[HN Gopher] What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922) ___________________________________________________________________ What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922) Author : yamrzou Score : 656 points Date : 2022-01-06 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.loc.gov) (TXT) w3m dump (www.loc.gov) | tdeck wrote: | I vividly remember reading this book as a 90s kid with | predictions about what the home would look like in 2020: | | https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/post/143836250779/v... | henvic wrote: | oh man, had he predicted that a lot of people would be going nuts | on digital stamps that might be copied for free, that'd be | hilarious... | haunter wrote: | >Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will | survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of | which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. | | This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic | foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and | such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically | never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is | just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like | these. >It is conceivable, though not certain, | that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four | pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned | beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch | will roll by their side. | | Well Soylent do exist so that's not far fetched either. | ceejayoz wrote: | The "lunch will be a pill" stuff is always funny to me. There's | a major volume issue unless you're gonna have me eat chunks of | uranium or neutron star or something. | datavirtue wrote: | I thought it was goofy until I remembered that some people | eat pills for lunch. | awhitby wrote: | This was my initial reaction too: it doesn't seem to pass | basic conservation of mass. | | But actually how much mass must you _necessarily_ lose to | stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we | allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's | harder to rule out the pill diet. | | Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 | kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless | we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a | minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 | meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of | diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 | cm3 or 2x2x2cm. | | Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible | though. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | There's Soylent and similar meal replacements, but that's a | diet shake for people who try to min-max their life for some | reason. | galangalalgol wrote: | I was excited about the kickstarter because while a | recovering alcoholic can completely stop using alcohol, a | food addict always has to eat a little. Something bland, | and quick I didn't think about was a plus. But afyer the | Kickstarter they replaced the fish oil with polyunsaturated | vegetable oil in powder form and dropped the rice protein | content for more carbs. My triglycerides shot through the | roof after the first few months of that recipe. | 2snakes wrote: | Just replacing one meal like breakfast with Soylent is | probably preferred over replacing 3-4. | krupan wrote: | You could try keto chow. They started with the Soylent | recipe and made it carb free (if you don't count fiber as | carbs). | | https://www.ketochow.xyz/ | galangalalgol wrote: | I'm not against carbs, I just like macro ratios more like | the earlier versions. Lots of carbs and polyunsaturated | oils are in the literature as triglyceride boosters. If | they offered a version with the fish oil back in and the | old protein ratios I'd be interested, especially if the | replaced the rice protein with the collagen or fish meal | from the bait fish the oil came from. At least as | sustainable as giant fields of rice and safflower and | probably lower in heavy metals too. Rice sucks up the | cadmium. | krupan wrote: | There are several other Soylent mods out there. Super | Body Fuel, Huel, and Tsogo are a few others I tried. Not | a drink, but Meal Squares and Greenbelly Meals are a | similar idea too. No idea if any of them meet your needs. | I think there was a website that had a huge list of meal | replacements. | | (Edit typo fix) | krono wrote: | Thinking outside the box, that pill could be part of a more | involved system where it triggers the release of nutrition | that was consumed earlier. | | It doesn't have to be a completely self-contained solution. | scrollaway wrote: | I love where your head's at. Project: Chipmunk. Stuff those | cheeks :) | mc32 wrote: | If NASA[1] could have this, they would do this. They'd prefer | it if they could give their *nauts pill-like nutrition | delivery systems. | | [1] Also armed forced with deployed troops would love this | too as it makes food logistics much easier. | ceejayoz wrote: | The closest we can get volume-wise is a cup of olive oil | for about 2k calories. Stuffing any more calories into the | same volume would require using materials we can't | currently digest. | | (NASA does not like the side-effects of an all-oil diet on | space toilets, I suspect.) | mstade wrote: | > This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic | foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products | and such. I know a lot of young professional people who | technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they | have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a | lot people like these. | | Anecdata - I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, | Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order | in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I | cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a | friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My | kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or | space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do | shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. | Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but | that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to | which I shop for groceries. | | But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no | grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a | combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and | anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the | fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother | is usually there too so I have someone to cook for. | | I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't | even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping | onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for | myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That | way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad | because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, | everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will | go bad before I'm able to eat it all. | | It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It | was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at | home even once during those years. | davemp wrote: | I live in a place were I could easily order / go out for | every meal as well. If I cook ~2-3 times a week for myself | and box up the leftovers, I get high quality meals for | $2-5/meal vs $10-30/meal. This can save ~$8k per person per | year just cooking 10 meals a week. | | This may not be worth it for some, but I've found the time | savings of ordering in/carryout is marginal or actually worse | than cooking and reheating leftovers. Waste and grocery trips | generally sort themselves out in a couple weeks as you figure | out a schedule. This obviously scales with number of people | so for a family of 2-4 you'd save $16-32k/yr for little extra | effort. | | These sort of home economics seem to have really fallen out | of favor in my sphere, even in 2+ person households where | $40k+ in maintenance/service/food costs can be saved (factor | in childcare/education and I image the number can get to | $100k+). I don't understand why people leave so much money on | the table. There aren't many ways you can make $16k/year for | a <5hr/week moonlighting position. | | --- | | > That way I don't have to throw out groceries that | inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to | shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. | Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it | all. | | You have to cook larger batches and eat the leftovers. I've | had bad luck with bread too tbh. I might just start making my | own smaller loafs, because the quality is also just bad. | | EDIT: it's also worth pointing out that savings values are | post tax | danans wrote: | > My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling | or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when | I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at | home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make | sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and | it's the extent to which I shop for groceries. > But when I | go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, | I cook every single day. | | The incentive to cook yourself instead of ordering food is | multi-factorial, but a significant part is financial. People | who only cook "touristically" like you describe are people | for whom daily food expenses are a rounding error, whether | ordered or cooked by themselves. This could include single | well compensated people or very wealthy families. This is | further amplified by the fact that food consumes a smaller | portion of household income than it has historically. | | In contrast, when working and middle class families decide | that they need to save more, the first place they usually | economize is in their restaurant expenditures. | Voloskaya wrote: | > Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? | | Because | | > I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it | | ? | | Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can | usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you | typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a | different high end restaurant every single day. | mywittyname wrote: | I'm a reasonably good cook and this isn't terribly true for | me. There are entire classes of foods I can't do as well as | restaurants can. Be that because of a lack of equipment, or | a lack of ingredients. I.e, I can make great pizza, but it | doesnt' compare to the stuff I can get from the wood fired | pizza place down the street. Same goes for India, Thai, | Chinese, wings, etc, etc. | spurgu wrote: | If you extend this into making/mending your own clothing, | doing your own plumbing, electricity etc., suddenly all | your time goes to these "maintenance" tasks. | | Sure if you're growing food as well on the side so that you | can sustain yourself completely, it could be a happy way of | living life. But if you have to work 8 hours per day to | make a living, the spare time is valuable and subject to | prioritization. Some people do _some_ of these things on | the side, as a pleasant hobby, but practically no "modern | person" does all of them. | mstade wrote: | You're right, I wasn't very clear - my apologies. What I | meant to say was I really enjoy cooking for others, but | cooking for myself isn't at all the same. | galangalalgol wrote: | I enjoy cooking, but I enjoy other things more, and time is | not infinite. I notice that when my wife and I go on | vacation we cook much more and try out new recipes because | at the airbnb there are fewer competing tasks or | activities. And while I can cook and bake decently, there | are some dishes I don't always want to put the time in for, | or I haven't quite gotten right yet, or require fresh | ingredients that I can't buy within a 30min drive. But the | thai restaurant a few blocks away will have fresh keffir | lime leaves and lemongrass brought in in bulk every day. | Tyr42 wrote: | Yeah, I cooked less when I didn't have flatmates to share | with, even though I do like cooking. Cooking for yourself | does feel like a chore. | distances wrote: | I feel tossing together some basic meal is so simple I can't | bother to go pick anything from outside even though I live in | the middle of great restaurant concentration. A bit of frozen | veggies heated on pan, with pasta or couscous on the side. | Takes literally ten minutes and costs less than one euro. | | Or a large casserole that takes an hour to cook but gives | eight portions. Quick heat-up for lunch during the week saves | time too, and you stay in control of the salt intake unlike | with ready meals. So cheaper, healthier, faster. Downside is | that those meals are pretty basic and repetitive, but then | again eating out feels a bit more special if you don't do it | every day. | | I do cook "real" recipes too with more steps and more flavor, | but only with my partner as I don't care to do it just for | myself for weekday meals. | Server6 wrote: | I did this for a decade and gained 60lb. I've since lost it, | mainly from cooking at home. | frockington1 wrote: | Reduced sodium probably lowered your blood pressure as well | ipiz0618 wrote: | I guess it depends on the location and wealth. Eating healthy | is wayyyy more expensive than cooking healthy in some cities, | even when you can buy a meal virtually everywhere. | Karawebnetwork wrote: | It's important to remember that 77 percent of U.S. adults take | dietary supplements. We all eat "corned beef hash and pumpkin | pie" yet the majority of people already use supplements as pill | as needed. Living in the north, everyone I know uses Vitamin D | pills. This is a must to survive the winter and I can't imagine | how it would be if that wasn't as available. | [deleted] | smcl wrote: | Interesting, I didn't imagine there would be such a | noticeable effect. Can I ask what sort of difference do you | see if you don't take it? | Karawebnetwork wrote: | I go to work while the sun has yet to rise and when I come | back home the sun is already away (at the peak of the | winter, the sun is gone around 4pm). If I do go out for a | walk, it's behind a heavy coat, scarf and hat. Often with | sunglasses to protect against snow blindness and the wind. | | This means that for about half of the year, my body does | not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D | production so sitting by a window during the day will not | help. | | Between 70% and 97% of Canadians demonstrate vitamin D | insufficiency. It's also important to highlight that people | with darker skin need even more sun exposure to produce | vitamin D as skin pigmentation negatively influences | vitamin D synthesis. | | Contrary to popular belief, vitamin D is a hormone. It | impacts calcium absorption, which is the most known side | effect. But it's way more than that. Many of the body's | process simply cannot happen properly without vitamin D and | the only way to get it naturally is from the sun. | | One relevant symptoms these days is a weakening of the | immune system. Many studies already show that vitamin D | deficiency is one of the main factor behind the severity of | covid infections. | | Other symptoms are bone density loss, muscle pains, cancer | risks, heart disease, nerve issues, blood pressure. | | Another very important issue related to vitamin D is | Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is similar (but | different) to clinical depression. | | --- | | Edit: | | I was wondering when Vitamin D supplements and enriched | milk came around, since the current conversation in the | context of this 1992 event. | | There's a nice goldmine of information here: | https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_vitamin_D | | "1930 - Drug launch: Vitamin D prodrug dihydrotachysterol | is developed as a method of stabilizing the triene | structure of one of the photoisomers of vitamin D. This | represents the oldest vitamin D analog." | | "1952 - Product launch: Synthetic vitamin D2 and D3 | compounds start being produced." | smcl wrote: | Yep it's the same for me - dark when I go to work and | after I finish. But I'm not taking any supplements at all | so I'm just wondering if you personally notice a | difference between when you do and don't take it. | Karawebnetwork wrote: | Yes, I am on prescribed Vitamin D due to low results from | a blood test. The difference being the dose. I do not see | the sun at all for all winter. Difference is night & day | (pun intended). | teatree wrote: | As a person who has been exclusively on something similar to | soylent for entire 2021, it is certainly possible today albeit | not via 4 pills. | alex_duf wrote: | Out of complete curiosity: any particular reason to avoid | traditional food? | beeboop wrote: | It is tremendously difficult to eat a balanced, healthy | diet for people who lack the motivation or desire to cook | and eat subjectively boring foods. I know this will | probably strike a nerve in some people that perfectly enjoy | salads, chicken, and brown rice. But not every feels the | same about those foods. | seafoam wrote: | Ok I will bite, what are you on ? | aembleton wrote: | Probably Huel | bagacrap wrote: | the marketing team | Ancapistani wrote: | I know that "funny quips" are generally discouraged on | HN, but this is quality content that made me chuckle. | | Thanks :) | KineticLensman wrote: | > I know a lot of young professional people who technically | never cook. | | I think there is a distinction here between people who buy | meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When | my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there | are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece | and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits | and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be | microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They | generate a lot more plastic waste, as well. | wuliwong wrote: | I think that a powdered shake is pretty similar to the pill | idea. Protein or meal replacement shakes are widespread in use | in 2022. | pessimizer wrote: | > This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic | foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products | and such. I know a lot of young professional people who | technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they | have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a | lot people like these. | | Isn't that just having servants? | paxys wrote: | The idea of communal kitchens is nothing new. Young unmarried | professionals weren't cooking their own meals a hundred years | ago either. In urban areas you'd have landladies providing | supper, food carts, delivery boys, even subscription meal | plans. So not much has changed in that regard. | westcort wrote: | Another fragment from 1922 (found with | https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html): | | A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW Mary A. Ford | | O mighty human brotherhood! why fiercely war and strive, | | While God's great world has ample space for everything alive? | | Broad fields uncultured and unclaimed, are waiting for the plow | | Of progress that shall make them bloom, a hundred years from now. | | Why should we try so earnestly in life's short, narrow span, | | On golden stairs to climb so high above our brother man? | | Why blindly at an earthly shrine in slavish homage bow? | | Our gold will rust, ourselves be dust, a hundred years from now. | | Why prize so much the world's applause? Why dread so much its | blame? | | A fleeting echo is its voice of censure or of fame; | | The praise that thrills the heart, the scorn that dyes with shame | the brow, | | Will be a long-forgotten dream, a hundred years from now. | | O patient hearts, that meekly bear your weary load of wrong! | | O earnest hearts, that bravely dare, and, striving, grow more | strong! | | Press on till perfect peace is won; you'll never dream of how | | You struggled o'er life's thorny road, a hundred years from now. | | Grand, lofty souls, who live and toil that freedom, right, and | truth | | Alone may rule the universe, for you is endless youth! | | When 'mid the blest with God you rest, the grateful land shall | bow | | Above your clay in reverent love, a hundred years from now. | | Source: | https://www.locserendipity.com/full/platformpiece00hawn_djvu... | (written in 1922) | axegon_ wrote: | > It does not follow that, scientifically, the year 2022 should | fail to be amazing. | | Well... About that... | jdlyga wrote: | It's always interesting to read these. Everyone assumes that | technological progress will continue along the exact same lines | as before. And nobody really anticipates the social progress and | changes that truly set us apart from 1922. If we assume 2122 will | just be the same world with better electronics, that probably | wouldn't be very accurate. | neycoda wrote: | They didn't predict that I wouldn't be able read their article on | my phone. | aronpye wrote: | I wish the quality of prose as well as underlying journalism of | today's mainstream media and newspapers matched those of | yesteryear. When reading the posted article, the decline in | quality is shown to be immense. | virgilp wrote: | Average quality, yes. | | Total, and even max quality? Not so clear. | | In number of articles/ books that are above a given quality | bar? I wouldn't bet on 1922. | standardUser wrote: | I have always had a strong almost visceral dislike of people | attempting to predict the future with even a hint of confidence, | so I really appreciate this author starting off by saying "don't | worry guys, this is just for fun". | titzer wrote: | > The people of 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined | against the sky... | | Haha, so wrong. _All_ I see is power lines everywhere, and I can | 't unsee them. SO ugly. | iandanforth wrote: | Total tangent, but I too _hate_ wires and was pleasantly | surprised how easy https://cleanup.pictures/ makes it to remove | them from any and all photos. I'm not affiliated in any way and | sorry for the random. :) | kolinko wrote: | Are you from US? In Europe you see wires only outside of big | cities. | | I was surprised on my recent road trip across US that you've | got wires in urban/suburban neighborhoods - even the richer | ones like Palo Alto. | gumby wrote: | Pretty common in Japan too, despite all the money spent on | infrastructure. | godot wrote: | From what I've observed, wires outside almost entirely depend | on how new the city is. Old cities have wires outside, new | cities don't, that's really it; nothing to do with how rich | they are. Palo Alto is an old city. I live in a suburb in | Greater Sacramento that's a newer city and it's most | certainly not as wealthy as Palo Alto -- not even as wealthy | as some of the other towns in Sac -- we got no wires outside. | kseistrup wrote: | You always know when you see an American film because of all | the powerlines, and I always wonder why they are not put | underground. | beeboop wrote: | It's expensive, no one wants to pay for it, and our general | political leadership is inept at best and corrupt at worst | and is incapable of managing reasonable infrastructure | projects. | throwawaygh wrote: | Serious question: what are the benefits of burying cables? | Purely aesthetic? Losing power less than once a year due to | a downed line really just isn't a big enough deal to | justify the expenditure. Even low-prob/high-risk event | justifications aren't particularly compelling (there are | much more important ways to harden the grid). If this went | up for a vote in my muni, I'd probably be a "no". So many | better ways to spend the money, even if we scope to just | electricity transmission. | | My read on this has always been that the US has above- | ground cables mostly because it wasn't bombed to hell at | any point after the discovery that it's nice to bury power | cables. | titzer wrote: | Personally I find it so ugly that it ruins the look of | everything. It makes me think that nobody gives a damn, | and it makes me also not give a damn. Like if all the | houses on my house had broken windows, I'd feel like I | lived in a dump, and I'd be right. It's like nobody likes | to look at things. | beeboop wrote: | Underground is safer, less prone to accidents (trees | falling), take less space, reduces deaths and injuries by | car accident (cars hitting poles), less maintenance due | to not being exposed to elements, and of course the | aesthetic aspect. | | Honestly the aesthetic aspect alone should be enough. We | care about the aesthetics of everything else around us | and a lot of it is also fairly well regulated. Wires are | absolutely hideous and it's perfectly feasible to bury | them in most cases | titzer wrote: | I know, I grew up in the US, moved to Germany, and moved | back. There are _so many_. It doesn 't look like a modern | country at all. | commandlinefan wrote: | Actually he may have been right - they're still there, but I | never notice them because they just blend into the background | now. | kuczmama wrote: | This is one of the most insightful articles I've ever read when | it comes to predicting the future. If you are on the fence of | whether or not to read this article I highly recommend you read | it. | PotatoPancakes wrote: | Geez, is this really the best OCR we have in 2022? This is the | text generated by the OCR on that site: | | 'p========r^ SECTION SEVEN CL By W. L. George THERE is a good old | rule which bids us never prophesy unless we know, but, all the | same, when one cannot prophesy one may guess, especially if one | is sure of being out of the way when the reckoning comes. | Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this | world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess thrt | the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, | not so much because it was so different as because it was so | similar. In the main the changes which we may expect must be | brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a | revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than | to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises | between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in | 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same. | From which the reader may conclude that I do not expect anything | startling in the way of scientific discoverv. That is not the | case; I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will | be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the | present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the | world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I | suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl | who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew | nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, | aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even | know hot and cold bathrooms. The-little girl at Grand Central is | a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 | would have to produce something very startling to interest her | ghost. The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its | own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is | left. % w It does not follow that, scientifically, the year 2022 | should fail to be amazing. I suspect that commercial flying will | have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will | survive on the coasts. but it will have disappeared on the main | routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which | should cover the distance between London and New York in about | twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look | upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane | collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was | traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it | across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite | conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only | eight hours. The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and | ventilation to enable the aeronauts to survive. The same cause | will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have | ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads | may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will | be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does | not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. | Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from | the railroads by road trucks. As for the horse, it will probably | no longer be bred In white countries. The people of the year 2022 | will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is | practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless | telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the | century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air | when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly | discharged in the wrong place. Coal will not be exhausted, but | our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of | oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage | of fuel, but It is likely that by that time a ureal ueai 01 power | win ue ooiHineo irom tides, from the sun, probably from radium | and other forms of radial energy, while It may also be that | atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter Is | kept together by forces known as electrons. It Is possible that | we shall know how to dls< ?perse matter so as to release the | electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, | thefofore as long as the earth itself. I The movies will be more | attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been re* i THE I P | ma | | V ' placed by the kinephone, which now exists only in the | laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, | but they will have their natural colors and spaak with ordinary | voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely | disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie | actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but | also how to talk. Hna mttrVif AvianH i ? A ? fi ? i i ?1 vr nn | tKa V/UO "HftUt V<AtVUU 1UUC nunc 1J uu tuo number of inventions | which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of | them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves | what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. | To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never | tears anything down completely to build up something else; it | erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now | standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at | Washington, many of the universities and churches will be | standing a hundred yearB hence, and that they will, almost | unaltered, be preserved by tradition. Also, many private | dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by Individual | families. I think that they will have passed through the | cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years | nence, wnen ine servant pruoiem nas oecome completely | unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to | engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That | cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress | who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 | she will have been bent by circumstances, but sh'e will have | recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a | day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as | well paid as If she were a stenographer, will wear her own | clothes, be called "Miss," belong to her trade union and work | under union rulea. Naturally the work of the household, which is | being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I | believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will | have been done away with. In the first place, through the | disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made | there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In | the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings | made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or | taping along the edges. Thus, instead of \ VEW YO GAZINE NEW | YORK, SUNDAY, Witt^L bB | PotatoPancakes wrote: | Continued: | | scrubbing Its floors, t^e year 2022 will unscrew the brass | edges or unstitch the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of | the floor or curtains. Then I every year a new floor board will | be J laid. One may hope that standard B chairs, tables, | carpets, will be peeled in the same way. SB Similar reforms | apply to cooking, a ^B great deal of which will survive ^B | among old fashioned people, but a SB great deal more of which | will prob- ^B ably be avoided by the use of syn- ^fl thetic | foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a H | complete meal may be taken in the m shape of four pills. This | is not en- ^ tirely visionary; I am convinced that corned ^eef | hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will | ?roll by their side. But at that time few private dwellings | will be built: in their stenH will rise the community | dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They | will probably be located in garden Bpaces and rise to forty or | fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. | This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day | three thousand people sleep i every night. It would mean also | that each ( block would have a local authority of its < own. I | imagine these dwellings as afford- 1 ing one room to each adult | of the family | and one room for common use. Such cook- l ing | as then exists will be conducted by the < local authority of | the block, which will also i undertake laundry, mending, | cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the i children | of the tenants. i Perhaps at that time we shall have at- j | tained a dream which I often nurse, name- 1 ly, the city roofed | with glass. That city < would be a complete unit, with | accommoda- | Hons for houses, offices, factories and open j | spaces, all this carefully allocated. The | root would | completely do away with < weather and would maintain an even | tern- ; perature to be fixed by the taste of the ( period. | Artificial ventilation would sup- ] press wind. As for the open | spaces, if the temperature were warm they would ex- l hibit a | continual show of flowers, which < would be emancipated from | wlifter and i summer; In other words, winter would not t come | however long the descendants of Mr. l Hutchinson might wait. t | The family would still exist, even though ] it is not doing | very well to-day. It Is in- , conceivable that some sort of | feeling be* r RK HE] SECTl MAY 7, 1922. nT/*A T<^ jo 1 | | ,cF ' w^f^i JBPpl|p^^jMi W. L. GEORGE, the distinguished | British autt tween parents and children should not persist, | though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. | I Imagine that the link will be thinner than it Is to-day, | because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not | only schooled but fed and ?lad, and at the end of Its training | placed In a post suitable to Its abilities. This may be | affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over | the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth | control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will | step in. as it loes in France, and make it worth peo pie's | while to have more children; then the State will discover that | it has made things too easy and that people are having children | recklessly; finally some sort of balince will establish Itself | between the State lemand for children and the national supply. | Largely the condition of the family will le governed by the | position of woman, be -ause woman is the family, while man is | nerely Its supporter. It is practically cer ;ain that In 2022 | nearly all women will lave discarded the idea that they are | prlnarily "makers of men." Most fit women *111 then he | following an individual career. Ml positions will he open to | them and a ;reat many women will have risen high, rhe year 2022 | will probably see a large RALD I [ n J11Z 38 th 8U | | y number of women in Con^ - a press, a great many on the | judicial bench, many m . in civil service posts and is perhaps | some in the mi President's Cabinet. But it is unlikely that ^ | women will have an ^ achieved equality with T1 i.|" men. | Cautious feminists At EsS Bk such as myself realize ^f | that | things go slowly and ^ that a brief hundred tf,i r years win | noi wipe out im the effects on women of m< 30,000 years of | slavery. rr1 ar Women will work, partly m( heeausc they want to | and partly because they will so be able to. Thus women w' tin | will pay their share in the upkeep of home and t)o family. The | above sug- bu gestion of community no buildings, where all the | household work will be u' ca; done by professionals, will | liberate the average trj wife and enable her out of her wages | to pay her ^ share of the household work which she dis- nr1 | likes. an Marriage will still exist much as it is Ati to-day, | for mankind has an Inveterate taste faf for the institution, | but divorce will prob- nn ag ably be as easy everywhere as it | Is in Nevada. In view, however, of the lm- Hti proved position | of woman and her earning Th power, she will not only cease to | be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, ^ after the | divorce, to pay her share of the thl maintenance of her | children. or As regards the politics of 2022, I should lsr | expect the form of the State to be much / th< the same. A few | rearrangements may a8 have taken pla^e on the lines of self-de- | or termination; for ?Instance, Austria may Bu have united with | Germany, the South pu American republics may have federated, | pil Ac., but I do not believe that there will be 1 i a | superstate. There will still be republics an and monarchies; | possibly, In 2022, the It Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian | tin kings may have fallen, but for a variety of tal reasons, | either lack of advancement or oci inni titu riiim nii'iup, we | may export silll vir to And kings in Sweden, .lugo-Slavia, gw | Greece, Rumania and Great Britain. on On the inside, these | States may have kli slightly changed, for th9ro prevails a ten- | an dency to socialization which has nothing to do with | socialism. Most of the Euro- tht pean governments are | unconsciously na- dif tionalizing a number of industries, and a | l TWELVE PAGES | PotatoPancakes wrote: | Continued: | | t i ti wJ Is will go on. One may therefore preme that in 2022 | most States will have tionalized railways, telegraphs, | teleones, canals, docks, water supply, gas \ ' any) and | electricity. Other industries 11 exist much as they do to- | day, but it likely that the State will be inclined to ntrol | them, to limit their profits, and to bitrate between them and | the workers, e find a hint of this in America in the ti-trust | acts; a hundred years hence e tendency will be much stronger. | It is >rth noting as an international factor at b/that time | purely national Industries 11 almost have disappeared, and | that the >rk of the world will be in the hands of ntrolled | combines governing the supply a commodity from China to Peru. | Unfortunately these international relains through trade are | not likely to have ected political conditions. There will ill | be war. The wars of that period may a little less frequent | than they are toy, and be limited by arrangements such the | Pacific agreement, the agreement tween Canada and the United | States of rierica to leave their frontier unfortified, ., but | it will still be there. I suspect at those wars to come will | be made horle beyond my conception by new poison ses, | inextinguishable flames and light>of smoke clouds. In those | wars the airane bomb will seem as out of date as is clay tne | hatchet. War may ultimately sappear, but this lies beyond the | limits this article and even beyond those of f mind. \s | regards the United States in particu, it is likely that the | country will have me to a complete settlement, with a | popition of about 240,000,000. The idea of rth and South, | East and West, will have noet disappeared; by that time the | Amerin race will have taken so definite a form it immigration | will not affect it. The nfirican from Key West and the Amerin | from Seattle will be much the same nd of mic. That is to say | as regards race, but I feel at mentally the American of 2022 | will ve enormously changed. He is to-day e most enterprising | creature in the orld, and is driven by a continual urge to | se, to make money. That is because the odern American lives | in a country that only partly developed, and where imense | wealth still lies ready for him to ke. In 2022 that will be | as finished as s to-day in England. American wealth 11 then | he eithe.- developed or known, d all of it will belong to | somebody, lere will he no more opportunity in nerica than | there is in England to-day. lose Americans will know that it | is actically certain that they will die much the same | position as the one in which ey were born. Those Americans | will erefore be less enterprising and much ire pleasure | loving. They will have belled against long hours: the chances | e that in 2022 few people will work >re than seven hours a | day, if as much. The effect of this, which I am sure unds | regrettable to many of my readers 11. in my opinion, be good. | It was essen1 that the American race should be cable of | intense labor and intense ambin if it was to develop its vast | country, t one result has been haste, overwork, ise, all of | which is bad for the nerves. 2022 America will have made her | forae and will he enjoying it as well as she n. I think that | she will be a happier counr than she is to-day. The appeal of | alth will be less because wealth II be difficult to attain, | so those aericans to come will be producing in t and | literature infinitely more than they e producing to-day. To- | day, in fiction, ? aerlca leads the world by sincerity, tli | and fearlessness, hut the American vel of significance is a | novel of revolt alnst the thralls of money, of convenn anrl | of puritanism. In 2022 Ameriran srature will be a literature | of culture, e battle will he over and the muzzle There will | be no more things one n't say, and things one can't think No | ubt there will be In 2022 people who nk as they would have | thought in 1022, even a little earlier, but a great liberaln | of mind will prevail, rt is not my business to corgrat ilat" | > future, and I have no desire to do so. It Is impossible to | say a thing Is good bad; all one can say is that it exists, | it in case some of my readers feel relsion when they | contemplate my lunch Is or my nationalized railroads, to | those vould say that they are perhaps unduly xious. The world | takes care of Itself; has been doing so for hundreds of cen | ries nnri is still spinning; tne worm win te care of Itsplf | In 2022: that Is Its chlpf r-upatlon. Morp than that. I fppl | conlcpd that though thp world may Iosp icps, It will dpvolop | othpr grarps, that the wholp. and as timp goes on. man id | grows more intelligent, more amiable d more honpst. rhp | fnturp will bp difficult: what dops it mattpr? So was thp | past difficult: flcultlps did not prevent Its turning into | tolerable preser^. | Xcelerate wrote: | And in almost one hundred years, we still haven't made much | progress on the fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, other | than perhaps Bell's theorem in the 60s. | | I wonder if Einstein, Dirac, et al. would have thought in the | early 1930s that the measurement problem would remain unresolved | and that there would still not be a consistent theory for QM and | GR almost a century later. | luis8 wrote: | The only thing I wish to see before I die is at least a way to | communicate faster than light. Something instant like quantum | entanglement would be ideal or if that is too much to ask at | least warp like communication. | | I'm currently doing software engineering but when I retire I'll | dedicate all my free time for this. If at least 1% of the | population follow this route someone will come up with a | solution eventually. | | Imaging exploring the near galaxies with a probe that is | capable of displaying real time video of whatever is out there | :) | thenoblesunfish wrote: | His comments about the slowing pace of scientific advancement | really struck me. I have felt the same thing, often. That in | 1922, we were actually somewhat close to the end of discovering | all the really interesting things about physics: that is, those | things which really shook up our understanding of the universe, | but were still somehow comprehensible to our little human | brains. I'm beginning to think that it wasn't just | overenthusiasm that led me to be pretty disappointed when I | went to get a PhD in science - it's that I grew up reading | about the results of the most interesting period, | scientifically, that man has ever had, which is now over. | jerb wrote: | Scientific progress has slowed, but engineering progress is | only just beginning. For instance, the electronic transport | chain of respiration/photosynthesis, is a series of quantum | tunnels. Man has barely scratched the surface of quantum- | level control which nature already exhibits. | thoughtsimple wrote: | The number of transistors produced in 2021 is a bit mind | boggling if you do the math. These are nanotechnology | produced at a rate by humans that rivals any large physics | number. By my calculation, Apple alone via TSMC produces | something like 1x10^18 transistors per year. Add up Intel, | Samsung and the rest of TSMC's customers and the number | goes far higher. We are so used to it, we don't boggle at | the concept any more but we should. | bencollier49 wrote: | What I find fascinating about these predictions is that a lot of | them came to pass around 1970 and then fell back. For example | nationalisation of utilities and railways (here in the UK), | communal living (tower blocks), and so on. | | Not to mention "a great liberalism of mind and the freedom to say | anything".... | timeon wrote: | That idea about 'tower blocks in gardens' reminds me what | happened 11 years later: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter | tabtab wrote: | Where's the flying cars, dammit! We were promised flying cars! | Jail somebody, the future is all rigged. | datavirtue wrote: | He landed everything except the peeling furniture (kudos for the | Ikea prediction) and labor conditions. Interesting how labor | hasn't advanced much except for women in the workplace (he nailed | that perfectly). | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I like how the author predicted that a hundred years wouldn't | be enough to ensure gender equality. | kierkegaard_s wrote: | Interesting that the author here made the assumption opposite of | WaitButWhy's Tim Urban in his AI article (see below). Author | asserted pretty early that future progress wouldn't advance as | quickly as past progress has. Or at least that's how I | interpreted it. | | (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...) | | "Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the | world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance | communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in | the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, | you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around | and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to | understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules | racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other | side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were | being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that | happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle | that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living | moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that | shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them | even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds | of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him | the internet or explain things like the International Space | Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general | relativity. | | This experience for him wouldn't be surprising or shocking or | even mind-blowing--those words aren't big enough. He might | actually die. | | But here's the interesting thing--if he then went back to 1750 | and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he | wanted to try the same thing, he'd take the time machine and go | back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, | bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy | would be shocked by a lot of things--but he wouldn't die. It | would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while | 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different | than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending | shit about space and physics, he'd be impressed with how | committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, | and he'd have to do some major revisions of his world map | conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750-- | transportation, communication, etc.--definitely wouldn't make him | die." | tomxor wrote: | This is surprisingly accurate, reserved and balanced through the | lens of society as well as science. I was expecting something | more fanciful like flying horses or whatnot. | Aperocky wrote: | Except that: | | > I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be | amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day | than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822). | | I don't know about that statement. | ghc wrote: | If you think about what they didn't have in 1822 that they | did have in 1922: | | - Radio | | - Movies | | - Motorized Rail Transit | | - Airplanes | | - Blimps | | - Recorded Audio | | - Electrification (esp. lighting) | | - Telephony | | - Cars | | - Subways | | - Fax | | - Early Television | | - Telegraph | | - Skyscapers | | - Underwater tunnels | | - Air Conditioning | | - Elevators | | - Modern Hospitals | | - Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern | war | | - Stock Tickers | | - Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.) | | - Modern Steel Manufacturing | | I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world | of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the | 1820s would find the world of the 1920s. | rbanffy wrote: | > I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the | world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people | of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s. | | Let's start by explaining smartphones, then Twitter and | Facebook and then on how companies used them to hijack | elections and destabilize democracies in multiple | countries. | | Or, for an amusing time, try to explain how a | cryptocurrency works. | | My mom, born in 1935, doesn't understand what I do beyond | that I write computer programs (which isn't even that much | true anymore). | tempestn wrote: | The internet is a big change. Cryptocurrency is not on | the same scale. But I would be inclined to agree that the | impact of even computers and internet on the | recognizability of everyday life is less than that of eg. | telephony and airplanes. | rbanffy wrote: | > I would be inclined to agree that the impact of even | computers and internet on the recognizability of everyday | life is less than that of eg. telephony and airplanes. | | Remember when we needed to go to a payphone to tell our | parents we were in the mall and to ask them to pick us | up? And that they had no way to phone us while we weren't | home? | tempestn wrote: | You're saying the ability to make a phone call from | anywhere is a more significant change than the ability to | make phone calls at all? | Aperocky wrote: | What you described was the industrialization - what lacked | in 1922, and would make at least a similar, inexplainable | change for people of 1922 today is information revolution. | | Information still traveled at human recognizable size in | 1922, largely the same in 1822 (just got a bit faster over | telegraph). Whereas today the first website you visit | probably contained more information (bloat) sent to your | phone than a person in 1922 would have came across in an | entire year. | | In other word, the largest transformation is not on the | front end, but that doesn't make it less significant. | Everyone can make a Google landing page - but it's the | stuff behind it that makes it Google. | netsec_burn wrote: | This exact prediction was made in the 1922 article. | ghc wrote: | That's what this thread is about. Parent of my comment | was disputing that prediction from the article, and I | presented a counter-argument. | netsec_burn wrote: | I see! Sorry about the confusion, I misunderstood the | context. | another_story wrote: | Cars, trains, airplanes, electricity used in consumer | devices, movies, telephones, radio, instantaneous | intercontinental communication, etc... | | We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue | the shift was greater. | feintruled wrote: | Reminds me of the Gavin Belson freakout in Silicon Valley | when his holographic call started freezing and they | suggested he went to audio only "Fuck you, the audio's | still working! Audio worked a hundred fucking years ago!" | Nbox9 wrote: | I'm really unsure about this. In 1822 canning food was new | technology. 1822 didn't have electrical generators but 1922 | had radios, and the TV was clearly on the horizon. 1922 has | the Model-T and airplanes. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Let me ask this question: Is the 777 further from the | airplanes of 1922 than the airplanes of 1922 are from the | hot air balloon? | | Airplanes _existed_ in 1922. But nobody you knew flew on | them. You didn 't take them from the US to Europe on | business trips; you took a ship. You didn't take them from | New York to LA, either; you took a train. You _sure_ didn | 't book flights online while sitting in your couch at home. | | The same (in fundamentals) technology existed in 1922. But | all the _social_ change came after that. | dragontamer wrote: | > The same (in fundamentals) technology existed in 1922 | | The first transatlantic flight by Charles Lindberg was | 1927, 5 years _AFTER_ this article was written. | | People were trying to do a transatlantic flight in the | 1920s the same way as we are trying to make hydrogen | cars, applicable artificial intelligence (self-driving?), | or other "nearly true" things today. | | There were many notable attempts at a transatlantic | flight. As such, the article is able to point out the | issues (ex: the lack of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, | leading to hypoxia). | | An individual pilot can do a transatlantic flight with | the use of a breathing apparatus, similar to a scuba | diver. But large-scale flights wouldn't be possible until | the invention of pressurized cabins (used as a secret- | weapon during WW2: the US Superfortress Bombers would fly | so high thanks to pressurized cabins, that other | airplanes couldn't reach them). | | ------- | | Predicting a successful transatlantic flight would be | like predicting a self-driving car today. We see lots of | cool tech demos and people starting to understand the | issues / technology... but it clearly doesn't exist yet. | Not in any way that's usable. | | We're probably 5 years off from a plausible tech-demo | (ex: Spirit of St. Louis like attempt), and decades away | from a commercial offering. | | Lindberg's flight was of 33-hours. This article is | suggesting an 8-hour flight time, well into the realm of | science-fiction by 1922 standards. The 400+ gallons of | fuel of "The Spirit of St. Louis" was manually strained | and manually purified by the team, for no commercial | process existed yet to make the fuel pure enough for high | reliability. | | A trans-atlantic flight was "inevitable", because the | march of progress over the last 10 years was so dramatic, | so incredible, so inspiring, that it almost certainly was | going to happen. But it absolutely was still science | fiction by 1922 standards. | Ostrogodsky wrote: | That is one of the most accurate statements of the whole | article!!! | Brendinooo wrote: | Yeah, I think he had a good understanding of the implications | of the newer technology of his day. | | You don't know what you don't know so there's nothing about | computers here, but most of this article was really well done. | apozem wrote: | These are better than 99% of predictions because the author has | a good eye for what will change (technology, transportation, | consumer goods) and what won't (human nature). | EGreg wrote: | Dude is describing tenements in Hong Kong... | overthemoon wrote: | It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: | https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... | | Especially with regards to this passage:: | | "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to- | day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or | known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no | more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day. | Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that | they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they | were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising | and much more pleasure loving. They will have rebelled against | long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work | more than seven hours a day, if as much. | | The effects of this, which I am sure sounds regrettable to many | of my readers, will, in my opinion, be good. It was essential | that the American race should be capable of intense labor and | intense ambition if it was to develop its vast country. But one | result has been haste, overwork, noise, all of which is bad for | the nerves. In 2022 America will have made her fortune and will | be enjoying it as well as she can." | mc32 wrote: | The above sentiment is not altogether wrong. | | Once people have certain comfort they cease to be productive | and look for ways to while away their time. Sometimes its | neutral, sometimes it may be a productive hobby and sometimes | it's detrimental (as in they know what needs to change in the | world and they will make it so). | | It's also telling that at the dawn of the XX cent, the US was | not a wealthy country. Per capita we were more or less on par | with countries that are today still "developing". Out position | isn't a foregone conclusion and needs active development to | remain there. | pindab0ter wrote: | What terrible phrasing is "they cease to be productive and | look for ways to while away their time." | | We don't live to work, we work to live. Once less work is | required to live, more living can be done. Some people may | 'while away their time', others do valuable things that don't | produce monetary value. | mc32 wrote: | Progress depends on people or, the economy in general, | progressing. If everyone is happy where they are and want | no more, there is no need to innovate and progress stops. | That may be fine if we think we have achieved all we need | to achieve as a society or species but most think we have a | bit of a ways to go still before we can declare victory. | misnome wrote: | What about people who are made happy by innovating and | progressing? | mc32 wrote: | When social support for that goes away, it's only the | "crazy" who would do that just because. But without | societal support it's a dead-end. | | There are countries with lots of people --but whose | contribution to innovation is substandard. There is no | societal support so innovation is stunted. | | It's like thinking justice will happen just because... | No, it happens because society supports justice. Justice | or innovation don't just "happen". | soco wrote: | Why should innovation lose support? It would fall under | "people do what they like" so the innovators would go on | innovating. And if the innovations bring even more to the | society of course they will be adopted. | mc32 wrote: | Let's look at the Soviet Union to Russia transition. The | state no longer had the same demand for space innovation. | Their tech sector has stagnated. People didn't carry on | just because they could. | hiptobecubic wrote: | Innovation _does_ just happen, but only under | circumstances that need it. People support it because it | makes their lives easier. If it doesn 't do that then | honestly who cares? Don't confuse innovation in general | with how many startups the country has. | mc32 wrote: | There has to be some pull. If people are conditioned to | be happy with say UBI + Netflix and conditioned to think | that you should have a small impact on the planet (little | consumption) and your daily needs met (food, shelter) | innovation will go down in a generation or so. | | [to answer weakfish who appears "dead": no it's not wrong | to revert to a subsistence existence, but it has trade- | offs. Just be aware of the trade-offs.] | weakfish wrote: | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | In the US a lot of people are very, very unhappy. | | The _lack_ of real political and economic agency for most | of the population is one of the defining features of US | capitalism. | NoImmatureAdHom wrote: | Citation needed. There are all sorts of measures of gross | happiness out there. | thereddaikon wrote: | This is also not a new phenomena but something that has | been slowly increasing over human history. Before | agriculture, humans spent almost all of their time hunting | and gathering. Agriculture freed up some time and every | major technological revolution has in some way made society | more productive and efficient allowing us for more time not | working. At some point in the 19th century the concept of | leisure time came around and its only been growing. | | Reducing the work required by each individual to survive | and support society is a natural effect of technological | progression. If people are getting more work then we are | regressing. | stocknoob wrote: | There still are hunter gatherer societies, and they don't | spend all their time hunting and gathering. | | https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510 | 187... | Clubber wrote: | >Before agriculture, humans spent almost all of their | time hunting and gathering. Agriculture freed up some | time | | Agriculture is more work than hunting and gathering, but | it's a much more consistent food source. | | https://www.zmescience.com/science/hunter-gatherer- | farmer-ti... | monocasa wrote: | And agriculture itself is less work than we think of. | Medieval peasants worked less hours than we do. | | https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hou | rs_... | Ancapistani wrote: | > And agriculture itself is less work than we think of. | | That depends entirely upon the ratio of agriculture to | other industries in a society and the level of | automation. | | People operating today's corporate farms in the US | probably work fewer hours than their 1920s analogues, but | produce far more output. People operating today's | small/"family" farms are probably about on par in terms | of hours worked, but still produce much more and there | are far fewer of them. | monocasa wrote: | It doesn't. People working today's farms (corporate and | self operated) appear to put in more hours than their | 1920s analogues as much more of their time is consumed by | the other parts of the business rather than working the | fields component. | | They do create significantly more for their time, true. | But this idea that exists that automation has given us | more free time isn't quite borne out by the evidence. | thereddaikon wrote: | I didn't say agriculture gave us leisure, I said it freed | us up to do other things. You may spend less time hunting | and gathering but everyone is a hunter and gatherer. With | agriculture a smaller part of your society is dedicated | to food production. This allows for specialization and | civilization. | | Leisure, as we understand it is a pretty modern | development. In that study they are defining leisure as | the opposite of labor. I wouldn't call that leisure | personally. Partaking in or consuming entertainment and | hobbies is leisure. | mc32 wrote: | It would seem plausible to claim agriculture put demand | on innovation; tools to make more efficient agriculture. | Things like irrigation channels, planting tools, | harvesting tools, etc. | | Maybe technology developed for conflict came first but | I'd guess peacetime uses also put demands on innovation. | | Interestingly, I watched some video somewhere where in | some part of India[1] there were people who were | harvesting wheat with a curved knife (sickle) like | implement rather than a scythe. So people had to bend | down to harvest a field. Meaning sometimes technology | doesn't diffuse everywhere --even well known solutions. | | [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iU0uYeO7XI | weakfish wrote: | NoImmatureAdHom wrote: | I haven't though it through in detail, but I think it has | to do with the intersection of these two things. Netflix | and ice cream is pure leisure, toiling in the mines is pure | work, but there's significant overlap...I'm sure for many | here working on a personal coding project can be both a joy | in the sense of leisure and also productive work in the | sense that other people would pay for it, or it brings | significant economic value to them. | | So...the middle of the Venn is the important part. Insofar | as leisure is both joyful and productive, good. Insofar as | we continue the "opiates of the masses" arms race and make | ever better Netflix + ice cream, bad. | [deleted] | atlgator wrote: | In the context of conquering "the land" from East to West, I | think the articles sentiments are spot on. The conclusion that | Americans would settle long term is open to debate. The | frontier discussed in the article is a physical one, conquered | by hard labor and sweat. And while Americans did succeed and | enjoy (physically) lighter days now, the author failed to | predict we'd find a new frontier, a digital one. The hard labor | is now done in the mind, even if we spend too much time binging | Rick & Morty. | ydlr wrote: | United States does rank below the UK in terms of social | mobility. The notion that that is because the economic | development of the country is "finished" seems weird. | | https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report.... | lettergram wrote: | The world economic forum is largely lead by former nazis and | communists. They have openly called for the United States to | decline as a power. | | I wouldn't necessarily take anything they say as fact. Lol | ianai wrote: | Citation very much needed. | sebow wrote: | lettergram wrote: | You can read the "Great Reset" book to get a wider view | of their vision. | | They've been talking about this for a long time | | https://www.salon.com/2010/12/06/america_collapse_2025/ | beaconstudios wrote: | And predicting the fall of the US... Makes them both | nazis and communists? I'm confused by your argument. | rbanffy wrote: | It's really hard to be both far-right and far-left at the | same time. | MadeThisToReply wrote: | What about horseshoe theory? | rbanffy wrote: | Nazism is far-right and authoritarian. Socialism is just | far-left, but not necessarily authoritarian. Soviet-style | socialism was very authoritarian and that's why it got | its bad reputation. And you can be authoritarian and not | even be on the left-right axis - Saudi Arabia is an | example, as is Afghanistan now. | beaconstudios wrote: | Both of those countries are theocratic and extremely | socially conservative, which places them on the far | right. | lettergram wrote: | Read the book, look into the forums content, funding | sources, history, etc | | I was pointing out the anti-United states propaganda has | been going on for years. | beaconstudios wrote: | I'm not going to do all that to verify your comment. It | strikes me as an absurd claim, at least in part because | nazis and communists are opposites, and everybody is | predicting the fall of the US' dominance to China these | days. | | The WEF is just liberal capitalism. The trend towards | technofeudalism (everyone is renting their existence from | big corps) has been going on for a while, at the hands of | capitalists. Because its profitable. See: the growth of | financing/credit, software subscriptions, etc. | habeebtc wrote: | If I am not mistaken "The Great Reset" is written by | Glenn Beck. I may be wrong, as there are several books | with that name, but the Beck book is the one most likely | to involve railing against Nazis and Communists. | | You can get a sense for Beck's work here: | | https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/?s=Glenn+beck | blackshaw wrote: | "The Great Reset" is the name of a book by Klaus Schwab, | who is chairman of the WEF. It was also the name that the | WEF gave to their 50th annual meeting, which took place | in 2020. | | Conspiracy theories aside, I've read Schwab's book, and | it's a moronic, badly-written pile of buzzwords and | corporate jargon that says nothing of interest and reads | like the work of a hungover undergraduate who's padding | the wordcount the night before the deadline while hoping | the professor won't realise he hasn't done the reading. | I'd tell you to ignore it, except Schwab is a man of | enormous power and influence, so his apparent inability | to produce an intelligent thought is really quite | troubling. | lettergram wrote: | Indeed. I was ignoring this stuff until the "build back | better" was the campaign slogan all over everyone in the | western world | hunterb123 wrote: | I don't see how you can read things like the Great Reset | and think the things you do. | beaconstudios wrote: | I'm open to convincing arguments. What do you think the | Great Reset is? To me it seems like late capitalists | doing a capitalism as they always do, trying to eke out | more profit by way of financier feudalism. | ajmurmann wrote: | Trading that article, I wonder if you are conflating | prediction and desire for something to happen. | easytiger wrote: | Use of the idea that now is an opportunity to be seized I | think dictates that it's a desire | ajmurmann wrote: | So, if I predict something catastrophical will happen and | I make efforts to prepare for it, I'm part of the | problem? | jollybean wrote: | "United States does rank below the UK in terms of social | mobility." | | It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who | had no much opportunity to 'climb'. | | The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of | migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely | different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the | world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while | technically might have the opportunities others have, they | live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. They | are happy in their version of he US, they're family oriented, | patriots - but not going to college or after the white collar | trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'. | | Those two cohorts make the US 'very different' in terms of | social mobility, and so you have a situation a bit akin to | Brazil etc.. | | Canada and Australia are 'Immigrant States' without those | cohorts, and newcomers do reasonably well or somewhere | approaching 'normal' after one or two generations. | | I'll bet social mobility among non-African American and | Latino Americans, is about on part with Canada or Australia, | and maybe even a little bit better than UK, and most of | Europe (even Sweden) which also have vestiges of class. | | Some indicative data here [1]. You can see mobility gap | between Black and White in the US, it's very crude and | subject to interpretation, but it does line up with PISA | standardized testing results which show the same, that non- | Black/Latino America is actually 'a lot like' Europe or Japan | in terms of so many outcomes. 2018 PISA test scores here [2] | (download the PDF). | | FYI I'm not 'endorsing' or 'supporting' any kind of system | here, just pointing out that the the US has a 'multi system | dynamic' different than other places and it's essential to | understanding how it works esp. on a comparative basis. FYI a | lot of E/S European countries are poor, and represent similar | kind of 'isolated communities' which is why gini coefficient | etc. for the entirety of the EU is much worse than it is for | any individual EU state. | | From 1922 until today - most of our progress has been | incremental. Other than satellites, and maybe computers, it | seems as though they ave predicted a lot. Maybe not quite the | social impact of them however. | | What will change in 2122? | | If we have successful Fusion at scale, it could change a lot | of things. | | If not, maybe it won't be that different: longer lives, more | fashion. Maybe we figure out Climate Change and get plastics | out of he ocean, but we'll probably still be arguing about | 'what is normal' | | Eventually, we'll be able to colour our skin, eyes, hair very | readily, we'll have cosmetic limbs (i.e. pair of wings that | don't to much but flap a bit). And maybe mechanical uterus - | where you provide the eggs and sperm and it will make a baby | in 9 months. If the identity wars are a bit complicated now | just wait. | | We will send a probe to Alpha Centuari and they'll be a small | station on Mars, but it will be boring and young people won't | even care. | | Reduced population in the West and massive population booms | in Africa and some other spots will crate some odd | international dynamics. Africa will be much better off, but | mostly still corrupt with crackpot leaders and nuclear | weapons. One of them will use one on their neighbouring | country. | | [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no- | room-a... | | [2] | https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm | dhosek wrote: | >Latinos from Central America, who are completely different | than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. | They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while | technically might have the opportunities others have, they | live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. | They are happy in their version of he US, they're family | oriented, patriots - but not going to college or after the | white collar trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'. | | This is so wrong and misinformed it's hard to know what to | say. This sounds like the happy slaves justification for | slavery. | | The fact of the matter is that Latino immigrants from | Central/South America follow the same path of assimilation | as immigrants from anywhere else do. From the outside it | may not see like it but that's because there's a steady | flow of new immigrants. I've taught a _lot_ of second- | generation Latino immigrants who are very much interested | in college and white-collar trades and not looking to | continue in low-wage service jobs. | | To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's | because of racist attitudes like yours. | [deleted] | jollybean wrote: | "immigrants from Central/South America follow the same | path of assimilation as immigrants from anywhere else | do." | | Their experience, on the whole is different. | | For some obviously much more than others. | | Latino Household income is 1/2 that of other recent | migrant groups of colour i.e. Asians [1], who fare better | than 'White Americans', a simple fact which makes your | 'it's all racism' immediately, well, probably wrong. | | Latino Americans are more likely to live in a segregated | version of America almost due to their own choices, much | like many other groups have historically, and much like | 'micro enclaves' (i.e. Armenian, Persian, Chinese, | Turkish) form among migrant communities across North | America, UK, Australia, Germany etc. - the difference | being, their cohort is enormous. Entire cities, or | regions of cities are formed by relative newcomers from | Central America, that doesn't happen with other migrant | groups. | | Latino Americans fare considerably more poorly in school, | and in terms of academic achievement; the independent | test scores (to which I referred) point to that, and | there's ample evidence of that otherwise. | | The 'it's all because of racism argument' holds little | water, obviously, because other 'migrants of colour' in | the US do actually very well. Would you imply that | Latinos face 'racism' but migrants from India don't? | That's not a very sound argument. | | There's even more detailed data to refute your argument, | right in the 2018 PISA references I provided. While | migrants across the board fare more poorly in school than | regular citizens, in the US, Canada, UK (aka Anglosphere) | - once you normalize for income, migrants overall | actually do as well as or better than local kids. The | same is not the case in Germany or Finland (ostensibly #1 | place for education). This is really strong evidence that | actually, migrants tend to have 'opportunity' at least in | the Anglosphere, at least the level of education. | | China, India, and Europe have high, even elite standards | for education at least for a minority, and migrants from | those places are likely to be from the upper tranches of | that spectrum. Canada mostly accepts only those with a | University degree. | | Migrants from Central America not only come from nations | with very poor educational standards, but they're also | individually, very poor. Many people cross the US border | with literally nothing, often as refugees. | | The contrast between Latino Americans and others holds | even for rates of crime, where Latino Americans are over- | represented in almost all forms of crime, while their | counterparts, migrants from other nations, are actually | underrepresented in crime data. | | Latino Americans, unlike African Americans, are not | represented as much pop culture, music, sports and media | nearly to the same extent, almost as though 'they don't | exist' - or rather they do, but in 'their own media'. | Even during the 'Oscar's So White' uproar, nobody wanted | to point out that nary 100% of the Latino prize winners | were not American. Nobody seemed to care. | | Go ahead and name for me some Black SNL cast members. | That's easy. Now name the Latinos ones. Much harder. I | can't think of a single one other than Fred Armisen who | has a bit of 'Latino Heritage'. | | If you take a moment to visit those areas of Texas and | California, you'll realize how vast the submersion in | 'Another America' many of them live in, and that it forms | an existential artifact of their integration experience, | which is very much unlike those of other migrants. | | (Again, it's not entirely the case, obviously there are | millions of Latino Americans who live as 'statistically | normative Americans') | | "To the extent that there's no opportunity to climb it's | because of racist attitudes like yours. " | | I think it's probably people screaming about this or that | and throwing names around that is 'a core problem'. | | Latino America is 'different enough' from the other | cohorts, and they are 'big enough' that this implies | differing policy measures, approaches etc.. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_i | n_the_U... | eganist wrote: | I'm still amazed the first and last times nukes were used | against people were in 1945. | sangnoir wrote: | I'm convinced that's because of M.A.D. had nukes bwwn on | only one side, they'd have bwwn used more often. | delecti wrote: | I've heard arguments for and against the justifications | to use nukes against Japan, and while I think it was | probably unnecessary, at least it only happened at the | very end of the war. If it had been introduced a couple | years earlier then I worry our perception might be that | it's just another thing you use _during_ war. | jacobr1 wrote: | If there wasn't a major adversary with similar weapons | that might have happened. Low-yield tactical are probably | more effective than things like the "MOP" bunker-busters. | But the hard-line we've drawn on the application of nukes | has prevented such a slippery slope in our proxy wars. | Ancapistani wrote: | In my eyes, nuclear weapons are both much less and much | more terrifying that they seem to be considered by most | people. | | The smallest nuclear devices aren't anywhere close to as | large as commonly believed. An M28 "Davy Crockett" with a | yield of 20T - 0.02kT - isn't _that_ much different from | a conventional GBU-43 /B MOAB, which has a yield of 11T. | | Tactical nuclear weapons are basically a faster and more | effective version of conventional strategic bombing. | "Little Boy", the first weapon used in combat (in | Nagasaki), had a yield of 15kT. That resulted in an | estimated 66k deaths and 70k injuries. Compare that to | the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed ~100k civilians | and burned the homes of over a million more. | | Strategic nuclear weapons... they're in a whole other | category. Obviously lots of people are killed during | conventional strategic bombing, but most of the damage is | ultimately done through fires set by the destruction of | the intended targets. Some people have a chance to | escape. | | What's more, conventional bombing is WW2 wasn't generally | a "one-night" affair; it took days or weeks to saturate a | target to the point of neutralizing it, and after the | first couple of attacks many people would have left the | target area. The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in so many | civilian casualties precisely because it was a (very | effective) one-night event, and people didn't have a | chance to flee. That was exceptional even in WW2. | | Strategic nuclear weapons are effectively instant. | They're incredibly powerful. We stopped building bigger | ones not because we didn't know how, but because _we | couldn 't see any reason to_. If a 50MT blast won't do | the job, a 500MT blast isn't going to either... so why | spend the money to develop, create, and maintain bigger | ones? | | Finally, the idea that even a full nuclear exchange | between major powers would be an extinction-level event | is absurd. It would utterly destroy the countries | involved, devastate the world economy, and poison huge | swaths of the planet practically in perpetuity. Between | the direct and indirect damage and the societal impacts | on the remainder of humanity, it would set us back | centuries as a species - but we would rebuild and it | would take much less time to do so than it did to get to | where we the first time. | xxpor wrote: | >Tactical nuclear weapons are basically a faster and more | effective version of conventional strategic bombing. | "Little Boy", the first weapon used in combat (in | Nagasaki), had a yield of 15kT. That resulted in an | estimated 66k deaths and 70k injuries. Compare that to | the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed ~100k civilians | and burned the homes of over a million more. | | Two points: | | The first bomb was on Hiroshima, and killed many more | people. The reason why the Nagasaki bomb killed "so few" | people is because they missed. They were supposed to do a | visual confirmation of the target, but the weather was | cloudy so they (probably) used radar targeting, which | wasn't particularly accurate in 1945. A lot of the energy | hit the side of a mountain. | | Second, there's a huge difference between a conventional | bomb and a nuke of the same size simply because of the | fallout. It continues to kill well after it's dropped. | Ancapistani wrote: | > The first bomb was on Hiroshima, and killed many more | people. | | Ugh. I hate when I do that. I don't know why I reversed | them, other than the fact that I've been commenting on HN | all day instead of working and probably just got | overwhelmed :). | | > Second, there's a huge difference between a | conventional bomb and a nuke of the same size simply | because of the fallout. | | This applies much less to airbursts than groundbursts, | and airbursts are the norm for modern weapons. | | That's not to say it's not there - it is - but it's | significantly less of an issue than commonly believed. | antux wrote: | > Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that | they will die much in the same position as the ones in which | they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less | enterprising and much more pleasure loving. | | You can see this today with the anti-work movement and the | overindulgence in tv shows, movies, porn, junk food, social | media, and video games. All these things are corrupting the | future generations of kids. | | The corporations that create these have made them too | accessible. Once kids start indulging at a young age, it's | harder to control when they get older. Their lives will revolve | around gaining short-term pleasures, and the world will lose | out on the potential long-term creative value they could have | contributed. | stareblinkstare wrote: | jahnu wrote: | Alternatively people have found their own way to be happy and | want to fill their lives with more experiences and less work | for someone else's wealth. | sologoub wrote: | Some, no doubt, will choose a less creative path, but we also | have evidence in history that people, who have the privilege | of not worrying about their daily bread, also choose to spend | their time in pursuit of sciences, arts, etc and many things | not practical for them in regular employment and that advance | all people. | antux wrote: | Those activities are fine and well. I never stated anything | against those things. My point, that you missed, is that an | overindulgence in modern media entertainment will lead | people down a spiral of short-term pleasure seeking that | can compromise their long-term creative potential. | sologoub wrote: | I didn't miss that point, just don't agree with it. The | two outcomes are not mutually exclusive and the | availability of entertainment isn't a good reason to | claim people cannot (will not?) be productive if their | survival no longer depends on that productivity. | | In short, I think people adapt and figure out their | priorities. If someone wants a life of binging Netflix, | who am I to say that's a wasted life? (So long as that | person doesn't make me live such a life.) | lettergram wrote: | > Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has | Never Been Better | | Let me translate | | "you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability | to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent | houses in our artificially limited VR world." | | I don't make much of predictions like these. It's ALWAYS a safe | bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED | was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just | wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When | was public education first introduced at scale? When was | eugenics promoted in the United States? | | The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian | and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the | history of Woodrow Wilson. | | At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was | losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on | higher-class circles. | | In that context all these predictions are really aspirations. | | That said, I think the United States is still one of the most | free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and | can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part | of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s | promoting the same general ideas. | verisimi wrote: | This is a very hard conversation to have on HN. | | It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has | been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper | classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling | system produces people that are incapable of seeing the | outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - | they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the | wealth extraction, that it is planned for us to move to | technocracy (with a bio-medical-wallet-etc-id, tracked | everywhere in spy-cities, not allowed to even leave your | 110sqft micro-flat unless the computer says so), that all the | disasters we face have resulted in incremental steps towards | this aim (911, covid). Its a lot to consider! | | That we have been harnessed and put to work creating someone | else's heaven on earth (and hardcore slavery for the rest) is | a bitter pill to swallow. And the techies here have recently | been the greatest driver of this change. Their livelihoods do | depend on it. | | Anyway, good on you, for bringing some of these issues up. | throwawayyear22 wrote: | "This is a very hard conversation to have on HN." | | Yes because it implies there is a conspiracy requiring God- | like abilities to plan the long term outcomes of a | multitude of decisions and actions many of which have | conflicting goals. | | What is more probable, that the current situation just | emerged organically or that some elite group has conspired | and executed flawlessly to make the world just like it is ? | | There are subcontractors who work for my CM in China and I | doubt they are paid much. It wasn't my plan to create wage- | slaves and if I paid my CM more they would just likely | pocket the difference. I'll admit I contribute to to | problems you describe but that's very different than having | intent and control. | verisimi wrote: | No. God-like abilities are not required. | | But lots of wealth and a clear long-term plan is. | | Do you think that those individuals that own | corporations, would be interested to gain greater control | and wealth? Wouldn't it be good to transform society in a | way that is most beneficial to them? Do you think that | those individuals would be pretty ruthless in their | execution of their plans? And that they would also try to | be secretive? Of course. | | Do you think that politicians can be encouraged to vote | one way or another? Those on the blue team _and_ on the | reds? Given lots of money, lobbyists, etc? Or threats? I | think it would be naive to think that they do not. | | And if you control governmental policy, what would you | work on? Education - to train obedient workers? Finance? | The legal system? All of those. | | Would you create or buy the media companies to ensure | that your message is always provided, and that any | negative exposure is squashed? Or get people talking | about all the wrong things? Yes again. | | Would you seek to increase dependence on government or | increase people's self-reliance? Increase dependence on | government, of course! What is the direction of travel do | you think? | | Would you even create a ready way to smear those who do | raise the reality of the situation. A handy handle that | allows you to dismiss those who are sharing information | that you don't like. This too has been done - and the | handle is 'conspiracy theorist'. This smear allows you to | ignore whatever evidence might be being presented, and | allow you to carry on with your day - no further | investigation required! | | My view is that if you have a good handle on human | nature, specific goals and lots of wealth, it is actually | not that hard to create the fish bowl. You will have | created a class (the majority) of people who are too | invested (financially, emotionally, spiritually) in the | unnatural system you have provided. They will go to the | schools you created, learn the values you want, just like | their parents. | | If you control the terrain, and provide the method that | people use to "verify" information for themselves (and | the method is accept the evidence free claims given, | maybe occasionally double check something on Wikipedia) | you can really go very far! No one checks anything - we | are so invested in this we have to trust that "they've | got this". | | The truth is that "they" look at you and I as cattle. And | they are just executing their best herd-management | procedures. And - I think - they have been running things | like this for a long time. | bilbo0s wrote: | Not that I disagree with the underlying ideas, but I'd | argue we're not slaves. I'll concede that in practice we | can definitely be thought something more akin to peasants, | but what we live in today is not slavery. | | Now, is being a peasant, with all the concomitant | limitations on one's livelihood any better than being a | slave to the mental health of the bright and ambitious? | Perhaps not, but it would be significantly more deleterious | to their physical health. | | I also understand that reasonable people can debate whether | physical or mental health is more important. | verisimi wrote: | If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a | government I do not want, I think that is slavery. You | wouldn't think it ok if an individual forced you, or the | mafia. The government is just big mafia. | | But that is not really the nub of it. | | Slavery is really a mental state - having been through | the system we have been propagandised that the government | is a good thing, it's the right way to manage ourselves - | anything else is very bad. This is the creation of the | slave mentality, putting the policeman inside your head, | so that you feel highly uncomfortable just considering | non-standard ideas - they are thoughtcrime. | | Thoughtcrime egs: that news is just another show, a | serious type of advert. That pharmaceutical companies | will run world wide campaigns, seconding governments, | drafting laws, to poison millions - this will fill up | their pipeline with sickness for the coming decades. | xxpor wrote: | There will always be someone more powerful than you. I | prefer that I can elect the leaders of the most powerful | group. This is why anarchy doesn't make any sense: The | government is simply the most powerful violent group. As | long as violence exists, any anarchic arrangement is | inherently unstable. | bilbo0s wrote: | _If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a | government I do not want, I think that is slavery_ | | This is a good example of what I'm talking about. | | Maybe you think of it as slavery, but in reality, it's | the very definition of peasantry. | | Slavery is you get _no_ money. And by the way, if you | disagree with it, the power holder beats the tar out of | you. Or maybe s /he just kills you and gets another | slave. Whatever's most convenient at the time/place. | | Other than money, there are also a host of other | differences between how we live and slavery. Including | the fact that slaves don't choose their masters. There is | no right to leave. Less than expected productivity | results in severe beatings. And on and on and on. | | Again, peasantry is its own special form of perdition. No | need to exaggerate to get that point across. I was only | saying that it's clearly not slavery. | alpha_squared wrote: | > I also understand that reasonable people can debate | whether physical or mental health is more important. | | I'm actually unsure what this means. I take it to imnply | that physical health is more important, but I'm not | convinced of that. Physical health impacts the individual | and loved ones (via emotional labor and support). Mental | health impacts the community (mass shootings); it's hard | to predict the outcome of poor mental health per | individual but it's clear on the whole that it's often | the community that pays for it. | ActorNightly wrote: | Knowledge is Bayesian, and while there is finite | probability for what you said, the probabilities are very | low based on real events. | | Also, the premise that finance people are just naturally | evil isn't based in reality, its just fetishism. | godshatter wrote: | Yes. Those that have the power to trick others into giving | them even more power have little restraining them from | doing so. | | It's also complicated by the fact that those who push | against it haven't exactly made a name for themselves as | reasonable people (at least the most vocal ones haven't) | leading to derision of "freedumbs" and so forth. | | I mourn the dearth of different perspectives and not | assuming everyone is on a "side". | 2Xheadpalm wrote: | 'power to trick' - that hit the nail on the head! The | oligarchs, higher level bureaucrats, politicians, extreme | wealthy etc. that is the superpower, at their core, they | are magicians but not in a good, fun way, more like con- | man who have mastered the power to _trick_ and deceive. I | came to the conclusion sometime ago, that all these | people of power and position are really just charlatans, | albeit extremely good ones, they are nothing to aspire to | and respect, they are no better then a grifter using | 'slight of hand' and deception to remove as much wealth | and power from others to themselves and when all else | fails, they will resort to force/war if need be. In a | nutshell, nothing but liars, cheats, cowards and | dishonorable megalomaniacs that put on a (good) show for | us peasants to better rob us blind. | thegrimmest wrote: | I mean, "liberty" is exactly allowing people to convince | each other to exchange things. Some people might get the | short end, but does that mean it's not free exchange? Or | does that mean liberty itself is not an aim worth | pursuing? | godshatter wrote: | In my personal opinion it is worth it to have liberty, | even if so many people are fine with giving it up to | others at the drop of a hat. It's too important not to | have. I just wish individual independence wasn't so | derided these days. | long_time_gone wrote: | Gun control in the 1880s Old West: | | "The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon | entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's | office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge | City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)" | | "Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. | According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, | the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in | town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who | wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, | and bring their families." | | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old- | west-... | queuebert wrote: | Probably unconstitutional, but never challenged in the | Supreme Court, I believe. | long_time_gone wrote: | It would have been perfectly Constitutional until the | Supreme Court changed their interpretation of the 2nd | Amendment in the Heller case. | | > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._H | eller | queuebert wrote: | IANAL, but I think there was no interpretation until the | Supreme Court made that ruling. The Second Amendment was | in a quantum state before that, both an individual right | and not. When it becomes necessary to clarify something, | then SCOTUS collapses the wave function in that | particular area of law. | camgunz wrote: | Nah _Heller_ is the outlier here. Here 's the Wikipedia | page for its precedent, _Miller_ : | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller | wbsss4412 wrote: | SCOTUS didn't begin to apply the bill of rights to anyone | besides the federal government until _Chicago, | Burlington, and Quincy Railroad v. City of Chicago_ in | 1897. The entire notion of individual rights (in the | modern sense) guaranteed by the constitution was in its | nascency in 1878. | long_time_gone wrote: | John Paul Stevens was a lawyer and a judge on the Supreme | Court. He disagrees and includes actual court decisions | and opinions. | | >the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second | Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm | that did not have "some relationship to the preservation | or efficiency of a well regulated militia." And in 1980, | in a footnote to an opinion upholding a conviction for | receipt of a firearm, the Court effectively affirmed | Miller, writing: "[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no | right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have 'some | reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency | of a well regulated militia.' | | https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/john- | paul-... | jmedefind wrote: | Back then the Second Amendment was read as a right to an | Armed Militia. SCOTUS probably would of allowed these | laws at the time. | | It's only the in past few decades that the Second | Amendment has been perverted into the right to carry any | gun you want where ever you want. | | Ref: | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/09/why- | accura... | queuebert wrote: | That's an Op Ed, not a reference. | Spooky23 wrote: | It's probably a waste of time to argue this, but the | arguments for central banking were the same as the arguments | put forth by Alexander Hamilton. More stability, greater | resilience, etc. | | The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, | orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from | resource extraction and inherited wealth. | zionic wrote: | Central banks and their role in tyranny is hardly "vague". | | They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by | printing money. It's an irresistible temptation that I | don't trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power | shouldn't be in the hands of any one person or | organization. | pydry wrote: | >They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by | printing money. It's an irresistible temptation | | A) Which makes it basically another form of tax. | | B) The raising of which always driven the wealthy into | fits of rage no matter how necessary or beneficial. | zionic wrote: | No the wealthy love this because their debt becomes | cheaper to service while their assets skyrockets. | Inflation primarily hurts the non-asset owning poor. | pydry wrote: | Have you met the non asset owning poor? They have debt. | LOTS of debt. | slg wrote: | >They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by | printing money. | | There are a countless other ways a country can do this | and most of those are more targeted. The tax code is the | most obvious example. Inflation is a flat tax of a few | percentage points. If the goal is to wield power, it is | much more important to control the tax code and move the | income tax from 0% (generally true before the 16th | Amendment in 1913) to 91% (1954-1963) or from 91% back | down to 37% (the current rate). Blaming central banking | as the primary cause for these issues just doesn't make | sense to me. | iso1631 wrote: | > Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points | | Flat tax on cash holdings, which poor people don't have. | | It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to | hold. It doesn't apply to assets. | | Now if wages don't keep track with inflation, that's not | a tax, it's an employer reducing wages. | slg wrote: | I'm not sure the distinction you are making here. A flat | tax is called that because it is flat in percentage not | in nominal value. Yes, debtors will benefit more than | creditors, but that doesn't mean it isn't a flat tax. | Also it doesn't just impact cash which should be obvious | from the last sentence. If inflation decreases the real | amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount | that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the | value of their investments. | iso1631 wrote: | > If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, | it also decreases the real amount that is owed to | creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their | investments. | | I'm sure that's upsetting for wealthy people with | investments | | For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as | Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary, | her debts being whittled away, that's great news. | | Now if Macdonalds can cut salaries relative to inflation, | that's a whole other problem. | slg wrote: | I think you are projecting a moral or political argument | into my comments. That wasn't my intention. My point is | that there are more powerful levers in the government | than the inflation rate. | | Sure, having your debt reduced by 6% or whatever is good, | but the government could also easily forgive all | federally owned college debt and 100% reduction is | certainly better than 6%. Increasing the minimum wage is | another example. That would more directly benefit that | mom with 3 jobs more than inflation. | | Whatever your political goals are, there is likely a much | more powerful tool to accomplish them than nudging the | inflation rate up or down a few percentage points. | zionic wrote: | > For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as | Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary | | Huge assumption. Wages have not kept up with inflation | since the 1970's. Know what has? Asset prices. Guess who | owns stocks/gold/real estate? | long_time_gone wrote: | >It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to | hold. It doesn't apply to assets. | | Thank you!! This is the first time I've heard someone | acknowledge this since the "inflation crisis" started. | Inflation is good for student debt holders. | nightski wrote: | Could be, but it makes a lot of assumptions and is loose | with terminology. Monetary inflation does not equal price | or wage inflation necessarily. We are definitely seeing | price inflation which no longer seems to be transitory. | There does seem to be wage inflation, but that is not | guaranteed. So while if wage inflation keeps up for those | holding debt, then yes. I wonder though if those in the | position of student debt have the least leverage to take | advantage of the wage inflation. | | The other thing is that costs go up. The impact of this | is much greater if you are poor which could also affect | your ability to actually pay the loans. One has to eat | after all. | | So imho, it's a lot more complicated for an individual. | Sure for a corporation that borrows tens of millions for | a new capital expenditure it makes debt cheaper. But that | may or may not translate to someone that is poor and | paying off debt. | zionic wrote: | Their student debt might go down but so does their chance | of ever owning a home. | | They hoodwinked an entire generation of children into | going six-figures in debt, made the high school diploma | worthless etc. | | Before: -HS degree -no debt -immediately start a factory | job that makes enough for an average home, 2 cars, and a | spouse that doesn't work | | Now: -4 year degree, delaying income in prime years | -graduate with a small house-worth of debt, with no house | -your new job's earnings in real terms is barely enough | to rent -your spouse has to work too -have to make one | car work | | The American people have been robbed of their prosperity | and sold a bucket of lies. | toomanydoubts wrote: | >There are a countless other ways a country | | A country? The federal reserve is run by private | individuals. It is a private bank. Don't let the name | fool you. | IAmEveryone wrote: | Your username is incorrect. | slg wrote: | "The Federal Reserve is private" is a meme at this point | that is largely divorced from our usual meaning of | public/private. Calling the Federal Reserve Board | "private citizens" is like calling the Supreme Court | Justices "private citizens". They are both officials | appointed by the president, who must be confirmed by the | Senate, and who collect a public salary. Any profits from | the Federal Reserve go right back into the US Treasury. | What more do we need to consider this part of the | government? | nightski wrote: | While all supreme court justices are appointed, from my | understanding only the chairman is appointed correct? | Everyone that works for the fed is not necessarily | appointed? | | Maybe we say it is private but the government serves as | the board :) | | Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the | President, and Congress implies to me that the government | does not have absolute authority over the Fed. | slg wrote: | All the board members are appointed. From their | website:[1] | | >The Board of Governors--located in Washington, D.C.--is | the governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is | run by seven members, or "governors," who are nominated | by the President of the United States and confirmed in | their positions by the U.S. Senate. | | Not everyone who works for the Fed is appointed, but that | is also true of the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI, or | any other part of the government. The leaders are | political appointees and they oversee a bureaucratic | system that includes many workers who are ostensibly | apolitical. | | >Seeing the tension over the years the Chairman, the | President, and Congress implies to me that the government | does not have absolute authority over the Fed. | | Once again, just like the Supreme court. Both of these | entities are designed to be more independent of the day- | to-day political squabbles of the president and Congress. | | [1] - | https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure- | federal... | toomanydoubts wrote: | Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them | win, the winners appoint the financial elite to be board | members of the organization that is capable of printing | money and giving bailouts/buying poisoned assets from | said financial institutions. The money is not made from | FED profits, the money is made by the financial | institutions owned by the board members. What's so hard | to understand about that? It's clearly a scam. | | It does not only happen at the central-banking level, but | it's another tool used by them. Let me give you a similar | example, not directly involving central banking, from my | country. Paulo Guedes is the founder of BTG Pactual bank. | He goes on and funds the candidate Jair Bolsonaro for | presidency. Once elected, Bolsonaro appoints Guedes to | Ministry of Economy. His monetary policies decisions | makes the USD/BRL go from R$3.71 to R$5.70. November/2021 | comes by and pandora papers are released. We find out the | dude has almost 10 million USD stashed in offshore tax- | heavens. His decisions made his personal fortune grow by | 14 million BRL(equivalent to 956 years of minimum wage). | | This does not involve central banking directly but the | idea is the same: put the financial elite in positions | that allow them to make large scale decisions to grow | their personal fortunes while affecting the lives of all | others. It's a scam. | slg wrote: | >Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them | win | | Your entire point rests on this premise and once we | accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government | is already compromised. Once that happens why does the | central bank matter when everything that follows could be | accomplished some other way through that already | compromised government? That is my fundamental point. It | isn't that the central banks don't have power. It is that | a central bank's power pails in comparison to the overall | government. Therefore conspiracies theories about taking | over the government to gain control of the central bank | don't make much sense. | toomanydoubts wrote: | >Your entire point rests on this premise and once we | accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government | is already compromised. | | I agree. | | >Once that happens why does the central bank matter | | I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary | for us not to allow history to repeat itself. As Ford | once said: "It is well enough that people of the nation | do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if | they did, I believe there would be a revolution before | tomorrow morning." | slg wrote: | >I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary | for us not to allow history to repeat itself. | | But it is a symptom rather than a cause of the | corruption. The energy spent on raising public awareness | about this would likely be better served drawing | attention to what we both seem to think is the underlying | problem, the outsized influence that the wealthy have on | the government. | toomanydoubts wrote: | Fair enough. | Spooky23 wrote: | No. | | It's more akin to a public authority. | [deleted] | VirusNewbie wrote: | Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the | upper class without most people realizing it. Wealth, be it | institutions or individuals, will always push for central | banking as it entrenches their power. | whakim wrote: | Inflation is super complicated because it depends on what | types of assets are held by whom and how susceptible | those assets are to inflation. For example, high rates of | inflation during/after WWII were a large contributing | factor in a net reduction in wealth inequality, because | much of the wealthy was heavily invested in fixed-return | war bonds. Much of the rentier economy of the 19th | century elite depended on predictably low (almost | nonexistant) inflation in order to sustain their | fortunes. Theoretically, the financial assets of today's | wealthy should be somewhat less vulnerable to inflation | (real returns over the last ~80 years seem to be lower | during periods of high inflation but it's also sometimes | hard to untangle inflation from the overall state of the | economy). Ultimately, inflation is a pretty crude | instrument in terms of who it affects; I think it's hard | to make sweeping statements about who it's "good" for | that hold up well over time. | Spooky23 wrote: | That's why the regulatory environment of the 20th century | is important... Monetary policy that includes full | employment provides benefits to the broader population. | | "Hard money", gold, Bitcoin, land, etc focused policy | only benefits the return on assets for the people with | those assets. | | What we have now is the worst of both worlds. | WalterBright wrote: | > Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into | the upper class | | No, it is a means of wealth transfer to the government | without raising taxes. Where does the trillions in | deficit spending come from? Inflation! | | The politicians, of course, know this. But they keep up | the misdirection by blaming it on greedy capitalists | and/or unions. | | The notion that it is for monetary stability is also | propaganda. Milton Friedman in "Monetary History" showed | that instability _increased_ after the creation of the | Fed. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | "Inflationary monetary policy" is wealth transfer _to the | government_ (which they 're then supposed to spend on | common infrastructure, and other collaborative projects | that everybody agrees on but nobody wants to shell out | for unless everyone else is too). If the government is | supporting the upper class and leaving everyone else to | rot, no monetary policy will fix the issue. | queuebert wrote: | I think this is supposed to be true, but nowadays when | the wealthy mostly hold assets that have real value, like | real estate and equities, as opposed to USD in a bank | account, I'm not sure how well it works. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | That's what tax is for. | | Sadly, my internet degree in armchair economics doesn't | give me the ability to come up with a _functioning_ tax | system (however much I think I can _beat_ the status quo) | so I have no further pearls of wisdom. | Manuel_D wrote: | Is this really the case? Inflation favors debtors over | creditors, the upper class tends to be the latter not the | former. While it is the case that the value of savings | goes down, the lower class are much less likely to save. | vkou wrote: | It's not the case, but people keep wringing their hands | about how inflation robs the poor of the ~$500 they have | in their savings accounts, while ignoring how much it | helps the middle-class mortgage owner who is in fixed- | rate debt for a million dollars. | | They get away with it because they don't make the | distinction between price inflation and asset inflation. | The cost of bread doubling is a huge problem for the | poor, but means little to everyone else. The cost of | assets doubling doesn't matter to the poor, because they | have never, and will never save enough money to buy | assets. The cost of assets doubling matters greatly | against a yuppie who is trying to buy a home. The cost of | assets doubling matters greatly in favor of someone who | bought a home last week. | | Inflation sucks for you if you earn minimum wage, because | half the country thinks that raising the minimum wage to | keep up with inflation means will bring about the | apocalypse. Inflation doesn't matter much to you if | you're in a high-demand industry, with wages rising to | match it. Inflation sucks for you if you're not working, | but doesn't matter to you if you are, and there's a | labour shortage, which increases your wage bargaining | power. | VirusNewbie wrote: | Let's use an example that might look familiar. | | If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps | the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other | things being equal, we transferred wealth _from_ the poor | person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far? | | By the same account, if the middle class person is helped | a little bit by inflation, (but also has some cash) the | rich person who is leveraged many times over into 10 | properties, and has most of their wealth in equities | (which themselves are leveraged because of corporate | debt) is going to be even _better_ off after the increase | in money supply. | | Their share of the pie grew and the middle class persons | maybe grew, but not relative to the rich person. | Therefore, that is wealth transfer. | | The majority of US equities is held by the upper class | and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including | mortgages). | Spooky23 wrote: | All things are not equal. I know someone who was the CEO | of a small hospital network. | | When he retired, his compensation was greater than the | sum of salary for the entire company. The company paid | for his Tesla lease, but orderlies making $12/hr had a | uniform deposit deducted from their first few checks. | lotsofpulp wrote: | I would need a source to believe this. The hospital would | have had to not have any doctors on staff to come close. | Manuel_D wrote: | But you're missing the bigger picture: the rich who | _issues_ mortgages (or more likely, has stake in a real | estate company) is having their wealth transferred to the | lender. Most wealthy people loan more than they owe. If | you owe more than to loan out then by definitely you 're | not wealthy, your net worth is negative. Similarly, a | poor person who owes $20,000 on an auto loan, whose car | is now worth $25,000 just saw a significant gain. | | Inflation helps people who owe more than they lend out | (most poor and middle class people). People who lend out | more than they owe, directly or indirectly through stake | in companies that do lending, are the ones experiencing | less profit because of inflation. | VirusNewbie wrote: | You're right that the banking system is a little more | complicated than I made it out to be, but let's ignore | that for now. You agree that the majority of the fortune | 50 is holds more debt than credit, right? | | We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich | people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned | by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt | to corporate debt. | | Now as to the banking system, there's a little bit of a | feedback loop here because they're really the ones | creating money, so no they're not really a net creditor | either. I owe my bank 700k on my house, but that's _new_ | money being created in some respects. | vkou wrote: | > If inflation robs the poor person of the $500 and helps | the middle class person with a mortgage.... all other | things being equal, we transferred wealth from the poor | person to the middle class person. yay, with me so far? | | No, I'm not with you, because it's not the poor person | who is fronting a million bucks in cash that the middle | class person borrows, in order to buy the house. | | For the obvious reason that he doesn't have a million | dollars to lend out. | | FYI, corporate debt is ~60% of household debt in the | United States. (~10T vs 15T). Corporate cash balances are | ~4T, and household cash balances are ~5T. [1] Net | corporate debt is ~6T, and net household debt is ~10T. | | You look at these numbers, and you tell me - who benefits | more from having debt inflated away? | | [1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/average-savings- | account... | VirusNewbie wrote: | You need to stop viewing money in amounts and start | viewing it as % of total available money in existence. | | In our contrived example, now the middle class person | owns a bigger slice of the pie after the pie doubled in | size due to their leverage. | Spooky23 wrote: | Something like 70% of the population has no savings of | any kind. | | You know that the arguments about poor grandma with $500 | life savings are bullshit, because everyone making them | would happily let grandma die for a buck. | | The only reason resource extraction types care about | inflation is that most use debt to avoid taxation, and | increase interest rates hurt their return on assets. | Because the perversion of the US Senate has happened, we | care more about corn companies, oil drillers, etc than | anyone else. | tantaman wrote: | I'd imagine that wealthy individuals are highly | leveraged. In other words, rather than selling assets to | buy things they take loans against those assets to buy | things. This (1) prevents ever having to pay tax (2) | gives them benefits from inflation and (3) gives them | benefits from low interest rates as their assets | appreciate faster than their interest rate consumes money | Manuel_D wrote: | Most sources I read indicate the opposite: poor and | middle class people are much less likely to be debtors | rather than creditors. They're more likely to have an | auto loan rather than own a car outright. Likewise, | they're more likely to have a mortgage on their home | rather than own it. The wealthy, by comparison, are more | likely to invest their money, issuing loans to other | people. | VirusNewbie wrote: | Yes, the majority of US equities is held by the upper | class and corporate debt dwarfs consumer debt (including | mortgages). | wbsss4412 wrote: | > inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the | upper class without people realizing it. | | Going to need some evidence to back up that statement. | | Without centralized banking you essentially have no set | policy one way other the other. I can understand why one | would take issue with the current governance structure, | but I don't agree that letting money randomly fluctuate | with no mechanisms for intervention to be a good thing. | VirusNewbie wrote: | My evidence is arithmetic? Someone who is leveraged with | debt into assets now owns a larger piece of the pie | (which we can loosely define as wealth) than they did | before if the money supply increases compared to people | who aren't levered into assets or just hold cash. | thegrimmest wrote: | > _no set policy one way other the other_ | | Isn't that the idea of liberty though? No central | authority deciding what is a "good thing" - just keeping | the peace. | Spooky23 wrote: | That reductionist approach to liberty is a mirage for | teenage boys and hermits. If I can do whatever I want, | you can't. | | The United States would have been pushed into a deep | depression, but for JP Morgan's vacation plans being a | little different. Early 20th century America was not a | radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was | created underlies how fubar the system was. | thegrimmest wrote: | > was not a radical place | | By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and | bad for others, much like any other place. How | comfortable people are and how happy they are are | fundamentally unrelated to how free they are. | | > how fubar the system was | | All we basically disagree about is how the general | welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow | interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad | one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US | was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so | many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued | narrow interpretation would be catastrophic. | mcguire wrote: | " _How comfortable people are and how happy they are are | fundamentally unrelated to how free they are._ " | | That would be false. | | " _The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, | given that so many people immigrated there._ " | | That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. | Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland | does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father | was a sharecropper. | joshuamorton wrote: | That's _one_ definition of liberty, but not the only one. | I 'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to | take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society | that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty. | | You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but | ultimately deciding which things are good things or not? | thegrimmest wrote: | Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction | and providing due process for conflict resolution. | Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic | power. They are different words for a reason. You can be | very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. | Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who | can use legitimate force against you. | wbsss4412 wrote: | Your definition of liberty here is getting really | tangled. | | If liberty is "fundamentally your relationship with those | who can use legitimate force against you" then how is | having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as | long as it comes from a "legitimate" source of power? | thegrimmest wrote: | Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced | with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't | you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls | the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see | fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year | to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in | gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally | control, you'd be absolutely right. | joshuamorton wrote: | But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and | so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the | government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you | could deposit that in gold, you would still be _forced_ | to pay. The currency seems irrelevant. | | It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is | legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is | illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and | makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any | generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your | definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". | I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that | would distinguish between those two actions. | | I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency | no one could obtain, the government could equivalently | apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government | could define all speech as force or any number of other | things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, | but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency | doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be | capricious. | thegrimmest wrote: | The currency _seems_ irrelevant, but it 's not. Imagine | my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a | currency which was impossible to obtain except by | stealing it (also illegal). The government would then | hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to | arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes | and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to | pay them. | wbsss4412 wrote: | It seems like the government issuing their own currency | still isn't really the issue in this thought | experiment... | thegrimmest wrote: | It is though, since they can debase that self same | currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the | playing field when negotiating your taxes with the | government. The only reason USD has any value at all is | because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US | government in, and what US bonds are paid in. | wbsss4412 wrote: | What you're saying is essentially "imagine a government | with the power to create laws that allow arbitrary | imprisonment with no recourse, that would be tyrannical", | which, yes, but that only has to do with the currency | because that's what you chose for your example. | | Said government could pass a law stating that all | citizens must be in two places at once, and achieve the | same effect. | thegrimmest wrote: | As mentioned in a previous comment, I'm saying "Imagine a | government without broad power over general welfare". | This was the US government until 1936 with United States | v. Butler. I don't think it would be a catastrophe to | reverse this decision again. It seems that in spite of | best efforts, the US has failed to preserve the very | meaning of liberty, as it was initially envisioned, from | total deterioration even in its very definition. | wbsss4412 wrote: | The material distinction when the United States was | founded wasn't whether the state in general had broad | power over the general welfare, but whether the federal | government would. State government _did_ have such power. | wbsss4412 wrote: | Any centralized authority with a monopoly on force is | going to have to levy taxes. Otherwise you'd end up with | people just refusing to pay because they didn't get the | judgements they desire. | | If there is a state _at all_ there is force involved. I | don't really understand what you believe is possible | here. What you're discussing is tantamount to assuming | that American traditions of due process just exist in a | state of nature when they absolutely do not. | thegrimmest wrote: | I believe it's possible to have a state whose powers and | authority are fundamentally limited. I also believe that | was the original intention of US. I agree taxes must be | levied. I just disagree it's legitimate to levy them for | most of what they are spent on today. | | If I ask myself "what should the state be allowed to | do?", it's basically answered by "what would I be | comfortable holding a gun to someone's head for?". To | take a popular example: If it's wrong to hold a gun to a | doctor's head in order to force them to treat a patient | (which I think it is), and it's wrong to hold a gun to a | bystander's head to force them to pay the doctor, then | it's wrong to fund healthcare with taxation. | wbsss4412 wrote: | You would hold a gun to someone's head over petty theft | or the violation of a contractual agreement? | thegrimmest wrote: | > _over petty theft_ | | Yes, I'd have no problem shooting a thief, especially in | defence of my primary food supply. | | > _violation of a contractual agreement_ | | I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in | order to extract what compensation is due to me under a | lawful agreement. | wbsss4412 wrote: | Stealing from your primary food supply isn't really what | I had in mind when I was referring to petty theft. If | anything I meant stealing a small amount from a | significant excess. | | > I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in | order to extract what compensation is due to me under a | lawful agreement. | | So if a doctor enters into a contractual agreement with | the state to provide healthcare, then it's ok? | thegrimmest wrote: | Contracts should have monetary penalties only - you can't | sign yourself into slavery. If the doctor breaches a | contract, and the contract has provisions for what he | will pay in breach, then he must pay it or have it seized | (with force). We've long banned debtors prisons for good | reason. There's no holding a gun to anyone's head | required unless they try to stop you from seizing | property to which you have a lawful claim. | wbsss4412 wrote: | So as long as I write the laws and excite the laws I can | do whatever I want. Taxation is lawful because the | government duly passes laws asserting such claims. | Taxation therefore cannot be theft. | | Unless there is some definition of "lawful" that exists | outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the | question according to who? In this instance that someone | seems to be you. | joshuamorton wrote: | > enforcing nonviolent interaction | | By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to | prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, | right? | | > Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic | power. | | I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a | prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to | inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will | use force to prevent or remove them. | | [1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity | means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't | really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a | "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for | themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would | need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence. | thegrimmest wrote: | A homeless person can be more free than a person confined | in a mansion, can they not? | | > _By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to | prevent people from using force in disallowed ways_ | | Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the | definition of slavery and decidedly un-free. | joshuamorton wrote: | > A homeless person can be more free than a person | confined in a mansion, can they not? | | Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, | and a poor person confined in their home is less free | than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't | addressed my point. | | > Yes, since using force to compel action is basically | the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free. | | Right, so when I said | | > You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece | but ultimately deciding which things are good things or | not | | I was correct. The government decides which things are | good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents | those. Generally governments high in libetry also do | things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and | misleading people and stealing their money...reduces | liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and | should the government even do it? | thegrimmest wrote: | > _a poor person confined in their home is less free than | a rich person confined on their home_ | | I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but | they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. | | > Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty | | Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which | are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can | remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal | offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". | But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it | and relegated it to a tort. | wbsss4412 wrote: | The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there | shouldn't be any state at all. | | Why does the state need to "keep the peace"? It does so | through a monopoly on force. Why can't private | individuals simply work things out on their own however | they see fit? | | The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens | have power over collective decision making, ie the rule | of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the | minority in modern day America though. | thegrimmest wrote: | No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce | negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the | freedom from interference by or obligation to other | people. | | > _Why can't private individuals simply work things out | on their own however they see fit?_ | | They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state | provides is simply due process for the resolution of | disputes, and the expectation that this process will be | used instead of violence. | | > _The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens | have power over collective decision making_ | | This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You | can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more | hypothetically) a very free dictatorship. | wbsss4412 wrote: | I define liberty differently than you do. | | I don't accept the popular, modern definition of negative | rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It | leads to nonsensical conclusions. | | There is no such thing under my definition as a "free | dictatorship". A system where rulers aren't bound by | legitimate laws is by definition un-free. | | I don't think my definition is super far off from yours | though: liberty as non domination, one isn't subject to | the arbitrary will of another. | thegrimmest wrote: | A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's | powers are very limited, but he is not democratically | elected. | | > _liberty as non domination, one isn't subject to the | arbitrary will of another._ | | Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in | private negotiations/transactions between free, equal | people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating. | wbsss4412 wrote: | If interference with private transactions is | fundamentally authoritarian, I still don't understand how | you see any sort of state as compatible with liberty. | | Yes yes, "keeping the peace" but how is such an authority | deemed to be legitimate? Who gets to define due process? | How are they funded if not by taxation? | | At the end of the day I don't understand how you aren't | just an anarchist. | thegrimmest wrote: | The state is compatible with liberty in so far as it acts | to secure the liberty of its citizens. Again, liberty | here meaning, basically, freedom from violence by other | people. A state which acts to protect its citizens | liberty is legitimate (in my view) regardless of how its | members come to authority. Democracy (in one form or | another) seems to be the least-worst option for | administering this state (defining the process, etc.), | but to me, is it not the source of its legitimacy. | wbsss4412 wrote: | You just said that interference with private transactions | was by definition a violation of liberty, so any outside | action of the state would be at best a violation of | liberty to secure liberty, somehow. Which, is somewhat | nonsensical. There is no well defined liberty math. | thegrimmest wrote: | > _a violation of liberty to secure liberty_ | | You've pretty much got it. These are the only legitimate | violations of liberty. Doesn't seem nonsensical to me. | NoGravitas wrote: | "It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal | liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True | freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and | oppression of one person by another; where there is not | unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of | losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a | society personal and any other freedom can exist for real | and not on paper." - Ronald Reagan | opo wrote: | >- Ronald Reagan | | For those unaware, the quote is actually from Stalin. | NoGravitas wrote: | Spoilsport ;-P | thegrimmest wrote: | > _Ronald Reagan_ | | you cheeky monkey | walshemj wrote: | Unfortunately some of early American politicians had some | cranky ideas about central banks - which caused some | economic depressions. | SantalBlush wrote: | Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 | is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could | not vote. Seriously, give me a break. | mistrial9 wrote: | my ancestors had property rights and university education | for women, always anti-slavery.. please do not lump me into | your vague assertion | | edit- the USA was divided strongly between states, which | had constitutions of their own. There was a very bright | line between the Massachusetts colonies and the Virginia | colonies, and then others.. Property rights and real | education for women were a large topic! slavery was hated | for good reasons .. the social contract that "my particular | ancestors" created, specifically are what the PP were | dismissing.. its inaccurate to dismiss that | hiptobecubic wrote: | What do your specific ancestors have to do with anything? | mbg721 wrote: | We also had one of the strongest eugenics movements in the | world, under the same progressive flag as women's suffrage. | It took the horrors of WWII to snap us out of it. | jacobr1 wrote: | And it set us back because we overcorrected. The biggest | evil of historical eugenics was the non-consensual | application, not the idea that we should improve the gene | pool. | | This thread is an interesting summary of possible | "eugenics" type applications and if those surveyed | consider them moral today: | | https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1462824227090976772 | mbg721 wrote: | The Catholic Church still opposes all of those except for | offering network support and feeding single mothers (in | which cases it recommends generosity). I don't think | that's an overcorrection; I think it's the result of | thinking very hard about human dignity over many | generations. | NoImmatureAdHom wrote: | Maybe you mean different things? | kaesar14 wrote: | Why is freedom defined differently if you exclude slavery | and women's rights? | thegrimmest wrote: | It was a free country, for a subset of the population. I | would suggest that the idea of liberty, the definition, was | as worthy then as it is now. I would also completely agree | with the expansion of the people who are entitled to it. | georgeecollins wrote: | You can't completely discount the past because it doesn't | meet a modern standard. It's certain that something many | are doing today will be considered abhorrent in one hundred | years. So are we all today too evil to bother with? Are you | no worse than a murderer because you live in our flawed | times? I doubt it. There were people and institutions | before 1920 that were terrible and some that should be | celebrated. | jollybean wrote: | Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and | liberating achievements of civilization. | | And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your | employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, | you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% | did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything | in life. | | And what 'freedoms' have you lost? | | Well, there's more taxation. | | And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to | buy it from you. | | And you have to prove drugs work before selling them. | | You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they | don't die on the job. | | What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain? | mwint wrote: | > And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants | to buy it from you. | | Never thought about this before: Suppose I'm Black, respond | to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am | refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state | prosecute the seller under? | | Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to | companies, usually companies with more than N employees. | tlholaday wrote: | > What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? | | Start your research with Title VII of the Civil Rights | Act of 1964. | mwint wrote: | https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights- | act-196... - looks like this is all about employment, and | even then only applies to those employing more than N | employees: | | > The term "employer" means a person engaged in an | industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more | employees [...] | | I suppose the root of my question is this: Where is the | law stating that an individual cannot act with prejudice | against another individual, outside of an employment | context? I've always assumed such a law exists, but never | asked exactly where it is. | selimthegrim wrote: | Probably more relevant to dealerships | thegrimmest wrote: | I'd be keen to be able to employ people without the | government intervening in negotiations (minimum wage, | various employment laws, etc.). I don't think the | government has any place deciding what I can and can't | offer. I also would like to be able to use my own judgement | when hiring people, without having to worry about proving | (the negative) that I'm not being discriminatory. | | Workers have always had the freedom to strike. And | employers should have the freedom to terminate striking | employees. I don't see the need for regulation here. The | "freedom" to attend college has created a mountain of | student debt and an overeducated workforce. I fail to see | the benefit. | | All in all, directly, I'd like to live in a society where | people are entitled to only what they can negotiate for, | not more. And one that does not strive to protect people | from the consequences of their own misfortune or | inadequacy. | CryptoPunk wrote: | There is absolutely nothing liberating about central | banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that | monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence | (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance). | | It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of | dollars in national capital allocations every year, with | virtually no democratic oversight. | | It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of | corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in | wealth inequality that goes along with that. | | It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the | government mortgage guarantee program, where financial | institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government | guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are | 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year. | | >>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your | employer, | | You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get | the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and | not replace you, while you strike. | | This power has given public sector unions total control | over public finances. | | For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public | sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: | | https://archive.md/JnJQY | | In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% | of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. | | California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for | its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the | social welfare spending is going. | | >>Well, there's more taxation. | | Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, | to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy. | | >>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants | to buy it from you. | | And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less | advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination | lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from | corporations for their failure to comply with impossible- | to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing | the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti- | racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed | omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute | affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead | to less competent work forces, respectively. | | >>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them. | | Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory | gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people | from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a | timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine | due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude | lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5] | | >>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, | | Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have | improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per | capita productivity, which makes people far more | independent and assertive. | | >>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about | 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost | anything in life. | | That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, | which enables more people to be supported through their | post-secondary schooling years. | | The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 | could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced | economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has | steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last | several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement | or reversal. | | [1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as- | saddam-sta... | | [2] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained- | why-co... | | [3] https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist- | created-a-... | | [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus- | testing-de... | | [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson- | johns... | didericis wrote: | Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result | primarily of central banking and not social and | technological change? | | The key freedom lost via central banking (at least | irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in | the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. | | Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money | easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good | thing, but if debt obligations grow too large, people | increasingly forfeit their future productivity and the | future of their children's productivity to paying interest. | | No one can enjoy increased freedoms if they are spending | all their time paying off individual and collective | interest. | md_ wrote: | I'm confused. If you mean _public_ debt, doesn't central | banking free the public from meeting debt obligations | when those obligations are denominated in the national | currency? | | Countries can and do issue public debt in other | currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there's no | reason to think public debt would be lower. But the | obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to | dodge. | | It's worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on | cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward | (though I would expect this to change): | https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has- | increa.... | User23 wrote: | The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize | seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to | control politicians. The former is achieved through the | Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self- | explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is | electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very | nearly the entire face value of the created instrument. | | It's a blatantly undemocratic power grab, effectively | allowing a consortium of private banks to limit | Congress's power of the purse. Or at least that was the | theory. As we're seeing now, that one putative upside is | nonexistent and the Fed is happy to cooperate with | Treasury to spend trillions a year. The rentier class | appears to be consoling itself with massive asset | inflation, while still banking the seigniorage. | | The United States could just as easily once again fund | all of its spending by creating new U.S. Notes[2] | (perhaps without the public debt clause) and then control | inflation by extinguishing those liabilities through | taxation. | | [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/seigniorage.asp | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note | md_ wrote: | It seems like you're defining "central banking" in | relation to the independence (or maybe ownership of) the | central bank. That doesn't seem correct to me. | | China has a central bank, but it's fully publicly owned | and is not politically independent of the CCP. The ECB, | in comparison, is owned by the central banks of | constituent banks. And on the other extreme, the Swiss | National Bank is publicly traded and a minority of its | shares are privately held (i.e., not by governments). | (Perhaps related or perhaps not, the Swiss Franc also has | historically had very high trust and very low inflation.) | | My point is, there are multiple flavors of "central bank" | ownership and independence; it seems odd to argue that | the primary purpose of central banking is to allow | private bankers to violate political oversight when, in | some cases, the bank is fully public and not politically | independent. Conversely, some examples of significantly | more private central banks than the Fed seem to show a | history of good management in the public interest. | selimthegrim wrote: | The UK has plenty of private banks printing notes - it | doesn't seem to hurt them. | MR4D wrote: | > If we all used gold or bitcoin, there's no reason to | think public debt would be lower. | | For reference, public debt tends to be higher when based | in currencies that can be more easily debased. This was | true in Roman times as it is now. | | I'm on my phone, so I'd have to look up the book, but | it's well documented. | md_ wrote: | Entirely possible, but defaults tend to be higher when | debt is in a currency that cannot be debased, for | somewhat obvious reasons. | jacobr1 wrote: | There is a constraint the prevents (some) countries from | more frequent debasement: if you debase your currency, | then lenders will increasingly require that future debt | be issued in an external currency. And even if you find | lenders, the purchasing power provided in the debased | currency remains constrained by external trade in non- | debased currencies. | MR4D wrote: | You make a very good point. | | I should have noted that this applies only when it's your | own currency. | jollybean wrote: | " why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily | of central banking and not social and technological | change?" | | I didn't mean to imply that. | | Most of those things didn't come from Central Banking. | | That said, modern finance has 'enabled everything' just | like having a highly literate education 'enables | everything' as well. | toomanydoubts wrote: | They have also enabled commercial banks loaning other | people money irresponsibly and getting obscenous bailouts | when the loan takers default because "the banks are too | big to fail". What a great world to live in. | Aunche wrote: | > irresponsible central banking | | Would you also consider triple bypass surgery done on | morbidly obese patient as irresponsible? It enables bad | behavior and arguably the patient may be better off dead | than living in a life of pain, but it's undeniable that | emergency heart surgery is a good thing. | pzo wrote: | Current situation looks for me more like a surgeon doing | this triple bypass, and also keep selling junk food and | cigarettes to this patient on another shift. | Aunche wrote: | How exactly the Federal Reserve selling junk food and | cigarettes? Nothing they do is pressuring Congress to | increase our deficit. | toolz wrote: | > What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain? | | For me I'd like to not pay money for the "privilege" of | having a central organization constantly and | unapologetically spy on me. | pjbk wrote: | Interesting to see how sacrificing some freedoms to give | more freedom to others in the short term, eventually | enhances your same former freedoms in the medium or long | term. | atlgator wrote: | Has Central Banking been liberating or do we only perceive | it as such because it has historically aligned with | American business and political interests? Would a small | South American country being forced to sell it's natural | resources or lose it's borrowing power agree? Would Middle | Eastern countries that tried to form the petro dollar and | were met with endless wars agree? | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | It would be nice if the cost of rungs in the social later | (housing, education, etc) wasn't so high that only certain | kinds of people could achieve them. | | Many of the "your not allowed to do that"s of the past are | still in place for entire neighborhoods, only the words | changed. | jollybean wrote: | In 1922 only 5% of people went to University - now 50% go | on to post secondary which is largely due to cost and | opportunity. | | Only about 50% finished HS - now it's 95%. | | Doctors were not very affordable by anyone - now it's | >90%. | | Most people didn't have running water and electricity yet | now it's almost 100%. | | The only thing that's not as nice as 'real estate' - | housing was cheap, but the houses were crap, and often | you were isolated. | | If you want to go out of major US urban area, and build a | small home to 1925 standards, then it's affordable. | | But if you are young, then I am actually sympathetic to | you: education and housing costs are 'worse' now than in | then 1990's. Those are the two things I will say Gen Z | 'has it hard' with. That, and having to grow up where | everyone has social media, which is _not_ a social | benefit, it 's dystopian if you ask me. | scottLobster wrote: | All of those facts are meaningless without context. | | Higher education is far more necessary for even a middle | class existence than it was in 1922, and the middle class | is getting less and less affordable. One of my | grandfathers worked a family farm. My dad was able to | grind his way out of the lower classes by working at | Friendly's and other odd jobs to pay for college (up to | and including his PhD). My father in law's uncle was a | high school dropout who started showing people around at | the local hardware store and was such a good salesperson | the owner hired him after a few weeks. None of those are | possible for most Americans these days (good luck pulling | the leave-it-to-beaver "prove my value to the local store | owner" at Home Depot or Walmart). | | US citizens are now regularly advised to take Uber to the | hospital if they can survive the trip, as it avoids the | cost of an ambulance, which is often over a thousand | dollars in a country where most can't afford a $500 | emergency. I'm not sure how that qualifies as | "affordable", and certainly not affordable to 90%+. | Granted this is primarily an American issue. | | More important to me than the quality of the house is the | quality of the school district that it's in (see previous | remarks about the modern necessity of education). I can | fix/improve a house, I can't fix/improve schooling short | of private school, which would probably be more expensive | than fixing a house over the long term. Good look finding | an affordable house in a good school district near any | major metropolitan area with jobs. | Retric wrote: | A 1922s "middle class" experience is affordable for a | most Americans today. As in shelter with heat, phone | service, and electric lights but no appliances, no car, | minimal access to effective healthcare etc. | | Upward mobility is still available and just as rare. The | health, intelligence, and drive that allowed someone in | 1922 to better themselves are the same things that still | allow someone to better themselves in 2022. It's not | easy, but it was never easy. Just look at how many people | in 1922 where held back by the color of their skin. | | As to getting a job at Walmart, have you ever actually | applied? Their standards are incredibly lax. | scottLobster wrote: | So? A middle class experience from 1622 is also | affordable for most Americans today, and now we don't | have to worry about raids from the natives! Clearly we | have no right to complain /s | | I'm not arguing things are equivalent to 1922 on an | absolute scale, but on a relative scale they're closer | than they were in the recent past. The prosperity of the | previous century has shifted the goal posts for what | defines upper, middle and lower class. But after a long | period of shifting the goal posts in a positive | direction, we've had three or four decades of things | shifting in the opposite direction, and that trend | appears to be accelerating for the moment. | | As for upward mobility, that largely only exists for | people with college degrees these days. And even then | only a few select degrees are really worth anything. And | college costs are insanely inflated compared to where | they were in 1980, let alone 1922. Is it possible to | better oneself in 2022? Sure, but I'd argue there were | much more opportunities for middle class people just 40 | years ago. A Unionized coal miner with experience could | make an upper middle class salary without the burden of | higher education that costs as much as a house. Ditto for | many factory jobs. | | A job at Walmart making minimum wage that hasn't been | adjusted for inflation for decades does not have anything | resembling the same purchasing power as a minimum wage | job 60 years ago. Walmart jobs are notorious for | requiring food stamps despite working full time hours. | [deleted] | Retric wrote: | A higher percentage of Americans are going to collage in | 2020. They are also graduating with more debt, so is it | more or less affordable? That's a more complex question | than it might appear as students are in many cases | choosing a very expensive education when more economical | options are available. | | It's similar to how new cars in 2020 are both | substantially more expensive on average but also of | vastly higher quality. In both cases the cheapest options | represent a tiny slice of the overall market suggesting | cost is generally less an imposition by outside forces | than a choice. | Ancapistani wrote: | I'm explicitly not replying to the meat of your comment, | because I don't feel like I have anything to add to the | productive discussion in this thread - which, by the way, | I'm really enjoying reading :) | | That said, this stood out to me: | | > A job at Walmart making minimum wage [...] | | According to Glassdoor[1], a retail cashier at Walmart | with no experience earns an average of $22,049 / year. | Assuming 50 weeks @ 40 hours per week, that's $11.05 / | hour. | | That does not include cash bonuses or profit sharing, | which Glassdoor says adds another ~$1k. | | Indeed.com[2] shows the average wage for a Walmart | cashier is $10.56 - so we're at least in the right | ballpark above. | | My own experience at Walmart was unloading trucks from | 4pm-1am the summer after I graduated high school (2002). | I made $7.25 / hour then, when the minimum wage was | $5.15. | | Trying to build a life on that kind of money isn't easy, | and I'm not trying to say that it is; I _do_ want to | point out that even Walmart doesn 't pay minimum wage as | a rule. | | That's not to say there aren't other "tricks" that | employers use, like limiting hours to prevent employees | from qualifying from full-time benefits and such. There | are. | | The minimum wage in 1982 was $3.25. Today it's $7.25. The | purchasing power of the minimum wage has certainly | decreased, but I strongly suspect that many more | businesses paid minimum wage in 1982 than 2022. | | McDonald's in my town of <15k people pays $13/hr with no | experience, with a $500 signing bonus and a guaranteed | $1/hr raise at six and twelve months. The largest | manufacturing employer here produce stamped sheet metal | parts, and they have a large sign and banners lining the | road claiming $18/hr, a $1,500 signing bonus, and fully | paid family benefits. My California-based "healthtech" | company employer doesn't even have health insurance as | good as theirs. | | 1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Guest- | Service-Team-... | | 2: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Walmart/salaries | elhudy wrote: | Further, healthcare costs are only "affordable" insofar | as we are adding them to our country's growing debt via | medicare. | msikora wrote: | USA is pretty dystopian. I'm an immigrant from the EU, | and like most of us here I work in tech where the wages | and benefits are very good (wages quite a bit better than | even the richer EU countries and benefits on par I would | say). But for the lower middle class and below it | absolutely sucks in the US compared to most other | countries with similar levels of development... | mbg721 wrote: | I would argue, as many would, that a high-school graduate | now is much worse off now than a high-school dropout a | century ago. Jobs are much more specialized, you can't | rely on working on "the family farm", and the prestige of | a high-school diploma has tanked to "You don't have this, | what's wrong with you??" | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | All of these improvements, numerically speaking, and yet | my wife regularly has classes of 40 where none of the | students have parents that went to college, a quarter of | them need glasses that they can't afford, and an eighth | is homeless. | | The size of the group that benefits from modernization is | indeed growing, as your numbers point out, but if you're | not in that group you're just as stuck as you've ever | been. | deeg wrote: | I couldn't disagree more. Today's American society has way | more liberty than it did in 1912. Blacks, women, Native | Americans, LBGTQ+, other minorities: all live better today | than whatever period you want to choose. Native American | children were forced from their homes into institutionalize | schools. In NYC tenements the police conducted midnight raids | to force people to be vaccinated for smallpox (a worthy end | but a terrible means). Women didn't have the right to vote. | As others mentioned, Jim Crow ruled the South. There really | is no comparison. | peakaboo wrote: | I don't think the US is free at all, and would be interested | in seeing facts that back it up. I see a country run like a | corporation, where media, tech and science are carrying out | very specific instructions from their handful of billionaire | owners to steer the ship where they want it to go. | | You can think what you want in the US but you cannot express | it publicly if you have a significant following. You will get | blocked, censored, ridiculed etc. | | Maybe you mean something else with freedom? Freedom to carry | out work and get payed for it? Sure. | deanCommie wrote: | > the United States is still one of the most free ... | countries on the planet. | | By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude? | | Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries | maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom | abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th | in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], | probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top". | | [0] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking?wprov=sfla1 | | [1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom?w | pro... | jandrese wrote: | You are looking at this all wrong. If you want maximum | freedom you need to go to a place like rural Somalia. As | long as you have the most guns nobody will tell you how to | live your life. Want to rape children all day long? Nobody | is going to stop you. Want to kill your neighbors and steal | their stuff? Total freedom. No nanny state government is | going to try to take your money to build roads or remove | the dead bodies. | p1esk wrote: | Anyone who has "the most guns" will have "maximum | freedom" anywhere. Somalia, USA, England, anywhere. The | difference is it's easier to be the person with the most | guns in Somalia than in US. However we are talking about | freedom of ordinary citizens, not about being the most | powerful individual in your country. | causality0 wrote: | Depends on your definition of freedom, certainly. If your | primary definition is "the range of behaviors for which the | government will not prosecute you", it's probably the | highest one not currently involved in a civil war. | xdennis wrote: | Those rankings are very biased. The press one used to | penalize countries at one point for not having journalist | unions (don't know if they still do). | | As an example, the US press was allowed to publish on the | Snowden leaks but in the UK policemen forced The Guardian | to smash their hard drives. UK is 11 places above the US: | https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2021 | | The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. For | example: none include self defense possession, but do | include same sex marriage (something that was invented two | decades ago). | deanCommie wrote: | I assure you, same sex marriage wasn't invented two | decades ago. [0] | | What was invented two decades ago is treating gay people | with enough humanity to begin to CONSIDER giving them the | same universal freedoms as straight people get. | | So yeah, at this point, in 2022, same-sex marriage is an | objective basic freedom. I am not interested in any | religion-based counterarguments. Anyone's freedom to hold | religious beliefs cannot impune on OTHER people's | freedom, regardless of what religious people will claim. | | Self-defense posession is a subjective one, I agree. I | personally think it's an archaic freedom desire [1] | (Honestly, to me comparable "I want the freedom to be | able to beat my slave"). But I understand the alternative | arguments. This one happens to be something on which the | US is a massive outlier from the rest of the "developed" | world. | | The main point, though, is I don't think people on | HackerNews seeking "freedom" are talking about freedom to | own guns. I might be wrong. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same- | sex_marriage#Ancient | | [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000520/gun-risk-death | long_time_gone wrote: | >The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. | | Is there another way to index multiple countries and | measure against each other? | | Sounds like you might disagree with the freedoms they | chose rather than the process of defining and measuring | "freedom." That may be an expression of your own bias. | mardifoufs wrote: | Those rankings have absolutely 0 values. We are currently | under our 2nd curfew in less than a year, I can't go | outside after 10pm under the threat of a 2000$ fine (which | the police is very heavily enforcing) and yet we are way up | there in the list you linked. Complete joke | bennysomething wrote: | Are you in the USA? I didn't know you had curfews!? | mardifoufs wrote: | In canada currently. 6th month of curfews this year... | but at least this time it's until 10 pm and not 8pm like | the first curfew. So I guess that's something lol | deanCommie wrote: | Well, when we're in the middle of a Global Pandemic, with | the 5th-highest death toll in human history [0], a couple | things have to change temporarily, don't you think? | | Also, this is a Quebec-only curfew. Take it up with your | provincial government. If separated as a country, perhaps | Quebec wouldn't make the list. Quebec has plenty of other | counter-freedom policies including your government- | endorsed islamophobia. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#By_de | ath_tol... | mardifoufs wrote: | You are contradicting yourself. It's a global pandemic | yet only quebec is going for these absolutely ridiculous | measures. Hence why it's _ludicrous_ for canada to be | higher than the US. And it 's been 2 years, it's not | exactly temporary, especially since there's literally no | scientific backing for a _curfew_ in a pandemic and our | government is not even pretending that there is any. At a | certain point the "it's a global pandemic" excuse just | does not work and you get well into the threshold of a | non free society and I think we are well past that in | quebec. | | Also, quebec is still part of canada. So again, your | point is just strange. You are just deflecting very | weakly what I said. | dukeofdoom wrote: | Many non renewable resources are past peak production, and | declining fast. Austerity will be next. But it will be | disguised as saving the environment. So that not only do you | do not blame your politicians for being poorer. You will be | blamed for over consuming and destroying the environment. | | Energy crisis, like running out of heating gas is already | hitting Europe. And shortages of fertilizer will be here this | spring. China and Russia are not exporting. US doesn't make | enough. Farmers will be planting without it. Expect higher | food prices and possibly food shortages. | | Things are running short in the supply chain, from chips to | little bits and pieces. When things break, they will break | fast. Make a plan B people. The wave is coming. | belorn wrote: | There are trouble brewing in EU over energy and food | prices, but at the same time there are mitigating factors. | The cut that middle men get for food has risen sharply the | last few decades, especially for the kind of food that | risen most in price. The more the customer pays in stores, | the more incentive there is from the producers to cut the | middle men. As an example, around 1/3 of the price for raw | beef goes to the producer where I live, which is a result | of low competition among the middle men, strict regulation, | and a lack of innovation in the direct-to-customer space. | | Energy prices was at a historical low just last year. This | year the price has doubled compared to last year, but | compared to 10 years ago its the same. People need to have | a plan B, through hopefully it will involve investments to | use modern standards and energy efficient heating. | mistrial9 wrote: | this is horribly misguided to say "disguised as saving the | environment" .. it is conflating real environmental crisis | with political posturing.. It is intellectually lazy to | blur two big topics like this.. | dukeofdoom wrote: | I'm not conflating anything that hasn't been done. | Political posturing around saving thr environment is | exactly how politician convinced a vast section of the | professional class that solar is a solution to our energy | needs. Despite it being much less reliable, producing | minuscule amounts of energy in large parts of the country | and requiring a much more complicated supply chain. Even | solar's claimed environmental benefits are vastly over | stated. | | For poorer people, stuck in older homes with baseboard | heaters. The rising price of electricity meant they | couldn't heat their home as much. So they're already | suffering. While also being told by politicians its | better for the environment this way. | | A better, vastly more reliable, and powerful alternative | of building new nuclear plants lost out due to political | posturing around the environment. My province of Ontario, | killed two nuclear projects, and our electrical prices | nearly doubled. The professional class deference to "feel | good" saving the environment experts they see on TV is a | bummer to see. But they will not be isolated from these | feel good, but poor decisions into the future. So I don't | need to convince anyone. The bill will come due. | selfhoster11 wrote: | It's not just intellectually lazy, it's deadly. The last | thing we need is to conflate politics with a catastrophe | that will wipe out our lifestyle, a significant | proportion of species, and potentially our civilization. | dukeofdoom wrote: | This reads more like am emotional outburst from somone | with a belief system than an actual opinion. It's hard to | argue against belief systems. And it will probably be | taken by you in entirely the wrong way. It would be like | trying to convincing a hasidic jew the messiah isn't | coming. Kind of rude to even try. | selfhoster11 wrote: | I can't tell whether you're describing my own comment or | my parent comment. Which one are you describing here? | EGreg wrote: | Yes and no. | | You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. It | allows you to own things. For example, the Web disrupted AOL, | MSN, Compuserve, cable channels, radio stations, journalism, | etc. But then, people started to just make their own | "private" sites bigger. "I built it -- I own it!" OK, so Mark | Z owns facebook, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and so forth. Our | public discussions take place on "privately owned" platforms | (really, owned by Wall Street bigwigs, but even they can't | vote Mark Z out, they try and fail every year). | | So basically the current system has led to a bunch of | surveillance capitalism. That iPhone and Kindle can yank the | apps and books you "own" out from under you. That Alexa and | Siri listens to whatever you say all the time. That car you | "own" will also soon have a bunch of software downloaded to | make sure you are limited in what you can do -- which is | probably the scariest thing because some sleeper attack can | make all cars suddenly crash into gas stations at once. | | In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a | small level but then you get these large corporations that | continue "owning" things, and not giving them to you | (infrastructure, backend software, AI data sets, you name it | -- even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights). | | This IS a feature of capitalism, that we might want to rein | in. Perhaps there should be a principle that courts would | enforce private property less and less when it came to scale. | So on a small scale (enforce my right to chattel property, my | first 3 houses etc.) it's fine. But just what does it mean | that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability | to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, | just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with | Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"? The land used to | belong to some natives hundreds of years ago, or some other | group that the current group just "took" from them. What | moral system are you going to appeal to, that would allow | unlimited private property ownership? Even John Locke's | "homsteading" concept had a "proviso" saying that you should | only own that which you can reasonably use. Even Adam Smith | writing about the "invisible hand" was _actually_ writing | about how the Rich are led by an invisible hand to distribute | goods _equally_ (in his time) because they can only eat so | much. | | We see this pathology in online systems as well. Just like | Bitcoin and Ethereum allow sending unlimited amounts of money | in a fixed time for a fixed fee, this necessarily causes a | bottleneck somewhere (proof of work miner, for instance, or | everyone storing everything, leading to "flash loans" and | other crap on the "world computer"). Actually, they charge | the maximum fee for every transaction (even sending 5 cents) | because the entire network secures everything. It's built for | really huge transfers. | | It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and | happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to | enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited | value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be | centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus | leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to | the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the | top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using | the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. | Keep it decentralized whenever you can. | Ancapistani wrote: | > You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. | | Private property absolutely existed under fuedalism as | well, albeit in a more limited form for most people. Serfs | generally worked land privately owned by - or granted by | the crown to - private individuals. Minor nobles had | property rights equal to and exceeding those of private | landowners today. | | Property other than real estate was privately owned by | serfs. This included all of their possession and in many | cases and countries, their homes. They were usually | nominnaly free to move elsewhere, though in practice this | rarely happened for cultural and practical reasons. | | > So basically the current system has led to a bunch of | surveillance capitalism. | | I agree completely with this, except for the "capitalism" | part. Our current system has arisen in an increasingly | regulatory environment, and most of the issues with it are | directly attributable to that. | | > In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a | small level but then you get these large corporations that | continue "owning" things [...] | | Ah, this strikes me as important. The concept of the | corporation - or more specifically, limited liability - is | 100% a product of our governmental system. One place where | I break from the mainstream in a big way is that I believe | that those responsible for a company should be responsible | personally for damages caused by that company. How that | breaks down between employees, managers, officers, and | shareholders is left as an exercise for the reader but | suffice it to say that when Exxon covers the Gulf of Mexico | with crude oil I believe the damage caused by that should | be remedied by everyone involved, including those who | allegedly own a share of ownership in the company. | | > even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights | | My position here is very adequately described by "Against | Intellectual Property", by Stephan Kinsella | | https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 | | > But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and | see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY | living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted | with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some | "deed of ownership"? | | It means that if people don't agree with your practices as | a landlord, they shouldn't rent from you. If it's that | egregious, homeowners should decide not to sell to you or | to demand a higher price. | | If people don't want to rent from you, you will have to | lower your prices to maintain occupancy. If people don't | want to sell to you, you'll have to increase your offers to | continue to grow. Both of those things decrease | profitability. When they intersect, then you'll have to | start selling those houses to recoup your investment. | | > Even John Locke [...] > Even Adam Smith [...] | | John Locke and Adam Smith are surely foundational, but they | are hardly representative of our modern concept of | "Capitalism". | | For that matter, Thomas Paine is usually thought of as one | of America's Founders; he'd likely be considered a | Communist today based on the ideas he wrote about. | | > It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, | and happens through enforcement of some rules. The | resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed | for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they | shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining | elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge | centralized server farm) to the point that you get these | pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with | the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. | Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized | whenever you can. | | This statement is really interesting to me. I'm an Anarcho- | Capitalist. Obviously, based on your post here, you and I | have very different ideas of what an optimal socioeconomic | system would look like. | | ... yet I completely agree with the statements | "Centralization is bad" and "Keep it decentralized". I | would go so far as to say that while our policy ideas | aren't compatible, our worldviews _are_. We could likely | work together to build something that worked well and that | we both hated in equal measure. :) | [deleted] | cm2012 wrote: | This is one of the wrongest comments I've ever seen on HN, | hah. | Enginerrrd wrote: | This comment adds nothing to the discussion, and hackernews | isn't the place for comments such as these. If you disagree | with the ideas, elaborate and disect those you take issue | with. Additionally, please keep the tone civil, disagreeing | and adding nothing more that saying "hah" is not really the | maturity level expected in debates on HN. | cm2012 wrote: | Fair point, I've now elaborated in a child comment. | cscurmudgeon wrote: | Which part is wrong? Some parts are obviously correct. | | The US is definitely one of the most diverse large | countries. India is probably more diverse along language | lines. China is definitely not along any dimension. Even | the EU states (that depend on US for defense and use oil to | power their economies) are less diverse. | cm2012 wrote: | Some parts are correct, true. Mostly "It's ALWAYS a safe | bet to assume people will lose liberty." is really wrong. | | The US is a far more free country now than it was 100 | years ago or at any point since the introduction of | agriculture. | | Compared to one hundred years ago, there's political | changes: | | - Minorities and women can vote | | - Labor rights | | - Consumer protections (No more debtor prisons, etc.) | | And tech changes: | | - People aren't stuck on their farms all day | | - Families aren't stuck doing chores all day | | - Birth control has allowed sexual freedom | | - The trains, planes, cars and the internet has allowed | freedom of location | | Etc. | xdennis wrote: | Then it should be easy to say what's wrong with it. | rbanffy wrote: | My favorite way to characterize this is "it's not even | wrong". | LatteLazy wrote: | Sounds mostly right... | hooande wrote: | > They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are | that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, | if as much. | | honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about | right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting | back on the general time overhead of working in an office. | | I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've | become less enterprising due to class immobility. but we do | seem to be getting more efficient with our time | idiotsecant wrote: | >honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about | right. | | This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great | privilege. Most people in the US are _not_ remote workers | that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be | physically present doing things like retail service work, | manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc. | | The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that | has benefited enormously from recent economic trends, a | benefit that is not distributed evenly. Many (most?) people | are working more then they ever did for an increasingly | smaller piece of the pie. | sologoub wrote: | > Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to | work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically | present doing things like retail service work, | manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc. | | This is not entirely accurate -- as much as 69% of all | full-time employees worked remotely during the pandemic: | https://news.gallup.com/poll/355907/remote-work- | persisting-t... | | While we certainly do have professions that require in- | person presence, it's not every role in those professions | and certainly many more people can enjoy the benefits of | remote work. Those who cannot should be rewarded for that | and added enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate. | rbanffy wrote: | > Those who cannot should be rewarded for that and added | enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate. | | This is more or less the opposite of what happens to | these professionals - they are often those who are paid | the least and work the longest hours under hourly | contracts on multiple jobs (because, if they worked more | in a single job, the company would have to give those | benefits). | sologoub wrote: | Yeah it's what happens, but I'm of strong opinion that | this part needs to change. Unfortunately, some of the | hardest jobs don't come with enough dignity, let a long | pay. | rbanffy wrote: | It's shameful that in the richest country in the world | there are people being forced to work 12 or more hours a | day just to survive. | | And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't | live without payment. | sologoub wrote: | > And going to work with COVID symptoms because they | can't live without payment. | | That's a very grotesque illustration of perverse | incentives. Ask anyone, I doubt they'll tell you that | it's worth having a sick person show up to work over | providing sick leave/benefits and yet, here we are. | jacobr1 wrote: | While you see plenty of press decrying the shrinking middle | class ... it still is the majority of the US! Even things | like living in a detached single family home, still is | something that 70% of Americans do, even if homeownership | is down and rents are up. All economic trends happen at the | margin, 2% here, 5% there. Big shifts, even over decades, | are rarer. | krapp wrote: | I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be | amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the | present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A | sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson | much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise | the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. | | Hubris... hubris never changes. | thejohnconway wrote: | Hubris? I think he was right, and that the world of 1822 was | more different from 1922 than 1922 is to now. Computers seem to | be the primary novel invention in the last hundred years, but | long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine | sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924). | | 1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world that was in many ways the | same as it had been for millennia. 1922 was a world where rapid | transportation (planes , trains, and automobiles),recorded | images and sounds, electric light, radio broadcasts and | instantaneous intercontinental communication. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | > but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax | machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away | (1924). | | "Quantity has a quality all its own" | | -Joseph Stalin | | Saying the fax let us move information long distance is like | saying global trade was around in the middle ages because | Macro Polo. The quantity difference is so big it becomes a | qualitative difference. | | I can arrange to have an arbitrary industrial doodad show up | on my doorstep from literally the other side of the world | while taking a shit. I can stream 1080p to/from damn near | anywhere on the planet. In 30sec I can get answers to | specific technical questions that would have taken hours for | the president of the US to get an answer to in 1990. The list | goes on. Communication and information are just so much more | abundant than they were even 75yr ago. | Brendinooo wrote: | I get what you're saying, but I think I disagree. Ordering | on Amazon from your phone is a much faster experience that | reaches more products, but it is an analogue to mailing in | an order from the Sears catalog. I don't think there's an | 1822 analogue to the Sears catalog. | | And the quote was about "surprise". I don't think it'd be a | complete shock to see that the world got more connected, | ordering became easier, deliveries became faster. In 1822 | the railroad was very much still in its early stages; the | Erie Canal had just been completed, the Pony Express and | the telegraph were still almost 40 years away. | | Put differently, a lot of "0 to 1" stuff had happened by | 1922. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | >Put differently, a lot of "0 to 1" stuff had happened by | 1922. | | How much of that 0-1 is stuff that existed in some niche | or experimental capacity prior to 1822 but simply became | possible at scale? | | We had writing for millennia but the printing press | changed the world. | | We've had steel for millennia but the Bessemer process | changed the world. | | We've always been able to send information long distances | but digital communications changed the world. | | You can always pick whatever specific innovations you | want as the 0-1 transition point but it's the widespread | availability of something that changes the world. | Brendinooo wrote: | I don't think I disagree with your point, I just think | that your point doesn't speak to the "who would be more | surprised" question. And, thinking about it, maybe 0-1 | wasn't a good way for me to make that case. | | To order something from Amazon from your toilet, you need | | - indoor plumbing | | - computing | | - electricity | | - industrialized mass production | | - global connectivity | | - global transportation network | | Someone in 1922 could imagine a telephone in a bathroom | that could be used to contact a Sears-like company to | order a mass-produced product and have it delivered from | a faraway place. | | In 1822 you barely have the idea of industrialization and | electricity, let alone anything else. "Write a letter | from your cesspit to have a product from St. Louis | delivered to New York, but your letter is instantly | delivered instead of taking six weeks, production is | faster and cheaper than your local craftsman (it's not | being made to order!), and instead of taking six weeks to | ship it, it takes two days (2022) or a week(?) (1922)." | It's not just that the same kind of thing is happening at | a grander scale, it requires a fundamental reorientation | of how you'd think about consuming products. | | So yeah, Amazon's scale in 2022 is astronomically greater | than Sears's in 1922 and that is significant, but they | share way more fundamentals than 1822 and 1922 did. | jameshart wrote: | "1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world" | | In fact, gas light was bleeding edge tech in 1822 - confined | to a few parts of cities like London and Baltimore. The New | York City gas company was only chartered in 1823. Chicago | didn't get gas light until 1850. | | Whale oil was still a significant source of illumination | right through the 19th century, especially in the US. | Aardwolf wrote: | Of all the science fiction things that I knew when I was a | kid in the 90s, only one actually happened, and that's | handheld devices with touchscreens with all the world's | information accessible through them. | | Many others, like humanoid robots (that can do actual stuff | like independently clean a home), general AI, actual real | space travel (where people live on different planets or giant | space wheels), flying cars, replicators, fusion energy, self | driving cars (those are near though), brain uploads, | nanobots, curing many diseases, etc... didn't happen and | won't any time soon, and of course some are physically | impossible like FTL travel, teleportation, time travel, ... | | It's at least nice to have seen one science fiction fantasy | come true so far :) | NoGravitas wrote: | As always, when this kind of things come up, I'd like to | mention "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" | (2012), by the late David Graeber. There's a reason late | 20th and early 21st century technological development went | the way it did, rather than the way it looked like it would | from the mid 20th century. | | https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the- | declini... | singularity2001 wrote: | I wouldn't call it hubris but lack of universal knowledge of | the exponential nature of development. That was before I saw | the universal lack of just this comprehension in the comments. | | What people may mean is that a jump from 10^5 to 10^6 can feel | bigger than a jump from 10^6 to 10^7? And that we are more | surprised by large things than by some small piece of 'magical | paper' which can completely change its display at will. | elzbardico wrote: | Yep. Penicilin, Heart transplants, Supersonic travel. Nuclear | power, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear naval propulsion. Space | exploration. Artificial Satellites, GPS, Succesful cancer | treatments, NMR and other imaging diagnostic tools. Wireless | bi-directional personal television (the 20's name for making a | zoom call from your phone). And the list goes on. | leadingthenet wrote: | Do any of those even come close to 1822-1922 changes of | aviation, global telecommumications, ubiquitous electricity, | cars, Quantum Mechanics, and so on? Space exploration, | nuclear propulsion and satellites are great, but their impact | on people's daily lives is far smaller than the above, imo. | | I think the author was largely correct. | IceWreck wrote: | Personal Computers (and smartphones, etc) are the largest | change by far. | leadingthenet wrote: | They are definitely the biggest change in the past | century and on par with those big innovations I | mentioned, so I wouldn't want to undersell them as | they've been a major disruptive change to most / all | fields. | | However, they wouldn't exactly be incomprehensible to | someone from the early 1900's, since they already had the | telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send | pictures over a long distance came very soon after this | article was written. | | Whereas I think a person from the early 1800's would | genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world. | elzbardico wrote: | How not? Penicilin alone has a giant impact on the lives of | people. What about anti-conceptionals too. | Ostrogodsky wrote: | So did (even to a greater effect) the doctors washing | their hands. Between 1822-1922, only in Physics humanity | discovered/developed, the laws of Electromagnetism, the | laws of Thermodynamics and their microscopic extension: | Statistical Mechanics, the special theory of relativity, | quantum mechanics and the General theory of relativity. | | The last 100 years have been about doing things in large | quantities in a cheaper, faster way. Of course there has | been great progress (the era of the PC/Internet by far | the most important one) but the rate is significantly | lower. | thejohnconway wrote: | In my earlier reply to GP, I had forgotten about space | exploration, and I think that is a major technological | advancement that would amaze someone from 1922. However, I | still think that someone from 1922 would expect such things | of 2022 in a way that someone from 1822 would not expect of | 1922. 1822 - 1922 is the difference between being a barely- | technological world to being a fully-blown one, in many, many | fields. | elzbardico wrote: | Modern medicin would be nothing short of miraculous from | the eyes of someone from 1920. | richardwhiuk wrote: | Ditto 1922 medicine compared to 1822. | [deleted] | hwers wrote: | I kinda feel like this will be true in the next 100 years | though (2122). | Ostrogodsky wrote: | Yep, bet on an unchanging human nature,keeping things from | the past around, some social progress in certain areas but | not as fast as you would like it and that the world of 2122 | will be less alien to a 2022 person than the 2022 world to a | 1922 person. | danielrpa wrote: | Hubris yes, but perhaps not wrong. I'm not sure if the progress | between 1922-2022 was as significant as the progress between | 1822-1922. These are two 100-year periods of immense progress. | | Have in mind that he's referring to the 100 yr period that | brought us cars, airplanes, railroads, telephones, light bulbs, | electricity, electromagnetism, relativity, evolution, etc. | Macha wrote: | From a technological perspective, I'm not sure they're wrong? | 1922 had railways and cars and mass transit which had already | started increasing urbanisation vs 1822, skyscrapers were | already being built, passenger air travel was a go, telephones | and electricity existed in cities. | | The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a | visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more | alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822. | weisk wrote: | > The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but | from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 | is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822. | | Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process | millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to | establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in | the whole world. | | Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. | Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our | galaxy. | | Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability | to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear. | | Welp, I do think that technological progress has been growing | at a logarithmic rate, and it's probably keep growing at that | pace... | | I think the one point in which the author was super correct | is, when he says that the progress will be made on | technology, rather than the "emotion that arises between a | man and a maid" - as I understand it, emotional intelligence | - , which will remain stagnant. | Macha wrote: | > Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process | millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, | to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone | in the whole world. | | These are a different in quality more so than a different | in kind. In 1922 you could already talk to someone 100s of | miles away via the telephone. In 1822 you couldn't. And | getting there was going to take weeks. So you basically | couldn't talk to people long distance unless you were rich | or important. | | > Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. | Space missions that are already flying past the limits of | our galaxy. | | Means rather than an end here. Google Maps is neat and | convenient, but again, you _could_ use paper maps for much | of what people use google maps for. And large paper mapping | schemes (e.g. ordnance survey maps in countries of the | british empire) were carried out in the 19th century and | WW1. Communications could also be done, albeit more | expensively. Space missions are still currently in the | scientific curiosity stage, rather than impacting people's | lives, but who knows maybe commercial near earth space | missions end up being the one people get to to talk about | for 2022-2122. | | > Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the | ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to | hear. | | These are technically more accomplished achievements for | sure, but I'm not sure they have the same sort of societal | impacts as initiatives against cholera and tubercolosis of | the late 19th century. Vaccination is probably the 20th | century achievement to call out here. | webmaven wrote: | _> These are a different in quality more so than a | different in kind._ | | Sometimes the difference in quality is smaller. | Communication by mail could have a cadence reminiscent of | email, for example: | | https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail- | del... | ben_w wrote: | The keyword here is "visible"; for most of these things, | though the change is real, it is also easily missed, with | the exception of, as you say, thousands of satellites that | orbit the earth constantly (space missions are _not_ | however already flying past the limits of our galaxy, | they're just about reaching the heliopause; even just | leaving the plane of the Galaxy is 200,000 times further | than that, while leaving the rim of the Galaxy is about 12 | million times further). | | Video conferencing worldwide? If you draw attention to it, | I suspect it would've surprised 1922 people that anyone | richer than a literal subsistence farmer would also have a | device of their own for the other end of the call, but the | existence of the technology itself would not be surprising. | | For _visible_ changes between 1922 and 2022? New materials, | new lighting, new fashion, drones, the public acceptability | of same-sex relationships, race relations (in particular | attitudes to those of pre-Colombian, African, and Chinese | descent), and possibly also visible might be the absence of | disfiguring illnesses that we have now vaccinated against. | | But those are likely less than the changes from 1822 to | 1922. | | (The Blue Marble, or the photos of astronauts walking on | the moon... I don't know if those would've been shocking or | not. Jules Verne died in 1905). | jazzyjackson wrote: | They had radio and video cameras in 1922, I don't think | facetime would be all that shocking. 1822 had neither | telephone nor electric light. Steam trains were just | getting started; by 1922 they were running regular service | at over 100 mph. | | Evidently its debatable which century saw more change, from | sailboats to Titanic, or gunpowder rockets to Apollo... | certainly there have always been cynics and dreamers... | | edit: GPS would be pretty shocking to either, I expect | 11thEarlOfMar wrote: | If you're curious about the writer, W. L. George, he was hired by | the Herald to write a daily column in the Women's Page: | | https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24655109/new-york-herald/ | thecosas wrote: | Who's up for writing about what 2122 will look like? | nojs wrote: | This is amazingly accurate. It contains several predictions that | would have been very difficult when extrapolating based on life | experience at the time. | | Consider how difficult it would be to predict how the world will | look in 2122. I don't think I'd be this close to the mark. | krupan wrote: | I was just laughing at the idea of glassed in cities with all our | gas powered cars with my wife, but then I realized that if the | cities were well ventilated/filtered that could result in an air | quality improvement for a lot of places | nikkinana wrote: | hereforphone wrote: | You know what they call a quarter pounder in France? | gadders wrote: | " A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson | much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the | little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For | Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, | automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did | not even know hot and cold bathrooms." | | I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and | obviously the internet & computers come to mind. Antibiotics, | DNA? Anything else? | bspammer wrote: | I'd think somewhere like Times Square, the strip in Vegas, or | Shinjuku in Tokyo at night would be mindblowing. Then probably | show her VR, and a modern action movie in 3D. | | VR still blows the minds of everyone I show it to. I can't | imagine what kind of reaction someone from 1922 would give. | sixQuarks wrote: | Worldstarhiphop.com | adrian_b wrote: | Internet and computers are the most different from what existed | before 1922, but already then everybody was familiar with | telegraphy, telephony and wireless communications and various | fiction works about intelligent robots had existed for | millennia (starting with the Iliad). | | Space travel was also present in many fiction works, the best | known being several novels of Jules Verne and of H. G. Wells. | | Antibiotics were a huge progress, but the concept would not | have been a surprise for anyone, because searching for | substances that one would ingest to kill the parasites causing | various diseases was already a well understood method in | medicine, e.g. like using quinine against the protozoan that | causes malaria or organo-arsenic compounds against the bacteria | that cause syphilis. | | Even if already in antiquity some have supposed that many | diseases are caused by very small invisible parasites, only | during the 19th century the causes for most common infectious | diseases have been identified. So also in this domain the | differences between 1922 and 1822 are much larger than between | 1922 and 2022. | | By 1922, genetics was much better understood than in 1822 even | if it was not known yet that it is based on information encoded | in the molecules of nucleic acids. | | I cannot find any domain of science and technology where the | difference between 1922 and 1822 is not much larger than | between 2022 and 1922. | | On the other hand, in 1922 there was still a very large part of | the human population whose life had not been affected yet by | the progresses of the 19th century, e.g. who had never used a | telephone, an automobile or a train, much less an airplane or a | computing machine or a washing machine. | | The main difference between 1922 and 2022 is that all the | technologies that in 1922 existed only in extremely expensive | devices or in experimental devices now exist in cheap devices | that are used by most people and such devices have sizes and | energy consumptions that are many orders of magnitude less than | what could have been done with the technologies from 100 years | ago. | | The main progress during the last 100 years has been in | practical engineering, with much less progress in basic | science. | throwawaygh wrote: | I genuinely can't wrap my head around your perspective on | genetics. _Literally everything_ we know about genetics was | learned after 1922. What we knew in 1920 might get you | through the first half of a one or two week high school | lesson on genetics. | | _> The main progress during the last 100 years has been in | practical engineering, with much less progress in basic | science._ | | I actually think the situation is entirely reversed. | | The progress from 1822 to 1922 was largely engineering. The | industrial revolution cause a violent and visceral change in | the way that people experienced everyday life. | | Take genetics. In 1922 we didn't know that DNA existed. Or, | we kind of has a vague sense. Since then, we: discovered the | structure of DNA, sequenced the first human genome, and now | for less than a month's wages & a vial of spit you can get a | whole genome fastq. And that's just genetic _sequencing_. We | have also learned a mind-boggling amount about how DNA | interacts with other biological processes. And that 's just | genetics. Proteins. Neuroscience. The vascular system. The | list goes on and on. Just in life sciences. | | And the (bio)engineering implications of that vast amount of | scientific discovery are immense. More impactful but not as | visceral as a railroad or an airplane. | | Scientifically, the progress from 1922 to 2022 is | _incredible_ compared to the progress from 1822 to 1922, but | the engineering progress of 1822 to 1922 was much more | visceral. Not even more significant in terms of lived | experience. Just more visceral. | throwawaygh wrote: | _> I wonder what we would show the [candy selling] girl of | 1922?_ | | 1. One of the banks of vending machines found in the train | station where she used to work. | | 2. A high school classroom, as the alternative to her life of | child labor. | | You might also show her Spotify, Netflix, and take her on a two | week flight around the world. But I feel that a machine which | does her old job and a bookish life for working class youth | would be the most likely to blow her mind. | whoopdedo wrote: | The problem is Thomas Jefferson lived most of his life more | than a hundred years prior to when this was written. Although | still alive in 1822, he would have already seen much of the | progress that would be foreign to his younger self. Such as the | first steam engines. The author compares the perspective of a | young girl looking 100 years into the future with that of an | old man. | mikestew wrote: | _I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922_ | | She can sell those candles on Etsy instead of standing around a | train station all day. She will not, however, understand the | enormous amount of change that took place in order to make that | possible. It will give her a practical understanding of what | those changes brought about, though. | hoseja wrote: | _" There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in | 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have | fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement | or practical inconvenience, we may expect still to find kings in | Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain."_ | | Funny how among reasonable predictions this one is almost | completely wrong, only 3/9 guessed right. | [deleted] | FartyMcFarter wrote: | This is accurate enough that midway through the article I started | wondering if it was a prank written recently. | ramesh31 wrote: | >"It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific | discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least | degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a | maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the | people whom they illumine will be much the same." | | Nailed it. | dahart wrote: | > They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are | that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if | as much | | Bertrand Russell also famously predicted this. I believe I've | read that in the 1800's people were predicting industrialization | would do away with labor. People are still predicting this today, | with the advent of Machine Learning that's good enough to | automate things like driving. | | Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of | human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter | what we invent? | krupan wrote: | "Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of | human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter | what we invent?" | | Seems abundantly clear to me that there indeed is something in | our nature that keeps us grinding. I do hope that we at least | continue to increase the freedom to choose what and when we | grind | handsaway wrote: | I'd argue that it's not human nature but rather our socio- | economic system that keeps us grinding away. It's become | obvious that for the most part automation does a disservice to | workers rather than liberating them since they don't have the | legal ownership of the automating forces. A typical factory or | whatever if it is able to automate 20% of the current work | being done will simply lay off 20% of its workforce rather than | reduce everyone's workload by 20% while maintaining their wage. | | Now this creates a bit of a crisis since the automated | production produces things that need to be bought by the | workers they displace, who now no longer have any money. The | outcome as I see it is an extension of credit systems and the | propagation of tedious nonsense jobs (ala Graeber's Bullshit | Jobs). | | In order to bring about the ideal of automation creating more | free time for all without diminishing their income you'd have | to transfer ownership of the automating forces to the workers | they're replacing. But then I'm just a Marxist looney so what | do I know. | jugg1es wrote: | The most striking to me are passages like this: | | "It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will | have discarded the idea that they are primarily "makers of men". | Most fit women will then be following an individual career." | | ... | | "But it is unlikely that that women will have achieved equality | with men." | stareblinkstare wrote: | beeboop wrote: | He definitely missed the mark about alimony or men not bearing | the majority of child support | yurishimo wrote: | I don't think he did. My mother paid child support to my | father after the divorce. I think in most instances, it's | simply more convenient for the mother to take the children in | a divorce, or the kids are too young to choose, so it ends | that way by default. There is no rule for it though. | beeboop wrote: | The default way still being women that get the children | doesn't really change that the dynamic that gender versus | child support is not meaningfully any different than the | 1920s. Women's share of child support has gone from, I | assume, ~0% in 1922 (I didn't look it up but I imagine it | was less than 1%) to around 5% in 2022 in terms of dollars | paid. Men going from 99% to 95% of child support costs | isn't really a noteworthy change and doesn't align with a | prediction that it would be meaningfully different. | Ancapistani wrote: | I don't think he did. | | Alimony and child support _do_ apply to women as well as men | in the US, though it 's obviously not equally distributed | today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed | system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. | For example, any or all of the following could cause that in | a fair system: | | * wage earners are still disproportionately men | | * women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) | custody of children | | * women tend to be less likely to work outside the home | | While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't | think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own | view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men | who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child | support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's | fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with | no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left | to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - | because it is and always has been a common ocurrance. | beeboop wrote: | Men pay ~95% of the dollars given/taken for child support | in this country. It applies to women but only in a very | very marginal way. Men going from >99% to 95% of child | support costs isn't really a noteworthy change and doesn't | align with a prediction that it would be meaningfully | different. | [deleted] | dav_Oz wrote: | Somehow ironically the writer of that article, W L George, died 4 | years later aged 43 on "pneumonia and heart failure" and "had | been ill from the last twelve months" [0]. | | It reads like a high-school assignment in which "100 years from | now" is entirely used as a narrative device and the author with | his literary skill set kind of seemed bored with it and wants to | just get over with. | | He basically mirrows the sentiment of his time by extrapolating - | with hardly any spin of his own - the low hanging fruits: new | rays, wireless technology, movies with sound & color, ease of | housework (compressed papier mache: Ikea?), community dwellings, | "servant problem", everything you need in a pill, city roofed | with glass (his own spin?) ... | | His view that 1822 (Jefferson) is more dissimilar to 1922 than | 2022 will be to 1922 (for a little girl) is weirdly off. He does | not go into detail as to why and in which fundamental ways. | | "The more we discover the less is left" seems even more absurd | and goes contrary to the open-endedness of the scientific inquiry | (which he praised beforehand): "the more we discover the more | questions arise". | | Finally when turning to political issues his narrating device | serves only to illuminate his own (political/societal) views: | emanicaption of women (from 20.000 years of slavery), tendency | for socializations (not socialism!), (unconscious) nationalizing | of important industries, "Anti-Trust Acts" in which the State | limits profits and arbitrages between industries and workers, | international trade in the hands of "controlled combines" | (globalization) as a pacifying force, political conditions | (nations) as a driver for war. Well, as a witness to WWI, WWII | surely had to be "horrible beyond my conception". | | The potential of America to immense wealth ("most enterprising | creature") away from a euro-centric (and partly his feminist | views) are imho his most refreshing views. | | As a necessary flattery for the reader he goes on to predict an | american flowering in literature and arts ("infinitely more than | they are producing today" sounds more like an insult by an | Englishman ;)). | | And by ending with "there will be no more things one can't say | and things one can't think" and "a great liberalism of mind will | prevail" I can only reply 100 years later with Goethe's 200 years | old Wahlverwandschaften[1] and one prominent slogan of Occupy | Wall Street: "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who | falsely believe they are free." | | ("Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich fur frei halt, ohne es zu | sein") | | [0]http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19260408.2.125.. | . | | [1]http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Roma.. | . | whiddershins wrote: | Surprisingly good predictions on a number of fronts. | almogbaku wrote: | this is pretty cool to see how he predicted some things pretty | good | ekianjo wrote: | good cherry picking to find someone who was correct about quite | a few things among an ocean of wrong predictors/predictions :-) | bramgn wrote: | True, but also how outlandish certain ideas were about peeling | your house clean and replacing meals with pills... | viraptor wrote: | > how outlandish certain ideas were about peeling your house | clean | | Not that outlandish. My shower glass is covered in high tech | hydrophobic substance which keeps it clean, but I have to | replace it every couple of years. My kid's high chair is | covered in easily washable rubber surface that I can | literally peel off after a meal, rinse, and replace. | | So overall, practical idea that is partially applied. | ceejayoz wrote: | Hell, my house has vinyl siding. No repainting every 5-10 | years and you can pressure wash it in an hour or two. Close | enough! | JofArnold wrote: | Huel? | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Huel / Soylent for nutrition, psyllium pills for filling / | bowel operation, pretty much that yeah lol | hwers wrote: | That's a funny one since Huel and Soylent kinda came about | _because of_ the 1920s meme idea that pills would replace | meals in the future. A lot of these might just be self | fulfilling prophecies. | giantg2 wrote: | That's generally how things work. Sci-fi and stuff | influences the thoughts of others to help make the ideas | turn into creations. I think they even made a documentary | about all the Star Trek props that became a reality, but | I don't remember. | | https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/world/gallery/science- | fiction... | webmaven wrote: | You might like this book: | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreams_Our_Stuff_Is_M | ade... | paradite wrote: | Yes, the prediction is incredibly accurate. | | So my question would be: Is this a case of selection bias | (survival bias)? | | Did we cherry picked one accurate prediction (at the right time) | out of many different predictions made about the future? | sovnade wrote: | That only seems relevant if the author of this had a vast | number of predictions. | | Overall, yeah, there were tons. That doesn't detract from how | accurate this particular piece was. | Nbox9 wrote: | I'm unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown. | | If there was two dozen "What life will be like in 100 years" | articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we | will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. | Surely we would only see the most accurate of these | predictions, and that is survival bias. | | Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between | predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of | degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old | predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which | publications were better archived or random chance. | sovnade wrote: | It depends if we're judging the overall predictions of | everyone, or this specific author's predictions. I always | tend to look at it at the author-level, because otherwise | the infinite monkeys theorem applies anyway. | | I think this author should be given credit for the | accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing | and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only | control his own predictions, and they were very good. | [deleted] | wombatmobile wrote: | > It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific | discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least | degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a | maid. | | The relationship between a man and a maid is a core | characteristic of a society. | | The complexity of changing such relationships is attested to by | TFA, and yet, in many places, over a hundred years, we see (hard | fought) change. | | A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, the downfalls of | Dominic Strauss-Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein were | inconceivable. | | So was #MeToo. | | But there's as much tech in the hash tag as there is in the | x-ray, or more if you just count the investment dollars. | | Technology and social relations define and redefine each other in | long epicycles. | I-M-S wrote: | If anyone else is interested in the author who exerted such | prescience, Wikipedia has an article: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George | evancoop wrote: | The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a | human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have | predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in | 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one | prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will | increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. | | We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I | mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision | trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122. | tempestn wrote: | Over the broad arc of history things have gotten better over | the long term. I'm not sure that's always the case though. | Exponential growth of technology, or anything else, physically | can't last forever. What does it look like when it stops? | | I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the | present though, it's better than any time in history save for | possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that | 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a | certainty. | jfk13 wrote: | > Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of | technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world | will improve. | | I'm not actually very confident about that last part... | inglor_cz wrote: | Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on | Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years | to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of | longevity or whatever else. | | The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of | our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the | highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is | widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous | crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War | with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically | productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was. | | I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific | predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so. | Guillaume86 wrote: | > Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on | Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years | to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of | longevity or whatever else. | | > The reality is that we do not know | | Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit | claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their | lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter. | lelanthran wrote: | I have never seen a that claim, but since 2012 I have seen | not numerous upvoted posts on various forums that full self | driving cars are only five years away. | | I routinely saw similarly outlandish claims about AI in | general. | inglor_cz wrote: | True, it does not sound any better, especially if you take | into account the progress of other challenges in medicine. | | We aren't anywhere close to, say, solving cancer, but we | are conquering new territory inch by inch, with a massive | difference of outcomes in last 50 years or so. | | I suspect the same is going to happen in the longevity | field. Dr. Gregory Fahy managed to rejuvenate the thymus in | several individuals (TRIIM and TRIIM-X trials) and lower | their epigenetic age. It might have well been the first | baby step on that journey. | Damogran6 wrote: | In none of the hard Sci-Fi I read as a child did they say "I | needn't worry for light, as I had my portable cellphone" | | Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a | room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because | normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it | should be hidden from sight. | | Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist | excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector | with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all | the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: | We'll will it into existence. | bluGill wrote: | Maybe those hard SciFi were set in an age where people have | advanced beyond the phone. | Laforet wrote: | 70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being | used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact | that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form | back then. | | Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the | contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the | abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience | with. | ogogmad wrote: | Do the details of the storage medium matter? It still | stores ones and zeros - who cares how? | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold | imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits | with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but | generally designs are very much of their time. | | It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are | usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly | animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes | - like villains who wear chunky black leather. | | Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First | Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures. | | The background problem is that the 20th century was set up | for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with | Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading | to game changer developments like relativity and quantum | theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident | from attempts to find a theory of computability which | eventually led to modern computing. | | These were all bedrock insights which completely changed | what was possible in the physical world. | | Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at | that level more or less stopped happening after the | discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information | Theory. | | Quantum Gravity _might_ be the next game changer, but it | also might not, and in any case it 's an unknown distance | away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking | transformation. | atq2119 wrote: | The discovery of DNA may well be the Maxwell-style | foundation for the next game changer. It hasn't been a | century yet, and we've just deployed the first mRNA | vaccines last year... | ogogmad wrote: | > Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. | Insights at that level more or less stopped happening | after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's | Information Theory. | | I think Machine Learning today is equivalent in magnitude | to the other scientific breakthroughs you mentioned. I | don't know if you're overlooking it because it's mainly | engineering-led. | intrasight wrote: | A telco executive's astute predictions | | "Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, | pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final | development, the telephone will be carried about by the | individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will | require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be | able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows | but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - | Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953 | dougmwne wrote: | Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of | the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It's | the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in | the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is | individually transformative in a way that space flight will | probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue | racing forward and this current moment will look analog in | comparison. | intrasight wrote: | The future may be analog - if you look far enough. | | We are analog. | ajmurmann wrote: | There was a great scene in Station 11 which is partially | set after civilization-destroying pandemic in which one | character who was born before the pandemic explains to | someone who was born after how ride sharing apps worked on | a cell phone. It's magic of you describe it from scratch. | The tiny device has access to a detailed mail of the entire | planet, knows where you are and then a car shows up to | transport you to your destination without exchanging and | tangible money or even talking about it. | | It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In | Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that | can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone | had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use | energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board | computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print | everything. | dougmwne wrote: | Asimov envisioned printers on spaceships and every | evening I put on a pair of goggles that lets me interact | with an omnidirectional volumetric display with | millimeter accurate head and hand tracking. I think we | are starting to outrun our own imagination. | intrasight wrote: | Someone clearly is still imaging the stuff - and then | building it! | rbanffy wrote: | > The reality is that no such projection is plausible. | | It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be | easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was | born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although | it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in | december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a | prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century. | | > the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate | | There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor | may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast | we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at | least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all | bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to | predict what happens next). | | BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened | in 1900, I'd lose my leg. | | So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a | chance to last until 2122. | Macha wrote: | > Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone | | Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did | they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. | replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used | holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen | instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable | device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, | information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction | prior to the 90s. | jpindar wrote: | In the 1950s, comic book detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way | wrist radio, which later included video. | dougmwne wrote: | Still waiting for them to add a camera to the Apple Watch. | Then it can be a full phone replacement for low tech days. | heavyarms wrote: | I've been thinking this since the Apple Watch came out, | but other than practical limitations (battery life) | there's always this problem: have you tried to hold your | arm out in front of your face and stare at your watch for | a while? It's not the most comfortable position. You | might have to add some extra arm/shoulder days in your | exercise routine. | dougmwne wrote: | I think a fisheye lens plus face recognition should solve | that nicely. As long as you can see the watch screen, the | image could be cropped, skewed and rotated to focus on | your face. | jaclaz wrote: | For the record it appeared in 1946: | | https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio | | and the video in 1964: | | https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV | | More or less both are (fictional) "miniaturization" of | existing, known technologies. | amelius wrote: | Stallman could have. | ctdonath wrote: | "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be | converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things | being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able | to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of | distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony | we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we | were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands | of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to | do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present | telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." | - Nicola Tesla, 1926 | GrumpyNl wrote: | Jules Verne did a pretty good job. | Robotbeat wrote: | > _The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a | human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have | predicted a moon landing only 66 years later?_ | | I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than | that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). | Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical | grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from | Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in | acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen | in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 | of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty | accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, | automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both | external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods | became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as | suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and | gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical | features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that | document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date | for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical | features of spaceflight correctly. | | https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor... | | Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the | smartphone around that timeline. | | If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of | actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty | remarkably prescient predictions. | pbourke wrote: | > Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone | 1922? | | Yes | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton | dave333 wrote: | Article is pretty good and gets a lot of things right. So what | will the world be like in 2122? Climate catastrophe? Will AI have | taken over? Will democracy survive? Will people still travel or | just interact virtually/remotely? | nottorp wrote: | He got a lot of things right but, like everyone else, they didn't | predict the internet and its consequences. | | Does anyone know of a proper prediction of the internet? And I | don't mean predicting handheld devices or wireless networking. | Predicting the decentralized communication part that makes | distance irellevant and upgrades point to point communication to | group. | | And its consequence that it's very easy now to find a group that | shares your biases :) | arcade79 wrote: | Not necessarily what you're looking for, but I always found The | Shockwave Rider to be impressive: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider | | 1975 though, so quite recent. | nottorp wrote: | If we're talking Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar is even more | prescient socially. Not 100 years ago though. | max_ wrote: | 1950's America had online shopping.[0]. This may be the closest | thing to today's websites. | | [0]https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/14/online-shopping- | in... | koonsolo wrote: | In that sense, I really wonder what will be there in 50 or 100 | years, and that we are now completely unable to predict. | azangru wrote: | > like everyone else, they didn't predict the internet | | Nor the computer, personal or otherwise; nor robotics. It's | funny to see how he could predict, sometimes with surprising | accuracy, the trajectory of development of technologies that | were already in place, but could not fathom what had not yet | been discovered and thus had not yet entered the public | discourse. | user3939382 wrote: | Yep -- check out Marshall McLuhan & the Global Village, which | he put out in the 60s. Very prescient. | nottorp wrote: | Hmm I read him long ago, but I vaguely recollect he didn't | catch the decentralization much? If he did I must reread. | | Edit. Oh oops. Read the summary for Gutenberg Galaxy on | wikipedia. Turns out i MUST reread. | jkestner wrote: | Not exactly a prediction, but The Victorian Internet is a good | read: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/victorian- | internet-97816355739... | | That revolution was more about the speed that information | travels than who has access to it. | dznodes wrote: | This is so accurate it seems almost fake. | | Who has written something similar about the next 100 years? | | Preferably with as much positivity and wisdom as this gentleman | had. | viraptor wrote: | When he mentions the lack of cables, he's pretty close with most | of them being underground. But also he's incredible close if you | consider the mess of cables that was the Stockholm telephone | tower, functioning until 1913 | https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-stockholm-telephon... | worldvoyageur wrote: | It is an excellent article, I agree. However, it strikes me | that the author was more likely female than male. (gender | deliberately obscured in the author's name, 'W.L. George', for | instance.). | | If a male writer, the article is even more impressive given the | clear sensitivity to, and awareness of, women's issues and the | likely impact of technology and social changes on women. | | That said, the author was likely a person of privilege rather | than someone more representative of the population of 1922. A | starving writer was unlikely to have been so focused on the | challenges of hiring good household staff. | Maskawanian wrote: | Author was male: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George | worldvoyageur wrote: | Cool! Excellent predictions for the future, not just for | technology, but also for social change from a broader | perspective than just that of the lived experience of the | author. | | (W.L. = Walter Lionel, as revealled by a bit more | searching) | macns wrote: | "Cautious feminist" describes himself as: | | _But it is unlikely that women will have an achieved | equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize | that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not | wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery._ | | He's definitely on point 100 years later. | tpmx wrote: | In the same building, downstairs, a year after the commercial | launch of the telephone tower in 1887: | | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Allm%C3%... | braramod wrote: | I agree, but some other countries are still not using the | underground as a cable management system. | capekwasright wrote: | That's wild, thanks for sharing. I'd have to imagine it's | served as some level of inspiration for Simon Stalenhag's work. | | Ex: | http://www.simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/by_procession_1920.jp... | paxys wrote: | Going to be "that guy" and say that almost everything he | accurately predicted was already commonplace or on the rise in | the 1920s. | | - Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were | even successful transatlantic flights. | | - The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. | Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had | careers and even unions. | | - Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of | the world. | | - Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing. | | In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions - food | pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed | cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in | the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right | now). | otabdeveloper4 wrote: | > paper mache furniture | | Wait till you find out what that Ikea crap is made of. :) | RedBeetDeadpool wrote: | I once put a stool on a coffee table to put up a few curtains | and the leg of the stool went through the surface of the | coffee table. That surface is more or less paper mache by my | book. | | Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and | instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely | made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by | some adhesive. | | Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice. | jakemoshenko wrote: | I had to drill a hole for cables with a hole saw in my | wife's IKEA desk. Imagine my surprise when it was basically | laminate on top of corrugated cardboard strips arranged | vertically with actual empty space between them! | | It might even be this exact one: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vNRY6natiY | rbanffy wrote: | I find IKEA's materials work remarkable - their materials | are finely engineered to be light and pretty enough, and, | at the same time, being sufficiently strong to bear the | loads it's designed to. I'm writing this on an IKEA desk | with 4 big monitors and 2 laptops, plus an assortment of | external drives and docking stations. | | It's certainly not designed to bear my weight on 4 small | spots, however, so I wouldn't even try that. It's not made | of solid wood, but the furniture-equivalent of an F-22 | wing. | mywittyname wrote: | I have these $5 end tables that are going on 10 years of | use. They are just basic 4 post tables with square tops, | but they are light enough that I can pick them up by edge | with one hand while laying on the couch, but are still | like 20"x20". They've all been relegated to shop use | anymore, yet they are still perfect. | | All of my previous ikea desks are also spending their | sunset years toiling away in the shop. The oldest one is | 20 years old and I use it for assembling heaving parts | because nothing sticks to whatever plastic coating they | use on their desktops. | | Also, the obligatory note that Ikea does sell solid wood | furniture. It's made of softwoods, like pine or fir, but | if you put it together with wood glue, it will absolutely | outlive you. I have a dresser that's survived six moves | where I never bothered to unload it. | aidenn0 wrote: | I haven't bought IKEA in a while; the last time I did, | they used a lot of MDF, which is rather heavy for its | strength... | rbanffy wrote: | My desk is two thin sheets of MDF with a honeycomb-like | structure inside. Thicker wall-mounted shelves are more | or less the same, with supports anchoring the top and | bottom sheets. | shuntress wrote: | While "food pills" are obviously wrong, I think the general | concept of "prepared food" vs "cooking" is decently accurate. | | Paper mache furniture no but disposable furniture, yeah, kind | of. | | Private dwellings you could maybe stretch to make some sort of | comparison to rates of renting vs owning but that is a stretch. | | On nationalized industries and trust busting we seem to have | gone against his prediction. | | Regarding "no more opportunity" I think the possibility of The | Information Age was not even in the same dimension as this | guy's RADAR. | rpowers wrote: | I agree. | | However, having just recently replaced a couch from a chain | retailer, I can attest that they are pretty much made from | paper mache. | wombatmobile wrote: | Is there a text version of this? I'm having trouble navigating | the pdf with one hand on my phone from this hospital bed. | nyuszika7h wrote: | There's a button called "Show Text". | https://i.imgur.com/sf7ztjZ.png | wombatmobile wrote: | Top. Thanks! | jerrre wrote: | Off-topic but: is "Top" in this context a Dutchism? I only | know it from Dutch people | wombatmobile wrote: | Australian. Short for "top notch". | raskelof wrote: | So to the interesting question, what will the world be like in | 2122? | foobarbecue wrote: | Fascinating. I guess about one third of his predictions were | correct. Eye-opening moments for me: | | - "white countries" | | - "radial energy" | | - "the servant problem" | | - no smoke in the house, "perhaps not even tobacco" | | - "the child is likely to be taken over by the State" | | - His vision of a house filled with frequently replaced | disposable surfaces | | - "king of Jugo-Slavia" [will still reign] | | - "the American race [will become homogenous]" | | - "there will be no more opportunity [in America]" but that's a | good thing | shawabawa3 wrote: | > "the child is likely to be taken over by the State" | | I'd be interested what daycare and school looked like in 1922, | because arguably childcare is mostly state run at this point | throwawaygh wrote: | In 1920, | | * the high school graduation rate was around 16%. (Up from | below 10% in 1910!) | | * only 8 million women were in the labor force | | * Child labor laws either actually or functionally did not | exist (the major federal laws were not passed in the 30s.) | | * The industrial revolution was in full swing, but huge | swaths of the labor economy were still _very_ agrarian. | | For the working class, early childhood care was provided by | mothers and beyond that daycare/schooling was provided by the | factories and farm fields. | selimthegrim wrote: | I wonder how he expected the American race to be homogeneous | with segregation. He was probably implicitly meaning all the | new European immigrants. | tempestn wrote: | I think the 'no more opportunity' point was largely correct. | America _is_ now developed in much the way England was in 1922. | It does mean the limitless opportunity of 100 years ago is gone | for the vast majority. But it also means the majority are far | wealthier than they were. As he predicts, people only work 7-8 | hours a day now, and often only 5 days a week. 50-60 hours a | week was the norm in 1920. But at the same time, people do feel | that lack of opportunity. | | For a prediction made 100 years out, I'd call it dead accurate. | askin4it wrote: | the two preceding pages...situations wanted and help wanted | | https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=... | | https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=... | viraptor wrote: | The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we | really think much about these days, but the older limestone | buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the | old and either pressure-washed or redone wall: | https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a | residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly | covered with it every time you go out. | glandium wrote: | Remember how e.g. Notre Dame de Paris looked like before they | cleaned it? | adamjb wrote: | I live in a suburb with a power station that was converted from | coal to gas in the 70s. My older neighbours have told me that | they had to careful when hanging clothes out to try, lest they | got so dirty that they'd have to wash them again. | tonyedgecombe wrote: | Years ago (1986) I worked on a project for one of the bigger | power stations in the UK. We created a digital display which | showed which way the wind was blowing so they could choose | which coal to burn. They had been getting complaints about the | dirt on peoples line dried clothes. | datavirtue wrote: | Now it's just an invisible polluter/killer. | retrac wrote: | That was one of the most striking differences I noticed when I | saw a bunch of photos from c. 1970 of my hometown (Toronto). | Everything that wasn't freshly painted was grubby in a way you | don't see anymore here. | | 1971: https://www.blogto.com/upload/2014/03/20111020-royal- | alex-f0... | | 2009: | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Royal_Al... | | We phased out most coal in the 70s with the last eliminated in | the early 2000s. I do not miss the vibrant orange sunsets in | summer. | kinbiko wrote: | Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of | one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I | clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you. | viraptor wrote: | We may have met :-) It was actually hard to find a good | example on street view today - the whole centre is washed now | and Cheap/Westgate aren't black for over a decade. | Aachen wrote: | That link doesn't work for me, I get an infinitely loading | spinner (in the address bar, behind the overlay, it says | something about intent://) and the back button doesn't work so | I have to kill the browser. Probably because I'm not using | official chrome or something but a foss webview browser, it | pops over and disables the app I was coming from but the | content never loads. Can someone translate it into a regular | link, or a screenshot of the content? | | Edit: it works in Firefox (Fennec), here is the content in a | normal picture: https://snipboard.io/uxGWaZ.jpg | Cthulhu_ wrote: | There was a great picture of I think Manchester before and | after a ban on wood / coal and a good cleanup, it went from | black buildings to a place that looked pretty decent. | yalogin wrote: | The popular culture in those days and may be even a few decades | after that always predicted food intake to minimized to pills. | Has there ever been attempt to do so? I mean any company or | university attempting to deliver the same nutrients and | satisfaction in a much reduced form factor? | progval wrote: | Kind of, but still much larger than pills: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement) | never_a-pickle wrote: | Certain things the author got completely wrong (rise of racial | politics, actual liberalism of thought), but his level-headed | approach got him 75% of the way there. | | Though culturally he was eerily correct re: State-as-family. | gumby wrote: | > Though culturally he was eerily correct re: State-as-family | | That's not particularly surprising as it was one of the key | philosophies of the age: the Russian revolution was only a few | years old (and didn't spring from nowhere) while some of the | competing philosophies, like anarchism and bimetallism, had | burned out. | Animats wrote: | _" There was a time when the mistress of the house, having given | instructions to the servants, need do nothing at all. Of course, | the servants had to slave, day in and day out."_ | | Doordash. Uber. Grubhub. TaskRabbit. All require an underclass. | Is this progress? | parksy wrote: | What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and | penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an | apparent blind spot for the advancements in social change. Even | the most dire or utopian science fiction of the early to mid 20th | century seems to reasonably accurately predict technological | changes but somehow expects that future social structures will | somehow fall into place or adapt to the technology. They imagine | these wild technological advancements and bludgeon them into | their current-day social mores. | | Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed | trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's | out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, | notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, | knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or | more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients | and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is | just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to | bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It | could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in | the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, | forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not | saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend | that's easily extrapolated) | | But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of | society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the | products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the | status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the | organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences | globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into | virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much | harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having | servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed | so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress | couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being | so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of | technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if | not obsolete, in 100 years. | | I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got | right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter | this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but | she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even | be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not | something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're | surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of | humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm | going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened | slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting | how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're | wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and | that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective | environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years. | | Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids | futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out. | throwawaygh wrote: | _> where the topic of the day is distributed trustless | computing_ | | No one in my circles talks about those things. Even the vast | majority of crypto investors don't give a shit about | "distributed" or "trustless" or "computing". | | The topics of the day are: | | 1. climate change | | 2. automation (especially logistics and war) | | 3. the tension between nationalism and globalization (both with | respect to communication, commodity extraction, manufacturing, | knowledge production, ...). | | Flip the ordering of 1 and 3 if you'd like. | | _> old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping | (Hansards etc) could be obsolete_ | | I can't think of a single less exciting thing to say about the | future. | | The average person uses a notary perhaps a few times in their | life. | | The average bank provides the average person with a nearly | flawless UX. Anything that replaces a bank will look like a | digital bank account and behave like a digital bank account and | probably also be regulated like a digital bank account. For | almost all people, this is literally equivalent to staying "by | 2122 the IBM COBOL mainframes powering banks will have been | replaced with Java running on commodity hardware". Even if it's | true... who cares? | | _> knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one | or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - | clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, | information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful | AI assistants to bring things to your attention and /or demand | your attention)._ | | It's not 1999 anymore; we know how the WWW turned out. | wuliwong wrote: | From a quick reading of the entire article, I came away impressed | with how much was quite accurate. | bambax wrote: | It's striking that most of his true predictions were already in | place in the sixties, a mere 40 years after the article was | written (and some, much earlier). When we think about the distant | future we simply think about tomorrow. | golergka wrote: | > It's striking that most of his true predictions were already | in place in the sixties | | In first world countries, may be. Now more of them are true for | more and more people all around the globe too. | Damogran6 wrote: | "The future is already here - it's just not evenly | distributed. | | The Economist, December 4, 2003" | | -- William Gibson | Damogran6 wrote: | I think it's very easy to dismiss the creeping surge of the | future...You have computers EVERYWHERE, and with the Cloud - | somewhere else...but you also have access to a significant | percentage of the music recorded over the last 80 years, the | ability to predict future health issues by sending some spit to | someone via the mail, the internet from SPACE, and a supply | chain where it's easier to make a $.62 knicknack half a world | away, put it in a container on a boat and it can be requested | and sent to you same day, using your cellphone....while it | wirelessly sends that music to your ears using devices that | remove unwanted environmental noise. | SavantIdiot wrote: | More importantly, what FONTS will be in vogue in 100 years??? | marcus_holmes wrote: | I was fascinated to read about the predictions of communal-living | skyscrapers with their own management, etc. Eerily similar to the | Hab Blocks of Mega City 1 | | I then came to horrifying realisation that 1977 (when Judge Dredd | first appeared) is only 55 years after the article, and now 45 | years behind us(!!!). More or less halfway. Totally reasonable | for them to have read this article, and still been far enough | away from now to assume that this will still happen. This could | easily have been the inspiration for Blocks. | bleuchase wrote: | And now we have Charlie Munger gleefully making faceless, | windowless monoliths a reality. | aksgoel wrote: | Loved the poetic tone in the writing (1992). A lot less try than | today's writing. What caused writing tone to shift over the | century? | paradite wrote: | People having less attention span (instant gratification), | favouring utility and efficiency over aesthetics. | golemotron wrote: | I can't read the text. Does it say everyone will be overweight, | inactive, neurotic, trapped in their houses and living lives | devoid of in-person social interaction? | shuntress wrote: | The more things change the they stay the same. | | It's really interesting to read this, genuinely prescient, | starkly logical analysis that seems quite liberal and self-aware | while also deeply soaked in un-acknowledged bias. | | The time this was written was around the peak of the suffrage | movement a couple years after the 19th amendment. That, perhaps, | contributes to the placating tone in the author's description of | how little progress the movement will have made by 2022. | | I think especially noteworthy is the apparent blind spot towards | the speed of information. He spends a lot of space articulating | the physical characteristics of a City of Tomorrow but no | consideration of what it might mean to quickly and easily read | anything that has ever been published. | | Really interesting article. | | EDIT: Another note regarding his whole segment on work, | production and leisure: he seems to only conceive of work as | _labor_. Where, for example, an additional hour spent shoveling | coal means another hour 's worth of shoveled coal while | forgetting to consider the possibility of "critical thinking" | production where an additional hour spent working does not | necessarily mean an additional hour spent being productive. A | good prediction here would have touched on what careers in more | "creative" production might look like. | js2 wrote: | The author, W.L. George, passed away in 1926, so he wouldn't live | long enough to revisit his predictions. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George | lastofthemojito wrote: | Impressively thought-out article, but given the publication date | I'm also surprised there's no mention of the impacts of the flu | pandemic of 1918-1920. So much ink is currently being spilled | about how so many things will change thanks to the COVID | pandemic, whether architecture or remote work or medical | breakthroughs. I guess once the flu pandemic subsided it was no | longer at the forefront of thought? | wmiel wrote: | The Spanish flu largely overlapped with the WW1, and since its | 2nd wave had a high toll among people with strong immune system | (ex. young male) the perception was to a large degree mixed | with the perception of war and its casualties, at least in | Europe. | | The name 'spanish flu' itself also stems from the fact that | most countries involved in the war didn't want to talk too much | about the Flu, while Spain retained neutrality and didn't have | incentives to keep it in the dark - this could also be a reason | that people were putting the aftermath of the pandemic in the | same bucket as the outcome of the Great War imo. | | https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic | avnigo wrote: | What I understood from this article is that science and | technology may be more accurately projected than society and | politics; I would imagine because those seem to be more chaotic | processes, but also more easily carry the bias of the writer. | | The article also highlights some shortcomings of the 1922 | zeitgeist as there does not seem to be much thought about the | positive or negative environmental impacts of technology, other | than on air quality, or any talk on climate change. | nielsole wrote: | Pigou had just published the economics of welfare two years | earlier. The tragedy of the commons would only be published in | 1968. I wonder how much externalities were a commonly known | concept in 1922. | | Resource exhaustion of oil he got more right than club of Rome | even in 1972. | rossdavidh wrote: | Well some of it is what your current standard is. Replacing the | horse, which puts feces on the road (albeit less smelly than | human feces, still really bad in the quantity of a city's | traffic), with the automobile, was actually a great improvement | in the environment. We don't think of it as such, because we | never saw horses in the quantity that a modern city has of | automobiles. But what kind of toxic sludge we would have gotten | from that much horse manure in a city is difficult for the | modern mind to imagine. | | Similarly, the environmental impact of coal, when it was the | dominant method of heating a home, was not in some decades-off | global warming, it was in things like the London Fog | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog), a pretty horrific | environmental situation. Moving to non-coal methods of heating | the home (which he mentions) is a big environmental | improvement. | mcsoft wrote: | Some predictions were super accurate (i.e. Europe to America in 8 | hours), some failed (lunch in 4 pills), but, due to immense | optimism of human nature, one just couldn't envision the most | influencing events of XX century - the rise of totalitarianism | resulting in World War II and all its disasters. Something I | can't escape thinking about when reading modern predictions. | rkagerer wrote: | _I have a vision of walls, paper and hangings made of more or | less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along | the edges._ | | Hah, he basically predicted Ikea! | jameshart wrote: | Regarding flying: | | "The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and ventilation | to enable the aeronauts to survive." | | And indeed, ventilation is the primary concern among air | passengers in 2022. | [deleted] | ctdonath wrote: | Note that many of the predictions which didn't happen proved | doable but were a bad idea. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-06 23:00 UTC)