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What Will Happen in the 2020s

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Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#261
post #231

All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments. All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles. Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap camera…

I really doubt dashcams and gps will be required in the next decade but I bet installing them will get you a discount of some kind.

The eCall system - which automatically phones the emergency services with your position after a crash - is already mandatory on new cars in the EU. The GPS is already there. Making further use of it, perhaps to assist self-driving cars, doesn't seem like such a stretch. (Which is not to say I welcome it.)

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#262
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are billions of computers out there that are idle most of the time. They will remain idle unltil untethered energy and bandwidth become free. I won't let you use my phone's spare cycles and murder my battery while we're still using lipo cells that degrade after 2 years with regular use.

> They will remain idle unltil untethered energy and bandwidth become free unless you tie it to an incentive, and thus you arrive at cryptocurrencies

Funny you mention that, since we've seen cryptocurrency processing concentrated in big data centers... for all the same reasons everything else is located in big data centers - energy and bandwidth are cheaper.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#263

A few good takes, but China becoming the dominant global power? Not a good take. China is fairly good at a few things, namely lending money and manufacturing goods. What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months. I don’t think the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist. I think we’ve seen a brief period of these attitudes, but it’s not indicative of the next decade i…

I agree except with your last sentence. They have the biggest total pollution, but their pollution per capita is actually low compared to eastern countries, and they are investing and legislating aggressively for clean tech.

Yeah but in this case absolut numbers seem more relevant, per capita will always be low if you're a billion population nation.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#264

A few good takes, but China becoming the dominant global power? Not a good take. China is fairly good at a few things, namely lending money and manufacturing goods. What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months. I don’t think the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist. I think we’ve seen a brief period of these attitudes, but it’s not indicative of the next decade i…

I agree except with your last sentence. They have the biggest total pollution, but their pollution per capita is actually low compared to eastern countries, and they are investing and legislating aggressively for clean tech.

That is a logical stat I never hear about and it looks they they are indeed lower than USA and Canada (and the worst, Middle East):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

However it’s still far worse than most European countries in the list.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#265

I think the climate is going to change much faster than any models predict, like 3-4x faster, because we went past the tipping point about 30 years ago. Phytoplankton populations will crash out in the next 10 years and the marine food chain will collapse. Extreme wether patterns are going to completely disrupt food production, which will cause mass starvation and a global immigration/refugee crisis. In the U.S., the…

What's going to cause the crash of phytoplankton? Rising CO2, I presume, but by what mechanism?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#266
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that. Or, even simpler, a delivery person hopes out with a package and the remote driver circles the block. Garbage trucks might be the first to have this system installed. You need two people to operate a truck currently, a driver and a guy in the back. It drives slow along the road, very predicable routes. Needs to be driven back to the yard once filled, and another truck to take over the route.

Many garbage trucks have only a driver now. The guy in back was replaced by a mechanical arm that grabs and lifts the garbage cans.

I feel that this was the big trend that people missed; instead of AI we simple rebuilt the system to mechanically function better. First with standardized shipping containers, then progressed to other boring stuff.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#267
post #32

Any prediction of decentralisation of the Internet, or anything built on it, needs to explain how this will overcome the economies of scale (1 big data centre is cheaper than 1000 little ones) and the network effects (everyone buys and sells through Amazon because thats where you find the most buyers and sellers).

Network effects are important, granted. Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage. I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services. And that's effectivel…

It's $X per month though right, because of the electricity? I'm thinking about setting up an always on computer and I definitely will make sure to compare up front costs and operating costs if I do it.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Impossible Burger. Burger King sells them. Try an Impossible Whopper alongside the Beef Whopper. They're making a million pounds of burgers a month, from soy, potatoes, and heme for the meat flavor. Their plant in Oakland is only the size of a supermarket. This isn't an expensive product to make. When the beef industry's lobbyist in Washington first tried one, he called his people and said, "Guys, we have a p…

> When the beef industry's lobbyist in Washington first tried one, he called his people and said, "Guys, we have a problem". Source? This just sounds like a story made up for advertisement.

"If farmers and ranchers think we can mock and dismiss these products as a passing fad, we’re kidding ourselves. This is not just another disgusting tofu burger that only a dedicated hippie could convince himself to eat. It’s 95 percent of the way there, and the recipe is likely to only get better. Farmers and ranchers need to take notice and get ready to compete. I’ve tasted it with my own mouth, and this fake meat is ready for prime time."[1] - Eric Bohl, Director of Public Affairs & Advocacy for the Missouri Farm Bureau.

[1] https://mofb.org/taste-test-this-fake-meat-is-the-real-deal/

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#270
post #97
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice discussion folks.. BUT, there is an argument that never makes sense to me "the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption", so how can nature sustain amounts of PLANT consumption IF we all change it to plant-based diets? This does not make sense since for 1 piece of meat we need to eat dozen of different plants; plants as food have a huge impact in nature too.

The animals eat a lot more plants for a pound of meat they gain than humans would need if we only ate the plants. We are in the first day of this year and already over 120 million animals have been killed in the US for food. Approximations on amount of animals killed each year for food in the USA vary, but it is in tens of billions. Can you imagine the strain natural ecosystem would need to sustain to support tens of…

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