Anecdotally it would seem that people are more online in general, albeit episodically with smartphones rather than via desktops and for hours (apart from work). But engaged only passively on scrolling social media. I would agree that intelligent commentary is much less online than it once was. It seems that intelligent people have mostly seceded from society to do their own thing in peace, to whatever extent is possible, over the past 2 decades.

"Reaching net zero sooner means facing fewer of them". It also means traumatic deindustrialization and a sharp falloff in population. Yeah, I suppose if the post-fossil fuel world has only 5% of the current world population, then there are fewer people to be impacted by such events.

A lot of young men are NEETs these days, and in many cases not by choice - large numbers of college grads are underemployed or unemployed in America today. Honestly I feel badly for them, but I also don't know what to do about that. Living through an age of decline sucks.

This seems to be a clear case of "unreasonable search and seizure", aka a Constitutional rights violation, however the USA is increasingly lawless so who knows whether he gets off.

I meant the propaganda system, not nuclear power, LOL. Sorry for the confusion.

It has proven much more resilient than I would have thought 10 years ago.

There are lots of ideologues around these parts. It's one thing that has kept me from greater engagement with Lemmy. For instance, it's overrun with pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian sentiment in a very lockstep way. I suspect a fair amount of the ideological and downvote traffic is coming from bots and shills of the same kind that ruined Reddit.

Anecdotally my social circle has grown larger and I am doing more things IRL than before everything got unaffordable and enshittified.

I'm not buying his "the system has adapted" thesis either. It appeared that everything had normalized by summer 2020 as well, and then we had increasing troubles well into 2021 along with surging inflation. And if the Hormuz situation is a "logistical crisis" then so were the conditions of the Covid crisis. I wouldn't confuse delayed consequences for adaptation. If we get to this fall or next year without significant change then I'll believe it.

But I don't think that will be the case.

I find I can't even bring up climate change or limits to growth scenarios because it's either a conspiracy theory or there will be some miracle fix to save us in the nick of time. That's the current state of normie consciousness.

Well, BlackRock's Larry Fink is already on record publicly saying that the funding for AI (e.g. data centers) will come from peoples' savings, pensions, etc ...

I have commented already how the American economy is very min-max right now - the people who have money in the markets have more cash than they ever had before, they have a lot to spend, and they are spending it on a luxurious lifestyle. They also appear to be blissfully unaware of how everyone else is living outside of that bubble, so to them, the "economy is great, never better".

However, I have also noticed serious cutbacks outside of that top 10-20% or so.

I also think the economy never really recovered post-Covid. Commercial real estate is still in a deep depression because - although they tried to make "return to office" a thing - it was a mixed success and the bubble in CRE investment crashed with no survivors. Generally speaking, hiring has been good in only a few sectors - government, health care, education. The rest of the economy is pretty stagnant.

In the markets, most of the gain in recent times is from AI stocks, with the rest of the corporate world also stagnant. And right now, short term interest rates - the bond market - is not keeping up with inflation either.

We may not be in a recession but in my opinion the economy is majorly F'd up all the same.