JTarrou
10hr ago
Unless our current model of physics is totally wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. The real answer is, of course, violence. As national governments reduce violence, they reduce their own capacity for it, which inflates the value. Eventually the value gets high enough and the numbers of people who can produce it low enough that the two meet and a revolution, coup or invasion happens. This is almost always a losing proposition for the country in question, but it offers a platform to try radical new things, and the ones that work get more widely adopted.
The French Revolution was a disaster for France, and most of Europe. Most of their innovations were insane bullshit and were swiftly forgotten. But they did fix a bunch of issues with the legacy legal system and spread that to most of Europe, giving the continent a much better set of legal standards which contributed to trade, diplomacy and the eventual peace and unity of Europe. Just needed a dozen major wars, two world wars, a few genocides and a lot of ethnic cleansing to shake it all out.
Progress is produced in blood, not economics, philosophy or science. In the most anti-progressive and civilizationally corrosive manner. "Creative destruction" as an economist might say. It is by this bloody cycle that humanity progresses.
JTarrou
1d ago
Confucius say if you wait by the river, the bodies of your ops float by eventually. Or something.
JTarrou
1d ago
There's many layers of institutional power that don't just disappear, even after GDP dips and direct international influence wanes. Over time these erode in a failing society, but parts may last a long time. As an example, English being the lingua franca of the world isn't because Britain is so powerful right at this moment, but the fact that it is gives Britain more power than it would otherwise. Britain will always have an outsize influence through the language alone as long as this is the case.
European societies are broadly in a bad way compared to their recent relative status, but they remain advanced societies with great technical expertise and ability to organize along national lines. Most of them remain nations in a way nothing on the African continent or much of asia can possibly match. Nothing is irreparable, but it remains to be seen if their elites will change course by some means and hold to that policy. I'm guessing the answers will be uneven at best. Europe will likely be dominated by the first large country to fix their current malaise for some time.
JTarrou
2d ago
Eh, I mean look at Remington and Winchester. Both being run as budget brands and getting hosed by Savage.
JTarrou
2d ago
The allegation is weak, but added to the others might be enough to sink Platner. I think it's a ratfuck by the Democrats, and so does Freddie DeBoer. Doesn't mean it isn't also true.
My hot take? The Dems have spent so much time equating masculinity with toxicity that when they had to pivot to appeal to men, this is what they came up with. "How do you do, fellow Nazi Rapists!"
In a purely political sense, this is one long series of unforced errors which is deconstructing the moral authority of the party/movement (such as it was). Platner still hasn't faced a Republican. This is all inter-Dem infighting, with popcorn on the right.
JTarrou
2d ago
There's a lifecycle produced by higher-level capitalization. You have a company, you build a reputation for quality, value, service, whatever. You grow this company into a major success. Then you die/retire/sell. New company comes in, they want to make money off your reputation. They cut whatever it was that made your product successful, first a bit, then a lot. They switch suppliers, use inferior materials, drive out all the old skilled labor, outsource, etc.
The old reputation is sticky. If your product isn't something people buy with great regularity, it may take decades or even centuries for that reputation to fall to its proper place. My relative expertise here is firearms companies. Colt, for instance, the most iconic American gun brand. They haven't made a profitable new firearm since the 1930s, and the old company went under in teh 1980s, even with the military contracts. It's a brand name owned by a series of shell corporations that produces garbage knock-offs of old Colt designs that retards think is still Sam Colt's own shop. Anyone who knows guns knows Colts suck and have for a century. And yet every month you'll see the newest model Colt in every gun magazine, dipshits in trailer parks the nation over will jerk off in their basketball shorts over it, and even bigger dipshits will actually buy them.
JTarrou
6d ago
I very much agree. This is how skint mexicans can afford to come here and work for pennies on the dollar and raise a dozen kids. They value different things and are willing to live differently.
As to the trappings of merit versus its reality, that's the question isn't it? We target things that seem to be part of merit, but every proxy creates an incentive to game it. Everyone likes a meritocracy until it's time to define what merit actually is.
JTarrou
6d ago
Unlike economic pies, social status pies are zero sum by definition. Social status, and the economic and political benefits, tend to be "sticky". This isn't a problem with meritocracy, it's a problem with heirarchy, which meritocracy is supposed to streamline, but cannot entirely avoid.
JTarrou
6d ago
Eh, I don't have a dog in the fight, I married someone a whopping three months younger (pedo alert!). But people can be directionally correct for bad reasons.
I would say as a very great generality for the bulk of humanity for the bulk of history, the basic matchup and the best one for fertility is for men roughly 20-30 marrying women roughly 15-25. I think in modern society it's completely normal to expect men in their late twenties to date women in their early twenties. Part of it is resources, part is maturity differentials, part is fertility differentials, part is stages of life, the biggest is linear time. The fertility stuff is just obvious, there's no pro-natal way for women as a population to delay fertility beyond 30. Individuals can do what they want, but society will not hit replacement with women who start at thirty. It cannot possibly work.
Fundamentally, so long as both people are legal adults, I'm not that concerned with age gaps at all. Anyone trying to get high school girls for themselves is obviously sus, but the rest of it is just moralizing and wishcasting. Yeah, a lot of romantically unsuccessful guys will come up with convoluted explanations for why they should be given hot young women somehow, without learning game or going to the gym. Just as a lot of romantically unsuccessful women will come up with convoluted explanations why they should be considered hot young women by billionaire werewolves.
None of this impacts the basic underlying math of fertility and what that means for a society. Whether a given group should be at replacement fertility is a value question, but if you accept that, you must necessarily accept a system of social organization that provides for the bulk of women in society to have children prior to age 30, and the closer to 15 they start, the higher fertility will be. Once again, what rate of fertility society should allow/encourage is values and politics. Higher fertility is not necessarily better, and there are trade-offs no matter what you do.
JTarrou
6d ago
I think it's worse than that.....meritocracy might be dysgenic. Yes, you draw from a much larger population, take all the talent (on whatever metric you're measuring talent) and promote them into the middle-class rat race where one's career is the primary social status.
The problem with meritocracy is talented people who have attained wealth, power and privilege don't want their reversion-to-the-mean children to lose financial/social position. This makes the competition for those jobs greater, reduces the places for lower-class talented people to rise to, etc. The middle class fertility shredder is a natural consequence of social mobility. In the long run, this leads to genetic bifurcation of the population as the lower and working class lose everyone with this trait, and the middle class breeds with itself at far below replacement levels.
Distance and speed caps. FTL isn't possible under current physics.
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