The popular culture in those days and may be even a few decades after that always predicted food intake to minimized to pills. Has there ever been attempt to do so? I mean any company or university attempting to deliver the same nutrients and satisfaction in a much reduced form factor?
What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
341–350 of 659 posts
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty. You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?
Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled.
If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 government (which they're then supposed to spend on common infrastructure, and other collaborative projects that everybody agrees on but nobody wants to shell out for unless everyone else is too). If the government is supporting the upper class and leaving everyone else to rot, no monetary policy will fix the issue.
I think this is supposed to be true, but nowadays when the wealthy mostly hold assets that have real value, like real estate and equities, as opposed to USD in a bank account, I'm not sure how well it works.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no set policy one way other the other Isn't that the idea of liberty though? No central authority deciding what is a "good thing" - just keeping the peace.
The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there shouldn’t be any state at all. Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit? The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am i…
No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people.
> Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit?
They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence.
> The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making
This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty. You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?
Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
> enforcing nonviolent interaction
By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right?
> Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power.
I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them.
[1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#346Going 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…
> paper mache furniture Wait till you find out what that Ikea crap is made of. :)
I once put a stool on a coffee table to put up a few curtains and the leg of the stool went through the surface of the coffee table. That surface is more or less paper mache by my book.
Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by some adhesive.
Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exact prediction was made in the 1922 article.
That's what this thread is about. Parent of my comment was disputing that prediction from the article, and I presented a counter-argument.
I see! Sorry about the confusion, I misunderstood the context.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#348"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.
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Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#349The author, W.L. George, passed away in 1926, so he wouldn't live long enough to revisit his predictions.
Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)
#350The popular culture in those days and may be even a few decades after that always predicted food intake to minimized to pills. Has there ever been attempt to do so? I mean any company or university attempting to deliver the same nutrients and satisfaction in a much reduced form factor?
Kind of, but still much larger than pills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement)