This post from Alex Danco contains a similar but much more opinionated and falsifiable set of predictions: https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-202...
What Will Happen in the 2020s
651–660 of 692 posts
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#652Predictions for 2020s
1. Agree
2. Automation will be one of the anticlimaxes of the decade.
3. China will have a mixed decade, marred by competition from other countries for production, human rights scandals, a domestic financial crisis that will spread globally, and a complete slowdown in growth. But its government will survive.
4. Crypto currency will be no more relevant in 2029 than 2019. The dollar will continue to dominate beyond 2030, until at last in the 2030s the Euro is backed by a significant military force.
5. No decentralised internet will gain popularity.
6. Plant based diets will see a meteoric rise in the west, but will still be a minority by 2030.
7. Biggest story of space will be the failure of NASA to make much progress in landing humans on Mars. SpaceX will make the most progress along those lines, with a test landing of an unmanned craft, but safety concerns over manned flight will hold SpaceX back in serving NASA.
8. A surprising backlash against social media will see the end of Facebook (but Whatsapp will survive well, with Instagram in a long decline). Twitter will pivot successfully almost beyond recognition.
9. Baby boomers will no longer dominate the electorate, and a shift to the political left will take place across America and Europe. The UK will see the most left wing government since Atlee’s. The climate crisis will help make big government palatable again.
10. Progress on cancer will be piecemeal and slow. However, this disappointment will contrast with miraculous advances in treating and prevention of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Mine...
11. VR will replace games consoles. VR will have a huge impact on society, but it will be only the beginning - much like 90s Internet, it will grow in importance decade by decade, but the 2020s will be remembered as the one in which it “arrived”.
12. Apple will decline to a shadow of its former self.
13. To everyone’s surprise, smart watches will have a come back in the second half of the decade thanks to hardware improvements, and will become almost universal for younger demographics. They will become a significant item of self expression, and related “digital jewellery” will also take off.
14. Electric cars will arrive faster than anticipated, putting huge strain on electricity distribution.
15. In the US, the college bubble will burst. In the UK it will not, but student numbers will drop and many universities will be forced to merge and close humanities departments.
16. Post Brexit UK will suffer a economic stagnation similar to Japan’s post banking crisis. Scotland will vote to remain in the UK, but Ireland will be reunified. A great number of people will leave the UK to work in the USA.
17. Putin will die, and Russia will enter a period of crisis and civil disorder.
18. After Trump’s second term ends in economic disaster, popularism in the US will slowly retreat. The democrats will be in power for the remainder of the decade, particularly focused on climate change.
19. Amazon and Microsoft will emerge as the great winners of big tech over the decade, driven by cloud services and consumer appliances.
20. A new e reader device that actually works well will be launched, destroying the kindle’s grip on the market, and will be universally adopted for education and leisure. The maker will be a newcomer and will end the decade as one of the most exciting startups since Google.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point but could get tricky for edge cases. Medical emergencies where every second counts for example or escaping violence.
Put appropriate limiters in the vehicles, with a button to disengage all the limits that also notifies the police that you have done so, so that they can decide whether they need to come help, whether (as they later review the case) there was appropriate cause, &c.
"appropriate cause" sounds ripe for abuse. Cops will be able to disable this "feature" in their personal cars, naturally. without consequence.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#654Earlier 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.
The 18% and 4/5 in 500 is just an example I pulled out of my butt. I didn’t do a scihub search to find the study but 18% is pretty weak. It’s also more for an assessment at a personal level how much risk you could expect as an individual, which most people care about. Even if that means 600k more cancer patients than before, you’d have to compare that against the null hypothesis to even see if you’re still in the territory of what random chance could arrive at.
An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.
Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A GHG tax is one that prices in externalities and will hurt trade over long distances in more or less equal measure, I’m not the biggest fan of it because I fear it would be used for policies other than mitigating the effects of a changing climate, but it would at least raise the price of everything from leaves to meat to automobiles to fish to computers and candles and essentially anything that is industrially produced or raised or caught. The net effect is to depress the purchasing power of everyone, and possibly, maybe even likely making the repair of a widget more price competitive with the replacement of a widget. I wouldn’t be able to buy as much meat with my current grocery budget, but I also wouldn’t be able to buy as much spinach or apples or garam masala or coffee without increasing my grocery budget. This would be true of anyone and everyone within a jurisdiction that actually implemented it properly.
In pricing out the tax, you would need to compute the global warming potential of the emissions for every piece in the supply chain, as well as their half life to measure their short term and long term impact and finally put a price on all of that. You could limit it to certain classes of emissions to keep it simpler, but you would want to cover all the known major transportation, industrial and agriculture emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and so on.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#656I too dream of a decentralized internet and especially decentralized cloud resources, but I can't find a way around the question of how you securely host a database on some random person's idle computer/"spot instance". If that data is compromised, who do you sue? The random person who has no assets? Data security ultimately depends on secure physical access to the hosting hardware. Not everything can or should be pu…
This is what you're looking for:
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
As there seem to be very few comments actually defending the ethical vegan standpoint here I go. Vegans who ask for „sin taxes“ don‘t want to piss you off, they simply have the belief (and actually quite well justifiable so) that meat consumption leads to quite a lot of suffering in the world. You don’t seem to be opposed to taxes on ghg emissions - presumably because you believe that they cause suffering. Why is it…
Your assumption is wrong. The tax I would support is entirely theoretical and would raise the prices of all industrial products on the market from all forms of food to all forms of textiles and all forms of computers and machinery. I suspect that if it were ever implemented properly to begin with, it would become a target to steer into a kind of sin tax or luxury tax by doubling the rate on this or that product or zero rating it for others, so I can’t say I necessarily even would support it. Show me a policy proposal and I’ll say “maybe”.
Suffering doesn’t enter into it, but I don’t like subsidies. If the problem with climate change is that my lifestyle is being subsidized because the “true cost” isn’t in the purchase price, I’ll pay it, but so should everyone. I’ll be paying more for meat, but I’ll also be paying more for spinach, and coffee, and spices, and salt, and clothes, and every single industrial good that I buy. And so would everyone, because the net result would be to see the purchasing power of everyone decrease. I can live with that if you can, even factoring in my dietary preferences, I’m willing to bet money I have a lower net contribution to climate change than most in my country.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The Internet had temperately killed technical clubs like HAM radio, wood working shops etc., as people got into coding and could collaborate remotely. Around 2008 lots of Makerspaces started to open, but not nearly enough, the maker movement has stalled though. We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair sh…
Ham Radio is far from dead, and it isn't a "technical club". It is an activity with many varied subinterests from public service to exploration of extremely efficient low-power communication modes to bouncing signals off the moon. There are 750,000 licensed amateur radio opeators in the United States.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
There are so many nice dishes that don't have or need meat. I think a large thing is that people don't experiment much with their food. I have to travel a lot for work and especially in Asia and Africa, there are tons of dishes which are easy to make but very rich in flavour and much more 'refined' (in my opinion) than having a slab of meat on my plate. I sometimes think I want a steak, but after 2 bites I start thin…
It’s all about the spices and sauces. Doesn’t matter if you’re cooking steak or tofu, it doesn’t have to be boring.
Re: What Will Happen in the 2020s
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably the most balanced comment about meat-eating I've ever read. I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities. Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop…
I think the main issue is that money alone won't stop the greenhouse gasses from entering the atmosphere. We just need to stop flying so much, and stop eating as much meat. It's unfortunate and inconvenient.
Increased price pressure would incentivized a bit more ingenuity. There’s a number of things that are cheaper to purchase a replacement for than to maintain and repair. That has its pluses and minuses, but you could change up the cost equation, and plow the extra revenue into reforestation and artificial reef construction.