You ever sit there going "you know I should really stop working on massive political analyses and spend some of that time working on my BASIC programming book"?
Naw, thought not....
Naw, thought not....
So what I'm hearing here is if we pay off the national debt we better also repeal a bunch of federal laws. 🤔
Man, what a concern to have, eh? "Oh no! We won't be handing free money to banks all the time!"
I can see a time where the bigger tent collapses due to success, just like what's happened on the left which used to have a much broader coalition.
It's a really dynamic system overall, almost an economic question as much as a political one. "How valuable are these people to you compared to how much does tolerating them bother you?"
It's a really dynamic system overall, almost an economic question as much as a political one. "How valuable are these people to you compared to how much does tolerating them bother you?"
I don't even need to watch the video to agree.
I ... ah ... want to tell ... ah ... canadians ... ah ... that i'm listening ... ah ... from my .... ah .... friends yaht ... ah ... in panama ... ah ... we understand ... ah ... your problems ... ah ... my servant tells me ... ah ... the groceries are going up in price ... ah .... I tell him to remind them I'm the prime minister
I ... ah ... want to tell ... ah ... canadians ... ah ... that i'm listening ... ah ... from my .... ah .... friends yaht ... ah ... in panama ... ah ... we understand ... ah ... your problems ... ah ... my servant tells me ... ah ... the groceries are going up in price ... ah .... I tell him to remind them I'm the prime minister
In another post in this thread I mentioned that I think the time to actually solve this problem was the 50s or 60s, when they should have paid off the debts from the world war with the newly implemented income tax then abolished both.
But as you said, the quasi-empire couldn't exist in that case, but I feel like the decline that every generation has lived through since wouldn't have had to happen.
But as you said, the quasi-empire couldn't exist in that case, but I feel like the decline that every generation has lived through since wouldn't have had to happen.
I forgot to mention environmentalism since that was also part of the consensus I speak of. And it shows more of the quadrupling down. Solar panels and windmills prove to be not great for most places? Quadruple down and build them to the exclusion of anything effective because they were popular ideas in 2008.
I had a bit of a worm tunneling through the ideas in my brain a while back watching the video from whatifalthist about the mouse utopia experiment. Part of it is that many of the mice had their stress centers maxxed out for no apparent reason. Everything was fine. There were no predators, there was lots of space, there was lots of food, and the fact there was nothing wrong stressed the mice out to the point that the colony was completely destroyed.
The mouse sexes converged. Male mice became effeminate, female mice became more masculine. Male mice stopped contributing to society. Female mice stopped correctly raising their offspring, and those offspring were stunted.
The guy running the experiment called it "the first death", where the mice seemed to lose their will to live and their will to pass the flame of life onto the next generation. Despite that, the whole mouse society was hypersexual.
That there were roving gangs of mice finding anyone who was trying to keep the society running (which was a tiny minority) and actively attacking them and stopping them from doing the important things, and it was this group that destroyed the colony by attacking anyone who tried to maintain social norms or perpetuate the species.
Look at the eco-warriors doing things like throwing soup at paintings or gluing themselves to the road, or even someone like Greta Thunberg. Those people are oozing anxiety. Thing is, even if you take every claim about climate change at face value, this isn't a problem with consequences today. It's 2 degrees per century, so it'll be centuries before there's a major problem, and yet these people are expressing anxiety on the same level as someone holding a gun to a baby's head.
Meanwhile, nobody has the same level of anxiety about a national debt which is an existential threat to the nation with our lifetimes.
Within my lifetime, the national debt of the US went from about 2 trillion to 32 trillion. At the rate it's going, it won't be future generations paying the price of our largesse, it's going to happen in my lifetime. Sovereign debt crises tend to have cataclysmic consequences, including coups that install extremists. It could be said that the irresponsible policies of the Weimar republic were directly responsible for the successful rise of Adolf Hitler. That's the level of threat the national debt and inflation can pose.
But what if we're not really seeing anxiety about environmentalism, that's just the internal rationalization? It's that these little mice are filled with anxiety chemicals they don't understand and they're told they should be anxious about the environment and they're just assuming that's why they're so anxious.
I've been criticizing the environmental movement lately for appearing to be genocidal by demanding things that will actually destroy the human race if they got them. If this model is correct, I might not be that far off.
I had a bit of a worm tunneling through the ideas in my brain a while back watching the video from whatifalthist about the mouse utopia experiment. Part of it is that many of the mice had their stress centers maxxed out for no apparent reason. Everything was fine. There were no predators, there was lots of space, there was lots of food, and the fact there was nothing wrong stressed the mice out to the point that the colony was completely destroyed.
The mouse sexes converged. Male mice became effeminate, female mice became more masculine. Male mice stopped contributing to society. Female mice stopped correctly raising their offspring, and those offspring were stunted.
The guy running the experiment called it "the first death", where the mice seemed to lose their will to live and their will to pass the flame of life onto the next generation. Despite that, the whole mouse society was hypersexual.
That there were roving gangs of mice finding anyone who was trying to keep the society running (which was a tiny minority) and actively attacking them and stopping them from doing the important things, and it was this group that destroyed the colony by attacking anyone who tried to maintain social norms or perpetuate the species.
Look at the eco-warriors doing things like throwing soup at paintings or gluing themselves to the road, or even someone like Greta Thunberg. Those people are oozing anxiety. Thing is, even if you take every claim about climate change at face value, this isn't a problem with consequences today. It's 2 degrees per century, so it'll be centuries before there's a major problem, and yet these people are expressing anxiety on the same level as someone holding a gun to a baby's head.
Meanwhile, nobody has the same level of anxiety about a national debt which is an existential threat to the nation with our lifetimes.
Within my lifetime, the national debt of the US went from about 2 trillion to 32 trillion. At the rate it's going, it won't be future generations paying the price of our largesse, it's going to happen in my lifetime. Sovereign debt crises tend to have cataclysmic consequences, including coups that install extremists. It could be said that the irresponsible policies of the Weimar republic were directly responsible for the successful rise of Adolf Hitler. That's the level of threat the national debt and inflation can pose.
But what if we're not really seeing anxiety about environmentalism, that's just the internal rationalization? It's that these little mice are filled with anxiety chemicals they don't understand and they're told they should be anxious about the environment and they're just assuming that's why they're so anxious.
I've been criticizing the environmental movement lately for appearing to be genocidal by demanding things that will actually destroy the human race if they got them. If this model is correct, I might not be that far off.
I always like to point out that prior to the world wars there was no federal income tax in either the US or Canada, and there was no state or provincial income taxes either.
In other words, whereas a blue collar worker's last dollar today might consist of 50 cents to the government and 50 cents for themselves, our great grandparents would have paid 0 cents to the government and 100 cents for themselves.
In spite of that, the governments of the past routinely paid back their national debts, whereas today despite taking so much from us they've spent an unimaginable amount of debt.
In other words, whereas a blue collar worker's last dollar today might consist of 50 cents to the government and 50 cents for themselves, our great grandparents would have paid 0 cents to the government and 100 cents for themselves.
In spite of that, the governments of the past routinely paid back their national debts, whereas today despite taking so much from us they've spent an unimaginable amount of debt.
Depending on how you view everything, the problems arguably started before Nixon and have been snowballing since then. The guns and butter of the 1960s turned into the inflation and financial crises of the 1970s which turned into reaganomics in the 1980s, which turned into Bush 1 and Clinton spending gobs of money as well(with both parties in power of congress at different times so while the congress does control the pursestrings besides the veto power and bully pulpit of the president), followed by Bush 2 doubling the 4 trillion dollar debt to 8 trillion, followed by Obama nearly doubling it again, and Trump almost spending more money in 4 years than Obama spent in 8.
The right thing to do was back in the 1950s and 1960s, use the income tax to pay down the federal debt and then retire both.
The right thing to do was back in the 1950s and 1960s, use the income tax to pay down the federal debt and then retire both.
I guess you do have a point. It's like carrying capacity. If there was an island that supports 100 deer with the plants on the island, if a 101st deer is born the island does not immediately die, but it starts a long and slow destruction of the island until all the deer are dead.
American has survived so far, but that doesn't mean it will continue to survive just because it isn't dead yet.
Your point on national debt is also kind of a big deal (but also really damning of the 2-party system since both parties stabbed America in the back by racking up the debt) -- 30 trillion in debt and no plans to ever balance the budget, and exploding inflation even after raising interest rates.
American has survived so far, but that doesn't mean it will continue to survive just because it isn't dead yet.
Your point on national debt is also kind of a big deal (but also really damning of the 2-party system since both parties stabbed America in the back by racking up the debt) -- 30 trillion in debt and no plans to ever balance the budget, and exploding inflation even after raising interest rates.
Folks on the left and the right should both remember that at the end of the day, the next presidential election is important, but not the most important thing that will ever happen.
Whoever wins, it's only 4 years. You're not going to save or destroy the country.
For the left, remember that America survived 8 years of George W. Bush, despite his best efforts.
For the right, remember that America survived 8 years of Obama, despite his best efforts.
For the left, remember that America already survived 4 years of Donald Trump, despite Ray Epps best efforts.
For the right, remember that America already survived 3 years of Joe Biden, despite his deployment of shunananmaprezure and batacathcare.
Far more important than any single election are the general trends in public opinions, and it's those things that help inform what's really going to happen as the people who are doing things end up percolating through the system.
People forget that George W. Bush and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after 9/11 that something big needed to be done about islamic terrorism, and not just on the right. Most of the congress and the senate voted to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of their rewriting of history later -- he appeared to be going with the cultural consensus of the time.
People also forget that Barack Obama and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after the war on terror and the ensuing assault on civil liberties as well as the collapse of the economy after the 2008 that big changes needed to happen and at the time it appeared that he was going with that cultural consensus. People forget that the Democrats had a supermajority in the senate for a short time, people were voting en masse for Democrats rejecting the Republican paradigm of the moment.
At the moment, there is no broad cultural consensus around either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. 2016 was a coin flip, 2020 was really a coin flip, and it's possible this November will be one as well.
MAGA populism is the answer that came out of the collapse of the Republican party in 2008. In my view, it's an objectively better ideology than the 2001-2008 strategy, even if Donald Trump as its avatar is kind of a bumbling blowhard.
I was actually hoping that the Democrats would catastrophically lose 2020 because they're working off a strategy book that assumes it's still 2008, and a lot has happened since 2008 including all of us learning that the things they did to "recover" from 2008 didn't really work and everyone's lives have gotten a lot harder.
Anyway, my other post talks more about this cultural consensus, but it's just some whitepills for people who think the world is about to end. It's gonna be ok bros.
Whoever wins, it's only 4 years. You're not going to save or destroy the country.
For the left, remember that America survived 8 years of George W. Bush, despite his best efforts.
For the right, remember that America survived 8 years of Obama, despite his best efforts.
For the left, remember that America already survived 4 years of Donald Trump, despite Ray Epps best efforts.
For the right, remember that America already survived 3 years of Joe Biden, despite his deployment of shunananmaprezure and batacathcare.
Far more important than any single election are the general trends in public opinions, and it's those things that help inform what's really going to happen as the people who are doing things end up percolating through the system.
People forget that George W. Bush and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after 9/11 that something big needed to be done about islamic terrorism, and not just on the right. Most of the congress and the senate voted to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of their rewriting of history later -- he appeared to be going with the cultural consensus of the time.
People also forget that Barack Obama and his agenda wasn't just his, a lot of people agreed after the war on terror and the ensuing assault on civil liberties as well as the collapse of the economy after the 2008 that big changes needed to happen and at the time it appeared that he was going with that cultural consensus. People forget that the Democrats had a supermajority in the senate for a short time, people were voting en masse for Democrats rejecting the Republican paradigm of the moment.
At the moment, there is no broad cultural consensus around either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. 2016 was a coin flip, 2020 was really a coin flip, and it's possible this November will be one as well.
MAGA populism is the answer that came out of the collapse of the Republican party in 2008. In my view, it's an objectively better ideology than the 2001-2008 strategy, even if Donald Trump as its avatar is kind of a bumbling blowhard.
I was actually hoping that the Democrats would catastrophically lose 2020 because they're working off a strategy book that assumes it's still 2008, and a lot has happened since 2008 including all of us learning that the things they did to "recover" from 2008 didn't really work and everyone's lives have gotten a lot harder.
Anyway, my other post talks more about this cultural consensus, but it's just some whitepills for people who think the world is about to end. It's gonna be ok bros.
A good example of the decadent and detached governments is that they aren't doing anything to get more people into such fields at all and are in fact continuing to raise barriers so nobody who isn't a super-elite can get it.
There should be virtually unlimited apprenticeship positions available. The world needs people who can work with their hands and not one more bureaucrat.
There should be virtually unlimited apprenticeship positions available. The world needs people who can work with their hands and not one more bureaucrat.
I wrote a bit of a paragraph in a post somewhere, and thought it was an interesting topic to delve into more deeply to post here.
Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren't lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn't tied to religion at all), and aren't even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they're that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%.
It's really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it's a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren't hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren't hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and Jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that's out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the Overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn't happening because they're telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it's happening because they're finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don't represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn't just Christianity therefore, it's a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago for regular conservatives whether in terms of being too far left or too far right.
What was the cultural consensus of 15 years ago, what am I referring to? Well, I'm referring to the attitudes and views of millennials from around 2008. Those millennials were highly connected with 75% having a social media account at the time, there was an extremely high unemployment rate, they were very skeptical of other people and less skeptical of government, they are not religious, a smaller proportion than in previous generations were raised in two parent households and they themselves were largely unmarried, highly educated, many lived with their parents due to unemployment and the high housing costs, they leaned strongly democrat and extremely weakly republican, they identify as liberal, supported a progressive social agenda, were overwhelmingly receptive to immigrants, and I'm sure I could find more. Many of the millennials of that era were watching Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, which at the time often lambasted the hypocrisy of the Republicans and Fox News, particularly with respect to the handling of the war in Iraq and the economy. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/02/24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/
Now, I just said the left-wing is quadrupling down. What do I mean by that? Well, they have gone about trying to dominate social media to absurd lengths (and when they had a major loss in that regard the temper tantrum was heard around the world). They have implemented policies that in the most extreme circumstances practically deify the unemployed such as California refusing to arrest anyone for theft under 900 dollars. The Democrat president had a fiery speech surrounded by soldiers with a blood red backdrop screaming about the people you should personally be skeptical about and support many policies they would have disagreed with during the Bush administration (it's ok since they're the ones doing it now). They still monopolize the term liberal (though many people are skeptical about that), but have gone to far extremes with the social justice agenda including being openly and proudly racist against the majority, and seem to want straight-up open borders to accept every immigrant on earth. People still talk about the hypocrisy of the republicans and fox news, but frankly only Jon Stewart is Jon Stewart and his decision to retire in 2015 resulted in a bunch of people who didn't get the memo about what made him popular, essentially expediting the death of cable TV. Importantly, the left has wholeheartedly supported policies that empower the university educated white collar worker over the blue collar worker, and in fact that has become one of the defining traits of left-wing policies, favoring an educated elite over a broad coalition of the working classes. Corporations as an abstract concept are still treated with suspicion, but corporations that become organs of the "correct" government have become unquestionable, matching 2008 consensus that companies that contribute to social causes are more trustworthy than companies that solely seek profit.
The cultural consensus they base their ideas on are completely out of date in 2024. You can't just keep moving in one direction forever, or even good ideas end up looking insane -- Helping the downtrodden is nice and all, but if a plane is crashing you must affix your own oxygen mask before assisting others. It's been ancient wisdom that all virtues become vices when brought to the greatest extreme. Just as the 2001 consensus after 9/11 changed when people realized the extremes the government had gone to in order to "protect us from the terrorists", the 2008 consensus has been in a slow crash as people realize the extremes government and culture are going to in order to "ensure diversity, inclusivity and equity". I guess the interesting thing will be what the next phase is. I don't think that there's an established cultural consensus yet on what it might be, it'll be something that everyone finds agreement with, and at this moment the stuff on the table isn't going to work. The Republicans are closer to something since they've been putting in the work, but they haven't found anything universal yet.
One other notable thing is that the plan from 2008 economic plan has now been in effect for a very long time and while everyone was talking about how successful it has been, that hasn't been the experiences of the common person. The establishment is largely controlled by the left wing due in part to the powerful cultural consensus, and they talk a lot about how successful the post 2008 economy has been, but the working classes don't feel that. In the past 5 years it's been particularly notable where the establishment keeps talking about how great everything is doing, and the common man who doesn't live in gated communities can see the tent cities they have to drive past and the beggars outside the supermarkets.
One example of how the left supports educated elites over the common people is in their response to COVID. Instead of providing tools to the masses to manage the pandemic on their own, they handed unprecedented powers to government bureaucrats to dictate who can do what when, and they utilized media to effectively stigmatize all dissent. This is in direct contrast to a policy that respects the decision-making powers of the common man, which would provide tools to make their own decisions based on their own situations (such as making mechanisms available for people who felt uncomfortable working during a pandemic so they could stay home and remain supported while people who were less risk averse could continue to work). While it has become a left vs. right divide, it's really strange that it has cut the way it has, with the left wing blindly supporting the global pharmaceutical companies, and the right wing supporting people's right to choose what to do with their bodies and expressing mistrust of the large corporations.
While the left still retains the term "liberal", some of the things that have occurred are far from liberal. The Liberal party and the NDP in Canada worked together to invoke the Emergencies Act (the successor to the war measures act) to seize the bank accounts and property when many working class truck drivers were protesting measures that were going to destroy their livelihoods and disrupt their medical autonomy. Recently it was found by a court to have been unlawful. This attack on working class individuals who organized seems to me to show that the conception of the left as "for the working class" simply doesn't track. Protecting politicians and bureaucrats from having to hear about policies that put people out of work by taking away the workers ability to use money and further threatening their ability to make a living is purely elitist, as my analysis predicts would happen.
One example of how the left just tripled down on old consensus policies, the Democrats ran for years on abortion being "safe, legal, and rare" -- The accepted compromise being that abortions are actually bad and having them be legal for emergencies is so in the times they are required they would at least be safe. In a lot of cases, people left the compromise behind and started to celebrate their abortions as if they were a moral good in and of themselves, and many left-wing jurisdictions in the US pushed for extremely late term abortions, in some laws as late as the moment of birth, with some extremists (who admittedly were not part of the establishment) suggesting the concept of post-birth abortions so as to not privilege the act of birth.
I guess it's important to note that the left-wing does of course have internal factions as well, but part of the quadrupling down is a stricter adherence to and enforcement of orthodoxy. People who don't follow that orthodoxy are finding themselves cast as "racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic nazis" regardless of their actual positions, and so they're right wing conservatives by default. In light of that fact, the different factions have to tread lightly and maintain the orthodoxy.
One example of what I'm talking about would be J. K. Rowling. She is an outspoken feminist and supporter of social programs, and her books have at times been the favorites of many on the left. She spoke out with mild criticism of the trans movement because it conflicts with her feminist views and is now viciously attacked by her former fans on the left.
Another example would be Elon Musk. Say what you will about the man, he literally created the EV market and so has done a major thing in pushing forward environmental awareness and expanding the options for decarbonizing the economy. The fact that he holds some right of center social views and his acquisition of Twitter has resulted in being treated like actual 1945 Hitler.
Contrast that with the right, which has somewhat embraced figures like Tim Pool (a half-Asian skateboard kid who got his big break covering Occupy Wall Street positively and who regularly expresses support for progressive ideas), Dave Rubin (an openly gay married former leftist who has an adopted child), and Ben Shapiro (an orthodox Jew which might not seem like a big deal but a couple generations ago would be extremely questionable for a highly Christian world), all people who are relatively speaking very "impure" from a far right perspective. Even Donald Trump is a convert from the Democrats, and is extremely "impure" from a right-wing perspective being a crappy Christian who has done a lot of blatantly non-Christian things like cheating on his wife and embodying many deadly sins such as pride, lust, and greed.
I'm not saying all this as praise for the conservatives and a total attack on the left. Instead, it's an analysis pointing to the idea that the left as an effective political machine is going to have to adapt to a new cultural consensus because while they do have support at the moment, it's support that's almost custom engineered to collapse. They have lots of support from the boomers for example, and they also have support from felons and dual income no kids and the like, and many of the swing voters they have are just scared away from exactly one boogeyman whose political career is almost over no matter which angle you look at it from. There's going to become a point where they too have to find a new story that appeals to the actual majority as their lopsided coalition collapses and dies of old age.
Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren't lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn't tied to religion at all), and aren't even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they're that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%.
It's really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it's a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren't hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren't hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and Jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that's out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the Overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn't happening because they're telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it's happening because they're finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don't represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn't just Christianity therefore, it's a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago for regular conservatives whether in terms of being too far left or too far right.
What was the cultural consensus of 15 years ago, what am I referring to? Well, I'm referring to the attitudes and views of millennials from around 2008. Those millennials were highly connected with 75% having a social media account at the time, there was an extremely high unemployment rate, they were very skeptical of other people and less skeptical of government, they are not religious, a smaller proportion than in previous generations were raised in two parent households and they themselves were largely unmarried, highly educated, many lived with their parents due to unemployment and the high housing costs, they leaned strongly democrat and extremely weakly republican, they identify as liberal, supported a progressive social agenda, were overwhelmingly receptive to immigrants, and I'm sure I could find more. Many of the millennials of that era were watching Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, which at the time often lambasted the hypocrisy of the Republicans and Fox News, particularly with respect to the handling of the war in Iraq and the economy. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/02/24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/
Now, I just said the left-wing is quadrupling down. What do I mean by that? Well, they have gone about trying to dominate social media to absurd lengths (and when they had a major loss in that regard the temper tantrum was heard around the world). They have implemented policies that in the most extreme circumstances practically deify the unemployed such as California refusing to arrest anyone for theft under 900 dollars. The Democrat president had a fiery speech surrounded by soldiers with a blood red backdrop screaming about the people you should personally be skeptical about and support many policies they would have disagreed with during the Bush administration (it's ok since they're the ones doing it now). They still monopolize the term liberal (though many people are skeptical about that), but have gone to far extremes with the social justice agenda including being openly and proudly racist against the majority, and seem to want straight-up open borders to accept every immigrant on earth. People still talk about the hypocrisy of the republicans and fox news, but frankly only Jon Stewart is Jon Stewart and his decision to retire in 2015 resulted in a bunch of people who didn't get the memo about what made him popular, essentially expediting the death of cable TV. Importantly, the left has wholeheartedly supported policies that empower the university educated white collar worker over the blue collar worker, and in fact that has become one of the defining traits of left-wing policies, favoring an educated elite over a broad coalition of the working classes. Corporations as an abstract concept are still treated with suspicion, but corporations that become organs of the "correct" government have become unquestionable, matching 2008 consensus that companies that contribute to social causes are more trustworthy than companies that solely seek profit.
The cultural consensus they base their ideas on are completely out of date in 2024. You can't just keep moving in one direction forever, or even good ideas end up looking insane -- Helping the downtrodden is nice and all, but if a plane is crashing you must affix your own oxygen mask before assisting others. It's been ancient wisdom that all virtues become vices when brought to the greatest extreme. Just as the 2001 consensus after 9/11 changed when people realized the extremes the government had gone to in order to "protect us from the terrorists", the 2008 consensus has been in a slow crash as people realize the extremes government and culture are going to in order to "ensure diversity, inclusivity and equity". I guess the interesting thing will be what the next phase is. I don't think that there's an established cultural consensus yet on what it might be, it'll be something that everyone finds agreement with, and at this moment the stuff on the table isn't going to work. The Republicans are closer to something since they've been putting in the work, but they haven't found anything universal yet.
One other notable thing is that the plan from 2008 economic plan has now been in effect for a very long time and while everyone was talking about how successful it has been, that hasn't been the experiences of the common person. The establishment is largely controlled by the left wing due in part to the powerful cultural consensus, and they talk a lot about how successful the post 2008 economy has been, but the working classes don't feel that. In the past 5 years it's been particularly notable where the establishment keeps talking about how great everything is doing, and the common man who doesn't live in gated communities can see the tent cities they have to drive past and the beggars outside the supermarkets.
One example of how the left supports educated elites over the common people is in their response to COVID. Instead of providing tools to the masses to manage the pandemic on their own, they handed unprecedented powers to government bureaucrats to dictate who can do what when, and they utilized media to effectively stigmatize all dissent. This is in direct contrast to a policy that respects the decision-making powers of the common man, which would provide tools to make their own decisions based on their own situations (such as making mechanisms available for people who felt uncomfortable working during a pandemic so they could stay home and remain supported while people who were less risk averse could continue to work). While it has become a left vs. right divide, it's really strange that it has cut the way it has, with the left wing blindly supporting the global pharmaceutical companies, and the right wing supporting people's right to choose what to do with their bodies and expressing mistrust of the large corporations.
While the left still retains the term "liberal", some of the things that have occurred are far from liberal. The Liberal party and the NDP in Canada worked together to invoke the Emergencies Act (the successor to the war measures act) to seize the bank accounts and property when many working class truck drivers were protesting measures that were going to destroy their livelihoods and disrupt their medical autonomy. Recently it was found by a court to have been unlawful. This attack on working class individuals who organized seems to me to show that the conception of the left as "for the working class" simply doesn't track. Protecting politicians and bureaucrats from having to hear about policies that put people out of work by taking away the workers ability to use money and further threatening their ability to make a living is purely elitist, as my analysis predicts would happen.
One example of how the left just tripled down on old consensus policies, the Democrats ran for years on abortion being "safe, legal, and rare" -- The accepted compromise being that abortions are actually bad and having them be legal for emergencies is so in the times they are required they would at least be safe. In a lot of cases, people left the compromise behind and started to celebrate their abortions as if they were a moral good in and of themselves, and many left-wing jurisdictions in the US pushed for extremely late term abortions, in some laws as late as the moment of birth, with some extremists (who admittedly were not part of the establishment) suggesting the concept of post-birth abortions so as to not privilege the act of birth.
I guess it's important to note that the left-wing does of course have internal factions as well, but part of the quadrupling down is a stricter adherence to and enforcement of orthodoxy. People who don't follow that orthodoxy are finding themselves cast as "racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic nazis" regardless of their actual positions, and so they're right wing conservatives by default. In light of that fact, the different factions have to tread lightly and maintain the orthodoxy.
One example of what I'm talking about would be J. K. Rowling. She is an outspoken feminist and supporter of social programs, and her books have at times been the favorites of many on the left. She spoke out with mild criticism of the trans movement because it conflicts with her feminist views and is now viciously attacked by her former fans on the left.
Another example would be Elon Musk. Say what you will about the man, he literally created the EV market and so has done a major thing in pushing forward environmental awareness and expanding the options for decarbonizing the economy. The fact that he holds some right of center social views and his acquisition of Twitter has resulted in being treated like actual 1945 Hitler.
Contrast that with the right, which has somewhat embraced figures like Tim Pool (a half-Asian skateboard kid who got his big break covering Occupy Wall Street positively and who regularly expresses support for progressive ideas), Dave Rubin (an openly gay married former leftist who has an adopted child), and Ben Shapiro (an orthodox Jew which might not seem like a big deal but a couple generations ago would be extremely questionable for a highly Christian world), all people who are relatively speaking very "impure" from a far right perspective. Even Donald Trump is a convert from the Democrats, and is extremely "impure" from a right-wing perspective being a crappy Christian who has done a lot of blatantly non-Christian things like cheating on his wife and embodying many deadly sins such as pride, lust, and greed.
I'm not saying all this as praise for the conservatives and a total attack on the left. Instead, it's an analysis pointing to the idea that the left as an effective political machine is going to have to adapt to a new cultural consensus because while they do have support at the moment, it's support that's almost custom engineered to collapse. They have lots of support from the boomers for example, and they also have support from felons and dual income no kids and the like, and many of the swing voters they have are just scared away from exactly one boogeyman whose political career is almost over no matter which angle you look at it from. There's going to become a point where they too have to find a new story that appeals to the actual majority as their lopsided coalition collapses and dies of old age.
"aw shit I better really amp up the emotiveness in my writing or AI is going to take my job"
Typically, a laptop has the Wi-Fi antenna located in the screen, often on the top of the screen.
It's actually a really complicated.
So first, you have time distance and shielding being the main thing that says how much exposure you get to a source of any radiation. That's just sort of the basic standard. Typically you're not going to need to be merely as close to a laptop screen as you would have to be to a phone, and every time the distance between you and the radiation and admitting device doubles, you're getting a quarter of the dose.
Second, for the purposes of whether something is actually a meaningful dose of radiation it's very important where the device is in relation to your body. Muscle tissue tends to be much more robust, while internal organs are significantly more sensitive.
Third, the energy of each particle of radiation is very important. A light particle of infrared light is that a considerably lower energy level than far ultraviolet so the former tends not to be remotely ionizing wheread the latter is well known to everyone to cause skin cancer. Even within particles you would consider to be the same, for example a gamma ray produced by Cobalt is considerably higher energy than a gamma ray produced by cesium, and so the same number of particles is actually considered considerably more dangerous to the human body.
Fourth, the characteristics of the particle that you're dealing with are also quite important. Typically when you're talking about radiation we'd be talking about alpha, beta, gamma, x-rays, and neutron radiation. Neutron radiation consists of bare neutrons without any protons to give them a charge. Alpha radiation consists of essentially hydrogen molecules being spit out by a radioactive substance. Beta radiation consists of electrons being shot off by the radioactive substance. Gamma radiation is an electromagnetic wave with an extremely high power. X-rays are extremely similar to gamma radiation except that they are produced by an x-ray machine rather than the decay of a radioactive substance. Each of these behave in fundamentally different ways so you have to deal with them in fundamentally different ways. Alpha radiation will typically be blocked by a sheet of paper, but if it gets inside your body it's extremely harmful. Beta radiation can be blocked by pretty minimal shielding, and will only reach a load a millimeter to into your skin. Gamma radiation can penetrate the entire human body, and that has two consequences: first, it means that most gamma particles won't interact with your body, but once they do rather than just affecting your skin they can affect arbitrary molecules inside your body.
So the characteristics of radio waves matter in a number of different ways. First, the energy of an individual radio wave admitted by a radio transmitter or other electronic device is significantly lower than that of visible light. Typically what's going to happen is it can heat up molecules but it can't really change them. Second, different radio frequencies are going to have different transmission ability through the human body. As a general rule, the lower frequency radio waves tend to go through things without touching them, which is why for example radio stations tend to be in the kilohertz and megawatts range, and since it can blast past most of the obstacles in its way. By contrast, higher frequency radio waves tend to start to interact more with things around them. The new five and six gigahertz Wi-Fi standards really struggle even to make it through walls, which is one of the reasons why the 2.4 gigahertz frequencies are still in use by those standards.
You have experienced something similar to this in your life with respect to sounds. Have you ever been next to a place or a car and they're blasting their music? All of the high frequency sounds, and most of the mid frequency sounds are stopped by the windows of the car, but you can clearly hear the bass.
Just like the comparison with alpha and gamma radiation, it's an interesting trade-off because radio waves that don't penetrate the body at all will end up just heating up the skin, and they'll typically just dump all of their energy right there. Radio waves that can penetrate deeper into the body have a potential to affect things inside of the body, but there's also a greater chance that it just passes right through without depositing the energy anywhere, and also the energy is spread out over a larger physical area.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because something is electromagnetic radiation doesn't mean that it's necessarily dangerous or unwanted. Right now you are probably in the same room as a device designed to put out several Watts worth of electromagnetic radiation, the lights.
It's actually a really complicated.
So first, you have time distance and shielding being the main thing that says how much exposure you get to a source of any radiation. That's just sort of the basic standard. Typically you're not going to need to be merely as close to a laptop screen as you would have to be to a phone, and every time the distance between you and the radiation and admitting device doubles, you're getting a quarter of the dose.
Second, for the purposes of whether something is actually a meaningful dose of radiation it's very important where the device is in relation to your body. Muscle tissue tends to be much more robust, while internal organs are significantly more sensitive.
Third, the energy of each particle of radiation is very important. A light particle of infrared light is that a considerably lower energy level than far ultraviolet so the former tends not to be remotely ionizing wheread the latter is well known to everyone to cause skin cancer. Even within particles you would consider to be the same, for example a gamma ray produced by Cobalt is considerably higher energy than a gamma ray produced by cesium, and so the same number of particles is actually considered considerably more dangerous to the human body.
Fourth, the characteristics of the particle that you're dealing with are also quite important. Typically when you're talking about radiation we'd be talking about alpha, beta, gamma, x-rays, and neutron radiation. Neutron radiation consists of bare neutrons without any protons to give them a charge. Alpha radiation consists of essentially hydrogen molecules being spit out by a radioactive substance. Beta radiation consists of electrons being shot off by the radioactive substance. Gamma radiation is an electromagnetic wave with an extremely high power. X-rays are extremely similar to gamma radiation except that they are produced by an x-ray machine rather than the decay of a radioactive substance. Each of these behave in fundamentally different ways so you have to deal with them in fundamentally different ways. Alpha radiation will typically be blocked by a sheet of paper, but if it gets inside your body it's extremely harmful. Beta radiation can be blocked by pretty minimal shielding, and will only reach a load a millimeter to into your skin. Gamma radiation can penetrate the entire human body, and that has two consequences: first, it means that most gamma particles won't interact with your body, but once they do rather than just affecting your skin they can affect arbitrary molecules inside your body.
So the characteristics of radio waves matter in a number of different ways. First, the energy of an individual radio wave admitted by a radio transmitter or other electronic device is significantly lower than that of visible light. Typically what's going to happen is it can heat up molecules but it can't really change them. Second, different radio frequencies are going to have different transmission ability through the human body. As a general rule, the lower frequency radio waves tend to go through things without touching them, which is why for example radio stations tend to be in the kilohertz and megawatts range, and since it can blast past most of the obstacles in its way. By contrast, higher frequency radio waves tend to start to interact more with things around them. The new five and six gigahertz Wi-Fi standards really struggle even to make it through walls, which is one of the reasons why the 2.4 gigahertz frequencies are still in use by those standards.
You have experienced something similar to this in your life with respect to sounds. Have you ever been next to a place or a car and they're blasting their music? All of the high frequency sounds, and most of the mid frequency sounds are stopped by the windows of the car, but you can clearly hear the bass.
Just like the comparison with alpha and gamma radiation, it's an interesting trade-off because radio waves that don't penetrate the body at all will end up just heating up the skin, and they'll typically just dump all of their energy right there. Radio waves that can penetrate deeper into the body have a potential to affect things inside of the body, but there's also a greater chance that it just passes right through without depositing the energy anywhere, and also the energy is spread out over a larger physical area.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because something is electromagnetic radiation doesn't mean that it's necessarily dangerous or unwanted. Right now you are probably in the same room as a device designed to put out several Watts worth of electromagnetic radiation, the lights.
Nightmare of the druaga. I picked this game up at a pawn shop during my PS2 era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_of_Druaga
The secret motto of this game is "God is a dick". You are the chosen warrior wearing the golden sword and armor that God gave you.
That armor? Random pieces of brass you pick up off the ground provide 10 times the protection. Literally anything. You find a rusty tin can? way better than the golden armor that God gave you. If you try to sell the legendary golden armor that God gave you, it sells for 1GP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_of_Druaga
The secret motto of this game is "God is a dick". You are the chosen warrior wearing the golden sword and armor that God gave you.
That armor? Random pieces of brass you pick up off the ground provide 10 times the protection. Literally anything. You find a rusty tin can? way better than the golden armor that God gave you. If you try to sell the legendary golden armor that God gave you, it sells for 1GP.
What did it look like when the original pioneers found themselves getting swallowed by cities after the age of pioneering ended?