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What Will Happen in the 2020s

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Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#631

Post by jl2718 »

cableshaft wrote: post #35

What will happen in the 2020s: “Error establishing a database connection.” Yep, sounds about right.

Maybe this is the decade that web developers will finally stop using dynamic databases for static content.

I'll predict the opposite. Web stacks will get even more unnecessarily complex and buggy. Investment sizes, late-stage development cycles, and page size, will continue to grow toward infinity while startup success rates drop closer to zero. Page load times on the best available connection and hardware will remain constant as it always has.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#632

Post by soared »

nradov wrote: post #169
mymythisisthis wrote: post #126

All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments. All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles. Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap camera…

Our current cellular data infrastructure isn't nearly reliable enough to allow routine use of remote operated vehicles in public roads. What happens when a construction crew accidently cuts the backhaul fiber and takes out a whole group of base stations? And no, that problem won't be solved by 5G networks or satellite service.

That problem already occurs! How many of us stopped working for hours when github went down? When aws went down? When some construction cut a wire and took out some of the internet?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#633

Post by slipheen »

buckminster wrote: post #261
jayd16 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt dashcams and gps will be required in the next decade but I bet installing them will get you a discount of some kind.

The eCall system - which automatically phones the emergency services with your position after a crash - is already mandatory on new cars in the EU. The GPS is already there. Making further use of it, perhaps to assist self-driving cars, doesn't seem like such a stretch. (Which is not to say I welcome it.)

I'm curious if you happen to know -

Is it only mandatory to ship it with new cars, or is it mandatory to have it installed?

Would it be legal for me to remove, similar to what I've done with Onstar/Starlink in the past?

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#634

Post by mnm1 »

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…

Meat will also be eaten by people who are tired of the carb and sugar filled garbage that passes off as food but leads to obesity and death. Like the impossible burger and all the garbage like that. The worst part of a hamburger, as far as diet is concerned, is the bun which in America has tons of sugar. Assuming they didn't add sugar to the meat. The irony is that meat is some of the healthiest food available that's also tasty. People will be eating it way after global warming has given us a few degrees Celsius rise in temperature.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#635

Post by danans »

SllX wrote: post #356
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…

As someone who isn’t considering giving up my ways, red blooded meat eating American that I am, I actually appreciate vegans to some degree. 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,…

> 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.

Kudos to you, but this opinion would make you exceedingly rare among people for whom eating meat is an identity issue.

> 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.

It's less about you individually than the economic policies that enable the mass production and consumption of meat. Beyond the science, which pretty convincingly make the case that industrial meat is behind a huge amount of environmental damage, the politics of this are very much about personal beliefs about whether or not that situation should continue in the same form, or be biased more towards plant based foods (via the carbon/ghg tax you proposed). And politics are grounded for better or worse in beliefs and dogma, just like religion.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#636

Post by chillacy »

mistermann wrote: post #461
cesarb wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I suspect there's some relevant work in the financial sector, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#637

Post by chillacy »

puranjay wrote: post #562
pgodzin wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best. I think the reason would be that most countries that make short-term decisions are ones that have democratic elections every few years and need to avoid pissing off too many people. China's authoritarian system may have more leeway with short-term pain for longer-term strategic initiatives not…

Our evidence from the 20th century shows that the only countries that are successful are democratic. The list of authoritarian countries that crashed and burned is longer than the list of democratic countries that did the same.

Singapore is fairly authoritarian and they've had outsized success going from third world to first.

I think the root cause is pretty simple: having no checks and balances lets you move faster, no matter what direction (either up or down), and it's a lot easier to mess things up than it is to do everything right.

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#639

Post by bumby »

osn9363739 wrote: post #493
mitchty wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a bit shocking and I'll get downvoted for it but: Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization. I downvoted you not because of what you wrote, but because what you wrote is directly refuted by your (unlisted no less which I find intellectually lazy) source. Processed…

I'm on your side here, but by what you are saying, doesn't that amount to an additional 600,000 cancer cases just in the USA. Is my math wrong? That's nothing to sneeze at.

My back-of-the-envelope numbers are close to yours, but I think a very big caveat is the confidence of these associations from epidemiological studies. 18% percent is quite low by most standards. Most epidemiological studies expect 100%-400% to draw strong correlations. Smoking, by example, is in the thousands of percent increase risk.

"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are quite simply out of business." [1]

The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15255093

Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s

#640

Post by aussiegreenie »

Here are my 2 cents worth of prediction.

1. Energy will become very cheap (almost free), solar and wind will be about USD 5-7 per MW-h (or ~USD 13 per BOE)

2. The Chinese CCP will fail. - China will return to local strongmen who may claim to be the CCP. But are really Warlords similar to 1919 - 1940.

3. Major ecological failure. The shit will really hit the fan. Millions dead and many more millions trying to get to rich countries.

4. Economic growth stalls - all the neo-liberal bullshit dies. Growth hits hard ecological limits.

This is just the start, modern civilisation will be lucky to survive until 2040.

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