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What Will Happen in the 2020s

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Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#271

Post by esotericn »

maxerickson wrote: post #267
esotericn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess that having had a computer since age 10 or so I just considered it a fairly standard thing for nerds to do.

Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.

It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.

My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#272

Post by pascalxus »

opportune wrote: post #236

I don’t really buy into 4-6. I don’t see any benefit for a country to turn its currency into a crypto asset. Either they are relinquishing a great deal of control in democratizing their financial system (also exposing themselves to attack), or it’s a crypto in name only that doesn’t seem any better than digital cash through banks except for a buzzword. Decentralization is hit or miss. You get economies of scale with…

Yes, the only way #6 will come true is if the replacement for meat looks, smells and tastes exactly like the real thing and it'll have to be cheaper too.

People all over the world love meat, especially US, UK and the Chinese. I've tried to convince some family members to reduce their meat consumption even a tiniest amount gets a huge amount of resistance. People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.

Impossible meat has a great start and I think their market share will continue to increase. But, there's an immense amount of variety in the meat market and the alternative meat industry still has a huge amount of work to do to address it.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#273

Post by mdo91l »

magicsmoke wrote: post #248
RivieraKid wrote: post #175

> Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies Why? I don't see what would be the benefit of that. Fiat currency already is digital. And - at least where I live - domestic transfers are instant.

Here's a possible reason for why a crypto fiat currency with a distributed ledger might be attractive. Currently, all fiat currencies operate with a central ledger at whatever central bank is authorized to print or destroy units of the currency. For example, every US dollar is linked through a chain of deposits and liabilities back to an account at the Fed since any bank operating in the US is required to hold an acc…

So what is the incentive for countries with geopolitical clout? Why wouldn’t they just make it illegal?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#274

Post by chukye »

burfog wrote: post #105
yes_man wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Humans are not ruminants. We can not survive on hay. We can survive on the high-nutrition parts of plants, but creating these parts is resource-intensive. In some cases the whole plant is simply difficult to grow (pests, fertilizer, etc.) and in other cases we don't get very much food from each plant. There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew. Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and ca…

Exactly! Humans to survive need to combine a lot of fancy vegetables, we can't live eating grass...

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#275

Post by tomjen3 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #90

> Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories. This needs a huge asterisks at the end of it right? You could argue that plant based diets already dominate the world. Now if he's claiming that "muscular" foods that are produced in a lab will pound for po…

>This needs a huge asterisks at the end of it right? You could argue that plant based diets already dominate the world. Now if he's claiming that "muscular" foods that are produced in a lab will pound for pound outsell animal based meat I would happily take that bet against him.

This seems to be one of those issues that is likely to flip very quickly. I suspect there will be two cut-of points (making no prediction on when it will happen), with the first being when it is cheaper to make then lab-grown meat than the old-style with profit and return on investment in the assets to make the food (ie when you can no longer afford to start new farms, but can keep existing ones in profitable production) and when the price of lab-meat drops below the marginal cow cost (ie when you can only sell meat based cows at a loss).

I suspect that it will take much more time to reach the first cutof point than it will take to go from the first cutoff point to the second and when either is reached it will have very quick effects that will prove massively destructive to existing farms and related infrastructure.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#276

Post by [deleted] »

mymythisisthis wrote: post #266
nradov wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#277

Post by AnimalMuppet »

csomar wrote: post #244
ianai wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China doomed to fail based on what?

Based on history. Except this time there are several global powers looking to either take over or keep it fragmented.

There were last time, too. Eventually those global powers had troubles of their own, and had to pull out of China.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#278

Post by LeftHandPath »

bransonf wrote: post #209

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…

A lot of the article seems to be based on liberal ideals, which include a less prominent America, the promotion of Veganism, and embracing the fall of the West. For the most part, the author’s expectations about crypto are mistaken in that they assume financiers in the west trust China enough to buy into its digital currency. We are bordering on a Cold War; we aren’t about to trust them to keep their promises on crypto.

I think a more moderate take would be suggesting a straddle of the EU - either it strangles itself with clunky bureaucracy, or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russia, or China.

Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#279

Post by bsder »

bransonf wrote: post #209

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…

Yeah, the worst thing that could happen to China now is that Li Xinping lives a long life.

We have seen over and over in history that an individual dictator fairly quickly diverges from rational paths.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#280

Post by joyjoyjoy »

bransonf wrote: post #209

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…

"What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months."

Wrong Chinese people are very happy. In some rankings they belong to the happiest people. Here they are medium range: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/09/10...

My prediction:

We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/09/12/our-energy-and-debt-pr...

PS: The US is also pretty good at making other countries unhappy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran to name a few :-)

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