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Velocity Raptor posted:With all these chemical spills and train derailments happening lately, is this indicative of a bigger problem currently happening, or is it just frequency bias and the fact that these things are what people are paying attention to currently? In terms of derailments, we've been averaging three a day for over a decade, we're actually at a bit of a low right now though still around there, slightly up from last year but not a lot. We're at around half what we were in the 90s/2000s in terms of accidents per mile. Not sure how that translates to chemical spills specifically.
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Mar 27, 2023 14:56
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Veryslightlymad posted:I'm more distressed that so many people believe in the lie of hard work than I am in any decline of any other dubious personal value. Hard work is an extremely useful instrumental value for a wide variety of terminal values, even moreso in the current US environment where a lot of the things that made it less important (like functioning trust networks) are now less available, and where you need to work harder to get a lot of the things you want. Hard work, well, works, for a hell of a lot of things, especially when you don't have a lot else in terms of assets. Most of the good things remaining in my life still exist because there are still people willing to work hard to make them happen. Also, when adopted as a value, it provides a cheap source of confidence, pleasure, and bonding. There are a lot of lies people tell about hard work, but the survey doesn't seem to make any effort to tease out how many believe those. I don't think valuing hard work in and of itself requires believing any lies. Also, I know at least a few people who are huge believers in the importance of hard work as a value but don't, for example, apply that to things like "their job". Veryslightlymad posted:Those were the only values they even bothered to ask about? I don't know how to feel about that. "Like I don't belong here," I guess. Frankly, this is the part that confused me, what an odd subset of "values" to consider "defining American character" and "who we are" GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:29
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CuddleCryptid posted:It's difficult for legislators to go in front of people and go "we'll cut down a lot on shootings but we can't do everything", even if it's a gigantic reduction. It's significantly more difficult when they never bother to demonstrate or argue or even make an empty promise that it would be a gigantic reduction, it's usually "and it might do something maybe, every little bit helps right?". At least from what I've encountered in New England, the actual narrative being sold tends to make even meaningful gun control legislation feel anemic and symbolic, and driven primarily by the need to "do something" rather than by any belief that the something being done will actually help the problem.
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Mar 29, 2023 14:43
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:These poll results aren't really new and are kind of infamous, but the trend of the last 30 years or so where large majorities of Americans desperately want completely contradictory things is still holding strong. This is a lot less contradictory when you recognize that the fully expanded statement is "Cut taxes for me". I don't know why the Dems haven't bothered offering a plan that involves tax cuts for the majority of the population coupled with increased taxes on the wealthy so they could sell the whole thing as an important comprehensive tax reform under the label "Biden/Democrat Tax Cut", considering that seems to be a popular combination.
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Mar 29, 2023 15:03
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I do wonder what the breakdown looks like - is it that most people want a few things cut, but the things they want cut all differ wildly? Like if you're funding A, B, C and D, and have 4 people, and each of them thinks one of those needs to be cut completely and half its moneys moved to the thing of their choice, you'd have 75% thinking "good enough or more" for each item but 100% agreement that "the government spends too much" Of course there's probably also just a lot of "I want stuff without having to pay for it" as well
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Mar 29, 2023 16:00
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Isn't it absolutely undeniably a crime under the Watergate laws? Not accepting the gifts, but the complete failure to report them?
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Apr 6, 2023 16:36
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Fart Amplifier posted:It's deniably a crime, because they're going to deny it. Are they? I don't see why they'd bother when they can simply ignore it, it's not like anyone who matters is ever going to formally accuse them.
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Apr 6, 2023 18:47
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Vahakyla posted:DADT is similar to the 3/5th's compromise in that both are remembered as the actual evil, instead of the significant easing of the evil. Err... in what way was the 3/5ths compromise an "easing" of the evil? It literally made things worse than the starting and default position (not counting them), there was no previous worse condition where they were completely counted for it to have eased them from, it was literally just "slavers get more votes in Congress or we'll destroy the nascent union". It was an evil that could have been worse, sure. It was possibly necessary to allow it to achieve other good things. But it was a move in the evil direction nonetheless. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Apr 7, 2023 |
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Apr 7, 2023 01:12
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Velocity Raptor posted:The bolded parts pretty much describe me, a millennial who graduated college towards the beginning of the recession, 2009. You have a reduced say in president, perhaps, but you have an outsized vote on Senate makeup, which is far more important. You're also in the top five states of how much say you as an individual have at the state level. Your political goals as a Rhode Islander should really be focused on those elements, especially the Senate if you are interested in federal level political importance - you have 39x as much voting power in terms of influencing federal legislation as a Californian, don't act like that's nothing!
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Apr 9, 2023 17:35
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Trump absolutely ignored court decisions and would have ignored all of them if he wasn't reliant on the bureaucracy to do anything that mattered, but he never really had the opportunity to do so in a way that mattered (beyond investigations into him personally) because the bureaucracy largely refused to follow along. Even Republican bureaucrats generally aren't willing to ignore the courts, not openly at least.
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Apr 11, 2023 01:11
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Gyges posted:All livestock rearing is an the inefficient process where we Not all livestock rearing is an inefficient process, or we never would have started doing it. Livestock rearing can actually be done quite efficiently, but modern factory farming is about maximizing outcome - and less efficiency for more total production is the trade-off pretty much all of the industry makes every time the opportunity comes up. lil poopendorfer posted:It’ll be insect-based protein, actually. Cultured meat simply isn’t viable at scale. Producing a small sample of meat to drum up venture funding is a far cry from producing it at scale. I've literally never gotten the point of insect based protein. It has literally none of the appeal of eating meat while being less efficient than eating plants. It seems to occupy a dietary and economic deadzone that leaves no one happy. Kalit posted:My doomerism is because when it comes to human invention, including all of the items you listed, it always prioritizes convenience over everything, especially environmental impact. But that's exactly why cultured meat is likely to take off. It actually is more convenient, in addition to being potentially much more profitable. The environmental benefits are wonderful and will get it some R&D money, but it's not why its being pursued - its being pursued because it potentially gives customers what they want in a way that's far more profitable than traditional factory farming. Lumpy posted:This. What percentage of people who claim to care about global warming still eat meat? If everyone changed their behavior, we'd solve the problem in no time, but people are unwilling or unable (it'd be nice to work walking distance from work, but lol at affording it!) to do so, so solutions have to come from policies that force action at the system level. [ insert doomerism about that happening in time here ] Arguing people should "change their behaviour" doesn't work when you have a solid block of people that will never change their behaviour - collective action requires either large-scale solidarity, or the use of force. A situation where if everyone who agrees with you did everything you wanted at massive personal cost and the only outcome is things continue to get worse at half the speed is not a convincing one.
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Apr 12, 2023 18:27
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Failed Imagineer posted:I mean that was literally my exact post about media sources, it's just that US MSM sources generally aren't worth the effort due to low signal:noise ratio The implication with the "mainstream" is that non-mainstream US media sources are better, and I have not, generally, found that to be the case. Honestly, US media most people consider "MSM" is probably on the better side of the US media spectrum.
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Apr 12, 2023 19:32
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I don't think the lack of partisan consensus on the left on the issues of food is a bad thing. It's a complex topic with lots of different ways to view it even between people whose core values are pretty similar.
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Apr 12, 2023 21:20
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PT6A posted:The odd thing is that it tells parents they should be assholes, and most parents don’t want to be assholes. Most parents love their kids and want to help them, even at a personal cost, and instead of saying they shouldn’t, would it not make more sense to figure out how society drove us to this point? Also, they warn it will kick off the "vicious cycle" of leaving your kids financially stable enough to help you in turn if your own financial situation becomes precarious.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:27
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Honestly, I would fuckin' kill to vote for a genuinely progressive low-class, vulgar shithead who pisses off the people with "good taste" with every harmless aesthetic gesture he makes. I hate Trump supporters with a burning passion, but that particular sentiment is one I can fully get behind.
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Apr 16, 2023 04:44
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Charlz Guybon posted:Don't electric vehicles break down much, much less because there's an order of magnitude fewer moving parts? Significantly more expensive to fix when it does break, though, and trucks have a lot more parts to break that aren't the engine. And we don't actually know how frequently electric trucks would break down or how much more expensive most of those fixes would be that would let us figure out whether that would end up as significant savings or significant losses.
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Apr 18, 2023 05:24
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Which is technically true and there is definitely some element of sexism in that nobody ever said that about male Senators, but they also should have resigned and "everybody else does it" isn't really a great reason to continue the trend. Uh... nobody has ever said what about male senators, exactly? Because the calls for male senators to resign as soon as it might actually hurt the party for them to stay seem to be pretty much immediate, from what I recall of when situations have come up in the past? Traditionally the quickest way to get someone out of the Senate while letting them save face is to offer them a job in the administration - I wonder if Biden has considered that option? Seems worth sacrificing a pretty importing position if it means getting confirmations through. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 20:40
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the_steve posted:Other people already posted links to studies proving trans athletes don't have the advantage that critics claim they do, but my kneejerk reaction was "Well if you concede that trans athletes shouldn't be allowed in sports, then you're tacitly admitting that you are not a 'real' man or woman, that you are some sort of Other." and that just seems like ground you shouldn't want to give up. Being able to play in a specific sport is not what I'd consider the defining feature of a "real" man or woman considering most men and women cannot actually play most sports, largely down to genetics and chance, and sports themselves are an entertainment industry that exists primarily to ensure the highest likelihood of "fair" (usually somewhat balanced), entertaining games. That's the whole reason there's a man/woman split in many sports at all - to make things more entertaining and "fair". It's also why some sports split people into weight classes instead, or in addition to, a gender split, because again - the goal is to get entertaining somewhat equal matches between people. So no, I don't think you need, or should, to associate "realness" here with sports participation. Although a lot of the current anti-trans environment is using that as an excuse to try and Other-ize people, and they're the ones pushing things and reality doesn't line up with them, but there are plenty of pro-trans folk who see them as real men and real women that can still be convinced to buy in by their bullshit logic as a result. Edit: Also, at the local/school level I'm pretty sure you could convince most parents to ban anyone they suspect might be better than their own precious child from playing, for purely selfish reasons, which makes them susceptible to this sort of argument as well. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 16:16
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Dubar posted:What is the functional purpose of having children undress in a communal space anyway? It seems like the stripping of privacy and imposed shame are the point. That experience was probably the first clear memory I can have of anxiety, and that is without any added baggage from dysphoria The functional reason was largely just how much cheaper it is to do things that way, and also because cooking down and chilling together after a game while changing and getting cleaned up is actually really nice when around people you like anyway. It also potentially helps people from extremely prudish families become more comfortable with the idea of conditional nudity as opposed to it being an absolute taboo, something that is good for the health of society and practicallly required for a lot of rather nice experiences to be feasible later in life and not just restricted to the very wealthy. If you're not completely afflicted by the weird prudish body shaming complex that does, admittedly, currently pervade American culture, it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing.
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Apr 22, 2023 21:24
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Rappaport posted:Bernie endorses Sleepy Joe, will not run for president in 2024 (link to AP news) I agree with him, honestly - I feel like to the extent progressives are going to make political gains in the next election, it will come through winning seats in Congress (primarying conservadems and beating republicans where possible) rather than pursuing a failed presidential run, and we should be focusing on fundraising and organizing to that end instead. Mooseontheloose posted:Voters don't vote for the Vice President and there is no electoral incentive to change. Honestly, that is the incentive to change? He could put someone useful in the position and the average voter wouldn't notice or care. The problems are with political alliances, if anything.
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Apr 26, 2023 16:02
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the_steve posted:Well sign me the gently caress up. I started it recently and am quite hopeful. They have a very slow ramp up time, so I'm two months in and it will still by a while before I'm using the final, genuinely effective dose, but I have already been seeing improvements. Not only am I less hungry, but overeating feels... almost unpleasant? Like even when I was losing weight before, there was always, always that guilty pleasure of throwing an entire pizza down my stomach in one go - now it only takes like four slices before I think "I don't really want any more, maybe I'll save this for later". It's honestly kind of magical. BonoMan posted:There was a decent Science Vs. episode on Ozempic the other day. It apparently does actually work! (I know I'm just parroting the article) The habits it establishes are actually the exact problem, there. When you take them, you can easily settle into a habit of "only eat when hungry, and only eat as much as it takes to not be hungry", which is an incredible way to lose weight when you don't get hungry often and feel satiated sooner when you eat. If you stop taking the meds, the habits you have built for your successful weight loss basically immediately transition into habits that will cause massive weight gain. Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Not necessarily. Only about 11% of Americans have diabetes and about 60% of the country is overweight. According to Harvard Medical School, about 30% of overweight people end up with diabetes at some point in their lives. We're up to over 70% overweight now, actually, your numbers are a bit out of date. Unless you meant straight up obesity, which is still only a bit above 40%. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 17:03
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Mellow Seas posted:I think it's good that people are going to be better able to lose weight if they want - I've been a lot of different weights and less weight definitely feels better. Our definitions of overweight and obese are pretty arbitrary, though. Once you get to a point where 72% of people are "abnormal" it's time to start rethinking what normal is. These definitions are not based on actual health outcomes, they're based on a chart from the 1830s. Obesity has been normal for quite a while now and I think most people know that? What does "abnormality" have to do with anything? zoux posted:Maybe this is because of my own personal failings, but I'm coming around on the idea that "willpower" is something like height or hair color, that if you don't have it you can't get it. And given obesity rates and abysmal success rates of non-medical obesity interventions, most people don't have it. There isn't even really a general thing that can rightly be called "willpower" (there's a large cluster of loosely associated items that be could all be considered such) and I don't think it has all that much impact on most folks weight, but to the extent it exists and isn't just the enivronmental conditions making it easier or harder, it certainly isn't intrinsic - it can be trained, though how much training in one area will help in others is questionable. However, we have built a society that kinda intentionally tries to atrophy it at every turn, which probably isn't good? Combined with requiring more and more of it from people for the same end result.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:39
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zoux posted:I tend to agree with this, I believe, and I think it would be pretty common around here anyway, that we are entirely products of our genetics and our upbringing, neither of which we have any control over. But I'm also cognizant that this view also eliminates accountability, and while there may be one day an enlightened society that compassionately views all social, cultural, and legal transgressions as something that merely needs to be corrected without retribution or judgment, we ain't there. I don't think you can completely rule out environment as you're doing here - and part of the problem is that cultural beliefs are part of the environment that shapes what we do - believing we are in control of our actions might well lead to significantly better outcomes than believing we aren't, even if the second is closer to true.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:17
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zoux posted:Upbringing is environment. The rest of the environment, then.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:21
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pork never goes bad posted:Can you cite the bolded part showing that this is true in humans who restrict calories as part of a diet? Either you are making a trivially true point that is useless in the discussion of obesity management and public policy related to obesity or you are making a false point. A lot of this commenting seems to be saying people are wrong and then, when pressed, admitting that they are right but then arguing that it's not important or its bad because the implications of saying it are bad? As far as persuasive tactics go, it's really not working well from my perspective, and you seem to want to convince people so I figured I'd point out that at least for me, another approach might see better results than that one. (To top it all off, the argument on the whole you are making here, in terms of implications, is way worse, since your actual argument seems to amount to "we should not help people lose weight, and its not a medical issue so insurance shouldn't cover weight loss pills or anything really for people who want it, because if its not causing serious survival-based health problems its obviously not a problem for people" which is bulllllllshit) Mellow Seas posted:Here's a recent study I found, it's limited in scope but supports the principle: https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/12593-weight-loss-may-take-longer-than-expected-due-to-metabolic-adaptation Why does this article read like it was poorly written by a robot? Anyway, in my anecdotal experience, the major influence to metabolic loss here is just... losing weight. Ignoring any larger metabolic adaptations that may occur or how long they might last, like those mentioned in that article (though its interesting that the article says it disappears after only a few weeks), lots of folks dieting don't really seem to grasp that the more of you there is, the more you burn, simply through basic body processes, and losing weight at a consistent rate means that even if nothing else was a factor you would still need to make regular downwards adjustments to your caloric intake. This is the big reason almost every CICO program I've seen has a floating target that changes on your current weight, and why as you lose weight there's increasing emphasis on the "out" part. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 21:13
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Jaxyon posted:Insurers literally use personal BMI as a cutoff for covering bariatric surgery This seems like the opposite of the problem people are complaining about? Like specifically what is wrong with the requirement here, I'm not sure what your complaint is? Edgar Allen Ho posted:In no world are you so hard pressed that drive thru at rush hour is saving you time or money compared to a million slow cooker dishes or even slapping together a sandwich at home. HFCS is easily avoidable without paying extra at fancy places, it’s at walmart for store brand prices. Total actual time and money is not actually the resource that's at a premium, though they can be as well, but generally it is capacity, complexity, practical time and money. Drive through meals have minimal overhead, minimal executive burden, and are very hard to gently caress up. Slow cooker dishes offer a hundred different things that need to be done and managed to make them happen and you can gently caress up at any of those steps. Home sandwiches are easier by a wide margin, but (and I say this as a sandwich lover) there's still at least a dozen potential failure points and a comparative increase in cognitive load. I know, I hit most of them pretty regularly and realize I've hosed myself yet again and end up ordering out instead because I just can't deal with yet another loving thing, you know? And that's working from home now, where everything is much simpler, I managed to gently caress up bringing sandwiches to the office at least twice a week on average. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 22:04
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Zamujasa posted:I feel like your pedantic retort swings it too far the other way again with "unpleasant". It's not just merely going "I will simply not eat so much", it's constantly ignoring and rejecting your body's call to eat something. There is a systemic problem and "just willpower harder" is not the answer. If it was, we wouldn't be in the middle of an obesity crisis. You absolutely can willpower harder to get through. I've done it, and "unpleasant" is about right. Of the things I've willpowered through, hunger... isn't really one of the hard ones? It's nothing compared to one of the tough ones like boredom or fear - at least, and this should be emphasized, for me. But I'm also clear and abundant evidence that willpower isn't the solution, even if it can be a component. poo poo doesn't benefit you one iota unless several of the other pieces are in order. FizFashizzle posted:This isn’t correct. Err... that is absolutely correct. At least for my insurance they need a minimum BMI before they'll consider you as a candidate. If you want to talk maximum BMI, though, I've only ever been denied for that for the sleep apnea surgery I (almost) had last year. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 02:13
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the_steve posted:At the time, it was telling her that she was 5 pounds or so over the ideal. I don't remember her exact measurements, but she was fuckin' tiny. At 100lbs (which you seem to have proposed as the max), she'd have to be 4ft5 inches tall to be considered "heavier than ideal". At 5ft, she'd have to be over 128lbs to be. This isn't just a bit of playing around the edges of uncertainty about exact values - what you're saying here is a massive mismatch versus the numbers you're citing and the reality. If she had an eating disorder, are you sure she wasn't just... making things up, to you, to make it sound better? Mendrian posted:"You can will your way through a diet, I've done it, it's just hard" is sort of the core of the problematic attitude. If you've done it, we can conclusively say that the sum total of factors in your life contributed to it being possible for you. As a human, when something feels difficult that we nonetheless achieved, it is natural (but wrong) to conclude that your own strength was the primary contributing factor and other people, if they merely exercised the same tenacity, would also succeed. If this is in response to me, maybe you should finish reading the post before you respond since the point seems to have flown completely over your head. On a sociological scale it can absolutely be 100% true and still result in the outcomes we have right now. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 14:10
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Main Paineframe posted:On the other hand, even if they'd caught and summarily executed Nancy Pelosi and AOC, that wouldn't be the end of American democracy. It'd just be a couple more political murders. Wasn't the larger scheme in place and one of the key players just... walked away and refused to do what Trump had told him to do? Unfortunately I don't remember much in the way of details, some sort of security head Trump wanted there and he just said hell no?
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May 1, 2023 02:58
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Fister Roboto posted:Other than WW2, when have capitalists ever allied with communists for anything? Didn't the US ally with the commies in Iraq against Saddam, and actually maintain that alliance for a while pretty successfully?
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May 1, 2023 16:48
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cat botherer posted:I was just looking for this, and can't find any mention of such an alliance from googling. The US famously supported Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, however. The Kurdish ones, specifically, seem to be part of our larger middle east coalition alliance, or at least they used to be from what I remember? I don't know, maybe I'm remember wrong.
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May 1, 2023 17:00
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Zamujasa posted:my unfounded guess is that rents went up because people wanted more money and, what are you gonna do, go homeless? That pressure is always there, though, but its usually countered by the pressure of "poo poo I need to fill this room with a decent tenant and the decent tenants have cheaper options elsewhere, I gotta keep the prices low enough to get them to stay here or they'll rent somewhere else or just get a mortgage and buy a place". Unfortunately, tightly coupled in with the housing market changes, that second concern is no longer much of a concern.
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May 3, 2023 23:00
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Tayter Swift posted:I get the sentiment but I'm having trouble giving a poo poo about under $15k in stock. Maybe I should :/ $15k adds up when its happening time and time again, with a whole bunch of people doing it, and this is just the one where its obvious enough to notice.
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May 4, 2023 00:49
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I AM GRANDO posted:Is this Thomas stuff going anywhere? People knew he was an absolute monster in the 80s and he was still confirmed. The only place its going is into building a narrative that the court is fundamentally flawed and corrupt and that serious reform is the only solution, a public narrative which might bear fruit if the Democrats ever regain a strong legislative advantage. Directly and immediately, it will accomplish nothing.
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May 4, 2023 15:27
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Ghost Leviathan posted:'Reform from the inside' is a childish fantasy, and there's a reason even children's cartoons that show it as the 'happy ending' never actually get around to showing the results, or quietly forget about it. You're either converted or killed. Even joining the military to at least learn combat skills is crapshoot given the likelihood of getting abovementioned Pat Tillman treatment, or just your life thrown away or coming back broken in mind and body. The far right wingers seem to have done an incredibly good job at reforming things from the inside in the security forces, while having had difficulty doing so in the military specifically because of the reliable presence of those who are not right wingers. Ceding control of the tools for projecting power to the right wing seems unwise - even a leftist utopia would need a functioning military and military industrial base. There's no actual obligation to join one of those groups as a leftist and thinking so would be stupid, but similarly shaming and driving away anyone who does join those groups, where all the best-case scenarios sort of require some portion of them to be on your side, seems very unwise.
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May 8, 2023 03:22
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fizzy posted:I read this article. It indicates throughout, and concludes, that the interviewee is a sociopath who hunts the most dangerous game, and ends with a condemnation of the interviewee as being "guilty". I enjoyed this even if the others didn't get the joke (or they continued it more subtly than I managed to detect, in which case I'm a moron)
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May 8, 2023 15:48
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kzin602 posted:Because the shareholders want to get paid. It should be noted that it used to be that investing in a mid-sized company that focused on long term stability was a very effective way to get paid. The modern stock market has basically destroyed traditional valuation and shareholder dividends in favour of gambling-adjacent speculation as the driving force of economic progress, though, Our acceptance, or rather active encouragement, of that, basically building the bitcoin-esque hype system in as a fundamental component of the modern economy, is a real issue. We aren't just doing capitalism at this point, we have intentionally embraced a kind of speculative capitalism that really accentuates many of its negatives. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 02:22 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 02:18
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Jarmak posted:Continuous growth is required because inflation means if you're not growing you're losing money. Modern investors also tend to favor growth over dividends... which means the profit that would be paid out as dividends gets reinvested into the company. Inflation requiring continuous growth to counter is especially funny, just, like, as a concept. It represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of, like... literally everything. Yes, it means a stable, non-growing company will have to do things like fiddle with prices and wages to keep up, but that's not growth. This is almost as stupid as the people saying that inflation means we need to pay a higher percentage in tips. Also, on the population front, it should be worth knowing that "stagnancy" in terms of population terms if the ideal we're gonna fail to live up to, and shrinkage is the reality we're currently papering over already anyway. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 14:33 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 14:30
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James Garfield posted:The UN projects that the US population will grow ~10% between now and 2050. The US birth rate is 1.64 and falling. We had had several years of growth of only like two tenths of a percent, and that growth was based *entirely* on immigration. Birth rates are falling worldwide, including in the countries we currently rely on to keep our own population stable. The same UN also projects that the US population is going to get steadily older, and thats not exactly a sustainable model for growth either. So I have my doubts as to how accurate a prediction that is, and I wasn't able to find it myself to figure out where they think it was coming from so I'd appreciate you linking it. Even if its true though, the previous 30 years had 15% growth and the 30 before that had 28% growth - it's obvious the direction we're heading it and that population growth of the sort we've been building on is not a sustainable long term strategy for juicing the economy. Edit: I couldn't find the UN projection, but CBO puts 30 population growth at 9% so that's close enough. It also bases that entirely on the assumption that we are going to increase our immigration rates which... well, we certainly could, and maybe capital will make sure it happens, but I wouldn't say that's a guarantee, and it's exactly the sort of "papering over" I was talking about. It also points to a steadily aging population and a massive increase in the percent of it that is retired, which aren't really in the same place economically and I do wonder how that will impact things. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 16:58 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 16:49
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:23 |
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I don't think inflation adjustments are the kind of growth most people are talking about when they talk about "growth".
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May 9, 2023 18:47
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