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What Will Happen in the 2020s

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Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#461

Post by mistermann »

cesarb wrote: post #330
Symmetry wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? The Banquiao Dam failure killed something like an order of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. And there was the recent Oroville Dam incident which didn't kill anyone but it came pretty close to failing catastrophically.

> Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? Yes. You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.

Is there an accepted methodology for calculating risk estimations in these situations? I mean, it's essentially speculation afaict, so how do you put a number on it?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#462

Post by wolco »

jka wrote: post #376
gordaco wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're absolutely right that the status symbol aspect of meat consumption is going to be a large factor in people's decision-making. That said, there are inflection points at which certain products switch from being seen as status symbols into more questionable signals - wearing fur springs to mind as one example. I don't think it's at all guaranteed that traditional meat would end up in that category; it's a…

Fur is a fashion meat is a core pillar in many cultures and changing that will take longer than 10 years.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#463

Post by sangnoir »

cletus wrote: post #416

So, I have a problem with a large number of these points. Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read. I think Fred is way off here. The bullet points: 1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way h…

> 5. Decentralized Internet is a pipe dream.

I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.

Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#465

Post by Baeocystin »

Faark wrote: post #440
Baeocystin wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_attempts_and_victims_of... People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree.…

> Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional. Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised i…

>Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.

It's a convenient narrative, but it isn't, IMO, a correct one. Yes, the Treuhand had to decide quite literally which businesses got to live, and which didn't. Never before had an entire country been converted from a planned economy to a market one. There was no road map to follow. Decades of land and property seizure by both the Nazis & the Soviets made untangling actual ownership rights a Sisyphean task.

But at the same time this transition was occuring, billions and billions of Marks/Euros were and are invested in bringing the East up to the same levels of development. What do you think would have happened with the same governmental collapse, if the Treuhandanstalt hadn't existed? Honest question.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#466

Post by jogjayr »

brlewis wrote: post #441
cletus wrote: post #416

So, I have a problem with a large number of these points. Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read. I think Fred is way off here. The bullet points: 1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way h…

> Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/n…

Cool idea, but I don't completely understand the interface. It's not clear what the 1-5 buttons up top are: does clicking on it record my rating of the claim?

What are the numbers next to each of the links in Pros and Cons? They look like they correspond to the ratings above, but I didn't understand how those were derived.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#467

Post by mistermann »

iamwil wrote: post #127
gfodor wrote: post #63

I predict the 2020's will turn out to be the most difficult-to-predict decade yet. The predictions of the OP in my mind fail to account for several yet-to-mature disruptive technologies that will potentially transform our society to the degree the Internet and web have. The only prediction I'll make is in the domain where I work: By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing d…

> This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense. Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the…

> I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.

I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.

What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#468

Post by aerodude »

gordaco wrote: post #322
6nf wrote: post #304

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…

I'd go even further than that and argue that the reason vegan and vegetarian diets have taken off as much as they have is because they became status symbols in the 90s / 2000s.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#469

Post by petermcneeley »

brlewis wrote: post #441
cletus wrote: post #416

So, I have a problem with a large number of these points. Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read. I think Fred is way off here. The bullet points: 1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way h…

> Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/n…

There's some good ideas here.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#470

Post by mekster »

mattigames wrote: post #456
mekster wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need 150 people to run a non interactive site? I'm not against anything about them but if they want donations, their way of expense should be clearer.

"Non-interactive site" wtf, do you even know the trickery you have to do in JavaScript files to remotely work outside their intended domains? Or how hard was to create a working playable copy of hundreds of old games? Or how much people you need to handle an ever-growing data storage (e.g everyday bigger than the day before) while making it available over internet?

While the code needs maintenance to adapt to edge cases, it's build once and maintain feature. It's not user registering site that needs support for customers and no need to introduce new features to keep going.

Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.

You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?

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