Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

loc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 659 posts

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

#571

Post by Vetch »

rbanffy wrote: post #383
ghc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think about what they didn't have in 1822 that they did have in 1922: - Radio - Movies - Motorized Rail Transit - Airplanes - Blimps - Recorded Audio - Electrification (esp. lighting) - Telephony - Cars - Subways - Fax - Early Television - Telegraph - Skyscapers - Underwater tunnels - Air Conditioning - Elevators - Modern Hospitals - Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war - Stock Ticke…

> 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…

> Let's start by explaining smartphones

They had electric telegraphs, telephone and radio, so I'd explain it as miniaturized wireless telephones and typewriters combined, additionally with capabilities of paperless networked teleprinters of a kind. Some of the stations would be libraries with expert librarians on hand to tirelessly answer your questions.

> then Twitter and Facebook

I believe this is already covered. Anyone can now own a small personal broadcast station.

> try to explain how a cryptocurrency works.

I'd use the analogy of a network of tabulating machines with accumulators controlled by inputs according to something quite like point to point teleprinters instead of by punch cards. Records with a copy on each machine, would store on a very flexible type of automatically configurable control panel board with a special arrangement of relay circuits capable of acting as a memory, rather than in boxes of cards. Such a machine could track some quantity, addable and subtractable like a currency. I would then bring up the difficulty of protecting against liars and double spending. One solution might be to connect each machine to automatic slot machines and have them play till there was a winner who then got to broadcast an append to the record with the longest history in their collection of records. I'd also note that the more slot machines there were, the more slots were magically added to each. The idea being to make it costly for any one view to dominate the network.

Far from perfect but the gist could be communicated to anyone with a bit of imagination. Modern technologies have had a large impact on life but can be connected to 1920s tech. This is unlike the gap from the 1820s to 1920s that saw electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, radio broadcasting, telephone, electricity and electric engineering, atomic physics, flight, automobiles and more.

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

#572

Post by verisimi »

bilbo0s wrote: post #500
verisimi wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a government I do not want, I think that is slavery. You wouldn't think it ok if an individual forced you, or the mafia. The government is just big mafia. But that is not really the nub of it. Slavery is really a mental state - having been through the system we have been propagandised that the government is a good thing, it's the right way to manage ourselves - an…

If I am forced to give any percentage of my income to a government I do not want, I think that is slavery This is a good example of what I'm talking about. Maybe you think of it as slavery, but in reality, it's the very definition of peasantry. Slavery is you get no money. And by the way, if you disagree with it, the power holder beats the tar out of you. Or maybe s/he just kills you and gets another slave. Whatever'…

"Slavery is you get no money. And by the way, if you disagree with it, the power holder beats the tar out of you."

If you try to withhold payment of taxes, I suspect you will feel a the force of the law.

"There is no right to leave."

Can I stop paying tax without a negative effect?

--

I am not free if I am forced to pay 100% of my income - that is slavery by your definition.

But if I pay 90%, am I free now? What about 40% - is that the 'freedom percentage'?

Please let me know what amount of income a free man should hand over under threat of force if they do not consent willingly.

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

#573

Post by queuebert »

camgunz wrote: post #543
queuebert wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah Heller is the outlier here. Here's the Wikipedia page for its precedent, Miller : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller

Wow, that one sounds nuts:

"In reality, the district court judge was in favor of the gun control law and ruled the law unconstitutional because he knew that Miller, who was a known bank robber and had just testified against the rest of his gang in court, would have to go into hiding as soon as he was released. He knew that Miller would not pay a lawyer to argue the case at the Supreme Court and would simply disappear. Therefore, the government's appeal to the Supreme Court would surely be a victory because Miller and his attorney would not even be present at the argument....Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision had been rendered."

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

#574

Post by mardifoufs »

deanCommie wrote: post #565
mardifoufs wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are contradicting yourself. It's a global pandemic yet only quebec is going for these absolutely ridiculous measures. Hence why it's ludicrous for canada to be higher than the US. And it's been 2 years, it's not exactly temporary, especially since there's literally no scientific backing for a curfew in a pandemic and our government is not even pretending that there is any. At a certain point the "it's a global pa…

Every province can take invidiual actions for their citizens that the federal government disagrees with. Quebec can do more than the rest. That's not an argument for restrictive Canadian freedom, that's an argument for INCREASED freedom in Canada for individual provinces (especially Quebec) "You don't like it -> move" is an argument that doesn't work very well across international borders, but ABSOLUTELY works within…

Agreed, and as a Muslim it's for more than one reason as you pointed out earlier. I'm actively looking into moving, probably across the southern border though. But still, I think it's very reasonable to expect the experiences of the second biggest province in a country to be reflected in international rankings.

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

#575

Post by wbsss4412 »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #503
wbsss4412 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the upper class without people realizing it. Going to need some evidence to back up that statement. Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be…

My evidence is arithmetic? Someone who is leveraged with debt into assets now owns a larger piece of the pie (which we can loosely define as wealth) than they did before if the money supply increases compared to people who aren't levered into assets or just hold cash.

That depends heavily on the rollover period of said debt, along with other factors with how the debt is structured (eg variable interest rates).

Broad swaths of the middle class commonly fit within this framework as well, they leverage debt to buy houses.

The poor tend not to have mounds of cash sitting around, so the effects of inflation are only negative if there are not concurrent wage increases.

Pre central banking and stable (low) inflationary regimes, wealth has always been heavily concentrated in the upper class in the western world. The only real exception was the post war booms, which was during a time of heavy global monetary regulation.

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

#576

Post by rbanffy »

tempestn wrote: post #531
rbanffy wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You're saying the ability to make a phone call from anywhere is a more significant change than the ability to make phone calls at all?

Some quantitative changes become qualitative in enabling completely different behaviors. Few people had phones, they were tied to a physical location. Now we do video calls between people in different countries while driving.

You can ask your phone what's the molecular mass of methane. Or ask it to identify a song that's playing in the restaurant.

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

#577

Post by rbanffy »

sologoub wrote: post #534
rbanffy wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shameful that in the richest country in the world there are people being forced to work 12 or more hours a day just to survive. And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment.

> And going to work with COVID symptoms because they can't live without payment. That’s a very grotesque illustration of perverse incentives. Ask anyone, I doubt they’ll tell you that it’s worth having a sick person show up to work over providing sick leave/benefits and yet, here we are.

The point is that they aren't forced to provide sick leave unless the person works more than a certain amount of hours. If the person is desperate enough (and a LOT of people are), the "smart" choice is to never get a diagnosis and continue working.

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

#578

Post by rbanffy »

beaconstudios wrote: post #548
rbanffy wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nazism is far-right and authoritarian. Socialism is just far-left, but not necessarily authoritarian. Soviet-style socialism was very authoritarian and that's why it got its bad reputation. And you can be authoritarian and not even be on the left-right axis - Saudi Arabia is an example, as is Afghanistan now.

Both of those countries are theocratic and extremely socially conservative, which places them on the far right.

Maybe, but they don't have really free markets either. In this regard, North Korea is more of an absolutist monarchy than any previously known form of socialism.

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

#579

Post by tmnvix »

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…

> is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?

I once read a commenter here on HN claim that any increase in productivity is inevitably 'eaten up' by an increase in debt/credit and that this is why we don't see a corresponding decrease in time spent working. I think that is very insightful.

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

#580

Post by HDMI_Cable »

lettergram wrote: post #99
overthemoon wrote: post #35

It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-da…

> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…

> To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s.

Do you have any sources on this? I’m not trying to degrade your point though, just curious about the topic.

Post reply on HN