It's the simplified form of a personal narrative. I could probably write a long essay detailing all my tangent thoughts there, but that would be of little value, given my lack of actual education on the matter. Just something I got going for me. Also worth mentioning: I don't necessarily talk about clinical depression, but rather some abstraction I don't care to properly define.

For the most part, all this is extrapolated from and inspired by learning about animal models of depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression

Genetic variance aside, I think it's most interesting how depression-like behavior is reliably induced in animals through prolonged exposure to stressors the animal can't evade. The resulting catatonic state is described as learned helplessness (which is the conceptual opposite of confidence in self-efficacy).

To me that's a plausible outcome, thinking in biological abstraction. The brain has an inner model of the world for predicting cause and effect relations living in a mostly adversarial environment, to translate upstream emotions and needs into impulses and actionable plans (avoid bad things, find good things). For simple stressors there are autonomic reactions, like retracting your hand when touching something hot. If that fails, or with complex stressors, like falling into a body of water (if you are not a fish), the brain needs to derive hypotheses from its inner world model about the threat and how to evade it, e.g. swim towards the thing not water. Enduring non lethal chronic stressors, where the brain's predictions repeatedly fail to derive actionable evasion, causes a precarious situation for the brain. From a survival perspective, if something doesn't kill you within a certain time frame, endless evasion attempts will.

I believe there are two adaptive pathways possible: Adjusting neuronal homeostasis, let's call it anonymous integration (-> system depression, later chronification through epigenetics), and a relieving adjustment of the inner world model to integrate complex stressors (-> identitarian absorption). The latter is probably the healthier response, but can be dysfunctional and arbitrary, too. The former may be a resource sparing adaptation to infections originally, may otherwise result in mall-adapted emotional imperatives not caused by environmental/external stimuli. Since the higher brain always has to make sense of the world and upstream emotions (e.g. fear -> prepare fight/flight, identify threat), it is coming up with a reasoning for these emotions despite the missing stimuli, ex falso quodlibet. A depressed person may tell you they are suffering, unable to do anything, because "life is meaningless", "there is nothing that can be done", bla bla ... may even be logical reasoning to you, philosophically intriguing, but in reality, it's the other way around: The emotional state of helplessness came first. Similar in anxiety disorders, complex reasoning is formed around dangling upstream anxiety, often extra spicy with panic feedback loops obscuring cause and effect.

Personal reasoning and finding "meaning" are over-rated. The brain finds patterns in random noise and explanations for any contradiction. Despite agreement on the darkest of reasonings, some people are content and driven, some people are dysthymic and feel helpless, all things equal, living in the same universe. It's not the universe. It's not politics.

If lack of self-efficacy is the cause, experience of self-efficacy may be the cure. Instead of pointing out the reasonable infeasibility of long-term plans and complex changes, the defeatist mind may rather try to focus on what's possible right in front of them. Unless you are an unfortunate stress model animal, there is likely a path towards self-efficacy experiences.

Let's say you want to start exercising for whatever abstract reason, or vision of yourself. You make a reasonable plan. Then one day, against revolting convenience, you drag your self out for your first run. It's hell, but after you finished you feel sooo good! Some iterations later, you realize everything in your life has become slightly better. You can walk stairs without breaking a sweat, you sleep better, you subtly feel better, calmer, more relaxed. The abstract goal doesn't matter anymore, running has become an end in itself.

Top-down planning is an illusion of control and foresight. You couldn't have known all the things that changed for the better and where you ended up. The distant goal is less important than finding the closest step away from frustration and distress. If it wasn't for reason telling you "all is futile" you could intuitively decide for any possible action, if it's the right thing to do or not. Doom-scroll? No. Get stoned again? No. Bring out the trash? Yes. Brush your teeth? Yes. Go for a run? Yes. Not doing the bad thing, not giving in to helplessness, and decisively doing the right thing, any right thing leads to experiences of self-efficacy. Repeated experiences of self-efficacy, lead to confidence in self-efficacy, the opposite of learned helplessness. Work may become and end in itself. Joining a community may become an end in itself. Allowing yourself these experiences, that's where the content, "happy" life is. Despite all the shit. Yesterday, it's been the sabre-tooth tiger or purgatory, today it's total collapse of civilization, or nuclear holocaust.

I think in modern human ("western") life, the overbearing complexity, information overload and severe alienation from work and social belonging, causes an environment where the usual means to experience of self-efficacy are greatly reduced. Especially, since basic needs are weirdly met regardless (your brain won't give you credit for hunting minced meat in a supermarket). I think the alienation from work is the most important change within the last two decades and is increasingly getting worse (catastrophic thinking about LLMs). Here I mean, failure to fully identify with and understand the purpose of the work you are doing, due to specialization and abstraction in industrial production, losing touch with creation, the actual product of labor. Bullshit jobs, bullshit products and services etc..

Consequently, we need to make more of an active effort to find self-efficacy.

There is an incredibly good minute-by-minute account of the Cuban crisis: "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" - it covers a lot of areas that aren't often mentioned such as the U2 flight at the North Pole going astray or the Soviet nuclear cruise missile teams targetting Guantanamo that taken together with the more well known events make it seem remarkable to me that we survived.

Not as depressing as life in a world where nobody ever stops to reflect.

I'm not looking to get into a whole thing here, but I disagree. There are such things as people that will simply need emotional supportz and then there are those that cannot disagree and commit.

This apparent conundrum breaks away if you consider who holds the wealth now vs. in the 60s. In the 60s-70s, there was a wealth tax in Germany. Shortly after WW2, a law was drafted to redistribute wealth: All individuals and companies whose assets remained largely intact were required to pay 50% of their net wealth (as assessed on the day of the 1948 currency reform).

This means that the working class had immense wealth and so simple jobs could support a family on a single income, buy a house, etc.

Compare that to today — the two richest families in Germany hold more wealth than the bottom 50% COMBINED.

It is no wonder that normal families cannot afford to buy property anymore; and are forced to rent. This further exacerbates the wealth gap.

Another nice statistic is the productivity VS wage VS pensions curve: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KDug!,f_auto,q_auto:...

(Black line - GDP, blue line - avg comp; red line - avg pension)

In short - the productivity increased; but ordinary people are being squeezed out of the gains regardless. No wonder that everyone turns sour at some point.

> So is the growth of housing stock lower than the population growth?

National averages can hide a lot of local issues. I'm in Berlin right now, I'm told by locals that it's lost the reputation it used to have for "cheap" housing. (It's not cheap, but I'll have to take their word for it that it ever was, I've not found historical purchase prices vs. income graphs like I've seen in the UK).

Meanwhile, if you're willing to look at 115 year old places in the arse end of nowhere: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165084645?referrer=H... or https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/164269182?referrer=H...

New places are more expensive for various reasons. The land in Berlin can easily be as expensive as the cost of building a home on that land, because fixed supply and a lot of demand. Even if the land was free, the cheapest new build cost I've seen is more than twice the price of the more expensive of those two, but will almost certainly also make up for the full price difference (including land at Berlin prices) just in reduced energy bills before the mortgage is paid off.

I suspect part of it is that the housing being built now is both bigger and better than that built in the 60s and 70s. Think of what cars were like then versus now. The other might be the availability of land. Another factor is how housing has changed from being more of a commodity item back then (its a place to live) to an investment vehicle (its a thing you own and make return from). These trends are not specific to Germany, but would apply to many developed countries worldwide.

Excellent question, what happened is there are less people in a household than there used to be and households consume more m2 per household member. In reply to your second point, percentagewise there has been less building, in absolute terms there is more because of population growth since the 60s. This translates to ‘seeing more building projects’.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/private-haushalte-konsu...

IMHO the key problems is new building is not targeted to the affordable market and easier to build areas with access to jobs of good economic income are not really open any longer. The established land markets are more expensive because literal "green field" expansion of new cities is not very common, and no longer available in quantity. The cost to build are further increased because the higher end market demands more amenities and developers almost always target the highest market available.

Note: I have a personal theory that one way China was able to perform at this it's current stage of growth, was because it was expanding a lot of first generation real estate development to new areas. It will be very interesting to see if they are able to maintain low housing costs going forward into the next couple decades.

There are dubious claims that the lower end market will be served by aged-out high end market housing and that's simply not the case. It ignores that housing stock ages out of usability - and remodeling is often more expensive to work on than the initial builds. Once you remodel them, they occupied at the high end, then they never free up or go down in rent for other portions of the market.

Not German so I can only talk about how it is going in another country:

- Massive change in the average household size: way fewer people live together now (delayed couple & family formation, divorce, etc.). If you go from 4 people per household to 2 people per household, now you need twice as many homes.

- Massive internal migration: declining population in a lot of rural areas and increasing in cities & their suburbs. So lot of empty houses and super cheap houses in Dumbfuck, Nowhere but scarce & expensive homes where people want to live.

> When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”

Well, sometimes people do in fact get crazy or act irrationally.

> When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”, “they are barbarian subhumans” I know I am being manipulated.

You need to learn to recognize that when it comes from your side of the media, too.

The problem with the housing issue is that real solutions to it are extremely unpopular, even amount people who agree with the scale and intensity of the problem.

The regular voting public doesn't even agree that there's a connection between increasing the supply of housing and housing becoming more affordable.

Their position is, roughly, "there's plenty of housing already - it just needs to be more affordable for regular people". Sometimes this even manifests in support for self-defeating demand subsidies like help-to-buy schemes for new homeowners

This is a position that can never be satisfied because it is fundamentally disconnected from reality. It is equivalent to the meme of the dog with the stick in its mouth who wants you to throw the stick for them, but not take the stick from them.

So many people have much of their capital in housing which makes it extremely unpopular to try to lower the prices, so neither side is going to make this their top priority.

In much of the west we don't really have markets in any useful sense. Overregulation and financialization ruin markets, and we've allowed both to creep into effectively every market that matters.

> They reject party that make economy better.

I didn't realize there was a cut and dry "correct" answer. Has it occurred to you that perhaps you are subject to similar biases as other people without being aware of it?

Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context.

The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole.

I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent.

A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.

The more extreme billionaire types see the world as a zero sum game. If they lose a third of their paper wealth, they are still billionaires. The more extreme ones want to gut the middle class, because political power is the only threat to their existence. They see a path where they become merchant princes, and another where they are stood up against the wall and meet their fate.

German and Italian fascism took a similar path. In Italy the state even took over some industry, but the big industrialists with power did great. It didn’t end well for them, but their pal Franco was smarter and hung in there for decades.

That doesn't really make sense. The population in most of the west is vaguely around replacement. A given individual can only make use of so much housing at once. Sure if you're rolling in cash throw in a vacation home or two. There's a pretty quick falloff in terms of utility, status, desire, any metric that's coming to mind as I type this.

It seems to me that at least in the US the issue is location. There's cheap stock in places without jobs and ridiculously expensive stock where the good jobs are located. It doesn't have to be this way.

Millennia before Adam Smith was born, pretty much every human societies which built "houses" (be they crude tents, igloos, lean-tos, thatched huts, or whatever) made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.

Capitalism has financialized housing, and that seems to be a major cause of the "can't actually build housing" problem.

It's not capitalism that requires infinite growth, it's our current monetary system.

New money is created by lending it into existence, with interest.

That last bit is key. In order to pay off the interest, you need money, which was also loaned into existence with interest.

The only way to maintain this is through constant economic growth. Without it there's a deflationary collapse.

Emergent phenomenon, from the intrinsic dynamics of cable news. The medium is the message, and this medium requires around the clock 24/7 attention getting, which changes the way stories are reported, regardless of what the stories are. Internet news inherited much of this, and newspapers too then adapted for constant rather than daily/weekly updates.

I'm not claiming why people or afraid today, whether its manufactured, or by whom. Honestly those are interesting details to the story but not fundamentally important in the middle of the fear crisis.

For sure, I agree education helps and could be considered a prerequisite to someone really be principled to begin with. It takes wisdom to learn what matters to you and to see patterns behind any particular topic of the day, and wisdom only comes about through education and experience.

I am always torn a bit on education as a goal though. I don't like centralized education, it makes it much to easy to lead to similar problems we have today when any small group of people can decide what and how every person is required to be taught.

We need people educated by their own choice, going down whatever paths they find interesting and learning from that journey. Its my belief that people are generally good, and given the time and space to find their own core principles, and a Democratic type of system where our voices can be heard, things will generally work out for the best in the end. I'll always take the collective opinion of principled individuals over the strongly held views of the small few in power at the time.

I'm currently building an app for that: https://causity.app/

It's more of a communication tool than one for exact modeling of system dynamics, but this could follow once the basic mechanics are agreed on.

Exactly. Most propaganda is about embellishment and fear mongering that completely destroys the ability of the individual to accurately access the topic at hand.

Sorry I think I worded it badly. The OP is not the you, I mean the propaganda is. As in, a large part of the propaganda is the idea that people should have opinions about this kind of thing, as opposed to accepting the idea that there are people who are more well versed in these topics than they are. eg the scientific consensus is that global warming is real and it's a big problem. There isn't really an opinion to have there, broadly.

THIS

Notably, we could do that while still abolishing first past the post. Requirements for holding a previous position could be added while simultaneously reforming the federal (and hopefully also state) systems to be compatible with multiple parties. I imagine it would be sufficient for each level to require a single term served at the previous level - city or county, state, and federal.

The downside is encouraging career politicians, but the upside is that if you can't win increasingly high stakes elections over a period of 10 years or so then you probably have no business being the president of a country this size.

The obvious problem with the 5% rule is that voters who don't like any of the established parties are faced with the decision between voting for something they don't like or most likely throwing away their vote.

As someone who writes algorithms for a living I can think of ~ 100 ways to resolve this bug without limiting the original intent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with one. However the fact that this %5 rule hasn't been changed tells you everything you need to know about the legislators.

I would consider a world in which loonies have a couple insignificant seats in parliament to be a more democratic system than one that shuts them out.

Yes, and not just politics - also day to day life. People would naturally average out with others around them, emotionally.

Not that previously there weren’t real issues (including, quite literally Nazi’s), but it previously required a whole society to go through something like a wide scale traumatic event (like post-WW1 massive external payments, hyperinflation, and associated social problems!) to get the momentum going.

Of course, then it was super dangerous because you had most of a society on the same page and working together. :s

Here, it seems like it’s mostly chaos and navel gazing, with small scale specific targeting of high profile areas, for ratings. At least so far.

The Overton window is shifting, and I’m not looking forward to where it is going so far.

Oil is a good example today, but not the only example or only one I would be concerned with.

Energy (oil, coal, etc) is a problem today and is highly correlated with our consumption, but that's mostly a side effect of how we've built economies for the last couple centuries rather than a fundamental link to oil.

At least in my view, wealth is the accumulation of the resources, money is a claim on that wealth, and control (or force) is what props up that claim.

The bottom 50% has indeed gotten better (kinda sure but not everywhere) but technological progress is not guaranteeing they'll save everyone _anymore_. Fewer nations care about climate change and taking care of the poorer parts of the world (hope you dont expect me to show why too).

The billion is my number. Almost all scientists and officials underestimate deliberately and naively death tolls. I have a metric that whatever number the new york times publishes for an earthquake on day one, you should multiply it by 100 for the eventual total count. No one estimated a million plus deaths from covid in the US. The moment I read the first comprehensive report from China I assumed 1% of the population will die. Unfortunately in places like India that actually was true. So yeah I do think at the minimum a billion people will die due to climate change in the next 50 years, and billions more will suffer in unthinkable ways. Thats _my_ estimate.