We need dramatic social and tech changes:is societal collapse inevitable? | Hacker News Reader

We need dramatic social and tech changes:is societal collapse inevitable?

theguardian.com

7 pointsxbmcuser4 comments

Society collapse has always and will always be inevitable, regardless the culture. Nothing is forever.

As far as things go short term, most of the real solutions to our issues as a global economic society are entirely unpalatable to the owner class. One example is we need to outlaw the manufacture of all or almost all plastics. That's not going to happen though, so we'll come up with increasingly complex and increasingly useless academic solutions as the problem worsens perpetually.

Any profitable problem will get worse perpetually, until it's impossible for anyone to ignore, at which point the owner class will shrug and say "We did our best, lads, nothing could have prevented this", pointing to their million dollar non-solutions, while they (hope to) escape to their trillion dollar space colony or whatever, funded by their plastic money of course.

Social collapse is inevitable as long as real, simple solutions are intolerable.

If social collapse is the concern - then the huge, global, and extremely fragile (but current-profit-optimized, for the owner class) supply chains of the modern world are the #1 concern. Millions of essential items (chips, drugs, face masks, manufacturing equipment, etc.) are made in highly specialized facilities, in far-flung countries. So we've got the "perfect" setup, for very local collapses (or just natural disaster or social unrest) to take something critical, somewhere, off-line - which mushrooms into a major global problem.

The whole "owner class escapes to their space colonies" scenario is a combination of SciFi fantasy and short-term-only self-delusion. Space colonies are incredibly fragile, compared to life on virtually any inhabited part of the Earth. And most of the basic technologies they require - starting with air, water, and food supplies - have (at best) only been demonstrated at micro-scale. With extremely high maintenance needs...which gets you right back to the supply chain issue.

Yeah, here's what people get wrong: the equilibrium.

The problems are not in manufacturing but in the methods, which exist entirely for additional magic money profit.

Engineering solved most of the critical problems in manufacturing ( temporarily - in & for their time and partially even timelessly ) adequately in the past 30+ years. There's a lack of ( radical ) honesty.

It's cowardice.

Sue the right people, hack to unfuck insurance, the stock markets, and the different VC cycles and there won't be any social collapse at all.

Humanity would be 'anti-fragile' if it wasn't for the what? 400 - 500 million idiots on the stock and crypto markets - and now all the "GenAI" soft- and hardware people as well - half of which aren't even pot-committed and could pull out at any point in time.

Cities are becoming filthy crime, drug, and homeless ridden hellholes. Literacy is dropping. There are city block after city block of empty buildings where businesses used to thrive. Yet the voters keep electing the same city and state leaders. Collapse is already significantly underway.

Blaming national leader's corruption, and of course Trump, is not the issue. The issue is that the voters keep voting for the status quo at the local city and state levels. It seems highly likely that ignorance, lack of education, corruption, rampant drug use, and dependence on government subsidies are the main causes for this. And none of that is showing any signs of improving.

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