Yeah but we are not talking about the people of this article specifically, are we? I am talking about generally poor men.

I think this has been our problem, yes I have been specifically talking about men who have already self identified as being more disadvantaged because they are young white men.

I don’t believe that class has to do with race, but that was the specific claim I was originally negating. My arguments surrounding race were attempts to point out internal contradictions within this claim. If we do accept the framework of race specifying class, as the claim was stated, things don’t really make sense.

I think that the majority of people would simply want to have more, exactly like everyone else. The idea that people should deserve more based on their race seems closer to white suprematism which is a minoritarian ideology.

It is only a minority view depending on what part of the country you are in. When I went to elementary school in South Carolina they taught that the civil war was about state rights, and that the majority of southerners didn’t even like slavery, and that was because slaves made them poorer.

I think you are underestimating just how racist certain parts of this country are, and how important racial ideology is to their culture. And just how effectively it utilized race in class division. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Specifically, they are because their oppression is not acknowledged nor part of the agenda for the progressive movements.

Right, but that’s namely because western politics is devoid of any actual class consciousness. It primarily is still focused on individual rights, of which white men aren’t really disadvantaged.

So they are specifically disadvantaged from this perspective as there is not even a movement that they can support in which they recognize themselves.

See that’s where I disagree, there are progressive political parties who engage in class consciousness. They just aren’t popular, and don’t tend to attract a lot of white young men, or at least in my area.

Again, the mainstream cultural discourse lost a lot of the political connotation and flattened purely on gender/racial issues, so no, white oppressed men don’t have a political outlet that capture their struggle in the same way, right now.

Fox News doesn’t match that description? Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, a slew of other networks or anchors that specifically talk about this constantly? They have plenty of political outlets, just not a lot of healthy ones. But again, this is because those same networks are ran by the people who benefit from preserving the status quo.

Plus, i think the same problems are endemic to minority groups as well. It’s not like this representation is really focusing on class politics, they’re all based around individual rights. What exactly is the difference between the leaders of black lives matter and Jordan Peterson, other than one may have more legitimate complaints?

Well this in my opinion is an extremely limited perspective, because oppression and inequality is not solved by policy.

Yes, but that is typically what progressiveness looks like outside of class consciousness, and I don’t really foresee us evolving past that any time soon.

would answer the same I answered before, I don’t care about mens right per se. I generally strongly oppose this idea that class should be divided in the different population, each with its own set of problems and demands. This to me seems like a perfect way to shatter class unity which becomes purely based on mutual support (being an ally) rather than on common interests and reciprocal recognition as members of the same class and victim of the same dynamics.

Right, but this debate did not start in a vacuum. The original affirmation was that young white men were specifically disadvantaged.

I think there was a confusion where you thought my arguments within the framework of the original affirmation were taken as individual claims instead of rebuttals to claims. I think part of that is due to me responding to a slew of gish gallop made by the op.

I think we have essentially been in agreement, with maybe some differences in opinion about the scope of white supremacist ideology being practiced in America.

Again, there isn’t a single grant a female does not have access too, while males do not have the same access to all grants.

And those grants are for what?

But yes, males do get more grants for sports because, men play sports more often then females, and men normally enroll for sports mainly to get grants, not to become professional athletes.

Lol, okay so men have more access, but you’re mad they don’t have exclusive access?

third sentence, again no, men can communicate just fine, it’s just when we do, we are seen as lesser men. Stigmatization.

And the consequences of that is…men not communicating.

iv told close female friends and male friends of mine about me going to therapy and most times after iv done so, the people I told treat me differently. They treat me like a snowflake.

Sounds like you just have shitty friends.

Also, most of my friends are actually female belive it or not. I have a very small group of friends, and it’s nearly a 2:1 ratio of females to male. I love this so much, you don’t know fuck all about me, yet you assume so much

Well, you were the one who said you were completely alone and isolated and only relied on the comfort of your cats for companionship. Now you say you have a bunch of gal pals, but they call you snowflake when you tell them you in counseling?

Jesus christ you must consider yourself a victim.

Lol, why? I have great talks about mental health with my homies all the time. I’m a happily married man, with a wife who cares about how I feel just as I care about how she feels.

Also what echo chamber am I in? What gives you this impression?

FEMALE! It’s a dead giveaway my friend. Also the whole grant and suicide thing is a pretty popular trope in those circles, despite being pretty easy to explain if you actually did a little research.

never really had a father figure. I was the only male in a house of 4. 1 mother and 2 sisters. I raised with a female mindset, and did it ever cause me problems trying to make male friends.

There is no uniform mindset for men or women. If you spend all your effort caring about what people think of you, or worrying if you’re being manly enough, you’re never going to find the time to actually find someone or something that makes you happy.

is blaming men for everything.

Alternatively who’s fault is it? Are women responsible for our mental health? Who else can be responsible for your mental health other than yourself?

How many grants are designed to be awarded to exclusively females? I don’t know, but it’s more then 0.

Because those grants are usually in fields where the demographics are skewed male and they want more women in that workforce. That’s motivated by owners who want to lower labour cost, not because anyone’s targeting men.

How many grants are designed to be awarded to exclusively males? Including sports or fields mainly dominated by males?

Pretty sure men and women get scholarships to play every sport in college? And I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more males getting those scholarships than women, football teams are pretty large.

When a girl says they are suicidal how quickly do they get support? When a man says they are suicidal, how quickly do they get support?

That’s just because women are better communicators than men. They seek help when it’s less severe and are more likely to respond to treatment. Most men who seek help before suicide so it as a last resort, and America has really shitty healthcare. Again, not targeting men.

Anytime iv mentioned that iv been suicidal, the “help” I get was told to man up and not think about bad stuff. Iv been going to therapy on my own and at my own cost for years to help me give the strength to wake up tomorrow.

Well, shame on whoever told you that and I’m glad you sought help yourself. However, that’s mostly something we men are doing to themselves. We can’t blame anyone else for that, nor can anyone else but us fix it.

Why is it males still can’t talk about their thoughts and feelings without being considered a lesser man?

Because of other men… Have you tried having a platonic friendship with a woman or maybe better quality not man, they don’t tend to think less of you because you talk about your feelings. I talk to my friends about my feelings all the time, no one thinks of me as a lesser man.

Why is males have 3 times the suicide rate then females?

Because we don’t communicate our feelings as well or as often as a whole. We also tend to be less squimish about our method of suicide, when women tend to think of the aftermath more.

Why is it until very recently, women in a divorce would normally automatically be given full custody of their children?

It used to be a common belief in family court that mothers were more important to child development than men. This was assumed to be true as men traditionally were away at work more often and children required a stay at home mother.

This wasn’t targeting men, it was implemented by men who believed in the idea of the atomic family.

Why is it, when a male calls the cops over domestic violence, it’s the male who still gets arrested a majority of the time?

Who is making that discretion? The vast majority of police officers are men, they have the discretion to determine who gets arrested.

Why is there sigma still around a male being gay?

By who? And do those people think being a lesbian or bi is okay?

But yep, my male privlage gives me such a massive advantage over females, or others who identify as female, or non binary.

I mean just legally and economically…

use animals as a reason to keep going because on a personal level, I have nobody. I literally have to pay someone $310 CAD every month to listen to my problems.

You think that’s not happening to women?

Most females do not understand the isolation most males deal with.

Most men are not dealing with that kind of isolation, and I don’t think you have hung out with enough women to make that determination.

It’s easy to get stuck in an echo chamber because of how connected we all are, try different groups.

What I mean is that if I am a white unemployed, poor, knowing that 90% of rich people are white and male doesn’t make me any richer or privileged.

Would that person be claiming that young white men are the most disadvantaged class?

Remember, I didn’t claim that all white people were privileged. Only that if you were to for some reason break class down to race and gender, young white men would not more discriminated against than anyone else.

based on what you think so?

I mean we are talking about people who are claiming that young white males are being ignored or specifically discriminated against. So they’re already drawing conclusions based on race. In America a common trope is to blame minorities for economic disparity. Going back prior to the civil war, where poor white farmers blamed the slaves for ruining the labor market.

Class is not tied with demography in itself, class has to do with relationship to wealth. White people don’t belong to a privileged class, the privileged class is mostly composed by white people. They are not the same thing.

Again, the original context was about a group who already specified their demography. The premise was that young white men were specifically disadvantaged.

My rebuttal was that specifying young white men, instead of just young people was problematic. But if we were to examine this demographic as a class, it would be hard to say they were disadvantaged. I did not define the structure of class in this argument, the person I was originally responding to did.

Women and other minorities today have that representation.

And white men do not?

That’s the thing, being a man doesn’t make you on top. Thinking this way, with airtight categories is indicative of the kind of idea that as long as “a proportionate amount of women” are going to be “on top” (i.e.,

When I said the top, I meant in policy. If we are talking about political equality, there are not a lot of reasons for men to justifiably advance their own rights.

If someone told me that since I am man I am “on top”, and therefore I should just be an ally, I would feel alienated, because this fails completely to capture the mechanism of the system that oppresses both me and women.

And if they told you they were progressive about mens rights?

Sure, and that’s why I spoke about expectations. But a feeling of being prosecuted requires something else, in my opinion. Everyone in the situation you describe would realize that the problems are common, and not “mine” because male.

I am not that confident this is true. I don’t expect that level of self awareness in the majority of young people.

because we don’t live in statistics and we don’t live historically. If I am a struggling person, telling me that historically the category that I happened to belong to was privileged hence I am privileged

First I do think we live in statistics, some of us may be unaware of this but it affects nus either way. Secondly, I think the internal contradiction is that a poor white person is likely to believe they should be more privileged based on their race, but are not because of progressive policy. The same way poor people protect the wealthy from taxation.

Finally we are discussing social class, not how individuals react to the idea of social class. I didn’t say all white people were privileged people, I said white people belong to a privileged class. It’s the same as saying San Fransisco is a rich city, instead of saying everyone in San Francisco is rich. If you are not a rich person in San Francisco, and I said the problem is inherent in the wealth of San Francisco, would you take it personally?

am talking about mainstream and daily life. And it’s not even about men’s right, it’s about struggle of people independently from the individual social group(s) they belong to, but more focused on class (for example). The “men’s right” movement is a reactionary movement that sees in feminism and other movements a threat, and to some extend, they are a threat. Intersectional feminism is not mainstream, it did not really breach the social norm or discourse. What did breach is the superficial/apolitical version of it that stays on the surface. This is what people see everyday in movies, TV series, on the workplace, on social media etc. This is what I mean by not having representation, not having a voice.

Right, but who does have that kind of representation or voice if not white men? Even in your example you highlighted how intersectional feminism never got its time in the mainstream.

doesn’t include men at all. In fact, the main cultural result of progressive movements

I mean, I think that’s fairly natural if there really isn’t much room for men to progress in a society. If you’re already at the top, where else is there to make progress other than supporting allies who haven’t made it yet?

Progress isn’t a competition, there need not be losers. We can acknowledge two things being bad at the same time.

Then why do you insist that we divide class solidarity among gender? Why not advocate for improving life for all young people instead of insisting that men’s problems take priority?

As we type there are children being forced to mine toxic cobalt with no protection just so we can have these electronics to argue. How can we argue our lives are any bad compared to them? Might as well put off anyone’s progress until we finally beat out the modern salve trade. It’s a unproductive way of thinking.

Lol, what kind of rhetoric is that? Children in other countries work in cobalt mines, so it’s okay if American kids work at McDonald’s…

We are talking about equity in our own country, we are talking specifically about whether young men in the west are really experiencing more or worse problems than their counterparts.

Do you think a newborn “white male” as your oppressor too? Someone who has never had the chance to do anyone wrong? Must they really be subject to your scorn?

Lol, we are talking about sociology, not an individuals psychology. I don’t scorn individuals for being a part of any class, but i do scorn individuals try and preserve the class hierarchy for their own benefit.

And what of the white men today? If they gain nothing from your progress, then why must they be concerned with it?

That’s the thing, when we protect the most disadvantaged class we help protect every other class perceived as better than. This is a foundational to ideologies like feminism. If you can’t charge a disadvantaged class with some accusation, then there is no fear for the classes perceived to be more valuable.

This is one of problems with labeling white men as the most disadvantaged class. If we spend all our effort protecting A class that doesn’t really need protection, then we are leaving people actually in danger out on a line.

After all you seem to think that white men as a class have the ability to crush others with their privilege.

Do you think white men today as a class have not benefited from generational wealth created by systemic racism? What do you think slavery was if not crushing others with privilege?

How could we expect these people to work in the interest of a movement that only seeks to take from them indiscriminately?

So now equality is stealing? Just because I don’t think that white men are the most disadvantaged people in our country, I’m now taking from them indiscriminately?

What is progressive to these young men, what else could they possibly want that other people have?

And wouldn’t it be natural for them to simply follow the example that you have given them? Be wrathful, spiteful, hateful, boil down human beings to their perceived class, do anything to get a win for their own group.

Yeah… Seems to be exactly what they are doing. You have heard of Andrew Tate, correct?

Hell just look at the news, abortion rights are being repealed in America. This is happening in real time, and I promise you neither of us are happy about it.

And your solution is to …validate the men’s right movement? You’re literally claiming that men are not privileged, yet they are able to pass abortion laws. Further more you are saying that they are doing this because we don’t baby them enough in progressive political spaces.

Socioeconomics can say whatever it wants about groups and demographics and “numbers this” or “numbers that”, that doesn’t change the fact that we are individuals in a world of many other individuals.

You do understand that we don’t make policies around individuals?

Privilege, true and quantifiable privilege, is always relative

Relative to what…?

we should listen when people tell us about their problems, since it will encourage and empower them to do the same.

Oh yeah, I’m sure that encouraging the klansmen to air his grievances will surely benefit me, a man of color?

but that requires that we don’t waste our lives away trying to hold each other down out of a need for revenge.

It’s problematic to me that you think equality euates to revenge. I’m not saying to be mean to young white men, or even judge them. My only claims is that we shouldn’t prioritize white men’s problems over other demographics. And to you that means I’m thirsty for revenge?

Every step we take for ourselves or our own perceived group is a step backwards

And how does that apply to your original claim?

I still find it hilarious that you haven’t answerd my original rebuttal. How exactly are young men any worse off than anyone else in a similar demographic?

If my grandfather or father lived in a different world, this can at most create expectations, but cannot be really generating a feeling of prosecution, because the current one is the only life I have actually lived and I know.

The problem is that even if your grandfather isn’t around to tell you about it, the evidence of his accomplishments outlive him. You don’t need to embody someone’s personal lives to understand that your grandfather lived an upper middle class working at a factory, and you can barely afford to make rent. That your father married his highschool sweetheart and started a family in his twenties, and you’re thirty and can barely afford groceries for yourself.

the political discourse often flattens this issue and makes it almost two-dimensional. If you are a white man, you are privileged, period. Fact is, there are tons of white man that are absolutely not privileged, and are also victim of an unequal and oppressive society.

Right…but can you claim in an academically honest way that a poor white man has historically been offered more opportunities to succeed than a poor black man? That poor white men and poor black men have the same opportunities to lift themselves out of their class structure?

These people are substantially alienated because their voice is simply not represented anywhere.

Idk, I would say the majority of the United States Congress has been very open to mens rights advocacy. This discourse revolves around people like Tate who have created space specifically for men to air their grievances.

Some say they are driven there because they have no progressive place to go. I just think they don’t want anything to do with progressive spaces, because progressive spaces do not put them on a pedestal. They are included vicariously, the progressive ideology of supporting young people doesn’t preclude young men. It just isn’t solely focused on them.

was true already decades (centuries) ago, and that’s why lots of feminist battles were linked to socialism and leftist ideologies.

I agree, but until recently there has always been a social understanding that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. So long as the upper class threw enough scraps down from the table, the pet class would support the hierarchy.

This is nothing new, really, and forcing to read the current issues only from the racial perspective or only from the gender perspective (etc.) makes it much harder to build solidarity between groups who are instead left to fight battles within the system, without a perspective or a struggle to move past it.

That is my problem with specifically focusing on mens rights, it’s just another division in class solidarity.

Nobody is arguing for “elevation”

I think validating the claim that young men are specifically being treated worse than others in similar demographics is a tacit validation of allowing them to maintain their hierarchy.

However, when it’s men who feel wronged you ask them to turn the other cheek. Man up. Deal with it.

I can’t control how people feel? If someone feels wronged, but can’t explain how or why, am I supposed to genuflect in agreement? If two people are struck in the face, and only one of them cries, should I ignore the stoic? We should be improving the lives of all young people, not just the ones who shout about it the most.

The fact of the matter is it’s exactly this dogmatic rejecting of men that pushes them towards people like Andrew Tate.

I’m not rejecting that young men face problems, I’m just claiming they don’t face any problems more dire than anyone elses problem in the same demographics.

You just interpret that as rejection because you don’t empathize with the others.

We shouldn’t tolerate the intolerant, but if we truly seek to defeat it we must understand it and treat the systemic issues that cause it to arise.

And we do that by being more concerned about the problems of young men than others?

It’s not the romantic ideal of the rebel taking down the empire in a victorious display of self-satisfaction, but it is the method that gets lasting results.

What do they want, what are you willing to give them? According to the men’s right movement, their problem is that women are too free to turn down their advanced, women are too educated, no one wants to be their trad wife, and that there’s just too much competition in the job place because of things like affirmative action.

If that’s their problem, I don’t care, and I don’t really feel like he needs to validate their opinion.

I’ve never stood on anyone’s heads, least of all yours. I’d appreciate it if you could at least treat the next generation with the same respect.

You are an individual…we are talking about socioeconomics. We are talking about the systemic abuse that’s affected every demographic in America besides white men since the inception of this country.

Do you think the golden era of American history that the men’s right wants to revert to was shared by everyone in the country? That black families were able to afford a spacious house and take care of a large family on one person’s income? No, that was only a possibility for certain demographics. White men were given free home loans from the government, black families were sent to the projects, and women weren’t even able to open bank accounts.

You aren’t worried about the next generation, you’re only worried about the next generation of young white men.

Ignoring the issues people face becuase they come from what you determine to be a “privileged” class is just another form of bigotry.

Simply stating that the problems are not intrinsic to being male is not ignoring the problem.

Young men don’t stand to benifit from the same patriarchal systems we do, nor do we stand to benifit from the patriarchal systems our fathers did.

Who is we? What I’m saying is that young males are not being hurt anymore than any other demographic, they just aren’t culturally inoculated to it, and so they think they’re worse off.

And even if it did, one privileged doesn’t nullify the issues faced by other inequalities such as race, wealth, class, ability.

I never claimed it did?

issues they face are real reguardless of what privilege they have or are assumed to have.

Like? As I said, I keep hearing these blanket statements attesting to unique issues, but no one claims what they are or how they occur.

Equality should be about giving every individual a fair chance at life regardless of who they are or what they came from.

Do you think that we are living in some sort of post scarcity society? If there is an elevated class, its only means of elevation is to stand on the heads of it’s "equal"counterparts.

Not some team sport where “one side” must be crushed under to goosestep of self proclaimed progress seekers.

Lol, and those who stood on our heads suddenly proclaimed themselves victims. How do you think they stand elevated if not by crushing down the competition?

It’s only goose-stepping when the boot is on your face, when its someone’s else’s face they’re told to turn the other cheek.

Young men today face a mountain of issues with zero sympathy from the people or institutions around them. And grifters prey on these men

Idk, I don’t feel like young women are really offered any kind of safety net or support system that isn’t being offered to boys.

it’s actually insane to see all these people just insist being a guy’s world is all sunshine and rainbows and all these men are just awful people falling of their own accord.

This is the thing, I constantly hear how awful young men are being treated. I don’t ever really hear any specific reasoning that can’t be explained by other means other than sexism against men.

Imo this is one of the first generations of young men, especially young white men, that weren’t born on third base. The men’s right movement is a reactionary movement that’s just upset about being placed on an equal footing, and then falling to achieve the same results of previous generations of young white men.

That feeling of slowly rolling a stone up a hill all day as others unbound by such heavy burdens briskly walk by is the same feeling poc and women have experienced in this country since it’s inception. You aren’t being treated worse than everyone else, it’s just that equality feels like prosecution to those who have traditionally lived charmed lives. Welcome to the jungle, I hope you learn to enjoy your stay. I think the affectations of the moneyed class have ended, they have decided they don’t have to keep up the charade. We’re all the same to them now, and will all be exploited as such.

Oh hey, I’ve seen this at a factory before. Sometimes you have to create your own problems if you want that overtime.

New theory, the military industrial complex is officially late on child support.

T-bills are highly liquid.

Depending on what maturity rate you choose. I think the shortest is little over a month?

kept it in the SP500

Not super liquid if you are considering taxes.

The 400m dollar amount is based on an audit conducted in 2021, where it listed him having around 298m. The total of 400 was an estimate based on his income and liabilities since that time.

I for one highly doubt that he has 400m in liquidity. Not because he’s incapable of raising that much wealth, but because it’s an incredibly dumb move to keep 400m in cash. There’s no financial benefit like meaningful interests rates, and it doesn’t offer any tax benefits.

Even if he has kept it in partial liquidity like a money market account or Treasury bills, the amount and the timelines may not allow for him to access the totality of his funds in time.

Same for Phosphor https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

I’m sorry, but I didn’t see anything about the nitrogen cycle in the link you posted. What do you mean by “exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly”? I’m not very familiar with “planetary boundaries” as an ecological theory, and the site doesn’t seem to expand on their methodology to a significant degree, or maybe I’m just not looking at the right pages.

use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.

Right… But do we actually expect that to happen? You seem to be focused on the physical possibility and the science behind the problem, when my argument has been entirely policy based.

If we had the political will, or if we were motivated as nations to help our fellow man, I wouldn’t be worried in the first place. My concern isnt that this is some unsolvable and inevitable problem, but that governments will respond to this problem in the easiest and most profitable way. By ignoring it and allowing big AG to create a natural monopoly over an artificially inflated scarcity.

We can make nitrogen fertilizers just fine with the Haber Bosch process and Hydrogen electrolysis. All you need for that is water, air and electricity.

The Haber Bosch process is what we currently use… We can make hydrogen via electrolysis, but it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create it via gasification of a high carbon material like natural gas.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it will become more expensive, and that at risk communities already have a hard time paying the current price.

There’s of course a solution, my fear is that there will be no mechanism put in place by governments to make it economical for the entire globe.

Also crop yields are perfectly suitable to feed all of the global population without using fertilizers.

That’s just untrue. “around 175 million tons of nitrogen flow into the world’s croplands every year, and about half this total becomes incorporated into cultivated plants. Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken up by these crops. Because they furnish—directly as plants and indirectly as animal foods— about 75 percent of all nitrogen in consumed proteins (the rest comes from fish and from meat and dairy foodstuffs produced by grazing), about one third of the protein in humanity’s diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.”

just requires farmin techniques, that are not suitable for industrial farming for profit maximising companies.

The communities that are most at risk do not generally partake in industrial farming, nor do they export a lot of food.

On the contrary the current way of industrial farming destroys the yields as it erodes soils physically, chemically and biologically. If we continue farming like this for another century or two we will face severe global starvation.

Yes, we should refine the way we farm, but we are absolutely dependent on synthetic fertilizers, or at least 1/4 of the global population is. The current population is just too high for the nitrogen cycle to sustain us. There’s a reason we haven’t seen the levels of famine endemic to the period before the Haber Process, this despite a huge surge in global pop.

Unlike Operation Paperclip where they were given citizenship and put in charge of scientific programs and prisons in America.

That’s kinda debatable. They were deported back to East Germany, which was still under Soviet control, and were placed in charge of scientific programs and universities.

Or Operation Bloodstone, where the CIA put nazi war criminals in charge of South American special police forces

Who do you think ran the nkvd in East Germany? Unfortunately both great powers were a little too friendly towards the former Nazi for my taste. Though the Americans were the main proponents of the clean wehrmacht theory we are still entrenched in today.

Asbestos isn’t widely used in brake pads any longer, California and a couple other states banned it a couple decades ago. The market demand of those states pretty much forced manufacturers to change without federal input. It looks like this bill is just making it official.

I don’t really think using it as a reagent to make chlorine is very dangerous, so long as factory workers have access to proper PPE.

Fossil fuels can’t be banned overnight; I am pro-renewables, but we’re just not there for freight/ag/rural/heavy industry.

The largest concern I have as we move away from fossil fuels is the fact that we are super dependent on it for cheap fertilizers. Our current population exceeds the natural limitations imposed by the nitrogen cycle. As we stop fossil fuels production these fertilizers created mostly as a byproduct of refining fuel will go up in cost. Potentially moreso than poorer nations with large populations can afford to pay.

We still have to depart from fossil fuels, but I’m afraid of the consequences it will have on the global south.

in the 16th century, Okinawa was a vassal state of Japan (and also sort of China at the same time)

Ahh, everyone in East Asia’s favorite time honored tradition… avoiding becoming a vassal state of China or post Meiji restoration Japan. It’s a game everyone plays and a game everyone loses, especially China and Japan!

question whether VR is generally a good idea based on how our brains learn and do things.

I think the main problem with VR in general is the same problem we see mirrored in the rest of the tech world. Most people in silicon valley fundamentally do not understand the way the central nervous system works.

Because of sci-fi and other media, people tend to perceive the brain and the body as two different things. That the body is just the vehicle of the brain, and that we will someday be able to rid ourselves of these mortal vehicles.

In reality there are no clear delineations that separate the central nervous system from the rest of body in this manor. The more we learn about the brain, the more we discover that it doesn’t function like the command center we like to describe it as. That a lot of reactive motions aren’t signaled by the brain, but from the spinal cord.

Because of this relation between body and mind, screens will never be as effective as buttons. Things like NueroLinks will never be able to provide the ease of use as a mouse. And VR will never be a pleasurable experience for the vast majority of the population. We simply aren’t suited for an environment where our only stimuli is just the visual and audible spectrum.

My theory has always been that the better you try and make VR, the more it’s going to negatively affect the general population.

The same thing happens when you try to make life like prosthetics. If you make a prosthetic that’s too visually similar to the original, your brain actually tries to communicate with it, and when it doesn’t get anything back, it can cause symptoms of dysmorphia.

I think similar things are happening with VR, that the more sound and visuals are able to trick your brain, the more it will conflict with proprioceptors telling you that you’re actually just sitting in your room.