So good to see some actual Startup News on here. I miss the old days of this site when things were more optimistic and less click-bait.
replies(4):
- Global warming and how we don't seem to have any plans to a path to hit any of the less-than-apocalyptic warming targets, - Corporate regulatory capture, with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily, - The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago, - This one is a combination of all three of the others (and a lot more), I suppose, but capitalism eating itself and taking a lot of really helpless-feeling people with it.
A lot of things do keep improving, but a) a lot of people never get to see or benefit from those improvements, maybe more than you think, and b) there are these terrible monsters on the horizon and nobody with the power to do anything about it seems to be willing to actually do so. It shouldn't take a whole lot of empathy to project yourself into the shoes of someone for whom shit is the worst it's ever been, nor a lot of creative thinking to realize that there's a whole lot of those people out there.
Yet, the production of fossil fuels remains near record levels, and producers are aiming to scale up, as opposed to scale down. Political discourse on this topic often amounts to "but my expenses are already too high."
For many people, this is still an abstract and slow moving problem. Yet, it is a very real problem with dire consequences. (That are somehow easy to ignore!)
Is the world getting worse?
In some ways, it's getting better.
Yet, we seem doomed to cause so much destruction. It's gonna be bad. Very bad. But not right away (for many of us).
https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/0...
There will be new startups that eclipse all of these companies in interestingness. The one for the next 20 years is probably OpenAI.
I think people realize this more than they used to which explains so much of the tech pessimism
Oh here is a definition of whataboutism: "the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation or raising a different issue".
I am assuming you won't be able to figure it out though.
You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse in general.
"with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily"
Poverty around the world is being reduced on a massive scale. There are undeniable issues with wealth gaps, but the world population is still benefiting greatly from the imbalanced amount of downstream wealth coming to it.
"The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago"
The world has been dominated by these ideas for the majority of its existence. Several of the world powers still operate within these ideas, not to mention many of the third world countries, the power just moves from regime to regime. Acting like authoritarianism is "new" because the OP just got an inkling of it in their own country is pretty dense.
TLDR op just plucked a few news headlines that get re-iterated and made that their world view.
- Solar and wind power
- New Nuclear options
- Grid Storage
- Electric vehicles
It would be nice if we'd done a hard left turn on the economy and somehow never got here but that was probably never realistic.
A) poverty can be reduced while inequality increases. And inequality is definitely increasing. And the assessment that inequality isn’t that big of a deal and that we should focus only on poverty is very from a “categorical” assertion, imo.
B) “the world isn’t getting worse because bad things have existed in the past” isn’t a very clear argument. I think the BBC says it best: “Nationalism has always been a feature across Europe's political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.”
This is Hacker News. Not news-news. HN does not have to, and should not, look or feel like a news site.