Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Yet the new struggles are real too? explaining them away as more of the same does nothing. There are old problems and there are new problems and they're both problems.

View on HN

Yes there are struggles today. But there always have been. This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.

> This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.

I call bullshit... Debt. Bills. And for that matter, money. These are things that our species lived for hundreds of thousands of years without. Furthermore, there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.

> there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.

Instead of debt and bills, that moves the problem up to struggling to defend against tribes with better weapons who want your land/labor. Or natural disasters and no resilience due to trade network. Or dying from bacterial infections and childbirth complications.

It's hard to assess, especially from our position, which set of challenges the human soul prefers. But there's an interesting point to be made, touched in both "Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress"[0] as well as "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[1] that no 'savage' has been interested in non-coercively joining an 'advanced' society, whereas there are plenty of examples of 'civilized' people choosing the 'savage' life. I don't think the choice is as clear cut as it would superficially seem.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/d... [1] https://www.amazon.com/-/en/David-Graeber/dp/0374157359

As is plainly evident, the vast majority of savages have chosen to incrementally create and join civilized societies. It’s a much larger challenge for an illiterate hunter gatherer to make a multi millennia jump into modern society than it is for someone to do the reverse.

This says nothing about their level of wellbeing.

> As is plainly evident, the vast majority of savages have chosen to incrementally create and join civilized societies.

Have they chosen? Or were they civilized?

I think at the very least there was a sense that the struggles were leading to a better future. In America, it certainly feels like we’ve regressed from the optimistic “End of History” vision of the future of the ‘90s.

Absolutely - the thing I miss most about the 80s and 90s was the feeling that we could solve our problems (e.g. ozone layer, whaling)

The world was going to unite and we would set our sights on conquering space- even the disaster movies of the time were about humanity collectively dealing with a planetary threat (asteroid collisions).

Yes, that's true. For most of human history we feared starvation, not bankruptcy.

For a bit of context: people who were hit by the New Year's earthquake in Japan were living on small rice ball rations until aid could get to them. This is partly because Japan's 2.5 decades of economic consternation has forced the country to make hard choices about where investment goes - mostly to the dense major metropolitan areas, with their higher ROI, and not to the more rural ones that were affected by the natural disaster (hence, also, the long remediation process in Fukushima).

By way of comparison, much-less-dense America will find itself in trouble if it turns out that we're facing anything remotely similar in our weird will-it-won't-it stagflation.

The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities, and how infrastructure and aid - as in, water pipes and food access - are in the crosshairs just so that the whole shebang doesn't blow. Ironically, starvation may be back on the menu.

This is a weird take. Historically Japan has overinvested in rural infrastructure, because the ruling LDP's support base is rural, rural votes carry disproportionate weight, and when there's nothing going on economically construction is the best way to funnel money in.

In addition, Japan is exceptionally well prepared for disasters, probably better than any other country in the world. Those plans are regularly battle tested because it also has a lot of disasters. Yes, it took a while to get aid out, but that's because the tsunami wiped all coastal roads, railroads, airports etc, and AFAIK hunger was not an actual problem for survivors.

I'm not an expert, so I defer anyone who can present information contrary to my statements. That said, it would seem that "well-prepared" and "the tsunami wiped out all links" are contradictory. IIRC, many buildings and pieces of infrastructure were not up to anti-earthquake/fire/tsunami regulations due in part to their age. A quick check turns up an NHK article claiming that Ishikawa Prefecture's disaster preparedness plans were deemed insufficient by experts. https://web.archive.org/web/20240201140804/https://www3.nhk....

Additionally, I recall several documentaries and news reports that referenced the difficulty of delivering aid, including food, and the lack of preparedness for the extended period of dislocation.

In any case, I think it would actually be scarier to find that the conditions present after the recent earthquake were to be found in a country considered well-prepared for such disasters. Combined with the collective experience following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, we as Americans might be, for lack of a better term, f*cked.

Japan is incredibly mountainous, of course the transport links are near the coasts because that's the flat part where people actually live. There are sea walls etc built to guard coastal towns, but the size of the tsunami overwhelmed them and at that point you're screwed.

And yes, many buildings are out of code, because Japanese earthquake standards are continually strengthened and virtually anything built more than 20 years ago will not meet the newest set. This is also a big reason why the Japanese prefer to buy new houses.

Of course the disaster could have been handled better, and eg the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors was particularly bad, but (IMHO) they still did a better job this time than with the Kobe earthquake, where the Yakuza had to step in to help because the government was caught flat-footed by a disaster happening in the "wrong" place.

>The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities,

I'd be interested in reading this information. Is there a link on their site I can go to?

https://www.strongtowns.org/

https://www.youtube.com/@strongtowns/videos

The Strong Towns project cherry picks data to push a biased narrative. If looming insolvency of many American municipalities was a serious problem, then we would see that reflected in their bond yields and bond insurance rates. That isn't happening. Some cities in economically depressed areas will go bankrupt but nationwide the vast majority will muddle through and patch their infrastructure well enough to keep it working.

Some people just love catastrophizing.

yes but why do you keep saying it? It sounds like you are trying to invalidate people's modern problems or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com