What Will Happen in the 2020s
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Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
What do users of the archive gain by it being independent of advertising?
And why can't it be a non profit and also offset expenses by selling advertising?
Look at it this way.
There are plenty of non profits that can only make money by donations. They can't easily make money off of advertising. Internet Archive can. So in theory any money that someone sends to them would not go to an organization that might have a greater need. Make sense?
Now of course you are saying 'give them $5 instead of upvoting'. So that is a small enough amount that you would say 'you still have $5 to give to someone else'. But I say when people (en masse) behave like that a portion will feel that they have done their 'good person' duty and not make another donation to another cause (that once again can't sell advertising).
By the way 'service to humanity'???
Edit: One other thing. I'd be glad to pay IA for 'service'. That is if I need to get a page taken down or I need to get something scraped more or less I'd gladly pay for being able to discuss with a real person and get something done. This idea that free means 'you take what you get and you don't get upset' to me is just nonsense at the core. Maybe have a free no ad service but then charge for things to raise revenue not just 'donate donate donate'.
And even with donations they could in theory be 'corrupted' just the same. A rich person could give them a large sum of money (as a donation) and then would have some defacto say in how things were done.
Take as another example ball parks (to even counter my point). They sell naming rights. That does not mean that the entity who purchased the naming rights gets to decide who plays on the team or who coaches the team although you could argue that that could happen (and I would say it does not offset the benefit of not having that 'independence'.
(I was also going to suggest nominating Internet Archive as a charity for Humble Bundle purchases as well, but it seems like they no longer support choosing your own charities.)
Thanks archive, I'm glad I can support you a bit.
I'm not against anything about them but if they want donations, their way of expense should be clearer.
Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.
You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?
Please forgive my pithy comment, but the size of the task goes someway to explaining the size of the workforce in my mind.
I don’t see any benefit for a country to turn its currency into a crypto asset. Either they are relinquishing a great deal of control in democratizing their financial system (also exposing themselves to attack), or it’s a crypto in name only that doesn’t seem any better than digital cash through banks except for a buzzword.
Decentralization is hit or miss. You get economies of scale with centralization that are hard to beat. I only see decentralization being useful for certain applications (namely, anything that needs to be censorship resistant/ can’t rely on the centralized infra for some reason) like it already is being used for.
Meat won’t be a delicacy unless we are not counting lab grown meat. Absolutely no way. I would be willing to take a huge bet on this. People all over the world love meat, it’s one of the first things people start spending on when they hit middle income (globally speaking). Plant based alternatives will become a lot more popular especially once they become cheaper, and we will probably start eating mostly lab grown meat, but meat will be consumed, at least by stubborn, older red-blooded Americans wary of technology and set in their ways that the author likely has little exposure to.
People all over the world love meat, especially US, UK and the Chinese. I've tried to convince some family members to reduce their meat consumption even a tiniest amount gets a huge amount of resistance. People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.
Impossible meat has a great start and I think their market share will continue to increase. But, there's an immense amount of variety in the meat market and the alternative meat industry still has a huge amount of work to do to address it.
The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.
Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.
I downvoted you not because of what you wrote, but because what you wrote is directly refuted by your (unlisted no less which I find intellectually lazy) source.
Processed meat being a class 1 carcinogen doesn't mean that plutonium = read meat! It simply means there is a likely link between it and cancer. Not that they are equivalent. This statement is scaremongering at best, unsupported by the classification. Also "cancer" is vague, the WHO organization, IARC, listed colorectal cancer as the specific cancer.
Ref: https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
And for red meat being a class 2 carcinogen, they listed as probably not that its known.
From their FAQ:
This recommendation was based on epidemiological studies suggesting that small increases in the risk of several cancers may be associated with high consumption of red meat or processed meat. Although these risks are small, they could be important for public health because many people worldwide eat meat and meat consumption is increasing in low- and middle-income countries. Although some health agencies already recommend limiting intake of meat, these recommendations are aimed mostly at reducing the risk of other diseases. With this in mind, it was important for IARC to provide authoritative scientific evidence on the cancer risks associated with eating red meat and processed meat.
If you want to paint red meat with a broad "bad for humans and whatnot" brush. At least get your facts straight. I can't look at the paper cause its behind the elsevier paywall but it should be here for anyone that can get it.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
I bet the 18% more chance of colorectal cancer listed in the study amounts to for 500 people instead of 4 getting cancer, maybe 5 do now. One of my biggest pet peeves with all of this is the focus on whatever number is higher without contextualizing it.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are quite simply out of business." [1]
The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.
An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.
Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.
There is also the fact that plant based diets are still associated to certain ideologies and because of that they will keep being scoffed at by people from opposing ideologies. Sure, you don't have to lean left to be vegan, but the vast majority of vegan people, or people seriously trying to reduce their meat consumption, do lean left (continuing with the car analogy: remember the rolling coal fad).
Dietary choices go way beyond their nutritional value. People feel attached to what they eat, and they will resist change. So, yes, a strong economic incentive is needed, and even worse, it might not be enough.
As long as there are an appreciable number of them, I will enjoy a greater variety of dishes and ingredients available to me, and oftentimes fresher ingredients too.
Insofar as they are making choices that benefit them, they also make choices that benefit me.
Where they lose me, and this isn’t all vegans, but the ones that lose me are the ones that try to convince me that I am a bad person for the dietary choices I make. Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. The ones that make me want to go out and eat two steaks just to stick it to them are the ones that want to take away my choices or introduce sin taxes onto meat. I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that. I would argue such a fair tax is entirely theoretical, but in theory, it could work out. The ones that want to punish me specifically are the ones I can’t abide.
When someone introduces me to an entirely vegetarian dish or vegan dish that I like, I’ll probably add it to my menu and start making it myself, and I usually don’t modify it to add any additional protein. Good food is good food and I actually like tofu and some of those veggie patties on the market. I like them for that they are, not for what they pretend to be. It come down to making a different choice as to what to eat for dinner, rather than making a compromise.
Today, January 1st 2020, I’m not even thinking about lab grown meat. Maybe I’ll prefer it on January 1st, 2030, or maybe I’ll be paying a premium for my steak, or maybe the price of my premium cut steak will actually fall after checking against inflation and I’ll be eating even more steak. Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties. Vegans that practice veganism for dogmatic, ideological and religious reasons certainly aren’t going to win me over in ten or a hundred years by preaching to me though.
I make choices. Vegans make choices. Everyone makes choices. I think that’s a pretty good state of affairs.
I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities.
Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop enjoying the things humanity has worked for a long time to achieve. Instead we should think about how we can make technology work better together with the environment and enable even more comfort and prosperity. Not force us to go back, rather find ways of moving even further forward.
We just need to stop flying so much, and stop eating as much meat.
It's unfortunate and inconvenient.
A slab of meat like steak will be many years before that comes from a lab for a decent price. But worked into a nice curry or some usages for sausages etc, I say we are close or even there already.
But you are right; you can make exciting food with mostly anything. Even, god forbid, veggies! (seems that angry meat eaters are also dead against anything that resembles a vegetable; they eat the steak, leave everything else on the plate).
Kudos to you, but this opinion would make you exceedingly rare among people for whom eating meat is an identity issue.
> Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties.
It's less about you individually than the economic policies that enable the mass production and consumption of meat. Beyond the science, which pretty convincingly make the case that industrial meat is behind a huge amount of environmental damage, the politics of this are very much about personal beliefs about whether or not that situation should continue in the same form, or be biased more towards plant based foods (via the carbon/ghg tax you proposed). And politics are grounded for better or worse in beliefs and dogma, just like religion.
In pricing out the tax, you would need to compute the global warming potential of the emissions for every piece in the supply chain, as well as their half life to measure their short term and long term impact and finally put a price on all of that. You could limit it to certain classes of emissions to keep it simpler, but you would want to cover all the known major transportation, industrial and agriculture emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and so on.
Vegans who ask for „sin taxes“ don‘t want to piss you off, they simply have the belief (and actually quite well justifiable so) that meat consumption leads to quite a lot of suffering in the world. You don’t seem to be opposed to taxes on ghg emissions - presumably because you believe that they cause suffering. Why is it not reasonable to also punish/tax other behavior that causes suffering? Do you really believe that animal suffering doesn’t count?
I would really encourage you to reflect your position on this and maybe revise towards being more forgiving towards people who simply care about the suffering of animals.
Suffering doesn’t enter into it, but I don’t like subsidies. If the problem with climate change is that my lifestyle is being subsidized because the “true cost” isn’t in the purchase price, I’ll pay it, but so should everyone. I’ll be paying more for meat, but I’ll also be paying more for spinach, and coffee, and spices, and salt, and clothes, and every single industrial good that I buy. And so would everyone, because the net result would be to see the purchasing power of everyone decrease. I can live with that if you can, even factoring in my dietary preferences, I’m willing to bet money I have a lower net contribution to climate change than most in my country.
I could elaborate, but I don't expect to change your mind; you've already stated outright that you're determined not to. In any case, I'm not here to cast blame on you personally for eating meat. I still do it, too.
It's a shame about your stubbornness, though. You seem to be smart enough to engage in careful, reasoned analysis about a complex issue. In fact, I'd wager that you'd scoff at an anti-vaxxer or a Holocaust denier who shared the strength of your convictions. Of course, scientific and historical truth are a little more objective than basic moral principles—but when it comes to the way animals are manufactured in America today, not by much.
There isn’t a lot that is objective, even scientific and historical truths are often less scientific, less historic and less truthful than we think they are. I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be. In return, I don’t accept that the choices they have made are morally superior to my own. They’re just living their lives according to their beliefs and I don’t want to take that away from them, nor do I want them to take away my choices nor to be punished for them. Life is too short, fleeting and full of suffering and choices to start making choices for other people. I do not, and I would wager you do not, have the status, position or occupational license to cast judgements upon others that aren’t our children, charges, employees or elected representatives. Even these limited forms of subordination have their limits.
This is really unfortunate. An anti-vaxxer knows that it’s a question of science, just as a Holocaust denier knows that it’s a question of historical record (even if they lack the scientific/historical literacy to see through the counterfactual narratives they’ve bought into). There’s insurmountable conviction on both sides—but one is right and the other is not (for all practical purposes, as elusive as objective truth is).
To refuse to even consider the moral angle—I’d be tempted to call it bad faith, but I don’t get that impression from you at all. Rather, it seems to be this:
> I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be.
Taken to the extreme, the live-and-let-live / agree-to-disagree philosophy exhorts us to put down difficult questions simply because they are difficult (or seem unactionable), and to simply accept the status quo for what it is. But the moral implications of your actions do not go away simply because you choose not to examine them, or because they were the default configuration presented by the time and place you were born in.
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You’re right though; I’m not qualified to pass moral judgment on anyone, and that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a moral question. Moral virtue isn’t a contest or a report card.
Am I morally superior to a 19th-century plantation owner? (Were all slaveowners equally bad?) If I were raised in his family, as part of that society, what reason do I have to believe I’d do any different? If the answer is “none”, then why do we study history? and what makes me better than that guy?
It's not within my power to change the way things are. But the willingness to consider that the way things are isn't right might be a start.
If the way things are isn’t right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can’t change it without violently changing what it means to be human, so you essentially have to have humans become something other than human, and that doesn’t seem like a winning survival strategy in the long term.
When we’re not eating God’s creatures, we’re burning down the forests and fields they live in and pouring concrete over them so we can sleep better at night in little towns and villages and hamlets with other people who participated in the festivities, or at least their ancestors did, or at least they bought the house from someone whose ancestors did etc. We also do it to grow more food, all those plants we’ve selected for over the entire history of agriculture that we’ve deemed to be beneficial to us to keep around? We burned down other species, even to extinction with no regard as to whether the burning mass over yonder was plant or fungus or animal flesh or insect.
I can’t seriously consider ethical vegetarianism or ethical veganism a serious argument for not eating meat because it goes so deeply against the violent nature of humanity that it disregards what we are entirely. Given it is probably the most defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, it is a fairly massive characteristic to overlook.
I can seriously consider reasons for eating less meat that include things like “this meatless dish is delicious”, only you don’t emphasize the meatless bit, or “methane emissions are a pretty serious concern, is there something we can do about that?” or “cows actually use up a large amount of resources that might be better spent on something else.”
I can consider those seriously, I just don’t think they’re winning arguments. But, at least they’re willing to try to work with the nature of the beast rather than against it. People who consider themselves “ethical vegans” can make a better case than starting from a position that eating meat is morally wrong, even if you believe it! It’s okay to believe something like that, I don’t agree with you, but so long as you or someone else isn’t trying to use state force to enforce their belief on me, I think we’ll get along just fine.
If you don't buy into this for your own species, why do you cling to this world view in relation to other species? Have you ever considered that the universe is evolving and old practices which have worked at one point can/should be replaced by more effective ones? Just because we had cruel practices at one point, doesn't mean we should hold on to them if we notice that there are better alternatives.
But I am curious to know what you think: couldn't you have made this same argument about slavery two hundred years ago?
"The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical emancipation is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most hierarchical, socially stratified, and conquest-driven species to ever grace the Earth. If there's a people that hasn't been dominated by another, it's because they're so remote as to be beyond the reach of civilized society.
"If the way things are isn't right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can't change it without violently changing what it means to be human..."
Again, I'm not saying you should stop eating meat. I'd like to, but even I haven't. I'm also not saying that I would have asked a 19th-century plantation owner to just give up his slaves voluntarily. But I think the Civil War was the single most defining struggle in the building of our nation's moral character. Would you rather live in the America we have, or in the alternate-universe America where our great-grandparents skirted this question so that they could "live and let live"?
Of course you can have reasons for denying the importance of animal suffering but most of those accounts are easily shown to be inconsistent and simply self-serving. People who accept animal suffering as real and probably a bad thing tend to have a much easier time to articulate a consistent world view. If you don’t agree with that claim show me how I am wrong and coherently articulate why the suffering of animals doesn‘t matter... it’s really surprisingly difficult to not reach for arbitrary distinctions like „they are not human“ but have substantial arguments grounded in empirical evidence that justify your opinion.
In the end my goal was not to convince you of becoming vegan (that’s generally a quite difficult task due to current societal indoctrination) but to simply make you reconsider how you view vegans who actually care about animal suffering. It’s a totally reasonable position and it’s generally much more coherent and aligned with evidence then other positions. Even if you don’t care, you don‘t need to judge other people who do.
For what it is worth to you, I purchase the best meat I can find and afford at the local market. The more room to roam, the better. Absolutely no hormones, pointless antibiotics, or other growth techniques that degrade the meat. I’m under no illusions that what I purchase is cruelty free though, it’s livestock which was raised for slaughter, from a species that was cultivated to be raised as livestock, slaughtered and turned into various meat and leather products.
I buy better meat because it tastes better, I don’t do it to spare the animal. I advocate for better farming practices where possible because I want better and more pervasive products to be available and at a lower cost and to more people.
I do in fact care more for the lives of people than I do for most animals. I don’t care for needless deaths, nor do I like unnecessary cruelty, but when I eat an animal, it wasn’t needless or pointless. It lived until it died, and was recycled into my body. I too will live until I die and am recycled into other living creatures.
Laying it out, I sound more callous than I intend, but I don’t know that there’s a less brutal way to put any of that and keep it honest, but more than sounding callous, I don’t want to be or sound like a hypocrite, even unwittingly.
Thank you for engaging me, actually laying out my views allows me to solidify in my own mind what it is I’m thinking, and figure out how to communicate it better the next time.
Would be interested to hear your reply to that :)
That said, there are inflection points at which certain products switch from being seen as status symbols into more questionable signals - wearing fur springs to mind as one example.
I don't think it's at all guaranteed that traditional meat would end up in that category; it's a long way from it currently. But it's within the realm of possibility.
I think you are probably right... but I want to bring up the counterexample of smoking.
I mean, smoking was never as widespread as eating meat, but I feel like there was a tipping point in the '90s, where it went from something almost every red blooded american would do to something very rude and even forbidden in most indoor spaces.
Smoking became... divorced from manhood.
I remember as a kid I had an IT job; sort of an internship type deal fixing computers for the local county department of public health. I got credit for going to this job instead of taking the last two classes of the day in high school; There was nobody else in the building who wasn't old enough to be my parent. It was so much fun.
I remember when the city passed the 'no smoking in bars' ordinance. The office was super excited. a few people (who I'm pretty sure never went to bars) said they were going to the bar after work. (I was maybe 16, and not invited) I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now that I'm old, I go to bars, too... and you know? I probably wouldn't if they smelled the way they smelled walking past them in the '90s.
Well, oxen manage to be strong as an ox on a 100% plant-based diet. Giraffes get pretty tall too.
What an absurd analogy; cheetahs eat a 100% meat-based diet and they're very fast.
Chicken mcnuggets are barely chicken. The market already demonstrated that "real meat" is a matter of availability and marketing, not a matter status chasing (not that there aren't exceptions, which are a statistical minority).
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a compelling argument. SMH
Does raising chickens even have the same impact as raising cattle on the climate?
Obligatory wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
but you'd be hard pressed to find people who would substitute their animal protein with insect protein.
This is largely because pork is raised in factory-farming conditions that are awful for the animals, and poultry even more so. Environmental "benefits" are countered by animal welfare drawbacks.
Here is a good analysis, you need to scroll around a bit to find pork and poultry info:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
Beef is more carbon intensive, because it takes longer to raise beef cattle (and therefore more resources to feed).
Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers.
There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as opposed to high-methane[0] animal-based meat products. It's not the entire solution to environmental problems by any means, but it's a large opportunity.
A good chunk of meal decision-making comes down to the way that food is marketed and the way that we talk about and discuss our food options.
As determined and evidence-led entrepreneurs and technologists, all of us in the HN community can do a lot to advocate for and influence public opinion and behavior in whatever direction we choose.
[0] - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.
What if that long list is the cost of trying to engineer an alternative to something that evolved over millions of years? Why would that matter?
(Typical meat eater here, but interested in trying lab meat sometime.)
I imagine that meat will eventually be replaced by lab-grown meat that had been engineered to be as delicious (or moreso!) as the highest grade beef, but perhaps more healthy & cheaper. The fact that it would be better for the environment and animal rights needs to be listed as a benefit, but not the focus.
as a former tesla owner, i dispute both of these assumptions.
> ... lab-grown meat ...
tesla builds cars. cars are a recent human invention. cattle on the other hand is a product of millions of years of evolution. i think it will take a bit more time to get lab meat that is as good as the real thing.
It didn't select to be environmentally friendly. Humans scaled up animal growth fairly recently too, so we hadn't had enough time to figure out pathogen issue and ethics.
I don't think the evolution of cattle is a good indicator of the difficulty of creating great plant protein products.
But it does (possibly) help sequesters carbon.
The truth is that it's hard to tell which is better, but neither is great environmentally.
it’s hard to say whether grass-fed or grain-fed beef is better for the Earth – in part because they’re both pretty bad.
“No matter how you slice it,” he wrote, “eating beef will never be the greenest thing you do in a day.”
He cites an estimate by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan that producing 2.2 pounds of beef emits more greenhouse gases than driving 155 miles.
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s study of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption in Oregon found red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprint of all the foods Oregonians eat.[1]
(Needless to say the Cattlemen’s Association dispute these, and claim it only (?) produces 2.8% of greenhouse gases in the US).
[1] https://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/which-is-greener-gras...
The other issue is we’re basically running out of topsoil. Modern agriculture is an extractive process, and the result is we have maybe 60 years left until the topsoil is gone and we can’t grow any more crops.
The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84.[5][6] That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 32 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions.
How can you say that with certainty? There isn't any fake beef that tastes similar that I am aware of.
Ironic choice to use McDonalds "beef" as the example of real meat.
In many places, climate change will make existing agriculture unsustainable, so there'll be massive upheaval in the industry at the same time.
If that's combined with a cultural movement similar to flugskam, I think drastically reduced meat consumption is possible.
Of course, there'll be counter forces -- likely primarily cultural. "Only libtards don't eat meat" etc. So it goes.
People are lazy, and if the only source of cheap meat is the black market of illegally-imported products, only a very small segment of people will bother.
But perhaps the questionnaire and algorithm from terrapass is deficient in some way. What are you basing your calculations off of?
That still isn't very expensive in terms of offsets - about $10/year (Terrapass sells the offsets for $4.99 per 1,000 lbs). Why do you think that's astronomical?
I assumed that eg. 17% of the global total meant the individual allocation would be large, and thus very expensive to offset.
Note that there's a CH4 vs. CO2 conflation in the mix here, which probably doesn't help.
But it still doesn't seem to add up: if I can eat a "meat lovers" diet and that's only $10/year to offset, and it's roughly 15% of global emissions, that'd suggest that around $70/year could offset 100% of global emissions.
Still not what I would call astronomical.
But I also think it's remarkable how quickly public opinion in the UK has been shifting with regard to environmental concerns.
Traveling by train as opposed to air travel, reduction of single-use plastics and plastic packaging, and reduced-meat diets all feel like much more common discussion topics and lifestyle choices than they were even five years ago.
Shops and restaurants have also shifted to meet changing demands. There have been mistakes (incentives around long-life plastic shopping bags haven't worked out exactly as planned) but overall it feels like a wave of change.
2. we all live in our bubbles.
both meat consumption and air travel have increased YoY over the past 25 years in the UK.
and sticking with the UK, current estimates point to an almost 100% increase in air passenger numbers in the 2030s, and Heahtrow still being in the top ten busiest airports in the world.
anecdotally, my flights have increased 2x every year for the past 5 years. this year it's been 50 flights, 40 of which intercontinental (no train availability).
From a little more digging to try to break out of my bubble, here are some reading references:
Of beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and fish -- only poultry has seen any broad increase in expenditure by UK households over the past few years (and slim, at 2%); all others have decreased or remained the same[0]. I'm not claiming that's related to environmental concerns directly but it shows some changes in behaviour.
Air travel passenger numbers are certainly on the rise[1], although interestingly the number of flights ('air travel movements') appears to be somewhat more muted. Even so, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation have certainly increased a lot since the 1990s.
Brexit and the prospect of a high-spending majority UK government could both have impacts on these over the next decade, no doubt - but in what direction I'm not sure.
[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-p...
[1] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I didn't have an Impossible Whopper yet but it costs a lot of money. For $12.99 with a coupon I can gt a family meal of three Whoppers, three cheeseburgers, and 3 fries. I hear the Vegans are mad that the Impossible Whopper is grilled on the same grill as the regular Whooper.
I suppose the reason to turn away from meat eating is to save the environment? Animals exhale CO2 but not as much as factories with smoke stacks burning coal or oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
That's the problem; they will say it's not the same even if it is 100% the same. I bake a lot of pizzas for friends and I tend to do real sausage and Beyond sausage and have people taste. I tell them upfront that some are real and some are fake meat but not which are which. Yesterday I did almost 50 pizzas on a hangover party (it's a hobby...) and the most 'angry' meat eaters taste fake when it's real, real when it's fake, but once they think that they have the fake one (even though it was the real one), they simply leave it. And that I really don't understand. Little disclaimer about tasting: I don't load my pizza's up with that 'meatlover' amount of (fake or real) meat. I like subtle tastes, so there won't be a lot of sausage on a pizza.
I'm not an expert but I believe many EU countries now have instant P2P bank transfers. Australia just got their system going in the last few years too. The US is a bit behind but I'm sure it's coming.
- They sacrifice a goat (or sheep, cow, camel, etc.) once a year on Eid.
- They sacrifice a goat, etc. upon every baby's birth.
- They are encouraged to sacrifice an animal for atonement, blessings and other reasons.
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice#Islam
I don't think animal consumption is going down that soon.
Their regular diet consists largely of cereal grains, legumes, vegetables, and small amounts of meat to supplement, and even that is mostly cheaper to produce/acquire meat like chicken and eggs, or small riverine fish.
The religious observances you mention account for a tiny portion of overall meat consumption in the world, and to use them as an example why meat consumption can't be reduced is at best an abuse of statistics, and at worst a cultural scapegoat.
If anything, other cultures could perhaps learn from them to treat the consumption of meat as a sort of sacrament to be appreciated on special occasions, like the birth of a child. Prior to the era of industrial scale food production, that is how most non-aristocratic people consumed meat of larger animals, regardless of their culture or religion.
The far bigger factor driving meat production and the associated environmental issues is my kid ordering a 1/4 pound hot dog and then throwing away half of it.
I don't think it's a problem, if the economics are in place.
7 - I can't see massive exploration suddenly over 10 years. And when this boom does come governments will be very involved, like in the colonial periods, there is massive national advantage to get people to go stake claims. I can only see it being a similar blend of govt/private.
10 - we will see progress but anything groundbreaking in the cancer fight this seems too short a time scale.
All financial activity and transactions can easily be monitored on a blockchain; the movement of money could be tracked from it's inception to it's current location on one ledger. Each private key can correspond to a citizen (much like a social security ID) and citizens can be taxed more easily and efficiently. This is why China is leading the pack here and is already developing a PBOC digital currency[1].
[1]=https://fortune.com/2019/11/01/china-digital-currency-libra-...
I find it hard to believe any central bank will risk that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintChip
It didn't exactly explode in popularity, and has since been sold to a private corp.
China won't be the first country to issue a crypto-currency because it's already been done by other countries. If China does issue one, people likely won't trust it and will avoid it like the plague. China's only real advantage here it is to leverage their authoritarian state to force their own citizens to use a state-approved crypto-currency and hope it catches on elsewhere as a result.
As for China becoming the world's sole super-power in the next decade... I am skeptical. Given China's demographics (i.e. greying), current political problems (e.g. Hong Kong), exodus of manufacturing (e.g. Samsung), and increasing resistance to their influence from other states, I would predict China's global power is near its peak and will soon begin declining, likely being substantially lower at the end of the decade than it is now.
And moving to crypto is like going back on the gold standard. No way to expand or contract monetary supply.
Not _exactly_. This is kind of the whole point of Stellar, and why IBM invested in creating World Wire. Crypto can make this problem easier, especially if you're looking at it internationally rather than in day-to-day transactions. I also think for auditability there is an advantage here, which can't be brushed away. Tracing down international currencies can be very hard.
That said, what the article is describing is definitely not this, but seems to predict (at least based on the text) something more akin to a stablecoin that corresponds to a given fiat currency. So yeah, in that case, you'd probably be correct, but I don't think we can generalize that to every type of cryptocurrency.
I honestly can't see the average person dealing with this complexity. Even the basic math is hard to grasp for the average Joe.
Try asking a normal person to quickly add 0.0005 to 0.0461. The former was the fees for my transaction.
I don't think country is going to give up their control of currency and all those monetary tools that they know for something new. These monetary policies have been evolving base on past mistakes.
I can only see decentralize internet if the world crack down on the internet and put more pressure in it. Or more fragmentation like how bit torrent is rising because there are more streaming services.
Meat is not going anywhere either. China, Korea, etc.. place status and emphasize on meat. It's also ingrain in culture too.
Calling it a delicacy is a stretch, it not changing that fast.
But the "set in their ways" people are becoming the minority and those of us who are open to trying new stuff slowly change to stop eating meat and shifting towards plant-based.
I used to love a good steak, burger, chicken, etc. I stopped eating meat in early November 2019 to see how long I can go without it. Still going, and I don't have any need to eat it, so it's effortless.
When eating meat, I sometimes had this bad feeling in my stomach, and now it doesn't happen anymore. Sure, they use pesticides on plants and soy is said to be heavily modified and whatever. I get that from my family, who are set in their ways. I'm not trying to convince anyone, it's just what feels better for my body.
Also, I'm lucky to have a supply of home-grown vegetables so I can be sure of the origin. Tastes much better than the stuff they sell in stores too.
1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way here for solar.
2. Until someone can devise a safe way to processor nuclear fuel, transport the fuel and waste and process and store the nuclear waste nuclear power is just not making any kind of resurgence. It just isn't. Believing otherwise is a pipe dream that ignores the significant externalities of nuclear power (as in the waste products from the reactor and refinement processes).
3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best.
4. Crypto currency doesn't solve any problems that most people care about. Bitcoin surged in value for two reasons:
- So wealthy Chinese people could escape their country's capital controls and move their wealth out of China. Mine Bitcoin in China, sell overseas for USD, profit.
- For illegal activity.
Traditional currencies have reversible transactions (which most people actually want) and aren't subject to 51% attacks. Nor do they require technical proficiency to safely use.
5. Decentralized Internet is a pipe dream.
6. Plant-based diets by the end of the decade? Not a chance.
I look forward to having a chuckle at this list in 2030.
Handling nuclear waste is much easier, because we're actively working on that problem, there's practical know-how in spades.
Edit: perhaps coal would be phased out, without government intervention to save it. I don't think oil production would go down on its own.
I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
What are the numbers next to each of the links in Pros and Cons? They look like they correspond to the ratings above, but I didn't understand how those were derived.
Putting your ratings on the site requires a paid account. I'm making this in my spare time and would have a hard time controlling spam if such accounts are free. I still think the free version is useful for exploring your own opinions.
I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.
Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.
Ultimately, Discord/Slack/Whatnot succeeded over Jabber because far more money was put into services that can be commercialised than was put into something that's very hard to make a buck out of.
The run-out of IPv4 has massively exacerbated the problem, because with carrier grade NATs now the norm, protocols have to work via a central server to connect two end users. There won't _be_ a new decentralised killer app.
Well, if social unrest gets really bad across the globe we might see something like mesh networking with a mesh social media system spring up, I suppose.
I think the reason would be that most countries that make short-term decisions are ones that have democratic elections every few years and need to avoid pissing off too many people. China's authoritarian system may have more leeway with short-term pain for longer-term strategic initiatives not resulting in societal upheaval.
And any comparables likely failed due to war with democratic countries, and that seems unlikely given China's role in the globalization of trade as well as it being a nuclear power.
Just because they aren't copy cat 100% clone of US/UK democracy, it doesn't mean they aren't a democracy.
Also countries like Great Britain, France and all other big European powers made bulk of their super power status when ruled by Monarchs. The democracies later carried the inertia of those eras. Which is understandable. Once you build a sound educational ecosystem, with a great economy with an industrialized economic base, democracy works like a charm. There is a long term supply of good leaders and educated masses to vote for them.
Also democracy is not a process designed to produce good leaders. It's only a process that elects them in a system where they are already present, with a populace that can recognize.
I think the root cause is pretty simple: having no checks and balances lets you move faster, no matter what direction (either up or down), and it's a lot easier to mess things up than it is to do everything right.
> the only countries that are successful are democratic
And you're supporting it by excluding all counter-examples. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "most successful countries are democratic".
And since you mentioned China and India, India is a democracy, China is ruled by an authoritarian single-party. Both have huge populations, yet China has grown its GDP better? Assuming good economy = successful here. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/china-vs-india-economy.ph...
Let me present an alternative thesis: democracy has little to do with good governance. It acts as a buffer against discontent, it's in many ways moral, but it is not by itself sufficient to create prosperity.
Finland is building the world's first long term storage depot for nuclear waste and I think the same could be done in many other places.
Plus, all the push for nuclear is for new nuclear with better efficiency in the fuel used and passive safety futures. I don't think that a significant part of the grid will be powered by nuclear in 2030, but the newer models should be coming online by then.
That said, I think he might be wrong about (3) (among other things) and (5) is related in my mind. China is certainly growing, in part because of problems in the Euro-American world, but it is also brewing problems and unrest with increasingly autocratic behavior, and a number of other economic problems are showing.
I do see increased adoption of decentralized technologies, in part because of increased political volatility and mistrust of involved centralized IT corporations. That is, I see (5) happening in part because I think (3) might be a bit of an overprediction.
It won't just be China though, and hasn't been. People will increasingly be dealing with censorship and monitoring, and trying to bypass it, and will also become increasingly distrustful of things like Facebook, which correctly or incorrectly has been implicated in things like Russian-UK-US subterfuge. Adoption of decentralized tech is already happening with Hong Kong and Catalonia protests; I suspect it will grow to become more mainstream.
I don't see the traditional centralized internet going away, but I do see people gravitating toward a more hybrid system. Maybe where more critical, and more intimate communications with close others moves to more decentralized architectures, along with other stuff that doesn't depend on speed so much, whereas other mass communications remains more centralized.
All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.
Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.
If anything because there’s no way in hell they can cost effectively retrofit the vast amount of old vehicles we all tend to drive here.
E.g. in the Netherlands the "raw" price of gasoline (a few months back) was 0.61 euro/liter to that, add 0.6 gasoline tax and then add VAT, to come to the price at the pump (pump costs + profits come are included in the 0.61 raw price) of 1.46 euro/liter.
So about 58% of the cost of fuel is tax.
This is ignoring various other taxes that have to be paid, such as foreign taxes on the gasoline, profit tax, company tax, transport tax, road tax, approval tax, vat on the vehicle you're powering, ... All those taxes are either included in the raw gasoline price or are paid separately by the customers. So let's minimize that and say that 70% of the cost of gasoline really funds government (though not necessarily the local one), and should be considered tax (I do believe it'd be closer to 80% if you went really deep). Now of course, a number of those taxes are implemented on electric vehicles as well.
There's no way the government is going to let that tax income lower when it starts eating into their budget, so there will be some sort of tax, probably doubling the price of electric vehicles in the next 10 years or so.
And this is tax. It doesn't matter that you're not doing anything negative to the environment. Already the government is taxing companies generating their own electricity (the Netherlands) in various ways, and they're talking about taxing people who cut their grid connection.
In Europe all new cars, since 2018, must be able to automatically call emergency services and provide GPS coordinates in the case of a collision.
How so? Why would a new car not come with GPS navigation on the dash? Why would a new car not come with a data connection? These are commodities, your phone has them.
1. https://slate.com/business/2019/04/scooter-data-cities-mds-u... 2. https://blog.remix.com/mds-gbfs-and-how-cities-can-ask-for-d...
As for the rest, no way. The GOP has pivoted to being the rural party, and rural folks can not afford drone cars and will be paralyzed without them.
Or simply add a tax on new cars. Those who drive a lot will have to replace their vehicles more often and pay more tax.
At some point, its going to cost extra to buy cars without GPS trackers, houses without police-force endorses surveillance nets, or phones with an actual “off” button. This is much more pressing, in my opinion, than people buying into heavily processed meat substitutes.
Is it only mandatory to ship it with new cars, or is it mandatory to have it installed?
Would it be legal for me to remove, similar to what I've done with Onstar/Starlink in the past?
The technology required to geofence, speed-regulate, and otherwise control where, when, and how fast cars can go already exists. Why aren't we using it? We don't need fully autonomous cars. There are all kinds of things we can do incrementally. I have to imagine some jurisdictions are going to realize this, eventually. And once they do the totally predictable savings to life and property will be unignorable.
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.
I think the bigger unknown questions are around the impact of this technology. It seems hard to understate how much of a change it will be, particularly if there is a path towards young people being able to use it at a young age.
In the mean time you just have a display that obstructs your view and which can't be tolerated for more than a couple of hours.
How much data does a human 6 feet away from you project to you? How much of that data enters your conscious? How much enters your subconscious? With Moore’s law dying we can’t hope to match that amount of information, much less accurately record and transport it in real time. Lossy capture and output mechanisms will still be present in a decade.
Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I remember the early hype, but then read a few interviews with users/losers who were just escaping reality.
Too slow (latency is inevitable), too limiting, too hard to do or show anything non-trivial.
You could do interesting things if you put it a lot of time. But few have the time to spend on unclear benefits.
I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.
What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).
Or instantly punch anyone on earth in the face. Based on how the last decade went, I’m not optimistic.
From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use that only to further isolate themselves. At least today, physical location sometimes dictate you have to interact with people outside of your own social class and background. What you describe could reduce that, making every one retreat even further into their echo chamber.
People already live in close proximity to millions in cities. They generally don't hug each other; more fixated on rushing past each other, avoiding eye contact.
Humans just aren't made for having 7 billion friends...
We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair shops etc.
The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.
It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.
Of course we cannot extrapolate. Noone can know. But are there any specific reasons why the ongoing tide of political, ideological, social polarization would suddenly turn around?
You say "across great tribal boundaries". To me, physical proximity seems to be the main thing left now that still counteracts tribal boundaries.
Can you provide examples/scenarios perhaps?
As my counter-example, I just moved out to the country-side. As a result, I start to now see different opinions in my Facebook feed from when I lived in a city, simply due to Facebook-friending new people due to physical proximity. Due to this influx of "random" impulses in my Facebook feed, I think am likely to have less polarized views politically (I can see different friends arguing both sides of a topic) than if physical proximity didn't play a role in who I friended.
My favorite concept of that discussion was virtual guardians to protect your flow - look, you can interrupt that developer but you’re gonna have to defeat his virtual dragon first.
No room, or need, for decorations and fluff.
Perhaps your coworkers would be required to execute a perfect Japanese tea ceremony before interrupting you.
This sounds sad and absurd. Hugging someone in person is a much more visceral experience than via AR/VR.
Indie games are gonna get a lot weirder... pray for our overloaded dopamine receptors and shriveled serotonin ones. Pornhub will probably roll out their own game store steam clone lol
This made me laugh. We haven't even figured out how to do telephone conferences reliably. I'm still waiting for a telco that does not have the obligatory "You're breaking up" or "I cannot see the screenshare" or "Oh sorry, my microphone was still on mute" or whatever somewhere in between.
This is a well researched area, and embodied communication through VR/AR stands poised to solve many of these deficiencies by allowing the expression of non verbal cues, body language, spatial referencing, etc.
And for those few we really care to hug, we most often care enough for to be around anyway.
Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
Despite Thorium not being fully proven yet, I lean toward agreement with Yang: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
Charity often does good, but often does not have the intended or apparent result. See William Easterly on the subject.
Yes.
You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.
That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears.
Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/07/29/california-gas-plant-...
It was a smart move by Yang to bring up new technologies, which most don't seem to be aware of yet, and provides a way forward through the PR problem.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/inside-terrapower-nuclear-lab/
"Nuclear" probably needs a better name -- modern designs have come a long way since Fukushima was built.
Just out of curiosity, is the latter part of a generation that will begin to die off in the 2020s?
> The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one.
Oddly enough, if you go back to 2010 for predictions about the next decade, you'll see quite a few people talking about "peak oil." Almost nobody predicted a sharp turnaround in oil production and I don't think anyone in 2009 was predicting that the US would become a net oil exporter by the start of 2020.
I'll make a counter-prediction on the topic of climate crisis for the 2020s:
The climate crisis movement will become widely discredited for its attempts to manipulate scientific data and the scientific process for political ends. Grave prophecies of doom will not come to pass, causing loss of momentum and credibility. Climate research will continue, and as a result, new thermal regulatory mechanisms will emerge that lead to a more nuanced view of future climate change.
Why would you think this? Grave prophecies of doom have failed to come to pass for nearly half a century now and the climate change tale is _gaining_ momentum.
I'm not saying that climate change isn't responsible. I do believe that it has increased the severity of the situation, and that is a big problem. But this is not a doomsday scenario. It's a once every 20 years going back as long as we can measure scenario.
I think your reaction is a perfect example of what the parent comment is talking about.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
The problem is that since the late 1970s some very wealthy companies realized that this was happening and started spending money to try to muddy the scientific consensus and discourage action. Losing decades means that anything we do now is going to be harder since we’re starting much further behind.
Australia?
The area we will struggle with the most is fixing what we've done to our oceans.
The world wants and needs free, limitless energy, and there is no reason humanity can’t achieve that goal in the next decades.
Notice, that the scientific consensus does not spell doom and gloom.. just bad warmer weather, raising oceans, etc.
Peak oil didn't so much disappear as its ideas matured into a much more realistic depiction of it. Dr Hagans said that naming it peak oil was a bit silly and that it should have been called "Peak benefit of oil to society", that something that I can get behind.
The current idea is that the second peak will occur somewhere in the mid 20's as the debt load on fracking slows down additional drilling locations, this will raise prices and thus bring on even more newer more costly supplies as ultra-deep sea drilling, coal liquefaction becomes viable. Wheather this leads to a new increase in supply of just sustaining a plateau is anyone guess. Hopefully demand decreases and we move to alternative energy sources in time.
Some of the more reserved writers in the field did predict the production rebound and the higher prices that came with it, the idea that the issues of peak oil would be something that is a rocky road type of event that happens and fluctuates over a century not a sudden event. Folks like John Michael Greer and Dr Nate Hagans seem to be the most realistic folks in this area nowadays talking about the limits of oil production while focusing on possible future energy solutions.
John Michael Greer is a staggeringly convincing writer that has a fairly solid concept of the future of western industrial society. Essentially the idea that due to a wide degree of economic, social and environmental factors that we are in a situation that cannot be recovered from. He writes things that I don't want to agree with but they appear to hold water at least on the short term. I would recommend his books 'The Long Decent' and 'Dark Age America'.
The other reason why I mention his work is that his predictions are fairly in line with yours, the idea that the environmental movement is about to go quiet again because of the extreme message being pushed. That we are still learning how the climate reacts and that we do not have all the information. Climate blowback is going to be extreme but it will be a slow moving event.
Last decade seemed like the opposite. So much happened every year, but nothing changed over the decade. The biggest change seems to be the expansion of aggrieved classes to include almost everybody. This only applies to “the West” of course. Changes elsewhere are perhaps striking.
The list goes on and on.
One potential dark horse is genetic engineering. I wonder how close we are to the point where kids are doing gene hacking after school. It could happen this decade.
> Mass surveillance by governments and corporations will become normal and expected this decade and people will increasingly turn to new products and services to protect themselves from surveillance. The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy.
I'd take this a step further and fear that not only will it become the norm, even making use of privacy tech and devices will be viewed with suspicion or may even serve as barriers towards getting access to various societal instruments.
This already happens.
For example, in the US good credit is often necessary to rent an apartment, open a bank account, get insurance, or even land a job. In order to maintain "good credit", one needs to make sure their financial activity is reported to the bureaus. If you do everything using more-private cash or debit transactions you lose out.
Some things you want as a signal and some things you don’t. Paying rent on time should be a signal, but often is not. Going to a cancer clinic may not be a signal you want, but already is exploited.
Nuance is needed. Lots of small but important decisions to be made. Sounds like a product to me.
I hope so though, it would be beautiful if Open Whisper Systems was the next unicorn.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/china-s-p...
So not what you are expecting from a crypto currency?
This needs a huge asterisks at the end of it right? You could argue that plant based diets already dominate the world. Now if he's claiming that "muscular" foods that are produced in a lab will pound for pound outsell animal based meat I would happily take that bet against him.
Real meat, and all the rituals down to the actual killing of it publicly, can still coexist with artificial meat, with an elevated status, like marble beef, or having a sheep solemnly slain for a feast, already are today.
1.4B people adopting meat as they become wealthier would be disastrous for the planet
When the beef industry's lobbyist in Washington first tried one, he called his people and said, "Guys, we have a problem".
Source? This just sounds like a story made up for advertisement.
[1] https://mofb.org/taste-test-this-fake-meat-is-the-real-deal/
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/10/7/20880318/meatle...
This seems to be one of those issues that is likely to flip very quickly. I suspect there will be two cut-of points (making no prediction on when it will happen), with the first being when it is cheaper to make then lab-grown meat than the old-style with profit and return on investment in the assets to make the food (ie when you can no longer afford to start new farms, but can keep existing ones in profitable production) and when the price of lab-meat drops below the marginal cow cost (ie when you can only sell meat based cows at a loss).
I suspect that it will take much more time to reach the first cutof point than it will take to go from the first cutoff point to the second and when either is reached it will have very quick effects that will prove massively destructive to existing farms and related infrastructure.
China is fairly good at a few things, namely lending money and manufacturing goods.
What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months.
I don’t think the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist. I think we’ve seen a brief period of these attitudes, but it’s not indicative of the next decade imo.
And the author seems to think China will be able to rapidly adapt to change, pointing to global warming.
China is the world’s worst source of pollution. I don’t think they’re going to 180, especially since their economy is built on it.
US ~500 China ~1100 UK ~1500 Germany ~2000 Japan ~2000 South Korea ~4000
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
However it’s still far worse than most European countries in the list.
"Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account." Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States [1]. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix. Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet.
As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
copy/pasted from another thread
Prediction 5 is two decades overdue and Amazon Wavelength it just the beginning. Currently I'm working with on a problem that needs 1 TB RAM data processing and analysis. Given that's not raw data, but if a compulsary real-time technology similar to eVLBI (real-time optional), but it requires immediate processing of raw data that will probably be the killer application for the edge or fog computing. Typical web server hosting has transfer limit of few TB of data per month and Amazon cloud is charging by the bandwidth, the only way forward is to move to the edge.
Prediction 2 is quite self evident with the sudden rise of popularity of Elizabeth Warren with her proposed plan for wealthy citizen 2 percents tax [1].
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/31/2020-d...
I think a more moderate take would be suggesting a straddle of the EU - either it strangles itself with clunky bureaucracy, or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russia, or China.
Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland.
Adding PR to the House would significantly reduce the odds of a Republican House given that the current GOP makes a lot of noises that often seem like they're racist against Hispanics.
Not liberal ideals. Globalist neoliberal ideals.
> which include a less prominent America, the promotion of Veganism, and embracing the fall of the West.
These aren't liberal ideals. They are globalist neoliberal ideals. Anti-human, anti-american and pro-globalist financiers.
> or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russia, or China.
Simply will never happen as neither the US nor Russia would support this. Only china currently seems to want closer EU integration purely for economic/market purposes. Power is a zero sum game. The biggest loser in the rise of EU would be the US. Having europe turn from a "vassal" to a competitor would represent a significant loss of power for the US.
> Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland.
Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US. I think we should work with native greenlanders directly and have greenland become part of the US. Perhaps a large cash payment for each true native inuit greenlander ( not danish/european/etc settlers in greenland ) and a percentage of greenland's productive output for 100 or 200 years? Seems like something should have been worked out with the native greenlanders a long time.
"Neoliberal" refers to Clinton-style ("third way") liberal politicians. I don't know who you're using it to refer to.
> Having europe turn from a "vassal" to a competitor would represent a significant loss of power for the US.
You forgot to include why you think that's a bad thing.
> Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US.
But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress. Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
> You forgot to include why you think that's a bad thing.
What? I'm just pointing out why the US would be against a EU competitor? Perhaps you need to reread what I wrote and the comment I was responding to. I think "globalist neoliberal" triggered something that made you see things that aren't there.
> But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress.
All I said was that they are part of the US.
> Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
Sure. But they are still part of the US. I was responding to " Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland." Blacks and women couldn't vote in NY and the US for a long time. Doesn't mean NY wasn't a part of the US or the US existed.
I think "globalist neoliberal" really got you reading into things. I made specific replies to specific comments. Which you completely ignored.
> But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress. Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
It's a similar situation in Washington DC. DC residents were given a few electoral college votes, I believe that was put into effect only relatively recently in the 1960s. They have no vote in the US house and no senators.
We have seen over and over in history that an individual dictator fairly quickly diverges from rational paths.
In addition, Li Xinping has shown very little enlightenment toward those who would oppose him irrespective of their correctness. This is always the first step down a long dark path.
Wrong Chinese people are very happy. In some rankings they belong to the happiest people. Here they are medium range: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/09/10...
My prediction:
We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/09/12/our-energy-and-debt-pr...
PS: The US is also pretty good at making other countries unhappy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran to name a few :-)
"Can't complain!"
This is the mistake you're making regarding China.
Source: grew up there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_attempts_and_victims_of...
People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree. Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional. Balance that against the thought that the eastern system was unsustainable, and had the west not been able to step in when it did, the results would have been far worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine for an example of what happened in a centralized system that didn't have outside assistance when things collapsed.
Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.
Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.
It's a convenient narrative, but it isn't, IMO, a correct one. Yes, the Treuhand had to decide quite literally which businesses got to live, and which didn't. Never before had an entire country been converted from a planned economy to a market one. There was no road map to follow. Decades of land and property seizure by both the Nazis & the Soviets made untangling actual ownership rights a Sisyphean task.
But at the same time this transition was occuring, billions and billions of Marks/Euros were and are invested in bringing the East up to the same levels of development. What do you think would have happened with the same governmental collapse, if the Treuhandanstalt hadn't existed? Honest question.
"Great!"
Source: I live there!
This is the mistake you're making regarding stuff you have no idea of.
Source: I am there once a month.
I imagine that if English is not your first language, it would be easy to miss this, since the joke plays on multiple meanings for the phrase "can't complain".
Usually, in this context, "Can't complain" means "life is good".
However, in this joke, the secondary meaning of "Can't complain" indicates that "You can't complain about life in soviet Russia, because if you do complain, you get in big trouble".
Basically, this indicates that life in soviet Russia was NOT good.
One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing money. They are bouyed by the current, generationally low interest rates which are built upon politicized central banking policy. When interest rates rise, fracking grinds to a halt. When fracking stops, the price of oil shoots to 2008 or greater levels and the global economy grinds to a halt. The century scale economic depression that will result entirely invalidates each and every prediction made by the author of the article we're discussing.
Fracking also allows america to place economic pressure to some countries like Russian (by lowering the price of their primary export).
Given the above, it will be unlikely for interest rates to grow in the next decade - since doing so has no advantages (except inflation, which is kept under control by the dollar's reserve status), and has many dis-advantages (such as causing a shock to businesses borrowing, which can precipitate a depression).
Turns out, in a communist government you can cut through red tape incredibly easily to advance your goals for the party/country. This is common for communist govs, and not democracies. When you believe land ownership should be private, and everyone has a super strong opinion about things, it’s hard to advance infrastructure at a speed commensurate with societies needs.
Not an argument for communism, just an observation. Likely lacks some nuance, but just do a bit of research on China’s infra, and their heavy investment in that space.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-27/china-sen...
Keep up America!
I think it is very hard for us outside of Hong Kong to understand the problem. Speaking to people that live there, (with no reason to be beholden to the PRC), they think it is mainly disenfranchised youth causing problems and dressing up like ninjas (their words not mine) rather than the noble rebellion as portrayed by the media.
1 big data centre is cheaper
than 1000 little ones
everyone buys and sells through
Amazon because thats where you
find the most buyers and sellers
They will remain idle unltil untethered energy and bandwidth become free.
I won't let you use my phone's spare cycles and murder my battery while we're still using lipo cells that degrade after 2 years with regular use.
unless you tie it to an incentive, and thus you arrive at cryptocurrencies
Re: Amazon: Most of the other venues you mention are secondary markets for the exact same sellers. People have their own Shopify, Etsy, Ebay, etc., storefront but then also sell on Amazon because that's where so much of the market is. As far as I can tell it's an increasing trend in that direction.
That used to be popular (for instance, distributed.net) back when the processors used the same power whether they were idle or not. Nowadays, there is a huge difference in power usage and heat output between an idle or mostly idle processor, and a fully loaded one.
(My first desktop had a processor without a fan or even a heat spreader, and came with an operating system which had a busy loop as its idle loop.)
Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.
I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.
And that's effectively free because I already have it.
Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.
It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.
My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.
Peer-to-peer models last thrived when connectivity was predominantly symmetric (e.g., the early days of DSL) and faded quickly as asymmetric connectivity became mainstream. I think the decline of decentralization and the rise of asymmetric connectivity are intertwined; neither necessarily caused the other, but they are correlated. One could argue asymmetric connectivity became popular because users only wanted to consume rather than share/serve. But similarly, people stopped sharing and serving because their connectivity discouraged that use case.
Today, symmetric connectivity is returning, such as in the form of 1G/1G fiber connections to the home. Combine this with infinite static IP addresses, and ever rising edge compute capacity, and I think decentralization is inevitable. I won't predict the magnitude, but as a fan of decentralization, I personally hope it is at least significant.
Network effects of centralization explain why current big companies prefer to build centralized services -- but the next big idea never comes from existing big companies, anyway.
My 30,000' view of computing history is that big companies, as a rule, don't create big ideas that survive. They pick up small ideas that work and scale them up (Gall's Law). Git and HTTP and Python didn't come from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but those companies took them once they were already popular and made them scale -- in large part by making them work well in a centralized architecture.
The software that comes next won't win because FAANG like it better for building centralized architectures. It'll win because everybody and their dog will be using it at home. Then companies like FAANG will see that and pick it up and try to centralize it. Then the cycle will repeat.
We've already got a billion tiny data centers -- the powerful computers and smartphones in our houses and pockets. All we need is the right software, and the desire to not have every service delivered free-with-ads-over-the-web from big corporations.
Who authors and maintains this software? And what is their incentive?
With asymmetric up/download speeds.
It seems like a mix of wishful thinking and linear projection of a few trends this particular VC happen to like, but nothing bold or creative, nothing that could make me think and wonder.
Are most VCs living in their own world or something?
Regarding plan based diets, I agree but I think that eating meat will be seen as babaric. I believe that the way way we treat animals now will be seen similarly as we see slavery now.
Regarding, decentralized internet and crypto currencies. I don’t see why those would happen and believe will see more regulation not less.
Think you're totally wrong here. The only countries that will care about China's human rights record are the NATO countries. The other 6 billion people in the world live under governments that will be happy to work with a superpower willing to look the other way to their own transgressions.
China also has territorial conflicts with all of it’s neighbors in South China Sea.
Their neighbors will be forced to play nice with them or be blockaded. Which is exactly what the US did in the early 1900s with central / south American banana republics. There is a playbook for ascendant superpowers, and China is just playing their best hand. Anyone who isn't a superpower is just going to have to accept what China does.
I also believe that people will be more aware of these things in the future than in the past.
It will be quite satisfying to see the folks today who believe they hold the apex of morality and yet still eat meat, or tacitly support through participating in animal-product economic activity, realize ultimately that despite their self-assurance they are truly moral, good people their kids will see them as abject moral failures skin to those who sad idly by and participated in the economy underpinned by slave labor. The great irony is that just as they look down on our ancestors as being morally unenlightened, they will not even slightly avoid the same branding by the next generation — it seems unavoidable as long as our world exists due to the unjust treatment of others, including animals.
Why? I don't see what would be the benefit of that. Fiat currency already is digital. And - at least where I live - domestic transfers are instant.
Currently, all fiat currencies operate with a central ledger at whatever central bank is authorized to print or destroy units of the currency. For example, every US dollar is linked through a chain of deposits and liabilities back to an account at the Fed since any bank operating in the US is required to hold an account with the Fed. However, this gives the US the ability to control the transfer of USD to use in sanctions.
Suppose you were an Iranian company that wanted to buy goods from the EU, to be paid in USD. In normal times, an Iranian bank with an account at the Fed would ask the Fed to transfer USD from its account to that of the EU bank to complete the trade. However, since Iran is under sanctions, the Fed can freeze the assets and refuse to initiate the transfer or confirm that the Iranian bank has the required funds. Without assurance that you can actually pay for the goods in USD, the EU company decides not to sell any goods and you're stranded from the world market.
Trying to bypass this by buying the goods with Euros doesn't work either, since the Fed can also threaten the USD accounts of EU banks too. Suppose the US catches an EU bank helping an Iranian company trade with a EU company in Euros. The US could then order the Fed to freeze the accounts of the EU bank or extract a fine for violating sanctions. EU banks get spooked away from helping Iranian companies deal with international payments due to the risk of getting themselves locked out of the USD system. All this is thanks to the power the Fed has over the one central ledger of USD that they can modify and freeze at will.
But with a distributed ledger secured with cryptography, the Iranian bank wouldn't have to depend on the Fed to modify their central account book when performing money transfers. They could cryptographically prove that they had a certain amount of USD in their accounts and transfer it to the EU bank in a way that all bystanders can observe and confirm. You would have a currency system with unblockable and unsanctionable transfers, as if you had teleported containers of physically verifiable US dollar bills from Iran to the EU.
This would be the key draw for countries trying to make their fiat currencies crypto. They could then advertise it as a currency that is impossible for the host country to use for sanctions. This boosts the cryptocurrency's viability as a reserve currency, and once enough countries begin using it then the host country could print money to improve their country's consumption, living standards, and economic clout without worrying about inflating the currency away.
Yep, sounds about right.
I'll predict the opposite. Web stacks will get even more unnecessarily complex and buggy. Investment sizes, late-stage development cycles, and page size, will continue to grow toward infinity while startup success rates drop closer to zero. Page load times on the best available connection and hardware will remain constant as it always has.
People will not start trusting the Chinese government in the next 10 years. If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
That's the real use of Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin mining is such a big thing in China. It's "exporting". Made in China, sold outside China - that's exporting, and not only legal, but encouraged and subsidized. Buy a share in a Bitcoin mine in yuan, watch your EUR or USD balance build up in Hong Kong or Switzerland.
RE: Graphene though, there are so many military applications, that it’s hard to say what the lag will be to civilian technology. If history is any indication, and I hope it isn’t, there could be a decade or (much) more between first production applications and public knowledge that those applications even exist, let alone having access to products incorporating them.
The pendulum of history suggests this will occur (at some point), and I hope it happens sooner than later in many respects, but it is also seems like one in which we won't know the triggers/causes/sparks until after the fact, partially because it seems it will take complex combinations of causes?
Anyone seeing possible sparks which perhaps the rest of us aren't yet identifying?
These are outside of the blockchain world of compute/storage as a service attempts that got started suring the ico goldrush and seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
maybe that sounds like semantics, so to propose a rough taxonomy of different types of actors:
a. nation state level superpowers
b. nation state level challengers
c. large business / incumbents / leaders
d. small business / startups / challengers
e. individuals / consumers / social groups
f. possibly horizontal groups across combinations of the above
it would seem at least one of those groups would need to believe they can reap move-the-needle level benefits from decentralized internet in order to spark progress?
All of these things are failures?
What nonsense has infected the blockchain space that people believe these things??
It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute.
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-self-driving-car-computer-...
So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a technical reason you would need decentralization. I can see that happening for many use cases. I'm not sure if it will happen for the consumer web because centralization is more efficient and the current network effects are so ingrained. Similar to how Windows is still dominant on the desktop, but iOS/Android are perhaps more important platforms.
---
I think major changes in behavior are driven by new hardware -- phones in the 00's, PC's in the 80's, Internet in the 90's, etc.
People have been trying to push VR, but to me VIDEO is the real VR -- more stuff happens there and more people use it. I was chatting with a friend yesterday and observed that YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.
So if you need to process a lot of video locally for some reason, that could be a killer app for decentralization. Just like a self-driving car, although I'm bearish on self-driving impacting the average consumer in the next 10 years. I think it will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates.
A keen observation!
One example: I learned how to clean my toilet from this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd6pV5lyvG8&t=1s
The comments are hilarious... Tons of people having the same "AHA" moment. (Basically you paper mache your toilet with vinegar and wait a couple hours. Old mineral stains come off like butter!)
Compare a google search for "clean toilet" and it feels like a bunch of SEO-infested crap.
YouTube is more like the "old web" where you can get a real opinion on something.
-----
I have friends who cook and that's a whole other subculture of YouTube. I've been watching a good MMA show. And there are programming streams, and pretty much every programming conference has an archive, which is a rich archive of free information (e.g. PyCon, CppCon, etc.)
I don't know what's going on in Second Life now but to me it feels like it's probably not "real life". I guess people want "life" and not "second life", and video is becoming an increasingly large aspect of the former.
I would think of it as control plane vs. data plane. The data plane can be massively distributed in space, but the control plane can still be centralized.
And of course that's how Tesla works, and how software-defined networking works.
The "powers that be" just need to control software updates and the network's control plane (routing). They can remotely manage distributed resources.
So yeah unfortunately I'm not seeing a big motivator for decentralized networks (which can be very, very slow). You would have to have some need for a lot of local video processing but also a whole way to distribute code and software updates.
And right now that's more centralized than it's ever been. I'm not a fan of the "silent, frequent, and huge updates and pop up new TOS" model but that's the status quo.
It's still hard to share files that are 500MB in size, and I don't see why. I think it has to do with media companies like Google not wanting individuals to share files, unless it is through them. But the damn will break soon, much like Megaupload changed the scene in 2005.
There is active research into the theoretical and practical design of systems and protocols that will make this plausible. It has no precedent in literature and it is a very non-trivial problem but the sense is that a practical workable design is achievable in the not too distant future.
It is worth noting that effectively managing climate change requires implementing the same kind of data model with similar theoretical constraints. Building data models of physical reality at scale breaks just about every part of classic data infrastructure architecture.
https://futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2020-2029.htm
Most of the 'predictions' have links explaining why they think this may occur in that timeframe, e.g., this one about exascale computers: https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2021.htm#exascale
I don't think so. WWII was a war between two fronts. Climate change affects countries very differently. The ones not affected much will unlikely contribute. My guess is that everyone to his own in this one.
> experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.
I don't think it'll be more than experiments. Capital is very sensitive to being grabbed by government for the benefit of the "people". My guess is that we'll see countries that try to have their industries collapse; while other countries letting that capital flow to them.
> China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower
China is doomed to fail in the long run. Not sure if it's going to happen in the next decade or later, though. But it'd be all good and hopefully democracy is established.
> Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move.
This was already tried and failed. Crypto-currencies have no meaning without the decentralized factor. Governments will never be able to establish their crypto due to the fact that they want to control the underlying.
> Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies
Kinda related to the point above. Countries with low taxes are going to boom further as western countries are tightening their fiscal game.
> A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.
I, very, believe this one and hope it happens in the next decade.
China has had multiple generations of unrest. It isn’t just the young generation that is ready for change.
I wouldn’t say China itself is doomed but communism there might be.
It doesn't need an opposing mainland party to explain HK. There may be, but I see little evidence for it.
I guess this depends on SpaceX's success with the Starship - if a rocket that is made outside a cleanroom and with cheap rolled steel frame proves to be usable means that going to space becomes very very accessible.
Space based internet constellations have a huge resurgence right now, but that's unlikely what the author meant.
(Asteroid) Mining? Even if we already had the tech, such a mission would take decades. Who would accept the uncertainty risk of investing over such long time-spans? That is, if there is anything worthy enough to mine in space in the first place, will that still be the case many years later?
Tourism might be a thing, but enough to bootstrap an entire space economy?
Countries/politicians/billionaires wanting to project power or memorialize themselves still seems like the safest bet to me.
Data security ultimately depends on secure physical access to the hosting hardware. Not everything can or should be put in a public database, so you need physical security. Cloud providers provide physical security plus trustworthiness due to their reputations, as well as deep pockets to sue if something goes wrong.
Most industries end up with only a few competing firms. Why would cloud computing be different? I'm open to solutions on data security.
2. Encryption
I could see a solution where every user has their own key, served by a securely hosted (non-distributed) server, and decrypting the data client side, but that doesn't cover all cases where you might need to aggregate or share data across users.
I'm iffy on the cryptos but it's appearing less and less of a solution looking for a problem and more a solution for many problems dealing with decentralization.
For an interesting existing solution sans blockchain check out [gundb](https://gun.eco/).
I have an open source client that does client side encryption. I hope that once released people will use it, or ideas from it, to create their own clients.
In this decade? Not a chance. Maybe in 50 years this is more likely.
A decentralized internet
will emerge
led initially by decentralized
infrastructure services like
storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.
A bit like AirBnB, Uber etc. But probably he means that the rules of those new services will be enforced by protocols, rather then by companies. So I guess Bitcoin is the most prominent example of such a service that is already in existence.
World War III will be sold on supposed moral grounds as all wars are. China and other countries will say that they need to defeat an evil US that is immoral and forcing the world to use their baseless currency causing great suffering. The US will say that China is attempting to create a global dictatorship with total control and no freedom. Both sides will see moral justification to fight to the death.
As the likelihood of the war ramps up over the next few years, there will be a feverish push to create general purpose AI and improved robotic locomotion such as artificial muscle-based locomotion with high strength to weight ratios. Around the time that the first nuclear salvos arrive, perhaps around 2023-2025, these efforts will pay off with robust general AI and humanoid robots.
By 2030, the planet will be a nuclear wasteland, with several billion dead. There will be a new religion pushing to give the AGIs full autonomy and control. The Martian colony will have a few dozen people already and rapidly ramping up.
A growing group of nuclear survivors have adapted with advanced high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces connected to superintelligent AI systems that act as a supercortical layer.
Most of all Overpopulation.
People fear discussing it now because they only know of China's policy and eugenics. I predict that the successful, non-coercive policies of Thailand, Iran, Mexico, etc that increased peace, prosperity, and stability will become better known.
Those models will lead us to realize that we can peacefully and stably lower birth rate to increase peace and prosperity, easing all other environmental problems. We'll realize steady-state following de-growth works more successfully on a full finite planet than pushing economic and population growth forever.
Off the top of my head, his main examples were Thailand, Iran, and Mexico. Here's a piece on Thailand https://www.context.org/iclib/ic31/frazer. Wikipedia covers Iran between 1989 and 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran. Cultures including Japan and Italy saw dramatic decreases in birthrates without focused efforts.
Here are videos of him: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alan+weisman&oq.... I haven't watched them, but probably will give you a jump start on the book.
Well, let me think! I just ate a home cooked pizza. The total calories were 654, and 455 of those were from just the flour, a "plant based food"!
More generally, in the US, big time grocery store items are milk, butter, cream, eggs, beef, chickens, and pork.
For feeding the animals, we have grass, hay, wheat, corn, and soy beans. E.g., look at a rail yard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qv7y0W_mNM
and see the long train of grain cars!!! We're talking a LOT of grain.
For the retired dairy cattle, "think fast food" -- US hamburgers are not going away at all soon!
Point: No way, not a chance, not even a teeny, tiny chance, will that huge industry and supply chain, with huge fractions of the land in the US South and Midwest devoted to growing animal feed, be displaced or even affected by "laboratory" anything.
Sure, we grow some mushrooms in caves. And some greenhouses grow tomatoes and maybe oregano, bib lettuce, basil, rosemary, etc. But greenhouses and hydroponics both go way back with no chance of anything similar having a big, new impact now.
Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?
I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.
Best Buy’s pullback from it for their office staff is instructive.
However, I question that predictions /2 and /6 seem to be wildly far-fetched that it’s as if the author based his predictions from a damaged magic mirror.
/2) While the tech is there for automation, Several safety and regulatory requirements the AI technology is not transparent enough to completely replace workers. This will take more years to only end up being a complimentary tool for its users.
/6) doesn’t sound very realistic to achieve in this decade. The research is experimental or starting to emerge but not mature yet for be available to all yet and will not be in this decade. Probably the next or very late 2020s.
I’m surprised to see that mainstream AR not being mentioned nor the further regulation of tech being detailed more in this article.
Just look at how comical this stuff is:
> Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today.
In one decade? Dominating the whole world and meat becoming a delicacy. That's such a bad prediction it's borderline sad. Maybe over the course of 50-100 years. It would take a decade just to scratch the surface of that prediction. It'll take decades just to scale up the necessary food production changes and distribution required by that prediction. He entirely ignores the massive investment required, the slow moving nature of it, the entrenched gatekeepers that dictate food policies, and the very slow moving nature of changing global consumer taste & demand (more likely to occur via aging out and new young people adopting, rather than true mass adoption by existing people that have all been eating meat for the entire lives; that will take a long time).
> Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.
Things at that scale, dominated as they are in finance by giants with vested interests and tightly regulated and influenced directly by military muscle, do not change that much in the span of ten years or less. Another absurd, impossible prediction. This is Fred going overboard on a crypto binge.
He might as well have said in his list that we'll all be piloting flying cars in ten years. It's the exact same bullshit worthless futurism fantasy backed with the exact same supporting basis (vapor).
> China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower leveraging its technical prowess and ability to adapt quickly to changing priorities
In ten years the US will still have the only global projection military and will still have the world's largest economy. Another obvious error of projection by Fred and a bad one at that. If everything goes right for China, in 30 years they could theoretically occupy a dominant superpower position. That's best case scenario. However what is most likely is that China will split the world in half with the US and never achieve such an overwhelming position and that they'll suffer stagnation due to well understood problems they're already sinking under (demographics, debt, increasingly extreme authoritarianism).
Basically none of what he lists in item #1 will occur in the next decade. Most of it is so impossible to occur in the span of just ten years, that again, it's super far fetched. Someone should have screened all of this for him before he hit publish.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Bankruptcy;_stolen_bit...
GMO Frankenfood made in labs hasn't been proven safer than regular meat in peer reviewed studies yet.
Eating all plants like potatoes in The Martian have to take multi-vitamins as well. It is boring to eat the same thing each day.
McDonald's has farms so that it can sell a $1.48 McDouble cheaper than a $6 salad. If plants cost more money, why eat them when meat is cheaper? Ever tried to price plants in the veggie section? They cost too much, but you can buy a frozen pizza for $3 which is cheaper.
Before refrigeration, a considerable amount of meat on the market was spoiled, with a horrible taste as well as a horrible aftertaste. The price was much higher than today. You had to use a sauce to make it more palatable.
It would have made sense to go vegan back then, but no. People are more willing to eat spoiled, expensive meat with mold rather than going plant-based.
1. Energy will become very cheap (almost free), solar and wind will be about USD 5-7 per MW-h (or ~USD 13 per BOE)
2. The Chinese CCP will fail. - China will return to local strongmen who may claim to be the CCP. But are really Warlords similar to 1919 - 1940.
3. Major ecological failure. The shit will really hit the fan. Millions dead and many more millions trying to get to rich countries.
4. Economic growth stalls - all the neo-liberal bullshit dies. Growth hits hard ecological limits.
This is just the start, modern civilisation will be lucky to survive until 2040.
> Conversely the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view
I wonder what are some people's thoughts on this - specifically if they agree and what are some of the potential impacts to US citizens and abroad (influence, wealth, industry leadership, etc)?
OTOH I don't think serious global action will happen in this decade. I seriously hope I'm wrong on that one because we are already 40 years late and I fear we might have passed the point of no return.
Identifying the risky low lying areas is relatively easy. However, predicting how and where the climate will change for the better, is at best a crap shot.
We'll know things are getting serious when there's talk on Wall Street about moving out of lower Manhattan.
There’s about 50-60% of the US population, and 2/3 of the US economy, that are very much eager to do business with the rest of the world. They are concentrated in urban areas, and thus have issues in the political process, but it’s enough clout that I wouldn’t make hard predictions about US isolationism in the 2020s.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla/SpaceX towed a lithium filled asteroid to near Earth within the next decade. They are probably working on it right now.
Save this comment and come back in 2030
I feel like very little has changed in the last decade. Technologically, socially, politically, it feels like we’ve lived through a decade of very little noticeable change, especially compared to other periods such as 1990-2000 or 1980-1990.
I hope their fusion and quantum experiments are real, and not PR lies like the soviet union used to do in the 80s.
It’s obvious to me people are doing so only because they WANT all these predictions to come true not that they have any basis in reality. It’s bubble talk for bubble people, no offense.
His solution to NN (which we all died from, remember?) was “blockchain”.
Here he is last year heavily propped up for saying Trump wouldn’t be in office after Mueller probe... Remember the Mueller results? Anyone not involved in hyper partisan politics knew it was going to be a dud. https://avc.com/2019/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2019/
Just browsing his previous predictions just makes more curious how he gets spotlights here every year. 2018 he made a list “questions” answering only some himself, about 1/2 wrong. And 2017 is just... well... AI isn’t the new Mobile, Cyberwarfare isn’t the new Cold War: https://avc.com/2017/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2017/
This is a misunderstanding of how voting/promoting works. If someone is wrong you may want to promote them as much as someone who is right in the hopes of enlightening the masses.
Also, you may disagree with something and find it interesting still. In that case upvoting makes sense.
Upvoting != Agreeing. Unfortunately, when you do not have a button for agreeing or disagreeing, you are inclined to use the Vote button.
1. China overtakes the USA GDP by 2029
2. Trump wins reelection
3. The United States has a recession by 2021
4. Inflation becomes an issue in the United States because of high debt, increased military spending as a result of great power competition and huge pension debts/promises coming due with baby boomers retiring. The best investments (other then great startups of course) becomes Gold (because of the proclivity to favor spenders over savors.)
5. The United States will focus on big infrastructure spending.
6. Google develops a competitor to Huawei's Safe City project for the United States and its geopolitical allies, this will be a great benefit to our society
7. Humanity will reach mars
8. Humanity will turn the corner on Carbon pollution
9. San Francisco reaches a breaking point and elects moderates whose focus is building more housing.
10. The United States will join the TPP
11. Chinese culture and media breaks out and becomes popular in a similar way Hollywood and American culture is popular in other places
2. Trump wins by smaller margin (losing Michigan or Florida)
3. What will the recession be caused by?
4. Maybe younger voters vote against Social Security for this reason [insert doubt]
5. Unless Bernie is elected don't expect any infrastructure spending
6. Huh
7. Don't get your hopes up
8. Maybe
9. There's no breaking point. Their Hell has no bottom.
10. Both Bernie & Trump are against TPP. Would require moderate to get it.
11. Only Americans/Brits are good at spreading movie culture, that'll be true for a long time to come.
China won't become the dominate superpower this decade.
Plant based diets won't replace meat.
Youngsters won't replace oldsters in power (unless at that point they are the oldsters).
A decentralized internet won't be the norm.
There won't be a WWII level of effort against man made climate change and in fact after "nothing much happens" (again) the noise will die down.
Here's my prediction for the next decade: Some unexpected stuff happens but mostly incremental changes. I do agree with #10.
I don't how the first part of his prediction leads to the other. By the time Millennials/Gen Z take control they'll be just as old amd curmudgeonly as the Boomers. All in all the article seems pretty light on justification.
Why is the situation with Muslims concerning for China? For Muslims and for anyone who cares about human rights, sure, it's concerning, but it does not follow at all that this is bad for China. The US became the dominant power despite having slavery longer than any western nation, and then having Jim Crow laws for a full century afterwards, including during the post-WWII economic boom.
I would argue that, unfortunately, there is no evidence that treating your minorities well is necessary for economic success. In fact, it may be the opposite. Ancient Rome did quite well while having slavery, after all.
As for the surveillance state, here we don't really have a lot of historical precedent. Obviously it didn't work out too well for the Warsaw Pact nations, particularly East Germany, but what they're doing in China really isn't like that.
Putin is less likely to move on. There may be a new leadership in Iran but culturally it's unlikely to be more flexible, if anything it's going to be less flexible.
Europe already has it's new leaders. It probably won't be very different.
A politically resurgent youth vote will be coming into it's prime pissed off with current tax and social policy in housing and education. And of course climate.
The ww2 generation and it's successor will be dying out faster, but costing more in pension and health costs and contributing less in tax inputs.
Ubiquitous internet will be a given but more overtly a dual edged sword as tax and national borders continue to collide
No candidate for high office will have a blank sheet of high school pranks. Fifteen year old tweets will be held up to fresh air
Gen-X will continue to be forgotten, apparently.
1. Agree
2. Automation will be one of the anticlimaxes of the decade.
3. China will have a mixed decade, marred by competition from other countries for production, human rights scandals, a domestic financial crisis that will spread globally, and a complete slowdown in growth. But its government will survive.
4. Crypto currency will be no more relevant in 2029 than 2019. The dollar will continue to dominate beyond 2030, until at last in the 2030s the Euro is backed by a significant military force.
5. No decentralised internet will gain popularity.
6. Plant based diets will see a meteoric rise in the west, but will still be a minority by 2030.
7. Biggest story of space will be the failure of NASA to make much progress in landing humans on Mars. SpaceX will make the most progress along those lines, with a test landing of an unmanned craft, but safety concerns over manned flight will hold SpaceX back in serving NASA.
8. A surprising backlash against social media will see the end of Facebook (but Whatsapp will survive well, with Instagram in a long decline). Twitter will pivot successfully almost beyond recognition.
9. Baby boomers will no longer dominate the electorate, and a shift to the political left will take place across America and Europe. The UK will see the most left wing government since Atlee’s. The climate crisis will help make big government palatable again.
10. Progress on cancer will be piecemeal and slow. However, this disappointment will contrast with miraculous advances in treating and prevention of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Mine...
11. VR will replace games consoles. VR will have a huge impact on society, but it will be only the beginning - much like 90s Internet, it will grow in importance decade by decade, but the 2020s will be remembered as the one in which it “arrived”.
12. Apple will decline to a shadow of its former self.
13. To everyone’s surprise, smart watches will have a come back in the second half of the decade thanks to hardware improvements, and will become almost universal for younger demographics. They will become a significant item of self expression, and related “digital jewellery” will also take off.
14. Electric cars will arrive faster than anticipated, putting huge strain on electricity distribution.
15. In the US, the college bubble will burst. In the UK it will not, but student numbers will drop and many universities will be forced to merge and close humanities departments.
16. Post Brexit UK will suffer a economic stagnation similar to Japan’s post banking crisis. Scotland will vote to remain in the UK, but Ireland will be reunified. A great number of people will leave the UK to work in the USA.
17. Putin will die, and Russia will enter a period of crisis and civil disorder.
18. After Trump’s second term ends in economic disaster, popularism in the US will slowly retreat. The democrats will be in power for the remainder of the decade, particularly focused on climate change.
19. Amazon and Microsoft will emerge as the great winners of big tech over the decade, driven by cloud services and consumer appliances.
20. A new e reader device that actually works well will be launched, destroying the kindle’s grip on the market, and will be universally adopted for education and leisure. The maker will be a newcomer and will end the decade as one of the most exciting startups since Google.
1. While I do think climate change is something we need to mitigate now, political realities are very clear on this one -- people don't want to spend much money on mitigation. Furthermore, the dire consequences are still quite far away, doubtful 2020s are the years this will turn around.
2. I think for now automation will do what industrialization did before -- increase productivity which will lead to increase in consumption. I think it is only when we start approaching AGI when human labor will start becoming superfluous. Again, I don't think UBI is in the cards for mass adoption in the US or other major countries in the 20s (although I see it as inevitable on a longer time scale).
3. China IS a global super power, whether it will fully displace the US is again doubtful, they have the capacity to do it in the next 20-50 years, but probably not in the next 10. There is a lot of inertia against them basically everywhere (europe, east asia, india, etc).
4. There is literally no reason this would happen. Even private attempts on decentralized currencies (bitcoin/etc) did not produce assets that are used as money for regular transactions (not black market, not aimed at speculation). For countries it is even less attractive to start a crypto since if you have a stable fiat then why wouldn't you just... have the stable fiat? Countries LIKE having control over their currency.
5. Internet relies on hardware/infra that is currently privately owned by what are essentially local monopolies/duopolies. Unless laws that force infra sharing get passed (which in the US I just don't see happening), decentralized internet will absolutely not happen. Again, the 20s are now and we have no real movement in this direction.
6. Most people prefer meat. Currently population growth is such that meat production can easily keep up with demand. I agree that meat production is worse for the world (due to being resource inefficient) and I agree that it is more ethical to eat artificial meat due to decrease in suffering, but let's be real, most people will just eat the meat that is cheap and easily available. There is zero chance major countries manage to pass bills that would make meat expensive.
7. This one I almost agree with, I just don't think that there will be "a wave of hype" since without better propulsion/space elevators capital costs are obviously high and don't scale well (space isn't software).
8. I agree that governments will ratchet up surveillance, but I don't think consumers will be willing to put much money into privacy. I bet most people don't care (enough to spend money) about privacy, and the fraction who are OK with surveillance will only increase.
9. I mean, given that most baby boomers will be retired by 2030 I agree that they will play increasingly diminished role in the society, but I don't think it's because age/experience will not longer matter.
10. This is something I most agree with. I do hope that the 20s will be year genetics changes how we treat non-infectious diseases.
Looks like we're going back to the 00's
1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
2. we will have further centralization of the internet
3. Solar will only account for 10k Gw
4. Agree that nuclear will make a massive resurgence
5. Gas will still be the dominate power source for mobile transportation, but less so. This is because gas prices will fall.
6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
10. Meat will be nearly as prevalent today, but wild caught fish will be virtually no more
11. Self driving vehicles will operate in many of the non-heavily effected weather states. Laws will be passed to regulate and exclude some states after fatalities
12. Marijuana will be legal federally
13. Government will start accessing Alexa, Google, Siri recordings and public will be made aware
14. China will start using / building power projection in states it can. Specifically to protect food
The item on your list I have the biggest issue with is 10. We'll still be catching plenty of fish in the wild (but some places that fish are plentiful today won't be that way) in another 10 years.
So even if over fishing is not a threat any more, our ocean food source is still at huge risk.
>Saudi will have a violent revolution
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction. The ways in which modern states can maintain power and suppress their people is overwhelming. China can and has built perhaps the most oppressive totalitarian state ever to have existed. Saudi is diversifying its absurd wealth to resist downturns in oil, and the "first world" is still hapelly grovelling and kissing the rings of that disgusting despot, selling them weapons and propping them up diplomatically. All in all, I don't have my hopes up.
It's all rather depressing.
When people are fat and comfortable, they tend not to rock the boat too much for vague ideals.
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction.
The truly troublesome part is that predictions about social phenomenon can be self-fulfilling prophesy. If you basically want to see a bloody revolution instead of a better solution, that actively increases the odds of it happening.
The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
I doubt it. Saud family were interested in fighting the Ottomans, as were the British in WW1, and their interests aligned then. And during WW2, once it was found to provide access to oil, it only made sense for the west to make sure a stable regime was established. The US/Brits support the Sauds in whatever they want to do, and the Sauds provide oil and purchase weapons. Keeps the region nice and unstable for future weapons orders and to prevent a situation like Norway where the oil wealth is distributed to everyone and no longer able to be controlled by a handful of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud#Origins_and_earl...
For further proof, the more modern socially liberal Iran was destabilized in favor of a fundamentalist leader by the US for their refusal to play ball:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini#Khomeini's_c...
It's just business, it's easier to deal with a small country's king than a democracy.
This is a good book about the circumstances that result in the modern situation:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64594.A_History_of_the_M...
Isn't the wealth distributed to the saudis to keep them happy and inline?
And if the Saudi king decides to stop the payments or kill you for speaking out against them (see Kashoggi assassination), what good is a few thousand in oil money while the royalty splits the billions with the US.
Their highly leveraged economy will not survive at "6%" growth over the next decade. It is not clear that they will escape the Middle Income Trap [1]. They are struggling with zombie companies and transitioning from manufacturing to a services-based economy. Their manufacturing is also being slowly eaten away by countries like Vietnam.
As the PRC maintains its legitimacy through the economic growth that has happened under its existence, a recession could trigger political upheaval or force the CCP to distract the populace, e.g. they might try to annex the ROC (Taiwan and its other holdings) by force. A military conflict in which a large number of one child families lose their sole child would have disastrous ramifications as far as government stability, too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
(No opinion on Saudi as I only follow the economy/demographics of the PRC and Eurozone countries)
A key difference with middle income countries that only earn export income as manufacturing base is that there are quite a few Chinese companies that possess its own technology and brands. DJI, Oppo, Xiaomi are some examples. Many of these brands are not well known in the US but have become increasingly competitive with global brands, at least in some respect, in Asia and perhaps elsewhere.
It might make sense to compare them to Korean brands a while back, with an additional advantage of massive domestic market.
Their forward-looking focus on major industries of tomorrow like AI, EV, and biotech does not hurt either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868570
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692002
Since there are many areas in China that could be further developed, the service sector will also likely grow.
My point is that the US ought not get complacent and believe in wishful thinking that competition from China will simply go away in time.
>6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
why do people make these kinds of predictions. they're so uninformed it's beyond the pale.
china and SA are two of the most authoritarian and simultaneously well-funded (effective and efficient) governments on the planets -- we're not talking libya here (let alone syria, venezuela which still stand in their pre-upheavel form). how do you practically imagine either of these things happening? like a superhero comes down and leads the charge?
do you know what it actually takes to organize on such a massive scale as to bring down a state? here in america we can't get enough grass-roots organization for free health-care and tertiary education. and you think somewhere in china is a political mind so brilliant that they'll be able to organize some portion of 3x the population to violent revolution (since they don't have elections)?
SA has the 12th highest purchasing power parity in the world. what parallels do you see exactly with the soviet union?
Monumental changes can happen, and shockingly quickly.
Edit: or maybe I'm wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
Many of those Soviet Republics were very reluctant participants, forcibly occupied with underlying resentment going back centuries in a couple of cases, to WW2 in others.
There seem very few parallels with Saudi or China.
When has social change ever not been unique?
It's always easier to explain collapse with hindsight. :)
The Saudis are much more comfortable in their position. MBS can and will dangle individual rights for women, one by one, like red meat for the laity. He will garner applause throughout the next two decades for his progressive attitude towards women, even as he is a bloodthirsty despot.
Probably because there is no such thing. The people who vote against them realize that you’re still paying for them via taxes and that you’ll be destroying the entire market.
Destroying the market with the best healthcare research and the market with much of the best academic research shouldn’t be taken lightly.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/412545-70-...
and yet we can't get organized enough to pass it.
Someone who “somewhat” supports Medicare for all doesn’t really like the actual proposed implementation. With less than a majority strongly supporting it, are you really surprised?
Hope you're right about the CA housing market coming down, but I think more likely is just that Gavin Newsom and ilk get booted out for their failures to reign in PG&E and housing prices aren't particularly effected one way or the other.
Wildfires are generally not in the densely populated areas, so I don't think they'll move the needle much.
> We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate.
What happens this decade is the same as the last decade.
The difference is small for any measure. Seas rise at about the same rate, climate changes at the same rate. wtf? If anything technology is improving and long term implementations are starting to be implemented to reduce the issues we saw from the last decade.
> Plant based diets will dominate the world
Meat will rise and continue to rise. The world is getting richer, this stats are undeniable. It's like they look at the fad at McDonalds down the road and extrapolate across the world. Once lab based meat becomes normal (perhaps this decade) it will increase even faster.
https://torinrittenberg.com/writing/looking-back-and-ahead-o...
The “looming climate crisis“ and most of today’s popular academia will be a mainstream joke by 2030.
And as typical in such pieces, GenX gets forgotten...
Did I stop aging at some point and not notice?
What you need to realize is that Gen X is stuck in a crack in time that halts the aging process for them. All of them. A side effect of this is that while they can interact with the world and almost be perceived, they actually have been forgotten by the rest of the world.
On occasion a regular aging schmuck will notice a wild Gen Xer and be able to interact with them whilst the Xer is within their field of perception, however these interactions are invariably fleeting and almost immediately forgotten for it leaves the regular person’s body and mind in a strangely exhausted state. Interacting with a forgotten person stresses the body, and so while someone may not exactly know why they wish to flee from this person that seems like another person, at some point the brain sends the neurological equivalent of a kill -9 to end the conversation. It is estimated that about 200,000 Gen Xers are killed a year in this way, but nobody has been convicted since 1. nobody has been able to find the bodies again and 2. Even if they were, it would probably be ruled as self-defense and 3. All memory of the events that transpired invariably slips away from the living.
The United States - and really the world as a whole - has enjoyed its most prosperous time in all of human history during Gen-X's window of contribution.
Long to short, the jury is still out on the actual success of Gen-X.
The climate has changed and will change. Some of that change (although I think its a small part) will be influenced by human activity. The Earth will adjust. Humanity will adjust. And humanity will continue to flourish.
p.s. Humanity will continue to flourish? Your prediction is based on what, past performance? When Mother Nature's bounty was harvested mindlesssly and shameleessly? That's going to continue forever? Infinitely? Can you share some links supporting such projections?
That said, if anything, a cursory glance at my Facebook feed reveals the boomers yelling the loudest.
Also, yelling the loudest is problem the predates human history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Phytoplankton populations will crash out in the next 10 years and the marine food chain will collapse.
Extreme wether patterns are going to completely disrupt food production, which will cause mass starvation and a global immigration/refugee crisis.
In the U.S., the terrified of everything elderly, and right wing will go for less freedom and more authoritative government control. They will also secede more control to corporations as a way of avoiding “big government”, effectively handing over power special interests and the ultra wealthy.
Healthcare will however become nationalized because the system as it stands is out of control and therE is no way to reign it in, so costs will keep spiraling up until the system breaks.
Marijuana will get legalized in most states, and the percentage of THC will start to get capped.
Designer CRIsPR “therapies” will become popular.
The U.S. college system have a major event, costs are spiraling out of control, and the colleges have no way to stop the cost growth, students are becoming more accustomed to online classes, in the next 10 years there will be a mass realignment of the U.S. college system, just like banking, healthcare. A lot of closures, mergers and partnerships. A commoditization of higher education, which will be good for some majors, like STEM, and really bad for majors that are more “subjective”. I also think we’ll see incorporation of what is seen as traditional “trade school” skills. Learning is learning, and is the schools can make it profitable, “why not?”.
Furthermore, you don't believe they are going to happen. If you did believe this, it would be absurd to talk about a "major event" regarding the US college system - "mergers and partnerships", "commoditization", etc. Really? Really?? What happened to the major event of the students starving to death?
What happened is that you don't actually believe the stuff you say about climate change. You just think it's cool and sophisticated to say that you know that change will happen 3-4x faster than any scientifically-based model says. Because whatever...
Asia (China) would not have an incentive politically to run with it, as it would remove traceability and control of money flow. Not to mention online currencies pitfalls.
This will be the main catalyst for adopting greener infrastructure. Fear of permanent climate change will not be the catalyst, as that is a long term repercussion of not solving the pollution problem, and humans have never been good about preparing for things in advance.
There's a reason why people in rural areas are less aware of climate change due to human pollution. The effects of pollution are much less apparent in rural areas due to the far lower human density. Rural areas are "clean" to the human eye, so we have large swaths of the population that simply don't care about long term effects of pollution, because to them, even the short-term effects are almost indiscernible.
People are moving to cities at a faster rate despite the proliferation of the internet. As such, we'll eventually reach a critical mass of the population that eventually leads us to adopting greener policies. All because people are moving into cities from rural areas. I get that it sounds counterintuitive.
1) Maybe. Or maybe we fuck it up and we are the penultimate generation of pre-Anthropocene human life. Hard to say for sure. So far, the rich and powerful seem to have little trouble selling their property.
2) Automation will not lead to some sort of wakefulness and critique of capitalism, but just more technocracy. The future is Google being too busy to offer you customer service.
3) China will collapse after their attempts to monopolize the South China Sea fall through.
4) Cryptocurrencies as a technology will collapse after several showstopping protocol-level issues are found. Most notably, a team will crack Satoshi's key and steal their BTC hoard, crashing almost all cryptocurrency prices, while as a runner-up effort, another team will successfully demonstrate forgery of high-difficulty blocks with ironic complexity analysis.
5) The various decentralized mesh networks around the globe will each grow to blanket their metropoloi, and some areas will see their mesh networks merge to create massive clouds of ambient connectivity. Disks will still be expensive, though. In fact, I'll predict another disk supply crash due to a natural disaster, akin to the tsunami from last decade.
6) Most folks around the world do not eat that much meat, and no numbers are listed, so I'll instead say that people will continue to not eat much meat. Perhaps meat consumption in USA, China, etc. will diminish, but probably not.
7) India and China step up their national space programs over the next decade, while ESA and NASA continue operating. Elon Musk is still around because of sheer willpower, but nobody else is really privatizing.
8) Already happened. It will continue to happen. The author's really showing off their bubble with this one.
9) Yes, many Boomers are near the end of their mortal coils. Don't be so morbid about it. I'm not sure if this prediction's at all interesting, since any actuary could make the same prediction without a single cup of coffee.
10) Gene therapy will still be sputtering and straining at the end of the next decade. CRISPR with Cas9 will have been long obsoleted, and nothing will have replaced it. There may be a field of genetic programming, though, where people specialize in writing code using DNA; there will certainly be a field of epigenetics which is distinct from traditional genetics.
Almost every study about responsible plant based diets shows it has healthier than average outcomes. I say "almost" just as a hedge, I don't know of any.
By all means, eat whatever diet you want and don't feel bad about it, but do it for factual reasons and don't invent facts to justify your preferences.
For most people plant-based diet is probably completely safe and when debating this issue, the bottom argument of opposition to plant-based diets usually boils down to one thing: the god-given right or even necessity for man to eat other animals (be it because of it being natural to eat other beings in nature, because "plants have feelings too", or because of traditions or humans dying if they don't eat meat). This rests on ignorance of science, self-centered attitude and violence. Industrial-scale animal production for food is an abhorrent machine by any humane moral standards and most people use these counter-arguments because they like how meat or cheese tastes and they want to close their eyes.
Hunting or fishing or growing your own meat is much less evil than the animals-for-food industry but the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption. Also it has to be understood that in developing countries masses of people cannot afford to be fancy about what to eat and what not. In developed countries however... I think we should not consider ourselves "developed" if we kill 10x our own human populations amounts of animals each year for food based mostly on the fact that we are used to it and that meat tastes good. As more and more people realize this, the demand for plant-based diets goes up.
There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.
Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and cattle do almost as well.
Other food animals are happy to eat disgusting waste. Pigs, chickens, and catfish are especially willing.
There is also a whole lot of cashew attached to that tree, and the same tree produces more, year after year.
In fact, the creation of meat is a wasteful process, requiring up to 25kg of grain and 15,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of steak. [1]
1: http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report-48-WaterFoo...
And how do you reconcile the fact that animal agriculture is a large contributor to ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the result of a 5 year Oxford Uni study that recommends adopting a more plant-based diet to reduce your personal carbon footprint[0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331544/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26493452/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/90/4/943/4597049
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15072869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30061399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/
I'm not a huge fan of nutrition, so that's why I take too long post these, anyway don't believe me or in any article, test on yourself and tell me.
Plant-based diet might be good for environment, but for sure are not good for your health.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I'm not sure if you are being serious. Approximately 3% of the US population claim to be 100% plant-based, and you are saying that this 3% is responsible for most part of diseases?
Do you have any studies that back up your claim that humans need meat to live a healthy life?
Several governmental bodies worldwide state[1] that one can live healthy using a plant based diet and The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] even recommend a plant based diet for good health and disease prevention.
Did you know B12 is produced by bacteria and that some meat eaters are low in B12 and need to supplement. Animals in factory farms are being fed B12 supplements[2].
You might want to research this further so you're better informed next time you state information as fact. Or watch this documentary - https://gamechangersmovie.com/- it's on Netflix.
[0] https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-vegan-diet/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK396513/
[2] https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/carnivores-need-vitamin-b1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331544/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26493452/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/90/4/943/4597049
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15072869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30061399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/
I'm not a huge fan of nutrition, so that's why I take too long post these, anyway don't believe me or in any article, test on yourself and tell me.
Plant-based diet might be good for environment, but for sure are not good for your health.
I would recommend to read these articles properly next time and not make generalised statements like you've done.
You can live a healthy live without meat or dairy products.
We can't feed the whole world using a meat heavy diet as it's just too resource intensive and destructive to the environment. A shift to a more plant based diet is inevitable - that's why I'm thankful to people like Ethan Brown and his team working on meat alternatives that are as good or better than animal meat - to make this transition easier for people who just can't give up animal meat.
The article even states that a vegan or vegetarian diet is fine for kids[0]. So again please read articles properly next time and don't make generalised statements based one some headlines you read.
[0] "Babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop from a well-planned varied and balanced diet."