Hacker News Reader

Comment by airhead969 | Hacker News Reader

You're either a bloody liar, delusional, naïve, or don't have functioning eyes.

- Famine in Yemen. Ongoing.

- Famine in South Sudan. Ongoing.

- Two years of drought in certain countries would push the world into global famine. Climate change weather patterns like Oregon/Canada and the ongoing mega drought in the US west and SW are just previews.

- Millions and millions of homeless in America. I can see the camps and tents in every major city.

- Standard of living decreasing. Real wages declining.

- Mass shootings every day.

- More prisoners per capita than any other country.

- Doing absolutely nothing effective about climate change... which is going to kill us, most species, and the planet.

- The threat of global nuclear war over Taiwan is very, very real.

- Healthcare costs soaring, life expectancies plummeting.

- There is no democracy, it's a plutocracy. The very rich own the majority of Western countries outright.

View on HN

Two comments stood out to me in browsing as needlessly rude and angsty, and it turns out they were both yours. Are you commenting for effect or just to vent?

What do you have to add of value? You take and make things too personally. Look in the mirror.

Well it’s still better than it has ever been in the history of humanity:

- While famines are still a thing, the number of deaths due to hunger has fallen considerably since the start of the 20th century.

- The real median household income in the US has been consistently increasing in the past several decades. While growing inequality is a huge problem most people in the world still have a much higher QOL than their predecessors.

- While there was a spike in homicides in 2020, the homicide rate in the US is lower than it has ever been since the early 60’s (obviously it’s still huge compared to all other developed countries).

- Climate change obviously is going to have a huge effect, however claiming that it’s going is destroy all life on earth is delusional.. In any case most natural ecosystems have already been destroyed or permanently altered by humans, in the past few thousands of years anyway, so there isn’t that much left for climate change to “kill” besides humans (whom I’m sure will manage to adapt to a couple percent rise in avg. temperature, even though it’s likely it will cost several millions of lives).

- There is zero incentive for either US or China to start a nuclear war over Taiwan (or anything else for that matter) so I’d say the threat of a nuclear war is pretty low.

- Life expentancy has been increasing prior to 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it won’t rebound to the previous level soon and continue growing in the future. Healthcare related costs are likely to continue increasing due to ageing societies and higher R&D costs (as technologies become more complex). I don’t see this as huge problem, though, as long as it’s outweotghted by increasing productivity in other sectors. Ensuring universal access to high quality healthcare is a political problem that needs to be solved but even a market based system will likely result in better outcomes for the majority of the population.

Your first sentence contains the kind of abusive language which has no place on this platform. Don't do that here.

The famine in Yemen and Sudan is a result of logistic breakdown when the war etc. makes it very expensive to transport food.

US produces enough food to feed like 2-3 billions people. It is just the vast majority of it goes to feed animals to get cheap meat. So even with agricultural output drop like 50% the will be no famine in US. The meat will be much more expensive, but no calories shortage.

You should read more history books.

We could also resolve every problem you listed and then get nailed by a meteor and have a total extinction of all life of earth. 100% possible.

False equivalency. You should read more books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com