Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Will Happen in the 2020s

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 692 posts

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#301

Post by nobrains »

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…

Muslims, 24% of the world's population, have the following requirements to eat meat:

- They sacrifice a goat (or sheep, cow, camel, etc.) once a year on Eid.

- They sacrifice a goat, etc. upon every baby's birth.

- They are encouraged to sacrifice an animal for atonement, blessings and other reasons.

Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice#Islam

I don't think animal consumption is going down that soon.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#302

Post by hbt »

joyjoyjoy wrote: post #280
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 p…

difficult to know the truth when the population answers surveys by picking the right answer instead of giving their true opinion.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#303

Post by Symmetry »

tomjen3 wrote: post #275
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…

A possibly even more significant milestone would be when the best lab-grown or hybrid lab-grown/plant-based meat tastes better than the best natural meat. This seems like something that should be possible, possibly within a decade given recent trends.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#304

Post by 6nf »

pascalxus wrote: post #272
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 b…

Faced with a choice between beef or fake beef that tastes exactly the same, most people will just go for the real beef. They don't want the highly processed fake stuff that contains who knows what.

The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#305

Post by paul_f »

Animats wrote: post #174
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…

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…

There is a coming backlash against fake meat due to the amount of chemicals and processing required. It's not just soy, potatoes and flavoring.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#306

Post by uxcolumbo »

chukye wrote: post #89
warent wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you reconcile this with the existence of healthy individuals who have eaten nothing but plants for decades. I myself have not eaten meat in about 5 years, and I just had a health check-up with full blood work. My doctor said "whatever you're doing, keep doing. You're healthy and I don't recommend changing a thing."

I bet you live in San Francisco :D /jokes a side; for you to be healthy without eating meat you need to eat a large variation of plants, it's not only one, it's not only one meal by day. It's not easy and have a great impact in nature too, meat have all we need and is simpler. Also, humans that are fed only with meat are able to eat once a week (or less).

Again, please share the studies to back up your claims. You're either trolling or just very poorly informed and spreading misinformation without checking it.

And how do you reconcile the fact that animal agriculture is a large contributor to ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the result of a 5 year Oxford Uni study that recommends adopting a more plant-based diet to reduce your personal carbon footprint[0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#307

Post by Symmetry »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #265
watertom wrote: post #186

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?

Possibly ocean acidification could damage the cell walls of diatoms, which make up a fair fraction of phytoplankton? But I don't see how that could have been locked in 30 years ago.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#308

Post by danans »

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…

> There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.

There is also a whole lot of cashew attached to that tree, and the same tree produces more, year after year.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#310

Post by Symmetry »

ianai wrote: post #162

The predictions about China are a little confusing. I know they’ve copied lots of foreign tech, but have they demonstrated any ability to source original research and development that had no external links? This read a little like what China would want the 2020s to look like.

Historically most countries don't succeed in copying others and those that are able to, like the US and Japan, go on to innovate later.
Post reply on HN