The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.

Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.

Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.

As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.

Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.

I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.

I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.

Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.

This is a problem specific to the US. The price of your health insurance is very far from the actual cost of it to providers.

That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.

I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.

That’s incredible. That must be responsible for population decline (migration more than death).

Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!

Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.

And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…

Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.

If you go by the 30% of your budget guideline making $55K a year as a single person you can definitely find a place to rent for $1375 in a decent neighborhood.

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/

One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.

I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.

I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.

I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?

We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.

But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.

Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.

Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.

So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.

You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.

And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.

There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.

Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.

Yeah, succeed in the system, fuck everybody else. If the system is making the world a worse place, all the better, you can take advantage since you’re in the system. All that until you find yourself spat out by the system and get to experience what you’ve been part of with no recourse.

The trick is to compartmentalize

>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.

Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.

Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.

>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.

--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.

You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.

As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?

In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.

This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.

There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.

Presumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.

Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.

You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.

What is the point of producing all this stuff now?

Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.

At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.

You act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.

You are right.

The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.

This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.

I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements

While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.

Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.

LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.

you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.

And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger

SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP

I'm doing my part!

Would you like to know more?

> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves.

Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.

That didn't really answer the question...

However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.

Nope, using the "I am very intelligent" comic doesn't work to defend those who want to eliminate society

There is a more direct action possible here.

The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!

I think that the parent means Wall-E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot