I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
RIMR says:
> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States
It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:
1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.
2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)
3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)
4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.
So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.
It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.
I'm (genuinely) curious as to what your idea of a less dangerous theology would be. I'm an atheist, but I find the inherent dignity of humans as beings made in the image of God to be one of the more appealing aspects of the Abrahamic faiths.
Some of the greatest horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries were committed by people who refuted that theology and replaced it with Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.
If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.
There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.
So the 538 election coverage that year was:
- Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't)
- Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)
(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)
Touche, I was thinking of it more as 100 miles in length, not 100 miles in width running all the way down the coast, but your interpretation seems more correct.
IDK if pretty much everyone can exclude Florida and Texas, the second and third most populated states. (Or I suppose you could be excluding the Northeast Corridor instead of Florida)
> I make it a point to have 5-10 minute ad-hoc conversations with my directs 1-2 times a week, feels a lot more natural than a scheduled 1-on-1.
I prefer the exact opposite, especially when working remote.
When I was a manager, I saved non-urgent topics for a weekly 1-1 instead of pestering busy people with "Quick chat?" or "Do you have a minute?" messages. I wish others would do the same.
That's the whole point. When people hear "the middle class is shrinking" they intuitively believe people are slipping down a rung and joining the ranks of the working poor. The data doesn't back that up. The middle class is shrinking, but more people are moving up a rung than falling down one.
Which isn't to say that you're wrong about wealth inequality increasing. The share of wealth controlled by the ultra wealthy IS increasing, but the specifics of how that is playing out are nuanced and, at times, counter-intuitive.
The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.
This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).
The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
TBH, it seemed such an obvious point you're making that I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars, but from the (very little) digging that I did, it looks like that's not the case.
I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.
There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.
Hard to believe that people who suffered the atrocities of the first half of the 20th Century were tremendously optimistic about the future, yet birthrates were MUCH higher across the world.
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates.
- "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
The men and women who protested with MLK Jr. risked physical harm and death. Many of them paid the ultimate price. So it's hard to argue they didn't have much to lose.
I do take your point, though. Civil disobedience and a digital trail of "undesirable" behavior isn't compatible with a high-earning life in the corporate world.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)