There also has to be an aspect of the price of mozzarella in the post WW2 boom in America or else we wouldn't use such an indulgent amount of cheese as standard.
Even Canadians I know will take home an American pizza because of the ridiculous amount of cheese we put on pizza compared to Canada.
It ultimately comes down to being able to go to a physical location and get coins/paper or not.
I just don't see what the value is of having my account denominated in a way that getting coins/paper is gone. Even if we went to all digital money tomorrow we would probably quickly get a bank that denominates in gold and gives you back paper slips for proof of deposit. Or doesn't even bother with gold and gives paper slips of electronic currency deposits.
We can't even get rid of useless pennies in the US.
The moment the Rubicon is crossed, both the US and China would fall into an all out economic depression and that is exactly why that Rubicon will not be crossed in my lifetime.
This might be an issue at some point if you just graduated high school but for now we have mutually assured economic destruction.
I am far more worried about a debt bomb going off in China than a real bomb.
I have read 1984 twice. Once in 1999 and once in 2021.
The effect of the telescreen was so different from what I remember in 1999. It seemed trite in 2021.
Many aspects of 1984 would be an improvement over what we have now. I also imagine that however bad we think surveillance is now it is much more than what we believe it to be. It would hardly be shocking if voice activation is storing keywords from nearly all in person conversations.
A huge part of youth identity in the US use to be from the music business.
I mean we use to even have goth bars, punk bars. Imagine a bar in 2023 that only caters to people who like industrial or punk music. It sounds absolutely ridiculous.
The music business though was also highly connected to all other art forms in terms of the visual arts, fashion, literature.
With the change in the importance of music it basically devalued nearly all art forms compared to what use to be.
It seems like politics stepped in to fill this void for the youth. It is such a boring and disappointing development.
It is also not good for politics either to have competing factions who at 20 believe what they believe with near religious fervor.
It is because this always comes from the perspective of younger people.
Canada might be better if you are 20 and break your arm.
No one over 50 and worrying about death would rather be in Canada though.
I had family members who had heart attacks at roughly the same time, one in the US and one in Canada. It is unbelievable how slow everything goes in Canada when they were both needing basically the same treatments.
No, previous generations tended to preserve the social contract of not fucking over their grandkids so they could go out to eat more and take more vacations in retirement.
Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.
It is because there are all kinds of cost not being factored in here.
You aren't going to keep the subscription base without spending a ton on marketing.
I am sure many other cost that we aren't thinking about since not in the magazine business.
To me, I am a prime example of someone who use to absolutely love magazines who could not be bothered now. There is no price that will get me to subscribe. I just don't want to be sent paper in the mail.
Your point about the doomsday AI cultists is nonsense.
The doomsday AI cultists didn't come up with any of these ideas. The Matrix was a hugely popular movie in 1999.
chatGPT doesn't make the person who has believed since 1999 that AI is going to turn us all into Duracell batteries more correct. It is the same basic thought with with paper clips replacing batteries.
It is a stupid argument too because it devalues their own position.
I listened to about 6 hours of Marc Andreessen on this topic this weekend and he just smashes all the doomer arguments.
Even in the context of nukes he made a great point that the invention of nukes most likely caused WW3 to not happen. An all out, devastating war between the US and Soviets over Europe that was only averted and transformed to the cold war because of MAD. I have been thinking since then how nukes probably caused my father to not fight in WW3. Who knows how many of us reading this would never have existed if nukes hadn't been invented. You can't make the argument 'the Manhattan project, we blow the planet up, the end".
He also makes the point that you can't be worried about a super intelligence that is super intelligent in every way besides being so dumb that it turns everyone into paper clips. You can't have it both ways.
I have been walking 90 minutes a day for a month and feel amazing. I just realized that with remote work, 30-60 minutes a day is just not enough activity.
Of course, we can't realistically go back to the paleolithic but there is a sense that you can't afford to not get a baseline of physical activity in.
No one is more productive being out of shape. You don't get less stressed from being less physically capable.
If a person can't find time in a day for enough physical activity but they are reading this then maybe they are making a poor trade off with their time.