Quote: (06-20-2014 11:28 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:
thedude, I read his blog and felt that it was well matched to his product -- a lifeless, bloodless, tasteless distillation; a distillation, in this case, of all that is worst about mere useless "intelligence" on the Internet.
What can be duller, at this point, than this sort of sterile intelligence earnestly going through its death-dealing motions of irony and understatement? I would rather bathe in the fetid swamps of a thousand fatty Tumblrs than in this Dead Sea of sameness.
The funny thing is, though you know him only through his words, his demeanor is very much like you describe:
It's borderline parody, how robotic this man is - although I suppose such types abound in Silicon Valley tech circles. It reminds me of how we let economists tell us how to lead our lives and structure our societies, when economists are among the most profoundly lifeless people, and most ignorant of man's needs and desires.
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Meanwhile, the middle class and the rich are increasingly the only ones wealthy enough to eat real food. Rhinehart does an effective cost-per-calorie breakdown of a tomato vs. a fast food cheeseburger. A fresh tomato is, by a wide margin, much more expensive than a cheeseburger. I can tell you firsthand that wholesale prices of produce and animal protein are increasing at an alarming rate, not to mention higher quality products that aren't the result of the factory farming methods. At farmer's markets, I'm regularly seeing chicken go for $8/lb. One single chicken costs $24-$32? Fuck that.
It's clear that the world's population, and probably America's as well, is far in excess of what's optimal for human health and prosperity. The only way the whole world can be fed is with a substandard diet - and few are willing to sound the alarm and question the status quo because you're basically a Nazi if you say that the third world should have fewer births, and that the West should stop mass immigration (the source of most to all population growth in the West). Innovations like Soylent and in vitro fertility treatment are enabling inventions, inventions that accord us the ability to further degrade the human condition and further diminish the dignity of the individual. Scorpion described this with Soylent, while IVF burnishes the career woman's delusion that she can have it all - a strong family, career and balance sheet. There are many other such enabling innovations afoot, whose aim is to mend the outward symptoms of a deeper problem, thereby amplifying the virulence of that original problem.
I was just in a far more sparsely populated city than my current home of Los Angeles, and the enhanced quality of life in many ways was obvious and significant, including (or especially) in the attitudes of the girls - and this is not a location that you'd pick for 'love tourism.' If the average man cannot afford himself and his family a healthful diet and a comfortable home, as is most assuredly the case in our metropolises, then we have to wonder if we are overpopulated. To be sure, this ideal state of affairs is unprecedented in historical terms, but we have achieved it in the past, and technology permits us a high enough productivity level to deliver it... but population density has in many areas ushered in a material retreat in the human condition. Some allege that this is the history of human existence, whereby man went from hunting to farming, at great cost to his physical health and prowess.
The idea that population growth is essential to the well-being of individuals, to the prosperity of the average man, is of the same quality of the idea that women entering the workforce en masse would enrich us, i.e. evil and wrong. I'm continually surprised at how many otherwise intelligent people believe this sophistic fiction that population growth is synonymous with individual wealth and prosperity. Of course, big corporations and big government want higher population, because it means bigger revenues and more people to control, even if the typical man suffers a lower quality of life.
Median male wages in the US peaked in 1973, and virile men are increasingly frittering away their earnings involuntarily to the selfish elderly. Instead of letting your mother sleep in your home into her old age, a fifth of your earnings are going to fund a whole class of old people you've never met.