What Will Happen in the 2020s • Hacker News Board

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#621

Post by justin66 » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #17

> We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate. Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power. Despite Thorium not being fully proven yet, I lean toward agreement with Yang: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_p…

> Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.

Just out of curiosity, is the latter part of a generation that will begin to die off in the 2020s?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#622

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

6nf wrote: post #432

jka wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within a much smaller price margin, there'd still be plenty of reasons to make kill-free meat the default preference. Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers. There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as op…

Hey if they can develop lab-meat cultures with the same(ish) makeup of real meat then yes I'd love that stuff. If I can get the same product but without suffering of animals then I'm 100% on board. What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.

[deleted]

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#623

Post by o09rdk » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

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…

I have mixed feelings about the predictions; I get the sense that significant change is in the air, at least in the US, whatever direction that takes. I see some of these things as being realistic, especially on a global scale.

That said, I think he might be wrong about (3) (among other things) and (5) is related in my mind. China is certainly growing, in part because of problems in the Euro-American world, but it is also brewing problems and unrest with increasingly autocratic behavior, and a number of other economic problems are showing.

I do see increased adoption of decentralized technologies, in part because of increased political volatility and mistrust of involved centralized IT corporations. That is, I see (5) happening in part because I think (3) might be a bit of an overprediction.

It won't just be China though, and hasn't been. People will increasingly be dealing with censorship and monitoring, and trying to bypass it, and will also become increasingly distrustful of things like Facebook, which correctly or incorrectly has been implicated in things like Russian-UK-US subterfuge. Adoption of decentralized tech is already happening with Hong Kong and Catalonia protests; I suspect it will grow to become more mainstream.

I don't see the traditional centralized internet going away, but I do see people gravitating toward a more hybrid system. Maybe where more critical, and more intimate communications with close others moves to more decentralized architectures, along with other stuff that doesn't depend on speed so much, whereas other mass communications remains more centralized.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#624

Post by vnorilo » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #616

vnorilo wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, those million years of evolution did not select specifically for ”delicious and nutritious”.

I disagree. Evolution has created signals -- "tasty" -- for things that are good for us. Fats, salts, and sugars are comparatively rare in a wild environment, and thus they taste good.

Sure, but that's us evolving, not the animals, right? We have made quite a few other nutrient-dense foods that hack those signals. Evolution did not make cheese or chocolate in all these years, because it doesn't target our palate, rather the other way around. (Notable recent counterargument is the selective breeding of cattle for food, but that's thousands, not millions of years.)

I don't think the evolution of cattle is a good indicator of the difficulty of creating great plant protein products.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#625

Post by bransonf » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

Can_Not wrote: post #491

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also good at giving death penalties for white collar crime. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-27/china-sen... Keep up America!

The US has the opposite extreme of this problem, where we get 6 months for the same white collar crime but there's a minimum 5 year sentence if you grow a specific plant to treat your dehibilating asthma symptoms ( http://www.hr95.org/pinson.htm ).

I was going to make a quip about how you would probably fare worse in China, but at least according to Wikipedia, the penalty is 10-15 days [0]. On the other hand, legalization is probably imminent in the US. The same is not true of China.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_China

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#626

Post by pier25 » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

The 2020s will be when the majority of humanity finally agrees that we need to make climate change our highest priority since it will be too obvious to ignore. See what's happening in Australia now for example.

OTOH I don't think serious global action will happen in this decade. I seriously hope I'm wrong on that one because we are already 40 years late and I fear we might have passed the point of no return.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#627

Post by pharke » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #554

pharke wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would likely be unintended consequences to raising the price of meat through a carbon tax. It creates a market for cheaper meat that there will be no shortage of producers or consumers for. How that meat is made cheaper is an open question. It could be through carbon offsets but it could just as well be through worse conditions for the animals or importing the meat from countries where production is cheaper.

The same argument is made against raising the taxes on tobacco products, that "people will smuggle in cigarettes from countries without the tax", but it never seems to actually happen to any significant degree. People are lazy, and if the only source of cheap meat is the black market of illegally-imported products, only a very small segment of people will bother.

I live somewhere with high taxes on tobacco products and illegal cigarettes are a big problem. It's not a small segment of the smoking population either but it is disproportionately those who are more economically disadvantaged. People are lazy but they are also motivated by economic pressures. It's easy for something like that to become an 'invisible' problem to people who aren't in those economic or social groups while still having severe negative effects on a large number of people.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#628

Post by candiodari » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #206

criddell wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationale is taxation. As more cars go electric they have to replace the gasoline tax.

I would think it should be the other way around where gas cars would need to pay carbon tax. Or we can just call it even. Or in a hopeful scenario, stop oil and gas subsidies.

In most of the world, gasoline is mostly tax already. The US is an exception.

E.g. in the Netherlands the "raw" price of gasoline (a few months back) was 0.61 euro/liter to that, add 0.6 gasoline tax and then add VAT, to come to the price at the pump (pump costs + profits come are included in the 0.61 raw price) of 1.46 euro/liter.

So about 58% of the cost of fuel is tax.

This is ignoring various other taxes that have to be paid, such as foreign taxes on the gasoline, profit tax, company tax, transport tax, road tax, approval tax, vat on the vehicle you're powering, ... All those taxes are either included in the raw gasoline price or are paid separately by the customers. So let's minimize that and say that 70% of the cost of gasoline really funds government (though not necessarily the local one), and should be considered tax (I do believe it'd be closer to 80% if you went really deep). Now of course, a number of those taxes are implemented on electric vehicles as well.

There's no way the government is going to let that tax income lower when it starts eating into their budget, so there will be some sort of tax, probably doubling the price of electric vehicles in the next 10 years or so.

And this is tax. It doesn't matter that you're not doing anything negative to the environment. Already the government is taxing companies generating their own electricity (the Netherlands) in various ways, and they're talking about taxing people who cut their grid connection.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#629

Post by sagichmal » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #495

sagichmal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ipfs, dat, zeronet I think are good examples of the sparks you are looking for. All of these things are failures?

I agree. They are just modernized torrents with higher usability. The real problem (consensus) still only has one solution: blockchain with proof of work.

That's not true either.

What nonsense has infected the blockchain space that people believe these things??

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#630

Post by asveikau » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #377

elfexec wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the article seems to be based on liberal ideals Not liberal ideals. Globalist neoliberal ideals. > which include a less prominent America, the promotion of Veganism, and embracing the fall of the West. These aren't liberal ideals. They are globalist neoliberal ideals. Anti-human, anti-american and pro-globalist financiers. > or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russi…

> Not liberal ideals. Globalist neoliberal ideals. "Neoliberal" refers to Clinton-style ("third way") liberal politicians. I don't know who you're using it to refer to. > Having europe turn from a "vassal" to a competitor would represent a significant loss of power for the US. You forgot to include why you think that's a bad thing. > Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US. But they can't vote and have no (us…

>> Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US.

> But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress. Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").

It's a similar situation in Washington DC. DC residents were given a few electoral college votes, I believe that was put into effect only relatively recently in the 1960s. They have no vote in the US house and no senators.