo ago
But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.
Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.
but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now.
Can you explain why? Similar to you, I also thought that it was Hlynka four months ago, but with much higher confidence. What convinces me then as now is the last point from my post: TequilaMockingbird talked in the way someone deeply familiar with this forum, its history and connection to Scott Alexander would.
There plausibly are many other people with beliefs similar to Hlynka, so TequilaMockingbird having exactly the same views (and rhetoric! seriously, the Steve Sailer thing isn't the first time he's let his old ticks shine through) on every single issue as him isn't dispositive. The fact that an account with such beliefs is created three months after Hlynka's ban and immediately participates in discourse as an old regular would, even calling out specific users' post histories and ideologies, is though, especially when no other well known long-time poster was missing/banned at the time. It was very, very obvious that he was Hlynka from the start.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways.
Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.
And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.
Really? How many right wingers are there on here that thoroughly dislike race & AI discourse, argue for DR3, think that online nu-rightists and leftists are the same at their core, frequently use invective against sissy intellectual elites, tend to write think pieces as top posts, and like snappy one liners as responses, especially those with certain trademark expressions like "what's the old saw"? Not to mention that the account was created in June 2024, i.e. a short time after Hlynka's ban, but frequently talks like it's been part of the wider SSC-sphere for more than a decade.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Isn't he obviously Hlynka? My instincts could be misleading me here, but if that's the case there's a long history of exactly this behavior way beyond the lifetime of this particular account.
Not that I disagree with the core idea of the argument here, but it's not unlikely that Finland would ultimately end up the same as a Russian province in comparison to staying part of the Western system. Russia is undergoing demographic change as well, and while it's not as fast as in Central and Western Europe, the Russia of 2100 will be a whole lot more Muslim and Central Asian than it is now, at least based on the trends of the last few decades. Whether that's better than the Afro-Arab Finland that seems to be the destination at the moment is of course a matter of debate.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
My impression is that in terms of organized political resistance middle and lower class whites were certainly the drivers of that, but in terms of simply not giving a shit and going on with life regardless of what the state says that's definitely more of a minority thing, at least here in Germany. For the US I'm less sure, but it also depends more on the group. Using vaccine uptake as a vague proxy, Asians were all-aboard, but they're also more affluent on average, Hispanics were more likely than red whites but less likely than blue whites to take the vaccine, blacks were least likely overall. Another example are the riots after George Floyd's death which, while featuring plenty of white people as well, were disproportionately minority, and they were AFAIK the first large scale breakdown of public Covid discipline.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.
I think an even better example of this is Covid. A highly cautious view of Covid and of what measures were appropriate are highly correlated with class status and were particularly unpopular with less affluent, less white and overall less 'priestly' people both in the US and Europe. But at the end of the day, the priestly class still got its will for 1 to almost 3 years, depending on location, and hugely shifted norms of hygiene, social activity and economic behaviors like remote work among the rest of society. I still regularly see people here in Germany, mostly elderly and often of MENA heritage (confusing given that at group level they certainly had the least respect for any of the Covid theater), wearing a mask without covering their nose, and given the medical absurdity of this I struggle to think of this as anything other than an illustration of memetic elite dominance.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.
The various European groups that migrated to the US in the past were and are more similar to each other in terms of political views & shared cultural history than they are to the populations that arrived post WWII. Concluding that current migration is going to work out favorably from past European migrants being able to form a coherent new identity under vastly different socio-economic circumstances is a reach. From surveys like the GSS or others, it seems pretty likely that adding more migrants from places like Haiti, Central America or Africa isn't going to result in a smooth temporal continuity of extant American cultural sentiments about various things like immigration, free speech or the economy like you seem to imply.
As an aside, I remember reading a similar argument by you in the past, and sure enough going through my post history this turns out to be the third time I post this objection to the same kind of argument put forth by you. I don't expect you to concede, but given that you've never responded so far to me or others pointing out more or less the same thing, it'd be interesting to hear where you think this counterpoint goes wrong.
Can you post a link to the data you're referencing? Overall TFR regardless of ethnic origin is down to 1.34 last year and the number of births so far projects out to a similar or lower figure for 2024. There was minimal upwards movement in the late 00s and early 10s, but this could plausibly be related to immigration, see the jump between 2014-2016. I don't see at all where you're getting the present upwards trend you've mentioned from.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
What's your opinion on how this will work out long term? If low fertility is the genuine preference of the average woman, as you say further down in this thread, and you don't approve of the more heavy-handed, right wing-coded measures that might have some success in pushing up birth rates, what will the solution be? As things stand, we will see massive problems with social welfare systems in particular and the entire economy in general in the next decades.
Projecting further out, because of large differences between birth rates between groups, the heavy-handed right wing-coded measures might be implemented anyway, because the vast majority of future people will be descended from disproportionately clannish, religious and generally non-Western-liberal demographics, and this will have obvious consequences on what society considers as the proper stance on things like women's reproductive rights etc. Given your stated preferences, this seems like an outcome that should be prevented, but I get the impression that you're more or less endorsing doing nothing.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Demographic projections predict Russia to be Muslim majority towards the end of the century, at roughly the same time Western European nations will become majority non-European. Moscow and St. Petersburg might achieve this much earlier, similar to other European capitals like London. Russian (ethno-)nationalists have been angry for years about the higher fertility of Muslim minorities and Central Asian migration that are the causes behind this.
The Kremlin's line on this has vacillated between vague overtures towards blood-based nationalism and civic nationalism à la 'no such thing as an ethnic Russian' in their rhetoric and doing basically nothing to stem the tide or even facilitating it with migration treaties in practical terms.
I find this hard to believe if it were generalized. Regardless of the financial vehicle people choose for their retirement, the actual amount of physical resources and labor to fulfill their demands doesn't really change. The material burden caused by 40% of society being unable to work isn't alleviated in any way if all of those people are nominal millionaires due to their portfolios' appreciation over time, prices for elder care, cruises in the Caribbean, the local retirement home's weekly Bingo event etc. would simply adjust upwards according to the actual amount of working age people being able to deliver these things.
Society can't collectively out-save demographic change. The stock market or government pension schemes are different ways to save money, but they're just saving nonetheless, not material solutions to the actual issue. Individually, investing is obviously still the way to go as long as there are enough suckers unaware of or not engaging with these better financial options, but that just elevates your relative standing, it's not a solution for society as a whole.
More options
Context Copy link