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America Will Collapse by 2025 (2010)

35 points by truro 5y ago

starwind 5y ago
I lol'd at this oil analysis. The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I lol'd at this oil analysis. You really shouldn't tho. >The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels. Actually, not even any developments that might be created in the next 5-10 years, in the level that they can be applied within the next 15 years would solve such an issue.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Given that the US is now a net oil exporter, an oil shock scenario is pretty much off the table. Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too. And yet the gas price is higher it's been since 2014 or so. And "moving to EVs", with 280 million conventional cars in the USA atm, ain't gonna happen in any large degree for the next 10-15 years. EVs (including hybrids) are less than 4% of current annual sales, and all-electric are half that. That's even assuming there was the production capacity, battery materials availability, network, etc for this to happen - which includes several breakthroughs or handwaving micacles.
      - starwind 5y ago
        Gas, like all commodities, create their own business cycles. You don't want to compare spot prices, you want to compare trends. As a counterpoint, I could say "2 years ago, gas was cheaper than it had been since 2006"
    - DesiLurker 5y ago
      this is not even remotely true, the only reason US is a net oil exporter is because combination of high oil prices & cheap money has created an artificial support environment where unprofitable stuff like shale oil can survive. take some of these factors out and add demand destruction (even as low as 5%) from EVs and you are back to wildly fluctuating oil prices with no end in sight because every year the problem will be incrementally worse. if there is one takeaway from all this it is there are very few oil producers that are profitab;e above $50/bbl and US ain't one of them.
      - chasd00 5y ago
        isn't not being dependent on fossil fuels the goal? If EVs cause demand destruction for oil then that's good no? The more oil left unburned the better, i thought that was the point all along. who cares about wildly fluctuating oil prices if your country is no longer dependent on oil.
        DesiLurker 5y ago
        Oh I strongly agree about need of moving away from oil, I was just addressing the oil shock remarks parent made. I do worry about the compensatory behavior in non-ev addressed markets (like aviation, energy, food etc) just because oil prices are temporarily low after EV demand destruction. this is why I feel its best to start removing all fossil subsidies at the first chance we get because we may not want a distorted price signal to exist for any longer than it has to.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    The article's oil analysis is laughable in hindsight. Look at this chart: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... Almost immediately after the article was written, US oil production hockey-sticked up to the point we were a net exporter of oil starting in 2020. The Salon analysis is actually hilarious against what actually happened.
    - wcoenen 5y ago
      This energy miracle may be a bit of a short lived illusion. The shift to fracking also resulted in a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Quote from [1]: > Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of 10- or 20-to-one, or an energy cost factor of 5 to 10%. The EROEI with fracking is in the range of 5- or 10-to-one, or a cost factor of 10 to 20% The oil from fracking also runs out very quickly. From the same article: > A conventional well’s production declines at about 5-8% per year, and it can remain productive for decades. By contrast, the first-year decline in shale wells is over 60%, and about 90% of a well’s production occurs in the first five years. That creates a "drilling treadmill," as new wells are needed simply to replace production from wells drilled a few years before. [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-happy-solution-to-our-energy-needs/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-...
      - 300bps 5y ago
        I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date. Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.
  - starwind 5y ago
    > None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels. May I suggest the combination of hydraulic fracturing with centimeter-precise horizontal drilling allowing oil producers (many of whom are badly run, granted) to access massive crude and natural gas resources previously unreachable?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- notacoward 5y ago
  ...and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation. Everyone who tries to predict the future in this level of detail will have some misses, and it's always a bit too easy to criticize others' predictions. The question is whether their broader conclusions hold up better than mere guesswork, and I'd say this author did pretty well.
  - starwind 5y ago
    > and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation I beg to differ. Two years ago the Saudis and the Russians got in a bad spat where the Russians decided they wanted to bankrupt US natural gas producers and the Saudis decided to bankrupt the Russians
    - notacoward 5y ago
      How has that affected the US's trajectory which is the subject of the article?
      - starwind 5y ago
        A good portion of this article dealt with energy security. The US producing a ton of oil dramatically changed energy security. And I was specifically responding to the claim that US oil production has not had a geopolitical impact. It demonstrably has
deleted 5y ago
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Clubber 5y ago
Doom and gloom has been selling for decades. Don't buy it.
- coldtea 5y ago
  I think you've gotten the wrong takeaway message from "The boy who cried wolf story". At some point, there were indeed wolves, so dismissing the chance of them because of fradulent/failed prior warnings turned out to be a mistake. Plus, in 2022 it's more accurate than ever. Though of course, Rome didn't decline in a day, either...
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    The take away isn't to always listen, but to not always exaggerate/lie. The reader never got impacted by the wolves, the speaker did. So in the end, maybe the ones impacted will be the media, not the readers.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    This isn't a boy who cried wolf story, this is a business model that is toxic and makes money of peddling fear and have been for decades.
- fullstackchris 5y ago
  the end is nigh!
- esens 5y ago
  Empires all do end and when they do they often fracture because of a built up of social discontent, but they are predicted to be ending 1000x more often than they end. Eventually someone calls it correctly though, and generally you only know who in hindsight.
  - Joker_vD 5y ago
    It's like predicting someone's death: undoubtedly one day that person will die, it's just quite hard to predict it accurately. As devil in a certain book jested, "Yes, the man is mortal, but that's half the trouble; it's that he sometimes is abruptly mortal, that's the trick!"
JavaBatman 5y ago
Even if we transition to a multipolar world order and renewed great power competition, America will still be the strongest and most secure global power. It has hegemony in the western hemisphere through its enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine; it is protected by the two largest oceans; it has historical, linguistic, and cultural ties to two regional powers on both sides of the ocean (UK and Ireland in Europe, Australia and NZ in the Asia Pacific, Five Eyes, etc.); it is by far the leader in soft power (music, movies, TV, technology, English language, etc.); and most importantly, it has the strongest military by far. Despite strategic defeats in the Middle East and South Asia, US officers gained tons of battlefield experience and the ability to test its weaponry. So even if the US now has to deal with a hegemonic challenger in East Asia (China) and more assertive one in Europe (Russia), its geography and demography give it advantages no other great power has.
- SeungheonOh 5y ago
  I see oddity of article in comparing America to Portugal, France, Soviet, and Britain as well. The unique and original system of Democracy and Repbulicanism that have continuously forced politicians to innovate further protects America from collapsing, unlike China and its virtual dictatorship.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I think the key unmentioned weakness of the United States is our economic system and monetary policy. Especially because of our ever increasing debt and deficit spending.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    What do you pose is the implication of that?
    - vidanay 5y ago
      Yeah, I don't really get that either. If push comes to shove and we (the US) devalue our currency, then all the other foreign debt holders are left holding the bag while we just suffer through a couple years of recession.
educaysean 5y ago
Why is the Hacker News title editorialized? I believe the convention is to use the original title of the linked article. Removing the "how" from the sentence changes the tone by quite a margin.
erik_landerholm 5y ago
Using number of patents as a measure makes this whole premise dubious.
newaccount2021 5y ago
jfengel 5y ago
(2010)
djohnston 5y ago
I believed it until China started scoring own goals kneecapping their tech industry and their best and brightest kept coming to the West... Someday though, my VEMAX investments will look like a good decision.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  They kneecapped some of their consumer internet industry. They're still investing a lot in all other forms of technology.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    Exactly. China is very deliberately not allowing the ad-click business to divert talent from more strategic sectors. Whether you think it's a good idea or not, acceptable or not in the sense of market freedom, it's a rational move.
    - djohnston 5y ago
      My counterpoint is that you can make a rational decision and still be wrong. Ad click business is how they can build a facial recognition database of 3 billion people, and China is uniquely positioned to immediately apply that dataset to training ML with military applications.
      - notacoward 5y ago
        It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose.
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose. Yeah. Also, generalizations can be true but misleading in a particular instance. I think a lot of people make that mistake with China, assuming because in general democracies have been more successful than autocracies [1], they can be complacent because China will fail. There's no reason autocracy with a talented leader (or one who's lucky) can outperform a democracy. [1] People also often say that free markets are "more successful" than less free markets, and it's probably true to an extent, but there's also a lot of problems/disagreement defining what "success is." For instance, the US has traded away a lot of its general manufacturing capacity leading to more "success" by some financial metrics but failure by many others.
sAbakumoff 5y ago
America will not collapse, but American democracy likely will collapse. At the end of 2022, GOP will win the mid-term elections and have the majority in the house and the senate. They already have state legislatures effectively under control, and the supreme court is full of conservative judges. In 2024 Ron De Santos, or another authoritarian candidate, will win the GOP nomination and easily win the election because Mr. Biden is a total loser. With the supermajority, the GOP will establish an autocracy for decades.
- misiti3780 5y ago
  If that happens, the democrats only have themselves to blame at this point. Biden came in with a 60+% approval rating, now he is in the high 20s / low 30s. I actually think it's more likely that a third party like Andrew Yangs Forward Party emerges and wins an election. A lot of people are sick of two options, and feel alienated in by their own party (both sides)
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Biden's approval rating is currently 43%. Third parties can't win in a first past the post system.
    - misiti3780 5y ago
      33 and heading south: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipiac-poll-shows-biden-with-33-percent-approval-rating https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipia...
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/?cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/?... meta analysis much better than a single poll
  - sAbakumoff 5y ago
S_A_P 5y ago
Ahh the early days of clickbait. I wonder if the author was hoping to stop the demise or just wanted to be able to scream "see I told you so!" as the world burns.
- chasd00 5y ago
  i bet lunch that as soon as the author pressed the publish button they wrote another article under a different name title "Click to find out how that other guy is wrong and America won't collapse in 2025"
phekunde 5y ago
America will not collapse, it will become less relevant. The multipolar world is going to be more prominent going forward. Even France's Macron is talking about making EU independent of US influence. And with emerging country like India already having a DNA of non-alignment, it looks like the US will have a say in global world order but the influence will be far more limited than what it use to be.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Good, US has been spending unfair share and has been the nanny of the world. One thing I agreed with Trump policy was this inward-looking aspect - no more stupid wars, no more pulling the weight of NATO and no more nation building in ME. Note that these policies were bipartisan - Bushes and Clintons/Obama supported them and spun the military industrial complex slot machine. What Trump did was very much in the stark contrast to the classic liberal/conservative stance of US foreign policy. Essentially a more lucid version of Ron Paul.
  - piva00 5y ago
    > Good, US has been spending unfair share and has been the nanny of the world. Unfair share? Based on what? The spending is directly correlated to USA's interests, there is no nanny-ing or "good will" going on, it's a matter of purely international interests. Looking at this with the patronising "unfair share" is a bit preposterous. I'd say it's pretty unfair to a lot of countries being forced under the sphere of influence of the US to be continuously subjugated, through foreign policy or direct meddling in internal affairs, like the whole of Latin America. That is really fucking unfair.
    - avgDev 5y ago
      OP completely missing the point why US is spending so much money on military. US doesn't care about ANYONE but US. All moves and "nannying" is strategical in nature and to US benefit.
      - 5y ago
davideous 5y ago
The book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail" by Ray Dalio compares the rise (and decline) of the American "world empire" to prior world empires. The two most recent are the U.K. and the Netherlands. The same things that are happening now have happened before -- just not in our lifetimes. The history and his analysis is quite instructive. The book was refreshing in its objectivity, lack of political bias, and clarity of writing. I've given copies to several friends. It's pretty clear from his analysis and the data that the U.S. is in a decline of global influence. https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/dp/1982160276/ https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/...
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Ray Dalio is an international treasure. When I watch the Davos videos he often seems like the only one who's not in a quiet state of panic.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail" by Ray Dalio compares the rise (and decline) of the American "world empire" to prior world empires. Why should I put much stock in historical analysis done by a "American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager" [1]? My gut feel that someone like that probably has so much other stuff on his plate that the analysis would be in many ways superficial, and such a person likely has enough status that large numbers of people would indulge his pretensions at being a polymath even if it's not actually true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio
  - todorus 5y ago
    Ad hominem
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Ad hominem No, I didn't say he was wrong because of who he was. I have suspicions that he might be over-hyped, and I was asking questions about that. And if that's wrong, I have literally a million self-published books that you really ought to carefully consider, lest you be guilty of "Ad hominem."
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
No risk of socialism taking over?
parkingrift 5y ago
>After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. It's funny and interesting that the military budget is such a common punching bag. The defense budget is a pretty small percentage of the overall outlays. Yet people continue to act like it's the single line item that is holding America back. Here's where the American federal government spent money in 2020. * $1T on unemployment compensation and paycheck protection program * $1.1T on social security * $1.2T on medicare and medicaid * $1T on "other" which includes federal employee retirements and welfare programs * $900B on non-defense discretionary spending on thing such as housing assistance, transportation, and education. ...and then, finally, we get to defense spending at $700B. The budget deficit for FY2020 was $3.1T. Maybe the military budget is so high it is causing a ripple in the multiverse that makes arithmetic different in this universe. Maybe if we cut $300B from the military budget in our universe it will even out to $3T because magic.
- realce 5y ago
  Those figures are required expenditures, not budgets. They represent agreements between tax-paying citizens/employees and the government. The military's funding is variable and not required - the Constitution doesn't even support a centralized military. You're equating very different things.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    > the Constitution doesn't even support a centralized military Yes, it does. It just says that military appropriations for the Army have to be approved by Congress every two years. Congress controls the purse strings, the President has command. Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy..." Note that the Navy is not even subject to the two year limit on funding.
Shadonototra 5y ago
America won't collapse alone, the whole Western block will collapse with it, our civilization already died, the moment we decided stock market is more important than the education and health of our people Greed, gluttony, spread of cancerous culture, lack of social justice and many more
kragen 5y ago
This is particularly timely after the Taliban routed the US in Afghanistan in May to August of last year. An interesting thing here is the central role played by energy in this analysis; this article was before the fracking boom (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_Oil_Production_and_Imports.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_..., which shows the US fracking boom, though not the recent decline) and before the last factor of 8 or so decrease in the cost of solar panels made them cheaper than fossil fuels in much of the world. So it predicts Iran and Russia will be "energy kingpins" in 02025, which doesn't really seem to be in the cards. Maybe China will be an "energy kingpin"—it could cover the Gobi with PV panels and run HVDC, which might be outside the state capacity of countries like Perú, Saudi, and Libya which control vast desert territories on paper. But, so far, despite installing more PV capacity than the entire rest of the world, China's PV capacity factor is a disappointing 13%, compared to 29% in California, so it's apparently making terrible choices about where to site its solar farms. (Still better than the 10% you get in Germany or the Netherlands.) For the last 2500 years the "world's reserve currency" has been gold, except for the last 77 or so. That could easily happen again. Bitcoin was kind of gunning for that position, but China's thoroughgoing rejection of it forecloses that possibility for at least a generation, and Bitcoin could easily cease to exist in that time. Although the knowledge of this article's author about computer security seems to come from Hollywood, the computer security situation is indeed extremely grave, and as more and more things become digital, any state that doesn't take it seriously and take effective measures to improve the situation is likely to be destroyed. Presently, that means every state in the world. It's true that when financial and military collapse comes, they are likely to come very quickly.

35 points by truro 5y ago

I lol'd at this oil analysis. The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this

coldtea 5y ago
>I lol'd at this oil analysis. You really shouldn't tho. >The author had no idea what technological developments would be widely deployed in just the next couple years after they wrote this None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels. Actually, not even any developments that might be created in the next 5-10 years, in the level that they can be applied within the next 15 years would solve such an issue.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Given that the US is now a net oil exporter, an oil shock scenario is pretty much off the table. Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >Moving to EVs is going to take so much oil demand off the table that it's pretty much a non issue going forward too. And yet the gas price is higher it's been since 2014 or so. And "moving to EVs", with 280 million conventional cars in the USA atm, ain't gonna happen in any large degree for the next 10-15 years. EVs (including hybrids) are less than 4% of current annual sales, and all-electric are half that. That's even assuming there was the production capacity, battery materials availability, network, etc for this to happen - which includes several breakthroughs or handwaving micacles.
    - starwind 5y ago
      Gas, like all commodities, create their own business cycles. You don't want to compare spot prices, you want to compare trends. As a counterpoint, I could say "2 years ago, gas was cheaper than it had been since 2006"
  - DesiLurker 5y ago
    this is not even remotely true, the only reason US is a net oil exporter is because combination of high oil prices & cheap money has created an artificial support environment where unprofitable stuff like shale oil can survive. take some of these factors out and add demand destruction (even as low as 5%) from EVs and you are back to wildly fluctuating oil prices with no end in sight because every year the problem will be incrementally worse. if there is one takeaway from all this it is there are very few oil producers that are profitab;e above $50/bbl and US ain't one of them.
    - chasd00 5y ago
      isn't not being dependent on fossil fuels the goal? If EVs cause demand destruction for oil then that's good no? The more oil left unburned the better, i thought that was the point all along. who cares about wildly fluctuating oil prices if your country is no longer dependent on oil.
      - DesiLurker 5y ago
        Oh I strongly agree about need of moving away from oil, I was just addressing the oil shock remarks parent made. I do worry about the compensatory behavior in non-ev addressed markets (like aviation, energy, food etc) just because oil prices are temporarily low after EV demand destruction. this is why I feel its best to start removing all fossil subsidies at the first chance we get because we may not want a distorted price signal to exist for any longer than it has to.
- 300bps 5y ago
  The article's oil analysis is laughable in hindsight. Look at this chart: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... Almost immediately after the article was written, US oil production hockey-sticked up to the point we were a net exporter of oil starting in 2020. The Salon analysis is actually hilarious against what actually happened.
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    This energy miracle may be a bit of a short lived illusion. The shift to fracking also resulted in a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested). Quote from [1]: > Two aspects of shale production make it radically different from conventional production. First, it takes a lot more energy (including many miles of steel tubing per well, for example) to extract energy out of these wells. Traditional wells have a ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of 10- or 20-to-one, or an energy cost factor of 5 to 10%. The EROEI with fracking is in the range of 5- or 10-to-one, or a cost factor of 10 to 20% The oil from fracking also runs out very quickly. From the same article: > A conventional well’s production declines at about 5-8% per year, and it can remain productive for decades. By contrast, the first-year decline in shale wells is over 60%, and about 90% of a well’s production occurs in the first five years. That creates a "drilling treadmill," as new wells are needed simply to replace production from wells drilled a few years before. [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-happy-solution-to-our-energy-needs/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/is-fracking-a-...
    - 300bps 5y ago
      I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date. Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.
- starwind 5y ago
  > None of the technological developments created since then [2010] are able to mitigate an oil shock of the kind described in the article given their current deployment levels. May I suggest the combination of hydraulic fracturing with centimeter-precise horizontal drilling allowing oil producers (many of whom are badly run, granted) to access massive crude and natural gas resources previously unreachable?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
notacoward 5y ago
...and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation. Everyone who tries to predict the future in this level of detail will have some misses, and it's always a bit too easy to criticize others' predictions. The question is whether their broader conclusions hold up better than mere guesswork, and I'd say this author did pretty well.
- starwind 5y ago
  > and yet, those developments seem to have had little effect on the geopolitical situation I beg to differ. Two years ago the Saudis and the Russians got in a bad spat where the Russians decided they wanted to bankrupt US natural gas producers and the Saudis decided to bankrupt the Russians
  - notacoward 5y ago
    How has that affected the US's trajectory which is the subject of the article?
    - starwind 5y ago
      A good portion of this article dealt with energy security. The US producing a ton of oil dramatically changed energy security. And I was specifically responding to the claim that US oil production has not had a geopolitical impact. It demonstrably has

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Clubber 5y ago

Doom and gloom has been selling for decades. Don't buy it.

coldtea 5y ago
I think you've gotten the wrong takeaway message from "The boy who cried wolf story". At some point, there were indeed wolves, so dismissing the chance of them because of fradulent/failed prior warnings turned out to be a mistake. Plus, in 2022 it's more accurate than ever. Though of course, Rome didn't decline in a day, either...
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  The take away isn't to always listen, but to not always exaggerate/lie. The reader never got impacted by the wolves, the speaker did. So in the end, maybe the ones impacted will be the media, not the readers.
- Clubber 5y ago
  This isn't a boy who cried wolf story, this is a business model that is toxic and makes money of peddling fear and have been for decades.
fullstackchris 5y ago
the end is nigh!
esens 5y ago
Empires all do end and when they do they often fracture because of a built up of social discontent, but they are predicted to be ending 1000x more often than they end. Eventually someone calls it correctly though, and generally you only know who in hindsight.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  It's like predicting someone's death: undoubtedly one day that person will die, it's just quite hard to predict it accurately. As devil in a certain book jested, "Yes, the man is mortal, but that's half the trouble; it's that he sometimes is abruptly mortal, that's the trick!"

JavaBatman 5y ago

Even if we transition to a multipolar world order and renewed great power competition, America will still be the strongest and most secure global power. It has hegemony in the western hemisphere through its enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine; it is protected by the two largest oceans; it has historical, linguistic, and cultural ties to two regional powers on both sides of the ocean (UK and Ireland in Europe, Australia and NZ in the Asia Pacific, Five Eyes, etc.); it is by far the leader in soft power (music, movies, TV, technology, English language, etc.); and most importantly, it has the strongest military by far. Despite strategic defeats in the Middle East and South Asia, US officers gained tons of battlefield experience and the ability to test its weaponry. So even if the US now has to deal with a hegemonic challenger in East Asia (China) and more assertive one in Europe (Russia), its geography and demography give it advantages no other great power has.

SeungheonOh 5y ago
I see oddity of article in comparing America to Portugal, France, Soviet, and Britain as well. The unique and original system of Democracy and Repbulicanism that have continuously forced politicians to innovate further protects America from collapsing, unlike China and its virtual dictatorship.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I think the key unmentioned weakness of the United States is our economic system and monetary policy. Especially because of our ever increasing debt and deficit spending.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  What do you pose is the implication of that?
  - vidanay 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't really get that either. If push comes to shove and we (the US) devalue our currency, then all the other foreign debt holders are left holding the bag while we just suffer through a couple years of recession.

educaysean 5y ago

Why is the Hacker News title editorialized? I believe the convention is to use the original title of the linked article. Removing the "how" from the sentence changes the tone by quite a margin.

erik_landerholm 5y ago

Using number of patents as a measure makes this whole premise dubious.

newaccount2021 5y ago

jfengel 5y ago

(2010)

djohnston 5y ago

I believed it until China started scoring own goals kneecapping their tech industry and their best and brightest kept coming to the West... Someday though, my VEMAX investments will look like a good decision.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
They kneecapped some of their consumer internet industry. They're still investing a lot in all other forms of technology.
- notacoward 5y ago
  Exactly. China is very deliberately not allowing the ad-click business to divert talent from more strategic sectors. Whether you think it's a good idea or not, acceptable or not in the sense of market freedom, it's a rational move.
  - djohnston 5y ago
    My counterpoint is that you can make a rational decision and still be wrong. Ad click business is how they can build a facial recognition database of 3 billion people, and China is uniquely positioned to immediately apply that dataset to training ML with military applications.
    - notacoward 5y ago
      It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > It's absolutely possible to be rational and yet wrong. It's also entirely possible to promote or allow something for a while and then decide it has finished serving its purpose. Yeah. Also, generalizations can be true but misleading in a particular instance. I think a lot of people make that mistake with China, assuming because in general democracies have been more successful than autocracies [1], they can be complacent because China will fail. There's no reason autocracy with a talented leader (or one who's lucky) can outperform a democracy. [1] People also often say that free markets are "more successful" than less free markets, and it's probably true to an extent, but there's also a lot of problems/disagreement defining what "success is." For instance, the US has traded away a lot of its general manufacturing capacity leading to more "success" by some financial metrics but failure by many others.

sAbakumoff 5y ago

America will not collapse, but American democracy likely will collapse. At the end of 2022, GOP will win the mid-term elections and have the majority in the house and the senate. They already have state legislatures effectively under control, and the supreme court is full of conservative judges. In 2024 Ron De Santos, or another authoritarian candidate, will win the GOP nomination and easily win the election because Mr. Biden is a total loser. With the supermajority, the GOP will establish an autocracy for decades.

misiti3780 5y ago
If that happens, the democrats only have themselves to blame at this point. Biden came in with a 60+% approval rating, now he is in the high 20s / low 30s. I actually think it's more likely that a third party like Andrew Yangs Forward Party emerges and wins an election. A lot of people are sick of two options, and feel alienated in by their own party (both sides)
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Biden's approval rating is currently 43%. Third parties can't win in a first past the post system.
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    33 and heading south: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipiac-poll-shows-biden-with-33-percent-approval-rating https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipia...
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/?cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/?... meta analysis much better than a single poll
- sAbakumoff 5y ago

S_A_P 5y ago

Ahh the early days of clickbait. I wonder if the author was hoping to stop the demise or just wanted to be able to scream "see I told you so!" as the world burns.

chasd00 5y ago
i bet lunch that as soon as the author pressed the publish button they wrote another article under a different name title "Click to find out how that other guy is wrong and America won't collapse in 2025"

phekunde 5y ago

America will not collapse, it will become less relevant. The multipolar world is going to be more prominent going forward. Even France's Macron is talking about making EU independent of US influence. And with emerging country like India already having a DNA of non-alignment, it looks like the US will have a say in global world order but the influence will be far more limited than what it use to be.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Good, US has been spending unfair share and has been the nanny of the world. One thing I agreed with Trump policy was this inward-looking aspect - no more stupid wars, no more pulling the weight of NATO and no more nation building in ME. Note that these policies were bipartisan - Bushes and Clintons/Obama supported them and spun the military industrial complex slot machine. What Trump did was very much in the stark contrast to the classic liberal/conservative stance of US foreign policy. Essentially a more lucid version of Ron Paul.
- piva00 5y ago
  > Good, US has been spending unfair share and has been the nanny of the world. Unfair share? Based on what? The spending is directly correlated to USA's interests, there is no nanny-ing or "good will" going on, it's a matter of purely international interests. Looking at this with the patronising "unfair share" is a bit preposterous. I'd say it's pretty unfair to a lot of countries being forced under the sphere of influence of the US to be continuously subjugated, through foreign policy or direct meddling in internal affairs, like the whole of Latin America. That is really fucking unfair.
  - avgDev 5y ago
    OP completely missing the point why US is spending so much money on military. US doesn't care about ANYONE but US. All moves and "nannying" is strategical in nature and to US benefit.
    - 5y ago

davideous 5y ago

The book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail" by Ray Dalio compares the rise (and decline) of the American "world empire" to prior world empires. The two most recent are the U.K. and the Netherlands. The same things that are happening now have happened before -- just not in our lifetimes. The history and his analysis is quite instructive. The book was refreshing in its objectivity, lack of political bias, and clarity of writing. I've given copies to several friends. It's pretty clear from his analysis and the data that the U.S. is in a decline of global influence. https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/dp/1982160276/ https://www.amazon.com/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/...

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Ray Dalio is an international treasure. When I watch the Davos videos he often seems like the only one who's not in a quiet state of panic.
tablespoon 5y ago
> The book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail" by Ray Dalio compares the rise (and decline) of the American "world empire" to prior world empires. Why should I put much stock in historical analysis done by a "American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager" [1]? My gut feel that someone like that probably has so much other stuff on his plate that the analysis would be in many ways superficial, and such a person likely has enough status that large numbers of people would indulge his pretensions at being a polymath even if it's not actually true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio
- todorus 5y ago
  Ad hominem
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Ad hominem No, I didn't say he was wrong because of who he was. I have suspicions that he might be over-hyped, and I was asking questions about that. And if that's wrong, I have literally a million self-published books that you really ought to carefully consider, lest you be guilty of "Ad hominem."

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

No risk of socialism taking over?

parkingrift 5y ago

>After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. It's funny and interesting that the military budget is such a common punching bag. The defense budget is a pretty small percentage of the overall outlays. Yet people continue to act like it's the single line item that is holding America back. Here's where the American federal government spent money in 2020. * $1T on unemployment compensation and paycheck protection program * $1.1T on social security * $1.2T on medicare and medicaid * $1T on "other" which includes federal employee retirements and welfare programs * $900B on non-defense discretionary spending on thing such as housing assistance, transportation, and education. ...and then, finally, we get to defense spending at $700B. The budget deficit for FY2020 was $3.1T. Maybe the military budget is so high it is causing a ripple in the multiverse that makes arithmetic different in this universe. Maybe if we cut $300B from the military budget in our universe it will even out to $3T because magic.

realce 5y ago
Those figures are required expenditures, not budgets. They represent agreements between tax-paying citizens/employees and the government. The military's funding is variable and not required - the Constitution doesn't even support a centralized military. You're equating very different things.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > the Constitution doesn't even support a centralized military Yes, it does. It just says that military appropriations for the Army have to be approved by Congress every two years. Congress controls the purse strings, the President has command. Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy..." Note that the Navy is not even subject to the two year limit on funding.

Shadonototra 5y ago

America won't collapse alone, the whole Western block will collapse with it, our civilization already died, the moment we decided stock market is more important than the education and health of our people Greed, gluttony, spread of cancerous culture, lack of social justice and many more

kragen 5y ago

This is particularly timely after the Taliban routed the US in Afghanistan in May to August of last year. An interesting thing here is the central role played by energy in this analysis; this article was before the fracking boom (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_Oil_Production_and_Imports.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:US_Crude_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_..., which shows the US fracking boom, though not the recent decline) and before the last factor of 8 or so decrease in the cost of solar panels made them cheaper than fossil fuels in much of the world. So it predicts Iran and Russia will be "energy kingpins" in 02025, which doesn't really seem to be in the cards. Maybe China will be an "energy kingpin"—it could cover the Gobi with PV panels and run HVDC, which might be outside the state capacity of countries like Perú, Saudi, and Libya which control vast desert territories on paper. But, so far, despite installing more PV capacity than the entire rest of the world, China's PV capacity factor is a disappointing 13%, compared to 29% in California, so it's apparently making terrible choices about where to site its solar farms. (Still better than the 10% you get in Germany or the Netherlands.) For the last 2500 years the "world's reserve currency" has been gold, except for the last 77 or so. That could easily happen again. Bitcoin was kind of gunning for that position, but China's thoroughgoing rejection of it forecloses that possibility for at least a generation, and Bitcoin could easily cease to exist in that time. Although the knowledge of this article's author about computer security seems to come from Hollywood, the computer security situation is indeed extremely grave, and as more and more things become digital, any state that doesn't take it seriously and take effective measures to improve the situation is likely to be destroyed. Presently, that means every state in the world. It's true that when financial and military collapse comes, they are likely to come very quickly.