• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.

    I’m not sure whether we’re going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.

    All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you’re lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country’s systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.

    Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and “the elite” – to borrow a tired trope – also played a part here.

    No matter how we arrived at this point, I don’t think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.

    There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy…but at this point I think we’re frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.







  • The only fast food I enjoyed in recent memory was Pizza Hut. During some scare about MSG they removed all of the MSG and I ordered it a time or two after that and it was nearly inedible.

    I suspect similar things happened with other types of fast food. I think there’s a flanderization effect happening with a lot of it. The same is definitively not the case for things like pizza in general, as I can order from my local NY-style pizza place and pizza is still just as good as it ever was.

    All that is to say it wouldn’t surprise me at all if fast food was objectively shittier across a number of different metrics.







  • every new tech has curves for their maturity, cultural & societal fit.

    I’d believe this “nothing to see here” narrative if recent “advances” such as social media didn’t have measurable negative impacts. Things can get worse, and technology can assist that.

    The voices coming out as skeptical of things, and the watchdogs telling you early on that these newly introduced things may present a problem are ultimately part of the apparatus that gets you “cultural and societal fit”. That doesn’t happen automatically and it’s called “the bleeding edge” for a reason.

    Ultimately, I’m also not so sure about AI being a fad at this point. It sure looks like enough capital is invested in this stuff to make it be a thing even if nobody wants it.