> don't believe that Facebook/Meta would continue to grow next year
Huh.
The time I worked at a hyper growth company, us working in the coal mine had much the same skepticism. Our growth rate seemed ridiculous, surely we're over building, how much longer can this last?!
Happily, the marketing research team regularly presented stuff to our department. They explained who are customers were, projected market sizes (regionally, internationally), projected growth rates, competitive analysis (incumbents and upstarts), etc.
It helped so much. And although their forecasts seemed unbelievable, we over performed every year-over-year. Such that you sort of start to trust the (serious) marketing research types.
IMHO Pax Americana ended (passed the point of no return) with GWB. Iraq, 2008 financial crisis, SCOTUS picks, unitary executive, extraordinary rendition, breaking of weapons treaties (nuke testing, bio & chem warfare), abandoning peace between Isreal & Palestinians, etc, etc.
Forfieted any remaining goodwill.
(Post 9/11, It would have been so easy to choose the other path.)
The origins of each colony (a la Albion's Seed) continue to shape our politics. Spoiler: The Virginians won.
> it took a "white knight"
Yes and: each progressive reform, however modest, barely squeaked thru, overcoming huge opposition. The Farmstead Act (et al), New Deal, Great Society, ACA, IRA, etc.
Followed by an outsized reactionary backlash. Every single time. Just like the current cycle of revanchism.
Authentic human activity has been completely overwhelmed by bots and slop. Discerning signal from noise becomes too burdensome to bother with.
Of course the physical medium continues to exist.
Of course there are still humans, such as yourself, producing free content, to be harvested and regurgitated by parasites.
But authentic human activity is increasingly going out of band, no longer discoverable. Whatsapp, discord, private groups. Exactly as the theory predicted.
I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.
Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.
> don't forget that Joe Manchin
No one on the left ever will.
That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.
Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.
Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."
Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
So, well, whaddya gonna do?
The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.
> Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.
That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore.
> Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable?
This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—where we're all going to die tomorrow. We're already seeing the effects—as the submitted article shows—but the worst is yet to come. We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into, for no other reason than greed and selfishness. It's the ultimate betrayal of the future. (By the way, I'm a human and deliberately chose to use em dashes, because I felt like it.)
The best thing to happen for global warming in recent years was not the Biden administration but actually the pandemic, because it significantly cut industrial output for an extended time.
I concur. On (most) all points you've made in this thread.
Two things.
#1
What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
I totally understand nihilism, despair, despondency, hopelessness, etc. Under Reagan and living near Boeing, I was convinced we'd get nuked. I embraced the punk/goth lifestyle. Then I was diagnosed at 19yo with a terminal disease (aplastic anemia).
Then the weirdest thing happened.
We didn't get nuked. And I somehow beat the odds, surviving an experimental treatment (and its aftermath).
"Well shit" I said to myself. "Now what?"
And make no mistake; It was monumentally hard to pivot. To plan further ahead then "what's for breakfast?"
Fortunately, I had role models and mentors. Like the two science and policy people I worked (volunteered) for at Audubon. They knew the score. And yet they continued to fight. Marveling, I asked how they did it. Saving the salmon (in this case) was their day job. Living their lives, as best as they could, during their own time. It wasn't denial or compartmentalizing. It was choosing to embrace life, to give them the energy and purpose to continue the fight.
#2
What else are you gonna do?
During the 2000s, I was so filled with anger and disgust. I somehow fell into direct activism (leading vs just volunteering). I met so many other angry people. Most of them stuck in a doom loop. (Therefore useless, detrimental even, to activism.)
Learning activism as I went, I eventually decided a key factor to change was somehow transmuting that outrage into action. So we leaders stopped just opposing bad policy and decisions. We advocated for a better way, as best able.
So, ya, the world's going to hell. What are you going to do about it? Check out? (Which, IMHO, is a perfectly rational and valid decision for most people.) Will you fight for what's yours? Defending the future, and our planet, and a more just society.
The hardest part, for me, to becoming an activist was how to get started. There are few resources and even fewer mentors. Most people who try bounce off the wall of policy and politics and gatekeepers. So I know that individuals converting their outrage into action is wicked hard.
My Big Idea, as a recovering activist myself, for maybe mitigating that hurdle was starting an activism book study / support group. The goal was get something rolling, then document it, then spawn off new cells. (Something I learned how to do with design pattern study groups, back in the day.)
Members picked a topic, the smallest possible change, the lowest hanging fruit, they wanted to see happen. So participants could learn and experience the whole process and skill building needed for success. (Something I learned from Luke Hohmann, wrt teams delivering products, back in the day.)
And then we supported each other's efforts. We were off to a good start; 7 members, meeting twice monthly.
Alas, I had some health and family crises, and that study group didn't survive my departure. (Another wicked hard problem.)
In conclusion...
I think I understand where you're at. I feel like I was in a similar place, more than once.
All I want to convey is that you might be able to find a way thru by finding some positives to focus on.
Recovering from radiation, I used kitten and puppy pictures to cheer myself up. To prove I'm also not a bot, here's my corpus: https://imgur.com/user/zappini/favorites
Now I binge on podcasts like David Roberts' Volts. He's a natural born pessimist, like me. Yet he chooses to find and signal boost the people doing the hard work of implementing our glorious all electric future. He's also been (for me) a gateway to finding more sources of joy and optimism.
> What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?
It appears that you misunderstood. I said, "This is not [emphasis added] like nuclear war" and "We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into". Much more hostile does not imply the end of the world, and indeed the existence of our descendants implies that everyone is not dead.
> I think I understand where you're at.
I don't think you do, and I wasn't in need of therapy.
Yaya. Sorry. I didn't state my assumptions, am mixing issues.
To me, Kia/Hyundai is an example of a foreign manufacturer successively building EVs in North America for North America. Satisfying American standards, tastes, regulations, etc.
I expect the larger Chinese competitors to do the same.
Decades ago, European and then Japanese competitors did as well.
This is BMW's clever attack on Tesla's overvaluation, partially based on Optimus hype.
The use of (general purpose) humanoid robots in manufacturing will fail. BMW is just accelerating that outcome.
Then Tesla's market cap will implode.
Note that Tesla's business is pivoting to batteries. Demand is basically infinite. They'll kill it, basically printing money, if they survive the transition.
Huh.
The time I worked at a hyper growth company, us working in the coal mine had much the same skepticism. Our growth rate seemed ridiculous, surely we're over building, how much longer can this last?!
Happily, the marketing research team regularly presented stuff to our department. They explained who are customers were, projected market sizes (regionally, internationally), projected growth rates, competitive analysis (incumbents and upstarts), etc.
It helped so much. And although their forecasts seemed unbelievable, we over performed every year-over-year. Such that you sort of start to trust the (serious) marketing research types.
reply