DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed ad nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
DimitriRascalov
1d ago
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
DimitriRascalov
6d ago
The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.
Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.
DimitriRascalov
15d ago
Gays have lower fertility than straights, so surely we will have no gays at all within a few generations!
Why is that implausible? Until fairly recently, if you were (marginally) gay, you were unlikely to act on it, because the social environment heavily discouraged you. This meant that carrying a hypothetical gay gene wouldn't depress your fertility all that much, since the overwhelming influence of the default social script would still push you towards having the standard 1-3 children surviving into adulthood.
That social script has now expanded to include being openly gay and significantly decreased the pressure to have children, so many more people that in earlier times would have just kept their romantic thoughts about their same-sex neighbor to themselves can now actually live out their preferences. Consequently, the fertility of people with genes that make them gay, after having survived centuries of open repression, now crashes close to 0. A similar argument can be made for other formerly oppressed behaviors that are associated with low fertility, e.g. being trans or queerness in general.
Note that I don't have any clue as to whether a gay gene really exists or how much it eventually influences the expression of sexuality, but our environment changed so much w.r.t. to gay rights that it's not impossible that the selection pressures at play here have changed massively as well.
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
That's true, but it's not like it's impossible to broadly survey the alignment and publicly held ideological stances of feminists in general and to notice that the average feminist holds views that would put them into the center-left at least, if not further to the left. Notably, in modern times this part of the political spectrum is strongly correlated with stances on migration that directly imply that the West, particularly Europe, will become much more Muslim towards the end of the century. How e.g. 35% Muslim France is going to be compatible with the ostensibly central ideological tenets typically held by feminists is, to put it mildly, an open question.
Blaming specific negative consequences of (Muslim) migration like the rape gangs on feminists directly is unfair, in that I agree, but it's quite clear that the average feminist is pretty much all-aboard with the political program that brought those rape gangs here, is in fact quite likely to advocate for accelerating that program, and has no plausible, pragmatic & politically viable plan to ensure that it's not going to get worse as the prominence of Islam increases as the direct consequence of that program. For that, I think it is fair to blame feminists.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.
Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.
but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now.
Can you explain why? Similar to you, I also thought that it was Hlynka four months ago, but with much higher confidence. What convinces me then as now is the last point from my post: TequilaMockingbird talked in the way someone deeply familiar with this forum, its history and connection to Scott Alexander would.
There plausibly are many other people with beliefs similar to Hlynka, so TequilaMockingbird having exactly the same views (and rhetoric! seriously, the Steve Sailer thing isn't the first time he's let his old ticks shine through) on every single issue as him isn't dispositive. The fact that an account with such beliefs is created three months after Hlynka's ban and immediately participates in discourse as an old regular would, even calling out specific users' post histories and ideologies, is though, especially when no other well known long-time poster was missing/banned at the time. It was very, very obvious that he was Hlynka from the start.
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
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