The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.
Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.
It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.
Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.
The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.
So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.
Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
No, it's categorically different. Your point about not being able to judge based on "news feeds" is valid though.
Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.
A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).
Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.
Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
To be fair, depending on when these things were written, there was a lot of shit going on in Greece and Rome that merited such a take, including invasions, plagues, civil war. And the '20s[1], '30s[1], and '40s[2], and '50s[3].
But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.
That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.
I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.
I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.
I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.
I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.
I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.
The previous commenter had mentioned it already, and I don't think 9/11 had the same psychic shock and persistence as COVID and 2008. But I'm sure you have had a different experience behind your feeling of 9/11 as a more persistent traumatic event.
Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.
My point was that LLM written articles tend to long and verbose. Might as well have my LLM condense it into bullet points to consume the information faster.
I can appreciate clever writing by humans because another human did it. Maybe I'd still critique it for being convoluted. But there'd be some kind of interaction with me and another person, even though I might leave with a negative opinion/feeling.
If an LLM tries clever writing, it's just the result of a statistical model using its dataset. There's no joy in reading the extra fluff because I know there's no-one that spent the time on doing it. In fact, I know that the person on the other side didn't want to spent the time doing it. And it leaves me wondering why I should even read all of that in the first place. If we're using AI to be more efficient, why not have it just generate boring, efficient, articles that just give you the information without pretending to present any opinions or jokes.
TL;DR if you want to be efficient, be efficient; don't generate fluff
Portraits are not an artistic medium in the same sense, they’re something one creates with the tools of a particular medium. Painting is a medium, photography is a medium, both are capable of producing portraits.
An LLM can produce a portrait of you as well by generating a facsimile of you based on existing material (or functionally a “guess” if you describe yourself I guess).
That leaves a few questions though (which I'm not implying that I know the answers to):
Did this planted forest (used for logging) replace another forest that was used as a habitat for animals? Is it counted as an equivalent to non-logging forests to justify the destruction of non-logging forests?
Can this sustainable industry sustain suitable living conditions for animals in the forest? Or can the industry only sustain itself and its own interests in future resource extraction?
Very importantly, the biodiversity of mature old growth forest is exceptionally distinct to a bunch of 20 year old (often single or few species) trees. Take parrots for example. Many rely on old trees with openings or hollows for nesting. Without sufficiently old trees, they literally can't live there. The growth of such critical habitat often takes 100+ years, whereas fungi, reptiles, orchids, insects, and bryophytes may never recover from clear-felling.
If you're not someone's flamebait LLM bot: citation please. I find it very hard to believe that an endangered species chooses to live solely in recently planted forest, particularly with focused legal defense from such an esteemed and long-running NGO as the Wilderness Society. I find it far more likely you are incorrect, and frankly spouting nonsense.
There is nothing 'advanced' and 'sustainable' about clear felling old growth forests supporting endangered species, if you are lucky enough to have them as Australia is (they are vanishing globally at an insane rate). It is about as nuanced as shooting your children in the head.
Just want to point out, it’s polarising because it’s a wedge issues that divides voting blocks neatly, and nothing to do with it being The Issue that it is.
More people die from obesity, cars, flu, preventable illness, etc. But we discuss endless this one issue… it’s for political science reasons not humanity/moral/etc reasons.
It's different from those other cases because it's like getting in a car accident and other people saying you can't get treatment because it's against their religious values, or saying you're not allowed to lose weight because they don't like it.
Design and manufacturing for the rocket part of their business is mainly split between Auckland and Los Angeles. Various sources say they have between 500 and 700 employees in NZ.
My understanding is that they have a rocket body fabrication facility in NZ, where some of their historical institutional carbon fiber fabrication knowledge and stuff is, the engines and avionics and electronics are done in the Los Angeles area.
But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]
[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.