The Useless Generations

This too shall pass.
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Taboo
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The Useless Generations

Post by Taboo »

Enki wrote:
Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:Fertility declines as urbanization, which turns children from assets to liabilities, increases. Because urbanization tends to coincide with the late phase of a civilization's development, we tend to project causality where it probably doesn't exist. The world, as a whole, is in the process of a long-term move from the country to the city, and I'm skeptical that we'll ever see the population numbers modern-day Malthusians fear.
There is also the process of globalization. If you live in New York, London is as close as every other major city that is not Philadelphia, Boston or DC. Culturally speaking, Iowa is on another planet for peers who are familiar with backroads in Tuscany. This is an important part of urbanization in the Internet age. The very shape of the world has been remade. Just as it was remade for the second half of the millenium from 1492 onward as Capitalism arose as a necessary outgrowth of the sudden burst of global trade brought on by the competition between the European powers worldwide.

The thing about the lack of children is that there are destitute immigrants all over the world, hungry to be the underclass in a wealthy developed nation. They will come and fulfill the roles the economy requires, so they can send a remittance.

Cellular phones more than anything are spreading the global communications network into more and more neighborhoods throughout the world. This allows for people who were previously isolated by geography to trade in global and regional markets.
What I am really waiting for is when a generation of scientists starts making serious breakthroughs after autodidact study on iTunes U, MIT OpenCourseWare, Code Academy and the Kahn Academy. That's going to open up the market in a whole other way that people are not anticipating yet. We have yet to have a post Information Revolution generation. That's my kids, Halo 3 and Angry Birds for them, inhabit the place that Asteroids, Pac-Man and MIssile Command inhabited for my generation that grew up alongside the development of the video game as well as the information revolution. My kids do not know what it is like to not have internet in their home. They have an iPad and know how to use it at 2 and 5. I am only 34 and the world I grew up in is already an anachronism. From, "Car phones, what a waste of time and money, why would I want to talk on the phone while I'm driving?", to the same people who said that having a cell phone; every single one of them. My grandparents lived in horse and buggy days in New Mexico, my kids have been flying in airplanes since they were infants. I know people my age who order materials from China to cover their geodesic dome at Burning Man. The global economy is at our fingertips, literally.

This sort of interconnectivity at this scale is unprecedented. As Facebook and other 'network effect' products demonstrate that there are different orders of functionality in population groups when you have a large network effect.

In market terms, billions of people who couldn't get widget X, can now, and billions of people who couldn't sell widget X, can now. With 3D printers, more people will be able to manufacture complex machinery than could before.

Fertility collapse will drive miscegenation as people will look outside of their culture group more. If big cities are any indication, people are not making their love life choices based on notions of ethnicity nearly as much as they once did. We are all Mutts here in the Americas anyway.

In otherwords, if I can't find any blond blue-eyed corn-fed American girl, I'll find myself a brunette brown-eyed maize-fed Mexican girl.
Dunno, Enki. With the old computers from back when we were growing up, there was still a lot of room for tinkering alongside playing. I learned my first programming language (q-basic) in an effort to hack the "Gorillas" game that I was playing at the time. I modded CIV2 to death, and learned scripting in the process. Today's tablets are closed environments, more an interactive tv than a computer. People who use them consume entertainment, do not produce anything. Its closed nature is one of the reasons I've avoided all Apple products all these years, despite their obvious aesthetic advantage and even ease of use.

I keep having these images of a bunch of young people taking electricity, internet and food for granted, without any idea how to maintain all the infrastructure their forefathers and foremothers built up for them. Eloi bereft of morloks.

I know, I know. I'm getting cynical and misanthropic in my old age.
Ammianus
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Ammianus »

ST,

It all depends on whether the "makers"/"producters" are willing to part with their technological largesse and distribute and invest it downwards, instead utilizing it for purposes of clannish interests and economics of bullshit material. So far, present trends seem to indicate more the latter than the former. And even if the former was practiced, expect certain "strings" attached, per the Ipad.
Farcus

Brawndo - Its Got Electrolites

Post by Farcus »

Taboo wrote:
I keep having these images of a bunch of young people taking electricity, internet and food for granted, without any idea how to maintain all the infrastructure their forefathers and foremothers built up for them. Eloi bereft of morloks.

I know, I know. I'm getting cynical and misanthropic in my old age.
Probably been around a lot of women. Very few men can hold a machine in their hands for long without thinking upon how to improve it. Women Paretoize a little differently.
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Taboo
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Taboo »

:shock:

Guilty as charged. :P (Did I mention I now live in St. Petersburg, home of the 2nd (or 3rd) best dressed women in the world?)

I think you've been around too many engineers and scientists. They do consititute less than .5% of mankind, you know. (2.5% of US). And math is hard, and the quality of math education in 95% of schools isn't what is needed to instill a love of math and engineering in people who aren't already strongly predisposed by genetics or parents in that direction.
Farcus

Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Farcus »

Taboo wrote::shock:

Guilty as charged. :P (Did I mention I now live in St. Petersburg, home of the 2nd (or 3rd) best dressed women in the world?)
Nice. Hope you're settled in.
I remember seeing the Crown Jewels in Leningrad as a kid. The Palace Square left quite an impression. The Red Army guards were the best of it, I think.


I think you've been around too many engineers and scientists. They do consititute less than .5% of mankind, you know. (2.5% of US). And math is hard, and the quality of math education in 95% of schools isn't what is needed to instill a love of math and engineering in people who aren't already strongly predisposed by genetics or parents in that direction.
I just write like this because I post from my desk, where I look at everything like Murphy was paying me. I have to keep my head in the game.

You may have seen this. It's fun.

Lockhart's Lament
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Enki
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Enki »

Taboo wrote: Dunno, Enki. With the old computers from back when we were growing up, there was still a lot of room for tinkering alongside playing. I learned my first programming language (q-basic) in an effort to hack the "Gorillas" game that I was playing at the time. I modded CIV2 to death, and learned scripting in the process. Today's tablets are closed environments, more an interactive tv than a computer. People who use them consume entertainment, do not produce anything. Its closed nature is one of the reasons I've avoided all Apple products all these years, despite their obvious aesthetic advantage and even ease of use.
Yes, and the first hardware upgrades I ever did to my 486 were installing more RAM and a 28.8 modem so I could play Doom II and get on the Internet. But you are just projecting your own experience. The ability to make tablet applications is the new version of the sort of tinkering you did. Your comment about people who use them consume entertainment and do not produce anything is demonstrably false in my world. People in your generation tinkered with computers at FAR LESS a proportion than people today. There are more programmers per capita today than there were in the 1990s.
I keep having these images of a bunch of young people taking electricity, internet and food for granted, without any idea how to maintain all the infrastructure their forefathers and foremothers built up for them. Eloi bereft of morloks.
Yes, they will take them for granted just like we took the technologies we had for granted.
I know, I know. I'm getting cynical and misanthropic in my old age.
A bit.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
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Enki
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Enki »

Ammianus wrote:ST,

It all depends on whether the "makers"/"producters" are willing to part with their technological largesse and distribute and invest it downwards, instead utilizing it for purposes of clannish interests and economics of bullshit material. So far, present trends seem to indicate more the latter than the former. And even if the former was practiced, expect certain "strings" attached, per the Ipad.

Is Taboo ST? I didn't realize!

In response to your post, the makers will use the technologies in a social configuration akin to every other generation. Some people will try to uplift the whole species, some people will be clannish and secretive and some people will use them for destruction.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
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Juggernaut Nihilism
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Juggernaut Nihilism »

Taboo wrote:I learned my first programming language (q-basic) in an effort to hack the "Gorillas" game that I was playing at the time.
Haha, me too! Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps), I failed and gave up on programming.
"The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance."
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Taboo
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Taboo »

Enki wrote:Is Taboo ST? I didn't realize!
:)

I must've gotten more mellow in my old age...
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Taboo
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Taboo »

Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:
Taboo wrote:I learned my first programming language (q-basic) in an effort to hack the "Gorillas" game that I was playing at the time.
Haha, me too! Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps), I failed and gave up on programming.
Ha. Don't worry, I'm no programmer either. Right now, I play a political scientist paid to teach math and stats to math-phobic teenagers and early-twenties folk.
Last edited by Taboo on Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Taboo
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Re: The Useless Generations

Post by Taboo »

Ammianus wrote:ST,

It all depends on whether the "makers"/"producters" are willing to part with their technological largesse and distribute and invest it downwards, instead utilizing it for purposes of clannish interests and economics of bullshit material. So far, present trends seem to indicate more the latter than the former. And even if the former was practiced, expect certain "strings" attached, per the Ipad.
"Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing."
-- Ian Morris, "Why the West Rules, For Now."
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