RelativeDelta

It's about a conflict of mutually opposed interests.

You and I exist as citizens of our respective nations. We have wants and needs, and we engage with politics (hopefully by voting) to pursue those wants and needs.

So long as we are part of the majority, it is likely our wants and needs will be more or less met.

When we are no longer in the majority, our needs and wants are less likely to be met.

When politicians import (or allow to be imported) a new demographic into the voter base, who bring with them new collections of wants and needs, that activity harms our bargaining position as politicians are no longer beholden to our interests.

In America, in an era where special treatment and incentives and punishments are being awarded on the basis of ethnicity(which cannot be changed or altered), this maters even more.

We exist in a zero-sum system of relative power.

Changing society to cope with climate change functionally means picking which humans get to survive it.

The pure amount of projected arable land is insufficient to feed even 20% of the projected global population, let alone all the social instability mass climate migration will/already is kicking off.

Dealing with that reality via the proxy of some global body like the UN just means ceding the power to decide which groups live and die in what numbers to the global majority.

That's not you, and it definitely isn't going to be your kids if you even have any.

They're talking about the immigrants kids who are replacing you.

One would hope so.

The WW3 factions are lining up, so it seems inevitable that the sides would start to arm themselves in preparation.

From the perspective of the executive branch it very much did. Arguably still does, depending on your political persuasion.

Regardless of whether it would work or not it would disempower both halves - that alone makes it unlikely.

That is also why conflict is only going to increase over time until one side or the other is decisively defeated (and even then there will be clandestine groups).

It is because they are tasked with the preservation of the United States as a political entity.

Anything or group that threatens the power of the state becomes their target - those targets evolve with time.

It's both.

VEs are increasing in number and sophistication over time because the social contract of the United States has been cleaved.

On one side you have individualistic capitalists who don't want to be told what to do and don't want to subsidize the existence of others.

On the other you have communal idealists who recognize the scale advantage state actions and programs can have and want to deploy them.

The later are winning and the former do not have a political exit that does not involve secession.

That's the fundamental base. The heightened media attention being paid to instances of the above are in response to the general understanding that those fundamentals are now in place.

It'll probably be about as bad for the natives now as it was then.

Only difference is you have the option to stop it.

Relative difference in power.

If we have a smaller population we are at a tactical disadvantage in inevitable wartime.

Lower birthrates are only acceptable if they are experienced equally. They are not.

They won't be Amish, they'll be African.

The Amish lose a significant share of their children to secularism each epoch.

Climate change will force 1/3rd of the world's population out of Africa and into Europe/The Americas/South Asia within the next 30 years.

Unless you kill them at the border like the Saudi's are doing they will always still have incentive to get into your country by any means.

People in the know aren't trying to stop it, they're trying to regulate it enough to ensure it advances their agendas.

Because abilities correlate across wide swaths of personality traits.

A group of highly skilled competent people working on a shared highly specialized project will more likely than not be similar in other ways - enough so to establish common behavior patterns which become a shared culture that then gets adopted as a default mode of relation for efficiency.

Extrapolate that dynamic up to an entire sector and you find that certain combinations produce better results. Those then become popular and spread until they are all quite similar and stable.

Voila, a monoculture is born.

Almost like these arose as functional elements of society across time because they assisted those who followed them in outlasting their competitors. Weird.

Detroit is a great example and also a stark warning.

Detroit never learned, and still hasn't learnt, it's lesson.

You cannot repair a broken population after a doom loop. Keeping it on life support merely entrenches dependance and makes it even harder to undo the damage even generations down the line.

Doom loops only end when the population that doomed the area consumes itself, if they are prevented from doing so though programs, nothing improves.

No. Doom loops are products of demography.

You need a certain number of people capable of doing enough valuable work and willing to accept a reasonable tax on the value of that work in order to run a functional city, let alone a metropolitan one.

As talent and corporations leave, these demos get worse. As they get worse more companies and people want to leave and the drop accelerates.

This leaves only those reliant on the city/area and drives away the actual producers of value that previously kept it alive.

The trick will be ensuring this doesn't occur again after the inevitable collapse.

Other municipalities should take note:

Keep your % of competent high earners high or your city will die.

It's almost like this is occuring across entire societies as they lose a shared vision of the world and are thus less able to trust in cooperative networks. Weird.

I'm not a particularly political person, so I'll try to limit myself here to my fields of knowledge (namely biology).

I first want to clarify that I'm not advocating for social Darwinism. I'm using it as a foil to show how our society is NOT darwinist, as we have well established institutions who's entire purpose is to prevent death as a result of fitness failure.

My point with the poor(referring to the welfare class, not the working poor)/young/uneducated being unproductive is to point out merely that they are. WHY they are is for a much larger discussion.

That said, I wouldn't be overly concerned about people being temporarily disenfranchised. As you mentioned, the overall trend is for it to expand regardless of obstacle. A trend not to be taken for granted, but one which can be comfortably taken as faith.

Population and demographics matter far more over time. They represent the upper and lower bounds of the groups that can be enfranchised at all.

In short, even if some elections are bent by some actors to make victory more likely for their side, if they aren't cementing that victory in the form of future generations of whatever they define as their ingroup (biological, cultural, creedal, etc.) then their gains are temporary and will erode with time as they are simply replaced and new group interests take over.

And yes, if humans engaged in the social equivalent of memory garbage collection that would look an awful lot like eugenics. The tricky thing is that eugenics, when applied to actually heritable traits as opposed to merely associated traits (think Crohn's disease or sickle cell anemia vs something like income), does 'work' in that it reduces the % composition of whatever negative factor is being targeted. People are upset about the word 'eugenics' because it was so closely associated with racism. That made it morally repugnant, but unlike, say, phrenology before it eugenics is far more 'correct' in that it's predictions are accurate over time. The real heart of the remaining valid controversy over it is what traits are targeted for expansion or removal and how/if that is enforced in practice.

For example, in almost all developed countries, pregnant women have samples taken to do genetic screening on their children early on in pregnancy. These can detect things like aneuploidy, NTDs, heritable conditions (like sickle cell), and even facial features if you check for them. While facial feature results are uncommon, it is very common for women to be recommend a termination if their child will have some major genetic condition. This is eugenics, yet we have found it more help than not.

Exactly correct, but perhaps not in the way you think.

Having excess retinol does not offer 'protection' in the literal sense. It does not shield your DNA as it replicates to replace the cells that died at the elevated rate of death due to UV exposure.

Rather, retinol is rare (% of bodymass) and is a key component of the chain of cell duplication. Having excess retinol available means your processes won't 'run out' of it when they need it. This protects from the biological equivalent of 'cutting corners' in manufacturing and THIS is how it reduces transcription error.

It's preventative by way of avoiding a deprivation.

If you are anticipating any excess cell death for any reason, it is better to have a slight oversupply of retinol as well as a variety of other antioxidants. The benefits are (literally) microscopic but are cumulative over a lifespan.

Think of it a bit like brushing your teeth. You're not rebuilding enamel, you're preventing it's loss.

Thank you for the considered response.

My GC comparison was meant to show how optimized systems remove unproductive consumers of resources. Here 'unproductive' can simply mean consuming more net production than you generate (largely through tax and program subsidy).

The poor are, generally, unproductive. The uneducated are, generally, unproductive. The young are, generally, unproductive.

I had meant to illustrate that if elections had necessarily been created intentionally to perform a similar action, we would see elements in society that sought to perform a sort of socially Darwinian 'GC'. But we don't, we see the opposite where these groups are somewhat provided for despite their inefficiency and we have active programs that prevent (or attempt to prevent) them falling victim to the human equivalent of 'GC'.

I am meaning to use this as evidence that electoral democracies have evident features that developed over time counter to what majoritarian ruthlessness would suggest.

Then I threw a jab in at the end suggesting that this altruism can itself be a weakness if it is maintained in an increasingly resource-scarce environment (harder to develop/sustain complexity).

I generally agree with your political assesment. Humans are fundamentally seperate individuals, and thus have incentive for selfish strategies, but there are a lot of us and we compete in team because that too is a dominant strategy. Riding the line between group size, group cohesion, resource to power conversion efficiency, and individual vs collective interest is seemingly an eternal task.

I doubt that they are in there by design. Ascribing (or implying through framing) malicious intent to an object of criticism is very trendy these days as audiences are eager for justifications to destroy and rebuild various systems.

In computer science (a field I am admittedly only tangentially knowledgeable in) there is a process called 'garbage collection' in which portions of a zero-sum resource base (memory) are periodically freed up by removing the unused/underutilized processes so that the primary program or series of programs can use them to accomplish a directed task.

One would imagine that if electoral politics truely was designed maliciously it would have some similar function, yet we have the opposite in the form of various social safety nets which actively seek to prevent this.

Humanity most frequently seeks to do good. We fail, surely, but we strive nonetheless. What really worries me is whether this impulse will doom us in the lifeboat of the climate-ravaged future... But that's a topic for another day :)

I suspect this is what Musk will undo.

Blocking will become a way to filter out responses you don't like, but others who follow you will still see comments and reactions if they also do not already have a user blocked.

To be fair, inexperience, desperation, and stupid is a very potent and very dangerous mix.

I am unfamiliar with "epigenetic aging". Are you talking about methylation causing worse performance in one arena or another?

Immune atrophy and toxic accumulation I would read as being the terminal effects of decreased functionality as a result of error accumulation, no?

Fascinating perspective, but less applicable to typical dementia than to something more in the vein of schizophrenia.

An oversupply of undifferentiated signals and overly permissive signal processing.

It functionally is. Aging is just the build-up of error in genes as microscopic write errors accumulate in successive cell epochs.

It is, in short, a degenerative process marked by the failure to perfectly maintain instruction sets for the creation and maintenance of structures that allowed for survival.

Reading that back it almost sounds political.

Sadly unlikely. Excess Retinol concentrations do not reduce the rate of base transcription error, nor do they prevent passive oxidative stress.

What they do is preempt extra-environmental stress and the resultant write error. This is less protective and more avoidive.

IE, if you have less Retinol then you are genetically optimized for you will accrue slightly more oxidative stress as a result of your deficiency. Supplements can prevent this particular stress by alleviating deficiency, but they can't reduce it beyond whatever your base rate is.

The question is which population?

Especially relevant as the structure of aging is different relative to the rate of cellular replacement.

The more frequently cells replicate the faster they accumulate transcription error. Mice have a cell doubling rate far FAR higher than humans, so we would expect a wildly different pattern in encoding.

Sadly it's the opposite. The people choosing not to become parents are exactly the people who would LEAST become climate refugees.

The vast majority of children today are being born in regions they will have to flee, while the regions they will flee to are hollowing themselves out.

The scenario leans towards a future where the very people who were best positioned to save the world chose not to because the challenge of it made them sad.