Both slavery and imperialism have had a long history before capitalism. Capitalism exists in circumstances with no plausible relationship to slavery or imperialism.
It annoys me because this dialectic is so obviously wrong.
We've asked you before not to use HN primarily to argue about ideology. Since you're still doing that, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.
Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.
> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.
I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.
> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.
He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.
The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.
I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.
There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.
> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.
I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.
There are some very good criticisms from the alt-right. There are also great criticisms from the left and from the conventional right. It's easy to criticize. I always skip to "what's your solution?"
The solution offered by the alt-right is neo-monarchism and race nationalism. No thanks. Not only are these irrelevant and backward-looking but the latter is morally evil. Ironically it represents a rejection of the core of Western moral thought from Christianity through the enlightenment.
I agree to some extent with Thiel's stagnation hypothesis. I used to be really excited about him, thinking he got it and might work behind the scenes to try to re-invigorate a culture of genuine innovation in the West. But then he jumped on the alt-right horse and I lost interest.
One of the core hallmarks of a declining or at least demoralized/disillusioned civilization is looking backward. The right is now looking back to the Middle Ages, the 1930s, and the 1950s, while the left is still looking back to the 1960s. Reaction is what decline looks like.
> America has a lot of problems but I would not prefer to live in Russia or Saudi Arabia.
Would you prefer to live in Japan? Like most, I consider the "alt right" to be on the margins but I also think it's healthy to challenge conventional wisdom.
Japan is not nor does it strive to be diverse and they do not have a lot of the problems the US has.
Japan? It has tons of problems: chronically low birth rates, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, extreme workaholism, decades of economic stagnation, and probably the world's most intense forms of social alienation.
The latter seems a direct refutation of the alt-right's contention that racial uniformity promotes social engagement and unity. The Japanese are so alienated they barely even have sex anymore. A recent trend in Japanese restaurant design centers around making sure patrons never see another human being, not even a server.
In addition to moral reasons a big reason I can't take the alt-right's racism seriously is that I live in a very racially diverse area (Los Angeles/OC area). Being white I might even be in the minority, or nearly so. My neighbors are more often than not hispanic, asian, or black. Our kids play together, and my daughter's best friends are pretty close to a random sampling of the planet's genetic diversity.
If anything I've found the more recent immigrants to the USA to be more friendly, more socially engaged, harder working, and even more patriotic than multi-generational American natives.
Last year I witnessed the spectacle of a bunch of first and second generation immigrants actually celebrating the Fourth of July. Like really celebrating it. I've seldom seen white Americans genuinely celebrate their country like that. I'd say a good half the white Americans I know are depressed, cynical, and disengaged. This is true on both sides of the usual political divides.
Japan's problem might actually be too much isolation. At the very least some immigration probably would have prevented three decades of economic stagnation.
The neo-racist thesis is bullshit. There is no "white genocide," though there might be a bit of self-inflicted white suicide. Sometimes I think white Americans suffer from the same problems as native Japanese, namely the social diseases that stem from multiple generations of extreme wealth. Wealth promotes social alienation, laziness, a sense of entitlement, and generally taking things for granted.
I've long wondered if the cycle of civilizational rise and fall is caused by wealth. Civilizations rise on a tide of innovation, cooperation, and optimism, but then they get rich and succumb to the social diseases that result from wealth and power.
Edit: Yes there are racially segregated high-crime ghettoes in the LA/OC area, but this seems to happen when you have racial isolation combined with poverty and criminal enterprises like illegal drug trafficking. The entire metro area is incredibly diverse and the majority of it is pretty safe. The area I live in is extremely diverse and has among the lowest crime rates in the state.
Edit #2: If I didn't live in the USA I'd probably want to live in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. I'd like to add the UK too since I love a lot of their culture, but the UK's government seems just as insane and dysfunctional as ours.
What you want then is to follow the work of Slavoj Zizek who also wants to toss all failed political ideology like 20th century communism as it consistently led to authoritarianism. He is often pushing for a new political theory age. One interesting theory was Murray Bookchin's 'Libertarian Municipalism' as it is designed to operate within a state as a horizontal not vertical power and gradually reduce the centralized control over populations https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-k...
These seem concerned with the technical debt we have, used loosely.
As the famous Ycombinator talk by Balaji Srinivasan pointed out these kinds of projects have a common theme of starting from first principals.
I blame the stagnation on the rejection of nuclear energy and biotechnology by our society. We built a fine collection of mythological fog stories around each of them, nuclear might produce mutant children and kill us all, biotechnology might produce race/class war (more mutants). Where have all of these misanthropic ideas been cultivated? Hollywood and the Universities. Actually I blame people like Mr Stross for this, the breed of people who decided we had a moral imperative not to support the use of these technologies.
The piles of fissile material, petri dishes and computer circuits don't contain any urge to murder us all. The existential funk started proper I think like yourself, with the failure of Communism, and then a loss of faith in democracy (increasing numbers of non-voters), lots of apathy.
This is why I feel like we should revitalize the old Victorian spirit of exploration, get the body moving, work together in gentleperson clubs (hacker spaces) and that shall produce more optimistic individuals. Then when we toy with new ideas we shall be less so inclined to view them darkly. I'm open to suggestions.
* To Charlie (who will be reading this thread and can tell me exactly what he thinks) I suspect these sorts of possibilities have a whiff of sulfur about them? I'm also curious to know if you've read Nick Land's essays. Context: Yarvin/Land are accusing Mr Stross of the thing he was flaking the transhumanists with, namely that his socio-political (socialist-democrat?) beliefs are a thinly veiled form of Christianity, where original sin is discrimination and paradise is multicultural utopia.
I suppose after a thousand or so years it kind of seeps in everywhere even when it becomes assumed it is on its last legs.
The story of slow moving AI is compelling, but since The Election there has been 24 hour news/outrage coverage of how we're all going to hell ever since - so at least one paperclip maximizer has influenced the motivation to make the talk.
The trouble I think is that nearly everything I can imagine Mr Stross supporting as progress basically backfires because at least half the public will have you for lunch over infringements to liberties. Once you're being tossed between the bulls horns of the left and right it's hard to imagine positive outcomes. At the start of the talk microtransactions were mentioned. That seems like a much better route because it is not partisan in nature.
I see that view as a form of revisionism. Was it ethnic based nationalism, or was it ethnic based nationalism and political ideology and perverse financial incentives and class warfare and... seemingly countless other things.
Perhaps we need to look at it from a meta-perspective then? I'd argue that it was caused by the existence, and ultimate subservience of people to, a state. Large states too, where power was allowed to accumulate, develop and weaponize itself in the form of an army.
32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house.
Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today.
Today that would buy you a Tiny House on the low end of that market.
In my opinion, and I know we are far richer than our great-grandparents, but anybody arguing we're quantitatively richer than our parents has a long row to hoe. If this is progress it sure is lumpy. As Peter Thiel says the most likely explanation is we've had an nearly completely unacknowledged (by Western intelligentsia) stagnation technologically.
> Tyler Cowen points out that there's not a single thing in your list of kitchen appliances that didn't exist in the 50s. People have highly temporally displaced notions, believing that things like washing machines or dishwashers are recent mass consumer items but they're not, they're nearly a century old.
Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.
So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.
For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years.
Have you been to the UK recently? :)
I don't know how much of an increase there was from about a century ago, but for the last few decades it's very much been going the other way. But the UK is something of a basket case when it comes to housing; people want to spend all their money on a mortgage.
Tangentially related, not long ago a minister suggested that people could keep a "jerry can" or petrol in their garage and was roundly mocked not only for the fire hazard, but for the casual belief that everyone has a garage.
Personally I've always felt the existence of the garage to be an underrated contribution to American innovation.
I don't mean Americans aren't aware of it, I mean that sort of thing never comes up when Europeans discuss how to increase innovation. They will produce 'e-centers' and 'hubs' but I think most of the good stuff just comes from some people screwing around, probably with some things that don't rate much fanfare or seem adequate for a proposal.
Sorry about the edit, I thought I was waffling on too long.
My position is not that you're wrong, it's that most of us are missing the subtext of our technological development which is that nearly all of it is computer related and we've papered over failures in a large number of technological areas by simply not talking about them (in society, not on HN).
> Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.
That is true. I wouldn't dispute the affect of accumulated incremental changes to existing product lines, it's meaningful.
It's true in two directions. For instance many items today are inferior goods to past goods. Here is an example.
New growth lumber is inferior to old growth lumber. Something made out of wood such as siding, framing or window/door frames will require more frequent replacement due to rot, insects, weather. The old growth equivalents lasts for decades and even centuries. Today we rely on a mixture of more frequent maintenance and often toxic additives (protective coatings) and if that doesn't work we are forced to leap to far more complex, sometimes expensive replacements e.g. UPVC, I-Joists, LVLs.
I'm not saying the technology is bad. It's great engineering ingenuity, I'm stating its requirement exists because of a failure in our ability to match or improve qualitative tree farming and botanical biotechnology.
> So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.
This is a big subject, I'll just throw one dart at you.
There is a hidden assumption. Why are your houses more energy efficient? It's because a barrel of oil doesn't cost $1 anymore.
There's a dark side to energy efficiency.
The side affects of higher insulation requirements is that houses cost more, studies on passive houses suggest 10%-20% more in the positive scenarios. The real problem though is that the most common forms of insulation offgas toxins and since houses are meant to be more air tight... The fact is that most buyers of houses and most builders of them aren't up to speed on what is required to do this sort of housing without health risks.
Right now most houses in my country, without the latest insulation requirements, suffer from moisture, mildew and mold problems, all of which is not positive for human health - this only gets worse with the new regulations because consumers don't understand the importance of hvac or building houses as holistic systems.
Most of my complaints seem to go away if we actually had a real biotech revolution.
When DNA was discovered, when Human Genome was decoded, they said the exact same things they are now saying about CRISPR, that's what troubles me.
> * New growth lumber is inferior to old growth lumber *
I totally agree that many products are not "made to last" anymore. A fancy blender can do amazing things compared to an old one. But it will probably not last as long, and that's a problem.
The solution I have found is crowd sourced or expert recommendations from the following sources:
Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools book and website.
Metafilter
Reddit's Buy It For Life subreddit
Finehomebuilding's Tool Guide
I find I buy less stuff, but of much higher quality or utility in this way. Some times I get something at a cheap price which works really well, like my Kiwi knives. Other times I have to be educated into realizing why something costs what it does and why or why not it's worth the money. Usually the answer is that the price is right because the object lasts much longer than the cheapo alternative or that the cheap version has a health drawback.
Recent Examples:
Merkur Safety Razor vs cartridge disposables ($$$) (factor of 100 decrease in cost!)
Cast iron skillets vs Teflon pans ($$$)
Tempered glass (container/bakeware) vs disposable trays/soon-to-be-cracked stoneware. ($$$)
Induction cooking vs Gas (health)
Expensive meat vs cheap meat. (health)
Glycerin soap vs liquid soap/regular soap ($$$)
Here's a clear example. I buy a hard shave soap in a nice wooden bowl that costs $30. That's way more than a can of foam, but I've been using this for over four years now and it's only half used.
I don't do this with everything. I have a Silvercrest blender that has worked for a year, expected lifespan of three years I think, about $30 but buying a Vitamix or Blendtec at $500+ wouldn't 'pay me back' in a lifetime.
[waffle]
The China market isn't a problem if and only if it is understood by the consumer that they're getting disposables, so they should stock up and throw away more frequently. That requires money and space a lot of people do not have.
China production is immensely valuable for the bottom billions of the world who simply cannot plausibly afford West levels of wealth.
The rub is of course that you and I are getting lots of boxes with broken appliances/tools.
Yes, but can you build the Sears house for 35k today without materials substitutions. I don't think you can, prices of commodities were probably lower then, which is not in line with received wisdom.
The reason why I mentioned a Tiny House or THOW is that the comparison is much closer, I think like most countries in the past there were no planning permission or taxes on house building. A THOW too is built by the owner, but it is 200-300 sq ft and not 1200 sq ft.
The website you listed suggests a 50k modular house costs closer to 130k to install once everything is worked through. Do you believe the Sears house cost ~150-200% more in the end? Sure they had to dig wells too but I don't think that is plausible.
It seems like there should be a collection of historical lumber prices somewhere. Just that comparison will be pretty informative about the relative material costs.
It's not only what is said, but the timbre of the voice, repetitions and odd names, all these are hallmarks (some types) of the ASMR phenomenon Youtube.
