The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity.
Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.
The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.
Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
It's easier to understand that excuse when people realize that Americans tend to start with a conclusion then work their way backwards to support it. As in, 'we aren't doing much about climate change so here's why that's okay'.
I'm in Beijing right now. I was also here 20+years ago. The difference is astonishing. Back then the air was filthy, it was hard to breathe, you never saw the sun. Today it is blue sky most days, EVs everywhere, electric scooters, busses, even garbage trucks. The roads are quiet. The air is clean. The high speed rail system is astonishingly good. This really feels in some ways like living in the future. The West is years behind.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
The deleted videos did, in fact, violate YouTube's rules, but it's questionable whether YouTube would have taken them down if they hadn't shown an Israeli soldier carrying out a lynching.
Singaporeans have insanely high quality of life and high pride in their system and people. They have an immense number of negative freedoms that the average person across the world could only dream of: freedom from violence, freedom from the devastating effects of drug addiction on families and society, freedom from poverty, freedom from corruption, freedom from instability. For the average person looking to raise a family, build a quality life, and just live well, Singapore is the perfect social contract. Don't like it? They have the most powerful or second most powerful passport in the world and can move anywhere else they see fit, yet they see their country as the best place they could be
The whole situation is so extreme it almost reads like sick parody. Last year there were riots in Israel when some IDF soldiers were arrested for raping prisoners. The riots were in defense of the rapists, and were attended not only by extremist Israeli civilians but also Israeli lawmakers, who stormed the military base where the rapists were being held.
The leaker releases a video of some of the abuse and is then accused of "blood libel" against the IDF by the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz. That phrase, "blood libel", is specifically intended to invoke the old medieval stories of Jewish people sacrificing and eating gentile children for their religious holidays. For leaking a video proving that the abuse is real.
Ok we're transitioning to Salarya, but payroll is still in Bullfrog—did you see my Noosecock post? Submit your timecard on Fireplayce then jizz me on Smackdog. Do NOT upload to Crackerz without Yammer approval
Well, in the 90s through the late 2000s there was a LOT of paranoia from the right, especially the evangelical right, as well as the milieu that is sorta called the "patriot movement" which includes minutemen militias, sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists, separatists etc. regarding Government goons coming for them, "Mark of the Beast" stuff, and New World Order global cabals and what not. They even had magazines.[0] This is the precursor to the Obama FEMA Camp conspiracy theories (Which is ironic, since we are now building camps, just you know, for those people.)
Early 90's 2nd amendment anxiety, Ruby Ridge, assault weapon bans/Brady Bill and McVeigh's terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City propelled this stuff, and when we tried to impliment the national id (REAL ID Act) they very much flipped out, so they leaned on States Rights to shatter this notion, basically letting any state just not do it. 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane.
It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act. This is worth reflecting on.
Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Ice can say what they want. The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land here.
Oh yeah, and facial recognition does not work to anything like this degree of accuracy, and probably never can. Nice try.
> (Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and interest in maintaining them.)
Part of this is that the "old money" tended to withdraw from public life after the Great Depression when they decided infamy was a serious liability.
That's why one struggles to name any of the living heirs of the big names of that era, who are absolutely still filthy stinking rich, while newbies like Musk, everyone knows. The culture of what Fussell calls the "top out-of-sight" is to remain sufficiently anonymous that nobody knows their given names unless one goes looking (and even then, it may be hard to find much trace of them). A bunch of them don't show up on any of those "richest" lists not because they couldn't rank, but because you effectively have to opt-in to those, for enough of your wealth to be traceable without great effort to get counted.
Owning a highly-visible Newport mansion could well be a mark of poor taste, among that set.
They still have their grand houses, they just may not (though, may) be in the Georgian or Neoclassical style or whatever, and they're probably not visible (from remotely close-up, at any rate) from any public road. Drive minor highways in the right parts of the country and look for nice (though, not necessarily imposing or impressive) gates leading into what looks like a simple, wooded lot with an unremarkable, perhaps even gravel, drive that immediately disappears into the trees, and you've probably found one, and they're all over the place... plus their families will usually own plenty of extremely nice, but not flashy, well-located houses and condos and such in more-populated areas.
Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
On the one hand, the west seems to think that people have a fundamental right to protest and affect change in government, because, yeah, democracy, will of the majority and all that.
On the other hand, if you let democracy get a foothold in many of the muslim-majority states, the winner of a democratic process will very likely be what the west perceives as a religious fundamentalist group whose values are antithetical to almost every single value that the west holds dear (including democracy itself). It will mean the rise of groups such as the muslim brotherhood that have pan-islamism and the establishment of sharia as their stated goals.
So you can either support the right of the people to overthrow an authoritarian regime and establish a democratic process that will lead to a fundamentalist islamic state, or you can support a regime that is authoritarian but will allow the practice of some western liberal values.
Much has been said about the GLP drugs and their interactions with all kinds of addictive disorders. Alcohol, drugs, even gambling... Anecdotally, I "struggled" at times with gaming (not joking). I would find myself skipping meetings at times or ducking away to play online sometimes. It never became a real issue but I knew I did it and it was embarrassing.
Once I started on tirzepatide, and then with retatrutide, the "urge" to swap over to my PC between meetings and load up a game is pretty much zeroed out.
Is this an "addiction" or a form of "abuse" similar to alcohol or other drugs? I would have said no some time ago, but now I'm not sure. I definitely feel like, looking back, I was more or less "addicted" to video games. I don't want to romanticize it as some sort of "escape", it just is what it was.
This was an unintended side effect (benefit?) of the drug for sure, in addition to acute weight loss of course.
Unlike many others, even after titrating down and coming off the GLP's, I have not felt the urge to binge food, video games, or anything else. I maintain a healthy, active lifestyle and have kept my weight exactly where I prefer it. My relationship with my body and my time has massively improved. I feel like I am at risk of sounding like a complete shill, obviously, but in my mind these drugs can be something that absolutely has the potential to turn life around for many, many people.
Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?
We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.
I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.
And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.
Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".
We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
China’s rare earth strategy was formulated roughly 40 years ago — this in itself is an advantage of a one-party system.
Almost all nations that experienced rapid economic takeoff were built on one-party rule, strongman leadership, or authoritarian governance — such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore...
Taiwan had Chiang Ching-kuo, South Korea had Park Chung-hee, and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew.
At least in Asia, this pattern seems to hold true.
Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the moment you enter office.
It goes back way way further than that. The special mix of government funded technology, ruthless entrepreneurship, and social engineering predates Shockley by almost 100 years.
Start by figuring out who Leland Stanford is and how he got rich. Read the book ‘Palo Alto’ if you’re looking for a good starting point.
(0) Be exceptionally intelligent and capable of applying that intelligence to people, not just code or math — necessary for everything that follows.
(1) Keep attention diversified as long as possible until the winning path becomes obvious.
(2) Focus on fringe bets, but pursue many simultaneously until one clearly dominates (see (1)).
(3) Extreme social manipulation — people-pleasing, control- and power-seeking, selective transparency, skillful large-scale dishonesty, and a willingness to hurt or betray when it serves (1) and (2) and the relational cost is acceptable.
(2) brought him into the startup ecosystem and the first YC batch in the first place (he had to start somewhere); combined with (3) he made an early fortune from a failed startup. (3) also ingratiated him with PG and others in those years. (1)+(2) ensured he always had exposure to every plausible frontier of the industry; when he was effectively fired from YC for (1)+(3), (2) made the OpenAI pivot the next obvious move — and a better one. (3) almost cost him his career a second time when the board fired him from OpenAI temporarily, but he survived because (3) also ensured he had enough to offer everyone else that he leveraged his way back in.
Him or some other pointed out to some important EU person that if they (China, an industrial powerhouse) were actually supporting Russian war efforts, the war would already be over.
Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.
The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.
Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).
So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.
Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).
PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.