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Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
If you buy a lot from Amazon, you can also choose Internet Archive as your supported charity.
(I was also going to suggest nominating Internet Archive as a charity for Humble Bundle purchases as well, but it seems like they no longer support choosing your own charities.)
This is a good idea. On AmazonSmile I currently support National Park Foundation but can think of supporting this one too in the future (maybe rotating basis quarterly). I am curious which other similar nonprofits HNers think are available on AmazonSmile to think of donating to?
I found a couple of old scanned mathematics books on the archive, which I could not find elsewhere. Many times a web.archive.org link cut short a journey to an old blog post, that might have been lost in the ether.
"Non-interactive site" wtf, do you even know the trickery you have to do in JavaScript files to remotely work outside their intended domains? Or how hard was to create a working playable copy of hundreds of old games? Or how much people you need to handle an ever-growing data storage (e.g everyday bigger than the day before) while making it available over internet?
While the code needs maintenance to adapt to edge cases, it's build once and maintain feature. It's not user registering site that needs support for customers and no need to introduce new features to keep going.
Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.
You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?
> Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
What do users of the archive gain by it being independent of advertising?
And why can't it be a non profit and also offset expenses by selling advertising?
Look at it this way.
There are plenty of non profits that can only make money by donations. They can't easily make money off of advertising. Internet Archive can. So in theory any money that someone sends to them would not go to an organization that might have a greater need. Make sense?
Now of course you are saying 'give them $5 instead of upvoting'. So that is a small enough amount that you would say 'you still have $5 to give to someone else'. But I say when people (en masse) behave like that a portion will feel that they have done their 'good person' duty and not make another donation to another cause (that once again can't sell advertising).
By the way 'service to humanity'???
Edit: One other thing. I'd be glad to pay IA for 'service'. That is if I need to get a page taken down or I need to get something scraped more or less I'd gladly pay for being able to discuss with a real person and get something done. This idea that free means 'you take what you get and you don't get upset' to me is just nonsense at the core. Maybe have a free no ad service but then charge for things to raise revenue not just 'donate donate donate'.
It's more about being "independent of advertisers" than whether advertisements are practically hosted on the site. An archive should be a third-party, neutral source, and advertising jeopardises this.
It's not a newspaper (as only one example) where they hold editorial control over the content and are therefore (in theory) beholden to the people who pay the bills (the advertisers). Forgetting for a second whether it would have any major impact (I say it would not I mean they scrape web pages in a very clear fashion) it's hard to believe it could go the route of say YELP in their mission. Or that a minor impact to what they do would not be offset by not having to beg for money. (With PBS it was called a begathon when they had to raise money).
And even with donations they could in theory be 'corrupted' just the same. A rich person could give them a large sum of money (as a donation) and then would have some defacto say in how things were done.
Take as another example ball parks (to even counter my point). They sell naming rights. That does not mean that the entity who purchased the naming rights gets to decide who plays on the team or who coaches the team although you could argue that that could happen (and I would say it does not offset the benefit of not having that 'independence'.
I don’t see any benefit for a country to turn its currency into a crypto asset. Either they are relinquishing a great deal of control in democratizing their financial system (also exposing themselves to attack), or it’s a crypto in name only that doesn’t seem any better than digital cash through banks except for a buzzword.
Decentralization is hit or miss. You get economies of scale with centralization that are hard to beat. I only see decentralization being useful for certain applications (namely, anything that needs to be censorship resistant/ can’t rely on the centralized infra for some reason) like it already is being used for.
Meat won’t be a delicacy unless we are not counting lab grown meat. Absolutely no way. I would be willing to take a huge bet on this. People all over the world love meat, it’s one of the first things people start spending on when they hit middle income (globally speaking). Plant based alternatives will become a lot more popular especially once they become cheaper, and we will probably start eating mostly lab grown meat, but meat will be consumed, at least by stubborn, older red-blooded Americans wary of technology and set in their ways that the author likely has little exposure to.
Yes, the only way #6 will come true is if the replacement for meat looks, smells and tastes exactly like the real thing and it'll have to be cheaper too.
People all over the world love meat, especially US, UK and the Chinese. I've tried to convince some family members to reduce their meat consumption even a tiniest amount gets a huge amount of resistance. People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.
Impossible meat has a great start and I think their market share will continue to increase. But, there's an immense amount of variety in the meat market and the alternative meat industry still has a huge amount of work to do to address it.
Faced with a choice between beef or fake beef that tastes exactly the same, most people will just go for the real beef. They don't want the highly processed fake stuff that contains who knows what.
The only way beef loses is if the alternatives are significantly cheaper. If a McBeef is $5 more than a McFakeBeef then you got a shot at converting people.
You are being downvoted, but I think that you are totally right. For an awful lot of people, eating meat is a matter of status; it's similar to why many people prefer having big cars even if they are less environmentally friendly.
There is also the fact that plant based diets are still associated to certain ideologies and because of that they will keep being scoffed at by people from opposing ideologies. Sure, you don't have to lean left to be vegan, but the vast majority of vegan people, or people seriously trying to reduce their meat consumption, do lean left (continuing with the car analogy: remember the rolling coal fad).
Dietary choices go way beyond their nutritional value. People feel attached to what they eat, and they will resist change. So, yes, a strong economic incentive is needed, and even worse, it might not be enough.
As someone who isn’t considering giving up my ways, red blooded meat eating American that I am, I actually appreciate vegans to some degree.
As long as there are an appreciable number of them, I will enjoy a greater variety of dishes and ingredients available to me, and oftentimes fresher ingredients too.
Insofar as they are making choices that benefit them, they also make choices that benefit me.
Where they lose me, and this isn’t all vegans, but the ones that lose me are the ones that try to convince me that I am a bad person for the dietary choices I make. Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. The ones that make me want to go out and eat two steaks just to stick it to them are the ones that want to take away my choices or introduce sin taxes onto meat. I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that. I would argue such a fair tax is entirely theoretical, but in theory, it could work out. The ones that want to punish me specifically are the ones I can’t abide.
When someone introduces me to an entirely vegetarian dish or vegan dish that I like, I’ll probably add it to my menu and start making it myself, and I usually don’t modify it to add any additional protein. Good food is good food and I actually like tofu and some of those veggie patties on the market. I like them for that they are, not for what they pretend to be. It come down to making a different choice as to what to eat for dinner, rather than making a compromise.
Today, January 1st 2020, I’m not even thinking about lab grown meat. Maybe I’ll prefer it on January 1st, 2030, or maybe I’ll be paying a premium for my steak, or maybe the price of my premium cut steak will actually fall after checking against inflation and I’ll be eating even more steak. Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties. Vegans that practice veganism for dogmatic, ideological and religious reasons certainly aren’t going to win me over in ten or a hundred years by preaching to me though.
I make choices. Vegans make choices. Everyone makes choices. I think that’s a pretty good state of affairs.
As there seem to be very few comments actually defending the ethical vegan standpoint here I go.
Vegans who ask for „sin taxes“ don‘t want to piss you off, they simply have the belief (and actually quite well justifiable so) that meat consumption leads to quite a lot of suffering in the world. You don’t seem to be opposed to taxes on ghg emissions - presumably because you believe that they cause suffering. Why is it not reasonable to also punish/tax other behavior that causes suffering? Do you really believe that animal suffering doesn’t count?
I would really encourage you to reflect your position on this and maybe revise towards being more forgiving towards people who simply care about the suffering of animals.
Your assumption is wrong. The tax I would support is entirely theoretical and would raise the prices of all industrial products on the market from all forms of food to all forms of textiles and all forms of computers and machinery. I suspect that if it were ever implemented properly to begin with, it would become a target to steer into a kind of sin tax or luxury tax by doubling the rate on this or that product or zero rating it for others, so I can’t say I necessarily even would support it. Show me a policy proposal and I’ll say “maybe”.
Suffering doesn’t enter into it, but I don’t like subsidies. If the problem with climate change is that my lifestyle is being subsidized because the “true cost” isn’t in the purchase price, I’ll pay it, but so should everyone. I’ll be paying more for meat, but I’ll also be paying more for spinach, and coffee, and spices, and salt, and clothes, and every single industrial good that I buy. And so would everyone, because the net result would be to see the purchasing power of everyone decrease. I can live with that if you can, even factoring in my dietary preferences, I’m willing to bet money I have a lower net contribution to climate change than most in my country.
Sure, parent comment made a faulty assumption about your policy preferences and the reasons you have for them. In responding to this grievance, you've entirely missed their point: the consumption of meat is above all else a moral issue—yes, a sin—and making other lifestyle choices of below-average ecological impact do not make up for it.
I could elaborate, but I don't expect to change your mind; you've already stated outright that you're determined not to. In any case, I'm not here to cast blame on you personally for eating meat. I still do it, too.
It's a shame about your stubbornness, though. You seem to be smart enough to engage in careful, reasoned analysis about a complex issue. In fact, I'd wager that you'd scoff at an anti-vaxxer or a Holocaust denier who shared the strength of your convictions. Of course, scientific and historical truth are a little more objective than basic moral principles—but when it comes to the way animals are manufactured in America today, not by much.
I didn’t engage his point because I’ve taken it as a given that we’ll have to agree to disagree. There’s too much conviction on both sides to take that one in any meaningful direction. To some, to you and to the one I replied to, it is a moral issue. I’m not going to convince anyone that it isn’t a moral issue anymore than they will convince me that it is.
There isn’t a lot that is objective, even scientific and historical truths are often less scientific, less historic and less truthful than we think they are. I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be. In return, I don’t accept that the choices they have made are morally superior to my own. They’re just living their lives according to their beliefs and I don’t want to take that away from them, nor do I want them to take away my choices nor to be punished for them. Life is too short, fleeting and full of suffering and choices to start making choices for other people. I do not, and I would wager you do not, have the status, position or occupational license to cast judgements upon others that aren’t our children, charges, employees or elected representatives. Even these limited forms of subordination have their limits.
The point that I was trying to make is to try to show you that I am pretty sure that you actually do care about moral questions in the case of climate change (on the surface you seem to argue it’s a matter of justice and paying for the true cost of your actions but the very reason that carbon is being priced in the first place (and you accept that price) is that it causes suffering in the world, right? You wouldn‘t accept an arbitrary oxygen tax, would you?) but somehow don’t extend that concern to the suffering of animals. However, similar to how scientists have shown that ghg emissions cause human suffering, scientists have shown that factory farming causes animal suffering.
Of course you can have reasons for denying the importance of animal suffering but most of those accounts are easily shown to be inconsistent and simply self-serving. People who accept animal suffering as real and probably a bad thing tend to have a much easier time to articulate a consistent world view. If you don’t agree with that claim show me how I am wrong and coherently articulate why the suffering of animals doesn‘t matter... it’s really surprisingly difficult to not reach for arbitrary distinctions like „they are not human“ but have substantial arguments grounded in empirical evidence that justify your opinion.
In the end my goal was not to convince you of becoming vegan (that’s generally a quite difficult task due to current societal indoctrination) but to simply make you reconsider how you view vegans who actually care about animal suffering. It’s a totally reasonable position and it’s generally much more coherent and aligned with evidence then other positions. Even if you don’t care, you don‘t need to judge other people who do.
I won’t judge them for caring, I won’t even judge them, but I do find being preached at to be generally unenjoyable and I don’t enjoy the company of people who wish to preach to me rather than engage me. You’ve engaged me, but that’s not what I have come to expect from vegans who are of an evangelical type, and I say that without it meaning to be disparaging, merely descriptive.
For what it is worth to you, I purchase the best meat I can find and afford at the local market. The more room to roam, the better. Absolutely no hormones, pointless antibiotics, or other growth techniques that degrade the meat. I’m under no illusions that what I purchase is cruelty free though, it’s livestock which was raised for slaughter, from a species that was cultivated to be raised as livestock, slaughtered and turned into various meat and leather products.
I buy better meat because it tastes better, I don’t do it to spare the animal. I advocate for better farming practices where possible because I want better and more pervasive products to be available and at a lower cost and to more people.
I do in fact care more for the lives of people than I do for most animals. I don’t care for needless deaths, nor do I like unnecessary cruelty, but when I eat an animal, it wasn’t needless or pointless. It lived until it died, and was recycled into my body. I too will live until I die and am recycled into other living creatures.
Laying it out, I sound more callous than I intend, but I don’t know that there’s a less brutal way to put any of that and keep it honest, but more than sounding callous, I don’t want to be or sound like a hypocrite, even unwittingly.
Thank you for engaging me, actually laying out my views allows me to solidify in my own mind what it is I’m thinking, and figure out how to communicate it better the next time.
Thanks for your reply. It's good to see that you reflect your own thinking and attempt to articulate a coherent position. If you enjoy this type of engagement, I can also recommend you the following short youtube video (~3 min) with a philosophical thought experiment that turns the table on you and asks whether you would still hold your position in that case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUz6Rj5oo4.
> I’m not going to convince anyone that it isn’t a moral issue anymore than they will convince me that it is.
This is really unfortunate. An anti-vaxxer knows that it’s a question of science, just as a Holocaust denier knows that it’s a question of historical record (even if they lack the scientific/historical literacy to see through the counterfactual narratives they’ve bought into). There’s insurmountable conviction on both sides—but one is right and the other is not (for all practical purposes, as elusive as objective truth is).
To refuse to even consider the moral angle—I’d be tempted to call it bad faith, but I don’t get that impression from you at all. Rather, it seems to be this:
> I take a live and let live approach to the voluntary choices of others precisely because I’m not morally superior, nor do I endeavor to be.
Taken to the extreme, the live-and-let-live / agree-to-disagree philosophy exhorts us to put down difficult questions simply because they are difficult (or seem unactionable), and to simply accept the status quo for what it is. But the moral implications of your actions do not go away simply because you choose not to examine them, or because they were the default configuration presented by the time and place you were born in.
---
You’re right though; I’m not qualified to pass moral judgment on anyone, and that’s not what I mean when I say it’s a moral question. Moral virtue isn’t a contest or a report card.
Am I morally superior to a 19th-century plantation owner? (Were all slaveowners equally bad?) If I were raised in his family, as part of that society, what reason do I have to believe I’d do any different? If the answer is “none”, then why do we study history? and what makes me better than that guy?
It's not within my power to change the way things are. But the willingness to consider that the way things are isn't right might be a start.
I considered the morality of eating meat for a decent portion of my life. The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical vegetarianism is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most violent and violently omnivorous apex predator to ever grace the Earth. If there’s a landmass we haven’t walked, it’s because it is literally underwater having been foreclosed upon by some glacier or the Ocean, and we’ve walked some of those lands too once upon a time.
If the way things are isn’t right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can’t change it without violently changing what it means to be human, so you essentially have to have humans become something other than human, and that doesn’t seem like a winning survival strategy in the long term.
When we’re not eating God’s creatures, we’re burning down the forests and fields they live in and pouring concrete over them so we can sleep better at night in little towns and villages and hamlets with other people who participated in the festivities, or at least their ancestors did, or at least they bought the house from someone whose ancestors did etc. We also do it to grow more food, all those plants we’ve selected for over the entire history of agriculture that we’ve deemed to be beneficial to us to keep around? We burned down other species, even to extinction with no regard as to whether the burning mass over yonder was plant or fungus or animal flesh or insect.
I can’t seriously consider ethical vegetarianism or ethical veganism a serious argument for not eating meat because it goes so deeply against the violent nature of humanity that it disregards what we are entirely. Given it is probably the most defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, it is a fairly massive characteristic to overlook.
I can seriously consider reasons for eating less meat that include things like “this meatless dish is delicious”, only you don’t emphasize the meatless bit, or “methane emissions are a pretty serious concern, is there something we can do about that?” or “cows actually use up a large amount of resources that might be better spent on something else.”
I can consider those seriously, I just don’t think they’re winning arguments. But, at least they’re willing to try to work with the nature of the beast rather than against it. People who consider themselves “ethical vegans” can make a better case than starting from a position that eating meat is morally wrong, even if you believe it! It’s okay to believe something like that, I don’t agree with you, but so long as you or someone else isn’t trying to use state force to enforce their belief on me, I think we’ll get along just fine.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond here, especially when your ultimate position is a foregone conclusion. I share your pessimism about the overall trajectory of human progress, and there are parts of me that believe that the destructive patterns of human settlement are themselves an expression of the unique but entirely natural phenomenon that is our species. Finding optimism in spite of these facts is an exercise in mental contradiction.
But I am curious to know what you think: couldn't you have made this same argument about slavery two hundred years ago?
"The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical emancipation is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most hierarchical, socially stratified, and conquest-driven species to ever grace the Earth. If there's a people that hasn't been dominated by another, it's because they're so remote as to be beyond the reach of civilized society.
"If the way things are isn't right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can't change it without violently changing what it means to be human..."
Again, I'm not saying you should stop eating meat. I'd like to, but even I haven't. I'm also not saying that I would have asked a 19th-century plantation owner to just give up his slaves voluntarily. But I think the Civil War was the single most defining struggle in the building of our nation's moral character. Would you rather live in the America we have, or in the alternate-universe America where our great-grandparents skirted this question so that they could "live and let live"?
Yeah, you should really have a look at the youtube video I linked to in my sibling comment. What you buy into with your position is the right of strong or the law of the jungle which is something we as humanity have been trying to overcome and shown to be less effective than cooperation.
If you don't buy into this for your own species, why do you cling to this world view in relation to other species? Have you ever considered that the universe is evolving and old practices which have worked at one point can/should be replaced by more effective ones? Just because we had cruel practices at one point, doesn't mean we should hold on to them if we notice that there are better alternatives.
There are so many nice dishes that don't have or need meat. I think a large thing is that people don't experiment much with their food. I have to travel a lot for work and especially in Asia and Africa, there are tons of dishes which are easy to make but very rich in flavour and much more 'refined' (in my opinion) than having a slab of meat on my plate. I sometimes think I want a steak, but after 2 bites I start thinking how much better that would've been 1/3 of it in an Indian curry (which of course is blasphemy but I'm not religious or from India) or in a thai curry dish. And once you properly make it into a dish which is one melange of integrated tastes, the 'real meat' thing becomes far less pressing. Same with meat in potato oven dishes, Lasagna or Pizza => unless you are into those overkill hard tastes (which I personally don't like), you can learn to cook them without meat while they still have the texture and taste for (open minded) meat eaters.
A slab of meat like steak will be many years before that comes from a lab for a decent price. But worked into a nice curry or some usages for sausages etc, I say we are close or even there already.
Well some people, including the young me, would send steaks with spices and sauces back. I liked them thick, bloody and without anything. Somehow I always thought that most cooks put way too much salt on really good meat so I asked, in restaurants as (annoying) little boy, to leave the salt and spices and would send it back if it had any. It was a short phase I guess. Now I find it boring.
But you are right; you can make exciting food with mostly anything. Even, god forbid, veggies! (seems that angry meat eaters are also dead against anything that resembles a vegetable; they eat the steak, leave everything else on the plate).
> I’m cool with carbon/GHG taxes that make no exceptions, if the cost of my choices goes up because of a tax that applies to all levels of society in fair measure, I can live with that.
Kudos to you, but this opinion would make you exceedingly rare among people for whom eating meat is an identity issue.
> Maybe I’ll even lose my taste for meat, I mean I lost my taste for shrimp once upon a time, and I gained a taste for eggs in my early twenties.
It's less about you individually than the economic policies that enable the mass production and consumption of meat. Beyond the science, which pretty convincingly make the case that industrial meat is behind a huge amount of environmental damage, the politics of this are very much about personal beliefs about whether or not that situation should continue in the same form, or be biased more towards plant based foods (via the carbon/ghg tax you proposed). And politics are grounded for better or worse in beliefs and dogma, just like religion.
A GHG tax is one that prices in externalities and will hurt trade over long distances in more or less equal measure, I’m not the biggest fan of it because I fear it would be used for policies other than mitigating the effects of a changing climate, but it would at least raise the price of everything from leaves to meat to automobiles to fish to computers and candles and essentially anything that is industrially produced or raised or caught. The net effect is to depress the purchasing power of everyone, and possibly, maybe even likely making the repair of a widget more price competitive with the replacement of a widget. I wouldn’t be able to buy as much meat with my current grocery budget, but I also wouldn’t be able to buy as much spinach or apples or garam masala or coffee without increasing my grocery budget. This would be true of anyone and everyone within a jurisdiction that actually implemented it properly.
In pricing out the tax, you would need to compute the global warming potential of the emissions for every piece in the supply chain, as well as their half life to measure their short term and long term impact and finally put a price on all of that. You could limit it to certain classes of emissions to keep it simpler, but you would want to cover all the known major transportation, industrial and agriculture emissions including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, methane, and so on.
This is probably the most balanced comment about meat-eating I've ever read.
I think the tax thing is key - I eat meat and I fly a lot. I know both of those things contribute to the climate crisis - therefore I'd be completely ok with paying some more money as tax that goes towards offsetting the environmental damage from those activities.
Lots of people think we needs to go back in development of technology and stop enjoying the things humanity has worked for a long time to achieve. Instead we should think about how we can make technology work better together with the environment and enable even more comfort and prosperity. Not force us to go back, rather find ways of moving even further forward.
Increased price pressure would incentivized a bit more ingenuity. There’s a number of things that are cheaper to purchase a replacement for than to maintain and repair. That has its pluses and minuses, but you could change up the cost equation, and plow the extra revenue into reforestation and artificial reef construction.
I think you're absolutely right that the status symbol aspect of meat consumption is going to be a large factor in people's decision-making.
That said, there are inflection points at which certain products switch from being seen as status symbols into more questionable signals - wearing fur springs to mind as one example.
I don't think it's at all guaranteed that traditional meat would end up in that category; it's a long way from it currently. But it's within the realm of possibility.
>Fur is a fashion meat is a core pillar in many cultures and changing that will take longer than 10 years.
I think you are probably right... but I want to bring up the counterexample of smoking.
I mean, smoking was never as widespread as eating meat, but I feel like there was a tipping point in the '90s, where it went from something almost every red blooded american would do to something very rude and even forbidden in most indoor spaces.
Smoking became... divorced from manhood.
I remember as a kid I had an IT job; sort of an internship type deal fixing computers for the local county department of public health. I got credit for going to this job instead of taking the last two classes of the day in high school; There was nobody else in the building who wasn't old enough to be my parent. It was so much fun.
I remember when the city passed the 'no smoking in bars' ordinance. The office was super excited. a few people (who I'm pretty sure never went to bars) said they were going to the bar after work. (I was maybe 16, and not invited) I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now that I'm old, I go to bars, too... and you know? I probably wouldn't if they smelled the way they smelled walking past them in the '90s.
Some friends and I ran a weekly poker game at a local bar for a few years in the mid-00s, before an indoor smoking ban was implemented here. Every night when I came home, my clothes absolutely reeked of smoke, I couldn't even hang them inside my apartment.
I'd go even further than that and argue that the reason vegan and vegetarian diets have taken off as much as they have is because they became status symbols in the 90s / 2000s.
Chicken mcnuggets are barely chicken. The market already demonstrated that "real meat" is a matter of availability and marketing, not a matter status chasing (not that there aren't exceptions, which are a statistical minority).
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a compelling argument. SMH
Yes, I was thinking mostly about beef. Which seems to be the most environmentally impactful meat, by the way. Pork is less impactful and poultry is even less.
>...beef... the most environmentally impactful meat... Pork is less impactful and poultry is even less
This is largely because pork is raised in factory-farming conditions that are awful for the animals, and poultry even more so. Environmental "benefits" are countered by animal welfare drawbacks.
Here is a good analysis, you need to scroll around a bit to find pork and poultry info:
Not sure if it’s the brand, but I tried frozen patties based on insect protein here (in Germany, IIRC the producer was dutch). I was excited to try it, but besides being more expensive than beef, it tasted bland. Now with beef, it’s neither frozen not pre-assembled into patties, so that might also be a difference, but for now I’m holding out for lab-grown meat.
I don't think they necessarily eat meat and drive big cars because of the need to signal their ideology. I agree that their ideology means they don't care about their impact on the environment, which means they don't have the incentive not to drive a big car or eat meat; since they don't have disincentive, the positive reasons to do those two things win out.
It doesn’t help that I get headaches when I eat my garden grown tomatoes. No such reaction to eating a ribeye. How tall will my children grow up to be on a plant based diet? I want my children to grow up to be stronger than those around them.
How about gorillas they are 4-9 times stronger than a human on a vegetarian diet (some termites and ants) and they are pretty close to humans genes wise
Feed them a well-balanced plant-based diet and they’ll be fine. No guarantees on them being stronger than those around them, because if everyone wants this someone’s got to miss out due to chance ;)
Even within a much smaller price margin, there'd still be plenty of reasons to make kill-free meat the default preference.
Abattoir and meat-processing facilities might not be able to achieve the same quality bar for hygiene as lab-developed meat cultures. That should ultimately translate into better food safety for consumers.
There are also strong ethical and environmental arguments for choosing kill-free meat as opposed to high-methane[0] animal-based meat products. It's not the entire solution to environmental problems by any means, but it's a large opportunity.
A good chunk of meal decision-making comes down to the way that food is marketed and the way that we talk about and discuss our food options.
As determined and evidence-led entrepreneurs and technologists, all of us in the HN community can do a lot to advocate for and influence public opinion and behavior in whatever direction we choose.
Hey if they can develop lab-meat cultures with the same(ish) makeup of real meat then yes I'd love that stuff. If I can get the same product but without suffering of animals then I'm 100% on board.
What I don't like is this current crop of fake meat. I don't know what it's made of and I don't want to eat something with a list of ingredients as long as my arm pretending to be something else.
When you say that you don't know what it's made of, is that because you haven't actually looked it up? The Impossible Foods site goes into solid detail on what goes into their product, more than you'd find on other commonly ingested products like ice cream or whatever where the website is purely an appeal to taste buds. Many of us would be eating daily a variety of things with long lists of ingredients.
What if that long list is the cost of trying to engineer an alternative to something that evolved over millions of years? Why would that matter?
(Typical meat eater here, but interested in trying lab meat sometime.)
Consider that "subjects raw plant matter to complicated chemical processes to produce something meat-tasting" is equally true for fake meat factories as it is for cows. Just because the recipe for real meat has come about via evolutionary (and not laboratory) trial-and-error, doesn't necessarily make it healthier.
But what if it's not "highly processed" due to advancements in tech? Personally I would always choose the fake (lab grown or plant based) over the real meat. Real meat and three industrial farming process just has too many ways that the product is prone to contamination, not even to mention the cruelty/ethics. I say this as an avid meat eater as well. I love the taste of meat but I'd switch in a heartbeat once there's an alternative that compares.
This is a bit shocking and I'll get downvoted for it but:
Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.
That statement is factually correct but worded in a way that suggests a misunderstanding of the WHO classification system. "The lists describe the level of evidence that something can cause cancer, not how likely it is that something will cause cancer in any person (or how much it might raise your risk)."
> This is a bit shocking and I'll get downvoted for it but:
Not to mention that red meat is a class 2 carcinogen (Source: WHO). And processed meat, is a class 1 carcinogen, right up there with Plutonium, according to the World health organization.
I downvoted you not because of what you wrote, but because what you wrote is directly refuted by your (unlisted no less which I find intellectually lazy) source.
Processed meat being a class 1 carcinogen doesn't mean that plutonium = read meat! It simply means there is a likely link between it and cancer. Not that they are equivalent. This statement is scaremongering at best, unsupported by the classification. Also "cancer" is vague, the WHO organization, IARC, listed colorectal cancer as the specific cancer.
And for red meat being a class 2 carcinogen, they listed as probably not that its known.
From their FAQ:
This recommendation was based on epidemiological studies suggesting that small increases in the risk of several cancers may be associated with high consumption of red meat or processed meat. Although these risks are small, they could be important for public health because many people worldwide eat meat and meat consumption is increasing in low- and middle-income countries. Although some health agencies already recommend limiting intake of meat, these recommendations are aimed mostly at reducing the risk of other diseases. With this in mind, it was important for IARC to provide authoritative scientific evidence on the cancer risks associated with eating red meat and processed meat.
Note that phrase: "Although these risks are small"
If you want to paint red meat with a broad "bad for humans and whatnot" brush. At least get your facts straight. I can't look at the paper cause its behind the elsevier paywall but it should be here for anyone that can get it.
I bet the 18% more chance of colorectal cancer listed in the study amounts to for 500 people instead of 4 getting cancer, maybe 5 do now. One of my biggest pet peeves with all of this is the focus on whatever number is higher without contextualizing it.
My back-of-the-envelope numbers are close to yours, but I think a very big caveat is the confidence of these associations from epidemiological studies. 18% percent is quite low by most standards. Most epidemiological studies expect 100%-400% to draw strong correlations. Smoking, by example, is in the thousands of percent increase risk.
"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we
are quite simply out of business." [1]
The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.
The 18% and 4/5 in 500 is just an example I pulled out of my butt. I didn’t do a scihub search to find the study but 18% is pretty weak. It’s also more for an assessment at a personal level how much risk you could expect as an individual, which most people care about. Even if that means 600k more cancer patients than before, you’d have to compare that against the null hypothesis to even see if you’re still in the territory of what random chance could arrive at.
An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.
Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.
I think you're right, but there might be another way. What if there were a Tesla-like company? Tesla didn't just produce cars that are better for the environment, they made them awesome in every other way as well.
I imagine that meat will eventually be replaced by lab-grown meat that had been engineered to be as delicious (or moreso!) as the highest grade beef, but perhaps more healthy & cheaper. The fact that it would be better for the environment and animal rights needs to be listed as a benefit, but not the focus.
> Tesla didn't just produce cars that are better for the environment, they made them awesome in every other way as well.
as a former tesla owner, i dispute both of these assumptions.
> ... lab-grown meat ...
tesla builds cars. cars are a recent human invention.
cattle on the other hand is a product of millions of years of evolution.
i think it will take a bit more time to get lab meat that is as good as the real thing.
It didn't select to be environmentally friendly. Humans scaled up animal growth fairly recently too, so we hadn't had enough time to figure out pathogen issue and ethics.
I disagree. Evolution has created signals -- "tasty" -- for things that are good for us. Fats, salts, and sugars are comparatively rare in a wild environment, and thus they taste good.
Sure, but that's us evolving, not the animals, right? We have made quite a few other nutrient-dense foods that hack those signals. Evolution did not make cheese or chocolate in all these years, because it doesn't target our palate, rather the other way around. (Notable recent counterargument is the selective breeding of cattle for food, but that's thousands, not millions of years.)
I don't think the evolution of cattle is a good indicator of the difficulty of creating great plant protein products.
I think this is inevitable if #1 is true. It may seem politically infeasible now, but if governments get really serious about climate change, then the price of many meats but especially beef will increase significantly, and that alone will give the fake beef a cost edge.
I guess there's no reason veggie meat wouldn't become much cheaper than real meat. It takes a lot less resources to grow a bushel of soy or wheat or GMO super-grain than a quarter pound of a cow.
Grass fed cattle produces more methane than grain fed thoug (and methane is a much worse greenhouse gas).
But it does (possibly) help sequesters carbon.
The truth is that it's hard to tell which is better, but neither is great environmentally.
it’s hard to say whether grass-fed or grain-fed beef is better for the Earth – in part because they’re both pretty bad.
“No matter how you slice it,” he wrote, “eating beef will never be the greenest thing you do in a day.”
He cites an estimate by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan that producing 2.2 pounds of beef emits more greenhouse gases than driving 155 miles.
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s study of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with consumption in Oregon found red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprint of all the foods Oregonians eat.[1]
(Needless to say the Cattlemen’s Association dispute these, and claim it only (?) produces 2.8% of greenhouse gases in the US).
Methane is short lived in the atmosphere. Also, North America historically had about 300 million ruminants, before human intervention: bison.
The other issue is we’re basically running out of topsoil. Modern agriculture is an extractive process, and the result is we have maybe 60 years left until the topsoil is gone and we can’t grow any more crops.
Indeed, methane is shorter lived than CO2 on the atmosphere. Taking that into account:
The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84.[5][6] That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 32 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions.
As someone from the UK who has tended to eat meat a lot in the past - I do agree with your reading of culture in the UK historically.
But I also think it's remarkable how quickly public opinion in the UK has been shifting with regard to environmental concerns.
Traveling by train as opposed to air travel, reduction of single-use plastics and plastic packaging, and reduced-meat diets all feel like much more common discussion topics and lifestyle choices than they were even five years ago.
Shops and restaurants have also shifted to meet changing demands. There have been mistakes (incentives around long-life plastic shopping bags haven't worked out exactly as planned) but overall it feels like a wave of change.
both meat consumption and air travel have increased YoY over the past 25 years in the UK.
and sticking with the UK, current estimates point to an almost 100% increase in air passenger numbers in the 2030s, and Heahtrow still being in the top ten busiest airports in the world.
anecdotally, my flights have increased 2x every year for the past 5 years. this year it's been 50 flights, 40 of which intercontinental (no train availability).
From a little more digging to try to break out of my bubble, here are some reading references:
Of beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and fish -- only poultry has seen any broad increase in expenditure by UK households over the past few years (and slim, at 2%); all others have decreased or remained the same[0]. I'm not claiming that's related to environmental concerns directly but it shows some changes in behaviour.
Air travel passenger numbers are certainly on the rise[1], although interestingly the number of flights ('air travel movements') appears to be somewhat more muted. Even so, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation have certainly increased a lot since the 1990s.
Brexit and the prospect of a high-spending majority UK government could both have impacts on these over the next decade, no doubt - but in what direction I'm not sure.
There would likely be unintended consequences to raising the price of meat through a carbon tax. It creates a market for cheaper meat that there will be no shortage of producers or consumers for. How that meat is made cheaper is an open question. It could be through carbon offsets but it could just as well be through worse conditions for the animals or importing the meat from countries where production is cheaper.
The same argument is made against raising the taxes on tobacco products, that "people will smuggle in cigarettes from countries without the tax", but it never seems to actually happen to any significant degree.
People are lazy, and if the only source of cheap meat is the black market of illegally-imported products, only a very small segment of people will bother.
I live somewhere with high taxes on tobacco products and illegal cigarettes are a big problem. It's not a small segment of the smoking population either but it is disproportionately those who are more economically disadvantaged. People are lazy but they are also motivated by economic pressures. It's easy for something like that to become an 'invisible' problem to people who aren't in those economic or social groups while still having severe negative effects on a large number of people.
I buy carbon offsets based on a questionnaire about lifestyle. It works out to about $180-220 USD per year, depending on whether I take a vacation by flying to Europe. If that were factored into prices as a tax I don't think it would count as an astronomical increase.
But perhaps the questionnaire and algorithm from terrapass is deficient in some way. What are you basing your calculations off of?
That still isn't very expensive in terms of offsets - about $10/year (Terrapass sells the offsets for $4.99 per 1,000 lbs). Why do you think that's astronomical?
I was coming from the other end. I've repeated seen claims that livestock contributes a significant fraction of global greenhouse emissions. eg. most recently, a claim of 17% in this article https://a16z.com/2019/12/30/life-in-2030/ from HN yesterday.
I assumed that eg. 17% of the global total meant the individual allocation would be large, and thus very expensive to offset.
Note that there's a CH4 vs. CO2 conflation in the mix here, which probably doesn't help.
But it still doesn't seem to add up: if I can eat a "meat lovers" diet and that's only $10/year to offset, and it's roughly 15% of global emissions, that'd suggest that around $70/year could offset 100% of global emissions.
Well, no. The difference between an average American diet (2.5T) and a vegan diet (1.5T) is ~$10/yr to offset. In total, a "meat lovers" diet (3.3T) would be about $33/year to offset. If that's about 15%, that works out to about $220/year per individual offset on the high side, which is consistent with what I purchase.
Yeah I don't see our species evolving into pure herbivores anytime soon. I'm from Africa and the only vegans I know there are either allergic to meat or just can't afford it yet. Eating meat is actually something we work towards aggressively. Meat is also a status symbol, as a result. We will be eating meat for a very very long time.
> People aren't going to give up their meat: they may not even be willing to try alternatives.
That's the problem; they will say it's not the same even if it is 100% the same. I bake a lot of pizzas for friends and I tend to do real sausage and Beyond sausage and have people taste. I tell them upfront that some are real and some are fake meat but not which are which. Yesterday I did almost 50 pizzas on a hangover party (it's a hobby...) and the most 'angry' meat eaters taste fake when it's real, real when it's fake, but once they think that they have the fake one (even though it was the real one), they simply leave it. And that I really don't understand. Little disclaimer about tasting: I don't load my pizza's up with that 'meatlover' amount of (fake or real) meat. I like subtle tastes, so there won't be a lot of sausage on a pizza.
Tyson changed from a meat company to a protein company. Can make veggies taste like chicken or beef.
I didn't have an Impossible Whopper yet but it costs a lot of money. For $12.99 with a coupon I can gt a family meal of three Whoppers, three cheeseburgers, and 3 fries. I hear the Vegans are mad that the Impossible Whopper is grilled on the same grill as the regular Whooper.
I suppose the reason to turn away from meat eating is to save the environment? Animals exhale CO2 but not as much as factories with smoke stacks burning coal or oil.
Only a very small segment of loud'n'proud vegans on social media complain about the cooking method of the impossible whopper. And you can have it microwave cooked if you want it to not touch the grill.
The reason a country would want to use a crypto asset for their money supply would be to own the private ledger completely; they wouldn't utilize the decentralized, public, blockchains we see today.
All financial activity and transactions can easily be monitored on a blockchain; the movement of money could be tracked from it's inception to it's current location on one ledger. Each private key can correspond to a citizen (much like a social security ID) and citizens can be taxed more easily and efficiently. This is why China is leading the pack here and is already developing a PBOC digital currency[1].
Yeah, but if you own the private ledger completely, what advantage do you have over just having that kind of control over banks? It seems you can just do all of that with heavy handed banking regulations.
In any democracy this would kill the banks and government and central bank's ability to lie about spending and liquidity ... (because the ledger would be accessible to the justice system)
I find it hard to believe any central bank will risk that.
I don't think any major currencies will get turned into crypto assets either, there's no reason for a government to do that. Instead what's happening is that traditional banking systems are being upgraded to allow instant and person-to-person transfers of money. This is one of the main benefits of crypto - being able to instantly send money to anyone. If you can just use your existing online banking system, so much easier. And the government still gets to track it all and make sure we're not cheating on our taxes or funding terrorists or whatever.
I'm not an expert but I believe many EU countries now have instant P2P bank transfers. Australia just got their system going in the last few years too. The US is a bit behind but I'm sure it's coming.
The Australian system does not require signup from the recipient (or the sender for that matter) and there's no transfer limits beyond what your bank already had on your accounts previously.
Ditto for the UK and European systems. Give destination routing number and account and amount, press some button. Done. No fees, ever, and transfer is more or less instantaneous.
It didn't exactly explode in popularity, and has since been sold to a private corp.
China won't be the first country to issue a crypto-currency because it's already been done by other countries. If China does issue one, people likely won't trust it and will avoid it like the plague. China's only real advantage here it is to leverage their authoritarian state to force their own citizens to use a state-approved crypto-currency and hope it catches on elsewhere as a result.
As for China becoming the world's sole super-power in the next decade... I am skeptical. Given China's demographics (i.e. greying), current political problems (e.g. Hong Kong), exodus of manufacturing (e.g. Samsung), and increasing resistance to their influence from other states, I would predict China's global power is near its peak and will soon begin declining, likely being substantially lower at the end of the decade than it is now.
I predict china will hit a ceiling in growth as a result of it's imhumane policies, and eventually authoritarianism is going to hit a line where the people rise up. China may go to far in it's ethnic cleansing or other bad things might come up and unless they change, they will never rise above a certain growth level. Not saying they'll become democratic, but at least better stewards over their own people. Also, I think and HOPE their social credit program fails miserably, that's the last thing we need other countries to start adopting.
Meat will also be eaten by people who are tired of the carb and sugar filled garbage that passes off as food but leads to obesity and death. Like the impossible burger and all the garbage like that. The worst part of a hamburger, as far as diet is concerned, is the bun which in America has tons of sugar. Assuming they didn't add sugar to the meat. The irony is that meat is some of the healthiest food available that's also tasty. People will be eating it way after global warming has given us a few degrees Celsius rise in temperature.
I don't think country is going to give up their control of currency and all those monetary tools that they know for something new. These monetary policies have been evolving base on past mistakes.
I can only see decentralize internet if the world crack down on the internet and put more pressure in it. Or more fragmentation like how bit torrent is rising because there are more streaming services.
Meat is not going anywhere either. China, Korea, etc.. place status and emphasize on meat. It's also ingrain in culture too.
Not _exactly_. This is kind of the whole point of Stellar, and why IBM invested in creating World Wire. Crypto can make this problem easier, especially if you're looking at it internationally rather than in day-to-day transactions. I also think for auditability there is an advantage here, which can't be brushed away. Tracing down international currencies can be very hard.
That said, what the article is describing is definitely not this, but seems to predict (at least based on the text) something more akin to a stablecoin that corresponds to a given fiat currency. So yeah, in that case, you'd probably be correct, but I don't think we can generalize that to every type of cryptocurrency.
7 - I can't see massive exploration suddenly over 10 years. And when this boom does come governments will be very involved, like in the colonial periods, there is massive national advantage to get people to go stake claims. I can only see it being a similar blend of govt/private.
10 - we will see progress but anything groundbreaking in the cancer fight this seems too short a time scale.
For point 6, as the article mentions in a different place, there will be fewer baby boomers "dominating the conversation". Sure, that's meant mostly politically, but it applies to other sections too.
Calling it a delicacy is a stretch, it not changing that fast.
But the "set in their ways" people are becoming the minority and those of us who are open to trying new stuff slowly change to stop eating meat and shifting towards plant-based.
I used to love a good steak, burger, chicken, etc. I stopped eating meat in early November 2019 to see how long I can go without it. Still going, and I don't have any need to eat it, so it's effortless.
When eating meat, I sometimes had this bad feeling in my stomach, and now it doesn't happen anymore. Sure, they use pesticides on plants and soy is said to be heavily modified and whatever. I get that from my family, who are set in their ways. I'm not trying to convince anyone, it's just what feels better for my body.
Also, I'm lucky to have a supply of home-grown vegetables so I can be sure of the origin. Tastes much better than the stuff they sell in stores too.
The vast majority of those Muslims are in poorer countries (think Indonesia and Bangladesh, and not Saudi Arabia), and could never afford to eat meat in the daily quantities eaten in the West, the Gulf, and increasingly in the wealthier population of China.
Their regular diet consists largely of cereal grains, legumes, vegetables, and small amounts of meat to supplement, and even that is mostly cheaper to produce/acquire meat like chicken and eggs, or small riverine fish.
The religious observances you mention account for a tiny portion of overall meat consumption in the world, and to use them as an example why meat consumption can't be reduced is at best an abuse of statistics, and at worst a cultural scapegoat.
If anything, other cultures could perhaps learn from them to treat the consumption of meat as a sort of sacrament to be appreciated on special occasions, like the birth of a child. Prior to the era of industrial scale food production, that is how most non-aristocratic people consumed meat of larger animals, regardless of their culture or religion.
The far bigger factor driving meat production and the associated environmental issues is my kid ordering a 1/4 pound hot dog and then throwing away half of it.
Well, that's an interesting angle, i.e their consumption of meat can be looked as a one time / 2 times a year treat at special occasions, with non-meat products for the rest of the year.
It could even be once a week and it would still have a dramatic effect on GHG emissions. But as others have noted, it's too big a problem to rely on individually motivated behavior change. The price has to go up for it to be considered precious.
So, I have a problem with a large number of these points. Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read. I think Fred is way off here. The bullet points:
1. There will be no global change in human behaviour and activity that is against the short term interests of those people. Period. The way to replace fossil fuels with renewables is by them being a cheaper source of power. We're well on the way here for solar.
2. Until someone can devise a safe way to processor nuclear fuel, transport the fuel and waste and process and store the nuclear waste nuclear power is just not making any kind of resurgence. It just isn't. Believing otherwise is a pipe dream that ignores the significant externalities of nuclear power (as in the waste products from the reactor and refinement processes).
3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best.
4. Crypto currency doesn't solve any problems that most people care about. Bitcoin surged in value for two reasons:
- So wealthy Chinese people could escape their country's capital controls and move their wealth out of China. Mine Bitcoin in China, sell overseas for USD, profit.
- For illegal activity.
Traditional currencies have reversible transactions (which most people actually want) and aren't subject to 51% attacks. Nor do they require technical proficiency to safely use.
5. Decentralized Internet is a pipe dream.
6. Plant-based diets by the end of the decade? Not a chance.
I look forward to having a chuckle at this list in 2030.
> Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read
I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
Cool idea, but I don't completely understand the interface. It's not clear what the 1-5 buttons up top are: does clicking on it record my rating of the claim?
What are the numbers next to each of the links in Pros and Cons? They look like they correspond to the ratings above, but I didn't understand how those were derived.
You're on a link that's my opinion, so the numbers next to each link are my ratings. Clicking the buttons on top saves your rating to local storage, and makes a 'You' link to your opinion, where you can put pro/con arguments with your own ratings.
Putting your ratings on the site requires a paid account. I'm making this in my spare time and would have a hard time controlling spam if such accounts are free. I still think the free version is useful for exploring your own opinions.
Yeah, there's definitely a resemblance, also a resemblance to kialo. Notice how arguman had to temporarily shut down due to bot accounts. This is a major reason why howtruthful requires payment to be used socially. https://en.arguman.org/blog/new-user-registration-disabled-s...
I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.
Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.
It happened long ago. We had a decentralised Internet, with end-to-end communications the norm. Money is more easily made with centralised control of users, though, so money is more readily spent on centralisation of services.
Ultimately, Discord/Slack/Whatnot succeeded over Jabber because far more money was put into services that can be commercialised than was put into something that's very hard to make a buck out of.
The run-out of IPv4 has massively exacerbated the problem, because with carrier grade NATs now the norm, protocols have to work via a central server to connect two end users. There won't _be_ a new decentralised killer app.
Well, if social unrest gets really bad across the globe we might see something like mesh networking with a mesh social media system spring up, I suppose.
I do think nuclear will have a resurgence. You don't have to make nuclear as safe as clear air to use, only reasonably safe with a plan to handle the waste. Nuclear is already safer than coal in terms of people killed by power generation.
Finland is building the world's first long term storage depot for nuclear waste and I think the same could be done in many other places.
Plus, all the push for nuclear is for new nuclear with better efficiency in the fuel used and passive safety futures. I don't think that a significant part of the grid will be powered by nuclear in 2030, but the newer models should be coming online by then.
I think nuclear will have a resurgence... in some places. I keep hearing that nuclear is safer than coal but coal won't make entire regions uninhabitable if something goes REALLY wrong. I'm thinking terrorist attacks, natural disasters, missile strikes, etc.
I have mixed feelings about the predictions; I get the sense that significant change is in the air, at least in the US, whatever direction that takes. I see some of these things as being realistic, especially on a global scale.
That said, I think he might be wrong about (3) (among other things) and (5) is related in my mind. China is certainly growing, in part because of problems in the Euro-American world, but it is also brewing problems and unrest with increasingly autocratic behavior, and a number of other economic problems are showing.
I do see increased adoption of decentralized technologies, in part because of increased political volatility and mistrust of involved centralized IT corporations. That is, I see (5) happening in part because I think (3) might be a bit of an overprediction.
It won't just be China though, and hasn't been. People will increasingly be dealing with censorship and monitoring, and trying to bypass it, and will also become increasingly distrustful of things like Facebook, which correctly or incorrectly has been implicated in things like Russian-UK-US subterfuge. Adoption of decentralized tech is already happening with Hong Kong and Catalonia protests; I suspect it will grow to become more mainstream.
I don't see the traditional centralized internet going away, but I do see people gravitating toward a more hybrid system. Maybe where more critical, and more intimate communications with close others moves to more decentralized architectures, along with other stuff that doesn't depend on speed so much, whereas other mass communications remains more centralized.
> 3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best.
I think the reason would be that most countries that make short-term decisions are ones that have democratic elections every few years and need to avoid pissing off too many people. China's authoritarian system may have more leeway with short-term pain for longer-term strategic initiatives not resulting in societal upheaval.
People seem to overrate Xi's standing in the long-term. It is easy to keep a population docile with double digits economic growth. Once that trend terminates though...
Our evidence from the 20th century shows that the only countries that are successful are democratic. The list of authoritarian countries that crashed and burned is longer than the list of democratic countries that did the same.
Singapore is fairly authoritarian and they've had outsized success going from third world to first.
I think the root cause is pretty simple: having no checks and balances lets you move faster, no matter what direction (either up or down), and it's a lot easier to mess things up than it is to do everything right.
Again, countries like Singapore are poor models to follow simply because of their size and population. It is drastically easier to govern a country you can cycle across in a few hours, than a country like India or China.
I think that's certainly a factor but your initial claim was:
> the only countries that are successful are democratic
And you're supporting it by excluding all counter-examples. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "most successful countries are democratic".
And since you mentioned China and India, India is a democracy, China is ruled by an authoritarian single-party. Both have huge populations, yet China has grown its GDP better? Assuming good economy = successful here. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/china-vs-india-economy.ph...
Let me present an alternative thesis: democracy has little to do with good governance. It acts as a buffer against discontent, it's in many ways moral, but it is not by itself sufficient to create prosperity.
China is a kind of democracy and a very meritorious one at that already.
Just because they aren't copy cat 100% clone of US/UK democracy, it doesn't mean they aren't a democracy.
Also countries like Great Britain, France and all other big European powers made bulk of their super power status when ruled by Monarchs. The democracies later carried the inertia of those eras. Which is understandable. Once you build a sound educational ecosystem, with a great economy with an industrialized economic base, democracy works like a charm. There is a long term supply of good leaders and educated masses to vote for them.
Also democracy is not a process designed to produce good leaders. It's only a process that elects them in a system where they are already present, with a populace that can recognize.
Happy to consider other examples, but it does feel like the combination of China's capitalistic reforms while maintaining its authoritarian rule and the state control of information is fairly unique in the 20th century.
And any comparables likely failed due to war with democratic countries, and that seems unlikely given China's role in the globalization of trade as well as it being a nuclear power.
I don't think he knows enough about any of these things to make big predictions. He should stick to his day job. Not that I'm better, but I see these themes come across from my wide selection of Twitter followers and regularly see highly convincing arguments which would go against them. And that's no me seeking out an answer, it's just scrolling.
Actually, one more significant problem with nuclear power is that there isn't enough manufacturing capability to build reactor cores. Most existing reactors are decades old, and although we have a lot of theoretical knowledge on how to build reactors, how to build more modern reactors than the existing ones, we globally lack the practical know-how, there's no assembly line that we can just pick up reactors from. So the cost of a new reactors is almost unknown. How much does it cost to build the factory that builds the reactors?
Handling nuclear waste is much easier, because we're actively working on that problem, there's practical know-how in spades.
"Modern" reactor designs would indeed solve many problems with nuclear energy. But nuclear reactors are for the most part extremely expensive projects with high risks, so only conservative designs that are well tested are actually being built. This has been a problem for the last four decades, and I don't see why it would suddenly change. If anything risk appetite probably decreases as civilian nuclear reactors stop making financial sense.
I believe that China has the appetite for it and will pursue new reactor types unlike the luddites that we have here in the USA. Luckily they will probably sell them to us for a profit.
Cheaper power would just lead to greater consumption of power. If cheaper solar and wind power replaces fossil fuels in some areas, the fossil fuels will just get used in others instead. Such as bigger vehicles and more long-distance tourism.
Edit: perhaps coal would be phased out, without government intervention to save it. I don't think oil production would go down on its own.
All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments.
All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.
Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.
Our current cellular data infrastructure isn't nearly reliable enough to allow routine use of remote operated vehicles in public roads. What happens when a construction crew accidently cuts the backhaul fiber and takes out a whole group of base stations? And no, that problem won't be solved by 5G networks or satellite service.
That problem already occurs! How many of us stopped working for hours when github went down? When aws went down? When some construction cut a wire and took out some of the internet?
The eCall system - which automatically phones the emergency services with your position after a crash - is already mandatory on new cars in the EU. The GPS is already there. Making further use of it, perhaps to assist self-driving cars, doesn't seem like such a stretch. (Which is not to say I welcome it.)
I don’t like this. I’m okay with dying in a cold river or a burning car after a crash if it means I don’t have to be worried about being tracked every second of my life.
At some point, its going to cost extra to buy cars without GPS trackers, houses without police-force endorses surveillance nets, or phones with an actual “off” button. This is much more pressing, in my opinion, than people buying into heavily processed meat substitutes.
I think there's quite a gap between, 'built into every car' and insurance companies requiring access to it. GPS is in every customer phone but insurance companies don't require access to that either.
They should. It wouldn't be hard for carmakers to add a camera at the top of the windshield. The US already requires every new car to come with a backup camera.
It's arguable that dashcams are "required" now as insurance in many ways already. At least as much as adequately insuring your vehicle, and arguable to reduce the likelihood of police abuse.
I recall a discussion of this point on HN a long time ago, but GPS is only one way to charge taxes based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) - another, which is less invasive, is just to read the vehicle's odometer on some regular basis, either by hand when doing an annual vehicle safety inspection, or automatically by having the vehicle transmit the data. Certainly those have risks of tampering, but so does GPS.
Your last point got me thinking about people sitting in a dark room waiting for autonomous cars to have trouble on the road then alert them to intervene, turning 1 driver:1 car into 1 driver:20 cars.
I can see that. Or, even simpler, a delivery person hopes out with a package and the remote driver circles the block. Garbage trucks might be the first to have this system installed. You need two people to operate a truck currently, a driver and a guy in the back. It drives slow along the road, very predicable routes. Needs to be driven back to the yard once filled, and another truck to take over the route.
Also the ability to drive the truck, at least to some degree from controls at the back of the truck. In my neighborhood there are too many parked cars to be able to let the robotic arm do everything. I often see the driver at the back of the truck moving it forward and hoping off to position trash cans where the robotic arm can pick them up.
I feel that this was the big trend that people missed; instead of AI we simple rebuilt the system to mechanically function better. First with standardized shipping containers, then progressed to other boring stuff.
There are all sorts of people. To some art is “boring”. To some being a refuse truck operator is interesting or being a remote crane operator is exciting. I’ve met people who straight up love “cold calling”. I cannot cold call for the life of me. Some people are excited by engaging with strangers and trying to get them excited about a product or service.
Sure, some people may find being a garbage man to be even erotically stimulating, but that doesn’t mean the majority of garbage men think it’s all that great. It’s a relatively pointless observation.
If this happens, I bet police cameras and trackers are still unreliable at convenient times while all the other commodity cameras and trackers work 100% of the time.
If you ride a rented scooter from e.g. Lime or Bird, your GPS location is being streamed in real-time to many of the departments of transportation in the cities in which they operate[1][2]. It's not a quantum leap to assume cars will follow, especially if they're autonomously operated by some central service, doubly so if they're rented (e.g. from Uber) and not individually owned.
I would think it should be the other way around where gas cars would need to pay carbon tax. Or we can just call it even. Or in a hopeful scenario, stop oil and gas subsidies.
Depending on location, we already pay carbon taxes. In gasoline, tax on the new car, green sticker for being able to drive into low emission zones. Electric cars have none of that, yet they contribute heavily. For example by using electricity produced from coal. It’s just that the owner does not see the emissions.
In most of the world, gasoline is mostly tax already. The US is an exception.
E.g. in the Netherlands the "raw" price of gasoline (a few months back) was 0.61 euro/liter to that, add 0.6 gasoline tax and then add VAT, to come to the price at the pump (pump costs + profits come are included in the 0.61 raw price) of 1.46 euro/liter.
So about 58% of the cost of fuel is tax.
This is ignoring various other taxes that have to be paid, such as foreign taxes on the gasoline, profit tax, company tax, transport tax, road tax, approval tax, vat on the vehicle you're powering, ... All those taxes are either included in the raw gasoline price or are paid separately by the customers. So let's minimize that and say that 70% of the cost of gasoline really funds government (though not necessarily the local one), and should be considered tax (I do believe it'd be closer to 80% if you went really deep). Now of course, a number of those taxes are implemented on electric vehicles as well.
There's no way the government is going to let that tax income lower when it starts eating into their budget, so there will be some sort of tax, probably doubling the price of electric vehicles in the next 10 years or so.
And this is tax. It doesn't matter that you're not doing anything negative to the environment. Already the government is taxing companies generating their own electricity (the Netherlands) in various ways, and they're talking about taxing people who cut their grid connection.
The cash for clunkers program paid $4k to everyone with an old car. A couple of hundred dollars for GPS trackers (and transmitters, which is presumably what is meant) seems well within the collective budget of all parties who pay for cars in the US.
If I had to implement it, I’d do a two stage system. If you install a tracker you pay ten cents per mile. If you don’t have a tracker you have to report mileage every year and pay twelve cents per mile plus a $40 processing fee.
Not everything is done for a rational choice, or even moderately good reasoning. Insurance companies what to know where you drive, when, and have a dashcam video if you get into an accident. Government want to experiment with different forms of taxation. Police and courts want to track people convicted of crimes. Employers want to know that their company car is being used responsibly. Car companies get sued for making fast cars, start to install GPS for liability. Municipalities want to fine/tax speeders. Cars that are on lease can be tracked and shut down remotely if payments stop. All these reasons start to add up.
How so? Why would a new car not come with GPS navigation on the dash? Why would a new car not come with a data connection? These are commodities, your phone has them.
Why limit it to tracking? Why do we put these powerful machines in the hands of users that we know with certainty will kill themselves and others at a predictable rate and then just ask them nicely not to do harm?
The technology required to geofence, speed-regulate, and otherwise control where, when, and how fast cars can go already exists. Why aren't we using it? We don't need fully autonomous cars. There are all kinds of things we can do incrementally. I have to imagine some jurisdictions are going to realize this, eventually. And once they do the totally predictable savings to life and property will be unignorable.
Put appropriate limiters in the vehicles, with a button to disengage all the limits that also notifies the police that you have done so, so that they can decide whether they need to come help, whether (as they later review the case) there was appropriate cause, &c.
I predict the 2020's will turn out to be the most difficult-to-predict decade yet. The predictions of the OP in my mind fail to account for several yet-to-mature disruptive technologies that will potentially transform our society to the degree the Internet and web have. The only prediction I'll make is in the domain where I work:
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.
The internet is already a huge step up in communication from 20 years ago. Turns out people use that to find ideologically likeminded people meaning tribalist movements everywhere are stronger now than before internet came along. 90's were full of optimism about how tribalism could be overcome that is completely vanished now.
From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use that only to further isolate themselves. At least today, physical location sometimes dictate you have to interact with people outside of your own social class and background. What you describe could reduce that, making every one retreat even further into their echo chamber.
People already live in close proximity to millions in cities. They generally don't hug each other; more fixated on rushing past each other, avoiding eye contact.
Humans just aren't made for having 7 billion friends...
Yet in these same cities people meet in places, and have the positive experiences we often define as being human. Consider how many of these are currently possible to have through the Internet, and how likely that is to change if social presence and shared spatial awareness are deliverable remotely.
The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.
It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.
I guess what I'm saying is that many people had that exact same hope, for the same reason, 20 years ago -- and that hope ended up being extremely wrong; the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Of course we cannot extrapolate. Noone can know. But are there any specific reasons why the ongoing tide of political, ideological, social polarization would suddenly turn around?
You say "across great tribal boundaries". To me, physical proximity seems to be the main thing left now that still counteracts tribal boundaries.
Can you provide examples/scenarios perhaps?
As my counter-example, I just moved out to the country-side. As a result, I start to now see different opinions in my Facebook feed from when I lived in a city, simply due to Facebook-friending new people due to physical proximity. Due to this influx of "random" impulses in my Facebook feed, I think am likely to have less polarized views politically (I can see different friends arguing both sides of a topic) than if physical proximity didn't play a role in who I friended.
The Internet had temperately killed technical clubs like HAM radio, wood working shops etc., as people got into coding and could collaborate remotely. Around 2008 lots of Makerspaces started to open, but not nearly enough, the maker movement has stalled though.
We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair shops etc.
I think libraries are a better fit than public schools, and some already have maker spaces, seed banks or gardens, and opportunities for continuing education. With funding provided by a dedicated library district (which is increasingly common) in addition to private foundation support, these institutions can have a significant positive impact in the communities they serve.
School are normally significantly larger and mostly unused outside of their normal operating hours. Realistically it shouldn't be an either or thing but rather both.
Ham Radio is far from dead, and it isn't a "technical club". It is an activity with many varied subinterests from public service to exploration of extremely efficient low-power communication modes to bouncing signals off the moon. There are 750,000 licensed amateur radio opeators in the United States.
Beaming in might be popular for some use cases, however physical presence will still be the gold standard. VR/AR will always represent a big drop in information density compared to reality. In human conversation even a 75ms lag would be noticeable compared to real-time. I highly doubt looking at a vr projections eyes can match the same intensity as looking at a real person’s. Also, VR completely removes items such as touch and smell.
How much data does a human 6 feet away from you project to you? How much of that data enters your conscious? How much enters your subconscious? With Moore’s law dying we can’t hope to match that amount of information, much less accurately record and transport it in real time. Lossy capture and output mechanisms will still be present in a decade.
I think framing face-to-face vs remote copresence as a hierarchy is a poor mental model. Existing remote communication media can be equally effective as face to face in very narrow, specific contexts. My argument isn’t so much that remote embodied communication will be a panacea, but that it will radically shift the constraints around copresence for a wide variety of contexts. Ultimately, face to face will be vastly superior for some contexts, but I would not underestimate how far that set will drop proportionally over the next decade. And it certainly seems possible that new forms of communication may become only possible in a virtual context, much like the very one we are participating in right now.
> People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
This made me laugh. We haven't even figured out how to do telephone conferences reliably. I'm still waiting for a telco that does not have the obligatory "You're breaking up" or "I cannot see the screenshare" or "Oh sorry, my microphone was still on mute" or whatever somewhere in between.
Teleconferencing has issues not due to technical issues typically. Though that was common up to relatively recent history, modern audio and video teleconferencing software seems reliable and robust. The main deficiency, which can not be mitigated through technology, is the low bandwidth for human communication it has, which yields a lot of the dynamics you mention. Simple things like turn taking and taking awareness of the emotional states of others is largely impossible to do well vs in person using these tools.
This is a well researched area, and embodied communication through VR/AR stands poised to solve many of these deficiencies by allowing the expression of non verbal cues, body language, spatial referencing, etc.
> This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I had a coworker that worked on the fraud team at Second Life. He said the engineers ran the place and would work on stuff that was technically interesting to them, rather than working on stuff that users wanted or needed. That probably didn't help.
> I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.
What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).
A coworker and I were discussing this trend as it relates to the physical workspace. We imagined a psuedo-virtual cubical which you can “decorate” in any theme you’d like - jungle, sci-fi, steampunk, tropical beach, etc. - which would be rendered by your coworkers’ AR wearables/implants.
My favorite concept of that discussion was virtual guardians to protect your flow - look, you can interrupt that developer but you’re gonna have to defeat his virtual dragon first.
I, for one, make my physical workspace disappear from my view as much as possible. When I'm at my desk, 99% of what I see is my screen, 1% goes for the occasional look at the tea cup.
What's the deal with this videogamey bullshit you're proposing? Why would anyone want to participate in this?
First thing I'm doing is installing an adblocker/augblocker to byoass this sort of thing.
Dude, it’s to prevent people from interrupting you when you’re trying to work. It would literally be designed to keep shitty coworkers like you away from my desk.
I don't want to annoy people/be annoyed, either: if you want to be left alone, put up a sign. But you can't force people to participate in a virtual fantasy dragon battle- they'll just refuse and look at you weird!
Steam achievement unlocked: <insert whatever is in your imagination here lol>
Indie games are gonna get a lot weirder... pray for our overloaded dopamine receptors and shriveled serotonin ones. Pornhub will probably roll out their own game store steam clone lol
While its correct that telecommunication will become much important at work, i dont see why people will be stuck in VR outside work. If all work is remote, why would anyone choose to live away from loved ones?
This is a good point — the elimination of physical co presence as a requirement for most forms of interaction other than intimate ones may lead to a world where people physically return to be nearest their kin, and interact with all other institutions they are in remotely (not just work, but for school, entertainment, worship, etc)
What are your thoughts considering that VR was supposed to be the next big thing in the 90s already (at least from what I remember hearing...) and what are your thoughts regarding human chemistry?
The tech track towards full perceptual override in this current generation of VR is fairly well understood and has been on track, though slightly delayed, for approx 7 years now, with the current Oculus Quest device being the best available, and something many of us in the industry felt was almost a dream possibility a few short years ago. So I'm fairly optimistic that the tech will mature to a point where it is effortless to have fully convincing perceptual software proxying all day in 10 years.
I think the bigger unknown questions are around the impact of this technology. It seems hard to understate how much of a change it will be, particularly if there is a path towards young people being able to use it at a young age.
The problem with all these predictions about VR taking over, is they seem to pretend that visual sense is the Holy Grail of VR immersion we've all been waiting for. But that's a far cry from what was imagined in The Lawnmower Man or The Matrix. In reality we have 4 other senses to take care of first.
In the mean time you just have a display that obstructs your view and which can't be tolerated for more than a couple of hours.
Think farther. In ten years incident photons and sound pressures to your senses will likely be possible to fully software modulate. The other senses I agree are harder to speculate about, but on a ten year horizon imagining the existing status quo of form factor and method (headsets) is the wrong way to think about it. Likely these things will be effectively invisible or weightless. At the ten year point I’m imagining these to be lightweight over-eye lenses/goggles or even contact form factor. The analog would be legacy, large headphones vs modern earbuds.
> We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate.
Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
I support nuclear power, however I doubt we will ever see many more reactors built in most countries. The growth of photovoltaic solar power combined with coming cheaper grid scale battery storage is going to wreck the economics for nuclear (including fusion if it ever works).
Check the rate of nuclear power plants being built. It's fallen off a cliff. The people who finance nuclear reactors already think that nuclear power will be uneconomic in the lifetime of any new plants.
We will need at least 3x of that amount (assuming 70% renewables). Even if you can somehow build 50 nuclear plants per year it will still take 21 years to build the next 1050.
There are a lot being decommissioned at the moment too. I'm not sure if that's more or less than the 50 that the World Nuclear Association page claims are being constructed.
By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in addition to new tech. So Yang is right to focus on thorium.
Wish these billionaires with good intentions would invest in marketing to revamp public nuclear sentiment. There’s clearly the possibility of progress given how effective other political campaigns are.
If they really cared they would invest into getting rid of the source of the anti nuclear sentiment: shut down obsolete power plants with unsafe designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl happened because everyone ignored this simple advice. Nuclear power plants are so capital intensive that operators keep plants with known design defects or gross mismanagement running.
Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? The Banquiao Dam failure killed something like an order of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. And there was the recent Oroville Dam incident which didn't kill anyone but it came pretty close to failing catastrophically.
> Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though?
Yes.
You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.
>a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time
That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears.
Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.
Is there an accepted methodology for calculating risk estimations in these situations? I mean, it's essentially speculation afaict, so how do you put a number on it?
It's incredibly unfortunate nuclear has such a bad PR problem, as we need it to get to large scale clean energy. If we had properly invested in nuclear earlier, we'd probably be in a much better position today. Now we need to play catchup.
It was a smart move by Yang to bring up new technologies, which most don't seem to be aware of yet, and provides a way forward through the PR problem.
> Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
Just out of curiosity, is the latter part of a generation that will begin to die off in the 2020s?
Many of these seem like wishful thinking on the part of the author. For example, take the first one:
> The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one.
Oddly enough, if you go back to 2010 for predictions about the next decade, you'll see quite a few people talking about "peak oil." Almost nobody predicted a sharp turnaround in oil production and I don't think anyone in 2009 was predicting that the US would become a net oil exporter by the start of 2020.
I'll make a counter-prediction on the topic of climate crisis for the 2020s:
The climate crisis movement will become widely discredited for its attempts to manipulate scientific data and the scientific process for political ends. Grave prophecies of doom will not come to pass, causing loss of momentum and credibility. Climate research will continue, and as a result, new thermal regulatory mechanisms will emerge that lead to a more nuanced view of future climate change.
I'm in a country that has seen the land mass of Indonesia (population: approx. 240 million), burn off in the last month or so. I'm not sure where you are (somewhere colder?), but it's real and happening now and there's no further argument to be had about it really. Talking about the credibility of institutions changes nothing of the actuality of what is actually going on.
> Grave prophecies of doom will not come to pass, causing loss of momentum and credibility.
Why would you think this? Grave prophecies of doom have failed to come to pass for nearly half a century now and the climate change tale is _gaining_ momentum.
The problem is that since the late 1970s some very wealthy companies realized that this was happening and started spending money to try to muddy the scientific consensus and discourage action. Losing decades means that anything we do now is going to be harder since we’re starting much further behind.
Australia is always on fire. More of has burnt many times, many decades ago.
I'm not saying that climate change isn't responsible. I do believe that it has increased the severity of the situation, and that is a big problem. But this is not a doomsday scenario. It's a once every 20 years going back as long as we can measure scenario.
I think your reaction is a perfect example of what the parent comment is talking about.
Peak oil is funny, there were a lot of people that were riding the doom train and predicting that we where heading to the sudden crash kind of collapse. Obviously it didn't happen and those ideas are comical.
Peak oil didn't so much disappear as its ideas matured into a much more realistic depiction of it. Dr Hagans said that naming it peak oil was a bit silly and that it should have been called "Peak benefit of oil to society", that something that I can get behind.
The current idea is that the second peak will occur somewhere in the mid 20's as the debt load on fracking slows down additional drilling locations, this will raise prices and thus bring on even more newer more costly supplies as ultra-deep sea drilling, coal liquefaction becomes viable. Wheather this leads to a new increase in supply of just sustaining a plateau is anyone guess. Hopefully demand decreases and we move to alternative energy sources in time.
Some of the more reserved writers in the field did predict the production rebound and the higher prices that came with it, the idea that the issues of peak oil would be something that is a rocky road type of event that happens and fluctuates over a century not a sudden event. Folks like John Michael Greer and Dr Nate Hagans seem to be the most realistic folks in this area nowadays talking about the limits of oil production while focusing on possible future energy solutions.
John Michael Greer is a staggeringly convincing writer that has a fairly solid concept of the future of western industrial society. Essentially the idea that due to a wide degree of economic, social and environmental factors that we are in a situation that cannot be recovered from. He writes things that I don't want to agree with but they appear to hold water at least on the short term. I would recommend his books 'The Long Decent' and 'Dark Age America'.
The other reason why I mention his work is that his predictions are fairly in line with yours, the idea that the environmental movement is about to go quiet again because of the extreme message being pushed. That we are still learning how the climate reacts and that we do not have all the information. Climate blowback is going to be extreme but it will be a slow moving event.
I agree. Activism, Politics, Inter-governmental cooperation and policies will not be what alleviates the dangers of climate change. A few major technological breakthroughs will rock the world and we will be having a much different discussion in 20 years.
The area we will struggle with the most is fixing what we've done to our oceans.
100% agree. Simple economics, self interest, and riding technological curves seem likely to be the things which silently solve climate change compared to the ongoing advocacy towards creating a moral panic.
The world wants and needs free, limitless energy, and there is no reason humanity can’t achieve that goal in the next decades.
> people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade.
Last decade seemed like the opposite. So much happened every year, but nothing changed over the decade. The biggest change seems to be the expansion of aggrieved classes to include almost everybody. This only applies to “the West” of course. Changes elsewhere are perhaps striking.
There are enormous changes ocurring. Rapid development of less developed countries, complete commoditization of computing power, secularization of america (catching up to Europe), revizitalizion of the space industry (SpaceX and other "new space" companies, smallsats, internet constellations, etc), amazing resurgence of psychedelic research, prosthetics and other biotech advancing rapidly, continued progress in many fundamental technologies (batteries, materials science, robotics, BMIs, etc), AI technologies, information representation and communication (changes in media, continued digitalization of business, etc).
I agree - the list of technologies (not just bits and atoms, but human institutions) winding their way along the innovation cycle leaves many, many reasons to feel confident the next decade is going to be one of profound, transformative, positive change.
One potential dark horse is genetic engineering. I wonder how close we are to the point where kids are doing gene hacking after school. It could happen this decade.
> Mass surveillance by governments and corporations will become normal and expected this decade and people will increasingly turn to new products and services to protect themselves from surveillance. The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy.
I'd take this a step further and fear that not only will it become the norm, even making use of privacy tech and devices will be viewed with suspicion or may even serve as barriers towards getting access to various societal instruments.
> making use of privacy tech and devices will ... serve as barriers towards getting access to various societal instruments
This already happens.
For example, in the US good credit is often necessary to rent an apartment, open a bank account, get insurance, or even land a job. In order to maintain "good credit", one needs to make sure their financial activity is reported to the bureaus. If you do everything using more-private cash or debit transactions you lose out.
Some things you want as a signal and some things you don’t. Paying rent on time should be a signal, but often is not. Going to a cancer clinic may not be a signal you want, but already is exploited.
Nuance is needed. Lots of small but important decisions to be made. Sounds like a product to me.
Yea, I really think this one will be the opposite. Surveillance will increase and people will not do anything about it. People cannot effectively deal with online surveillance, what happens when that intensifies in the physical space? We are so far behind on this front that I do not believe we can catch up.
I hope so though, it would be beautiful if Open Whisper Systems was the next unicorn.
China is not going to provide a crypto version of its currency. The Chinese government is all about centralisation and control. It will go for electronic transactions via a few tightly-controlled banks combined with the elimination of physical cash.
> Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.
This needs a huge asterisks at the end of it right? You could argue that plant based diets already dominate the world. Now if he's claiming that "muscular" foods that are produced in a lab will pound for pound outsell animal based meat I would happily take that bet against him.
Look at Impossible Burger. Burger King sells them. Try an Impossible Whopper alongside the Beef Whopper. They're making a million pounds of burgers a month, from soy, potatoes, and heme for the meat flavor. Their plant in Oakland is only the size of a supermarket. This isn't an expensive product to make.
When the beef industry's lobbyist in Washington first tried one, he called his people and said, "Guys, we have a problem".
"If farmers and ranchers think we can mock and dismiss these products as a passing fad, we’re kidding ourselves. This is not just another disgusting tofu burger that only a dedicated hippie could convince himself to eat. It’s 95 percent of the way there, and the recipe is likely to only get better. Farmers and ranchers need to take notice and get ready to compete. I’ve tasted it with my own mouth, and this fake meat is ready for prime time."[1] - Eric Bohl, Director of Public Affairs & Advocacy for the Missouri Farm Bureau.
Yes, and it's funny.[1] The Impossible Burger was cool when it cost $20 at Jardiniere. Then the company scaled up and started supplying Burger King. This got some foodies upset. Wait until they get the price down to well below meat and start supplying McDonalds.
Processed food often already has a huge portion of soy and/or wheat protein in addition to the grade F meat. HN's Whole Foods crowd seem to way over-estimate Your Average Persons diet and how much they care what's in the tasty meal.
And if he had made a prediction based on processed meats like burgers, deli meat or sausages being outsold by lab derived products it would have been an interesting prediction, but there is a wide variety of animal meats that people rely on day to day.
>This needs a huge asterisks at the end of it right? You could argue that plant based diets already dominate the world. Now if he's claiming that "muscular" foods that are produced in a lab will pound for pound outsell animal based meat I would happily take that bet against him.
This seems to be one of those issues that is likely to flip very quickly. I suspect there will be two cut-of points (making no prediction on when it will happen), with the first being when it is cheaper to make then lab-grown meat than the old-style with profit and return on investment in the assets to make the food (ie when you can no longer afford to start new farms, but can keep existing ones in profitable production) and when the price of lab-meat drops below the marginal cow cost (ie when you can only sell meat based cows at a loss).
I suspect that it will take much more time to reach the first cutof point than it will take to go from the first cutoff point to the second and when either is reached it will have very quick effects that will prove massively destructive to existing farms and related infrastructure.
A possibly even more significant milestone would be when the best lab-grown or hybrid lab-grown/plant-based meat tastes better than the best natural meat. This seems like something that should be possible, possibly within a decade given recent trends.
Same. Beyond the obvious lack of perspective on the developing world (where meat-eating can only grow), entire cultures are completely wrapped up in the rituals around eating meat and will resist any attempt to go back to the bad old days of meat scarcity.
As an Indian, I just hope fake meat can become good enough to stop the widespread adoption of real meat into Indian diets. India is largely vegetarian (eating meat, even in non-vegetarian households, is like a once-a-week affair) and that has been good for the planet.
1.4B people adopting meat as they become wealthier would be disastrous for the planet
If artificial meat becomes really good, these cultures won't need to change.
Real meat, and all the rituals down to the actual killing of it publicly, can still coexist with artificial meat, with an elevated status, like marble beef, or having a sheep solemnly slain for a feast, already are today.
Knowing how far we advanced with body parts reporuduction (altho not much in widespred use yet) but 2030 I envision most meat producers will move into printing meat, rather than regular farming. And its not because of growing demand or some personal feelings but because it will be much cheaper to print out part of a cow than raise one.
A few good takes, but China becoming the dominant global power? Not a good take.
China is fairly good at a few things, namely lending money and manufacturing goods.
What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months.
I don’t think the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist. I think we’ve seen a brief period of these attitudes, but it’s not indicative of the next decade imo.
And the author seems to think China will be able to rapidly adapt to change, pointing to global warming.
China is the world’s worst source of pollution. I don’t think they’re going to 180, especially since their economy is built on it.
A lot of the article seems to be based on liberal ideals, which include a less prominent America, the promotion of Veganism, and embracing the fall of the West. For the most part, the author’s expectations about crypto are mistaken in that they assume financiers in the west trust China enough to buy into its digital currency. We are bordering on a Cold War; we aren’t about to trust them to keep their promises on crypto.
I think a more moderate take would be suggesting a straddle of the EU - either it strangles itself with clunky bureaucracy, or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russia, or China.
Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland.
In theory the US could add Guam and Puerto Rico... but how would that ever be politically viable? There's no way this is going to happen if one party in a two party system knows it will lead to their doom.
That works for balancing the Senate, but not really the House.
Adding PR to the House would significantly reduce the odds of a Republican House given that the current GOP makes a lot of noises that often seem like they're racist against Hispanics.
I don't know what "adding Guam and Puerto Rico" means when they are already US territories. Your comment seems to imply that this means statehood, i.e. addition of senators and voting representatives. But the parent throws them in with Greenland, which is not a US territory.
Isn't the point of the electoral college that they can and are reassigned Isn't the point of the electoral college that they can and are reassigned values for each territory periodically? periodically?
> A lot of the article seems to be based on liberal ideals
Not liberal ideals. Globalist neoliberal ideals.
> which include a less prominent America, the promotion of Veganism, and embracing the fall of the West.
These aren't liberal ideals. They are globalist neoliberal ideals. Anti-human, anti-american and pro-globalist financiers.
> or it becomes more closely unified and a world power in the likes of the US, Russia, or China.
Simply will never happen as neither the US nor Russia would support this. Only china currently seems to want closer EU integration purely for economic/market purposes. Power is a zero sum game. The biggest loser in the rise of EU would be the US. Having europe turn from a "vassal" to a competitor would represent a significant loss of power for the US.
> Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland.
Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US. I think we should work with native greenlanders directly and have greenland become part of the US. Perhaps a large cash payment for each true native inuit greenlander ( not danish/european/etc settlers in greenland ) and a percentage of greenland's productive output for 100 or 200 years? Seems like something should have been worked out with the native greenlanders a long time.
> Not liberal ideals. Globalist neoliberal ideals.
"Neoliberal" refers to Clinton-style ("third way") liberal politicians. I don't know who you're using it to refer to.
> Having europe turn from a "vassal" to a competitor would represent a significant loss of power for the US.
You forgot to include why you think that's a bad thing.
> Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US.
But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress. Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
>> Guam and Puerto Rico are already part of the US.
> But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress. Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
It's a similar situation in Washington DC. DC residents were given a few electoral college votes, I believe that was put into effect only relatively recently in the 1960s. They have no vote in the US house and no senators.
> You forgot to include why you think that's a bad thing.
What? I'm just pointing out why the US would be against a EU competitor? Perhaps you need to reread what I wrote and the comment I was responding to. I think "globalist neoliberal" triggered something that made you see things that aren't there.
> But they can't vote and have no (useful) representation in Congress.
All I said was that they are part of the US.
> Citizens of Guam and Puerto Rico are treated as second class citizens ("US Nationals", not "US Citizens").
Sure. But they are still part of the US. I was responding to " Furthermore, I think we could see the United States grow with the additions of Guam, Puerto Rico, and/or Greenland." Blacks and women couldn't vote in NY and the US for a long time. Doesn't mean NY wasn't a part of the US or the US existed.
I think "globalist neoliberal" really got you reading into things. I made specific replies to specific comments. Which you completely ignored.
China is good at things we are really bad at: building up modern infrastructure fast and at reasonable cost, investing in long term projects (payoff in decades so meaningless for election cycle driven politics in other countries).
They have now have 2/3 of the worlds high speed rail despite starting incredibly late in the game, and not having a ton of people that can afford it.
Turns out, in a communist government you can cut through red tape incredibly easily to advance your goals for the party/country. This is common for communist govs, and not democracies. When you believe land ownership should be private, and everyone has a super strong opinion about things, it’s hard to advance infrastructure at a speed commensurate with societies needs.
Not an argument for communism, just an observation. Likely lacks some nuance, but just do a bit of research on China’s infra, and their heavy investment in that space.
The US has the opposite extreme of this problem, where we get 6 months for the same white collar crime but there's a minimum 5 year sentence if you grow a specific plant to treat your dehibilating asthma symptoms (http://www.hr95.org/pinson.htm).
I was going to make a quip about how you would probably fare worse in China, but at least according to Wikipedia, the penalty is 10-15 days [0]. On the other hand, legalization is probably imminent in the US. The same is not true of China.
Extreme (death penalty) sentencing for corruption is generally not something you see in regimes that have highly effective regimes of anti-corruption enforcement.
I agree except with your last sentence.
They have the biggest total pollution, but their pollution per capita is actually low compared to eastern countries, and they are investing and legislating aggressively for clean tech.
Furthermore to your point, I don't think we need to look at pollution from a more holistic point of view. How much of the pollution in China is due to them manufacturing and "recycling" goods for the west? Can we look at pollution that has been "offshored" and calculate that into the mix?
"Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account."
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States [1]. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet.
As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
Exactly. To say that you're unhappy is frowned upon. I'd assume in China it's both politically and also socially steming from confucianism, (i.e. against upsetting the harmony).
I mean, yeah, being against those in power isn't a good idea in authoritarian regimes. At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. Being taken care of as long as you do as your told isn't all bad and probably was the default state of the smaller communities in the past. Whish we would find ways to achieve this without the authoritarian aspects.
People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree. Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional. Balance that against the thought that the eastern system was unsustainable, and had the west not been able to step in when it did, the results would have been far worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine for an example of what happened in a centralized system that didn't have outside assistance when things collapsed.
> Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional.
Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.
Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.
>Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
It's a convenient narrative, but it isn't, IMO, a correct one. Yes, the Treuhand had to decide quite literally which businesses got to live, and which didn't. Never before had an entire country been converted from a planned economy to a market one. There was no road map to follow. Decades of land and property seizure by both the Nazis & the Soviets made untangling actual ownership rights a Sisyphean task.
But at the same time this transition was occuring, billions and billions of Marks/Euros were and are invested in bringing the East up to the same levels of development. What do you think would have happened with the same governmental collapse, if the Treuhandanstalt hadn't existed? Honest question.
I imagine that if English is not your first language, it would be easy to miss this, since the joke plays on multiple meanings for the phrase "can't complain".
Usually, in this context, "Can't complain" means "life is good".
However, in this joke, the secondary meaning of "Can't complain" indicates that "You can't complain about life in soviet Russia, because if you do complain, you get in big trouble".
Basically, this indicates that life in soviet Russia was NOT good.
You can roughly divide the Chinese population into the well educated and the rest; the boundary of course is fluid. It doesn't mean the latter category isn't smart or doesn't have college education. It means that those people didn't know the kinds of freedom (speech, assembly, etc) that Westerners think are the pillars of democracy. They didn't live through or have memories of a China on the verge of having a beginnings of a real democracy in the 1980s before the massacre killed it. They didn't know there is a vast Internet outside China so tightly controlled by the government as to be unusable. They didn't know President Xi had been increasingly instituting "red" policies that were worryingly similar to the 1960s. Those are the people who had newly gained wealth and didn't know any better. They could very well equate material wealth with happiness without yet realizing anything more.
>We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy:
One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing money. They are bouyed by the current, generationally low interest rates which are built upon politicized central banking policy. When interest rates rise, fracking grinds to a halt. When fracking stops, the price of oil shoots to 2008 or greater levels and the global economy grinds to a halt. The century scale economic depression that will result entirely invalidates each and every prediction made by the author of the article we're discussing.
america has an interest in making fracking viable, since it's a technology that not many nations can employ (without the involvement of american firms anyway).
Fracking also allows america to place economic pressure to some countries like Russian (by lowering the price of their primary export).
Given the above, it will be unlikely for interest rates to grow in the next decade - since doing so has no advantages (except inflation, which is kept under control by the dollar's reserve status), and has many dis-advantages (such as causing a shock to businesses borrowing, which can precipitate a depression).
This pattern has, sadly, been pretty reliable over more than 2000 years.
In addition, Li Xinping has shown very little enlightenment toward those who would oppose him irrespective of their correctness. This is always the first step down a long dark path.
Another interesting aspect is they might need to transition into a focus on their middle class or risk pricing themselves out of the labor market. Politically, I would think thats a bit of a catch 22 for the party. Empowering a large group would weaken the party, I would think.
Are you seriously talking about the China of today? This critique belongs in the 1980s. You can't ignore demographics, just look where the population is.
I think it is very hard for us outside of Hong Kong to understand the problem. Speaking to people that live there, (with no reason to be beholden to the PRC), they think it is mainly disenfranchised youth causing problems and dressing up like ninjas (their words not mine) rather than the noble rebellion as portrayed by the media.
Funny that IMHO prediction 5 is the most likely and followed by prediction 2.
Prediction 5 is two decades overdue and Amazon Wavelength it just the beginning. Currently I'm working with on a problem that needs 1 TB RAM data processing and analysis. Given that's not raw data, but if a compulsary real-time technology similar to eVLBI (real-time optional), but it requires immediate processing of raw data that will probably be the killer application for the edge or fog computing. Typical web server hosting has transfer limit of few TB of data per month and Amazon cloud is charging by the bandwidth, the only way forward is to move to the edge.
Prediction 2 is quite self evident with the sudden rise of popularity of Elizabeth Warren with her proposed plan for wealthy citizen 2 percents tax [1].
Any prediction of decentralisation of the Internet, or anything built on it, needs to explain how this will overcome the economies of scale (1 big data centre is cheaper than 1000 little ones) and the network effects (everyone buys and sells through Amazon because thats where you find the most buyers and sellers).
1 big data centre is cheaper
than 1000 little ones
There are billions of computers out there that are idle most of the time. Utilizing them might very well be cheaper then building and maintaining a new datacenter.
everyone buys and sells through
Amazon because thats where you
find the most buyers and sellers
Not everyone. Not even the majority. Even in the USA which is Amazons biggest market, their market share is less then 50%. Individual onlineshops are also moving billions. Even the small ones built with Shopify are moving billions when you combine their revenue. And then there is Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Alibaba, Rakuten, Zalando ... all moving billions worth of goods.
Funny you mention that, since we've seen cryptocurrency processing concentrated in big data centers... for all the same reasons everything else is located in big data centers - energy and bandwidth are cheaper.
That's up to whoever is supplying the services. While many may be outsourcing this to data centers, I'm sure it's not the case for everyone and there are people operating their own hardware.
> There are billions of computers out there that are idle most of the time. Utilizing them
That used to be popular (for instance, distributed.net) back when the processors used the same power whether they were idle or not. Nowadays, there is a huge difference in power usage and heat output between an idle or mostly idle processor, and a fully loaded one.
(My first desktop had a processor without a fan or even a heat spreader, and came with an operating system which had a busy loop as its idle loop.)
And most of these computers are running on batteries. Even on my desktop I'd have to get a decent return to share my CPU/GPU/storage. The computer cost me about $700 to build so I certainly wouldn't share it for pennies.
Re: unused computers: I don't see technology on the horizon that would tackle usage of unused systems in any way that could compete with the low-friction of something like AWS. I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it doesn't seem like a problem that is getting much attention.
Re: Amazon: Most of the other venues you mention are secondary markets for the exact same sellers. People have their own Shopify, Etsy, Ebay, etc., storefront but then also sell on Amazon because that's where so much of the market is. As far as I can tell it's an increasing trend in that direction.
The gradual return of symmetric connectivity, which is underway today, as well as edge adoption of IPv6, could/should usher in a revitalized era of peer-to-peer and other decentralized computing models.
Peer-to-peer models last thrived when connectivity was predominantly symmetric (e.g., the early days of DSL) and faded quickly as asymmetric connectivity became mainstream. I think the decline of decentralization and the rise of asymmetric connectivity are intertwined; neither necessarily caused the other, but they are correlated. One could argue asymmetric connectivity became popular because users only wanted to consume rather than share/serve. But similarly, people stopped sharing and serving because their connectivity discouraged that use case.
Today, symmetric connectivity is returning, such as in the form of 1G/1G fiber connections to the home. Combine this with infinite static IP addresses, and ever rising edge compute capacity, and I think decentralization is inevitable. I won't predict the magnitude, but as a fan of decentralization, I personally hope it is at least significant.
I assumed that was covered by #8 ("The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy"), somewhat by #9 ("Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions"), and mostly the second half of #5 ("a killer decentralized consumer app").
Network effects of centralization explain why current big companies prefer to build centralized services -- but the next big idea never comes from existing big companies, anyway.
My 30,000' view of computing history is that big companies, as a rule, don't create big ideas that survive. They pick up small ideas that work and scale them up (Gall's Law). Git and HTTP and Python didn't come from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but those companies took them once they were already popular and made them scale -- in large part by making them work well in a centralized architecture.
The software that comes next won't win because FAANG like it better for building centralized architectures. It'll win because everybody and their dog will be using it at home. Then companies like FAANG will see that and pick it up and try to centralize it. Then the cycle will repeat.
We've already got a billion tiny data centers -- the powerful computers and smartphones in our houses and pockets. All we need is the right software, and the desire to not have every service delivered free-with-ads-over-the-web from big corporations.
Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.
I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.
And that's effectively free because I already have it.
It's $X per month though right, because of the electricity? I'm thinking about setting up an always on computer and I definitely will make sure to compare up front costs and operating costs if I do it.
I guess that having had a computer since age 10 or so I just considered it a fairly standard thing for nerds to do.
Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.
It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.
My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.
The people operating them if you have the proper incentives in place such as is done with cryptocurrencies. They pay the upfront operational cost and then are paid for usage by those using the network.
In my opinion, most the predictions made here are dumb, to be honest.
It seems like a mix of wishful thinking and linear projection of a few trends this particular VC happen to like, but nothing bold or creative, nothing that could make me think and wonder.
Are most VCs living in their own world or something?
Regarding China, I believe that the Chinese economy will collapse because less and less countries will want to do business with China due to it’s human rights violations.
Regarding plan based diets, I agree but I think that eating meat will be seen as babaric. I believe that the way way we treat animals now will be seen similarly as we see slavery now.
Regarding, decentralized internet and crypto currencies. I don’t see why those would happen and believe will see more regulation not less.
> Regarding China, I believe that the Chinese economy will collapse because less and less countries will want to do business with China due to it’s human rights violations.
Think you're totally wrong here. The only countries that will care about China's human rights record are the NATO countries. The other 6 billion people in the world live under governments that will be happy to work with a superpower willing to look the other way to their own transgressions.
China is very much in the same position the US was in at the turn of the 20th century: lots of territorial conflict with old powers, but a grudging recognition that the winds of change are in their favor. All it will take is a single small-scale conflict akin to the Spanish-American War and China will have unquestioned dominance over the South China Sea (like the US did with the Caribbean and South Pacific).
Their neighbors will be forced to play nice with them or be blockaded. Which is exactly what the US did in the early 1900s with central / south American banana republics. There is a playbook for ascendant superpowers, and China is just playing their best hand. Anyone who isn't a superpower is just going to have to accept what China does.
I agree with you on the sentiment of meat of our descendants. I consume meat but have moved towards less sentient animals, but the status quo gives one a deep moral appreciation for the world it seems likely people lived in during slavery, where the moral calamity was appreciated to varying degrees by all, but each person other than those who woke up each day fighting the institution directly were living lives with some level of embedded hypocracy.
It will be quite satisfying to see the folks today who believe they hold the apex of morality and yet still eat meat, or tacitly support through participating in animal-product economic activity, realize ultimately that despite their self-assurance they are truly moral, good people their kids will see them as abject moral failures skin to those who sad idly by and participated in the economy underpinned by slave labor. The great irony is that just as they look down on our ancestors as being morally unenlightened, they will not even slightly avoid the same branding by the next generation — it seems unavoidable as long as our world exists due to the unjust treatment of others, including animals.
People are more than happy to deal with the Saudi’s despite appalling human rights records. So long as they have something people want, countries don’t care about human rights.
There are number of differences: China doesn’t have a natural resource only China has, China’s human rights violations are on a larger scale, China is trying to pressure western companies (e.g. the nba) and is copying intellectual property which will backfire on them.
I also believe that people will be more aware of these things in the future than in the past.
If we start predicting that the 2020's will be the rise of the remote-working 6-hour workday, maybe it will catch even more momentum and finally become true.
Yeah, if anything, central banks have been clear that cryptocurrencies are the devil and they will be shot down. From today on , EU adopts stricter controls for transferring Gold as well. If anything, there will be a backlash to this extreme capital controls , but theres no way governments will loosen the leash on money on their own volition
Giving each citizen an account at the central bank. Then everyone will have access to "real" money digitally (not only via cash, which is currently the case).
Here's a possible reason for why a crypto fiat currency with a distributed ledger might be attractive.
Currently, all fiat currencies operate with a central ledger at whatever central bank is authorized to print or destroy units of the currency. For example, every US dollar is linked through a chain of deposits and liabilities back to an account at the Fed since any bank operating in the US is required to hold an account with the Fed. However, this gives the US the ability to control the transfer of USD to use in sanctions.
Suppose you were an Iranian company that wanted to buy goods from the EU, to be paid in USD. In normal times, an Iranian bank with an account at the Fed would ask the Fed to transfer USD from its account to that of the EU bank to complete the trade. However, since Iran is under sanctions, the Fed can freeze the assets and refuse to initiate the transfer or confirm that the Iranian bank has the required funds. Without assurance that you can actually pay for the goods in USD, the EU company decides not to sell any goods and you're stranded from the world market.
Trying to bypass this by buying the goods with Euros doesn't work either, since the Fed can also threaten the USD accounts of EU banks too. Suppose the US catches an EU bank helping an Iranian company trade with a EU company in Euros. The US could then order the Fed to freeze the accounts of the EU bank or extract a fine for violating sanctions. EU banks get spooked away from helping Iranian companies deal with international payments due to the risk of getting themselves locked out of the USD system. All this is thanks to the power the Fed has over the one central ledger of USD that they can modify and freeze at will.
But with a distributed ledger secured with cryptography, the Iranian bank wouldn't have to depend on the Fed to modify their central account book when performing money transfers. They could cryptographically prove that they had a certain amount of USD in their accounts and transfer it to the EU bank in a way that all bystanders can observe and confirm. You would have a currency system with unblockable and unsanctionable transfers, as if you had teleported containers of physically verifiable US dollar bills from Iran to the EU.
This would be the key draw for countries trying to make their fiat currencies crypto. They could then advertise it as a currency that is impossible for the host country to use for sanctions. This boosts the cryptocurrency's viability as a reserve currency, and once enough countries begin using it then the host country could print money to improve their country's consumption, living standards, and economic clout without worrying about inflating the currency away.
The incentive is for countries with less geopolitical clout to use cryptocurrencies to pull more countries towards their bloc. I don't see the US moving towards cryptocurrencies anytime soon.
Maybe this is the decade that web developers will finally stop using dynamic databases for static content.
I'll predict the opposite. Web stacks will get even more unnecessarily complex and buggy. Investment sizes, late-stage development cycles, and page size, will continue to grow toward infinity while startup success rates drop closer to zero. Page load times on the best available connection and hardware will remain constant as it always has.
> 4/ Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move. The US will be hamstrung by regulatory restraints and will be slow to move, allowing other countries and regions to lead the crypto sector. Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.
People will not start trusting the Chinese government in the next 10 years. If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
That's the real use of Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin mining is such a big thing in China. It's "exporting". Made in China, sold outside China - that's exporting, and not only legal, but encouraged and subsidized. Buy a share in a Bitcoin mine in yuan, watch your EUR or USD balance build up in Hong Kong or Switzerland.
It also messes up the Bitcoin mining economics for the rest of the world. If you see mining bitcoin as a way to convert CNY -> equipment and electricity -> bitcoin -> foreign currency, you’re willing to operate at a loss. Kind of like how when people launder money they accept they’ll only get 50% or something of their dirty money converted into clean, except in reverse.
Trust is not binary in the world of finance. It is a measurable quantity and it’s equal to the premium investors are willing to pay. If the market is attractive enough people will invest in the hell.
I think the next decade will see a radical change in the materials used to make a significant percentage of common goods. From biodegradable materials that equal the performance of petro/plastics, to graphene replacing steel, aluminum, carbon-fiber, etc. for many applications. Also potentially changing the game with respect to microchip fabrication and performance.
RE: Graphene though, there are so many military applications, that it’s hard to say what the lag will be to civilian technology. If history is any indication, and I hope it isn’t, there could be a decade or (much) more between first production applications and public knowledge that those applications even exist, let alone having access to products incorporating them.
>5/ A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc. The emergence of decentralized consumer applications will be slow to take hold and a killer decentralized consumer app will not emerge until the latter part of the decade.
The pendulum of history suggests this will occur (at some point), and I hope it happens sooner than later in many respects, but it is also seems like one in which we won't know the triggers/causes/sparks until after the fact, partially because it seems it will take complex combinations of causes?
Anyone seeing possible sparks which perhaps the rest of us aren't yet identifying?
Maybe there will be a need for massive computing in remote areas: Antartica, or space. They need a lot of local storage and compute. And they have low bandwidth.
It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute.
So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a technical reason you would need decentralization. I can see that happening for many use cases. I'm not sure if it will happen for the consumer web because centralization is more efficient and the current network effects are so ingrained. Similar to how Windows is still dominant on the desktop, but iOS/Android are perhaps more important platforms.
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I think major changes in behavior are driven by new hardware -- phones in the 00's, PC's in the 80's, Internet in the 90's, etc.
People have been trying to push VR, but to me VIDEO is the real VR -- more stuff happens there and more people use it. I was chatting with a friend yesterday and observed that YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.
So if you need to process a lot of video locally for some reason, that could be a killer app for decentralization. Just like a self-driving car, although I'm bearish on self-driving impacting the average consumer in the next 10 years. I think it will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates.
Yeah it's probably because I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately, but it feels like there's just a lot more real interaction going on there than on other platforms. It sounds like Twitch is the same way.
One example: I learned how to clean my toilet from this video.
The comments are hilarious... Tons of people having the same "AHA" moment. (Basically you paper mache your toilet with vinegar and wait a couple hours. Old mineral stains come off like butter!)
Compare a google search for "clean toilet" and it feels like a bunch of SEO-infested crap.
YouTube is more like the "old web" where you can get a real opinion on something.
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I have friends who cook and that's a whole other subculture of YouTube. I've been watching a good MMA show. And there are programming streams, and pretty much every programming conference has an archive, which is a rich archive of free information (e.g. PyCon, CppCon, etc.)
I don't know what's going on in Second Life now but to me it feels like it's probably not "real life". I guess people want "life" and not "second life", and video is becoming an increasingly large aspect of the former.
Rebutting my own comment: even if you need heavy computation and storage locally, that still doesn't motivate a decentralized network.
I would think of it as control plane vs. data plane. The data plane can be massively distributed in space, but the control plane can still be centralized.
And of course that's how Tesla works, and how software-defined networking works.
The "powers that be" just need to control software updates and the network's control plane (routing). They can remotely manage distributed resources.
So yeah unfortunately I'm not seeing a big motivator for decentralized networks (which can be very, very slow). You would have to have some need for a lot of local video processing but also a whole way to distribute code and software updates.
And right now that's more centralized than it's ever been. I'm not a fan of the "silent, frequent, and huge updates and pop up new TOS" model but that's the status quo.
The spark is already here. I work in a rapidly emerging domain where the trends clearly indicate that traditional concepts of centralized infrastructure cannot serve the required workloads: operational sensor/geospatial data models. Basically, machinery measuring and reasoning about the physical world at scale, often in real-time. Several aspects of these data models (technical, economic, regulatory) strongly indicate a globally federated implementation that allows for fast, decentralized, ad hoc cooperation of storage-dense compute elements at the edge. The aggregate data velocity is so high that the physics of data model centralization is untenable, so there is a certain near-term inevitability about it even though you can make a centralized solution work today.
There is active research into the theoretical and practical design of systems and protocols that will make this plausible. It has no precedent in literature and it is a very non-trivial problem but the sense is that a practical workable design is achievable in the not too distant future.
It is worth noting that effectively managing climate change requires implementing the same kind of data model with similar theoretical constraints. Building data models of physical reality at scale breaks just about every part of classic data infrastructure architecture.
There will be another factorial increase in, for a lack of a better term, email attachment sizes.
It's still hard to share files that are 500MB in size, and I don't see why. I think it has to do with media companies like Google not wanting individuals to share files, unless it is through them. But the damn will break soon, much like Megaupload changed the scene in 2005.
ipfs, dat, zeronet I think are good examples of the sparks you are looking for.
These are outside of the blockchain world of compute/storage as a service attempts that got started suring the ico goldrush and seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
i might categorize protocols (or even combining ipfs and dat as the basis of interesting solutions) as fuel. not sure they are the spark that lights the fire.
maybe that sounds like semantics, so to propose a rough taxonomy of different types of actors:
a. nation state level superpowers
b. nation state level challengers
c. large business / incumbents / leaders
d. small business / startups / challengers
e. individuals / consumers / social groups
f. possibly horizontal groups across combinations of the above
it would seem at least one of those groups would need to believe they can reap move-the-needle level benefits from decentralized internet in order to spark progress?
I agree. They are just modernized torrents with higher usability. The real problem (consensus) still only has one solution: blockchain with proof of work.
I think we should be asking: What problem does it solve? why is that problem important? and why would someone use that new solution rather than what they're already using.
> The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one.
I don't think so. WWII was a war between two fronts. Climate change affects countries very differently. The ones not affected much will unlikely contribute. My guess is that everyone to his own in this one.
> experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.
I don't think it'll be more than experiments. Capital is very sensitive to being grabbed by government for the benefit of the "people". My guess is that we'll see countries that try to have their industries collapse; while other countries letting that capital flow to them.
> China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower
China is doomed to fail in the long run. Not sure if it's going to happen in the next decade or later, though. But it'd be all good and hopefully democracy is established.
> Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move.
This was already tried and failed. Crypto-currencies have no meaning without the decentralized factor. Governments will never be able to establish their crypto due to the fact that they want to control the underlying.
> Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies
Kinda related to the point above. Countries with low taxes are going to boom further as western countries are tightening their fiscal game.
> A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.
I, very, believe this one and hope it happens in the next decade.
Witness what’s going on in Hong Kong? There’s plenty of speculation that what’s happening there is being funded or supported by an opposing party in China. Older generations are also implicitly supporting protestors there very carefully. The young college kids are who everyone sees but there is a lot happening behind the curtain.
China has had multiple generations of unrest. It isn’t just the young generation that is ready for change.
I wouldn’t say China itself is doomed but communism there might be.
The older generation in Hong Kong, if my friends there are in any way representative (all adults at 97 handover, like me) in what they tell me, simply hold the same resentments they did in 98, 99, 00 etc for the changes China has made to their home and how it is governed, and the constant chipping away at what they have. Some of those friends have been out on the marches and protests across the years, not just 2019's. First demo in favour of universal suffrage was probably in 98 when China dismantled the electoral system for the LegCo and replaced with the pro-Beijing weighted system. Universal suffrage of the Chief Exec was promised right back then.
It doesn't need an opposing mainland party to explain HK. There may be, but I see little evidence for it.
Demographics if nothing else. I am now betting that China is going to grow old before it becomes rich, I think they made a good try but will end up losing that race. China has a gender imbalance that is going to cause serious problems over the next decade, both due to social disruptions caused by a staggering cohort of men who will never find brides and by the hit these 'missing families' will have on the next generation.
>7/[...] The early years of this decade will produce a wave of hype and investment in the space business but returns will be slow to come and we will be in a trough of disillusionment on the space business as the decade comes to an end.
I guess this depends on SpaceX's success with the Starship - if a rocket that is made outside a cleanroom and with cheap rolled steel frame proves to be usable means that going to space becomes very very accessible.
Yeah, but space needs to be profitable, not just accessible, for private companies to take over investments. Even as SpaceX fanboy, I have a hard time imagining this any time soon.
Space based internet constellations have a huge resurgence right now, but that's unlikely what the author meant.
(Asteroid) Mining? Even if we already had the tech, such a mission would take decades. Who would accept the uncertainty risk of investing over such long time-spans? That is, if there is anything worthy enough to mine in space in the first place, will that still be the case many years later?
Tourism might be a thing, but enough to bootstrap an entire space economy?
Countries/politicians/billionaires wanting to project power or memorialize themselves still seems like the safest bet to me.
I too dream of a decentralized internet and especially decentralized cloud resources, but I can't find a way around the question of how you securely host a database on some random person's idle computer/"spot instance". If that data is compromised, who do you sue? The random person who has no assets?
Data security ultimately depends on secure physical access to the hosting hardware. Not everything can or should be put in a public database, so you need physical security. Cloud providers provide physical security plus trustworthiness due to their reputations, as well as deep pockets to sue if something goes wrong.
Most industries end up with only a few competing firms. Why would cloud computing be different? I'm open to solutions on data security.
I think it's very possible to decentralize databases. Not to sound like I'm jumping off the deep end... What if each set of decentralized data was verified by each user on... a block chain. Using a proof of work/stake model that each existing copy verified each new copy or propagated update. If the hashes didn't match with the greater pool then data would be considered corrupt and ignored. Even cooler is people could simply fork their data sets and create a new blockchain for their project. Truly free data.
I'm iffy on the cryptos but it's appearing less and less of a solution looking for a problem and more a solution for many problems dealing with decentralization.
For an interesting existing solution sans blockchain check out [gundb](https://gun.eco/).
Multiple clients sync to/from a server. Server syncs with other servers. Part of the sync with clients is a list of all servers so clients can cycle servers until sync succeeds. Eventual consistency. I'm doing this with a small dataset now.
Data is encrypted (or not) by the client. The server is a zero-knowledge sync service.
I have an open source client that does client side encryption. I hope that once released people will use it, or ideas from it, to create their own clients.
You need to decrypt the data somewhere, which requires holding the key in memory. What's to prevent a nefarious node in the distributed cloud from extracting your key?
I could see a solution where every user has their own key, served by a securely hosted (non-distributed) server, and decrypting the data client side, but that doesn't cover all cases where you might need to aggregate or share data across users.
Only some workloads make sense to offload on such a network. For example I could see it working as a DYI render-farm. I guess the algorithm could be creative in which pixels to give each node so that they don't reveal the source data based on one corrupt node.
> 6/ Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.
In this decade? Not a chance. Maybe in 50 years this is more likely.
It already is decentralized. No single authority controls the routing of packets.
led initially by decentralized
infrastructure services like
storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.
Seems like what he means is that more decentralized services will be built on top of the internet. Services, where you don't know who will provide the service you are buying. And where anybody can jump in to provide that service.
A bit like AirBnB, Uber etc. But probably he means that the rules of those new services will be enforced by protocols, rather then by companies. So I guess Bitcoin is the most prominent example of such a service that is already in existence.
#9 is hilarious. There will be 50 year old millennials in 2030, making the "prediction" nothing more than an observation about how political power has worked for all of known history.
The global debt crisis and intractable US entitlements will lead to a global depression. China will promote a new cryptocurrency to compete directly with the failing dollar. The US and allies will attempt to use their massive military to defend the dollar. China will not have sufficient military might be so will lean on other countries in particular Russia with their nuclear arsenal.
World War III will be sold on supposed moral grounds as all wars are. China and other countries will say that they need to defeat an evil US that is immoral and forcing the world to use their baseless currency causing great suffering. The US will say that China is attempting to create a global dictatorship with total control and no freedom. Both sides will see moral justification to fight to the death.
As the likelihood of the war ramps up over the next few years, there will be a feverish push to create general purpose AI and improved robotic locomotion such as artificial muscle-based locomotion with high strength to weight ratios. Around the time that the first nuclear salvos arrive, perhaps around 2023-2025, these efforts will pay off with robust general AI and humanoid robots.
By 2030, the planet will be a nuclear wasteland, with several billion dead. There will be a new religion pushing to give the AGIs full autonomy and control. The Martian colony will have a few dozen people already and rapidly ramping up.
A growing group of nuclear survivors have adapted with advanced high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces connected to superintelligent AI systems that act as a supercortical layer.
What about demographic collapse in the west/china? will it not overshadow a lot of this? Esp coupled with demographic looming catastrophe in africa. Poor countries becoming increasingly unsustainable at a time when the developed ones will be least able to help.
immigration requires opportunity, and opportunity is becoming increasingly scarce in europe. it's more likely, lots of capital will be reallocated towards the growing parts of africa
What? No reference to country specific disconnected-from-the-rest-of-the-world Internet, a-la Russia's experiment a few days ago? To me, more government control over the Internet to the extent of governments basically sealing the Internet to within country borders with more regulation (taxes, anyone?) of out-of-country access seems like a no-brainer thing happening in the upcoming decade...way more than just the great-wall-of-china firewall.
Climate left out many other environmental issues: pollution, plastic, extinctions, etc
Most of all Overpopulation.
People fear discussing it now because they only know of China's policy and eugenics. I predict that the successful, non-coercive policies of Thailand, Iran, Mexico, etc that increased peace, prosperity, and stability will become better known.
Those models will lead us to realize that we can peacefully and stably lower birth rate to increase peace and prosperity, easing all other environmental problems. We'll realize steady-state following de-growth works more successfully on a full finite planet than pushing economic and population growth forever.
I'm intrigued by this and definitely open to learning more about de-growth models. Would you mind providing some examples of the policies implemented in these countries?
Alan Weisman's book Countdown revealed to me about countries that lowered birth rates without coercion. Before reading it I only know about the one-child policy and some eugenics attempts. I highly recommend the book. I just recorded a conversation with him for my podcast. Fascinating conversation but it's still in the editing queue.
No excessive carbon taxation will happen. No significant or global emergence of digital currencies (not including regular "electronic" dollars or euro). Meat may become more rare along with fish (due to still unregulated in 2030 overfishing and acidification), but there will be no or almost no lab grown food. Mass surveillance will propagate even more but privacy will not succeed or become sought by majority.
and see the long train of grain cars!!! We're talking a LOT of grain.
For the retired dairy cattle, "think fast food" -- US hamburgers are not going away at all soon!
Point: No way, not a chance, not even a teeny, tiny chance, will that huge industry and supply chain, with huge fractions of the land in the US South and Midwest devoted to growing animal feed, be displaced or even affected by "laboratory" anything.
Sure, we grow some mushrooms in caves. And some greenhouses grow tomatoes and maybe oregano, bib lettuce, basil, rosemary, etc. But greenhouses and hydroponics both go way back with no chance of anything similar having a big, new impact now.
Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?
I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.
Distributed work will continue to be a minor thing prevalent mainly in tech circles. Human nature doesn’t change on 10 year timescales. We’re tribal beings who organize around work and family.
Best Buy’s pullback from it for their office staff is instructive.
Yeah I've been doing remote 95% of the last couple years and it takes a toll not being able to be around people at all. Even as a mostly introverted person who needs quiet alone time for solving harder problems and general flow state. There's something about social interaction that helps with motivation that I find hard to get over chat and video. This is assuming the people are not toxic somehow.
See my post above: there are reasons to be optimistic remote social presence and shared spatial awareness for many contexts will be solved this decade.
Some of the points made here I agree with, probably slightly more accurate that the other warped predictions I’ve seen so far.
However, I question that predictions /2 and /6 seem to be wildly far-fetched that it’s as if the author based his predictions from a damaged magic mirror.
/2) While the tech is there for automation, Several safety and regulatory requirements the AI technology is not transparent enough to completely replace workers. This will take more years to only end up being a complimentary tool for its users.
/6) doesn’t sound very realistic to achieve in this decade. The research is experimental or starting to emerge but not mature yet for be available to all yet and will not be in this decade. Probably the next or very late 2020s.
I’m surprised to see that mainstream AR not being mentioned nor the further regulation of tech being detailed more in this article.
Several of his answers are between laughable and decades sooner than would be possible under any scenario. It came across as Fred reaching desperately to say something interesting and instead he just wrote a bunch of well-worn low value fantasy from other sources.
Just look at how comical this stuff is:
> Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today.
In one decade? Dominating the whole world and meat becoming a delicacy. That's such a bad prediction it's borderline sad. Maybe over the course of 50-100 years. It would take a decade just to scratch the surface of that prediction. It'll take decades just to scale up the necessary food production changes and distribution required by that prediction. He entirely ignores the massive investment required, the slow moving nature of it, the entrenched gatekeepers that dictate food policies, and the very slow moving nature of changing global consumer taste & demand (more likely to occur via aging out and new young people adopting, rather than true mass adoption by existing people that have all been eating meat for the entire lives; that will take a long time).
> Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.
Things at that scale, dominated as they are in finance by giants with vested interests and tightly regulated and influenced directly by military muscle, do not change that much in the span of ten years or less. Another absurd, impossible prediction. This is Fred going overboard on a crypto binge.
He might as well have said in his list that we'll all be piloting flying cars in ten years. It's the exact same bullshit worthless futurism fantasy backed with the exact same supporting basis (vapor).
> China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower leveraging its technical prowess and ability to adapt quickly to changing priorities
In ten years the US will still have the only global projection military and will still have the world's largest economy. Another obvious error of projection by Fred and a bad one at that. If everything goes right for China, in 30 years they could theoretically occupy a dominant superpower position. That's best case scenario. However what is most likely is that China will split the world in half with the US and never achieve such an overwhelming position and that they'll suffer stagnation due to well understood problems they're already sinking under (demographics, debt, increasingly extreme authoritarianism).
Basically none of what he lists in item #1 will occur in the next decade. Most of it is so impossible to occur in the span of just ten years, that again, it's super far fetched. Someone should have screened all of this for him before he hit publish.
A lot of the regulations that "hamper" U.S.-based fiscal markets provide basic protection against financial mismanagement and corruption. The writer's supposition that relatively unhampered Asian crypto-currency markets would be trusted is highly optimistic. They are more likely to turn out to be prone to in-house theft or corrupt insider-dealing, or to external hacking (the 750K BTC lost from Mt Gox are still missing[1]), or to government control and manipulation.
>6/ Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.
GMO Frankenfood made in labs hasn't been proven safer than regular meat in peer reviewed studies yet.
Eating all plants like potatoes in The Martian have to take multi-vitamins as well. It is boring to eat the same thing each day.
McDonald's has farms so that it can sell a $1.48 McDouble cheaper than a $6 salad. If plants cost more money, why eat them when meat is cheaper? Ever tried to price plants in the veggie section? They cost too much, but you can buy a frozen pizza for $3 which is cheaper.
It’s a fallacy when making ten year predictions to assume nothing will change in order to lead to the prediction. Presumably for the idea of plant based diets to dominate, there will need to be an available substitute for meat which is competitive economically and in taste.
It might be enough to force near prices to include their environmental impact. I think that's what the post says about meat becoming like caviar. So it would still be available, just way too expensive for every day meals.
Jacking up meat prices would upset a lot of people. Meat-substitutes would have to be cheaper than they are now. Food By Products are already used in meat as filler. Like ground beef and hamburgers have cereal or soy in them.
There are two wealth in this world: financial wealth, and demographic wealth. Both are limited by natural resources, so it should come as no surprise that they are declining. Humanity will be confronted with the principle of reality.
The reality is the universe is infinite and so are its resources. So in the long run, it’s unknowable if we will fail to harvest them. But there is no innate limit.
These predictions don't show any particular insight beyond the things that absolutely everyone talked about in 2019. Literally just predicting that some of this year's causes du jour will extend a decade.
> 6/ Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.
Before refrigeration, a considerable amount of meat on the market was spoiled, with a horrible taste as well as a horrible aftertaste. The price was much higher than today. You had to use a sauce to make it more palatable.
It would have made sense to go vegan back then, but no. People are more willing to eat spoiled, expensive meat with mold rather than going plant-based.
One thing that was not mentioned was anti-trust action by the government. I predict by 2030 one of the FAANG + MSFT will have been investigated and broken up by the government. Leaning twords FB or AMZN.
There was a smattering throughout about areas where the US lags. There was a lot of discussion around #6 but I found #3 to be quite interesting, esp. the last sentence:
> Conversely the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view
I wonder what are some people's thoughts on this - specifically if they agree and what are some of the potential impacts to US citizens and abroad (influence, wealth, industry leadership, etc)?
The 2020s will be when the majority of humanity finally agrees that we need to make climate change our highest priority since it will be too obvious to ignore. See what's happening in Australia now for example.
OTOH I don't think serious global action will happen in this decade. I seriously hope I'm wrong on that one because we are already 40 years late and I fear we might have passed the point of no return.
> We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate.
Identifying the risky low lying areas is relatively easy. However, predicting how and where the climate will change for the better, is at best a crap shot.
We'll know things are getting serious when there's talk on Wall Street about moving out of lower Manhattan.
> the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view.
There’s about 50-60% of the US population, and 2/3 of the US economy, that are very much eager to do business with the rest of the world. They are concentrated in urban areas, and thus have issues in the political process, but it’s enough clout that I wouldn’t make hard predictions about US isolationism in the 2020s.
Isolationism does not seem to be anything more than a ghost. Any analysis that assumes that the current US administration is isolationist is in my opinion a tell that someone is trapped in a filter bubble.
One prediction he missed out is the mining of space for scarce resources. (He just touched on commercialization of space, but he probably assumed things like satellite launching and space tourism)
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla/SpaceX towed a lithium filled asteroid to near Earth within the next decade. They are probably working on it right now.
On the central conceit about people underestimating how much happens in a decade... how much has happened in the last decade?
I feel like very little has changed in the last decade. Technologically, socially, politically, it feels like we’ve lived through a decade of very little noticeable change, especially compared to other periods such as 1990-2000 or 1980-1990.
I think by the end (very end) of this decade it will become common place for at least the upper class to cryogenically freeze and store a cell culture to take advantage of advances in medicine that will also occur in this decade such as affordable / reliable processes for growing your own organs for transplant, etc.
I think so too. Autonomous cars are going to fuel urban sprawl like crazy. I know I want to get further out of the city. Once I can commute without driving I won’t mind a long commute.
The predictions about China are a little confusing. I know they’ve copied lots of foreign tech, but have they demonstrated any ability to source original research and development that had no external links? This read a little like what China would want the 2020s to look like.
I agree. Except for mass manufacturing and stolen tech, most chinese tech is smoke and mirrors at the moment. Chinese research is famously low-quality given that most researchers are paid by the paper.
I hope their fusion and quantum experiments are real, and not PR lies like the soviet union used to do in the 80s.
Does it matter? They're a manufacturing powerhouse and have a government in place that can (and has shown willingness to) take long term bets that are in the interest of their country.
Fred Wilson (A VC) somehow dominates HN last New year as well... And was so completely wrong it’s shocking anyone would promote him year after year.
It’s obvious to me people are doing so only because they WANT all these predictions to come true not that they have any basis in reality. It’s bubble talk for bubble people, no offense.
His solution to NN (which we all died from, remember?) was “blockchain”.
Here he is last year heavily propped up for saying Trump wouldn’t be in office after Mueller probe... Remember the Mueller results? Anyone not involved in hyper partisan politics knew it was going to be a dud. https://avc.com/2019/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2019/
Just browsing his previous predictions just makes more curious how he gets spotlights here every year. 2018 he made a list “questions” answering only some himself, about 1/2 wrong. And 2017 is just... well... AI isn’t the new Mobile, Cyberwarfare isn’t the new Cold War: https://avc.com/2017/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2017/
And was so completely wrong it’s shocking anyone would promote him year after year.
This is a misunderstanding of how voting/promoting works. If someone is wrong you may want to promote them as much as someone who is right in the hopes of enlightening the masses.
Also, you may disagree with something and find it interesting still. In that case upvoting makes sense.
Upvoting != Agreeing. Unfortunately, when you do not have a button for agreeing or disagreeing, you are inclined to use the Vote button.
Reminded me of 2009 "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century" by George Friedman of Stratfor. Among of his far fetched (but who knows, still possible) predictions was Poland becoming [again] a decisive power in Europe...
There's a large plant based burger chain here in Australia. Many of their customers aren't even aware they aren't having meat, they just enjoy the taste. I definitely think the plant based prediction is on the money.
By the end of this decade a commercialized, industrial strength solution will exist for people to (a) make machines do things just by thinking, (b) transfer a subset of your thoughts to someone else just by thinking them.
Majority of the HN community would downvote anything decentralized/crypto/block chain up until a few months ago. Lately I see less titled "why you don't need blockchain*. Let's see
The fallacy I see here is the assumption that today's hot topics will still be as relevant in 10 years and not (as I suspect) superseded by wholly different issues and problems.
4. Inflation becomes an issue in the United States because of high debt, increased military spending as a result of great power competition and huge pension debts/promises coming due with baby boomers retiring. The best investments (other then great startups of course) becomes Gold (because of the proclivity to favor spenders over savors.)
5. The United States will focus on big infrastructure spending.
6. Google develops a competitor to Huawei's Safe City project for the United States and its geopolitical allies, this will be a great benefit to our society
7. Humanity will reach mars
8. Humanity will turn the corner on Carbon pollution
9. San Francisco reaches a breaking point and elects moderates whose focus is building more housing.
10. The United States will join the TPP
11. Chinese culture and media breaks out and becomes popular in a similar way Hollywood and American culture is popular in other places
My favorite is the part where the torch will be passed from baby boomers to millenials and gen z. As if there isn't an entire generation of people between the baby boomers and the millenials.
AI will attain perfect scores on international math and computing olympiads. Toward the end of the decade we'll see AI solve an unsolved Clay Millennium Problem.
> 9/ We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade. Age and experience will be less valued by shareholders, voters, and other stakeholders and vision and courage will be valued more
I don't how the first part of his prediction leads to the other. By the time Millennials/Gen Z take control they'll be just as old amd curmudgeonly as the Boomers. All in all the article seems pretty light on justification.
In my view being optimistic about the future is in conflict with believing that China will become the dominant power. There are many concerning signals from China, not least the situation of Muslims and also the surveillance state. There is much we don't know about the true situation of debt, public and private, in China.
>There are many concerning signals from China, not least the situation of Muslims and also the surveillance state.
Why is the situation with Muslims concerning for China? For Muslims and for anyone who cares about human rights, sure, it's concerning, but it does not follow at all that this is bad for China. The US became the dominant power despite having slavery longer than any western nation, and then having Jim Crow laws for a full century afterwards, including during the post-WWII economic boom.
I would argue that, unfortunately, there is no evidence that treating your minorities well is necessary for economic success. In fact, it may be the opposite. Ancient Rome did quite well while having slavery, after all.
As for the surveillance state, here we don't really have a lot of historical precedent. Obviously it didn't work out too well for the Warsaw Pact nations, particularly East Germany, but what they're doing in China really isn't like that.
In 2020 a cohort of US politically active people will die, retire or be replaced in significant roles. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is statistically likely. Saunders and McConnel likewise. This is influencing longer term politics because of obsession with 'legacy' such as the make up of the supreme court.
Putin is less likely to move on. There may be a new leadership in Iran but culturally it's unlikely to be more flexible, if anything it's going to be less flexible.
Europe already has it's new leaders. It probably won't be very different.
A politically resurgent youth vote will be coming into it's prime pissed off with current tax and social policy in housing and education. And of course climate.
The ww2 generation and it's successor will be dying out faster, but costing more in pension and health costs and contributing less in tax inputs.
Ubiquitous internet will be a given but more overtly a dual edged sword as tax and national borders continue to collide
No candidate for high office will have a blank sheet of high school pranks. Fifteen year old tweets will be held up to fresh air
> We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade.
2. Automation will be one of the anticlimaxes of the decade.
3. China will have a mixed decade, marred by competition from other countries for production, human rights scandals, a domestic financial crisis that will spread globally, and a complete slowdown in growth. But its government will survive.
4. Crypto currency will be no more relevant in 2029 than 2019. The dollar will continue to dominate beyond 2030, until at last in the 2030s the Euro is backed by a significant military force.
5. No decentralised internet will gain popularity.
6. Plant based diets will see a meteoric rise in the west, but will still be a minority by 2030.
7. Biggest story of space will be the failure of NASA to make much progress in landing humans on Mars. SpaceX will make the most progress along those lines, with a test landing of an unmanned craft, but safety concerns over manned flight will hold SpaceX back in serving NASA.
8. A surprising backlash against social media will see the end of Facebook (but Whatsapp will survive well, with Instagram in a long decline). Twitter will pivot successfully almost beyond recognition.
9. Baby boomers will no longer dominate the electorate, and a shift to the political left will take place across America and Europe. The UK will see the most left wing government since Atlee’s. The climate crisis will help make big government palatable again.
10. Progress on cancer will be piecemeal and slow. However, this disappointment will contrast with miraculous advances in treating and prevention of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Mine...
11. VR will replace games consoles. VR will have a huge impact on society, but it will be only the beginning - much like 90s Internet, it will grow in importance decade by decade, but the 2020s will be remembered as the one in which it “arrived”.
12. Apple will decline to a shadow of its former self.
13. To everyone’s surprise, smart watches will have a come back in the second half of the decade thanks to hardware improvements, and will become almost universal for younger demographics. They will become a significant item of self expression, and related “digital jewellery” will also take off.
14. Electric cars will arrive faster than anticipated, putting huge strain on electricity distribution.
15. In the US, the college bubble will burst. In the UK it will not, but student numbers will drop and many universities will be forced to merge and close humanities departments.
16. Post Brexit UK will suffer a economic stagnation similar to Japan’s post banking crisis. Scotland will vote to remain in the UK, but Ireland will be reunified. A great number of people will leave the UK to work in the USA.
17. Putin will die, and Russia will enter a period of crisis and civil disorder.
18. After Trump’s second term ends in economic disaster, popularism in the US will slowly retreat. The democrats will be in power for the remainder of the decade, particularly focused on climate change.
19. Amazon and Microsoft will emerge as the great winners of big tech over the decade, driven by cloud services and consumer appliances.
20. A new e reader device that actually works well will be launched, destroying the kindle’s grip on the market, and will be universally adopted for education and leisure. The maker will be a newcomer and will end the decade as one of the most exciting startups since Google.
1. While I do think climate change is something we need to mitigate now, political realities are very clear on this one -- people don't want to spend much money on mitigation. Furthermore, the dire consequences are still quite far away, doubtful 2020s are the years this will turn around.
2. I think for now automation will do what industrialization did before -- increase productivity which will lead to increase in consumption. I think it is only when we start approaching AGI when human labor will start becoming superfluous. Again, I don't think UBI is in the cards for mass adoption in the US or other major countries in the 20s (although I see it as inevitable on a longer time scale).
3. China IS a global super power, whether it will fully displace the US is again doubtful, they have the capacity to do it in the next 20-50 years, but probably not in the next 10. There is a lot of inertia against them basically everywhere (europe, east asia, india, etc).
4. There is literally no reason this would happen. Even private attempts on decentralized currencies (bitcoin/etc) did not produce assets that are used as money for regular transactions (not black market, speculation, or capital control evasion). For countries it is even less attractive to start a crypto since if you have a stable fiat then why wouldn't you just... have the stable fiat? Countries LIKE having control over their currency.
5. Internet relies on hardware/infra that is currently privately owned by what are essentially local monopolies/duopolies. Unless laws that force infra sharing get passed (which in the US I just don't see happening), decentralized internet will absolutely not happen. Again, the 20s are now and we have no real movement in this direction.
6. Most people prefer meat. Currently population growth is such that meat production can easily keep up with demand. I agree that meat production is worse for the world (due to being resource inefficient) and I agree that it is more ethical to eat artificial meat due to decrease in suffering, but let's be real, most people will just eat the meat that is cheap and easily available. There is zero chance major countries manage to pass bills that would make meat expensive.
7. This one I almost agree with, I just don't think that there will be "a wave of hype" since without better propulsion/space elevators capital costs are obviously high and don't scale well (space isn't software).
8. I agree that governments will ratchet up surveillance, but I don't think consumers will be willing to put much money into privacy. I bet most people don't care (enough to spend money) about privacy, and the fraction who are OK with surveillance will only increase.
9. I mean, given that most baby boomers will be retired by 2030 I agree that they will play increasingly diminished role in the society, but I don't think it's because age/experience will not longer matter.
10. This is something I most agree with. I do hope that the 20s will be year genetics changes how we treat non-infectious diseases.
1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
2. we will have further centralization of the internet
3. Solar will only account for 10k Gw
4. Agree that nuclear will make a massive resurgence
5. Gas will still be the dominate power source for mobile transportation, but less so. This is because gas prices will fall.
6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
10. Meat will be nearly as prevalent today, but wild caught fish will be virtually no more
11. Self driving vehicles will operate in many of the non-heavily effected weather states. Laws will be passed to regulate and exclude some states after fatalities
12. Marijuana will be legal federally
13. Government will start accessing Alexa, Google, Siri recordings and public will be made aware
14. China will start using / building power projection in states it can. Specifically to protect food
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction. The ways in which modern states can maintain power and suppress their people is overwhelming. China can and has built perhaps the most oppressive totalitarian state ever to have existed. Saudi is diversifying its absurd wealth to resist downturns in oil, and the "first world" is still hapelly grovelling and kissing the rings of that disgusting despot, selling them weapons and propping them up diplomatically. All in all, I don't have my hopes up.
The PRC's working population peaks somewhere between right now and the next 5 years. By 2050, over 1/3 of their population is over 65 years old. They've been under replenishment birth rates for a long time. Their population pyramid is really, truly scary.
Their highly leveraged economy will not survive at "6%" growth over the next decade. It is not clear that they will escape the Middle Income Trap [1]. They are struggling with zombie companies and transitioning from manufacturing to a services-based economy. Their manufacturing is also being slowly eaten away by countries like Vietnam.
As the PRC maintains its legitimacy through the economic growth that has happened under its existence, a recession could trigger political upheaval or force the CCP to distract the populace, e.g. they might try to annex the ROC (Taiwan and its other holdings) by force. A military conflict in which a large number of one child families lose their sole child would have disastrous ramifications as far as government stability, too.
Given their focus on technology and modernization and massive investment in R&D and STEM education, it is likely that China will grow further still. China’s R&D investment is now at the top of the world about on par with the US. There are also a very high number of capable engineers in China as suggested by PISA results.
A key difference with middle income countries that only earn export income as manufacturing base is that there are quite a few Chinese companies that possess its own technology and brands. DJI, Oppo, Xiaomi are some examples. Many of these brands are not well known in the US but have become increasingly competitive with global brands, at least in some respect, in Asia and perhaps elsewhere.
It might make sense to compare them to Korean brands a while back, with an additional advantage of massive domestic market.
Their forward-looking focus on major industries of tomorrow like AI, EV, and biotech does not hurt either.
It’s all about trade. The USSR was brought down because they had no nations to trade with and refused to play ball with them and excluded them from the world diminishing their growth and power. The key difference this time around is Europe seems pretty complacent to let China keep doing its thing.
Yep, and the thing is that most Chinese don't even mind the high level of control for the time being. I don't see any significant large scale instability as long as the material quality of life continues to improve for the average Chinese.
This is probably pretty normal historically. People start rebelling not just because of restrictions on freedom, but usually because their quality of life sucks. See what's happening in Hong Kong: they don't like the increasing Chinese oppression, sure, but they also have some serious quality-of-life complaints too, namely with housing prices.
When people are fat and comfortable, they tend not to rock the boat too much for vague ideals.
>China will fall
>Saudi will have a violent revolution
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction.
The truly troublesome part is that predictions about social phenomenon can be self-fulfilling prophesy.
If you basically want to see a bloody revolution instead of a better solution, that actively increases the odds of it happening.
The best the world can hope for Saudi Arabia is the status quo. As authoritarian and barbaric as they are, the problem is, Saudi's internal opposition isn't some liberal freedom lovers – it's much more radical religious fanatics that would turn the country in (in essence) ISIS, but with oil and wealth.
The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
>The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
I doubt it. Saud family were interested in fighting the Ottomans, as were the British in WW1, and their interests aligned then. And during WW2, once it was found to provide access to oil, it only made sense for the west to make sure a stable regime was established. The US/Brits support the Sauds in whatever they want to do, and the Sauds provide oil and purchase weapons. Keeps the region nice and unstable for future weapons orders and to prevent a situation like Norway where the oil wealth is distributed to everyone and no longer able to be controlled by a handful of people.
For further proof, the more modern socially liberal Iran was destabilized in favor of a fundamentalist leader by the US for their refusal to play ball:
Who knows what proportion of it is distributed. Money isn’t the only wealth. A high trust society with an open and accountable government is far more “wealth” for the average citizen than getting a check every month.
And if the Saudi king decides to stop the payments or kill you for speaking out against them (see Kashoggi assassination), what good is a few thousand in oil money while the royalty splits the billions with the US.
>1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
>6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
why do people make these kinds of predictions. they're so uninformed it's beyond the pale.
china and SA are two of the most authoritarian and simultaneously well-funded (effective and efficient) governments on the planets -- we're not talking libya here (let alone syria, venezuela which still stand in their pre-upheavel form). how do you practically imagine either of these things happening? like a superhero comes down and leads the charge?
do you know what it actually takes to organize on such a massive scale as to bring down a state? here in america we can't get enough grass-roots organization for free health-care and tertiary education. and you think somewhere in china is a political mind so brilliant that they'll be able to organize some portion of 3x the population to violent revolution (since they don't have elections)?
Many were alive when the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain fell. That makes such large upheavals believable. The weakness of authoritarian regimes is that by their nature dissention is hidden. Those in charge aren't really aware of how far they're overshooting until it's too late to release some of the pressure. I don't understand Chinese culture or their current situation enough to say whether or not they're in danger but Saudi Arabia certainly seems to have many parallels with other authoritarian regimes that fell to revolution.
If anyone predicted in 1985 that a mere 7 years later the Soviet Union would no longer exist and Germany would be reunited, and it would all happen with essentially no violence, people would have derided them mercilessly.
Monumental changes can happen, and shockingly quickly.
Not to me. Soviet Union's fall was a very unique set of events, some unique to the time and sweep of history, some just plain unique. It was a combination of the right leaders, Chernobyl, fallout from WW2 divisions such as the Baltic States Molotov Pact protests, and Solidarity and Lech Walesa in Poland, then the right chain of events over a decade.
Many of those Soviet Republics were very reluctant participants, forcibly occupied with underlying resentment going back centuries in a couple of cases, to WW2 in others.
There seem very few parallels with Saudi or China.
Yeah, when China breaks down again, it will be for very unique reasons, singular for their time and place, and dependent on a few very good or bad political decisions.
Well, Soviet Union (hence the Iron Curtain itself) were not really _well funded_ anymore when they fell. The system they had in place was completely failing.
The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries were in many ways the opposite of modern China. They were not efficient at all, and their economies were absolutely terrible. China has its problems, but a moribund economy is not one of them.
Fascist states don't need a revolution to collapse, though; they just need to run out of anger and people to oppress. Consider China's attempts to oppress Hong Kong; like with all prior oppression attempts, China must succeed if they want to continue expanding. Given how precarious their position is in HK, it's not a stretch to imagine that they might not be able to reconquer the South China Sea soon enough to ensure continued growth. China's out of places to expand in the west and south, and so it's South China Sea or bust for them. I don't know how they'll collapse, just that they will.
The Saudis are much more comfortable in their position. MBS can and will dangle individual rights for women, one by one, like red meat for the laity. He will garner applause throughout the next two decades for his progressive attitude towards women, even as he is a bloodthirsty despot.
Because they’ve never been to China but simultaneously think they knew a lot about China because the news they were fed. Particularly that Chinese people want democracy like Iraqis under Saddam (note: both are untrue).
The Han Chinese are, by far, the majority. Uyghurs are a small and unliked minority. What makes you think they're going to destabilize that nation? Did the poor treatment of black people in the US cause it to collapse? It did lead to a civil war at one point, and to some turbulent times a century later, but that's only because people in the US actually cared about human rights. I don't see any evidence that most of China's population is too concerned with the treatment of Uyghurs, unfortunately.
True for the Uyghurs, but less true for Tibetans. The Tibetan public is largely happy with what has happened under China - it's the deposed nobility who are less excited about it.
Probably because there is no such thing. The people who vote against them realize that you’re still paying for them via taxes and that you’ll be destroying the entire market.
Destroying the market with the best healthcare research and the market with much of the best academic research shouldn’t be taken lightly.
And in your effort to repeat dogma, you’ve missed mine. Support for a vague notion of nationalizing healthcare. In that article you linked it’s only 42 percent strongly supporting it. The rest is “somewhat” or worse.
Someone who “somewhat” supports Medicare for all doesn’t really like the actual proposed implementation. With less than a majority strongly supporting it, are you really surprised?
I'd bet the farm, all the farms, that your list turns out more correct than the one at the link.
The item on your list I have the biggest issue with is 10. We'll still be catching plenty of fish in the wild (but some places that fish are plentiful today won't be that way) in another 10 years.
Even if over fishing is under control there is still an issue with climate change and everything that comes with it, including ocean acidification, ocean current disruptions, migrations of pervasive alien species, collapse of important local populations (due to the above).
So even if over fishing is not a threat any more, our ocean food source is still at huge risk.
> 7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
Hope you're right about the CA housing market coming down, but I think more likely is just that Gavin Newsom and ilk get booted out for their failures to reign in PG&E and housing prices aren't particularly effected one way or the other.
Wildfires are generally not in the densely populated areas, so I don't think they'll move the needle much.
> We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate.
What happens this decade is the same as the last decade.
The difference is small for any measure. Seas rise at about the same rate, climate changes at the same rate. wtf? If anything technology is improving and long term implementations are starting to be implemented to reduce the issues we saw from the last decade.
> Plant based diets will dominate the world
Meat will rise and continue to rise. The world is getting richer, this stats are undeniable. It's like they look at the fad at McDonalds down the road and extrapolate across the world. Once lab based meat becomes normal (perhaps this decade) it will increase even faster.
> 2/ Automation will continue to take costs out of operating many of the services and systems that we rely on to live and be productive. The fight for who should have access to this massive consumer surplus will define the politics of the 2020s. We will see capitalism come under increasing scrutiny and experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.
This post was very carefully written by a STEM field Ph.D. from a world class research university and is solid science and not politics.
If you have a rational argument, then make it.
Else it appears that HN has some dedicated climate alarmists who attack anything that questions their orthodoxy. Such behavior is political and against the Hacker News rules.
>9/ We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade.
And as typical in such pieces, GenX gets forgotten...
GenX is tiny and has failed to progress forward precisely because it is so small compared to the Boomers and Millennials. Also by the end of the decade parts of GenX will be approaching 60.
Gen X did just fine. They created most of what we know of as the internet. You probably don't hear much about them because we've (Gen X -- I'm one) been focused on building new things and not complaining about old things. It's a model other generations should look at and emulate quite frankly.
"Failed to progress forward" - what are you talking about?
The United States - and really the world as a whole - has enjoyed its most prosperous time in all of human history during Gen-X's window of contribution.
Yes. But that prosperity came with a massive balloon payment in the form of climate change. What's label prosperity today will be "Grand ma, WTF were y'all thinking?"
Long to short, the jury is still out on the actual success of Gen-X.
The climate has changed and will change. Some of that change (although I think its a small part) will be influenced by human activity. The Earth will adjust. Humanity will adjust. And humanity will continue to flourish.
A high percentage of the world's population lives on or near the coast. Why the climate is changing doesn't change the effect on these people and the places they live. Dismissing this fact as alarmist isn't going to help anyone.
p.s. Humanity will continue to flourish? Your prediction is based on what, past performance? When Mother Nature's bounty was harvested mindlesssly and shameleessly? That's going to continue forever? Infinitely? Can you share some links supporting such projections?
What you’re perceiving as aging is merely an illusion created in your mind when you look in the mirror. You think you must be aging because most people do, in fact, age.
What you need to realize is that Gen X is stuck in a crack in time that halts the aging process for them. All of them. A side effect of this is that while they can interact with the world and almost be perceived, they actually have been forgotten by the rest of the world.
On occasion a regular aging schmuck will notice a wild Gen Xer and be able to interact with them whilst the Xer is within their field of perception, however these interactions are invariably fleeting and almost immediately forgotten for it leaves the regular person’s body and mind in a strangely exhausted state. Interacting with a forgotten person stresses the body, and so while someone may not exactly know why they wish to flee from this person that seems like another person, at some point the brain sends the neurological equivalent of a kill -9 to end the conversation. It is estimated that about 200,000 Gen Xers are killed a year in this way, but nobody has been convicted since 1. nobody has been able to find the bodies again and 2. Even if they were, it would probably be ruled as self-defense and 3. All memory of the events that transpired invariably slips away from the living.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but as time passes people get older, and they usually gain experience. Soon, Gen X-ers will be the ones with the optimal experience/dementia ratio.
Also, yelling the loudest is problem the predates human history.
Really? Honestly I hate generation-based generalizations. Each group is the result of different circumstances and faces different generational challenges.
That said, if anything, a cursory glance at my Facebook feed reveals the boomers yelling the loudest.
I think the climate is going to change much faster than any models predict, like 3-4x faster, because we went past the tipping point about 30 years ago.
Phytoplankton populations will crash out in the next 10 years and the marine food chain will collapse.
Extreme wether patterns are going to completely disrupt food production, which will cause mass starvation and a global immigration/refugee crisis.
In the U.S., the terrified of everything elderly, and right wing will go for less freedom and more authoritative government control. They will also secede more control to corporations as a way of avoiding “big government”, effectively handing over power special interests and the ultra wealthy.
Healthcare will however become nationalized because the system as it stands is out of control and therE is no way to reign it in, so costs will keep spiraling up until the system breaks.
Marijuana will get legalized in most states, and the percentage of THC will start to get capped.
Designer CRIsPR “therapies” will become popular.
The U.S. college system have a major event, costs are spiraling out of control, and the colleges have no way to stop the cost growth, students are becoming more accustomed to online classes, in the next 10 years there will be a mass realignment of the U.S. college system, just like banking, healthcare. A lot of closures, mergers and partnerships. A commoditization of higher education, which will be good for some majors, like STEM, and really bad for majors that are more “subjective”. I also think we’ll see incorporation of what is seen as traditional “trade school” skills. Learning is learning, and is the schools can make it profitable, “why not?”.
Phytoplankton populations are not going to crash. Extreme weather is not going to cause mass starvation. There's no scientific basis for either of these things happening.
Furthermore, you don't believe they are going to happen. If you did believe this, it would be absurd to talk about a "major event" regarding the US college system - "mergers and partnerships", "commoditization", etc. Really? Really?? What happened to the major event of the students starving to death?
What happened is that you don't actually believe the stuff you say about climate change. You just think it's cool and sophisticated to say that you know that change will happen 3-4x faster than any scientifically-based model says. Because whatever...
Possibly ocean acidification could damage the cell walls of diatoms, which make up a fair fraction of phytoplankton? But I don't see how that could have been locked in 30 years ago.
Asia (China) would not have an incentive politically to run with it, as it would remove traceability and control of money flow. Not to mention online currencies pitfalls.
The climate crisis will be exacerbated by the increasing centralization of large cities. Humans are tending towards centralized population hubs, and away from rural areas.
This will be the main catalyst for adopting greener infrastructure. Fear of permanent climate change will not be the catalyst, as that is a long term repercussion of not solving the pollution problem, and humans have never been good about preparing for things in advance.
I thought it was the other way around? Don't people in cities have a lower carbon footprint because of public transportation, smaller homes, and other things that can be shared?
Yes it seems people were confused by my first sentence. I should have said "the perception of the climate crisis will increase, leading to faster adoption of green policies".
There's a reason why people in rural areas are less aware of climate change due to human pollution. The effects of pollution are much less apparent in rural areas due to the far lower human density. Rural areas are "clean" to the human eye, so we have large swaths of the population that simply don't care about long term effects of pollution, because to them, even the short-term effects are almost indiscernible.
People are moving to cities at a faster rate despite the proliferation of the internet. As such, we'll eventually reach a critical mass of the population that eventually leads us to adopting greener policies. All because people are moving into cities from rural areas. I get that it sounds counterintuitive.
I'm not following your logic. Yes, humans are leaving rural communities for cities, but I'm not sure how that exacerbates climate problems...unless they're all moving to New Orleans.
I’ve seen at least one article suggesting the end of centralization into cities. I suspect LEO based internet services will further help people move back to the country. All that’s needed is work out there.
A friend lived outside a city of 20,000 in rural Colorado. He dropped $10-20k to get fiber run out. It seems like a lot, but If that's literally the only thing keeping you from moving from the Bay Area to a small town, you just haven't done your research.
1) Maybe. Or maybe we fuck it up and we are the penultimate generation of pre-Anthropocene human life. Hard to say for sure. So far, the rich and powerful seem to have little trouble selling their property.
2) Automation will not lead to some sort of wakefulness and critique of capitalism, but just more technocracy. The future is Google being too busy to offer you customer service.
3) China will collapse after their attempts to monopolize the South China Sea fall through.
4) Cryptocurrencies as a technology will collapse after several showstopping protocol-level issues are found. Most notably, a team will crack Satoshi's key and steal their BTC hoard, crashing almost all cryptocurrency prices, while as a runner-up effort, another team will successfully demonstrate forgery of high-difficulty blocks with ironic complexity analysis.
5) The various decentralized mesh networks around the globe will each grow to blanket their metropoloi, and some areas will see their mesh networks merge to create massive clouds of ambient connectivity. Disks will still be expensive, though. In fact, I'll predict another disk supply crash due to a natural disaster, akin to the tsunami from last decade.
6) Most folks around the world do not eat that much meat, and no numbers are listed, so I'll instead say that people will continue to not eat much meat. Perhaps meat consumption in USA, China, etc. will diminish, but probably not.
7) India and China step up their national space programs over the next decade, while ESA and NASA continue operating. Elon Musk is still around because of sheer willpower, but nobody else is really privatizing.
8) Already happened. It will continue to happen. The author's really showing off their bubble with this one.
9) Yes, many Boomers are near the end of their mortal coils. Don't be so morbid about it. I'm not sure if this prediction's at all interesting, since any actuary could make the same prediction without a single cup of coffee.
10) Gene therapy will still be sputtering and straining at the end of the next decade. CRISPR with Cas9 will have been long obsoleted, and nothing will have replaced it. There may be a field of genetic programming, though, where people specialize in writing code using DNA; there will certainly be a field of epigenetics which is distinct from traditional genetics.
6 is a big NO. The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets. Humans need meat, without it we get sick. B12 can't be found in plants, there are plenty studies that shows how sick we get if we eat ONLY plants.
In case you are serious, vitamin B12 is produced by single celled organisms. It is found in algal (seaweed) and fermented foods, too, not just animal based foods.
Almost every study about responsible plant based diets shows it has healthier than average outcomes. I say "almost" just as a hedge, I don't know of any.
By all means, eat whatever diet you want and don't feel bad about it, but do it for factual reasons and don't invent facts to justify your preferences.
RE: The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets
Do you have any studies that back up your claim that humans need meat to live a healthy life?
Several governmental bodies worldwide state[1] that one can live healthy using a plant based diet and The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] even recommend a plant based diet for good health and disease prevention.
Did you know B12 is produced by bacteria and that some meat eaters are low in B12 and need to supplement. Animals in factory farms are being fed B12 supplements[2].
You might want to research this further so you're better informed next time you state information as fact. Or watch this documentary - https://gamechangersmovie.com/- it's on Netflix.
This is one isolated case of parents who were probably quite dogmatic and ill informed and they were fruitarians - mainly eating raw food, so probably not living on a well-balanced diet.
The article even states that a vegan or vegetarian diet is fine for kids[0]. So again please read articles properly next time and don't make generalised statements based one some headlines you read.
[0] "Babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop from a well-planned varied and balanced diet."
Thanks. But none of those articles say that a plant based diet is not good for your health and that you need to eat meat instead. Your last link about mental disorders for example even says there is no evidence that a plant based diet causes mental disorders and it even states "vegetarians are in good physical health".
I would recommend to read these articles properly next time and not make generalised statements like you've done.
You can live a healthy live without meat or dairy products.
We can't feed the whole world using a meat heavy diet as it's just too resource intensive and destructive to the environment. A shift to a more plant based diet is inevitable - that's why I'm thankful to people like Ethan Brown and his team working on meat alternatives that are as good or better than animal meat - to make this transition easier for people who just can't give up animal meat.
Vegetarians can eat animal products like milk and cheese, which do contain vitamin B12. "Meat" refers to muscle and other foods derived from animal death, but does not refer to animal products like milk, cheese, and eggs.
There are indeed people who have medical conditions that make their life dangerous with a plant-based diet. For people without such conditions (the majority of people), science on negative effects of plant-based diet seems to focus on certain deficiencies (such as deficiency of zinc and iron, or omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acids). These deficiencies can be avoided by consuming specific plant-based sources, such as certain seaweeds for EPA and DHA.
For most people plant-based diet is probably completely safe and when debating this issue, the bottom argument of opposition to plant-based diets usually boils down to one thing: the god-given right or even necessity for man to eat other animals (be it because of it being natural to eat other beings in nature, because "plants have feelings too", or because of traditions or humans dying if they don't eat meat). This rests on ignorance of science, self-centered attitude and violence. Industrial-scale animal production for food is an abhorrent machine by any humane moral standards and most people use these counter-arguments because they like how meat or cheese tastes and they want to close their eyes.
Hunting or fishing or growing your own meat is much less evil than the animals-for-food industry but the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption. Also it has to be understood that in developing countries masses of people cannot afford to be fancy about what to eat and what not. In developed countries however... I think we should not consider ourselves "developed" if we kill 10x our own human populations amounts of animals each year for food based mostly on the fact that we are used to it and that meat tastes good. As more and more people realize this, the demand for plant-based diets goes up.
Nice discussion folks..
BUT, there is an argument that never makes sense to me "the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption", so how can nature sustain amounts of PLANT consumption IF we all change it to plant-based diets?
This does not make sense since for 1 piece of meat we need to eat dozen of different plants; plants as food have a huge impact in nature too.
The animals eat a lot more plants for a pound of meat they gain than humans would need if we only ate the plants. We are in the first day of this year and already over 120 million animals have been killed in the US for food. Approximations on amount of animals killed each year for food in the USA vary, but it is in tens of billions. Can you imagine the strain natural ecosystem would need to sustain to support tens of billions of new animals every year? We are already on the edge when feeding those animals with industrial crops.
Humans are not ruminants. We can not survive on hay. We can survive on the high-nutrition parts of plants, but creating these parts is resource-intensive. In some cases the whole plant is simply difficult to grow (pests, fertilizer, etc.) and in other cases we don't get very much food from each plant.
There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.
Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and cattle do almost as well.
Other food animals are happy to eat disgusting waste. Pigs, chickens, and catfish are especially willing.
I'm not sure how you reconcile this with the existence of healthy individuals who have eaten nothing but plants for decades. I myself have not eaten meat in about 5 years, and I just had a health check-up with full blood work. My doctor said "whatever you're doing, keep doing. You're healthy and I don't recommend changing a thing."
I bet you live in San Francisco :D /jokes a side; for you to be healthy without eating meat you need to eat a large variation of plants, it's not only one, it's not only one meal by day. It's not easy and have a great impact in nature too, meat have all we need and is simpler. Also, humans that are fed only with meat are able to eat once a week (or less).
Again, please share the studies to back up your claims. You're either trolling or just very poorly informed and spreading misinformation without checking it.
And how do you reconcile the fact that animal agriculture is a large contributor to ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the result of a 5 year Oxford Uni study that recommends adopting a more plant-based diet to reduce your personal carbon footprint[0]
This is just not true. You're probably thinking of vegans who aren't allowed to have cheese, milk, and eggs. Vegetarians can easily get B12 in their diets.
Vegetarians get B12 from the animal products created from animals which supplemented B12. Everyone is supplementing B12 regardless of their diet, it's just a matter of how many steps removed from the supplement that people seem to think makes a difference (it doesn't).
It is a technical problem, not a law of nature. B12 and other nutrients will be produced by plants, insects or bacteria in sufficient supply by the end of the decade, given the amount of interest vegetarian diets receive. Some investment will come from space companies, which need to shorten the food chain.
> The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets.
I'm not sure if you are being serious. Approximately 3% of the US population claim to be 100% plant-based, and you are saying that this 3% is responsible for most part of diseases?
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