Very impressive young lady! Unfortunately she’s in Texas, a state dominated by too many lunatics for rationality to have much effect.
Of which country?
I would add that you always look for the good in a situation, person, or critter – whether the critter is a deserving dog, an evil cat, or even a humble possum! 
I disagree, although there’s certainly an element of truth in the observation that science is increasingly complex and requires ever-increasing amounts of skill and specialization. But the other side of the coin is that science and engineering have also provided us with unprecedented access to vast amounts of information to an extent that would have been unimaginable in the pre-internet era. This greatly enhances our collective knowledge and helps illuminate the most productive paths for new research. It’s surely impressive how fast we were able to develop a COVID vaccine – and not just one, but half a dozen of them.
Another example is climate change. Sure, it’s a huge problem and we’re not doing nearly enough, but at least the science is advancing in productive and informed directions; despite the hype in some irresponsible media, there are almost no real scientists wasting their time on fundamental questions like whether the bulk of post-industrial climate change is due to human causes from carbon emissions. But a mere fifty years ago, the fundamentals were so poorly understood that we didn’t even know the right questions to ask, and the National Academy of Sciences was advocating the urgent need for major climate research programs to begin to understand the issues. One can perhaps be pessimistic that we still don’t know enough or aren’t doing enough, but we really have come a very long way in a relatively short time.
As for the plateau in computer chip performance, that has little to do with science and is mainly indicative of the inherent limits of silicon chip technology. But that technology is perfectly adequate for a large class of problems, and for others, can be addressed through techniques like massive parallelism or perhaps entirely new technologies like quantum computing.
My pandemic-time investments are starting to look pretty good right now.
" Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love."
But at least their son is a good elitist who looks down upon the trash humans who smoke and drink. Good for them.
what gives me hope?
on a larger scale, the great wash of history as I perceive it. science, technology, education, available knowledge and easily accessed knowledge, these are things that have grown and improved over the span of humanity. These things have, generally, made our lives easier, both directly and indirectly. This progression has been inevitable and unstoppable overall.
Today’s youth, those 35ish and younger by my reckoning, are really much the same as I was. Not exactly the same, but very similar and they will face mostly the same day to day problems and successes as we did.
The beginning of emphasis on quality of life over quantity. Many are saying, “Why would I want that big $ mcjob if I hate myself, ignore my SO, yell at the kids kick the dog because I hate my job?” There are many who have said, “no thanks, I’ll take the small $ career I love and kiss the SO hug the kids and play fetch with the dog”
Personal insults of posters, or their families, are not allowed in IMHO.
Warning issued.
Long time gardener here and the pandemic afforded me lots of time to garden in 2020. But then there was a 125 year freeze event in Texas. Combined with a power failure, most of my plants died including sheltered plants that would be normally heated by electricity.
Long story short, a lot of the plants came back from the roots :guavas, citrus, … And recently the tropical lotuses bloomed (they were frozen solid) into ice during the Texas freeze (they are grown in planters ). Flowers give me hope.
The fact that old coots can retire and relax.
Seriously, for awhile there I thought “Were the WWII vets the last generation that could retire, before everything went to hell?”
Things went to hell, but I still got to retire. I can handle the apocalypse, as long as I can watch it from my porch with the aforementioned Scotch whisky.
And if the world gets run by youngsters that are anything like my thirty-sumpthin’ daughter and her friends, we’ll be okay.
My contacts with the yoots have been really positive as well. Strangely, television portrayals of many of those young people don’t correspond with that experience and I don’t know what to make of that.
Because we don’t have “young people” writing TV shows.
Even as a grade schooler, I realized that the kids that were characters in the books I was reading were a grownup’s version.
What really cemented that was Spider-Man comics, where Peter Parker’s friends would use way over the top “teen slang”. Things would be “groovy” or “boss, daddy-o!”. But the worst was Mary Jane Parker calling something "GINCHY".
And the word kept popping up, with other characters gushing over hippie fashions with “Oooh, isn’t this fringey vest just the ginchiest? C’mon, squares, get with the happenin’ vibe and score some fringe, too!”
I actually had a friend ask “Do big kids really talk this way?” and I still remember telling him “Naaah, I bet this was written by some fat, middle-aged writer… who doesn’t even have kids.”
My grandchildren are all in their teens and 20s. In ten years, they will be in 20s and 30s and just getting to an age where they are starting to run things. Climate change is in their future in a way that it isn’t in mine.
So is gun control and better safety nets in the face of increasingly hostile employment environments.
I think the world was trending in the direction of becoming a safer, more convenient, and more interconnected place. IMHO it was a good thing, and I believe we were headed more towards a Star Trek TNG style utopia rather than Brave New World style. IMHO that trend has had a long term reversal for the first time since the fall of the western Roman Empire. Exactly when that trend reversed is still difficult for me to pin down, but I think it’s in the very recent past, no earlier than the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic on 3/11/2020, and possibly as recently as the responses of various Republican elected officials to the 1/6/2021 Capitol insurrection. My hope is that 2022 and 2024 will go blue and that that will be enough to lead to the demise of the current version of the Republican Party, ending this particular threat. This will have to happen despite my guess that the 2022 US elections will be the first to be less free than the prior elections sine the end of Reconstruction.
Really? What has happened recently that has been worse than hundreds of other world events, from the Black Death to the rise of Nazism?
Those were all temporary setbacks in the general trend of progress over the past 1,600 or so years. Even the ones you mention, as well as things like the Mongol invasion and the US Civil War, were temporary blips. Although we can’t be sure yet, I have the feeling that if Republicans win any of the next 4 to 5 national elections, that it will mean the permanent end of functioning democracy in the United States. Given where we are, especially with regards to being in some critical years in the fight against global warming, that would be disastrous for human civilization as a whole. It wouldn’t be a setback lasting a few years or even a few decades. It would probably be a setback lasting several centuries or a permanent decline.
Assuming future historians even ponder such things, it could be that they say the end of Obama’s term was the peak of human civilization in the western world. They may say that we coasted on momentum in the first years of Trump’s term until the current Republican attempt to destroy progressive western civilization (and IMHO that is what their goal is) got going in earnest on 1/6/2021. The current Republican Party isn’t a party of Evil Empire like they were under Bush Jr. That’s something that would at least be manageable, and was managed under Bush Jr. Instead they’re a party of barbarians who would rather burn the whole thing down if they don’t get their way.
Who would challenge a new non-democratic authoritarian US that’s more interested in destruction than in building up a civilization? Germany? Japan? New Zealand? No, they would all fall sooner or later as well. Even China and their Evil Empire strategy would fail due to the unmitigated effects of global warming. IMHO the only way out of it is if Democrats can manage to keep winning until the Republicans renounce their goal of ending human progress. My guess is that it will take a string of Democratic victories though at least the 2028 election before that would happen.
I think you give the Republicans too much credit.
Also the Civil War wasn’t a “temporary blip”. It was sort of a major inflection point in a fundamental history of the USA, the effects of which we are still dealing with today.
Donald Trump is the temporary blip.
The Civil War only lasted 4 years. Yes, we’re still feeling the after effects, but the overall arc of history has been one of progress for Blacks. Reconstruction ended in 1877, so we can say that 1878 was worse than 1877. After that, there were a few other temporary blips like the Great Depression, WWII, the 2008 recession, and so on. Overall, however, I think it’s safe to say that the overall trend since 1878 was that each year was better for Black Americans than the year before. Even under someone like Reagan or the Bushes, things got better. Black people as a whole were better off in 1992 than they were in 1980. The recession of 2008 was a short term setback, but Black people as a whole were also better off by, say, 2010 than they were in 2000. I’m not sure we can say the same after 4 years of Trump. Had he won last year, things would likely be set to be even worse by 2024.
I hope you’re right about Trump. The man himself will of course eventually age out of relevance. But if his style of “leadership” leads to another Republican victory, whether fairly or by stolen election, I fear they will de facto outlaw the possibility of Democrats ever winning another national election. They will also refuse to do anything about global warming, and our failure to stop the tipping point of global warming from occurring is likely to lead to a permanent decline in human civilization.
I think Bush winning was the beginning of the end, possibly. Al Gore may have been our best shot.
Jeez, there is a bit of hyperbole on this thread.
Everything in the last 1,600 years was a “temporary setback”, but the Republicans have cracked the code, we’re on the road to dystopia.
I had things to deal with that my parents never had to deal with. My kids have things to deal with that I don’t. I’m sure someone on the front lines in 1917, or someone in a Nazi concentration camp, would be glad to know they don’t live in awful 2021, and should be happy in their temporary setback state.
Hopefully people will fight for something better. I’m not dismissing what is going on today. When your enemy changes tactics, you change. Changes are made after every calamity. Let’s us and our children be as brave as we believe our ancestors to be.