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I am getting rid of my Yugo
JimH:
I'm trying to find some peace about the situation we're in. Not reading the news is helping.
To your point about incumbency, a lot of people are unhappy with governments that have become more and more invasive. And corrupt. So they tend to vote incumbents out. From memory, our Presidents have alternated between Republican and Democratic for a while.
There are now seven billion people on the planet and only a few thousand tigers and elephants. Songbirds are decreasing because of loss of habitat. Damage to the ocean.
Too many people are competing for too few resources. Water even.
Resources are in the hands of the privileged few. These few have free rein in influencing elections. Musk bought votes and nobody stopped him.
Governments fail to solve basic problems because it's not in their self-interest.
When Gaza and Lebanon descend into chaos, it's no great surprise. Not enough land. Too many people. Tribal hatred.
See why I've sworn off the news?
Going back to my recliner now. I'll be 80 in a month. I need to find my teeth so I can keep my strength up.
jmone:
Since we are taking a global view. It is the simply the best of times, and our children will live in even better times. I mean that seriously.
You would rather be living now than at any other time in the history of humanity.
Sure there are issues, but humans are fantastic at finding solutions, and it is relentless. Life is better now for the average human than it has ever been and is trending to an even brighter future (I've tried to include both the Global and USA trend lines as a comparison). I was going to add Minnestoa to the charts but it sounds all doom and gloom. :) JimH needs to get out in the sunshine, or simply stop reading whatever "news" source is feeding the negativity as it is simply not factual.
Basic Needs : These trends are fantastic over time
- Life Expectancy at Birth (but you can see the impact of Covid-19) - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Child Mortality Rates - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=earliest..latest&country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Share of Population Living in Extreme Poverty - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-extreme-poverty?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA
- GDP per Capita - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Literacy Rate - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Share of the Population with Access to Electricity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-access-to-electricity?tab=chart&country=USA~OWID_WRL
Higher Order Needs : These are some of the more popular topics being debated, and many of them show a less well defined trend, ones that move up and down, or even regresses.
- Income Inequality - https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=chart&time=1820..latest&Data=World+Inequality+Database+%28Incomes+before+tax%29&Indicator=Gini+coefficient&country=USA~OWID_WRL
- Per capita CO2 Emissions - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&country=USA~OWID_WRL
- Political Civil Liberties Index - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-civil-liberties-index?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Human Rights Index - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA
- Social Rights for Women - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-countries-with-key-economic-and-social-rights-for-women
- LGBT+ Rights - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-protecting-core-lgbt-rights
jmone:
I'm also going to tackle the myth of finite resources.
- Quantitatively a resource is finite
- Economically they are infinite.
Let's take Oil as an example. It's been peddled for most of my life that we are about to "run out", yet we never do... and we never will. There is very simple economic reason we will never run out:
- As oil gets more scarce the price rises.
- As the price rises, it makes previously uneconomic reserves economically viable
- As the price rises, substitution takes place as other alternatives become more economically viable (solar, wind, nuclear, bio-fuel, whatever).
Same with Water. We will never "run out". It might get more expensive to get the quantity we need in the location we want, but we will not "run out". The stuff is even trivial to "make", or "desalinate" but both are far more expensive than digging a hole and letting it fill up with rain.
JimH:
Myth. Ha!
Apply your logic to songbirds who need certain habitat to survive. Will evolution save them? Sure, but it's going to dump humans along the way.
Water? You must know about all the crap in our water. Microplastics, anyone?
JimH:
--- Quote from: jmone on November 10, 2024, 04:08:08 pm ---Since we are taking a global view. It is the simply the best of times, and our children will live in even better times. I mean that seriously.
--- End quote ---
My kids can't afford a house. They start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only way for them to do it is to get someone else's help.
My first house was $13,000. Then there were a couple in the $20,000's. I was earning $10/hour doing construction. The math worked then. Now you need to be upper middle class, at least.
Still lookinng for my teeth.
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