Where's the flying cars, dammit! We were promised flying cars! Jail somebody, the future is all rigged.
What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
251–260 of 659 posts
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…
Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…
There is absolutely nothing liberating about central banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance).
It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight.
It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% of corporate profits since 1973, with all of the growth in wealth inequality that goes along with that.
It leads to gigantic corporate welfare programs, like the government mortgage guarantee program, where financial institutions buy $1.5 trillion worth of government guaranteed mortgage backed securities - where profits are 100% privatized, and risk is 100% socialized - every year.
>>And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer,
You always had that freedom. Now you have the power to get the state to force the employer to keep you employed, and not replace you, while you strike.
This power has given public sector unions total control over public finances.
For example, New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going.
>>Well, there's more taxation.
Yes, the state now forces you, under pain of imprisonment, to work 40% of the year to pay a bloated bureaucracy.
>>And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And every one has to suffer higher costs, and less advancement, as a specialized caste of anti-discrimination lawyers extract billions of dollars per year from corporations for their failure to comply with impossible-to-comply-with anti-discrimination laws [1] while forcing the private sector to 1. spend billions more in "anti-racism" training, that includes lessons on the supposed omnipresence of "white privilege" [2] and 2. institute affirmative action programs, that waste resources and lead to less competent work forces, respectively.
>>And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
Yes, you need the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper, which is often incompetent, and prevents people from accessing life-saving medical products/services in a timely manner [3][4] or denies people access to a vaccine due to a risk from side effects that is orders of magnitude lower than the risk the vaccine mitigates. [5]
>>women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job,
Women had jobs back then. The jobs available to women have improved due to the cultural impact of much higher per capita productivity, which makes people far more independent and assertive.
>>you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
That is entirely due to higher per capita productivity, which enables more people to be supported through their post-secondary schooling years.
The massive per capita productivity growth seen since 1922 could soon be a thing of the past in the advanced economies, as the growing repressiveness of the state has steadily reduced per capita GDP growth rates over the last several decades, and this trend sees no signs of abatement or reversal.
[1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
[2] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/this-scientist-created-a-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johns...
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#253It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-da…
> Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving. You can see this today with the anti-work movement and the overindulgence in tv shows, movies, porn, junk food, social media, and video games. All these things are corrupting the future generation…
Some, no doubt, will choose a less creative path, but we also have evidence in history that people, who have the privilege of not worrying about their daily bread, also choose to spend their time in pursuit of sciences, arts, etc and many things not practical for them in regular employment and that advance all people.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#254Dude is describing tenements in Hong Kong…
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#255It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-da…
> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…
> the United States is still one of the most free ... countries on the planet.
By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude?
Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking?wprov=sfla1
[1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom?wpro...
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…
> And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you. Never thought about this before: Suppose I’m Black, respond to a Craigslist ad for a $10k car for sale by owner, and am refused for my skin color. What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under? Most of the anti-discrimination laws I know of apply to companies, usually companies with more than N employees.
> What law do I or the state prosecute the seller under?
Start your research with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#257Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822. Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world. Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Spa…
> Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world. These are a different in quality more so than a different in kind. In 1922 you could already talk to someone 100s of miles away via the telephone. In 1822 you couldn't. And getting there was going to take weeks. So you basi…
> These are a different in quality more so than a different in kind.
Sometimes the difference in quality is smaller. Communication by mail could have a cadence reminiscent of email, for example:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail-del...
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…
This is one of the wrongest comments I've ever seen on HN, hah.
Which part is wrong? Some parts are obviously correct.
The US is definitely one of the most diverse large countries. India is probably more diverse along language lines. China is definitely not along any dimension. Even the EU states (that depend on US for defense and use oil to power their economies) are less diverse.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. For reference, public debt tends to be higher when based in currencies that can be more easily debased. This was true in Roman times as it is now. I’m on my phone, so I’d have to look up the book, but it’s well documented.
Entirely possible, but defaults tend to be higher when debt is in a currency that cannot be debased, for somewhat obvious reasons.
There is a constraint the prevents (some) countries from more frequent debasement: if you debase your currency, then lenders will increasingly require that future debt be issued in an external currency. And even if you find lenders, the purchasing power provided in the debased currency remains constrained by external trade in non-debased currencies.