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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

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in what sense is it getting worse? While there may be local minima, I'd argue that its the best its ever been. News has always been pessimistic because negative emotions are easier to trigger to drive attention which pays the bills.

We've already passed the 1.5 Degree Celsius limit on global warming. That alone has catastrophic consequences.

Yet, the production of fossil fuels remains near record levels, and producers are aiming to scale up, as opposed to scale down. Political discourse on this topic often amounts to "but my expenses are already too high."

For many people, this is still an abstract and slow moving problem. Yet, it is a very real problem with dire consequences. (That are somehow easy to ignore!)

Is the world getting worse?

In some ways, it's getting better.

Yet, we seem doomed to cause so much destruction. It's gonna be bad. Very bad. But not right away (for many of us).

https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/0...

While I agree that global warming is a serious issue without a clear future, it seems a little far fetched to attribute that as a factor in the deterioration of hackernews community's cultural standards.

We've been over-polluting with CO2 for over a 100 years[1]. I prefer to focus on how now we're slowly gaining the will and the way to address that.

- Solar and wind power

- New Nuclear options

- Grid Storage

- Electric vehicles

It would be nice if we'd done a hard left turn on the economy and somehow never got here but that was probably never realistic.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2889/

Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are

Is it clear? Microsoft of old? IBM of old? AT&T of old? Juggernauts with abusive monopoly power that tech companies today could only dream of.

Apple, Google, Amazon are every bit as bad, and Microsoft is still up there, too.

Assuming that’s true, is that counter to my statement? Mine was in response to someone saying it’s clear tech companies are getting worse, and your response to mine is they are just as bad? So also in your mind not clear they are getting worse, correct?

Just as bad, and then some. The big ones used to only have B2B power with vendor lock-in. The new ones have much more. They have power over their individual users, too, by locking in their data and controlling the communication and sharing with others, and trough that even over people who are not their customers yet. You want to communicate/share with person X? Looks like you have to have an account at Y for that, too bad, eh?

I'm getting visions of that New Yorker cartoon about shareholder value but it's just a techie in Allbirds saying "is it really worse, tho?"

Yeah, I mean, these companies are at the end of their "startup" lifecycle and are now just ordinary big companies that exist to chill and produce dividends. When you hear "Amazon", think "IBM". When you hear "Apple", think "Coca Cola". When you hear "Google", think "Goldman Sachs". All of those companies make an enormous amount of money but haven't done anything interesting in 50 years.

There will be new startups that eclipse all of these companies in interestingness. The one for the next 20 years is probably OpenAI.

Yeah this seems like the important factor to me. The whole industry is doing layoffs, at least partially in an explicit attempt to combat the insane amount of privilege that we techies have cultivated since the .com boom. Hacker News is bound to get a little more vicious when people are being fired and told that it’s because someone else took their job

A lot of things are getting superficially better (personal computing tech has never been more incredible), but there's a lot scary shit that is encroaching on the daily without sufficient plans in place to really deal with. Off the top of my head:

- Global warming and how we don't seem to have any plans to a path to hit any of the less-than-apocalyptic warming targets, - Corporate regulatory capture, with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily, - The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago, - This one is a combination of all three of the others (and a lot more), I suppose, but capitalism eating itself and taking a lot of really helpless-feeling people with it.

A lot of things do keep improving, but a) a lot of people never get to see or benefit from those improvements, maybe more than you think, and b) there are these terrible monsters on the horizon and nobody with the power to do anything about it seems to be willing to actually do so. It shouldn't take a whole lot of empathy to project yourself into the shoes of someone for whom shit is the worst it's ever been, nor a lot of creative thinking to realize that there's a whole lot of those people out there.

Would you agree that whatever you are currently working on, either at Nodewood or evisort, is contributing to this superficial betterment of the world? Not to be dense but you are talking about empathy for people who are at the bottom of the human totem pole while posting on a tech forum while working on products that most likely don't contribute anything to actually making the world a better place. If you really cared, you would give up almost everything to give up what you have to go help those in need...but I guess a post on HN will do as well.

Isn't that sad though? An entire industry that in your own words doesn't "contribute anything to actually making the world a better place"

I think people realize this more than they used to which explains so much of the tech pessimism

It is sad, I work in it as well, I ask myself "wtf am I doing" every single day. But the security of having and providing a warm/safe home for my family, being able to have fun experiences, etc...is too much to give up. I can definitely say I am selfish.

Friend, you're not going to get anywhere in life by being a disciple of Whataboutism, I promise you that.

You are not my friend, so let's not pretend. My response had nothing about whataboutism, and I am skeptical that you even know what that means based on your reply. I am directly saying that you are speaking from a high moral chair, while likely not actually doing anything to help the world. Its okay, I do the same thing, the difference between you and me is that I am not pretending to be Gandhi.

Oh here is a definition of whataboutism: "the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation or raising a different issue".

I am assuming you won't be able to figure it out though.

I think you two agree more than it seems.

You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse in general.

The OP is categorically wrong about some of their assessments:

"with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily"

Poverty around the world is being reduced on a massive scale. There are undeniable issues with wealth gaps, but the world population is still benefiting greatly from the imbalanced amount of downstream wealth coming to it.

"The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago"

The world has been dominated by these ideas for the majority of its existence. Several of the world powers still operate within these ideas, not to mention many of the third world countries, the power just moves from regime to regime. Acting like authoritarianism is "new" because the OP just got an inkling of it in their own country is pretty dense.

TLDR op just plucked a few news headlines that get re-iterated and made that their world view.

Friend,

A) poverty can be reduced while inequality increases. And inequality is definitely increasing. And the assessment that inequality isn’t that big of a deal and that we should focus only on poverty is very from a “categorical” assertion, imo.

B) “the world isn’t getting worse because bad things have existed in the past” isn’t a very clear argument. I think the BBC says it best: “Nationalism has always been a feature across Europe's political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006

Just enjoy your time here, plant a tree if that would make you happier. Don’t dig your self into an hole and loose sight of brighter things. / a parent

I think it’s more that the startup ecosystem has matured considerably since ~2007. Starting a company back then was still kind of a counter cultural thing, now it’s a common career path.

I guess it depends on your PoV. For example, for iraqis the world is much better now than it was in 2009 or 2007, at the peak of "tech optimism" when they were getting bombed into oblivion. And vice versa

> The world is actively getting worse so it makes sense the news is actively getting pessimistic.

This is Hacker News. Not news-news. HN does not have to, and should not, look or feel like a news site.

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