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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)

#371

Post by p1esk »

jandrese wrote: post #272
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:/…

You are looking at this all wrong. If you want maximum freedom you need to go to a place like rural Somalia. As long as you have the most guns nobody will tell you how to live your life. Want to rape children all day long? Nobody is going to stop you. Want to kill your neighbors and steal their stuff? Total freedom. No nanny state government is going to try to take your money to build roads or remove the dead bodies.

Anyone who has "the most guns" will have "maximum freedom" anywhere. Somalia, USA, England, anywhere. The difference is it's easier to be the person with the most guns in Somalia than in US. However we are talking about freedom of ordinary citizens, not about being the most powerful individual in your country.

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

#372

Post by dahart »

> 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

Bertrand Russell also famously predicted this. I believe I’ve read that in the 1800’s people were predicting industrialization would do away with labor. People are still predicting this today, with the advent of Machine Learning that’s good enough to automate things like driving.

Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?

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

#373

Post by kaesar14 »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #129
SantalBlush wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could not vote. Seriously, give me a break.

Maybe you mean different things?

Why is freedom defined differently if you exclude slavery and women's rights?

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

#374

Post by thegrimmest »

joshuamorton wrote: post #363
thegrimmest wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally control, you'd be absolut…

But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant. It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opini…

The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.

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

#375

Post by slg »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #339
slg wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win, the winners appoint the financial elite to be board members of the organization that is capable of printing money and giving bailouts/buying poisoned assets from said financial institutions. The money is not made from FED profits, the money is made by the financial institutions owned by the board members. What's so hard to understand about that? It's clearly…

>Financial elite finances all candidates, some of them win

Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised. Once that happens why does the central bank matter when everything that follows could be accomplished some other way through that already compromised government? That is my fundamental point. It isn't that the central banks don't have power. It is that a central bank's power pails in comparison to the overall government. Therefore conspiracies theories about taking over the government to gain control of the central bank don't make much sense.

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

#376

Post by ajmurmann »

dougmwne wrote: post #262
intrasight wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A telco executive's astute predictions "Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually trans…

Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It’s the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is individually transformative in a way that space flight will probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue racing forward and this current moment will look analog…

There was a great scene in Station 11 which is partially set after civilization-destroying pandemic in which one character who was born before the pandemic explains to someone who was born after how ride sharing apps worked on a cell phone. It's magic of you describe it from scratch. The tiny device has access to a detailed mail of the entire planet, knows where you are and then a car shows up to transport you to your destination without exchanging and tangible money or even talking about it.

It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print everything.

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

#377

Post by wuliwong »

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…

I think that a powdered shake is pretty similar to the pill idea. Protein or meal replacement shakes are widespread in use in 2022.

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

#378

Post by thegrimmest »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #355
thegrimmest wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I define liberty differently than you do. I don’t accept the popular, modern definition of negative rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It leads to nonsensical conclusions. There is no such thing under my definition as a “free dictatorship”. A system where rulers aren’t bound by legitimate laws is by definition un-free. I don’t think my definition is super far off from yours though: liberty as non do…

A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's powers are very limited, but he is not democratically elected.

> liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.

Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.

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

#379

Post by throwawaygh »

beeboop wrote: post #290
kseistrup wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You always know when you see an American film because of all the powerlines, and I always wonder why they are not put underground.

It's expensive, no one wants to pay for it, and our general political leadership is inept at best and corrupt at worst and is incapable of managing reasonable infrastructure projects.

Serious question: what are the benefits of burying cables? Purely aesthetic? Losing power less than once a year due to a downed line really just isn't a big enough deal to justify the expenditure. Even low-prob/high-risk event justifications aren't particularly compelling (there are much more important ways to harden the grid). If this went up for a vote in my muni, I'd probably be a "no". So many better ways to spend the money, even if we scope to just electricity transmission.

My read on this has always been that the US has above-ground cables mostly because it wasn't bombed to hell at any point after the discovery that it's nice to bury power cables.

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