ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
Just have most of someone's FICA be earmarked to their parents. It shifts the framing from punitive to a benefit. More or less eliminate Social Security for people who don't have kids (maybe give them a couple hundred of dollars a month or so); if you don't have kids, you have more opportunity to earn income anyway, so you don't have an excuse not to have saved for retirement.
Somewhere on the Motte we were having a discussion about male vs female life expectancies (IIRC motivated by the UN declaring men dying 5 years earlier than women "equality"), and the decrease in the gap comes in much earlier than billionaires. I think it was, once you get into the top decile, the gap drops to below two years.
It's much more accurate to say, if you're poor, don't be a man, than it is to say if you're rich, don't be a woman, unless your interest in life expectancy is just in having a big gap. Every step up the income ladder for both sexes increases life expectancy; it just does so much more for men.
It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do.
It is, somewhat. Across the animal kingdom, the heterozygotic sex (XY, ZW) nearly always has a shorter average lifespan than the homozygotic sex (XX, ZZ).
You are comparing yourself to AI at its present capabilities (or the capabilities it has that have already diffused to your interest and skills). Give it some time.
I do manage to be cautiously optimistic, though, at least for my individual future. I have no illusions that I'll be able to provide any economic value in 5 years, and I'm fine with that. And I'm excited for many of the same reasons you are: knowledge is so much easier to find and learn than three years ago, and I'll have decades to learn things about the world that no human knows today. The only question is how to protect myself from futures where we evolve into a two class society of the high and the low.
ThenElection
4d ago
The stakes are low, actually: inevitability means that your individual choices aren't going to do anything to shift the arc of history. This is liberating, in a way, as you can focus on protecting your own humanity (and, with much more difficulty, your children's) instead of having moral responsibility to try to save the world.
ThenElection
6d ago
Spectacular wealth and corrupt hedonism. The masses of people in their state-provided goonboxes, with a small elite caste engaging in their own particular kind of debasement except with spectacular wealth, with an AI zookeeper watching over us all. And, in an accelerationist sense, I think it's inevitable, unless the AI decides to put us out of our misery.
ThenElection
6d ago
I agree that those communities are kind of counterexamples. The reason for "kind of" is that they didn't emerge through any intentional action or planning, and attempts to replicate them through a plan have all failed AFAICT. Any attempt in contemporary times to recreate their success will end up co-opted and corrupted. They're more historic relics that occupy niches that so far have been resilient to capitalism.
Though, perhaps they'll survive and out reproduce us all, and capitalism can be retried on a more resilient culture.
ThenElection
6d ago
I am not at all a socialist or any other -ist, btw; my comment was meant as descriptive, not polemical.
to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible?
Entirely responsible; all of capitalisms' ill-effects are mediated through how it hollows out culture and local communities. Capitalism delivers massive material improvements to society through whatever ways its able to find to deliver those improvements. One way that's been very effective is by mining and hollowing out local communities, customs, traditions; turning the sacred profane. Socialism and various other -isms have their own issues: capitalism's genius is in allowing its participants to make that trade (of community for self-interest) in the most effective way possible.
My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).
It's a romantic vision, and probably the best option we have on an individual basis. But I don't believe it can amount to much, collectively; capitalism is too good at harnessing our energies to its own ends.
It is more or less the same, but (with proper massaging) might be framed in a more popular way than direct taxation of the childless. E.g. make future cost of living adjustments apply only to parents.
More options
Context Copy link