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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)

#461

Post by handsaway »

dahart wrote: post #372

> 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. Wil…

I'd argue that it's not human nature but rather our socio-economic system that keeps us grinding away. It's become obvious that for the most part automation does a disservice to workers rather than liberating them since they don't have the legal ownership of the automating forces. A typical factory or whatever if it is able to automate 20% of the current work being done will simply lay off 20% of its workforce rather than reduce everyone's workload by 20% while maintaining their wage.

Now this creates a bit of a crisis since the automated production produces things that need to be bought by the workers they displace, who now no longer have any money. The outcome as I see it is an extension of credit systems and the propagation of tedious nonsense jobs (ala Graeber's Bullshit Jobs).

In order to bring about the ideal of automation creating more free time for all without diminishing their income you'd have to transfer ownership of the automating forces to the workers they're replacing. But then I'm just a Marxist looney so what do I know.

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

#462

Post by blackshaw »

RajT88 wrote: post #250
beaconstudios wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to do all that to verify your comment. It strikes me as an absurd claim, at least in part because nazis and communists are opposites, and everybody is predicting the fall of the US' dominance to China these days. The WEF is just liberal capitalism. The trend towards technofeudalism (everyone is renting their existence from big corps) has been going on for a while, at the hands of capitalists. Because it…

If I am not mistaken "The Great Reset" is written by Glenn Beck. I may be wrong, as there are several books with that name, but the Beck book is the one most likely to involve railing against Nazis and Communists. You can get a sense for Beck's work here: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/?s=Glenn+beck

"The Great Reset" is the name of a book by Klaus Schwab, who is chairman of the WEF. It was also the name that the WEF gave to their 50th annual meeting, which took place in 2020.

Conspiracy theories aside, I've read Schwab's book, and it's a moronic, badly-written pile of buzzwords and corporate jargon that says nothing of interest and reads like the work of a hungover undergraduate who's padding the wordcount the night before the deadline while hoping the professor won't realise he hasn't done the reading. I'd tell you to ignore it, except Schwab is a man of enormous power and influence, so his apparent inability to produce an intelligent thought is really quite troubling.

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

#463

Post by queuebert »

long_time_gone wrote: post #401
queuebert wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IANAL, but I think there was no interpretation until the Supreme Court made that ruling. The Second Amendment was in a quantum state before that, both an individual right and not. When it becomes necessary to clarify something, then SCOTUS collapses the wave function in that particular area of law.

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

#464

Post by queuebert »

jmedefind wrote: post #402
queuebert wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's an Op Ed, not a reference.

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

#465

Post by smcl »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #316
smcl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I didn’t imagine there would be such a noticeable effect. Can I ask what sort of difference do you see if you don’t take it?

I go to work while the sun has yet to rise and when I come back home the sun is already away (at the peak of the winter, the sun is gone around 4pm). If I do go out for a walk, it's behind a heavy coat, scarf and hat. Often with sunglasses to protect against snow blindness and the wind. This means that for about half of the year, my body does not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D production so sitting…

Yep it's the same for me - dark when I go to work and after I finish. But I'm not taking any supplements at all so I'm just wondering if you personally notice a difference between when you do and don't take it.

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

#466

Post by Ancapistani »

jacobr1 wrote: post #279
delecti wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard arguments for and against the justifications to use nukes against Japan, and while I think it was probably unnecessary, at least it only happened at the very end of the war. If it had been introduced a couple years earlier then I worry our perception might be that it's just another thing you use during war.

If there wasn't a major adversary with similar weapons that might have happened. Low-yield tactical are probably more effective than things like the "MOP" bunker-busters. But the hard-line we've drawn on the application of nukes has prevented such a slippery slope in our proxy wars.

In my eyes, nuclear weapons are both much less and much more terrifying that they seem to be considered by most people.

The smallest nuclear devices aren't anywhere close to as large as commonly believed. An M28 "Davy Crockett" with a yield of 20T - 0.02kT - isn't that much different from a conventional GBU-43/B MOAB, which has a yield of 11T.

Tactical nuclear weapons are basically a faster and more effective version of conventional strategic bombing. "Little Boy", the first weapon used in combat (in Nagasaki), had a yield of 15kT. That resulted in an estimated 66k deaths and 70k injuries. Compare that to the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed ~100k civilians and burned the homes of over a million more.

Strategic nuclear weapons... they're in a whole other category. Obviously lots of people are killed during conventional strategic bombing, but most of the damage is ultimately done through fires set by the destruction of the intended targets. Some people have a chance to escape.

What's more, conventional bombing is WW2 wasn't generally a "one-night" affair; it took days or weeks to saturate a target to the point of neutralizing it, and after the first couple of attacks many people would have left the target area. The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in so many civilian casualties precisely because it was a (very effective) one-night event, and people didn't have a chance to flee. That was exceptional even in WW2.

Strategic nuclear weapons are effectively instant. They're incredibly powerful. We stopped building bigger ones not because we didn't know how, but because we couldn't see any reason to. If a 50MT blast won't do the job, a 500MT blast isn't going to either... so why spend the money to develop, create, and maintain bigger ones?

Finally, the idea that even a full nuclear exchange between major powers would be an extinction-level event is absurd. It would utterly destroy the countries involved, devastate the world economy, and poison huge swaths of the planet practically in perpetuity. Between the direct and indirect damage and the societal impacts on the remainder of humanity, it would set us back centuries as a species - but we would rebuild and it would take much less time to do so than it did to get to where we the first time.

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

#467

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Isn't that just having servants?

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

#468

Post by soco »

mc32 wrote: post #92
misnome wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who are made happy by innovating and progressing?

When social support for that goes away, it's only the "crazy" who would do that just because. But without societal support it's a dead-end. There are countries with lots of people --but whose contribution to innovation is substandard. There is no societal support so innovation is stunted. It’s like thinking justice will happen just because… No, it happens because society supports justice. Justice or innovation don’t…

Why should innovation lose support? It would fall under "people do what they like" so the innovators would go on innovating. And if the innovations bring even more to the society of course they will be adopted.

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

#469

Post by mywittyname »

sailingparrot wrote: post #74
mstade wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? Because > I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it ? Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.

I'm a reasonably good cook and this isn't terribly true for me. There are entire classes of foods I can't do as well as restaurants can. Be that because of a lack of equipment, or a lack of ingredients. I.e, I can make great pizza, but it doesnt' compare to the stuff I can get from the wood fired pizza place down the street. Same goes for India, Thai, Chinese, wings, etc, etc.

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

#470

Post by Ancapistani »

monocasa wrote: post #319
Clubber wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before agriculture, humans spent almost all of their time hunting and gathering. Agriculture freed up some time Agriculture is more work than hunting and gathering, but it's a much more consistent food source. https://www.zmescience.com/science/hunter-gatherer-farmer-ti...

And agriculture itself is less work than we think of. Medieval peasants worked less hours than we do. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

> And agriculture itself is less work than we think of.

That depends entirely upon the ratio of agriculture to other industries in a society and the level of automation.

People operating today's corporate farms in the US probably work fewer hours than their 1920s analogues, but produce far more output. People operating today's small/"family" farms are probably about on par in terms of hours worked, but still produce much more and there are far fewer of them.

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