351–360 of 692 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"How's life in soviet russia?" "Can't complain!" This is the mistake you're making regarding China. Source: grew up there
"How's life in China?" "Great!" Source: I live there! This is the mistake you're making regarding stuff you have no idea of.
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 th…
I don't think it's a problem, if the economics are in place.
Regarding China, I believe that the Chinese economy will collapse because less and less countries will want to do business with China due to it’s human rights violations. Regarding plan based diets, I agree but I think that eating meat will be seen as babaric. I believe that the way way we treat animals now will be seen similarly as we see slavery now. Regarding, decentralized internet and crypto currencies. I don’t…
People are more than happy to deal with the Saudi’s despite appalling human rights records. So long as they have something people want, countries don’t care about human rights.
I also believe that people will be more aware of these things in the future than in the past.
>5/ A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc. The emergence of decentralized consumer applications will be slow to take hold and a killer decentralized consumer app will not emerge until the latter part of the decade. The pendulum of history suggests this will occur (at some point), and I hope it happens sooner than later in man…
Maybe there will be a need for massive computing in remote areas: Antartica, or space. They need a lot of local storage and compute. And they have low bandwidth. It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-self-driving-car-computer-... So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a t…
A keen observation!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are being downvoted, but I think that you are totally right. For an awful lot of people, eating meat is a matter of status; it's similar to why many people prefer having big cars even if they are less environmentally friendly. There is also the fact that plant based diets are still associated to certain ideologies and because of that they will keep being scoffed at by people from opposing ideologies. Sure, you do…
As long as there are an appreciable number of them, I will enjoy a greater variety of dishes and ingredients available to me, and oftentimes fresher ingredients too.
Insofar as they are making choices that benefit them, they also make choices that benefit me.
Where they lose me, and this isn’t all vegans, but the ones that lose me are the ones that try to convince me that I am a bad person for the dietary choices I make. Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. The ones that make me want to go out and eat two steaks just to stick it to them are the ones that want to take away my choices or introduce sin taxes onto meat. I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that. I would argue such a fair tax is entirely theoretical, but in theory, it could work out. The ones that want to punish me specifically are the ones I can’t abide.
When someone introduces me to an entirely vegetarian dish or vegan dish that I like, I’ll probably add it to my menu and start making it myself, and I usually don’t modify it to add any additional protein. Good food is good food and I actually like tofu and some of those veggie patties on the market. I like them for that they are, not for what they pretend to be. It come down to making a different choice as to what to eat for dinner, rather than making a compromise.
Today, January 1st 2020, I’m not even thinking about lab grown meat. Maybe I’ll prefer it on January 1st, 2030, or maybe I’ll be paying a premium for my steak, or maybe the price of my premium cut steak will actually fall after checking against inflation and I’ll be eating even more steak. Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties. Vegans that practice veganism for dogmatic, ideological and religious reasons certainly aren’t going to win me over in ten or a hundred years by preaching to me though.
I make choices. Vegans make choices. Everyone makes choices. I think that’s a pretty good state of affairs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regarding China, I believe that the Chinese economy will collapse because less and less countries will want to do business with China due to it’s human rights violations. Think you're totally wrong here. The only countries that will care about China's human rights record are the NATO countries. The other 6 billion people in the world live under governments that will be happy to work with a superpower willing to loo…
But those are the countries that China would want to trade with. China also has territorial conflicts with all of it’s neighbors in South China Sea.
Their neighbors will be forced to play nice with them or be blockaded. Which is exactly what the US did in the early 1900s with central / south American banana republics. There is a playbook for ascendant superpowers, and China is just playing their best hand. Anyone who isn't a superpower is just going to have to accept what China does.
Putin is less likely to move on. There may be a new leadership in Iran but culturally it's unlikely to be more flexible, if anything it's going to be less flexible.
Europe already has it's new leaders. It probably won't be very different.
A politically resurgent youth vote will be coming into it's prime pissed off with current tax and social policy in housing and education. And of course climate.
The ww2 generation and it's successor will be dying out faster, but costing more in pension and health costs and contributing less in tax inputs.
Ubiquitous internet will be a given but more overtly a dual edged sword as tax and national borders continue to collide
No candidate for high office will have a blank sheet of high school pranks. Fifteen year old tweets will be held up to fresh air
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…