Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

loc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 659 posts

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#291

Post by toomanydoubts »

jollybean wrote: post #197
didericis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, bu…

" why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change?" I didn't mean to imply that. Most of those things didn't come from Central Banking. That said, modern finance has 'enabled everything' just like having a highly literate education 'enables everything' as well.

They have also enabled commercial banks loaning other people money irresponsibly and getting obscenous bailouts when the loan takers default because "the banks are too big to fail". What a great world to live in.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#292

Post by iso1631 »

slg wrote: post #234
zionic wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> Inflation is a flat tax of a few percentage points

Flat tax on cash holdings, which poor people don't have.

It's a negative tax on debt, which poor people tend to hold. It doesn't apply to assets.

Now if wages don't keep track with inflation, that's not a tax, it's an employer reducing wages.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#293

Post by atq2119 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #137
Laforet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then. Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.

TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time. It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear…

The discovery of DNA may well be the Maxwell-style foundation for the next game changer. It hasn't been a century yet, and we've just deployed the first mRNA vaccines last year...

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#294

Post by luis8 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #30

And in almost one hundred years, we still haven’t made much progress on the fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, other than perhaps Bell’s theorem in the 60s. I wonder if Einstein, Dirac, et al. would have thought in the early 1930s that the measurement problem would remain unresolved and that there would still not be a consistent theory for QM and GR almost a century later.

The only thing I wish to see before I die is at least a way to communicate faster than light. Something instant like quantum entanglement would be ideal or if that is too much to ask at least warp like communication.

I'm currently doing software engineering but when I retire I'll dedicate all my free time for this. If at least 1% of the population follow this route someone will come up with a solution eventually.

Imaging exploring the near galaxies with a probe that is capable of displaying real time video of whatever is out there :)

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#295

Post by bilbo0s »

verisimi wrote: post #271
lettergram wrote: post #99

Earlier 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 a very hard conversation to have on HN. It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction,…

Not that I disagree with the underlying ideas, but I'd argue we're not slaves. I'll concede that in practice we can definitely be thought something more akin to peasants, but what we live in today is not slavery.

Now, is being a peasant, with all the concomitant limitations on one's livelihood any better than being a slave to the mental health of the bright and ambitious? Perhaps not, but it would be significantly more deleterious to their physical health.

I also understand that reasonable people can debate whether physical or mental health is more important.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#296

Post by ActorNightly »

verisimi wrote: post #271
lettergram wrote: post #99

Earlier 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 a very hard conversation to have on HN. It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction,…

Knowledge is Bayesian, and while there is finite probability for what you said, the probabilities are very low based on real events.

Also, the premise that finance people are just naturally evil isn't based in reality, its just fetishism.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#297

Post by hoseja »

"There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical inconvenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain."

Funny how among reasonable predictions this one is almost completely wrong, only 3/9 guessed right.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#298

Post by bennysomething »

mardifoufs wrote: post #268
deanCommie wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:/…

Those rankings have absolutely 0 values. We are currently under our 2nd curfew in less than a year, I can't go outside after 10pm under the threat of a 2000$ fine (which the police is very heavily enforcing) and yet we are way up there in the list you linked. Complete joke

Are you in the USA? I didn't know you had curfews!?

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#299

Post by heavyarms »

dougmwne wrote: post #270
jpindar wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1950s, comic book detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way wrist radio, which later included video.

Still waiting for them to add a camera to the Apple Watch. Then it can be a full phone replacement for low tech days.

I've been thinking this since the Apple Watch came out, but other than practical limitations (battery life) there's always this problem: have you tried to hold your arm out in front of your face and stare at your watch for a while? It's not the most comfortable position. You might have to add some extra arm/shoulder days in your exercise routine.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#300

Post by md_ »

User23 wrote: post #196
md_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency? Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge. It’s worth noting, as an a…

The primary purposes of central banking are to privatize seigniorage[1] revenue and increase bankers' ability to control politicians. The former is achieved through the Primary Dealer system and the latter should be self-explanatory. Needless to say, since most spending is electronic transactions, the seigniorage revenue is very nearly the entire face value of the created instrument. It's a blatantly undemocratic pow…

It seems like you're defining "central banking" in relation to the independence (or maybe ownership of) the central bank. That doesn't seem correct to me.

China has a central bank, but it's fully publicly owned and is not politically independent of the CCP. The ECB, in comparison, is owned by the central banks of constituent banks. And on the other extreme, the Swiss National Bank is publicly traded and a minority of its shares are privately held (i.e., not by governments). (Perhaps related or perhaps not, the Swiss Franc also has historically had very high trust and very low inflation.)

My point is, there are multiple flavors of "central bank" ownership and independence; it seems odd to argue that the primary purpose of central banking is to allow private bankers to violate political oversight when, in some cases, the bank is fully public and not politically independent. Conversely, some examples of significantly more private central banks than the Fed seem to show a history of good management in the public interest.

Post reply on HN