281–290 of 659 posts
> The people of 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky... Haha, so wrong. All I see is power lines everywhere, and I can't unsee them. SO ugly.
I was surprised on my recent road trip across US that you've got wires in urban/suburban neighborhoods - even the richer ones like Palo Alto.
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As a person who has been exclusively on something similar to soylent for entire 2021, it is certainly possible today albeit not via 4 pills.
Out of complete curiosity: any particular reason to avoid traditional food?
- Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were even successful transatlantic flights.
- The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had careers and even unions.
- Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of the world.
- Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing.
In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions – food pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right now).
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> 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.
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It’s probably a waste of time to argue this, but the arguments for central banking were the same as the arguments put forth by Alexander Hamilton. More stability, greater resilience, etc. The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.
Inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer into the upper class without most people realizing it. Wealth, be it institutions or individuals, will always push for central banking as it entrenches their power.
" A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms." I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obv…
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Central banks and their role in tyranny is hardly “vague”. They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation that I don’t trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power shouldn’t be in the hands of any one person or organization.
>They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. There are a countless other ways a country can do this and most of those are more targeted. The tax code is the most obvious example. Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points. If the goal is to wield power, it is much more important to control the tax code and move the income tax from 0% (generally true before the 16th Amendment in 1913)…
A country? The federal reserve is run by private individuals. It is a private bank. Don't let the name fool you.
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> They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much. honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting back on the general time overhead of working in an office. I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've become less enterprising due to class immobi…
>honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great privilege. Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc. The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that has benefited enor…
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In my earlier reply to GP, I had forgotten about space exploration, and I think that is a major technological advancement that would amaze someone from 1922. However, I still think that someone from 1922 would expect such things of 2022 in a way that someone from 1822 would not expect of 1922. 1822 - 1922 is the difference between being a barely-technological world to being a fully-blown one, in many, many fields.
Modern medicin would be nothing short of miraculous from the eyes of someone from 1920.
> The people of 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky... Haha, so wrong. All I see is power lines everywhere, and I can't unsee them. SO ugly.
You always know when you see an American film because of all the powerlines, and I always wonder why they are not put underground.