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Everything has been getting so much better, for so long now, that asking ‘wait guys why are we all just getting more completely miserable?’ has the magnetic force of a skunk’s ass
Everything has been getting better?
Are you sure about that? What are family formation rates looking like? Local manufacturing? Levels of societal trust? The military, media and political institutions are all hopelessly corrupt and you don't even have to be particularly smart to see that the economic strategy of the last few decades has largely consisted of kicking a can down an increasingly short length of road. The geopolitical scene is a complete disaster and has been hopelessly mismanaged to boot. Don't forget a variety of other problems lurking in the wings - climate change is already starting to have an impact, and I don't think we've even started dealing with the sheer quantities of pollution that the modern world has generated either.
Some things have gotten better - but a lot of the things which are really essential to human flourishing and living the kind of life that a lot of people want have gotten far more difficult. Ever looked at the collective measurements of women's happiness over time? There's absolutely a reason that "why are we all just getting more completely miserable" is gaining traction, and those reasons were strong enough to let Donald Trump of all people get into the presidency.
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"had" I'd say -- it's hard to avoid the feeling that the walls are closing in on various interests (firearms, vaping, lightbulbs, driving cars, freedom of speech -- take your pick) these days.
While any one of these is probably not worth going to war over, every camel has his breaking point.
The economy seems perilous as well. It just sorta feels like the dam is about to break. I don’t have proof. Just a gut feeling that I think many share.
I can agree with this take, at least anecdotally. It increasingly seems like the economy is only perceived as good because of number shuffling by fancy finance grads with creative statistics. Whereas the reality on the ground for poor folks is getting worse and worse in actuality.
It would track with the increasing amount of rage coming from the right as well, which I think is generally made up of poorer people than the left.
I do well for myself. So it isn’t being poor. But my wage should go further than it does and makes me wonder how the vast majority of people who make less than me get by.
That’s what makes me think it’s a house of cards. I think people are in more hawk and once the consumer spending stops Because credit limits are hit the fall could be sudden and extreme.
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It's only hard to avoid feeling that way if you are in a filter bubble that is pushing those narratives and subconsciously motivated to accept them.
Most people feel fine about those things, if they ever think about them at all. Or, more to the point, picking a few narrow interests where there have been some new regulations is a form of cherrypicking; it says little about the state of the world overall, you could find similar contemporary examples at any point in history.
If by "filter bubble" you mean "enjoyer of things some government flak wants to ban/fuck up" and by "subconsciously motivated" you mean "doesn't want things he enjoys banned/fucked up" then sure, I guess -- the point of the comment is that this tendency is spreading from niche issues (vaping lets say) to things that are less so (guns) and now seems to be at things that are decidedly non-niche. (cars, fucking up the economy)
Like, uh -- Prohibition, I guess? That went well.
I'm struggling to find a historical example similar to 'let's ban IC cars in five years' -- what did you have in mind?
Internal combustion cars are not going to be banned in five years. I don't where you're getting that from.
But think about McCarthyism or the Comics Code Authority, warning labels on music and stores refusing to stock albums after government investigations, etc. The government is always having a panic and going after something or other.
The point being that now they are panicing about many things at once -- which feels like walls closing in.
(Seems as though many governments are waver somewhat on their timelines, but 2030 was originally a popular date for banning sales of IC vehicles; looks like 2035 is the new 'real soon now', which is still absolutely insane and will be very unpopular to the extent that it's actually implemented. You think some Hollywood people being investigated for communism is equivalent to Greater London enforcing crippling taxes on vehicles they don't like?)
Ok, so by 'IC cars will be banned in 5 years' you meant 'several environmental agencies have suggested phasing out new sales of IC cars to consumers within the next 12 years'.
That is indeed much closer to what I expected, and pretty much demonstrates my point about filter bubbles distorting your perception of the world.
It is interesting that discovering this huge gap between what you thought was happening, and what is actually happening, does not seem to have changed your position or argument at all. I propose that it should have, and I would be interested to hear your thought process on how you reacted to learning this.
Anyway, if we're moving from 'actual laws on the book' to 'proposals by agencies for things they think we should do a decade from now', then yes, we've always had lots of crazy shit like that, and we can't remember most of it because most of it never actually happens.
No, I mean governments have committed to this and informed auto manufacturers that it will be the case. Read the fucking link man.
The UK originally said 2030; they've since slid it back to 2035 -- it's still uncomfortably close.
I'd add that numerous automakers have committed to going all electric between 2025-2035, including many announcing that they have no intention of developing any additional IC vehicles. Many cars on sale today have been labeled by their makers the last IC generation of cars.
Given the typical development window of an all new car lasts from 3-10 years, even if the industry were to reduce or reverse course there would still be a significant gap in development that would need to be filled. The EVs are being designed the factories are being retooled. While it might still be easy to buy an IC car today, suddenly it won't be in the not very far off future.
https://www.gearpatrol.com/cars/g38986745/car-brands-going-electric/
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No, I think that Hollywood people being investigated by the US Congress for their political beliefs and losing their jobs is worse than London taxing vehicles that are harmful to the both the local and global environments.
OK, and the Holodomor was worse than the Armenian genocide -- the Armenians were still correct to be concerned.
This is a bit of an unfair retort - you're the one who asked him to make the comparison.
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The London system exempts almost every vehicle made after 2006. That’s hardly crippling, almost nobody will pay.
If almost nobody will pay, then why waste all the money putting up cameras and whatnot?
Obviously they think they stand to make a profit on the enterprise, or they wouldn't.
That is not necessarily my impression of how the British government works.
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That's silly. A trespassing fine will virtually never cover the cost of prosecuting the offence - but the point is not to turn a profit, it's to deter trespassing. Governments don't need to worry about turning a profit from law enforcement, they can just reach into your pocket and take what they want even when you've done nothing wrong.
The point is to boil the frog. They can't impose their climate goals all at once, that would piss off too many people. So they just slice off the oldest cars. Then they come back for the next oldest. And it ratchets up and up until we're magically living in the electric car utopia.
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The average vehicle age is 9 years (making the average vehicle on the road there a 2014 model), so the people who are still driving cars made in 2006 and earlier are also obviously poorer than average, since the 200,000+ km cars that are 20 years old are currently the only thing they can even afford (not that the shutdowns over the last 2 weeks weren't hardest on the poor to begin with, through the combination of banning the businesses they work at and directly causing consumer good prices to inflate through various means).
So it's a highly regressive tax by design, levied specifically against the people who can't pay it, for the explicit purpose of taxing their private transport away (and heavily enshittifying what they even can afford in the first place).
After all, nobody needs a high-capacity
assaultvehicle that can travel over 500km and recharges in 5 minutes. God forbid anyone ever want to spend the extra cash not to have to wait the extra time it takes for transit to get them anywhere, that's a privilege only environmentalists and bureaucrats should be able to afford.More options
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For now it does -- do you think that this will be a static thing?
Already a fair number of people feel strongly enough about it to go after the cameras -- so some people are expecting to pay I guess? Both of my vehicles are pre-2006, and I'm making 6 figures -- are there no working poors in the LMA?
It's supposed to incentivise you changing your vehicles, so that the air becomes less horrible. I can understand poorer people being annoyed about ULEZ, but you can obviously afford to change your cars, so what are you actually upset about? I mean, would you say it's that you're concerned for the livelihoods of poorer vehicle users? Or is it a principle of liberty thing?
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Ideas so unattractive we must ensure they are demonetized, deplatformed, and delisted from searches, lest someone bumps into them accidentally.
Yeah that's the great irony - it's Schrodinger's right wing. We're in furious agreement that like you're suggesting 'normal' ideas are tautologically popular. But, only 'weirdos' rock the boat. Given a choice between being unfulfilled and having to do laundry by hand...
You'd take doing laundry by hand, right? I get you are presenting a way of thinking, but presented with that choice which would you go for?
Sure, I'm laundry by hand all the way. For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).
But that won't stop a good chunk of people from saying they hate doing laundry already and 'fulfillment' is lame and for tryhards
Is the biological arms race not overstated? There are strains of a few diseases resistant to some common antibiotics, but there’s backup antibiotics, and backup to the backup antibiotics, and etc, and those strains are generally not dominant, anyways- they’re mostly found in hospitals(where they are indeed a problem) and the general public doesn’t have to worry about them much at all.
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(because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).
I think this is in large part due to human mismanagement. If we used antibiotics sensibly and judiciously the superbug problem would not be an issue at all - but instead we decided to just dump them into all of our animal feed and hand them out like candy for incredibly trivial problems.
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In an arms race, your enemy's tactics change to something more deadly, because you've left whatever Schelling point had let two sentient competitors settle on less-deadly weapons. The end state is some new equilibrium where war is more deadly to both sides.
In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, our enemies' tactics change to something equally or potentially less deadly, because optimal virulence decreases for a disease that risks eradication as soon as it's noticed and because constraining an optimization problem (especially with a constraint as extreme as "evade custom-targeted poisons and the human immune system at the same time) never makes the optimum higher. The end state is one where the very best most evolved "superbug" bacteria, the ones immune to any known antibiotic ... are thereby back to the "no antibiotics" status quo at most, not deadlier.
We call them "superbugs" only because the status quo where every germ was that dangerous was just that awful, not because it would somehow be even more awful for only a fraction to again be that dangerous.
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never-ending biological arms race was already happening, penicillin give humans powerful weapon that gets less powerful but is still really powerful and unlocked entire piles of things that can be used
both me and my brother would be dead without antibiotics and thousands (millions?) of other people as well
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