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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Always wondering exactly what people mean when they talk of "civil unrest", and who and how will it start. Do the various riots in 2020 America or the Jan 6 storming of the capitol count?

On the other hand, Elon Musk Twitter purchase: $44bn. There's plenty of money out there still.

I think it's unlikely that merely raising rates will do anything, for two reasons: firstly there's a real need to do some fiscal policy as well, and secondly this inflation is being driven by real shortages not just the bidding up of goods. Chip shortages, fossil fuel shortages due to cutting Russia off the world market, food shortages, and the war in Europe's sixth-largest country destroying a lot of production capacity. Not to mention ongoing COVID costs.

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> Do the various riots in 2020 America or the Jan 6 storming of the capitol count?

They do. So does Occupy Wall Street. It's actually been a little over a decade of people of many political stripes having the general impression that there's a significant disconnect between the will of the elected officials and the will of the people. People disagree about root causes and remedies.

I'm pretty sure politicians prefer BLM and Jan 6 riots to occupy.

Because occupy actually got at the root of the problem... The other two are distractions.

>Always wondering exactly what people mean when they talk of "civil unrest", and who and how will it start. Do the various riots in 2020 America or the Jan 6 storming of the capitol count?

A whole lotta people, mostly outside the HN demographics, are real pissed off about a decade of public policy that has amounted to making their lives worse and worse at every juncture and now it's finally getting to the point where ends are hard to meet.

I am not dumb enough to try to make specific predictions but that's a pretty substantial powder keg.

It's been a lot longer than a decade. Reagan kicked off the looting of the middle-class in the 80s, and both parties officially adopted that policy by the mid-90s, almost 30 years ago. It takes a long time to drive an airplane as big as the US into the ground, but we're finally starting to see the tires hitting the ground now.

Please expand on this:

> Reagan kicked off the looting of the middle-class in the 80s, and both parties officially adopted that policy by the mid-90s, almost 30 years ago.

>A whole lotta people, mostly outside the HN demographics, are real pissed off about a decade of public policy that has amounted to making their lives worse and worse at every juncture and now it's finally getting to the point where ends are hard to meet.

They had four years under Trump threatening the city-dwellers and neo-liberals, a literal armed rioting mob, sympathy within the government and law enforcement and a gallows in front of the Capitol on Jan. 6th. They had the half of the country with all of the guns and all of the dreams of patriotic revolutionary glory convinced the election was being stolen at that moment by Chinese communists and the very party they blamed for all of their problems.

If they couldn't make it happen then, when all of the stars were aligned and the winds of populist ferver were at their backs, I don't think anything more than an occasional riot is going to happen in the future.

>If they couldn't make it happen then, when all of the stars were aligned and the winds of populist ferver were at their backs, I don't think anything more than an occasional riot is going to happen in the future.

Gas was cheap and shelves were full then.

I remember $5.00 a gallon gas during the recession, and there were two gas crises in the '70s and '80s. We've been here before.

Your average person wasn't being crushed by their rent in '08 and wasn't over leveraged on consumer debt in the 70s and 80s. Those are just two factors that are different this time around.

The information and media landscape is also very different now in ways that make disseminating "be a good little boy and everything will be all right" messages far less effective and the institutions such messages would come are more reputationally bankrupt than ever.

Sure, there's "plenty of money out there", but so much of it is held by the super-wealthy that the rest of us might as well be a rounding error. (Disclaimer: numbers not intended to be literal)

Increasingly, money and power are concentrating at the top, with people who are also increasingly insulated from the negative consequences of....well, all the bad stuff that's happening. That's a recipe for things spiraling out of control.

Look at the luxury stores being regularly robbed in cities like LA. Not exactly “civil”, but it’s an inevitable consequence of inequality: rich people can’t easily enjoy their nice things.

> Do the various riots in 2020 America or the Jan 6 storming of the capitol count?

Is there any reason those would not count as "civil unrest"? And non-rioting protesters of whom there was plenty count as civil unrest too.

> On the other hand, Elon Musk Twitter purchase: $44bn. There's plenty of money out there still.

Not sure what that has to do with civil unrests. Some people being super rich does not imply all that much benefit for the other people in the same country.

> On the other hand, Elon Musk Twitter purchase: $44bn. There's plenty of money out there still.

The money is concentrated in the hands of a very few.

I haven't been able to comment on HN since my controversial post which mentions civil unrest. No doubt your comment is related? I'll eventually be able to post this response.

>Always wondering exactly what people mean when they talk of "civil unrest", and who and how will it start. Do the various riots in 2020 America or the Jan 6 storming of the capitol count?

For sure those count. Racial civil unrest, riots, and insurrections are contemporarily happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_United_State...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_att...

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict this will continue. Occupy wallstreet and teaparty stuff started 10 years ago and the USA hasn't really stopped since. We can go into reasoning or causes but that's not important.

The bigger reality is what's next. We have some pretty seriously bad economic numbers going down. High inflation, strong possibility of a recession, very probably food security issues.

When you mix civil unrest and riots with hunger. It's going to be bad. A civil war isn't inevitable, though if i'm predicting correctly, it wont be democrat vs republican or north vs south.

>I think it's unlikely that merely raising rates will do anything, for two reasons: firstly there's a real need to do some fiscal policy as well, and secondly this inflation is being driven by real shortages not just the bidding up of goods. Chip shortages, fossil fuel shortages due to cutting Russia off the world market, food shortages, and the war in Europe's sixth-largest country destroying a lot of production capacity. Not to mention ongoing COVID costs.

May 4th, I'm expecting a huge rate increase. Probably headed well over 1% and nothing you or I say matters. Supply vs demand inflation is certainly debatable but won't change their course of action.

Something we should seriously be looking into is massive seeding effort for lakes. Get tons of fish growing this year. Get fishing boats out into the oceans pulling fish in. Major culling and harvesting of sharks.

Effectively the plan would be to produce significant more food than necessary and proactively deal with consequences like overfishing.

By eliminating this problem, we may eliminate the possibility of the unrest/riots becoming something more.

> Something we should seriously be looking into is massive seeding effort for lakes. Get tons of fish growing this year. Get fishing boats out into the oceans pulling fish in. Major culling and harvesting of sharks.

Accelerate the destruction of the fish ecosystem? It's already being run at capacity, ditching quotas will give you more in year 1 and a total disaster in subsequent years. Most sharks are endangered species; which do you want to make extinct for a political point?

>Accelerate the destruction of the fish ecosystem? It's already being run at capacity, ditching quotas will give you more in year 1 and a total disaster in subsequent years. Most sharks are endangered species; which do you want to make extinct for a political point?

I know the great lakes very well. We are maybe around 5% capacity there, possibly far less. I believe your confusion might be that you misunderstood when I said massive seeding effort.

Oceans are less than 1% capacity. I couldn't even fathom to tell you how many zeros are in that small fraction of 1 percent.

In terms of sharks, great whites, tigers, bulls, hammerheads. All are 'vulnerable' or less but certainly not endangered. Yes there's a handful of endangered shark species but none of those would be your typically targeted types.

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