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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps not entire civilization collapse, pending nuclear arsenals unleashed, but I think we are edging ever closer to massive social upheaval, what shape of this I am unsure about. To quote an adjacent article that was mentioned in this one: How Western Civilization Could Collapse

> Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day[0][1]

This is from 2017. This has gotten, in my view, much worse and is not continuing to alleviate itself, and I believe climate change is only making this worse over the next 5-10 years as wealthier nations and their wealthiest citizens try to insulate themselves further from its effects at the expense or perceived expense of the poor. I don’t think the current political climate is going to prove its sustainable.

Couple that with serious economic pressures as in part, a result of globalization and coming shortages and issues of natural resources and it’s a recipe for real disaster

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170418-how-western-civi...

[1]: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/3/4/470/2669331/Modelin...

View on HN

The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars.

But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West.

Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.

> The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago

This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table.

Also:

We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26...

Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...

Etc.

If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.

People are better off, but not our arable land, the fish in our oceans, the soil we grow our crops in, the animals in our forest, the forest themselves, etc...

We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.

Production per acre of farmland has increased massively and is still increasing. The size of forests in developed countries has increased substantially.

At the same time the rate of population growth has decreased and is projected to go negative within a few decades.

Sure, lots of things are still getting worse, but "getting worse more slowly" is progress. No reason to get complacent but in my opinion doom sayers do more harm than good by promulgating the nihilistic philosophy that we're all doomed anyways, so fighting our problems doesn't do any good.

Forest cover has increased after we cut much of it down. We've replaced much of it with monoculture timber that gets one maybe two growth cycle before the soil is depleted.

Production of food has increased along with our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and the other products needed to do so. Topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate.

I don't think a person sounding the alarm that we'll have depleted our fish stocks within 25 years, or are losing an incredible amount of topsoil each year, or are heading for dramatic climate changes that will cause an increase in disasters is a doomsayer. They're just living according to what every scientific report says. Being optimistic won't change a disruption in food supply or mass migration due to shifting weather patterns.

Reduction of global child mortality from near 50% to below 4% is not "talking about how much better the interior is" ...

The past was an ongoing disaster worse than any westerner can imagine.

But isn't all this progress bought with the destruction of our environment? It isn't sustainable at all and we are basically betting we can switch to a sustainable model before everything starts breaking down.

Climate change is no good, and we have to do better, but the past was even worse.

Try to imagine near 50% child mortality on a global scale in 1800.

That's the past. Today even the poorest regions in Africa have "only" ~15% child mortality.

The better things will not remain so for long. Many of the industry and technical progress came at a huge cost. It's the future generation who will bear it. Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario.

https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU

Well, many things in the environment are a lot worse now than 100 years ago, but some things are better. While there was much less industrial production, it was more polluting per output. Waste water cleaning, industrial process cleaning or in general taking care of garbage has improved a lot in the last sixty years in developed countries.

Why per output? To make it look better? Total is worse, more co2, more pollution, more oil spill in oceans, plastic in oceans even inside animals etc. It's better just for a selfish species.

Well, in many places, since population and consumption per capita has plateaued, total pollution has reduced a lot. Some local anecdotes follow.

Waste water cleaning plants were built, so human excrement wasn't dumped to the sea anymore. At some point district heating replaced coal and wood burned in houses. Double and triple glazing arrived. The metro started operating in the eighties, replacing a lot of buses. Lead gasoline was banned in the nineties as well. Cars got electronic ignition, fuel injection and catalytic converters. Diesel engines started having tightening regulations every few years. Waste water treatment was upgraded to even remove nitrogen. New bicycle highways were made, the metro is being extended, tram lines are being built, and just a few weeks ago many diesel bus lines were replaced by Chinese electric ones.

Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. But not everything has gotten worse.

Some things are better only for humans. For every other species it's worse. The whole ecosystem is worse than ever. The better things will also become useless in few dacade as the climate is tracking the worst case scenario of the IPCC report.

The wastewater cleaning is certainly better for marine life.

That's only one thing, overall there are way too much oil leaks and plastic in oceans, so it's silly to say things are better. Then there are things that are hidden like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-environmental-disast...

and https://v.redd.it/ayd4itr1kqg71

Marine life halved in few decades https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/marine-wil...

Yeah, of course. But some areas in the sea, like close to the city where I live, are in much better shape than they were before I was born. There's plenty of data on that.

The sea in total is not doing great, because of agricultural emissions.

Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life.

You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.

What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive.

It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms.

Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.

it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

It frankly still is a stretch to claim that living conditions would revert to even just 1950s levels if we reduced emissions to a sustainable level. Again, most of those improvements have been in real terms. We are simply more productive.

the analogy of course assumes that there are a bunch of different problems that will come to the family when the cops, the IRS, the electric company, and their bank all come to talk to them at once.

Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around...

it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving!

on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.

Do we have a good sense of how much of that increase in productivity can be sustained in a carbon neutral fashion?

The problem is not that we could not revert to even just 1950 levels.

The problem is that it's advantageous for everyone to continue to externalize the costs and let everyone else pay the bill[0].

Since everyone is doing the externalizing, no one is paying the bill. Since no one is paying the bill, the resource will be exhausted sooner or later.

The resource in question is the resilience of our own biological life support system; we're wrecking it, both by by our predatory over exploitation and by pollution. We're destroying the foundations of our own survival.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

is it? I think it's entirely possible that our civilisation would completely collapse.

I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present.

I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"

GP is objectively correct. 200 years ago, ~95% of humans lived in extreme poverty. 100 years ago it was ~85%. Today only ~10% live in extreme poverty, and the number continues to fall.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

That doesn't change that fact that the ground is getting closer and closer and we're still accelerating.

We're burning the planet.

This is because we've more efficiently exploited the poorest people on Earth. As we run out of human resources to extract, surely something will change. Perhaps we'll reach an equilibrium, at least until jobs start to become automated by Google machine learning and Boston Robotics drones.

When people say "the world is better today", they mean only humans right? Because for all other species it's worse. Humans are pretty selfish to say world is better.

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc).

E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future.

And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies).

>Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me.

Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.

> in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about

I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.

Well, CO2 in the atmosphere (and amount of carbon above ground in general, a lot has been brought up from below in the last 100 years) and plastic pollution come to mind. Ocean pollution. Bio-diversity. Less or no weapons of mass destructions. No climate change yet, e.g. in the western US water from rivers was less of an issue and could be distributed more freely.

There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part.

I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.

Hugely more pollution (increased exponentially from 100 years ago as shown in graphs).

Higher temperatures (climate change, not the same as pollution).

Worsening infrastructure (the US, for example, is turning into a developing world country in many areas) as opposed to the era of great infrastructure projects, from scryscrappers and railways to the interstate system .

Lower/flattening productivity increases (as opposed to continuous productivity booms 100 years ago).

Lower/flattening invention rate (the low hanging fruits ended circa 1950-60).

More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).

Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).

Hugely increased inequality.

Crumbling pension systems (as opposed to pension systems being developed 100 years ago).

There are also a few tricks such "we're getting better" treatises use:

1) use the progress in countries starting from a very low bar to offset regressions in more developed countries (and since the third world countries have higher population, use an average state to shove it to the face of doubters who see their own lives and those of their countries/societies get worse and worse). This is kind of like averging Jeff Bezos' and mine wealth (kinda: what it does it says since e.g. 1 billion people went from $1/day to $2/day this is a huge 200% increase, who cares is another billion went from $100/day to $80/day and falling...).

2) take official measurements (made to make states and organizations affecting change look good) as the ground truth

3) when convenient, compare with say a century back, not 30 and 40 years back (e.g. when people didn't even have the notion of a pension, not when you expected and got one).

4) ignore any qualitative metric.

> - Hugely more pollution (increased exponentially from 100 years ago as shown in graphs). - Higher temperatures (climate change, not the same as pollution).

Fair enough

> Worsening infrastructure

If you're claiming that infrastructure 100 years ago was of lesser quality than today, you're living in an alternate reality.

> Lower/flattening productivity increases

False when increases taken in real terms: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RTFPNAUSA632NRUG It's pretty much a line as straight up as it gets.

> Lower/flattening invention rate

As in? Science is working worse now?

> More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).

That's hard to judge. Yes, modern states have more potential for surveillance, but they arguably can get away with less abuse than they used to.

> Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).

Very nice how you take the first derivative.

> Hugely increased inequality.

As much as people love talking about it, 'inequality' is a vague term. Are we talking income or wealth? Worldwide, US or Europe?

Worldwide, inequality has dramatically decreased (both income and wealth). Income inequality in the US is slightly higher than post war, but marginally so. The charts they show you don't have the origin at zero, that's all.

> Crumbling pension systems

In countries that have nationalized pension systems (which aren't actually a bad thing imo), pensions are generally pay-as-you-go. If pension systems are not sustainable it's simply because politicians love using them as the 21st century grain dole: they aren't crumbling for any fundamental reason other than the political unwillingness to do the honest thing and cut benefits.

> 1) use the... > 2) take... > 3) when...

I have no axe to grind and absolutely nothing to defend. If 'those treaties' do that, they are wrong. I like talking about concrete, factual statements though, "our society is getting worse" is something that's been said for literally millennia.

> ignore any qualitative metric.

Can you point out some qualitative metric that isn't just "life was better X years ago because I was X years younger?" Because let's be honest, that's what most "qualitative metrics" boil down to. As imperfect as it might be, data is at least an honest attempt to understand the world.

Not a direct answer to your question (also 1921 isn't exactly a local optimum considering it's just after the end of WW1 and on the precipice of the Great Depression) but if you take away a "primitive" tribal community's land, charge them for living in it and pay them a starvation wage to work the land for you, you've increased their economical wellbeing by almost every metric.

Additionally the metrics being called out are things like the World Bank's poverty statistics, which applies fairly arbitrary definitions of income-based poverty that in many cases would identify people otherwise labelled "food insecure" as "not in poverty". The definitions are also applied globally and by their nature adjusted over time, which can skew the results. And even if all of these limitations are ignored most of the "improvements" are localized in China.

I'm not going to defend primitivism because I think the problem today is mostly a matter of distribution and resource inefficiency but for a metric that has gotten worse over time (though again not in the 100 year view for obvious reasons) consider leisure time. Hunter-gatherer societies spent considerably less time on sustaining themselves than the 40+ hours per week the average modern human spends working a job, doing household chores and shopping.

The problem is that a lot of the ills don't neatly fit into metrics and even when you try to do so, you have to rely on self-reporting for a lot of them. For example for most workers industrialization massively increased alienation from their work, remote work (but also on the opposite end the need to relocate for career advancement) has drastically increased social isolation, enclosure and the increasing commodification of leisure activity also have take their toll, and social media has increased the spread of disinformation, replaced social interaction with public performance and has been a massive cause of social anxieties.

And of course the thing is that a lot of the problems we have can't just be fixed by a clever improvement because their causes are intrinsic to the system. You can try to reduce overproduction and improve recycling but the best consumer action to help the environment is not to consume and the best industrial action to help the environment is not to produce. But considering how much of our economy hinges on demands people didn't know they had for things they didn't know they need (not just production but also sales, advertising, financing, sales and advertising for the financing, debt collection, sales and advertising for the debt collection to the companies doing the financing, insurance for the companies doing the financing, sales and advertising for the companies doing the insurance, and so on) that just translates into "killing jobs" and "ruining the economy".

The quote you inlined strikes me as total nonsense.

First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here.

Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology.

Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.

No, the crash will come from a total systemic collapse, caused by the ecosystem destruction we are wrecking.

Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak.

Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef.

This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations.

And so forth.

> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass

This is clearly an absurd claim. Did you mean to qualify this somehow, like “non-livestock mammalian biomass”? That would still be incorrect, but at least might not be off by orders of magnitude.

> Water is beginning to get critically scarce

Not really. Even desalination is cheap enough at this point (on the order of 1kL/$, last I checked) that we’d be fine with modest cost increases.

> But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore

What exactly are you predicting here? This sounds very apocalyptic but doesn’t match any plausible model I’m aware of for ecological failure modes.

> Did you mean to qualify this somehow, like “non-livestock mammalian biomass”? That would still be incorrect, but at least might not be off by orders of magnitude.

Not necessary. The loss in biomass in fish[0][1] and insects[2][3] and tropical rainforests[4] can account for that. Birds have also taken a deep dive[6]. The most visible I think it is for fish. There alone we've lost an approximate 80% since the 1950ies. Imagine that. 80% of fish biomass, just gone. Similar for insects. German nature reserves have seen a decline of insect population by 75%. Really; non-livestock mammalian biomass is the least of our problems.

> Not really. Even desalination is cheap enough at this point (on the order of 1kL/$, last I checked) that we’d be fine with modest cost increases.

That only covers populations near bodies of water. Ironically these are the most vulnerable to climate change and threatened by the rising sea level. And while it might be possible to build and maintain the desalination infrastructure for the 9M people in Israel, good look trying the same thing in countries like India[8] or Balgladesh[8a]?

Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012[9].

A quarter of the world's population faces severe water shortage[10]. Are you going to provide water to 3 Billion people using desalination plants? In many of these places, even water treatment plants are too expensive to operate. What are you going to power these plants with? Coal? We don't even have a plan to migrate the already existing energy infrastructure to renewables.

> What exactly are you predicting here? This sounds very apocalyptic but doesn’t match any plausible model I’m aware of for ecological failure modes

Here's a helpful link[11].

The norther African coast of the Mediterranean used to be woodland. The continued depletion and over exploitation of the has led to it being the arid region it is today [12]. Now imagine that, but on a global scale. Because the last 250 years have been harsh for our ecosystem and it's now as threadbare as it can be. Ecosystem fragmentation is already a dire issue. The strings in the web are breaking, one by one [13].

[0] https://www.aaas.org/news/researcher-reports-stunning-losses...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266684781_A_century...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326657472_Loss_of_b...

[5] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210225082525.h...

[6] https://abcbirds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Bird-Decline...

[7] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309200743_Defaunati...

[8] https://qz.com/india/1114843/chinas-grand-plan-for-the-brahm...

[8a] https://undark.org/2021/08/04/the-water-crisis-in-climate-vu...

[9] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_202...

[10] https://news.trust.org/item/20200902202142-ku0o2

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_collapse

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman...

[13] https://theecologist.org/2012/feb/27/humanity-has-already-ha...

“Fish and insect population” != “biomass”

No non-trivial total biomass change occurs on scales shorter than thousands of years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)

"The biomass is the mass of living biological organisms in a given area or ecosystem at a given time."

Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass.

They’re not the total biomass. Are you intentionally clowning me here? Just because a couple species types have declined by X%, the total global biomass has not declined by that much.

This paper tries to measure the thing you claimed as 75% over the last hundred or so years as actually being around 45% over the last 5,000 years. http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs61... I found this on the greenpeace website, so if anything this is probably a gross overestimate.

> Are you intentionally clowning me here?

Let's assume good faith on both sides, otherwise this discussion will go nowhere. Agreed?

> They’re not the total biomass

No, they're not. I never claimed that. My claim was that

>> Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass.

Anyway. That out of the way, let's have a look at

> Just because a couple species types have declined by X%,

It's not a couple of species. It's whole ecosystems that are being emptied. The Zoological Society of London report [0] monitors 4392 vertebrate species. There's a consistent and dramatic reduction.

> This paper tries to measure the thing you claimed

Thanks for the research and for taking it serious enough to do some data hunting. I'll happily dig into the report. Since it's from 2011, I wonder if there's an updated version that includes more recent data.

I honestly don't have a better source that aggregates the loss globally over all species. I would be interested in more exact numbers. (Ask HN?!)

>>>> but at least might not be off by orders of magnitude.

I think we have established that the 75% is not "off by orders of magnitude". Could it be 60% reduction? Or 50%? Sure. Absent more data this could be possible, certainly. Given that it's only been a few decades, I don't think that matter too much - it's devastating in any case.

But I think we can agree that it's definitively above 7.5% or 0.75%. I honestly think that 75% is not too far off.

[0] https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/LPR%202020%20Full%20...

> Let's assume good faith on both sides… I never claimed that.

It’s hard to assume good faith when you keep saying nonsense and then acting like you didn’t. You said:

> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity.

That’s obviously untrue, so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?

> I think we have established that the 75% is not "off by orders of magnitude". Could it be 60% reduction? Or 50%? Sure.

Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?

Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.

>> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity.

> That’s obviously untrue,

I've provided quite a bit of material for your research. Here are some highlights:

- birds: reduced by 29% (north america) since 1970

- birds: reduced by 20% (europe) since 1980

- ocean fishes: 80% lost in the last 100 years (global)

- insects: 82% lost in the last 27 years (Europe)

- freshwater fishes: 80% lost since 1970

- non-livestock mammals: 78% lost since 1960

I freely admit that the 75% since 1950 number is a ballpark guess. Given the data I refer to above, I reckon it's not far off. Certainly not orders of magnitude and it is certainly not "obviously untrue". We can debate if we lost 75% or 65% or 55%, but given the consequences in any case it doesn't really matter[0].

> so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?

What? No. I'm talking about global, total biomass. Every species, every habitat. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. (Why would you think that I was talking only about fish? Are you trolling me?)

With regards to fish I wrote

> The most visible I think it is for fish. There alone we've lost an approximate 80% since the 1950ies.

To rephrase; the decline of fish is easily observed by the ever diminishing returns of fishery fleets and there's a lot of data about development of the fish population.

> Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?

That's one paper that makes some assumptions and comes up with a model. I have to check it in detail and it looks interesting. But that does not in any way refute the data in the papers I already provided or the very comprehensive report by ZSL[1]. This is a very thorough study that compiles data for 21,000 populations of animals from 4392 species.

To quote: "The population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have seen an alarming average drop of 68% since 1970.

> Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.

I'm sorry if you got that impression, because it's not my intention. I thought that I'd made a good case by quoting the research and various papers. I'm not sure why you say that this is "totally whack"; everything is sourced pretty well.

[0] We're staring into the abyss and the abyss is winking back.

[1] https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/LPR%202020%20Full%20...

If the ecosystem and climate collapsed, us rich folk could live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power, eat food grown in green houses and drink desalinated water.

It would be a truly miserable experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of civilization.

The wars started by those who no longer can afford food might end civilization, but that's not assured either.

> If the ecosystem and climate collapsed, us rich folk could live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power, eat food grown in green houses and drink desalinated water.

Eh, no. We don't have the infrastructure to live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power. Both solar and nuclear only can power a fraction of houses. And if you need additional power to grow food that fraction gets ever smaller.

For both nuclear and a solar power you need an extensive, global infrastructure that will require raw materials (nuclear; fuel, solar; finished products) from all over the world. Good luck trying to acquire enough uranium from all over the world when all is going to shits. Who do you think exactly is going to do the extraction?

So, I guess we'll all die, rich and poor.

This country is working on a $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill. New Orleans was just saved by a massive infrastructure program to build levees. We'll build most of the required infrastructure. Probably not enough of it, and we'll spend too much for it, but most Americans will be "fine". (Insert "this is fine" meme picture here)

Uranium is easy. That comes from Northern Canada.

The budget - and I think you are talking about the budget reconciliation - includes a lot of stuff besides infrastructure. It's the budget after all.[0]

Well... one half of the country is working on such a budget. The other half is doing everything to sabotage that budget, get back control of the senate and the house and spend that $3.5 trillion on a tax bill for the super-wealthy. You know, like the last time they did that [1].

Bit even if the infrastructure got $3.5 trillion; that isn't enough to even fully repair the existing infrastructure[2]. The last time the ASCE released an infrastrucutre report, fixing the infrastructure would cost about $4.8 trillion.

That's just to fix the existing infrastructure. That money isn't going to build new nuclear reactors. By the way; how many nuclear reactors are currently being built in the US?

... Two... Two reactors with each a bit more that 1TWh. The latest one to come operational one was the Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2, which began operation in June 2016. Before that Watts Bar Unit 1 in 1996. So, two new one ones in operation in 25 years. Two new ones being built.

How many more do you think we would need?

Well, we don't just have to cover the existing energy needs. Since it's getting hotter (I'm taking +1.5°C by 2050 as granted, since we're already at +1.25) we're going to need a bit more - but hey! - let's discount that. Let's say for living we don't need more energy, as generous as that is. Unfortunately you also want to grow food using electricity. And desalinate water. But let's also discount that. Let's discount all that and go with our current energy needs, for the sake of argument.

We currently have 100 reactors with each about 1TWh. That covers about 20% of US energy needs. Let's say we can get the other renewables also up to 20%. That would still leave us with about 600 new reactors to be built. By about 2060.

Do you honestly thing that this country has the political will to build 600 nuclear reactors over the span of forty years? This country cannot muster the political will to phase out coal or gas. This country cannot even muster the political will to stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

Sorry, my friend. I'm afraid that brute-forcing technology will save none of us. It might play a part in saving us, but unless we have a radical rethink about our current economic structure and incentives[3], this is just hot air.

[0] https://wusf.org/heres-whats-in-the-democrats-3-5-trillion-b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017

[2] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/

[3] And we know that this isn't going to happen. See [1]

Not a word about solar (or wind) in your rant. Solar is dirt cheap, and being built at a quickly accelerating rate.

You'll say "but storage". However, storage is getting cheaper even faster than solar/wind production is, and storage is not necessary for its use in food production.

> your rant.

Uff! I certainly didn't write it as a rant. But fine, I'll take that. But my intentions are good. I just want to make it clear to all of you that we face calamity and destruction and that there's no magical technofix that will save us. We will have to completely overhaul our socialeconomical value and incentive structures. Fat chance of that happening. (Prove me wrong! Do it!! Save mankind!)

> Not a word about solar (or wind)

Not a word about my pretty conclusive rebuttal of nuclear power as the technojebus to save mankind! I guess today no one gets what they want.

Hey, sure, we can do a feasibility examination of solar too.

> You'll say "but storage".

Haha, no. Storage is fine. There are pretty nice battery concepts in development. Liquid metal batteries are one crazy idea that I think has promise.

No, the problem lies elsewhere. Let's see: nowadays about 1.5% of energy comes from solar power, both PV and CSP. That's about 100GW (about one nuclear plant) and takes up about 1000 square miles.[0]

Let's say we somehow have the political will to cover a third of our energy needs with solar, somewhere in the ballpark of 2TW. That would cover an area of about 22,000 square miles.

So, to get to only about 33% of solar power by 2050, we'd have to cover 785 square miles with PV or CSP. Every year. For the next 28 years. Every year.

As a metric; in 2020 we've added about 190 square miles (or about 19GW) of solar power. Even if the current growth of solar power installations continues for a few years; we're still ridiculously off target. The bottleneck is installation capability.

The story is different but similar with wind.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

> Two reactors with each a bit more that 1TWh

About 1,100 MW each. Silly me.

The best stats you've ever seen | Hans Rosling

https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w

I do really like that video and the book Factfulness.

However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted.

Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.

At first I really liked Hans Rosling's book. But afterwards I read some very valid criticism [0].

> We see that while per capita income has indeed increased in the global South, the global North has captured the vast majority of new income generated by global growth since 1960. As a result, the income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today.

> In other words, there has been no “catch up”, no “convergence”. On the contrary, what’s happening is divergence, big time.

The same goes for the other topics, including biodiversity.

[0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world

Jason Hickel's criticism is either disingenuous or demonstrates basic innumeracy. The criticism uses absolute differences to "prove" that divergence is increasing.

This does not make sense. If A and B went from earning 30k and 45k respectively to earning 70k and 90k respectively, Hickel would claim this was "divergence" - because the gap between them has risen from 15k to 20k.

But it simply isn't - A is converging with B (the gap has narrowed from 50% to 28.5%). If this trend continued linearly, A's income would surpass that of B within about 3 more periods of such "divergence".

Is income inequality even good measure in the forst place? More and more people of this world are rising out of poverty, and getting education, why specifically does uphieval would occur?

Measure of what?

Income is a proxy for a lot of tings.

While completely understandable and rational, people racing to get out of poverty at the same time as the great climate change catastrophe, feminism (sexes "wars"), all sorts of minority/ perpetual victims/ alternative motivation groups/attention wars -- I don't see how we'll navigate these centrifugal forces and chaos in a wise and beneficial way for the planet and for us on the long term.

No, it’s not a good measure, but it is a useful tool for people to build support for political upheaval that wouldn’t otherwise be justified.

The thing is, it's all relevant. You can't pretend human psychology doesn't exist

Having not watched the video due to crappy mobile (but I've seen some of his videos before), is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video, a "many things are ok, but we have very serious problems here", something else?

> is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video

Yes.

And sadly it isn't happening from what I can tell ; see for instance the latest IPCC report [0].

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

> "things are getting better, stay the course"

This is the overarching theme.

>Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough

What does it mean for the "working population" to "crash"?

In the West and the rest of the world, those with the lowest income have the highest birth rate. So it can't mean a decrease in population due to low birth rate.

In context this means political and economic crash, where the poor / working class lose their shirts in an economic upheaval (of which we’ve had at least two in my lifetime, the 2008 crash and the previous dotcom bubble). Unemployment at high levels etc. think 1930s depression

If we look back further, the situation can be even more dire (like the French or Russian revolutions).

But they don't have better health, education, and life expectancy. So they can't make the rich any richer. And at the same time, they will continue to become poorer.

Why do they need better anything to avoid civilizations collapse? Why do the rich need to get richer to avoid civilizations collapse?

If the status quo was maintained civilization would not be in danger.

There are also these data points [0], that show that the newer generations have fewer and fewer wealth.

[0] https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/143127950480736666...

That graph is misleading (to say the least) because it is not per capita.

The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.

Let me paint the shape of the calamity to come:

Our predatory exploitation of our biological life-support system and the massive reconfiguration of the climatic setup will cause enough disruption so as to lead to a breakdown in global cooperation. The damage wrought by pollution and over-consumption of natural resources will finally lead to a breakdown local ecosystems and to famine. Huge waves of refugees will (rightfully) demand a place to live sheltered from the calamities of climate change and they will be denied. Global commerce will stall and then stop, as refugees from failing states and countries turn to banditry and piracy. This will disrupt global cooperation and lead to regional conflicts that turn will lead to war over resources.

At least that's my best guess.

The sad thing is that we probably all see it coming, but we are in denial of it's reality. At least as a civilization. We're still chasing profit margin where where should gear for a fight for survival.

Classic Greek tragedy!

> crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough,

This is an absolutely moronic premise to start with. The portion doesn’t matter as long as the purchasing power stays static or is increasing.

The population doesn’t collapse when people are still getting abundant food, shelter, etc regardless of how well the rich are doing. The focus on the income of the rich instead of poverty is a distraction to pull people into a power struggle they otherwise wouldn’t care about.

It’s better to have obscenely wealthy + a high earning middle class than poverty across the board. However, the reframing of everything into income inequality makes the latter sound somehow better.

But an ever growing population isn’t getting shelter (or very poor shelter), and as the climate crisis gets worse (and the wars of the world worsen) I would expect that on the global scale an ever growing population would also go hungry. These people will start migrating to the places that don’t have famines and wars. And if the current border policies persist, these people won’t be welcomed by the government. This means that you will have people rebelling against a government which is denying them food and shelter.

Absolutely. People always forget how population migrations can bring down empires.

What do you expect these climate refugees to do? Die quietly? "Well, we earned it, not being born into wealthy societies. We've got no one else to blame but us"?

Get real. There will be strive and conflict and war, and everyone (lookin' at you, China, USA and Russia) will still be playing the 'Great Game' and try to one-up the other ones, even though survival is at stake.

I'm generally of the opinion that the solutions to climate change also help global inequality. As a simple example, the equator now has access to the cheapest energy in human history, and in a very democratic way that can't be controlled by a small elite.

But it seems common to claim that dealing with it will make this worse. Is there any actual reasons behind this or is it just "renewable energy will kill birds" again, a sociopathic attempt to use peoples empathy against them?

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever less so all the time.

If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

Yea that's not a conspiracy theory at all. CCP/Russia most definitely have heavily targeted campaigns to sow disunity via the whole "USA is a dumpster fire" and "we're so divided" nonsense all over social media sites like FB/Twitter and Reddit. Of course Reddit being Reddit and so forth you get regular Americans gobbling it up and amplifying. Even worse when late-night hosts with big audiences do it. The strength of the United States is literally its motto - "e pluribus unum" - of course foreign countries want to oppose that.

What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.

I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.

I hear this line of reasoning constantly from people who have had the system work for them. What they don't realize is that there is a huge portion of this country where the system is not working and thats where this discontent is coming from.

Their misinformation campaigns wouldn't work if there weren't real core issues with the society. The internet has empowered a generation the sees whats behind the curtain.

AOC said it best: Millennials have seen a situation where 9/11 happened in Middle School, the GFC happened in college and now the covid disaster has screwed hoards of millennials once again when they are trying to purchase a home and get on their feet. Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced. With this reality is it any wonder where there is massive discontent that results in this division? The system has failed them.

>Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced.

This exaggerated view is unfortunately quite common. It completely ignores the crises that previous generations had to go through, from WWII and the Korean War, to Vietnam, to depopulation of rural areas, to the Oil Crisis, to massive pollution in modern cities, to the mass lay-off of industrial workers starting in the 1980s, to inflation rates of 15-20%, etc, etc.

Yes, but those "previous generations" had oxygen in the tank, as in financial assets stored away from the good times, to survive the bad times. Millenials go pearl diving.

Try telling that to all those laid off in the 1980's, or those who had to abandon family farms in the 1960's and 1970's, etc, etc.

Ordinarily it is the older generation that looks to the past with rose-tinted spectacles. Millenials must be one of the few times when it is the younger generation that does so.

If you look at the arc of the whole generation and compare it to subsequent generations, overall the Boomers ended up much better off than their successors at the same point in time. Time is running out for Millenials to catch up. The oldest part of the cohort are in their 40s now so its looking as if they will end up poorer compared to their parents.

Poor people in the fifties did not have any financial assets.

Oh wow this comment is packed with so many unrelated events spanning multiple generations. You fail to see that going into the 70s and 80s the societal structure shifted to a far conservative view in terms of taxation, regulation and other governmental actions. This leads to a direct correlation to the outcomes for Gen X, Y and Z which have had their upbringing in the decades since post-Nixon.

If you look at the raw numbers of how Boomers prospered in their life cycle and compare it to the trajectory of Millennials it tells a clear and jarring picture. Even more so for Gen Z which explain why they are eschewing capitalism at far greater numbers than Millennials ever did. Note: all of my comments applies to a lesser extent to GenX as well but AOC was referencing Millennials since she is one. The point is if you look at the trajectory from Gen X onwards it paints a picture of decline in most aspects of life.

WWII is really the Silent + Greatest Generation and does not excuse the decline that started after Boomers.

>so many unrelated events spanning multiple generations.

That's the point; the world has always been turning. In terms of post-WWII economic history, the current "crisis" in the west is neither special nor very great.

This academic view of things does not matter to the people who are living a reality where their parents have done better than them. You seem to be ignoring this fact.

Plenty of people are living a reality where they're doing better than their parents. I should think that includes a lot of the well-paid software industry readership of HN.

The majority aren't.

Repeating my previous comment:

You can pluck a small group from any generation and show that they are doing better. How is the cohort as a whole doing?

It appears that you are set in your ways and are not willing to actually look at how Gen Y and Gen Z are doing in reality. Every answer you have given is an excuse to lay blame on the millennials as if the majority of the generation made some critical mistake in their lives.

You are just too out of touch to reason with.

Yes, the challenges faced by Millenials are different from those faced by their parents. But I don't think they are harder than those faced by previous generations.

Okay, so, what’s your point? There’s always some crisis in history. You’re moving the goalposts to weird places and leaving out all the boom times in the time periods you mention. Doesn’t seem like a good faith argument to me

Also, the Korean and Vietnamese wars were about fighting communism and imposing Western democracy on the East

Millennials also have high speed internet, smartphones, and video games to tune out local life that previous generations lacked.

Did previous generations have the same regulations in place that cause companies to restrict employment in crappy jobs to less than 40 hours a week so you need to move between job sites or work unsteady 'gig' jobs on the side? To avoid some mandatory benefits?

Previous generations had significantly higher tax rates for the ultra-wealthy and had wages that were in line with inflation. Those wages have stagnated for decades and all those taxes have been pulled back. All of this started to happen around the time of Gen X onwards.

In exchange we have cheap Chinese produced crap that shows the mirage of wealth but in reality there are external costs to all this tech that is not priced in when you go to pay for it. Costs such as the slave wages paid to the people who produce them and the environmental cost to produce and dispose. If US consumers had to pay the true cost of all these toys then it would expose the wage gap much more clearly.

You mention FB/Twitter but forget how much of a shit show our corporate media is. So much so that FB/Twitter uses them as the so called “fact checker” and act as proxy. If anyone has followed the media in last 5yrs, you know how dysfunctional and opposite to ideals of free press our so called mainstream news organizations have gone. A large portion of the country rightfully have zero trust on these once much respected media outlets. Just watch an hour of CNN or MSNBC or NYTimes or Fox coverage and you would know you don’t need CCP do divide us. Our elites running the media outlets and choosing which narrative to push on a given day will happily do t themselves.

Ironically, the market is the biggest division force in the US right now. CCP/Russia/elites propaganda machines are strong but they have never been a match for the US market. Is it an inherent flaw of capitalism or there’re different market structure to incentivize union.

> I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this.

A large amount of US politicians sold out to both China and Russia long ago. We recently had a president over $200 million in near outstanding personal debt to the CCP...

Check out which group of US senators and representatives went to have tea time with Putin on one of the recent 4th of Julys.

All of our manufacturing infrastructure is over there. There's no going back, because they're somehow able to dupe their constituents into believing they're actually hard on them while lining their pockets, especially with regards to China. Celebrities and corporations have also sold out.

It's going to be a great day of reckoning if some of these people ever learn that their leaders who've always told them they're hard on China and fighting against them are... actually not, lol.

Trump's mainland China nickname amongst the educated and literate is "Nation Builder" for a reason. With reference to their nation, not the United States. Certainly weird times we're in.

But you are pretty divided from an outside perspective.

You still haven't universally grasped very simple things the rest of the world nailed almost a century ago. Little things like "vaccines are good", "Nazis are bad" or "Universal healthcare is a basic human right"

I get its a pretty young country all things considered but these are fundamental basics.

Oh please. There are plenty of anti-vaxers, political extremists, and ignorant citizens in the EU. I know quite a few of them personally. The US is a hundred times more unified than the EU, which has been teetering for a decade now. I think the situation is not nearly as bad as the American press says it is, but the EU is absolutely chock full of problems, just like everywhere else.

Granted you're very correct that American health care got way too profit driven which is causing accessibility and standard of care to suffer, but EU healthcare is not without its issues, just different issues.

parent comment didn't mention EU. vaccine avoidance is much less prevalent in developing countries compared to so called developed countries in my (limited) experience. and atleast we don't have that many flat earthers

> To be honest I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this.

Because CCP/Russia have already incorporated this into their disinformation campaigns. Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist. It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.

> the pattern they used to name pandemics.

What pattern is that, exactly? Looking at the Wikipedia list of worldwide pandemics with more than 1 million deaths[0], only two were named after places, and one of those ("Spanish flu") was the result of wartime misinformation and/or racism.

Admittedly the other example on that list is "Hong Kong flu" from 1968–1969, but there are other recent outbreaks which are not included, like SARS, Swine flu, and Bird flu.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Major_epidem...

> What pattern is that, exactly?

That pattern used now (e.g. for COVID-19) is this:

World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases (2015)

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...

This is an improvement, as they note, on names that "provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities". The world has moved on since the "Spanish Flu" was named.

But I think that saying "the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics [because of China specifically]" is likely a misattribution and oversimplification of these guidelines.

The idea that "the government names pandemics" is both too general - a government is a huge diverse structure, if this was a governmental role, some named health body within it would have this responsibility; and also too specific - "the" government? which country's government would take on that role?

And it's not accurate - this is not any one country's government's role. Point of fact, COVID-19 was named by WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Here are the viruses targeted by this year's flu vaccine. Since the flu hasn't been politicized yet they're still using places in the names.

A/Victoria/2570/2019 or A/Wisconsin/588/2019

A/Cambodia/e0826360/2020

B/Washington/02/2019

B/Phuket/3073/2013

None of those are pandemics (parent's phrase) or "new human infectious diseases" (WHO term).

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

I'm with you that Chinese/Russian propaganda is a real thing, but your example is ridiculous.

> Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist.

This response always comes up when someone tries to point out racist and nationalist anti-china motivations, so clearly this argument is propaganda as well /s.

> It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.

The Spanish Flu was named that way precisely so everyone would blame Spain. The participants of WWI censored any mention of the pandemic until the war was over, so Spain served as a convenient scapegoat.

This paper published by Harvard is an analysis of actual CCP propaganda tactics [1]. Arguing with people online about an issue you dislike just brings more attention to it. Instead, propaganda generally serves to distract. The average Redditor has no direct impact foreign policy in China, but they can riled up enough to cause politicians to focus on placating them rather than geopolitics. Indeed, if you observe the Russian propaganda ads on Facebook, they have nothing to do with Russia [2]. They're simply meant to sow discord.

[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf

[2] https://cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gallery/

We are already in a low-level Civil War and have been for quite some time. The important thing to understand is that digital / media / information warfare will be the future of warfare, both in the US and abroad.

Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war.

There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.)

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.

>As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war.

I don't think the population is capable of a civil war just due to their health.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

What are they going to do? Fight each other on their Power Wheelchairs?

Yes I am aware of the far right arming themselves and training for years for a coming 'war'. I think with the Parler leaks + Facebook, I suspect the government knows the exact location of the overwhelming majority of these people and wouldn't hesitate to gun them down if some calamity broke out.

I agree that the CCP, Soviets and others are probably devoting some resources to spreading division. It is so cheap to do in the grand scheme of things so I guess that everyone including 'soft allies' might be participating but these tactics only work due to real issues in the society that have been unresolved for decades.

Besides...long term China has more serious problems to contend with. Things such as the coming population collapse, extreme climate change that threatens their food supplies, and growing unrest as the population starts to expect more and more from the CCP.

> If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop.

If those are your options, what is wrong with being destroyed from within? The two sides can split the country and each get a share - say, in proportion to their numbers.

The British aren't exactly suffering after their empire dissolved. Life still looks pretty good for them.

There is no reason to unite people who do not want to be united.

> If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us,

This is not only a terrible American exceptionalism thing to say, but also probably wrong if you look at history of failing states. The Russian emipre was it the brink of collapse before WW1, participation in that war lead to its collapse sooner then it probably would have.

From an outside view much of the world is long since tired of American exceptionalism, and American influence on the rest of the world. For many people the collapse of America would be a preferable option over the status quo. Me personally would prefer no war at all (neither civil nor world). However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).

> However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).

Pardon my assumption, but are you a software engineer in america? How would the downfall of American hegemony and union of transnational labor favor you?

Just maybe they aren't thinking primarily of their own advantage.

Yes I am a software engineer in America (although from Europe originally). And to answer your other question, the downfall of America might favor me personally if it would be replaced with international solidarity of workers (as I am a worker my self). However my personal wealth is not my aspiration. Or as Mr. Spock once said: “The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few”. If I am one of the few, who’s benefits will marginally decrease in order for the needs of the many to be met. Then so be it.

Alright there Comrade... lets hope your vision for the future never becomes a reality.

Here's the real rub, there's many of us who would also fight to preserve the status quo or something close to it. You think many (most?) HN'ers with their 150K+ jobs want to live either individually or with their families at a much worse quality of life so some folks an ocean or two away can be a little better off? Big doubt.

The status quo, globally, is inequality and suffering for many. What a pathetic way of thinking that this must be defended with violence. It's unthinkable for you that this could be balanced out a bit more?

There is only one road and it does not continue past a certain point.

Progress toward that point needs to be arrested or reversed judiciously, with rest stops along the way being some of the most useful.

Sometimes it can be worthwhile to point out that after WWII peace had been achieved but there were only three types of people in the world remaining.

Those that won WWII, Those that lost WWII, and those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.

Everyone else was killed.

That's what made it a world war.

Everyone living is descended from only these three types, spawned for better or worse out of their hard-won environment of unprecedented world peace.

Anyone dissatisfied with this, the only way they can change it is to start WWIII.

Got any ideas if there might be somebody willing to take us further down that road anytime soon?

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a full-time job for a large number of Russian KGB, and Chinese state security employees.

Not mutually exclusive. I could easily see a future where the breakup of the U.S. essentially sparks WW3 as every regional power takes the fall of the global hegemon as license to make war on its neighbors. Could totally see China taking Taiwan and eventually Japan, India and Pakistan erupting in bloodshed, Russia invading Eastern Europe, [the Middle East is already in flames], etc.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the CCP or Russia or both are conducting propaganda campaigns to break up the U.S. without them firing a shot. These strike me as very shortsighted; the threat of an external adversary is pretty much the only thing holding large empires together, so both of those are next on the break-up list of the U.S. splits. (Arguably, the primary factor behind political divisions in the U.S. was the breakup of the Soviet Union; without the external threat of communism we have nothing to remind us that we're more alike than different.)

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

How is this a conspiracy theory and how is this a bad thing? The so-called Cold War (i.e., WWIII) was won by the USA "without ever firing a shot", by exactly the same method: sowing division within the socialist bloc. Do you think that the U.S.-influenced division of its enemies was a bad thing? Would you have preferred an all-out war between the two nuclear powers?

Some would argue the actions of the US in Afghanistan during the Cold War led to 9/11 as blowback. That one event permanently altered the US's path and helped to show that the empire is declining.

In terms of civilisational collapse 9/11 is meaningless, and all of the damage done by response was a series of unforced errors on the US's part. They didn't have to tear off a nose to spite their face.

>They didn't have to tear off a nose to spite their face.

That is the civilizational decline made clear by 9/11.

Actually it was the Soviets that were in Afghanistan during the Cold War, not the US.

Are you seriously ignoring the US's role in arming the mujahideen?

Not at all but somebody else would have done it anyway.

The Soviet Army's fate was sealed not much differently than the US Army's was early into the operations.

Others having much more to lose through Soviet aggression would have stepped up to the plate except US arms dealers had first right of refusal for things like this.

Re “without firing a shot” - the US fought several proxy wars as part of the “Cold” War and fired a lot of shots.

Replace CCP with Russia, and it's not a conspiracy theory.

Correct.

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-...

In my view, the primary reason we are edging toward a new civil war is that politicians have decided to wield the law as a weapon in the growing urban/rural cultural divide.

Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal choice, you're on the road to division.

The Right should stop trying to ban gay marriage or abortion or TG folks from public schools. The Left should stop trying to ban guns or family gatherings or large sugary drinks or the rebel flag or traditional pronouns.

Until American can break the habit of trying to control one another and make other Americans live a certain way, we will never live up to E Pluribus Unum.

EDIT: Case in point...

> traditional pronouns

Nobody is banning traditional pronouns.

In many parts of the world they are being soft banned.

Yet. And somebody certainly is.

Would spice things up a bit. Might not be a bad idea.

> ... should stop trying to ban ...

Or perhaps these contentious social questions should be decided by the individual states, and citizens should be free to move to states which best match their views?

It would be nice to think that the federal government could just ban "bans", but deciding what is and isn't a ban (or which bans are strictly necessary) is an equivalent problem to the one you are trying to solve.

I never suggested that the federal government ban "bans" and, perhaps, the fact that you immediately thought of yet another government ban is emblematic of the problem I am describing.

In any case, yes, to some extent, federalism is a partial answer to ensuring a baseline liberalism.

I don't think there will be a civil war, or if there would be, the outcome will be inescapable and perpetual tyranny.

The technology we have today is such an overwhelming advantage and every tyrant's wet dream.

At this point, we can only hope for an illuminated and benevolent tyrant, something like a emotionally mature Elon Musk.

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