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

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

#301

Post by slg »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #287
slg wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)…

>There are a countless other ways a country A country? The federal reserve is run by private individuals. It is a private bank. Don't let the name fool you.

"The Federal Reserve is private" is a meme at this point that is largely divorced from our usual meaning of public/private. Calling the Federal Reserve Board "private citizens" is like calling the Supreme Court Justices "private citizens". They are both officials appointed by the president, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and who collect a public salary. Any profits from the Federal Reserve go right back into the US Treasury. What more do we need to consider this part of the government?

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

#302

Post by xdennis »

deanCommie wrote: post #255
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…

> 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 are very biased. The press one used to penalize countries at one point for not having journalist unions (don't know if they still do).

As an example, the US press was allowed to publish on the Snowden leaks but in the UK policemen forced The Guardian to smash their hard drives. UK is 11 places above the US: https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2021

The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. For example: none include self defense possession, but do include same sex marriage (something that was invented two decades ago).

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

#303

Post by MR4D »

md_ wrote: post #225
MR4D wrote: post #219

Earlier 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.

You make a very good point.

I should have noted that this applies only when it’s your own currency.

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

#304

Post by godot »

kolinko wrote: post #281
titzer wrote: post #104

> 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.

Are you from US? In Europe you see wires only outside of big cities. 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.

From what I've observed, wires outside almost entirely depend on how new the city is. Old cities have wires outside, new cities don't, that's really it; nothing to do with how rich they are. Palo Alto is an old city. I live in a suburb in Greater Sacramento that's a newer city and it's most certainly not as wealthy as Palo Alto -- not even as wealthy as some of the other towns in Sac -- we got no wires outside.

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

#305

Post by godshatter »

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,…

Yes. Those that have the power to trick others into giving them even more power have little restraining them from doing so.

It's also complicated by the fact that those who push against it haven't exactly made a name for themselves as reasonable people (at least the most vocal ones haven't) leading to derision of "freedumbs" and so forth.

I mourn the dearth of different perspectives and not assuming everyone is on a "side".

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

#307

Post by rpowers »

paxys wrote: post #283

Going to be "that guy" and say that almost everything he accurately predicted was already commonplace or on the rise in the 1920s. - 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 e…

I agree.

However, having just recently replaced a couch from a chain retailer, I can attest that they are pretty much made from paper mache.

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

#308

Post by wbsss4412 »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #278
Spooky23 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the upper class without people realizing it.

Going to need some evidence to back up that statement.

Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be a good thing.

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

#309

Post by slg »

iso1631 wrote: post #292
slg wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm not sure the distinction you are making here. A flat tax is called that because it is flat in percentage not in nominal value. Yes, debtors will benefit more than creditors, but that doesn't mean it isn't a flat tax. Also it doesn't just impact cash which should be obvious from the last sentence. If inflation decreases the real amount owed by debtors, it also decreases the real amount that is owed to creditors, and therefore decreases the value of their investments.

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

#310

Post by danans »

mstade wrote: post #58
haunter wrote: post #15

>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever th…

> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour o…

> My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries. > But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day.

The incentive to cook yourself instead of ordering food is multi-factorial, but a significant part is financial. People who only cook "touristically" like you describe are people for whom daily food expenses are a rounding error, whether ordered or cooked by themselves. This could include single well compensated people or very wealthy families. This is further amplified by the fact that food consumes a smaller portion of household income than it has historically.

In contrast, when working and middle class families decide that they need to save more, the first place they usually economize is in their restaurant expenditures.

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