Egypt went from 8 million to 80 million in the last century. In large part because of the rest of the world (massive grain imports from Ukraine ... for example). But it can obviously work, thanks to globalization and how cheap it's to transport things by container ships.
Desalination that runs off of Solar panels makes it pretty viable for places like Dubai to exist. The cheap solar energy from the Desert, makes it attractive for future data centers to be placed there. Also, Ancient Egypt had slaves. A lot of the modern middle eastern states rely on cheap labour from India and Afghanistan.
And Oil money ...
Can capitalism buy it's own goods it produces without inflation? I heard someone claim that the only way the system balances is by printing money. Workers are paid less than the value they produce, and they're most of the consumers. So governments encourages workers to borrow money from banks (home loans, car loans, credit cards, and so on) to buy the goods they produce. But in the end the government still needs to purchase the excess through deficit spending. Like we saw for example during covid. In Canada government doubled its debt. To keep things from falling apart. And inflation is the only way they made it go on. But it's not sustainable, because now good chunk of taxes go to paying previous government's debt, and citizens get less services in return for more taxes. Clearly this loop is not sustainable too many times.
The government is not borrowing foreign currencies to buy an oversupply of domestically produced goods.
I think your model depends on "workers" being the only people who are taxed, so if workers are being paid less than the cost of the goods they have to consume, the government + workers must be running at a constant deficit.
But you also tax employers and owners.
Inflation is a tool intentionally used by governments to quickly lower wage costs across the board. People at the bottom end can be subsidized, and productive people whose nominal worth just went up with inflation will negotiate for higher pay. Everybody else gets a pay cut.
Something similar happened in Ontario many years ago, it was out for like 7 days. The neighbours came outside and talked, and everyone spent a lot more time outdoors. Saw the stars, and people burned candles in the evening. I actually look fondly at it, and feel like everyone should experience this. Now in the back of my mind is this feeling of wanting to live in a world without modern technology. Take a time travel vacation to the 17th century.
Judging from the French movie (with Pierre Niney) I saw last year (which was awesome btw) , and my vague recollection of the book, there's lots of physical skills involved. It's not just an intellectual pursuit, but more like applied science in getting vengeance. Really fun read.
Big chunk of social media is self improvement. Stumbled across this guy yesterday and actually gives pretty solid advice.
If your wife isn't happy to see you fencing (which I can understand) you might want to take a look at archery instead? And add this book (which impressed me during my teenage years) to your reading list:
Fact is that service jobs don't pay as well, or well at all, and some not even not enough to live on your own, or enough to save for retirement, or to start a family. This resentment is from the young working class males, and the rage is building. You can look at the election in Canada, to see how the younger people voted, and its totally opposite of the boomers they increasingly want to MAID.
Populism isn't necessarily bad, It's what gave birth to America. Raging hillbillies rebelling is kind of a thing though out humanity. But particularly successful in America, thanks to the constitution it spawned. And probably many more examples since ...
If service jobs pay way worse than manufacturing jobs, how come manufacturing share v. GDP per head is some kind of inverted parabola? And why are manufacturing jobs deeply unpopular with young people?
Yes, it's no longer a taboo and many younger people are cheering it on. As the older generation controls most of the resources, and wealth.
I remember reading somewhere it's actually illegal (or maybe it was a proposed law) to try and discourage someone once they consented. It's currently one in 20 deaths, but that number is growing steadily.
It's more like an assistant that can help you write a class to do something. You could write on your own but feeling lazy. Sometimes it's good, other times it's idioticly bad.
Need to keep it in check and keep telling it what it needs to do because it has a tendency to dig holes it can't get out of. Breaking things up into
Smaller classes helps to a degree.
I have an old Xbox 360, and a projector. Any multilayer games for get togethers. I'm actually building a backyard tki bar soon. Would be fun to add this for parties as well.
Classic Gauntlet in MAME is always a winner at parties, I've long found. Up to four players, complicated enough to be interesting, not too complicated to be fun when you're drunk, easy to pick up and put down.
I don't mean to be too critical, but why is breathwork/meditation so popular in Atheist circles? When I would presume rationality is the goal, and this seems like it would alter it in a negative way. (depriving your brain of oxygen, presumably decreases its ability to think rationally, or at least run at full capacity)
I get that someone like Sam Harris, makes bank promoting his meditation app. But his atheist audience is very receptive.
If you presume rationality is the goal, then the rational mind should point to decades of research and anecdotal evidence that shows the positive effeccts of meditation and breathwork on mental well-being. Why are you assuming depriving your brain of oxygen for a short period of time is decreases the ability to think rationally? That could be a short term effect, but a long term adaptive effect could be the brain thinks more clearly. Same with fasting from food, etc.
Well, if one's thoughts can be altered depending on the amount of oxygen the brain receives. How can you possibly be sure about your own rationality. Couldn't you rationally start to question anything you've come to a conclusion about before, as just a byproduct of your brain's oxygen levels at that time.
The best part about true things is they are still true whether you believe and understand them or not. Seeking truth isn't limited by your ability to understand everything.
I believe by "true things" what is meant is "as good as a real world experience as one can get", rather than "logically sound".
It is certainly reasonable to argue about whether logic stands on its own without an observer, but not to doubt that there is a true world out there to be experienced.
Oddly enough becoming a serious athlete, changing my diet and training as my job, completely changed who I am and remembering my thought processes and overall mental state of the previous lifestyle is bizarre as though that person is truly alien to my current self.
So increasing your VO2 max, has improved how your brain functions. A few years ago, I read an article where they improved kids Math scores by having them exercise on a treadmill before class.
I used Harris's app, and was a bit surprised to hear him use language that he'd savage anyone else for.
I get the problem there; you're trying to teach what something feels like, and there just aren't words.
It's not surprising that you can alter the brain by various exercises, or that those exercises are counterintuitive. The brain is complicated and our tools for manipulating it are baroque. Still, it was a little weird to hear Harris give in without apparently reconsidering other forms of mental exercise from that standpoint.
Think of meditation more as a physical exercise for the brain, like yoga. Is yoga a religion, even if it strengthens your core? Many people do it without any religious ideas.
Same with breathing, 'low CO2' sounds bad, but we do have the next breath, the goals isn't continued low CO2, it can lead to increased oxygen later.
As to rationality. Meditation helps declutter thoughts, so that helps with rationality doesn't it? Why would being strung out and stressed be more rational?
Atheism isn't specifically "a goal of rationality" it's just not believing in a deity (usually because of a rejection of "trust me bro, now pay your tithing" style pitches). I expect for most people the choice to believe or not believe stories with no evidence is orthogonal to the choice of an altered mind.
It looks like you put atheism and agnosticism in the same boat. There’s a certain belief, trust and conviction to lack of a deity in atheism. Not in agnosticism. That state of mind is orthogonal to belief is mostly true. On the other hand , there is also a motivation to explain away religious experience as physiological process, which explains the overlap in group membership.
> There’s a certain belief, trust and conviction to lack of a deity in atheism
Atheism means a lack of belief in a god. Just because many atheists go a step further or the word agnostic exists, that doesn't change the meaning.
I have yet to see an "official" source that says it's definitely belief of absence and not absence of belief. Agnosticism works just as well if you view it as subcategory of atheism.
My understanding is atheism is not believing in a deity (a - without, theism - belief in deity) and agnosticism is about not knowing (sometimes not knowing if it's possible to know). It gets messy because plenty of folks play games with the words like "clearly I don't believe the major, self-contradicting religions but maybe there is some deity out there somehow that had an influence beyond 'natural processes'" or that Einstein quote about calling the beauty of physics and the universe "god".
Similar to what you said about me, I think you're perhaps putting faith/religious dogma and spirituality/holding things sacred in the same boat. I think having awe or wonder or a feeling of being part of something bigger is again orthogonal to belief in a particular god. I don't even think religion is the dividing line here - religion and ritual exists all over without an overarching deity.
I liked the underlying idea to what you said about motivation to explain away religious experience as physiological process; I think there is something interesting there. I expect this is a result of what people already believe, not a cause, but I like the concept of how people take in new information and default to directing it to "knowable, let's figure it out" or some version of "unknowable".
tl;dr - not believing in a god seems separate from spirituality and religious experience. Theist and atheist are extremely high level (and one dimensional) labels and there is a LOT of diverse (and overlapping) belief and experience under each.
I study cognitive neuroscience. Meditation is extremely evidence-based. It is literally one of the most evidence-based things there is in terms of actions you can take to improve mood, executive function, focus, general cognition, etc., it's almost as backed as physical exercise. Of course, there is also a lot of woo-woo spiritual stuff around it, but you can just ignore that side and use it effectively. Not sure about breathwork, I'm moderately skeptical of many the claims made about it, but I haven't looked super far into it comparatively.
Desalination that runs off of Solar panels makes it pretty viable for places like Dubai to exist. The cheap solar energy from the Desert, makes it attractive for future data centers to be placed there. Also, Ancient Egypt had slaves. A lot of the modern middle eastern states rely on cheap labour from India and Afghanistan. And Oil money ...