Believe it or not, this is the best time to be alive

[applegrove]

Believe it or not, this is the best time to be alive

by Scott Gilmore at Maclean's

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/believe-it-or-not-this-is-the-best-time-to-be-alive/

"SNIP..............


Our societies have never been healthier. The number of democracies has blossomed, from only 11 in 1900, to over 80 today. There are fewer autocracies. In 1976 there were over 80. Only 22 remain. Crime is down. In the 1970s, for example, 50 out of 1,000 Americans were victims of violent crime. Now it is less than 15. In Canada, crime rates are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years. Other social indicators, like global literacy rates? Never better. In the last 40 years the number of people who can read has climbed from 57 per cent to 84 per cent.

.............

Which brings us to the second problem: information technology. Humans have never been exposed to as many of these stories and images as we are now. From the moment we wake up, a flood of radio reports, newspaper columns, TV dramas, Twitter links and Buzzfeed lists wash over us. Once, you needed to personally watch someone in your clan teach you a lesson about not petting lions. Now, there are 496,000 YouTube videos of lion attacks viewable from the phone in your pocket. It is no wonder we remain nervous wrecks.

This creates a perverse dilemma, which may actually lead to our own demise as a species. When we fixate on visceral but unlikely threats like terrorism or child abductions, we ignore the intangible but genuinely dangerous risks such as climate change. Sadly, our political class has discovered this bug in our code, and happily exploits it. Cynically they know the minuscule threat of Ebola carriers is more important to you than the inevitable threat of climate change.

So, for 2015, take a deep breath. Appreciate that these are best of times, but acknowledge that unless we overcome our evolutionary handicaps the worst of times are coming. Then call your MP and tell him to do the same.


..............SNIP"

[Egnever]

1. Kick!

[leftofcool]

2. Well, according to Bernie Sanders, the sky is falling!

[draa]

12. For many of these children it is.

More than 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 45% of children live in low-income families.

http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html

That's a staggering number no matter how you slice it. It's only the best time to be alive if you can afford to live. For many of those children though it's a living hell.

[angrychair]

15. What???

That is an amazingly tone deaf and perversely crude thing to say in my opinion. In a time when the US has more of its citizens, per capita, in prison than any modern economy in the world. When black males are more likely to be arrested and jailed then any other racial group. When 51% of all income earners live on less than $30,000 a year. When .08% (yes, point zero eight percent) of income earners earn 53% of all wages earned in America. When voter surpression and gerrymandering, of some kind, occurs in over half of the state's.
Yes, Bernie is right and it does matter.

[Javaman]

22. yeah, all that talk of climate change is so ridiculous...

[el_bryanto]

29. "So what do you want to have for lunch?"

"You know who really hates eating? Bernie Sanders."

"Boy that new Star Wars film is dope!"

"You know who the real dark lord is? Bernie Sanders."

"What a beautiful day; nice and crisp."

"Bernie Sanders is doing his best to ruin the weather."

"Have you ever wondered if you reference Bernie Sanders a little too much?"

"I have Bernie Sanders syndrome, forcing me to inject his name into every conversation. And you know who gave it to me? Bernie Sanders!"

Bryant

[truebluegreen]

3. Hafta wonder about--for example--

"number of democracies." Do we in the US count as one?--because we aren't.

And yes, climate change is our biggest, our existential, threat.




And "...for 2015 take a deep breath....?" What's their current evaluation/advice?

[AngryAmish]

4. As bad as Daesh is, they are not Tamerlane.

[applegrove]

7. Under 50 people have been killed by terrorists in the USA since 9/11. About the same as right wing

fundies have killed with guns in the same period. Many more have died by other domestic forms of gun violence in the US. Or lack of health care. Or other GOP policies. The USA is heading in the wrong direction for sure. And what a huge waste of time the GOP has caused in the last 30 years. Rich and useless are the GOP.

[zeemike]

10. And we kill 50 of them every week with drones.

Wedding parties, hospitals no problem, shoot em down.
But out murder is justified.

[daleanime]

5. We know.....

you love the status quo.

[applegrove]

6. I fight to end growing inequality in $$$ and power every day. I don't want to see the GOP

dismantle liberalism around the world...... because liberalism works. I think the point of the article, people pay attention to shiny things rather than the reality of climate change, is important. No? But thanks for stereotyping me.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

9. If you really cared about that you'd not vote for HRC

[LanternWaste]

38. I'd pretend the same as you if my bias depended on it.

I'd pretend the same as you if my bias depended on it.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. I miss the 70s myself....

Still have my lava lamp but I miss my waterbed.

[moondust]

11. Me too.

Music of the 60s and 70s. Lived and traveled in Europe for 21 months and loved it. End of Vietnam. Jimmy Carter. Relative socioeconomic equality. Quite a few jobs with or without a college degree. Twilight of the post-WWII/pre-Reagan "Golden Age."

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. Not to mention the sexual revolution in the days when "Aids" was a diet candy....

Okay,...it was SPELLED "Ayds", but still.

[mountain grammy]

19. Yeah, me too

I really thought we had a chance, till morning in America turned out to be our demise.

I know we're better off, but it sure doesn't feel secure or permanent.

[snooper2]

25. the 70's, the stuff dreams are made of

[Spitfire of ATJ]

32. Think THAT'S bad? We had an AMC Pacer.

[lovemydog]

14. Outstanding article.

Thanks a million for sharing it, applegrove.

I've been thinking a lot about these issues lately. How to reduce the information overload that can fry my brain. How a glacial change that may we don't hear or see so distinctly like climate change can creep up on us almost without us knowing. How to live a meaningful life (and dare I say a life with spiritual purpose) without succumbing to religious shame or superstition. How to be aware and happy without neglecting the suffering around us.

Much food for thought as we go into the holiday season. I'm grateful so many online here share articles like this one.

[applegrove]

17. Yes. I loved it too. And for sure I am guilty of going online

or watching the news and not paying as much attention to climate change and the really big stuff like that. I should do more to recycle. I could easily save up my organic waste and share it with a neighbour (I'm in a 8 unit bldg - we recycle everything but organic waste). I'm trying to eat more legumes and less meat. I just made a big batch of onion-garlic green lentils. Served it on a bed of rice with sour cream and tomatoes. Everyone said it was delicious. If I make a pot of it a week I would cut down on ordering in and all the waste that entails. But yeah great to hear the world is improving. Trade has a lot to do with better outcomes worldwide. I just hope we can keep the GOP from rolling back all of our accomplishments. And I just hope it is not too late to stop the worst parts of climate change and to avoid water wars and mayhem.

[Recursion]

16. Ironic, isn't it?

But, yeah.

[hunter]

18. Depends who you are, and where you are. Same as always.

I'm feeling pretty shitty right now, thanks.

Hurt too much to sleep, hurt too much to be awake. A bottle full of codeine and a handful of prednisone would be pretty sweet right now, but professionals always reject my self-medication plans.

Like this:

Of course some have actually seen me in my AMA states, so maybe they do know better.



Well, I suppose it could be worse.

Suppose I was a Syrian farmer, looking for refuge in Europe...

--more--

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/syria-climate-years-living-dangerously-symbolia

200 years from now these high fossil fuel use "good times" will be regarded as the prequel to the fall.

Our house is on fire but most of the people partying haven't noticed yet.

They don't want to notice.

[mountain grammy]

20. Good perspective. Our house is on fire

And we lack the will to put it out before it spreads.

[Orsino]

31. Yes. Best to be to be alive unless it isn't.

Without a doubt the best time to be rich and well-fed.

[LanternWaste]

39. Or, like me, poor and well-fed.

"Without a doubt the best time to be rich and well-fed..."

Or, like me, poor and well-fed.

[whatthehey]

21. Humans have a terrible time with aggregates and universalization

It takes an unusual knowledge of analytical techniques or an even more unusual degree of dispassionate circumspection to say the world is getting better when yours is getting worse.

Add to that this perverse Kunstlerite doomerism that pervades much of this site, where large numbers triumphantly predict the total collapse of capitalism any day now while naively believing in the fairy tale that a socialist utopia might replace a collapsing market economy, when the only things that ever have are brutal autocracy or destructive anarchy, and this piece is unlikely to be well received.

People in bad circumstances seek three things generally speaking. Help, blame and company. Nobody is interested in tales of plummeting UE rates when THEY can't get a job of their choice, because they fear both external and internal recognition that their plight is not universal and invincible and unconnected to their own choices.

Humans also have a tough time reacting to trends rather than absolutes. How many times have we seen morons respond to any news of improving GDP or UE or initial claims or whatever with variations of "well that's bullshit because everything's not perfect and wonderful. The factory in my town shut down last month"? They seem incapable of differentiating between improvement and perfection. If you weighed 400lbs, losing 30 still likely makes you massively overweight, but it also means you are rapidly solving your problem. Thus we see true, valid seachanges in violent crime "rebutted" with anecdotes of school shootings etc, and great improvements in global human rights abuse "rebutted" by real, but both parochial and themselves improving, instances of racial injustice in the US. Misery loves company indeed, but it also hates others being saved from misery.

[hunter]

24. Most of my formal education is evolutionary biology.

Exponential growth of innovative species always ends, or as they say on the triage deck, the bleeding always stops.

Humans just ain't that special. Sorry. In ten million years this civilization is nothing more than an interesting layer of trash in earth's geologic record, with a few odd bits of metal in outer space.

Even in human scales of history civilizations rise and vanish.

That's not doomerism, that's just ordinary reality.

Our wild fossil fueled party, our exponential population growth and conversion of natural resources into shiny toys, all are consequence of human biological evolution. (I personally think it has to do with story-telling, the stories your grandmother told that you pass on to your grandchildren. Then came the written word, and next you know everyone is fighting over religion... utterly illogical.)

We humans are not the first time such biological innovations have led to explosive growth and then collapse. It's happened before, and it will happen again.

Personally, I don't like this civilization for many reasons. This thing we call "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we do to the earth and our own human spirit.

If I was the missionary sort, I'd tell everyone to use birth control and chill out. Plant a garden. Stare at the stars. Be kind to your neighbors.

You do know your neighbors, don't you?

What are the essential things? Food, appropriate medicine, comfortable shelter, literacy, numeracy, and art. Resource-wise, in some Utopian world of gradually shrinking populations and increasing automation, these essentials are inexpensive.

[DLevine]

26. +1. nt

[whatthehey]

30. I think we are talking different time scales

Is human mastery of the earth going to last until the death of the planet? Not a goddamn clue but highly likely it won't, at least unless you think what we have now is the mastery of our tree-shrew like ancestors. You're right that's not doomerism. That's a combination of biology, geology astronomy and climatology. But is capitalism likely to collapse in ruins in a few years? The improbability is staggering. The entirety of human economic world history has trended towards open global trade and regulated private enterprise. Sure there will be slowly shifting core, peripheral and external individual economies, but any attampt to choose sustained externalism has been doomed to utter failure within a century or so if not faster, from the Japanese shogunate to the Soviets. Meanwhile capitalism and free trade has lasted millennia of slowly expanding and strengthening progress, lifting billions out of abject poverty and spreading every single improvement that makes modern life so much more comfortable than that suffered by our forebears.

The economic future? Utter guesses is all anyone has, but my guesses tend towards more global standardization and mobility. Our descendents centuries hence will wonder about differing currencies the way we wonder about wampum, and marvel that imaginary lines on an an imaginary map decided whether you lived comfortably or in desperation given an equal amount of labor or knowledge. We'll eventually get closer to equality as the neo-Marxists hope, but it won't be at the command of an earnest committee of fellow comrades with a twee acronym. It will be because everybody eventually works out that it doesn't matter if an Afghan assembles your car or a Pole programs your CRM software you use to sell soda to Spaniards.

[hunter]

34. Ugh. I loathe automobiles and airline travel...

... resenting every moment I've wasted driving, or flying trapped in a pressurized aluminum cigar tube hurtling through the upper atmosphere at 450 m.p.h..

When my wife and I met we were both Los Angeles commuters. By some planning and greater good fortune we've avoided that hideous lifestyle since the mid 'eighties.

I resent the fact that I'm not considered adult in many communities unless I have a car and a driver's license.

My own car, (yes I'm a bit of a hypocrite, I feel compelled by community standards to have one) is a big "FUCK YOU" to our automobile culture. The only parts of the car I wash are the windows and mirrors and occasionally the headlights, and I don't repair anything that's merely decorative.

I'd like to live in a culture where people always have time to enjoy the ride. The only vehicles that really need to go fast are ambulances and fire trucks. (In my experience the cops always arrive after the shooting is over, unless of course they are the ones shooting. And I'm always amazed that some people live in communities where the cops will show up for things like minor fender-benders, vandalism, or burglaries.)

My favorite forms of transportation are walking, sailing, and trains that go slow enough that you can open the windows in nice weather without annoying the other passengers. Bicycles I don't like so much because I am a bit of a klutz, with scars. My sister rode her bike across the U.S.A. once, from Southern California to Long Island. She's got a better idea of the actual scale of the continental U.S.A. than most U.S. Americans. The longest trip I've made on bicycle was about 70 miles. I've taken longer walks. Both my sister and I have crossed the Atlantic on slower ships.

I make my own sodas, and I make my own ales, which I don't sell to Spaniards or anyone else.

I'm probably some kind of dumpster-diving neo-Luddite. My idea of fun is finding a broken laptop, repairing it, replacing the hard drive with an SD card, and installing Debian on it. My last major "desktop" computer purchase was a Raspberry Pi, for $35.

What you are describing is still a high energy economy. I'm personally hoping we humans, as we are, never get clean cheap fusion energy to work because then we would literally eat the entire biosphere.

[whatthehey]

36. Try living without one as a hemiplegiac with a 200' walking range who can't do stairs

But even given the (thankfully true) fact that my situation is not typical, the idea that we'll ever go back to non-powered transportation is a ludicrous pipedream. What powers personal transportation will certainly change, and extremely densely populated regions (but ONLY extremely densely populated regions) can use public transportation effectively, but as every society becomes more advanced they universally seek more mobility and more independent mobility. This is not limited to some self-flagellating nonsense about decadent western materialism either but seen in, for example, both India and China even in areas where collectivist politics are still extremely popular. Soviet workers would wait years on the list for an utterly terrible Lada. The working poor in Vietnam or the Philippines scrimp and save until they can buy scooters. Their equivalents in sub-Saharan Africa will do the same once LCC sourcing moves there in force. It is a universal and unstoppable force of global human nature that given the opportunity people will sacrifice enormously for the ability to be independently mobile over distances and with passengers/goods that make human-powered transportation unworkable.

I drive an EV, actually on my second such (although as much for the cool tech/cost saving aspect as for the eco impact but both are nice). They will become more popular. The tipping point is already gone. They will be more and more efficient and powered more and more by renewable sources. They are likely to be joined by hydrogen vehicles once delivery challenges are met, and the gods alone know what else will follow. Fossil fuels simply cannot last for ever, although I for one won't see the end of them. But all that will do is change what moves individual transit, not that it exists.

[hunter]

37. My problem may be that I never learned to equate automobiles with any kind of freedom...

... always saw them as some kind of rock chained to my ankle.

First problem is that automobiles confine you to roads, the second problem is parking them somewhere. Third problem is they are bloody expensive.

Basically it's like always having a license plate attached to your butt. Most people rarely wander far from their automobiles.

The same is true of air travel. Someone is making a list and checking it twice. Fly with someone else's ticket and you may find yourself locked in a little room while someone wearing blue gloves explores your bodily orifices.

I can walk, hitchhike, take anonymous public transportation, and end up in places nobody else knows where I am. That's my notion of freedom.

Most of my ancestors ended up in the U.S.A. anonymously. I've got one documented European immigrant, she was a bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran away.

The rest of my ancestors were clearly escaping various sorts of troubles in Europe and Britain. They landed in the Americas and didn't want to be found.

Nobody knows where one of my great grandfathers came from. None of the several stories he told of his origins turned out to be true. My Army Air Force officer grandfather was a character of the similar sort. The dates-of-birth on his California Driver's Licence, his Social Security record, and his military records didn't match, and he'd gone by several names throughout his life, consistently keeping only his dad's surname, my surname, which may have been authentic or not.

I like that.

[whatthehey]

40. Hmmmm... I do. It's either a car or never leave my street.

[Ghost Dog]

33. That's extremely well put, hunter.

Thanks.

[yellowcanine]

23. May be but how much better could it be? That is the real question.

Still a lot of work to do. Relatively and as a whole we are better off, yes. But there are still too many people around the world who are living desperate lives and the gun violence is still way too high in this country.

[Octafish]

27. In Canada, maybe.

In the USA, no.

[Inkfreak]

28. I'm enjoying it.

I suppose it depends on if you're alive or not.

[Stuart G]

35. Each day is a miracle for me..?? Yes you are correct!!!!

I have had a number of severe medical problems over the past 10 years. Yes, very severe.

I am still alive and get around very well. A whole lot better than a few years ago. Often, I forget and get wrapped up in the ....
...negative stuff....but without these times, and advances..I would be dead....as someone once said in my youth..

"Yes, sir ree Bob"...that's all folks...