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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

This mood excuses a lot of behavior that would otherwise seem off limits. If the end is near, why worry about consequences? Get yours before it’s too late!

Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming. Either you understand the science and implications, or you think it’s a global hoax being perpetrated to excuse oppression. Either way it sits in the background every day like a tick tock clock of impending doom. It’s huge and so far totally unresolved.

A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically. It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

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I think people are just bored.

Compared to the 2000s and 2010s it seems like there is less innovation. Much more significant, we have smartphones and technology which deliver fast dopamine and make everything easy.

People are getting ADHD-like symptoms and becoming desensitized to everything. They want novelty and intense stimulation. Events like the Capitol Insurrection, GME / cryptocurrency “lottery”, off-the-rails politicians - those provide novelty and intense stimulation. A global apocalypse or war, even though it would be awful, provides novelty and intense stimulation.

Just the thought of a global apocalypse and imagining the consequences gives people motivation. Predicting it on the news gets the news channels attention and ratings. Even if it never happens, the idea of a global apocalypse itself is capturing people’s attention.

I think technology addiction is a real thing and a real concern. I'm young enough to have had a Nokia brick cell phone that stayed in my car in high school and was only used for parental conversations. I just did things, explored, played. Now, I am stuck on my computer, phone, or iPad all day. Yes, I tend to read a lot of non-fiction and interesting things there or I'm doing work, but it's an endless onslaught of surface-level material and not deep and exploratory thinking. And I don't even play phone games or watch TV. We even see a change in how people watch things. The days of something like an hour-long Letterman show is over. Everyone wants little clips and bits to gnaw on. If one goes back to old radio and TV interview programs, they had real intellectuals on there with real questions. Now we simply have drivel.

I have personally become worried about my own addiction, which I would wager is pretty light relatively speaking. It's been helping for me to get out and do yard work, it's amazing how simply touching dirt grounds yourself. I've also been trying to get a work setup conducive to just sitting down and actually getting through some books I've surrounded myself with and get back to playing music and also exploring electronics.

Your comment deeply resonated with me.

As someone who has been writing computer code for nearly 30 years now, I hold tangible experiences dear (esp. yard work), and have been taking immense pleasure in reading physical books, with sticky notes ready for annotating and engaging with the material.

Yea, yard work is a nice escape. I am fortunate to have recently obtained something that can be called a yard after having moved on from living in the city. I am doing my best to treat it as a conservation effort. We've started composting, I'm researching bird houses for the surrounding native birds (nesting only, no feeders), and I am looking for other ways to properly manage the place.

I recently started researching how to have a lawn that's sustainable and acts as a carbon sink, and what I learned is basically the opposite of what the typical suburban yard does, which is usually to plant grass and weed out all unwanted weeds and species. Apparently that's quite bad for the soil and doesn't capture carbon well. A lot of people in my area have even cut down trees, put up fences, and made mono lawns. I found this article helpful.

https://news.globallandscapesforum.org/38003/how-to-turn-you...

I really like the quote "We need to stop treating our soil like dirt". I'm looking forward to the spring and getting to plant locally native wildflowers. We had a bee or two in the fall when we first got here, and I'd love to see more activity.

It's the Internet. I hold it as humanity's greatest invention. The amount of effort from all the different entities over the decades it took for it to coalesce into what it is is nothing short of extraordinary, awesome (in the original sense of the word). Civilization-changing in the span of only several years.

However as each year goes by, I think its negatives are fast outweighing its positives. Society...humanity is not equipped to be a global community. We didn't evolve that way. Everyone having a voice in everything is not a good thing because nothing ever changes or gets done. We are desensitized by an endless deluge of information, and we lose track of what is physically around us.

K-12 education should direct a significant portion of childrens' attention to learning how to use the internet in a healthy way, perhaps an entire class dedicated to learning how to find and evaluate information online. There are a lot of lessons learned in the last 20 years that should be immediately taught to the next generation.

A special room in the house. Unpleasant fluorescent lights. A timer like a sauna. Hazmat shower afterwards.

I'm actually half serious.

The opposite is, people set their desk up in the most comfortable way possible, with the nicest view, so they want to spend more time there and do more work.

That is a great idea, but then the challenge is to find the people to teach such a class. But really, great idea, I'll reflect on what such a class would look like. I'm amazed it doesn't exist already tbh.

For most of us here, the 2000s and 2010s were the pinnacle of innovation of our respective fields. Anything that follows would seem like a downturn. Likely, if we want to see innovation it will be in a field that we're less familar with.

>Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

It's happening because of the widening wealth gap. There was a time when the average American only had to compare themselves to the folks in their neighborhood. Now they see how the actual wealthy are living and are angry about it and for a large portion of them they direct their anger at immigrants or China or insert boogeyman because they work hard and deserve to live like that. It's never the rich guy's fault though... as best I can tell from talking to a couple folks in that mindset their theory is we shouldn't increase taxes or re-implement actual estate-taxation because "when they make it big" they don't want to become poor again because of high taxes. They don't understand what a progressive tax rate is, and they haven't the faintest idea that taxes are literally the LAST thing that is going to cause someone who is wealthy to ever become poor.

That's ignoring the entire generation just entering the workforce that also sees those ultra-wealthy on Instagram and feel that if they can't obtain that wealth working hard, they want to work as little as possible. And I can't entirely blame them.

I for one, am not going to blame it on an actual wealth gap. Shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and "MTV Cribs" were around long ago and didn't cause financial angst. Probably because watching a weekly tour through some poorly decorated Beverly Hills mansion wasn't that big of an influence. We knew that a fair number of the homes were staged and the musician didn't live there (from how awkward the "tours" were). [0]

However, we usually watched those shows with someone around us (family/friends), but social media is typically consumed while alone and no one else is there to laugh at the absurdities. If the people in their feeds aren't explaining that all the new clothes, cars, houses, and so on were given to them for free by their sponsors - that may be the real problem. Resulting in a perceived wealth gap.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ-Z7aFgDPk

>Now they see how the actual wealthy are living and are angry about it and for a large portion of them they direct their anger at immigrants or China or insert boogeyman because they work hard and deserve to live like that. It's never the rich guy's fault though... as best I can tell from talking to a couple folks in that mindset their theory is we shouldn't increase taxes or re-implement actual estate-taxation because "when they make it big" they don't want to become poor again because of high taxes. They don't understand what a progressive tax rate is, and they haven't the faintest idea that taxes are literally the LAST thing that is going to cause someone who is wealthy to ever become poor.

It must be tiring talking to so many strawmen. I'm imagining being someone who has a problem illegal labor and the government taking 20% of my pay, then talking to someone like you who just thinks I'm the biggest moron in the world.

> My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming.

Back when I were a kid people were afraid of nuclear winter, or getting fried by UV radiation because of aerosols, or 10 billion people in 2010. The sense of impending doom is hardly a new thing.

That's a great frame/empathetic connection I haven't thought of!

I personally experience this existential dread and anger from not being able to force any action on the scale we need on climate change. Kind of feel silly that I've never really put together that people in your generation felt similarly about an impending nuclear winter, population growth starvation etc.

Sadly a lot of that generation are the least likely to want dramatic efforts to fight climate change/most skeptical. Some points almost 2X less likely to want immediate action.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/05/26/gen-z-millenn...

I think every generation has had their 'dread'... from world wars, to cold wars, to climate...

Personally, it seems like what changed was somewhere around Gen-X we lost faith in our ability to change anything. That feeling of helplessness seems to have deepened from Gen-X to Gen-Z. Oddly, my generation-Alpha nieces and nephew's still seem optimistic. Is is just youth? or will things start to turn around...

Only time will tell....

Interesting about gen A. they have seen & helped create dramatic change from even just 10-15 yeas ago when I was in school. On LGBTQ issues, equality, & so much more. So maybe they are our saviors!

Hell I work in politics myself with decent access to politicians and help raise money. Nope. Doesn't matter in terms of power I have basically none besides perhaps getting more money spent on climate issue ads.

I think the only way to get drastic action is if a large % of voting population demands it. Sadly the defeatist attitude reinforces the powerless cycle by not voting and not participating, because they think it doesn't matter. So therefore it doesn't.

>>I think the only way to get drastic action is if a large % of voting population demands it. Sadly the defeatist attitude reinforces the powerless cycle by not voting and not participating, because they think it doesn't matter. So therefore it doesn't.

Yeah - its the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's maddening that so many people are upset with how things are going, but refuse to vote..I don't care how or who you vote for...just vote! Nothing will change until people get off the sofas.

As a Gen-Xer we were very much aware of the possibility of nuclear war. While the previous generation (boomers) had their bomb drills at school, they didn't bother by the time we were in school because what was the point in surviving a nuclear war?

If you want to get a feel for the zeitgeist at the time, check out the movie Miracle Mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mile_(film)

But was it so constant? I can't recall the exact number but a huge percentage of Gen Z are persuaded they are likely to die of global warming. I can't say, I'm a millennial, but definitely remember being infused with information about environmental destruction since a small child.

The fear of imminent nuclear destruction was much more omnipresent than the fears of environmental catastrophe are today. Seriously, it's not even close.

When The Day After came out, it was a huge deal. It literally had such a strong impact it directly affected the US' nuclear deterrent policy. When the Wind Blows and Threads, both British productions, also accurately reflected the ennui of the time.

Heck, you had a pop single hit #1, and the entire subject was accidental Armageddon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Reception

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_film...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

Growing up in the 70's and 80's I was pretty convinced we'd never see the year 2000 as a society. The 90's were a welcome shock, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of Apartheid and a provisional peace in Northern Island amongst other positive signs.

Global warming was there, but seemed much less likely to cause the apocalypse compared to nuclear war.

Its not just global warming, fairly huge amount of global population barely registers it, since its not so much right here & right now making you die slowly.

Doom and gloom bombardment is everywhere, at least to some extent. Its covid, economy, ecology, politics, global politics, wars and so on. Then you go to some other place and magic happens - people are still cheerful, live like covid isnt a thing bombarding us from every direction constantly.

I am in paragliding course in south Spain now, and I can tell you. I've teleported into another dimension for 2 weeks. Regardless of all the cold hard facts, I like it very much, a breath of the age gone. Recharging batteries that badly needed it.

At the end its childishly stupid to not see forest for the trees, and living in semi-bearable misery over things one cannot change. I for a change have faith in mankind resilience and technologies future will bring, ie for cleaning up the mess we all do right now, by using devices to type/read this for example. Because we think its our right to have them, buy often almost same ones and brag on anonymous forums like this one about how much power one wields and how smooth animations are.

Apparently it was. Keep in mind that that generation had a much fresher and more direct memory of a significant conflict (WW2) and so there are common experiences where people would be jumpy at any odd light flying around, sirens, sounds, always ready to jump under the table or shelter to try to hide from the nuclear blast.

I am certainly glad we don't live under that kind of fear, even if we have something else to replace it.

> Keep in mind that that generation had a much fresher and more direct memory of a significant conflict (WW2)

Not just the generation you refer to (pre-boomers who would have some memory of WW2), but also boomers and us Xers also were also quite aware that nuclear war was a real possibility.

When I was a kid in the 80s I was sure I was going to experience global nuclear war before I became an adult. I thought about it a lot.

Where i live we had weekly air siren tests back in the 80ies, i don't think that was ever the case for America but on the projected front-lines the Cold War was very real, and the release of tension that when the wall finally came crusting down and the eastern European countries re-emerged as friends were an powerful event doing my childhood.

Yeah, but we reacted differently. We still went to school, and got jobs, and got married, and had kids, even though the world could end tomorrow.

We still had literal duck-and-cover drills in school long into the mid '80s. New York area. File into the hallway, face the wall, kneel on the ground with your head in the corner between the floor and wall, put your hands behind your neck, kiss your ass goodbye.

The nuclear scare was definitely that constant, if not even more so. It was also a much more black and white issue, there was a clear us vs them to it. I personally think that 9/11 and the response to it would have all been taken completely differently if it weren't for the Cold War only ending a decade before. Bush wasn't laughed out of Congress for talking about an Axis of Evil because it sounded exactly like American foreign policy had for decades at that point, notably Reagan's Evil Empire back in the 80's.

Yes it was at least as constant. Growing up in the 70s/80s there was a constant feeling that nuclear annihilation was quite possible and maybe even imminent. Around 1980 our family moved to a house that was only about 5 miles from a nuclear submarine base. We joked that if a nuclear war started we were pretty much at ground zero and at least we wouldn't suffer.

I think there is a difference in intensity with respect to climate change fears.

Climate change is being taught as an existential threat that will certainly destroy your future if action is not taken.

This is taught and messaged to young elementary school children. My friends third graders class recently held climate policy protests with picket signs and everything.

This is a level of pervasive fear is higher than I remember with nuclear winter/UV/ or the fear of the day when I was growing up

Probably, there's a difference with respect to outcomes.

Nuclear war: scary, but nothing you can actually do anything about. So you have, in a way, permission to forget about it.

Climate change: everyone is told all the time that they have a personal responsibility to save the planet, even though there's actually not much they can do either. But people aren't giving themselves permission to forget about it, and people who point out that there's not much the average person can do are demonized.

I do agree that climate doomerism is a major impediment to progress of all kinds, partly because it redirects a lot of mental energy down rabbit holes that don't actually make people's lives better, only different or less worse (e.g. renewable power doesn't directly improve anyone's lives, and may make it worse if it reduces grid stability, so it doesn't feel like "progress" in the way that 60s sci-fi authors thought of it).

I think you are on to something, but it is even worse.

There are several things that individuals can do to reduce their carbon impact, but they are extremely inconvenient. Coupled with an inability to forget, this leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance.

However, individual impacts are irrelevant.

See the case of the UK. It makes up 1% or less of global carbon emissions. It doesn't matter how much the average Brit does to reduce their personal carbon impact, it will all amount to nothing. Therefore, they should stop worrying and forget about it - but "society" (really, the media/public sector classes) won't let them.

>It makes up 1% or less of global carbon emissions. It doesn't matter how much the average Brit does to reduce their personal carbon impact, it will all amount to nothing.

I think this is a bad take, and at the center of the climate discussion.

If the UK's 1% is irrelevant, than each other 1% that add up to 100 are also irrelevant. This is obviously not true, 1% is not 0%.

There is a meaningful difference between being unable to solve a problem by yourself and being irrelevant. The fact that I can not do something alone, does not mean that it can not be done.

This is a classic prisoners' dilemma. You can never reach 100% without each 1% contributing. If they all do, it adds up, if they don't, it won't.

You can make a different arguments that the world could reduce carbon emissions 99% without UK cooperating, or that the UK shouldn't go first, or that it isn't worth trying the whole effort is likely to fail, but these are all a different points than the UK is irrelevant.

China and India makes up most of it and they don't care, nor are they going to care any time soon. So UK is in fact irrelevant. It could reduce carbon emissions to zero (impossible in any reasonable time frame), and nobody would even notice. Nor would setting an example encourage big emitters to change, if anything it'd discourage them as they'd see that net zero = poverty, and poverty is the thing they're trying to solve, not create more of.

So I hear 2 positions:

1) Global reductions are doomed to failure, so the UK should not do their part.

2) It is more effective to continue to emit carbon emissions to encourage china and India to implement reductions

Well, there are actually a whole lot of positions other than those two, like:

3) The UK has already done its part: it's well ahead of other countries in terms of carbon reduction. So now it can stop creating new problems by trying to reduce it further.

4) There is no such thing as a country "doing its part" because that's false collectivism: tens of millions of people that happen to inhabit the same island don't all have some sort of shared responsibility to the "world" regardless of what globalists might want.

5) The whole thing is irrelevant anyway because the problem is way over-hyped, current mitigation measures are plenty sufficient and China/India will naturally de-carbonize as they get richer anyway.

etc etc. Many of these positions are more future-positive than the one the media force feeds us all the time, of course.

> If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

This is what is keeping me motivated and above all the bullshit. I have a really good team at a small company with a ton of latitude to do the right thing by our customers. We are on track to capture a huge chunk of our target market. Our competition seems to be idle/nonexistent right now. I like to believe its a combination of this "apocalyptic mood" you describe combined with the complexity of our customers' businesses. No one wants to mount an effective battle against bank core logic from 1990 when they think society is about to fall apart.

I think a big part of this path is avoiding [social] media as much as possible. Hackernews is about as much as I can stand these days.

People have been preaching the end of times for ages. "Miami Beach will be underwater in 5 years!" has been a headline my entire life. There was also "PEAK OIL" where people thought the world was going to end because we would run out of energy, turns out we found more. Journals like the Atlantic will print anything that generates clicks

This is true, and I’m not sure that culturally we have acknowledged the consequences of involving kids in these apocalyptic concerns. Anxiety seems to be a chronic condition affecting more kids in quantity in my community than I ever recall years ago. But what do you think is going to happen when parents are constantly on about end of the world, end of democracy, the second coming of hitler and other enormous hyperbole. Of course kids take that shit more seriously than most adults, of course that will affect them when the few people they have absolute trust in are preoccupied by it. Parents/teachers have sense of existential dread = chronically anxious kid.

IMO, one of the primary jobs of a parent is to create a sense of security for a developing human. Even if you believe the end is nigh, help your kid ignore it for (quite) a while, be a kid, develop and retain a sense of hope. It doesn’t help that the media is in the business of keeping the population scared about something and in a constant state of worry. This is why part of that job involves shielding kids from poisonous media for a large part of their development. Formative years should be positive experiences.

I've noticed I have a tendency to search for and latch on to the big existential crisis of the day. I have no desire to bring children into this world when climate change is largely 'baked in' and unsolvable. I can't imagine how my parents decided to have kids back at the height of the cold war when nuclear oblivion seemed right around the corner.

And yet? Humanity has faced worse and still kept going. The black death? The mongol invasions? The 30 years war? All of these had absolutely huge death tolls. I can't help but think they were made of different stuff than I am.

I think if ever in history there was a time to have children and to be optimistic about their future, now is it. I realize I am speaking as someone enjoying all the benefits of living in the first world but we are mastering science, lifespan is increasing, our ability to fight disease is growing, wars are fewer and farther between, quality of life is improving across the world. There are of course outliers that are very much surfaced via the media such as the refugee crisis. The fact that there is a place for the refugees to go though is even an improvement even though their circumstances are terrible. The threat of global nuclear war was an unstoppable idea a few decades ago, but war did not happen so all the worry was for nothing. With global warming its a steady thing that humanity can adapt to as it happens; technological advancement does not end, we will deal with it. Have kids if you want them and teach them to feel optimistic about the future, humanity is young and we are just getting started. I have kids and I am thrilled about the opportunities they are going to have growing up.

Matt Taibi was on Joe Rogan a few days ago and during the interview Joe related a story about one of his Israeli friends. Joe went over to his friend's home for dinner, and hung out with his family, and the entire time the friend and his wife and kids were dancing and singing and celebrating, for no particular reason.

Joe asked why are you Israeli's so happy? The friend said that when you live in Israel, you live under the perpetual notion that a rocket strike will kill you at any moment. So you don't need a momento mori, you have death hanging over your head at every moment, so every moment is imbued with a heightened preciousness, so you engage happiness as much as possible, whenever possible.

I wish the modern, globally-homogenized mass culture that washes over us enjoyed this kind of apocalyptic thinking, rather than the dour, annoying "omg the ghgs!" crap we've got.

I agree that it is problematic for the media to be so hyperbolic. However, are you saying that Florida is not having regular and more historical flooding? If so, why is articles about frequent floodings[0] wrong?

Regarding peak oil, geologists pretty much know where all the oil is. Finding a little more oil did not solve the problem. What solved the problem was the shift to electric cars and fracking for gas. These two things triggered a reduction in drilling[1] that caused the collapse of Venezuela.

[0] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-key... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-oil-rigs/

Nope, there's more nuance to it than that. I see it as humanity has painted itself into a corner. We're running out of cheap oil, fracking didn't turn out too well and that combined with climate change has put us in a giant pickle. The low EROEI of renewables make the transition (decoupling from fossil fuels) borderline impossible without some serious ramifications. I think humanity is in for a shock. If you go by real inflation (not the government made-up numbers) the world economy has pretty much stalled already for the past decade or so, and the energy transition is going to cause it to collapse in a way where there's no return. Either the human population is drastically reduced (in one way or another), or a drastic change in lifestyle will be required.

Global warming is just a slight inconvenience in comparison to that. I suppose a number of "climate change deniers" are aware of this and would like to keep the world going as it is for just a little while longer. Others are aware of the cost of the transition and think it's cheaper to just keep going and deal with it as it comes - sea levels won't rise that fast, there's ample time to migrate out of the way, even if some cities will be lost. They however don't take into account that oil depletion is inevitable sooner or later, and when that time comes they won't have the resources to achieve a transition to renewables anymore (which is doubtful to work out even now).

How about that for some doom?

I have trouble believing this when nuclear exists and isn't anywhere close to utilized. Sure, the political will to build nuclear doesn't exist currently, but give everyone a taste of the sort of energy crunch you're describing and I bet it'll manifest pretty quick.

Nuclear will be a part of the (attempted) solution for sure. The problem with nuclear is that it takes many years and billions to build. The US alone would need somewhere around 500 new reactors to replace fossil fuels, not to mention the rest of the world. Who will build these reactors and pay for them and how long do you think this would take? Even in the most optimistic scenarios we'd be talking many many decades (if we somehow managed to pay for them).

Also - to elaborate - it doesn't actually cost billions of money to build nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines, or solar panels for that matter. Ultimately it costs energy. You could argue that money is a claim on future energy. EROEI is the ratio between energy input and output. This goes back to humanity starting to use horses. This positive EROEI allowed some people to not have to work all day long anymore and could instead become blacksmiths and other professions. Fastforward a bit and the EROEI of coal and oil supercharged the growth/economy. That's the wave we've been riding so far, up until now, allowing us to get to almost 8 billion people on the planet. But with a lot of external costs.

We've depleted all the easy to extract oil resources and the golden age of abundant EROEI is over. Since a good while ago (EROEI for oil started dropping in the 70's or 80's IIRC). And this is what we should have been preparing for, for decades already. But oil companies fought tooth and nail against policymakers even bring it up, and tried to refute it by stating that there is tons of oil still left to be extracted (without bothering to mention the cost).

It's not a popular talking point if you're a politician but climate change on the other hand is something people can easily grasp and get outraged about and policy makers can't avoid. It's simple: The world heats up, sea levels rise, weather becomes increasingly aggressive and erratic - we're fucked if we don't do something. But that's not the whole picture. We'd be fucked anyways.

When the EROEI sinks below a certain threshold the economy (that runs on human brains and external energy inputs) starts shrinking. This has arguably been going on for a while already (even though economists have been trying hard to doctor the numbers to look favorable). And if it drops enough it's a death spiral (the negative logarithmic curve).

People end up blame policy, the economy, the capitalists, globalization, immigrants or racism, but what it actually boils down to is that energy is becoming more expensive to extract, and the whole thing is hitting us from behind (well some alarmists have for decades but have been considered fringe or "conspiracy theorists").

Nuclear is our best bet at this point, but it seems somewhat of a pipe dream. Throw some China into the mix where they are ramping up coal plants, or Russia, and there's no way we're going to be reaching any CO2 targets. We'd have to actually change society, people's behavior, how we live.

One simple example is public transportation. We're frantically expending a ton of resources at converting existing transportation to electric, but we're not thinking it through. Instead of converting existing ICE vehicles to electric we should (somehow) be shifting to public transportation (not an attractive proposition in the middle of a pandemic). High efficiency vs counting on limitless abundant cheap energy. But people like their cars, and won't change their habits unless they are forced to. And this is why I think we're doomed.

I'm with you on this being a possibility, but I'm curious if you have a couple specific numbers that I'd want to better evaluate this possibility.

It of course costs energy to create solar panels and wind turbines (let's ignore nuclear for now), but the energy output potential of a given solar panel over its lifetime isn't really inherently tied to the energy required to produce it. Theoretically production of these devices should become significantly more efficient at certain levels of scale, and if solar panels production were to increase by 10x, the amount of energy needed to produce those panels would increase by some other smaller multiplier.

Given that people presumably can see this coming, it makes sense that some entrepreneurs will take advantage of the current climate of relatively cheap power to create and stockpile energy production capacity in anticipation of the failing of fossil fuels from an EROEI perspective. This, combined with ample opportunity for additional hydroelectric development if we're willing to sacrifice certain riparian ecosystems, makes me think that electricity generation itself will not really fall, and instead the problem will mainly be seen with things that require dense, portable energy i.e. airlines.

Here's a refreshing read on some of the issues with solar specifically:

https://doomberg.substack.com/p/herbie-spoils-the-party

Great article, thanks.

Something that occurs to me- currently, the main way that countries with an excess of electricity export that excess is via smelting aluminum (Tiwai in NZ and Hafnarfjörður in Iceland, for example).

It looks like it costs about $1.5 billion and takes ~2 years to create a new large polysilicon plant. Perhaps we'll see some of these places with an excess of unrealized hydroelectric capacity moving towards polysilicon production rather than aluminum.

Looks like the polysilicon plant in Washington (also an area with a lot of hydro power) is being restarted: https://www.bernreuter.com/newsroom/polysilicon-news/article...

The Roman empire declined too. It wasn't because they were worried about global warming. Decay is inevitable.

Plenty has been written and argued about the rise and fall of civilizations and how their political systems and culture played into it.

You'll probably find possible causes that are much more satisfying if you look in that direction.

The glory that was Rome is nothing to the glory that is today. Rome was good at extracting wealth and so created some awesome science and statues, but it does not a stable society make, because if you want more stuff you have to take it from somebody else.

We are good at creating wealth. That means that if you want more stuff, you are better of creating something that others value that you can then trade for. Not always, not for everyone and not for everything, because the system isn't perfect. But often enough that the standard of living is rising around the world, and has only partially declined in some sectors in the US and other advanced economies.

But if you compare the US with Rome, Persia, the Greek states or anywhere else, beware of the fundamental difference.

Parroting that we are in decline is definitely a contributor to the mood of doom.

My impression is that there is plenty of growth left. However, the perception has changed for the worse because technology has allowed us to expose the bad side through social media and ubiquitous surveillance via cell phones and security cameras. Our grandparents and parents were quite uninformed compared to our generation.

I think it's the confluence of three major trends that are all going to hit concurrently, within the 2020s.

Global warming, as you mentioned, which is going to cause widespread droughts and crop failures, a redistribution of habitable land, mass migrations, and increased frequency of natural disasters.

A demographic bulge that is all hitting prime young adult & family formation age right now. Historically, societies get more violent when there is an excess of young unmarried men with poor prospects for finding a mate or raising a family. And this is exacerbated by...

Systems and institutions that have become rigid, complex, and too inflexible to change. The rational response to a large number of young adults reaching family-formation age is to build more housing. Zoning laws prevent that. The next best response is for all these young people to move to new cities and settle new land, building their own housing. You can't do this when all the land is already owned, and you need a job to have any hope of getting enough money to buy it. That forces all the people to cluster where the good jobs are, but the good jobs don't want to leave areas where skilled workers already are, and those are the same areas with a shortage of housing.

Perhaps the reason people are acting like the party is going to stop soon is because they're right. People aren't stupid; even if they haven't studied enough history to rationally analyze it, they emotionally know that something's wrong. When you switch from an abundance to a scarcity mentality, the rational response is to grab whatever you can personally, because by definition, there isn't enough to go around. And unfortunately this results in chaotic behavior that is very difficult to plan around. It'll be a great time to build long-term things after the crisis reaches a climax and everybody who's going to die and every institution that's going to fail already has. Until then, the priority is surviving to that point.

Thank you for writing this, I could've written this word for word.

I also strongly resonate with the sentiment this is the golden age for optimists, it has always been a key for innovation and vitality, but in today's world it it a superpower. It is tricky though, and requires one to sidestep the culture in a way that can't be taught.

> Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

I blame clickbate. It's new, it's extortionary popular, it's making a whole lot of money for media outlets which had previously been on life-support.

Anger sells, outrage sells, victimization sells, especially when everyone feels like their generation is uniquely screwed and it is everyone else's fault.

I don't know how to stop it. I wish there was a voice in everyone's head that said "maybe this article is confirming all my beliefs because it wants to sell ads, not because it contains anything truthful or insightful".

That voice seems absent so far. People believe everything they read, even if they crow loudly about how perceptive they are and how everyone else believes everything they read.

The advertisement industry has been successful beyond its wildest imagination. Don Draper would be mind blown.

> they better grab what they can now

Is there a time in history when it wasn't like this? Didn't we get to this point precisely because people have, more or less, always been doing this? I don't think people suddenly changed in the last half century or so.

The difference in modern times just seems to be that we found resources (oil, etc) that could be burned on a massive scale for a variety of purposes.

>I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

People have been working like dogs with no end in sight, while the super rich become ultra rich and wealth accumulates in smaller and smaller enclaves. Why would you NOT be acting this way if there is no vision of the future held by your democratically elected politicians of how to make this stop.

The answer is that people's lives are materially stagnant with no improvement in sight.

Can I have my PhD now?

> A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically.

Not even metaphorically. People literally behave like the time horizon for the consequences of their choices is shrinking. This explains so much of the zeitgeist:

- Hustle culture. Better climb to the top of the hill fast because the metaphorical/literal floodwaters are rising.

- The doom and gloom of progressive culture, which used to be much more positive. If we don't fix these cultural problems right now, it means we'll never fix them because there's no future, and if we'll never fix them, we lost. Therefore, we failed and should feel morally miserable.

- The plummeting birthrate. Who would want to bring a child into a dying world?

- Dropping rates of marriage. Why make a long-term relationship commitment when "long-term" doesn't even mean anything?

- Anti-work. Why work hard now to save up for a retirement or future stability when you won't be there to enjoy it? (There are other entirely valid reasons to be critical of capitalism, of course.)

> It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things.

This is an incredible insight. Now is a perfect time for long-term bets because everyone else is undervaluing them.

Also, it's just straight up more psychologically healthy and objectively likely to believe in a positive future.

If you follow Ray Dalio, he hypothesizes a lot of what we're seeing is due to decadence. Specifically, newer generations expect a high living standard but are not actually as rich as prior generations to support that living standard. At the same time, the population spends on decadent luxury goods instead of productive goods (which you can see in deindustrialization and the rapid expansion of low quality goods on Amazon).

If you look at the history of the Roman Empire you see a lot of similarities. Increasing living standards means people aren't willing to work as hard as their predecessors because they already have it pretty good. That leads to a loss of competitiveness, loss of competent political leadership (because why struggle in politics when you don't have to?), and increasing corruption. At the same time, people continue to purchase luxury goods to maintain their living standard rather than re-invest in productive assets that might decrease their living standard.

Ah, decadence is such an interesting word to bring up. It does fit the feel of our times because it implies both having a lot but yet also a certain moral emptiness.

Every time inequality comes up here on HN, someone always pipes up to say, "Consumers are able to afford more goods today than they ever have. We're doing fine." And, sure, I get we can have more shirts, games, a processed food than ever. Yes, definitely some of those material goods are important (clean water, healthy food, medicine, shelter).

But there is clearly something missing in our lives, and "decadence" describes it exactly. We have too much of things that don't mean anything and too little of the things that mean everything.

I think this is why we're already starting to see a shift towards platforms like Etsy rather than Amazon -- people are realizing that goods become worthless when you can just obtain anything. Personalization is going to be big in the next few years.

I can just see some salivating HN startup candidate pitching, "We'll use AI to automate creating personalized products!"

It's because economic growth is slowing down and society is predicated on a higher rate of growth than we're likely to get.

I doubt most people think about global warming at all. Most people have more immediate problems going on: paying rent/mortgage, raising their kids, dealing with a spouse or parent's health problems, etc.

Your comment reminded me of 'fin de siecle' mood of the end of 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_de_si%C3%A8cle

The triggers were different then perhaps (rapid industrialization, urbanization?)

There was widespread discussion of social degeneracy, decadence, loss of spiritual values. Quoting wikipedia: "England's ideological space was affected by the philosophical waves of pessimism sweeping Europe, starting with philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's work from before 1860 and gradually influencing artists internationally. R. H. Goodale identified 235 essays by British and American authors concerning pessimism, ranging from 1871 to 1900, showing the prominence of pessimism in conjunction with English ideology."

contextually while global warming is very bad and could kill way too many people it is not a apocalyptic threat by any mean

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on...

> the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

I have been having some thought experiments on company models that I think would be interesting. I've used the phrase "I like to move fast to move slow" to describe to people worried about rate of progress or deadlines on how long term thinking is actually faster in the end. Someone also recently reminded me of Phil Dunphy's "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". Another thing is that I think it would be interesting if a company acted almost as a non-profit in spirit, adjusting for sustainability of the company, quality of products, livelihood of its employees and customers, and not for growth and short term goals.

However, I am stuck for lack of good, concrete ideas. Some things that have become interesting to me are conservation, recycling, the ocean, social programs, etc., but I don't yet understand how to turn these around as businesses. One thing I see is the explosion of space companies, but I don't understand their business model outside of government contracts. So I can imagine a parallel of ocean-tech companies, although I don't see where the rubber meets the road. The idea of a recycling company is interesting to me, because I like the view that the company's goal should almost be to make the company shrink and not grow in that it should provide backwards pressure against the amount of stuff needing to be recycled at the end stage (e.g., providing companies with more sustainable products or materials that can be reused or recycled upstream).

Do you have any ideas? Who is thinking and writing about this? How does one capture the excitement and hype of space to the actual importance of the ocean?

It evens seems like a law to me that anything actually worth doing that will actually help people and the environment is not something that will make money.

>Do you have any ideas? Who is thinking and writing about this? How does one capture the excitement and hype of space to the actual importance of the ocean?

Bioplastics are probably a big factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

Dont need to clean up plastic in the ocean if it properly biodegrades. We need to get it to scale and costs low enough to replace oil based plastics. Which might be virtually impossible because if oil stops being used for fuel, it'll end up increasing and becoming cheaper for plastics. Eventually though the scarcity of oil and the extensive availability of corn and potatoes means you win.

>Eventually though the scarcity of oil and the extensive availability of corn and potatoes means you win.

Or hemp for that matter[1]. Might be possible to dominate a luxury niche first, then move into mass-consumption; one thing I think Tesla Motors demonstrated very well is that people will pay a premium for an untested product that might do good for the world, so long as there's a status signal involved.

[1]https://hempzoo.com/products/hemp-filament-3d-printing

I'm so glad you asked! I have two or three, I'd love to have any of them critiqued or stolen.

First one or two are not ocean-based but might be intrigueing all the same. Essentially, people flip houses, but there's not much flipping of land itself. And yet, a lot of land can be bought for relatively little money because of either nutrient degradation or soil contamination. So the business model would be slow but simple - buy distressed or contaminated land, practise slow but inexpensive means of remediation[1], flip it for a profit once it's remediated, and use that to buy more distressed land. There's actually a company in South America named Adecoagro that does this as one of their business segments. From what I could gather via their investor reports, the major bottleneck to this business is finding people with the expertise to do it. Adecoagro works on quite large farms, but I have the idea that if one did it with smaller parcels and combined the remediation efforts with hosting permaculture or similar courses, it might be a better way to bring in the necessary expertise.

Possibly the same or possibly an adjacent idea is phytomining[2]. Find land that either has been mined out and is distressed, or that a local community will sell cheap rather than have it go to a conventional mining company. Mine the soil via phytomining over a longer period of time, possibly in tandem with other regenerative land management techniques.

And the ocean one - there are techniques for recycling plastic for a fairly low cost[3]. With a basic plastic shredder and press, it should be possible to clean up the seas and make artificial islands[4] in situ. Combine with an ecotourism or seasteading brand and it should be quite interesting to people with money.

Like I said, I'd welcome any feedback! They're all very early-stage ideas (besides the land-flipping one, which exists but has an early-stage twist on the standard execution) so I'd be very interested in hearing how others would modify them.

[1] e.g. https://www.amazonmycorenewal.org/ [2] e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43258437_Method_for... [3] e.g. https://preciousplastic.com/ [4] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Island

Oh come on, you can't just tease us like that. What are you doing to try and win the next decade?

The Death of God and the End of History.

The rest is noise.

Slamming Nietzsche and Hegel together and expecting a peanut-butter-chocolate moment might be ... more so a fried-chicken and used-panty vending machine.

I meant it earnestly too.

In the west, the right is grappling with decline of religion and community(Putnam), while the left is obsessed with increasingly minor debates and injustices, with nostalgia for the Big Questions were settled in the 20th century(Fukuyama).

Putnam --- A prime example of the metaphor of a dominant technology re-conceptualizing the notions of the social sphere. Human relationships are reified as 'social capital' and the fundamental functioning of such is interrelated with productivity (which by common definition is always seen as needing to continually advance on an upwards trajectory). All relations (from the Rotary Club to romance) can be codified in terms of transactions.

The Left --- Does it exist in the United States? The last time a member of the American Communist Party was elected to a state senate was 1929. They're often spoken of in the 2nd person in American political discourse (and have been since the 1870s) but have tended to lack any official capacity to speak in the 1st person, and no one (not even the most minor of minority parties) presents themselves on the floor of any state or federal congress. Those who do occupy these positions (at the most extreme) advocate for political and social changes that could be summarized by their detractors as: capitalism with a few bandaids. (As with the above) government is re-defined in terms of the operations of business. As such, to advocate for anything else would in effect create a business whose function was to be an anti-business, which leads to a situation where: 'All true Dadaists are against Dada'.

Fukuyama --- After over 100 years of communists trying to destroy capitalism, one political scientist almost single-handedly ends it. Interesting how communists, liberals, neoliberals, and neoconservatives have all implicitly accepted Hegel's End of History. The only distinction being three of the four view the present as that End while the first sees that End one step beyond the present. With regards to the latter three, the system is a near Platonic ideal (just short of) enacted -- right up until it's the only game in town (End of History) in which case everyone's looking for the ejection seat. Whereas the communists rub their hands together, believing such creaks and grown signal that Utopia is just over the horizon and around the corner.

Which one is the fried chicken? I like fried chicken.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at a café table working. A waiter approached him

‘Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream’, the philosopher replied.

A few minutes later, however, the water returned and said,

‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream — how about with no milk?’

Sartre replied 'Ill have you instead.'

>I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling broke me out of this a few years ago. This apocalyptic mood is completely untrue and is being pushed by political ideologues. We are in a fantastic time.

>This mood excuses a lot of behavior that would otherwise seem off limits. If the end is near, why worry about consequences? Get yours before it’s too late!

It's not quite that. We are at a major inflection point in politics and economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

We are at the end of a saeculum which usually ends with a very bloody war or something to the level of killing a huge proportion of the world population.

Ray Dalio has talked about the long term debt cycle which also matches up exactly with these saeculums. We are there.

When socialism died in 1989, it took time for this to truly die. Neo liberalism and the culture wars is basically over. This was the last hurrah of communism/socialism. We are here. What seems to be happening now is that politically socialism is dead, it is becoming a religion. Super exciting to see a new major religion forming.

It's known, everyone is pulling up contemporary writers to Marx who predicted exactly what happened. The problem is the socialists don't think they've lost. So instead of acknowledging socialism failed, it's just apocalypse. Everything needs to be torn down and start over.

It's worse for socialists. If they acknowledge socialism failed, let it fail. How do they work within capitalism? Oh they do exactly what capitalism perscribes. Socialists could use robotics, ai, automation, etc to produce goods at virtually no cost and destroy capitalism from within.

>My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming. Either you understand the science and implications, or you think it’s a global hoax being perpetrated to excuse oppression. Either way it sits in the background every day like a tick tock clock of impending doom. It’s huge and so far totally unresolved.

About to blow your mind. Yes capitalism won, neoliberalism is king. But that doesn't mean climate change isn't real. Yes technically the losing camp are the people in the climate change camp.

The other problem politicians like al gore pushed the climate change hoax to further his political agenda. So you now need your thinking cap on to figure out where the hoax starts and climate change ends. Where is that line? You can see the hoax for your own eyes on wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Look at IPCC RCP8.5 bubbles for 2050 and 2100 years. Now read what 8.5 is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...

8.5 isn't happening. It's not going to happen. So why would this graph use only the worst prediction? One that isnt even happening? Because the true path doesnt look bad. It looks less bad than the Eemian spike.

So is this the hoax line? Where they outright misrepresent threats and risks? If we dont mispresent the science, will we not act and climate change kills everyone?

Or crazy yet? What if we don't act and nothing bad really happens? So far that's what has happened.

>A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically. It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

Did you know there's actual correlation between economic depression and psychological depression?

Kind of going back to ray dalio's long term debt cycle. When the cycle peaks, those who are significantly in debt have stress because of their debt. We don't know, but the probability we had significant psychological depression during the great depression is so high.

I like what you said, it's a great time to start building something. It doesn't matter if climate change is a problem. We have a limited resource that will increasingly become scarce and become more expensive. Staying on oil is a very dumb idea.

So it's super simple to see where all these ideas are. Build anything that replaces oil and you will win. Plastics, airplanes, trains, etc. Someone needs to come around and do this.

The idea of the 80 year generation related cycles is interesting. But your tangent about you don't like some narrow climate change 8.5 scenario means it's just some kind of a scam is just wrong. And you kind of go back and forth on whether climate change is real or not. I can't follow your arguments.

>The idea of the 80 year generation related cycles is interesting. But your tangent about you don't like some narrow climate change 8.5 scenario means it's just some kind of a scam is just wrong. And you kind of go back and forth on whether climate change is real or not. I can't follow your arguments.

I would find this characterization of my position on climate change to be quite inaccurate. I will take the blame for being unclear in my text.

The point about climate change I was making, there's clearly some BS happening and has happened by people like Al Gore. These actions have made climate change look political and not scientific. If climate change is the impending end of the saeculum that's about to kill a boatload of people. I think we won't be ready.

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