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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)

#401

Post by long_time_gone »

queuebert wrote: post #353
long_time_gone wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gun control in the 1880s Old West: "The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)" "Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one pro…

Probably unconstitutional, but never challenged in the Supreme Court, I believe.

It would have been perfectly Constitutional until the Supreme Court changed their interpretation of the 2nd Amendment in the Heller case.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

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

#402

Post by jmedefind »

queuebert wrote: post #353
long_time_gone wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gun control in the 1880s Old West: "The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)" "Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one pro…

Probably unconstitutional, but never challenged in the Supreme Court, I believe.

Back then the Second Amendment was read as a right to an Armed Militia. SCOTUS probably would of allowed these laws at the time.

It's only the in past few decades that the Second Amendment has been perverted into the right to carry any gun you want where ever you want.

Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/09/why-accura...

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

#404

Post by pydry »

zionic wrote: post #226
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.

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. It’s an irresistible temptation

A) Which makes it basically another form of tax.

B) The raising of which always driven the wealthy into fits of rage no matter how necessary or beneficial.

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

#406

Post by mardifoufs »

bennysomething wrote: post #298
mardifoufs wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

In canada currently. 6th month of curfews this year... but at least this time it's until 10 pm and not 8pm like the first curfew. So I guess that's something lol

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

#407

Post by throwawaygh »

parksy wrote: post #139

What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an apparent blind spot for the advancements in social change. Even the most dire or utopian science fiction of the early to mid 20th century seems to reasonably accurately predict technological changes but somehow expects that future social structures will somehow fall into place or adapt to the technolo…

> where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing

No one in my circles talks about those things. Even the vast majority of crypto investors don't give a shit about "distributed" or "trustless" or "computing".

The topics of the day are:

1. climate change

2. automation (especially logistics and war)

3. the tension between nationalism and globalization (both with respect to communication, commodity extraction, manufacturing, knowledge production, ...).

Flip the ordering of 1 and 3 if you'd like.

> old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete

I can't think of a single less exciting thing to say about the future.

The average person uses a notary perhaps a few times in their life.

The average bank provides the average person with a nearly flawless UX. Anything that replaces a bank will look like a digital bank account and behave like a digital bank account and probably also be regulated like a digital bank account. For almost all people, this is literally equivalent to staying "by 2122 the IBM COBOL mainframes powering banks will have been replaced with Java running on commodity hardware". Even if it's true... who cares?

> knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention).

It's not 1999 anymore; we know how the WWW turned out.

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

#408

Post by thegrimmest »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #395
thegrimmest wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like the government issuing their own currency still isn’t really the issue in this thought experiment…

It is though, since they can debase that self same currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the playing field when negotiating your taxes with the government. The only reason USD has any value at all is because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US government in, and what US bonds are paid in.

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

#409

Post by slg »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #388
slg wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

>Your entire point rests on this premise and once we accept this premise we acknowledge the entire government is already compromised. I agree. >Once that happens why does the central bank matter I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself. As Ford once said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if…

>I guess it matters because public awareness is necessary for us not to allow history to repeat itself.

But it is a symptom rather than a cause of the corruption. The energy spent on raising public awareness about this would likely be better served drawing attention to what we both seem to think is the underlying problem, the outsized influence that the wealthy have on the government.

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

#410

Post by slg »

iso1631 wrote: post #392
slg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> 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. I'm sure that's upsetting for wealthy people with investments For the mom working 3 jobs at Macdonalds, as long as Macdonalds continues to pay an inflation linked salary, her debts being whittled away, that's great news. Now if Macdonalds can cu…

I think you are projecting a moral or political argument into my comments. That wasn't my intention. My point is that there are more powerful levers in the government than the inflation rate.

Sure, having your debt reduced by 6% or whatever is good, but the government could also easily forgive all federally owned college debt and 100% reduction is certainly better than 6%. Increasing the minimum wage is another example. That would more directly benefit that mom with 3 jobs more than inflation.

Whatever your political goals are, there is likely a much more powerful tool to accomplish them than nudging the inflation rate up or down a few percentage points.

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