Crowstep
1d ago
In spite of Trump's pigheadedness, electric cars and renewables are still going to win. Humanity is undergoing an energy transition from turning heat into electricity or movement (fossil fuel electricity generation and petrol cars) to one where we generate and use the energy directly. Solar power is already the cheapest form of energy globally, followed by wind, and electric cars are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, faster to accelerate, quieter, easier to fill up (you do it at home overnight) and will soon be cheaper to buy, due to plummeting battery costs. The US can try and turn back the clock, but ICE cars are a mature technology facing off against an already superior, rapidly improving one which is still picking the low-hanging fruit.
The idea that in 50 years, Americans will still be driving petrol cars because the ageing boomer currently in charge thinks that EVs are for hippies is so beyond far-fetched it's hard to describe. It's like someone in the 1960s claiming that we'll never switch to colour TV because black and white TVs have clearer images.
Crowstep
2d ago
AI demand for energy will keep the price up.
The US generates approxmately 1% of its electricity from petroleum. Oil is useful for cars, but electric car sales are going exponential. I guess oil is useful as a manufacturing input, not that the US does much manufacturing any more.
That said, Trump is a mercantilist who hasn't updated his economic views since the 90s, so he may well believe something like that.
Crowstep
2d ago
Do the workers own the means of production/their firms?
Has that been the case in any communist regime?
If not, then it's not a particularly meaningful yardstick with which to judge how communist a country is.
Are lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, and architects in the developed world communist because the workers sometimes own the firms?
Crowstep
2d ago
In this context, has the dictator of the US been writing essays for decades about how Mexicans don't really exist, how they're really confused Americans who have been mislead by a regime of HitlerNazis, how Mexican land is rightfully part of the USA because of some confused historical nonsense about the Aztecs, has already invaded Canada and also the USSR has publicly refused to allow Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact, host Soviet military bases and SCUD missile installations?
Crowstep
3d ago
Airplanes?
Not there yet, but in fifty years, I'd wager so. They're already in development.
Ships?
For cargo shipping, there are already electric versions. Of course, cargo shipping doesn't really consume that much fuel relative to how much stuff they transport. Again, in fifty years we can reasonably expect technology to have improved.
Semi-trucks?
Solar and batteries are now cheap enough (and getting cheaper!) that grid-level storage is possible. We don't need any new technological innovations, just to scale today's technology at today's prices, which is exactly what's happening. Combine some overbuilding with solar panels (easy now that they are dirt cheap) along with some wind turbines and you've got yourself constant power, since wind and sunshine are anticorrelated. Not that oil even matters for electricity generation, almost all fossil fuels used to power grids are coal and gas, which are now significantly more expensive than solar panels and wind turbines.
Worrying about oil in 50 years is like worrying about shortages of natural rubber now. Technology has superceded old requirements. The future is now.
Crowstep
3d ago
Venezuelan oil isn’t for today, it’s for fifty years from now.
Do you think that oil will really matter that much in 50 years? Solar is outcompeting all other forms of electricity production and electric cars are replacing petrol ones. Oil is useful as a manufacturing material I guess, but in 50 years the global population will be in freefall thanks to low birthrates and the carbon transition will be completed. Surely there will be plenty of oil to go around?
Crowstep
3d ago
I have little sympathy for Ukraine. If you repeatedly antagonize your neighboring superpower, you get what you get.
For context, Ukraine's 'antagonisation' consisted of existing as a sovereign state that wasn't under the Russian boot.
Personally I have a lot of sympathy for the Venezuelan people. Sure, they elected Chavez, but it's not as if they are the only country in the western hemisphere to elect an erratic, authoritarian populist. I'm glad that Maduro has been deposed, and hopefully the lack of clannishness like in Iraq and Afghanistan means that regime change will be a little more effective this time, although I'm not holding my breath for good governance or anything.
Crowstep
4d ago
This means that roughly one out of three college-educated women who want to marry will basically have to either accept a husband without a college degree or forego marriage. As the former is unlikely in most cases, I very much doubt that the marriage rates quoted in the article will continue.
Actually, we've already seen this exact thing happening. Scott has written about it. Basically graduate women are marrying the higher-earning working class men. Turns out women don't care much about credentials for their own sake, only credentials as a proxy for high potential salaries.
Whenever women engage in transaction sex of any sort with men they aren't attracted to, as opposed to having sex for its own sake, I'd argue that doesn't count as sexual attention.
What percentage of the 90% of young, unmarried men who have had sex do you think visited prostitutes? My bet is a very low number.
Crowstep
5d ago
Women should be forced to settle or starve
I agree with your overall comment, but I've got to jump in here. 'Settle or starve' has never been the choice women had to make in the west. Not when we were hunter-gatherers (meat would shared within the band), not after the shift to agriculture (women can grow crops and make textiles for sale, hence the word 'spinster'), not after the industrial revolution (where there was ample factory and domestic work). Never.
Indeed, 'settle or starve' suggests that widows (who made up a huge percentage of women in societies before modern medicine) would just starve to death, which they didn't. People only starved to death during famines, when everyone was starving to death.
Crowstep
5d ago
And now the girlbosses aren't getting married, because Plain Jane doesn't want to settle for Plain John and is unhappily seeking her spot in Mr. Chad's harem.
That isn't true. The marriage rate for graduate women (a reasonable proxy for 'girlbosses') has been increasing since the 1980s, and has only declined by 10% from 1968 to today (85% to 75%). The collapse in marriage has been among lower class women.
The bottom 80% of the male population isn't getting 80% of the female attention. They're getting ~5% of it.
I'm not sure how you're measuring 'sexual attention' but if we define it as 'having sex' then this obviously isn't true. 20% of men having 95% of sex is an insane figure. According to the GSS, the most promiscuous 20% of sexually-active, never-married young men have about 50-60% of the sex. And more to the point, the figures are the same for women. Basically, there are a subset of promiscuous men and women who have sex with eachother, while the less promiscuous majorities of both sexes have less sex.
Lyman Stone explains what's going on with male sexlessnes:
The rise of young male sexlessness isn’t about Chads and Stacies; it isn’t primarily about Tinder or Bumble; it’s not mostly about attitudinal shifts in what women want from relationships; and it’s not mainly about some new war between the sexes. It’s mostly about people spending more years in school and spending more years living at home. But that’s not actually a story about some change in sexual politics; instead, it’s a story about the modern knowledge economy, and to some extent exorbitant housing costs. As such, it’s no surprise that rising sexlessness is being observed in many countries. This, in turn, suggests that finding a solution to help young people pair up may not be as easy.
Crowstep
5d ago
I could give my long, comprehensive argument (with stats!) showing that men are by and large the same as they've ever been, but women as a group have elevated their expectations while simultaneously becoming less appealing as mates.
Please do, because from what I can see in this comment, and the one you've linked, you haven't presented any actual evidence. Just a just-so story that doesn't match the data at all. To pick out an illustrative sentence:
It is a blackpill, but there is not a single piece of evidence really contradicting it. A man who is the combination of 'average' height, 'average' salary, 'average' talent, fame, renown, and 'average' physical strength will not get female attention under modern circumstances.
Among men between the ages of 22-34, 90% have had sex ever and 75% have had sex in the last year. There has been a big rise in sexlessless starting in 2014*, but even then, the average young man is definitely getting female attention. The article also demonstrates that while there is a gap in male a female rates of sexlessness, this is not driven by promiscuous men hogging all the women.
*Which happens to be the year after smartphone penetration crossed the 50% marker, I think this is related.
Crowstep
5d ago
The risk I see with 'make marriage a much stronger contract' social engineering is that even more people opt out of it. Marriage has already become an elite institution, with the commensurate dysfunction among the lower classes who aren't getting married.
Marriage worked better when everyone did it, because it reinforced the norm. The collapse of that norm is tragic, but making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Crowstep
6d ago
The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds.
Didn't they abolish segregation, mandate the legalisation of gay marriage, mandate the legalisation of abortion (before later returning that power to the states), abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns? Those seem pretty political and sigificant to me. Certainly they seem like things that should have been decided by elected representatives or by referendum.
Crowstep
6d ago
I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.
Crowstep
8d ago
What boggles my mind about this is the numbers. Minnesota only has about 90,000 Somalis, less than 2% of the state's population. And yet they've seemingly managed to embezzle at least $8 billion. Somalia's GDP is only $12 billion. If we assume that all the fraud was done by Somalis, that's $880,000 dollars per person. Just absolutely industrial levels of fraud.
Crowstep
8d ago
I'm pretty sure that men get specifically respiratory diseases worse than women. Like how women get worse migraines/headaches. This article suggests that men with pneumonia are more likely to die than women with pneumonia, and mentions that it has something to do with the male immune system.
Crowstep
8d ago
Mostly consumables (food, drinks etc). My wife insists on doing stockings for eachother so that's pretty easy. Plus I bought her a voucher for a massage place.
Crowstep
11d ago
It's a combination of things:
- It's easier for manufacturers to put in everything they want to in a bigger frame, especially batteries and cameras
- Modern phones are mainly used for media consumption, which is better with a bigger screen
- For a lot of people, the phone is the main computer, rather than a laptop or desktop.
- Once you've switched to using a phone two handed, then increasing the size doesn't matter much beyond that point
I'm a fellow small phone lover, but I recognise that we're a minority. Most people, when given the choice, choose the bigger phone. That's why the iPhone Mini flopped so hard. Even Apple couldn't make small phones work commercially.
Crowstep
14d ago
Nothing at all. But socializing more won't change the basic mathematics of the situation. No matter how much people socialize, there will never be enough 8/10 men to marry all the 5/10 women who want to marry them.
Then how on earth did people get married during the Baby Boom, and other periods of near-universal marriage? How was it possible if female pickiness is so strong that the US reached replacement TFR in 2007? 5/10 women do, in fact, marry 5/10 men. They always have and they always will.
Birth rates in the US have been on a downward trend since the late 1950s. There have been small ups and downs, but the biggest drop (by far) took place between 1960 and 1980.
Actually, US birth rates have been on a downward trend since 1800 (in fact earlier, but those are the earliest modern records go). The Baby Boom was a temporary abberation, not the historical norm. But between 1975 and 2008, birth rates were going up. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they would have continued going up if it weren't for smartphones, social media and the internet, so I think it's more practical to focus on fixing the social damage done by those things than by bitching about women being too picky or fantasising about war rape.
What I mean by "hypergamous" is that man is a naturally tournament species just like most other species of apes. In the absence of economic and social constraints, what you would see is that the top roughly 20% of men would mate polygynously with substantially all of the women.
And yet somehow such a society has never emerged at any point in history or anywhere in the world. Even in societies that tolerate polygyny, it is outcompeted by monogamy. That is why only about 2% of humans alive today live in polygamous households.
Crowstep
15d ago
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Yes I did, and they are excellent essays. But to explain the coupling and birth rate collapse on the excesses of anglosphere feminism is parochial. Coupling is down everywhere. I mean literally across the entire world. Since 2010 birth rates are down in Mongolia, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, Brazil. Name a country that isn't Israel and you can be almost certain that its birth rates have been dropping recently.
Mongolian shepherds aren't coupling up less because they are worried about getting Me Too'd. They're coupling up less for the same reason as everyone else. It's obviously the phones.
Crowstep
15d ago
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
Did you look at the link? Men and women are both socialising less. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. What about that fact do you doubt?
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
Yes I disagree, the birth rate collapse started around 2010, before then, birth rates were going up. Has the world really changed that much in 15 years? I'm not talking about the 1950s here.
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available. Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
What's hypergamous about sitting at home, alone, scrolling for hours and hours?
The addictive digitisation of life has harmed everyone, and it has harmed the ability of men and women to socialise and couple up. To blame that on women's hypergamy* is like blaming inflation on greedy corporations.
*Incidentally, I'm not sure you can describe women's dating preferences as hypergamous. Women prefer men who are taller and earn more than they do, and men prefer women who are younger and more beautiful than they are. In that sense, both men and women are 'hypergamous' but about different things. But regardless, assortative mating is extremely strong. Rich men don't marry beautiful young waitresses, they marry women of their own age and their own class. The beautiful waitresses marry handsome working class men.
Crowstep
15d ago
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Crowstep
15d ago
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
Crowstep
17d ago
I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.
This study suggests that about 10% or less of SIDS cases are infanticide.
I'm happy to concede that, at least for now, ICE cars make sense for the small niche of people who live in Alaska (about 0.2% of the US' population, by my estimate).
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