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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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This all sounds like a lot of doomerism. Most things are going fine.

Energy

Resource "running out" is not a real thing that happens. Prices adjust. Uses become more limited, or alternatives are found.

We used copper pipping everywhere, and then copper got expensive, and we used PVC pipe instead.

Oil has gotten nominally cheaper over my lifetime of driving. Its basically never gone over $5 a gallon. There are lots of oil reserves, like Tar Sands. Its just that the oil becomes a little harder to extract. Fracking was an invention that drastically opened up oil availability in the US. "Peak oil" if it is a thing, is not a bad thing at all. It just means that oil usage is tapering off as other technologies replace it.

Ethanol is indeed dumb, and is just a subsidy for farmers.

Battery tech has been improving slowly. Flywheel engines might make more sense for cars. They are used to great effect in formula 1.


Climate Change

Most obviously not a big deal because no one is yet to get serious about large scale geo-engineering projects. Estimated costs for such projects are in the $10-100 billion range (space based sun shield, or atmospheric sulfur injection). Less than Afghanistan cost us.

Most disasters are solvable with more wealth. Hurricanes suck when you are poor. Earthquakes suck when you have no engineers and live in shoddy buildings. Tornadoes are bad when they are not predictable and you don't have a basement. Winter storms are mitigated with more plows on the roads.


Pandemics

Covid was the worst pandemic the world has faced in like a century, and basically everything that was bad about it was as a result of people overreacting to it. We shot ourselves in the foot. The actual mortality rate for covid after first infection or after vacination was stupidly low. Even before that the mortality rate for initial infection was still very low once hospitals figured out how they should be treating it (don't put people on ventilators). Deaths were almost certainly over-counted by hospitals for the sake of financial benefits.


Birth rate

Not great, but you are exaggerating the severity. The decline has been slow. And part of the main problem is again that we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Don't build pyramid scheme retirement systems that rely on larger numbers of young people. The worst outcome won't be societal collapse. It will be old people with no children getting shoved under the bus harder than they thought they'd be.


"Brain rot**

Luckily we are booting up the AIs to think for us. Might have its own negative side effects. Or it might allow us to brain rot to idiocracy levels without the accompanying decrease in standards of living.