521–530 of 659 posts
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It's really hard to be both far-right and far-left at the same time.
What about horseshoe theory?
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> Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc. This is not entirely accurate — as much as 69% of all full-time employees worked remotely during the pandemic: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355907/remote-work-persisting-t... While we certainly do have professions…
> Those who cannot should be rewarded for that and added enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate. This is more or less the opposite of what happens to these professionals - they are often those who are paid the least and work the longest hours under hourly contracts on multiple jobs (because, if they worked more in a single job, the company would have to give those benefits).
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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.
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> I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s. Let's start by explaining smartphones, then Twitter and Facebook and then on how companies used them to hijack elections and destabilize democracies in multiple countries. Or, for an amusing time, try to explain how a cryptocurrency works. My mom, born in…
The internet is a big change. Cryptocurrency is not on the same scale. But I would be inclined to agree that the impact of even computers and internet on the recognizability of everyday life is less than that of eg. telephony and airplanes.
Remember when we needed to go to a payphone to tell our parents we were in the mall and to ask them to pick us up? And that they had no way to phone us while we weren't home?
Fascinating. I guess about one third of his predictions were correct. Eye-opening moments for me: - "white countries" - "radial energy" - "the servant problem" - no smoke in the house, "perhaps not even tobacco" - "the child is likely to be taken over by the State" - His vision of a house filled with frequently replaced disposable surfaces - "king of Jugo-Slavia" [will still reign] - "the American race [will become h…
For a prediction made 100 years out, I'd call it dead accurate.
It's really interesting to read this, genuinely prescient, starkly logical analysis that seems quite liberal and self-aware while also deeply soaked in un-acknowledged bias.
The time this was written was around the peak of the suffrage movement a couple years after the 19th amendment. That, perhaps, contributes to the placating tone in the author's description of how little progress the movement will have made by 2022.
I think especially noteworthy is the apparent blind spot towards the speed of information. He spends a lot of space articulating the physical characteristics of a City of Tomorrow but no consideration of what it might mean to quickly and easily read anything that has ever been published.
Really interesting article.
EDIT: Another note regarding his whole segment on work, production and leisure: he seems to only conceive of work as labor. Where, for example, an additional hour spent shoveling coal means another hour's worth of shoveled coal while forgetting to consider the possibility of "critical thinking" production where an additional hour spent working does not necessarily mean an additional hour spent being productive. A good prediction here would have touched on what careers in more "creative" production might look like.
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Some, no doubt, will choose a less creative path, but we also have evidence in history that people, who have the privilege of not worrying about their daily bread, also choose to spend their time in pursuit of sciences, arts, etc and many things not practical for them in regular employment and that advance all people.
Those activities are fine and well. I never stated anything against those things. My point, that you missed, is that an overindulgence in modern media entertainment will lead people down a spiral of short-term pleasure seeking that can compromise their long-term creative potential.
In short, I think people adapt and figure out their priorities. If someone wants a life of binging Netflix, who am I to say that’s a wasted life? (So long as that person doesn’t make me live such a life.)
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I’m really unsure about this. In 1822 canning food was new technology. 1822 didn’t have electrical generators but 1922 had radios, and the TV was clearly on the horizon. 1922 has the Model-T and airplanes.
Let me ask this question: Is the 777 further from the airplanes of 1922 than the airplanes of 1922 are from the hot air balloon? Airplanes existed in 1922. But nobody you knew flew on them. You didn't take them from the US to Europe on business trips; you took a ship. You didn't take them from New York to LA, either; you took a train. You sure didn't book flights online while sitting in your couch at home. The same (…
The first transatlantic flight by Charles Lindberg was 1927, 5 years _AFTER_ this article was written.
People were trying to do a transatlantic flight in the 1920s the same way as we are trying to make hydrogen cars, applicable artificial intelligence (self-driving?), or other "nearly true" things today.
There were many notable attempts at a transatlantic flight. As such, the article is able to point out the issues (ex: the lack of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, leading to hypoxia).
An individual pilot can do a transatlantic flight with the use of a breathing apparatus, similar to a scuba diver. But large-scale flights wouldn't be possible until the invention of pressurized cabins (used as a secret-weapon during WW2: the US Superfortress Bombers would fly so high thanks to pressurized cabins, that other airplanes couldn't reach them).
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Predicting a successful transatlantic flight would be like predicting a self-driving car today. We see lots of cool tech demos and people starting to understand the issues / technology... but it clearly doesn't exist yet. Not in any way that's usable.
We're probably 5 years off from a plausible tech-demo (ex: Spirit of St. Louis like attempt), and decades away from a commercial offering.
Lindberg's flight was of 33-hours. This article is suggesting an 8-hour flight time, well into the realm of science-fiction by 1922 standards. The 400+ gallons of fuel of "The Spirit of St. Louis" was manually strained and manually purified by the team, for no commercial process existed yet to make the fuel pure enough for high reliability.
A trans-atlantic flight was "inevitable", because the march of progress over the last 10 years was so dramatic, so incredible, so inspiring, that it almost certainly was going to happen. But it absolutely was still science fiction by 1922 standards.
The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1…
I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.
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> Those who cannot should be rewarded for that and added enjoy benefits/guarantees to compensate. This is more or less the opposite of what happens to these professionals - they are often those who are paid the least and work the longest hours under hourly contracts on multiple jobs (because, if they worked more in a single job, the company would have to give those benefits).
Yeah it’s what happens, but I’m of strong opinion that this part needs to change. Unfortunately, some of the hardest jobs don’t come with enough dignity, let a long pay.
And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment.