12-17-2020, 05:09 AM
(12-17-2020, 02:02 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 16-Dec-2020 World View: We're all going to die anyway
Cool Breeze Wrote:> Regarding John's, it is an interesting post. I just wanted to say
> that I didn't predict anything (I actually believe a crisis of
> some sort financially is nearly guaranteed and with potential for
> war). But the larger point is, what do these predictions mean if
> we are dead in the long run, anyway? Or we just cycle to another
> bad run for our grandkids? Especially if these are supposed to be
> so dire, as many on here "predict."
> This is why in particular timing matter for predictions. Severity
> does too. Everyone "knows" financial issues will come and that
> wars will come. If you can't even name a time period, though, it
> does little. I think only a small minority of people believe
> foolishly that wars won't happen again or economic crashes won't,
> to some degree. Yes, those are religious thinkers. Shit, most
> religious thinkers these days are the lefty progressives with
> their climate change as eschatology and "progress" with
> scientism. Basically, the underpinnings of murderous ideologies
> repackaged as communism 2.0
You raise important questions that I've always had to deal with. All
I can do is tell how I've handled them.
"What do these predictions mean if we are dead in the long run?"
Ideally we think beyond our current time. Civil engineers design bridges to last, and with clear lifespans. A bridge likely to collapse sixty years into the future with no warning is some horrible design unless it is intended to be replaced perhaps fifty-five years later.
Quote:I've told many people just to ignore these predictions. Unless you're
psychopathically obsessed, like me, or unless you have specific plans,
like building an underground bunker to live in, then you might as well
just go on living your life and enjoying it, and just let people like
me worry about how it's going to end. If there's a war, then both of
us will probably die at the same time, but you'll have lived a happy,
optimistic life, and I'll have lived a sad, depressive life. We'll
both be just as dead, but you'll be better off, at least in the Karmic
sense, because you'll have been happier.
There are some things about which we can do nothing. Asteroid collision with the Earth? Supervolcano eruption? Nearby gamma-ray burst? We can do nothing about those. If one is in Naples, Italy and Mount Vesuvius is about to blow, then you had better have well-rehearsed plans for getting out of there.
Cataclysmic wars? We need beware of electing the sorts of leaders who make such possible. Global warming? If we care anything for our grandchildren... or someone else's grandchildren... we do things to at the least slow it into something that we can deal with.
With engineering projects there is appropriate maintenance.
Quote:Another way of looking at it is that I can tell you that the camel's
back is going to break at some point, but I can't tell you which straw
will break the camel's back. But if you know that the camel's back
is going to break at some point, then you can take action, such
as getting another camel.
You stop well short. How many oily rags can you safely hoard? I do not hoard them.
Quote:But I don't think it's right to say that just because we can't
predict a specific time for something that it might not occur for
centuries. As I said, there have been multiple massive wars in
the last century and in every century, so you can expect a world
war "soon," whatever that means, but certainly a lot sooner than
the next century.
Eighty-year cycles indicate when brinkmanship fails because people get desperate and war looks like a profitable and easy enterprise when someone thinks that victory is certain and the loser will pay for having lost through reparations, property confiscation, or enslavement. With a sociopathic leader such as... you know who the candidates are... rules and can suppress dissent and make caution more dangerous to a person than is what is ordinarily suicidal recklessness, apocalyptic war is inevitable.
Quote:What Generational Dynamics does is to at least provide a timeline
associated with dystopic predictions, via generational cycles (which
are fairly fixed). So we can look at the dates of the last few major
Western financial crises (1637, 1720, 1789, 1857, 1929), and you can
make probabilistic estimates of when the next crisis can occur.
2008. 2008. 2008.
The arch-conservative economist Friedrich Hayek (1898-1992) explained how speculative booms lead to financial panics. Speculative booms look lie easy ways to make huge incomes... easier than starting a business, adding plant and equipment, maintenance, building or rebuilding public infrastructure, investing in human capital, doing research and development... and over a few years they devour capital that could be used for the less glamorous, real growth. Speculative investment crowds out other investment while failing to make life better. But it is a waste, and the destruction comes with the waste. The illusion of prosperity builds, but it depends on one more fool buying in. When there are no more customers the boom implodes. Once the boom implodes the capital for making money in other, more old-fashioned, ways vanish, too for some time.
Roughly eight years passed between Black Monday and Hitler's Anschluss against Austria. The difference this time is that the American political system backed the banks quickly to protect savers, payrolls, and the accounts on which businesses draw for payables and which they deposit receivables...It was the destructive bank runs of 1931 that turned a recession into a full-blown depression.
Question: did we need to have a full-blown depression to undo the rising inequality in America? If such is necessary, then we are far from out of trouble.
If we do not have a shooting war involving Americans we have mass death similar in scale to a bungled war. COVID-19 exposes the structural weaknesses of societies and the absurdities of the philosophical basis of those societies. The plutocratic ideal that the society works best that above all else rewards the super-rich for being super-rich will create a contradiction of a materialistic culture in which almost everyone is a failure.
Quote:You can start with generational trends to get an estimated date range, and
then you can can look at the list of previous crises and try to figure
out what they had in common that would predict another crisis, in
order to narrow the date range. That's what I've tried to do, without
attempting to set a specific date. So I can refer to exponential
growing interlocking global debt, or I can refer to the CCP's
increasing belligerence and delusional insanity, and I can quote the
saying, "If something can't go on forever, then it won't." And I can
talk about how "La Belle Époque" ended with WW I, or I can talk about
how the Roaring Twenties ended with the stock market crash, and that
can provide clues about when the crisis will occur, but no definite
time. As I said, I can tell you that the camel's back is going to
break at some point, and I can give you a probabilistic estimate of
when it will happen, but I can't tell you for sure which straw will
break the camel's back.
It is wise to stop well short of stressing an engineering object, a processing assembly, or a social order even to near its breaking point. So avoid heating some flammable oil beyond its auto-ignition point...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
