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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Doom and gloom has been selling for decades. Don't buy it.

Empires all do end and when they do they often fracture because of a built up of social discontent, but they are predicted to be ending 1000x more often than they end. Eventually someone calls it correctly though, and generally you only know who in hindsight.

It's like predicting someone's death: undoubtedly one day that person will die, it's just quite hard to predict it accurately. As devil in a certain book jested, "Yes, the man is mortal, but that's half the trouble; it's that he sometimes is abruptly mortal, that's the trick!"

720 broken clocks might have one with the correct time on it, but that doesn’t mean it was working properly.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 came as quite the shock to everyone, including both the Soviets themselves, nevermind the Americans. Yes, the West have been spelling "doom and gloom" for the USSR since November of 1917 and yet it never came to pass... until one day, it suddenly did. And BTW, spelling the imminent doom of the Russian Empire too has been quite in vogue in Europe during the XIX century, and still it came in as quite a surprise to everyone in 1917.

The USSR had alternate models to move to. What alternate model does the US have? The only ones that are somewhat successful are Russian and Chinese style authoritarianism, neither of which are palatable to the US population.

The alternative style for the US is more loose confederation of independent states than tightly unified under a powerful federal government.

This has literally been the key point of contention from just about day one.

Since before day one. Jefferson supported the former while Hamilton supported the later. This disagreement lead to the first political parties inside of GW's administration. This led to a dire warning in his farewell address:

"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

Maybe we could be like most of Europe? A little bit less capitalism, a little bit more socialism, quite a lot less stupid wars?

What was I thinking, of course that's absolutely unthinkable...

I think you've gotten the wrong takeaway message from "The boy who cried wolf story".

At some point, there were indeed wolves, so dismissing the chance of them because of fradulent/failed prior warnings turned out to be a mistake.

Plus, in 2022 it's more accurate than ever. Though of course, Rome didn't decline in a day, either...

The take away isn't to always listen, but to not always exaggerate/lie. The reader never got impacted by the wolves, the speaker did. So in the end, maybe the ones impacted will be the media, not the readers.

This isn't a boy who cried wolf story, this is a business model that is toxic and makes money of peddling fear and have been for decades.

the end is nigh!

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