onlooker wrote:why do you cite an obviously biased source about Americans driving and taking trips.
I've talked about the rise of Chindia too. It's not just the US.
onlooker wrote:How does that translate to a vibrant economy?
A "vibrant economy" doesn't mean everyone's going to be doing the kind of work you or I would prefer. If it were up to me, people would NOT be taking road-trips. I'm just describing things as they are.
What exactly would you want people to be doing?
onlooker wrote:I notice you do not post about how many Americans are the govt. dole or how many work in low paying, soul draining jobs etc.
How often in human history have everyone worked great white-collar jobs? Wouldn't it be a spoiled sense of entitlement to expect this, otherwise claim "doom"? Just because there's a glut doesn't mean everyone lives like kings, especially since we just pulled ourselves out of the great recession (not depression, recession).
Not only that, but I've explained how certain structural changes in work are being brought on not by peak-oil doom but by high-tech, like the robots that are doing and will do most of the actual work at the Gigafactory that just opened. The peak-oil narrative of yore never factored techno-singularity unemployment, only a reversion to a world-made-by-hand or falling all the way back to Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy. Either way you slice it, this is NOT the doom we were promised to see.
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Seriously, doomers should avoid the temptation of labeling the status quo doom just because the world isn't your chosen utopia. It really co-opts the term. Everyone has their own unique ideal of how the world should be and it's never in an ideal state (which is something even Plato understood in ancient Greece). Lack of subjective perfection != doom.
I knew a long time ago that the big force driving doomerism is ideological dissatisfaction with the status quo. But since everyone's idea of perfection is different, you can't go around issuing laundry-lists of grievances about why this or that should change and expect that to convince people we're living in a dystopia. What one person thinks of as hell is heaven to someone else.