[heresWaldo]

Sorry failed to call out I wasn’t delineating along typical party lines. Politicians, judges, gen pop; those empowered by past political and socioeconomic choices they ram down the futures throat are conservative quacks, full stop.

Preferring political/economic norms in the face of evidence it’s actively harmful is conservative quackery.

[rayiner]

> Preferring political/economic norms in the face of evidence it’s actively harmful

What a laughable statement. The default state of humanity is scrounging around in the forest for scraps. All the prosperity around you is the result of a particular set of “political/economic norms” and once you’ve found a magic combination that results in the US rather than Afghanistan you should be extremely afraid to change anything. You’re standing high on a mountain your ancestors climbed up and there’s very little keeping you from falling back down it.

You should be particularly skeptical of new ideas, because according to Sturgeon’s law there’s a 90% chance it’s crap.

[heresWaldo]

The past also screwed up a lot. At best their effort is a wash, still leaving little reason to deify them through intentional conservation of their legacy.

I’d qualify your default less literally; solving their problems with recursion and memoization

There are billions of people preventing implosion, none of us are an island unto ourselves. But since you bring it up…

If it goes bad for me, so what? Been there already; had to be zapped back to life. It all just goes dark. Quite peaceful relative to daily life, really.

On the upside, along with stem degrees, I spent my youth in farmland slaughtering and growing my own food, fixing heavy machinery. IMO one of the elders biggest mistakes is helping so many avoid the real work required to survive. I’m no Dick Proennekke, but neither are all the office workers who can’t even bake a potato let alone grow one (first hand experience with that; that was a very short romantic relationship).

Makes this economy that much harder to adjust and will probably just collapse given the lack of elasticity due to so many with so narrow a skill set.

Adam Smith is claimed to have written (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will lead to humans as dumb as the lowest animal. I think this economic experiment has proven his 200 year old quote.