Democracy is already dead. As in who spends more or buys more Ads wins elections. For decades now.
Trump and the Brexit vote broke the traditional media-advertising complex but that got fixed fast.
Compare the revenues of the MIL complex to the rest of the options available on the Fortune 500. People dont realize how big the gap has grown between what nation states can afford and what transnational corps are raking in. Its a no brainer where the best and the brightest end up working.
But the good Greeks did us a great service by shpwing us they couldnt afford those cars without taking loans from German banks. And by not being able to repay those loans, proved what a fucking house of cards the whole story about being a 'power house' is.
I guess that's a reference to the Greek government-debt crisis of 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#G... "Critics have also accused the German government of hypocrisy; of pursuing its own national interests via an unwillingness to adjust fiscal policy in a way that would help resolve the eurozone crisis; of using the ECB to serve their country's national interests; and have criticised the nature of the austerity and debt-relief programme Greece has followed as part of the conditions attached to its bailouts."
Not really. Read Pareto's Circulation of the Elites.
The mistake is assuming all those who have some amout of power all have the same agenda.
Such a state is never possible purely because people's personalities, needs, values, environment exist in a wide spectrum. Littlefingers and kissengers loose something everytime they win.
Its like a virus cant kill the host without killing itself.
Reminds me. I saw a bizarre fungus growing on an old Airport audio speaker left in storage. The speaker was a 5 foot high metallic tower. And this 4 inch high alien looking thing was growing on it. It had attached itself via a beautiful root like system of tenticles to the metal surface. Some one tried to kick it off and it was so tightly fused to the metal it broke the stem but the root system stayed fused. So they then scraped it off with like a chisel and there was a hole in the metal underneath. It looked like it was eating the metal. These were ancient speakers so that metalic frame was quite thick and heavy and it was really freaky to see how it had been sort of dissolved away. That storage unit hadnt been opened in 2 months. So the growth couldnt have been very old either. Left us all wondering what things would have looked like if no one had bothered to open the unit.
It might be some form of metal corrosion. The change from metal to metal oxide can be accompanied by an increase in volume which can lead to some very fanciful structures.
I have seen Aluminum turn into what looks like phyllo dough when near a coastline, exposed to salt air. The edge of a 1/2 inch thick sheet was fanned out, split and flaking away.
Are you sure that wasn't iron/steel? I've seen long term degradation of the sort you describe with those, but IME aluminum tends to get pitted and chalky.
A few years back I was helping clear out my parents’ garage, as they were having plumbing issues and needed a path cleared for the plumber. Eventually I come across a strange looking box with some weird brown tubes poking out of it. I look up at the ceiling, and see the waste pipe from a toilet. There was not only a hole in the ceiling, but a huge hole in the top of the waste pipe.
Turns out that strange box was full of newspapers that had had raw sewage dripping onto it for who knows how long. Those “brown tubes” were actually some sort of fungus, and when I looked closer, it was quite literally spewing out spores. It looked like steam.
I was horrified at the idea of this fungus surviving on nothing but sewage and ran to grab a respirator before rushing the thing into a compost bin. Wish I’d taken a photo, but my mind was elsewhere at the time.
Scary. Its really fascinating how they have such capacity to spread into every nook they can find. We spent a lot of time wondering how such an exotic looking thing, showed up in basically an urban closed off area (barely any windows) where you rarely see any kind of fungus growing. Must be producing a ton of spores.
My best guess is that the hole was there before the mushroom grew. It is hard to find a biological species that need so much iron in their metabolism to the point it evolved something that can dissolve pure metal in a matter of 1-2 months. Irons are often used in enzymes and usually the ratio is around a few iron atoms bounded in a structure of thousands or tens of thousands of carbons and hydrogen atoms. To use so much iron implied that mushroom is literally chock full of special enzymes and I doubt it actually is.
More likely, something broke a hole there and the mushroom grew on it and capitalized on the broken edges to scavenge some extra irons but it did not punch that hole by itself.
I dont know what metal that was but there was a grey coat of paint on it. Sometimes they coat the metal to prevent rusting or whatever, but the rusting happens under the coating anyway. So maybe possible the underlying metal was rusting and the fungus was feasting on the coating. It was quite a humid space.
Target EU govt and mil complex jobs. They have older stacks, favor experience and have more funds these days thanks to the war. Plus much less stress than in private sector.
You must not be very familiar with the way those are clustered in a few specific countries and the extraordinarily long and bureaucratic recruiting times.
Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid Modernity to Liquid Modernity?
With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.
The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing.
The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.
It doesn't have to be churches, local school with parents association making events, libraries that have spaces for the kids to hangout with others and work on projects together, open sports areas, parks and small festivities, farmers market that have a set periodicity. But it has to have one space where people can start to meet each other so they can talk and desire more things so they can build these other spaces or have some unified way to demand it from their local mayor.
Strictly true, but if people aren't strongly compelled to show up somewhere, they aren't apt to. Historically, the "fear of God" ensured that people went to church, effectively forcing them to gather, meet each other, so on and so forth.
The only thing I see that comes close to that these days is youth sports leagues, where parents have a fear of failing their children if not heavily involved in such activities. While this does seem to establish some kind of community amongst parents of children of similar ages, it does not seem to expand out into parents with children of dissimilar ages even within the same sport, let alone an even larger community. Which is not terribly surprising as there is not much reason for someone unrelated to a participating child to show up.
I might even go as far as to say that because parents get stuck in those narrowly isolated communities, it contributes a fracturing to any larger community that might have otherwise been able to form. It is difficult to have a general community of only 20-somethings and the elderly with little in-between.
What I want to know is why people will get up on the internet and say something counterfactual like people are moving more today than in the past, a hypothesis without a shred of supporting evidence. All measures of mobility are headed down, whether intercity moves or job changes. American mobility has hit a new record low every year this century, accelerating a trend that has been in decline since the end of the War.
An amusing thing about this is my reaction to reading this piece was that community was enabled in my own youth (which took place in the 80s) by something likely to be even more unpopular on Hacker News than church: sports. My dad was involved in adult softball leagues and many of my earliest friends were the kids of his teammates. We all went to tournaments together and played with each other while the adults played their softball. I was also involved in little league and youth basketball and made friends that way and spent a ton of time at the park with other kids playing baseball and basketball even outside of any kind of league. The neighborhood gathered together in one house even under the guise of television, which united us much more than it divided us, typically to do things like watch Lakers and Dodgers playoff games or major boxing matches that were only on pay-per-view, presumably because households didn't all want to have to pay separately.
Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine what could possibly create a community in my neighborhood today. Half the properties here are AirBNB party houses. The average tenure of a neighbor who actually lives in their own property feels like maybe three years. Hard to make any kind of lasting connections, with or without a church.
Not only that, the rate of change is increasing or speeding up. Brains are not really capable of handling constant change.
There is much more to learn. There are more unknowns. And there is much more competition.
If you take competitive sports and look at size of support stuff its ridiculous these days compared to 20 years back. There is coach, physio, shrink, nutritionist, biz manager, social media manager etc
So now extrapolate and imagine what things will look like 10 years or 20 years from now on the that trend line. Its just not sustainable.
People have to think about rate of change in the environment that surrounds us.
Everything feels like that all the time. And yet we constantly find
ourselves 10 years down the line, with years of exponential growth
piled on top, and some post-Malthusian explanation of how "actually it
is sustainable if we just keep pushing through and believe in
progress".
I'm not saying this or that _is_ sustainable, just that the point
people declare it "unsustainable" is often only the beginning. It's a
(mis)perception David Goggins speaks of a lot - about just how much
deeper an organism can dig in crisis, or how low our pain/risk
thresholds are set. Maybe we unconsciously factor that in.
Personally I think that's reckless and we are better heeding warning
signs. But if we'd done that in 1970 climate change wouldn't be a
thing, right.
Well, so far we have proof of unsustainability: we've already raised the extinction rate of species hundreds of times the background rate. So, already unsustainable.
Very useful comment: the rate of change is just as important as the nature of the change. Hence why the change through evolution in the biosphere is generally much more stable that the change brought upon us by technological innovation.
