Helping Rural America may have been a noble goal previously, but now best to speed run its decline and leave the sunbelt to address its insurance and climate crisis alone.
My prediction is that Rural America will continue to clear out [1]. Young folks with options will continue to move to urban areas for economic opportunity, leaving behind folks who won’t have options because the new administration isn’t going to care about them [2]. At the same time, red states with abortion restrictions are losing obgyn’s fast [3] [4] [5] [6]. This will lead to increased infant mortality and rational actors not living someplace they can’t get maternity care (“maternity care deserts” [7]). A lack of healthcare access in general is also a contributing factor [8]. This impairs the pipeline for future productive workers who might have stayed or were considering a move. Why there won’t be more immigration in the near term should be obvious.
Blue states will be fine. They are, for the most part, the economic engines of the country.
The little blemish in that scenario being that that the US's food supply and natural resources come from its rural areas. If the prices of food and other goods keeps rising, you won't be able to count on urban voters behaving sensibly either.
Hired farmworkers make up less than 1 percent of all US wage and salary workers (per USDA 2023). 43 million acres of corn is for ethanol biofuel alone, the need for which diminishes over time as light vehicle electrification continues. Urban areas are unlikely to go without food entirely, although the mix might change (less beef due to cattle herds shrinking [1], less dairy as smaller dairies continue to collapse [2], and so on). Based on the data, there is plenty of slack in the food production system as Rural America evaporates [3]. California is the country's largest ag product producer, for example, and also the world's fifth largest economy. You know who imports the most soybeans from the US? China [4]. Good luck to those farmers as China retaliates against US tariffs.
Russia is not so good on the battlefield but great at sowing dissent and getting their man elected. I’ll never understand Biden giving Ukraine just enough to not lose but jot enough to win. Ukraine is fucked. But Europeans should do more for their own defense and not rely on the U.S.
The U.S. outspends most NATO countries on defense spending a percent of GDP. The Europeans couldn't end the Serbia/Kosovo situation on their own. They needed the U.S. Europe needs to do more to defend themselves and not rely so much on the U.S.
It is a foregone conclusion. Countries should take steps to mitigate what happens to them. For instance the U.S. should prevent Saudi companies from exploiting water resources in the U.S. And we should build a wall to prevent mass migrations northward as Central America dries up.
I hope you don't have the notion that global warming means global drying. Warmer ocean temperatures increase rate of water evaporation, which in turn increases rainfall.
Some regions will probably become dryer (just as some regions will probably become colder), but I doubt you've have a rational basis for a belief that Central America in particular is likely to be one of the regions that will become dryer.
The Panama Canal is having problems now due to a prolonged drought. There have already been migrations from Guatemala and Honduras due to droughts in the highlands. Mexico City is facing a water problem partially due to drought.
From NASA: Increased evaporation will result in more frequent and intense storms, but will also contribute to drying over some land areas.
Don't know if Central America in particular will dry out in the long term. Was just using it as an example of the types of migrations that will come from global warming. Please try to understand the overall point and not pedantically nitpick.
Water can be solved with desalination and investments in energy output improvement tech.
New Mexico can’t build desalination plants. Probably a good idea to not allow water intensive crops to be grown there that are exported.
Mass migrations can be handled by destroying all the layers of laws that NIMByYs use.
It’s rational for a country to not have open borders and allow anyone to just come. It’s also rational to not allow more people to come in than what the citizens are comfortable with. It’s going to be much more Darwinian in the future.
India, for instance, isn’t going to be able account 200 million climate refugees from Bangladesh.
What if I told you that evidence has shown that immigration was deflationary and contributed to the low inflation that the US experienced where other nations had it far worse than we did?
Immigration at it's current levels might be great but not necessarily if it greatly increased. What you have to demonstrate is that in a world full of climate change caused chaos allowing tens of millions of people into the country is it a bad idea. We don't live in that word yet so referencing the effect of current levels of immigration is not relevant.
I’d like to think it was just an unfortunate reality of this period in human history that a VC fund had to do okay for HN to exist, in the same way an industrialist might patron MOMA.
Two servers and a handful of mods to run something so unique and powerful seems…cheap.
I fully expect the downvotes. America since Reagan has largely embraced the greed is good mantra. American evangelicals who profess to follow the Bible would downvote a comment that quoted the Bible by saying that the love of money is the root of all evil
people on this site are frequently very interested in compiler optimization, processor and instruction set optimization, faster clocks, pipelining, datapaths, effective utilization of cache, etc. etc. That's what "greed is good" means, greed drives people to try to improve, to get the most out of what they have.
The use of that line in the film was very clever, it had two meanings, but you don't seem to get the subtle one. There is nothing wrong with greed, greed is good.
what there is something wrong with is envy and jealousy; all cultures and ethical traditions recognize that.
There is nothing wrong with greed, greed is good.
what there is something wrong with is envy and jealousy; all cultures and ethical traditions recognize that.
Supply side Jesus appreciates you.
greed drives people to try to improve, to get the most out of what they have.
Salk was not good at what he did because of greed. Leonardo was not great becuase of greed and being more greedy would not have made him better.
Greed is not good. All ethical traditions recognize this. Your view is pathetic. The actual Jesus does not appreciate you.
Democratic persuasion techniques like this are also part of the problem...
People buy shirts that say “I’d rather be Russian than a liberal.” The demonization of the opposing ideology goes both ways. Everything you wrote applies to conservatives as well.
Trump lusts after his own daughter and if that alone doesn’t qualify him as a shitty person to his supporters then they clearly value ideology over the truth and morality.
That's disturbing and news to me. I didn't vote for Biden. The only time I voted for the winner in a Presidential election was my vote for Trump in 2016. But my vote for Trump was due to my theory that electing the dumbest, most corrupt, incompetent asshole possible is what America deserves.
America will get what it deserves regardless of how high you set your expectations. It'll always fall short. Shooting lower to compensate for something you already know is going to be pulled down anyway is just going to miss.
For 40 years there has been a demonization of liberalism. Liberals are seen as the enemy. Liberals seek to destroy America and other such sentiments are common by consumers of right wing media. There are similar sentiments by liberals of conservatives.
If the true enemy is the opposing ideology then the vileness of the candidate of your ideology is overlooked by many people. It’s not a good state of affairs for so many people to view an entire ideology as evil and the enemy.
Donald Trump is a piece of shit. So is Bill Clinton. AOC is a good person. So is Mitt Romney.
Liberals were demonized by the far left just as much, being castigated for reminding the public of the importance of "freeze peach"(sic) when the left wanted to suppress "misinformation" and pointing out that the Popper's paradox of tolerance did not excuse one's own intolerant behavior.
Did Tim Cook publicly comgratulate Joe Biden when he won? I don’t think so. Even if he did it wasn’t newsworthy. Trump supporters ask yourself this. What does it say about Trump that public displays of fealty are seen as necessary by powerful CEOs?
EDIT: I am wrong about Cook not tweeting when Biden won. I don’t think such tweets were newsworthy when Biden won but maybe I’m wrong. It feels to me like there is a need by the monied class to massage Trump’s ego. Maybe I’m blinded by bias in this regard and my perception is completely wrong.
Overall my post was a knee jerk reaction and not well thought out.
It's not particularly newsworthy but it's fairly routine - the suggestion it says or doesn't say anything about the current president-elect or his supporters is misplaced.
Hitler’s character has been going through a revival of sorts amongst right wing white nationalists. You can find such posts on X.com. Threads doesn’t want that on their platform. They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted. This will lead to things like what Texas tried to implement regarding social media platforms. Easiest course of action is to ban all mentions of Hitler.
In the 1980s a very few percent of people admired Hitler or sought to bring about a revival of his image. There is a mainstreaming of this revival. What is happening now is a normalization of the idea that perhaps he wasn’t all that bad. That he had the right idea to some extent. The center of the country has shifted greatly to the right. People who normally would not be right wing nationalists had the center not shifted are now right wing nationalists.
When I wrote there is a mainstreaming I meant that there is an attempt to make it mainstream. There are conservatives who say they’d rather vote for a rapist felon than a liberal. It’s an attempt to normalize certain viewpoints. I.E. voting for Hitler is better than voting for a liberal. The idea is that the worst of us is better than the best of you type mentality.
The approach is ridiculous, though. Again, it's a word ban. When someone bans the word from being mentioned do you say "awww shucks guess I'm not going to be a white nationalist anymore?" No, you start saying Vitler instead and move on.
> They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted.
One way to handle it is to stop fucking tampering with everyone's feeds. Then, if someone doesn't follow people who spout white nationalist gibberish, they won't get said gibberish in their feed. But no! That's not right! We have to show people things they don't follow to drive engagement and in the process effectively introduce algorithms that tamper. The end result is everyone wants the algorithm to tamper how they think it should.
Any social media company engaging in this tampering should be regulated, chastised, and/or systematically dismantled. But that doesn't happen, because people engage more when you show them things they never wanted to see in the first place, and engagement drives profit, and profit drives capital. And doing anything to upset capital is heresy.
They are in the position of not wanting pro-Hitler sentiments on their site. They also don’t want conservatives, who are now in power, to punish them. It seems like a reasonable decision to just ban the word altogether. It’s expedient; not ideal.
Since Citizen’s United and gutting the Voting Rights Act there has been a massive increase in money spent on U.S. political races and there have been thousands of closures of polling stations. We have a pretend democratic like system.
I’m very liberal and very much opposed to authoritarianism. I don’t see the problem with forcing online content to be different than offline content. You gotta show ID or otherwise prove age to buy alcohol and pornography offline. Why not for online as well?
Because when you show ID to buy age-restricted things in person, nobody is keeping a record of anything. A clerk looks at your ID and that's the end of it.
Online is a completely different beast on that count.
Governments have a terrible track record when it comes to privacy. Everything from the USPS selling your info when you move, to the 2 dozen texts I got yesterday because the government sells[1] your voting records on the cheap. Maybe you don't agree but surely you at least understand why people are widely worried about a future where the government decides to sell your adult website access records to make a few extra bucks.
They should be worried. Bad governance is bad. But people do want something to be done about ease with which children can access pornography online. A solution will eventually be imposed if the industry doesn't clean things up.
I don't disagree. The problem is that the solutions being talked about have a large negative impact far wider than the problem they're intended to address.
It is the parents responsibility to raise their children.
It's not my responsibility to have to show ID(I'm a grown adult, there is no mistaking me for someone 18 and below.. though I don't think there is any such laws in any country I would want to live in. this seems to be a fairly US centric world view).
"Think of the children"? That's the argument here?
There is a big difference between storing someones credentials in a porn identification database vs showing your ID to some clerk. These things are not identical.
Of course they aren't identical. The point is that prior to the internet everyone thought it reasonable to prevent kids from accessing pornography. Now it is widely available to them online. Some people think this is not right. There are no perfect solutions.
If you really want to buy pornography on the internet as a minor, you will have difficulties doing the transactions.
Aside from that you haven't thought about the implications of an ID system in the current political climate. Some advocates even state their real goals openly.
I don't think you are very liberal here for that matter. It is just a single issue, but it strongly correlates with positions around this particular topic.
It's easy to view pornography online regardless of age. That's what we are talking about.
Here are my leftist views: No one should have more than $10 million of wealth. Everyone should have a place to live, food, and healthcare. Healthcare should be free at the point of usage. The U.S. should stop funding Israel. Higher education should be free. Churches should pay tax on the property they own. Donations to charity should not be tax deductible. Public transportation should be heavily subsidized and greatly expanded. The DOD and CIA and NSA should be greatly reduced in size and scope. Elections should be publicly funded so that each candidate gets an equal amount of funding. Abortion should be legalized everywhere. Homeschooling should be outlawed.
