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

481–490 of 692 posts

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#481

Post by graycat »

Plant based food?

Well, let me think! I just ate a home cooked pizza. The total calories were 654, and 455 of those were from just the flour, a "plant based food"!

More generally, in the US, big time grocery store items are milk, butter, cream, eggs, beef, chickens, and pork.

For feeding the animals, we have grass, hay, wheat, corn, and soy beans. E.g., look at a rail yard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qv7y0W_mNM

and see the long train of grain cars!!! We're talking a LOT of grain.

For the retired dairy cattle, "think fast food" -- US hamburgers are not going away at all soon!

Point: No way, not a chance, not even a teeny, tiny chance, will that huge industry and supply chain, with huge fractions of the land in the US South and Midwest devoted to growing animal feed, be displaced or even affected by "laboratory" anything.

Sure, we grow some mushrooms in caves. And some greenhouses grow tomatoes and maybe oregano, bib lettuce, basil, rosemary, etc. But greenhouses and hydroponics both go way back with no chance of anything similar having a big, new impact now.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#482

Post by stjohnswarts »

wongarsu wrote: post #445
henrikschroder wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, one more significant problem with nuclear power is that there isn't enough manufacturing capability to build reactor cores. Most existing reactors are decades old, and although we have a lot of theoretical knowledge on how to build reactors, how to build more modern reactors than the existing ones, we globally lack the practical know-how, there's no assembly line that we can just pick up reactors from. So t…

"Modern" reactor designs would indeed solve many problems with nuclear energy. But nuclear reactors are for the most part extremely expensive projects with high risks, so only conservative designs that are well tested are actually being built. This has been a problem for the last four decades, and I don't see why it would suddenly change. If anything risk appetite probably decreases as civilian nuclear reactors stop…

I believe that China has the appetite for it and will pursue new reactor types unlike the luddites that we have here in the USA. Luckily they will probably sell them to us for a profit.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#483

Post by Gatsky »

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…

Are you seriously talking about the China of today? This critique belongs in the 1980s. You can't ignore demographics, just look where the population is.

I think it is very hard for us outside of Hong Kong to understand the problem. Speaking to people that live there, (with no reason to be beholden to the PRC), they think it is mainly disenfranchised youth causing problems and dressing up like ninjas (their words not mine) rather than the noble rebellion as portrayed by the media.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#484

Post by imtringued »

ianai wrote: post #140
chillacy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in addition to new tech. So Yang is right to focus on thorium.

Wish these billionaires with good intentions would invest in marketing to revamp public nuclear sentiment. There’s clearly the possibility of progress given how effective other political campaigns are.

If they really cared they would invest into getting rid of the source of the anti nuclear sentiment: shut down obsolete power plants with unsafe designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl happened because everyone ignored this simple advice. Nuclear power plants are so capital intensive that operators keep plants with known design defects or gross mismanagement running.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#485

Post by joering2 »

toyg wrote: post #138
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…

Same. Beyond the obvious lack of perspective on the developing world (where meat-eating can only grow), entire cultures are completely wrapped up in the rituals around eating meat and will resist any attempt to go back to the bad old days of meat scarcity.

Knowing how far we advanced with body parts reporuduction (altho not much in widespred use yet) but 2030 I envision most meat producers will move into printing meat, rather than regular farming. And its not because of growing demand or some personal feelings but because it will be much cheaper to print out part of a cow than raise one.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#486

Post by imtringued »

Animats wrote: post #375
paul_f wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and it's funny.[1] The Impossible Burger was cool when it cost $20 at Jardiniere. Then the company scaled up and started supplying Burger King. This got some foodies upset. Wait until they get the price down to well below meat and start supplying McDonalds. [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/10/7/20880318/meatle...

If that happens then we will stop seeing meat in any processed food because of extreme cost cutting even if people still want real meat.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#487

Post by RookyNumbas »

pmiller2 wrote: post #421
commandlinefan wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grave prophecies of doom will not come to pass, causing loss of momentum and credibility. Why would you think this? Grave prophecies of doom have failed to come to pass for nearly half a century now and the climate change tale is _gaining_ momentum.

Failed to come to pass? Are you aware there’s an entire continent literally on fire right now?

Australia is always on fire. More of has burnt many times, many decades ago.

I'm not saying that climate change isn't responsible. I do believe that it has increased the severity of the situation, and that is a big problem. But this is not a doomsday scenario. It's a once every 20 years going back as long as we can measure scenario.

I think your reaction is a perfect example of what the parent comment is talking about.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#489

Post by gfodor »

dagss wrote: post #144
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…

The internet is already a huge step up in communication from 20 years ago. Turns out people use that to find ideologically likeminded people meaning tribalist movements everywhere are stronger now than before internet came along. 90's were full of optimism about how tribalism could be overcome that is completely vanished now. From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use…

Yet in these same cities people meet in places, and have the positive experiences we often define as being human. Consider how many of these are currently possible to have through the Internet, and how likely that is to change if social presence and shared spatial awareness are deliverable remotely.

The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.

It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#490

Post by chii »

cc439 wrote: post #393
joyjoyjoy wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>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: One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing…

america has an interest in making fracking viable, since it's a technology that not many nations can employ (without the involvement of american firms anyway).

Fracking also allows america to place economic pressure to some countries like Russian (by lowering the price of their primary export).

Given the above, it will be unlikely for interest rates to grow in the next decade - since doing so has no advantages (except inflation, which is kept under control by the dollar's reserve status), and has many dis-advantages (such as causing a shock to businesses borrowing, which can precipitate a depression).

Post reply on HN