"In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day. Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving. They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much.
The effects of this, which I am sure sounds regrettable to many of my readers, will, in my opinion, be good. It was essential that the American race should be capable of intense labor and intense ambition if it was to develop its vast country. But one result has been haste, overwork, noise, all of which is bad for the nerves. In 2022 America will have made her fortune and will be enjoying it as well as she can."
> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better
Let me translate
“you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.”
I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When was public education first introduced at scale? When was eugenics promoted in the United States?
The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the history of Woodrow Wilson.
At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on higher-class circles.
In that context all these predictions are really aspirations.
That said, I think the United States is still one of the most free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s promoting the same general ideas.
It’s probably a waste of time to argue this, but the arguments for central banking were the same as the arguments put forth by Alexander Hamilton. More stability, greater resilience, etc.
The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.
It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction, that it is planned for us to move to technocracy (with a bio-medical-wallet-etc-id, tracked everywhere in spy-cities, not allowed to even leave your 110sqft micro-flat unless the computer says so), that all the disasters we face have resulted in incremental steps towards this aim (911, covid). Its a lot to consider!
That we have been harnessed and put to work creating someone else's heaven on earth (and hardcore slavery for the rest) is a bitter pill to swallow. And the techies here have recently been the greatest driver of this change. Their livelihoods do depend on it.
Anyway, good on you, for bringing some of these issues up.
"The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)"
"Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families."
> the United States is still one of the most free ... countries on the planet.
By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude?
Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top".
I don't think the US is free at all, and would be interested in seeing facts that back it up. I see a country run like a corporation, where media, tech and science are carrying out very specific instructions from their handful of billionaire owners to steer the ship where they want it to go.
You can think what you want in the US but you cannot express it publicly if you have a significant following. You will get blocked, censored, ridiculed etc.
Maybe you mean something else with freedom? Freedom to carry out work and get payed for it? Sure.
I couldn't disagree more. Today's American society has way more liberty than it did in 1912. Blacks, women, Native Americans, LBGTQ+, other minorities: all live better today than whatever period you want to choose. Native American children were forced from their homes into institutionalize schools. In NYC tenements the police conducted midnight raids to force people to be vaccinated for smallpox (a worthy end but a terrible means). Women didn't have the right to vote. As others mentioned, Jim Crow ruled the South. There really is no comparison.
Many non renewable resources are past peak production, and declining fast. Austerity will be next. But it will be disguised as saving the environment. So that not only do you do not blame your politicians for being poorer. You will be blamed for over consuming and destroying the environment.
Energy crisis, like running out of heating gas is already hitting Europe. And shortages of fertilizer will be here this spring. China and Russia are not exporting. US doesn't make enough. Farmers will be planting without it. Expect higher food prices and possibly food shortages.
Things are running short in the supply chain, from chips to little bits and pieces. When things break, they will break fast. Make a plan B people. The wave is coming.
Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization.
And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
And what 'freedoms' have you lost?
Well, there's more taxation.
And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job.
What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?
Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could not vote. Seriously, give me a break.
You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. It allows you to own things. For example, the Web disrupted AOL, MSN, Compuserve, cable channels, radio stations, journalism, etc. But then, people started to just make their own "private" sites bigger. "I built it -- I own it!" OK, so Mark Z owns facebook, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and so forth. Our public discussions take place on "privately owned" platforms (really, owned by Wall Street bigwigs, but even they can't vote Mark Z out, they try and fail every year).
So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism. That iPhone and Kindle can yank the apps and books you "own" out from under you. That Alexa and Siri listens to whatever you say all the time. That car you "own" will also soon have a bunch of software downloaded to make sure you are limited in what you can do -- which is probably the scariest thing because some sleeper attack can make all cars suddenly crash into gas stations at once.
In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things, and not giving them to you (infrastructure, backend software, AI data sets, you name it -- even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights).
This IS a feature of capitalism, that we might want to rein in. Perhaps there should be a principle that courts would enforce private property less and less when it came to scale. So on a small scale (enforce my right to chattel property, my first 3 houses etc.) it's fine. But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"? The land used to belong to some natives hundreds of years ago, or some other group that the current group just "took" from them. What moral system are you going to appeal to, that would allow unlimited private property ownership? Even John Locke's "homsteading" concept had a "proviso" saying that you should only own that which you can reasonably use. Even Adam Smith writing about the "invisible hand" was actually writing about how the Rich are led by an invisible hand to distribute goods equally (in his time) because they can only eat so much.
We see this pathology in online systems as well. Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow sending unlimited amounts of money in a fixed time for a fixed fee, this necessarily causes a bottleneck somewhere (proof of work miner, for instance, or everyone storing everything, leading to "flash loans" and other crap on the "world computer"). Actually, they charge the maximum fee for every transaction (even sending 5 cents) because the entire network secures everything. It's built for really huge transfers.
It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility. The notion that that is because the economic development of the country is "finished" seems weird.
"United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility."
It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'.
The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have the opportunities others have, they live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. They are happy in their version of he US, they're family oriented, patriots - but not going to college or after the white collar trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'.
Those two cohorts make the US 'very different' in terms of social mobility, and so you have a situation a bit akin to Brazil etc..
Canada and Australia are 'Immigrant States' without those cohorts, and newcomers do reasonably well or somewhere approaching 'normal' after one or two generations.
I'll bet social mobility among non-African American and Latino Americans, is about on part with Canada or Australia, and maybe even a little bit better than UK, and most of Europe (even Sweden) which also have vestiges of class.
Some indicative data here [1]. You can see mobility gap between Black and White in the US, it's very crude and subject to interpretation, but it does line up with PISA standardized testing results which show the same, that non-Black/Latino America is actually 'a lot like' Europe or Japan in terms of so many outcomes. 2018 PISA test scores here [2] (download the PDF).
FYI I'm not 'endorsing' or 'supporting' any kind of system here, just pointing out that the the US has a 'multi system dynamic' different than other places and it's essential to understanding how it works esp. on a comparative basis. FYI a lot of E/S European countries are poor, and represent similar kind of 'isolated communities' which is why gini coefficient etc. for the entirety of the EU is much worse than it is for any individual EU state.
From 1922 until today - most of our progress has been incremental. Other than satellites, and maybe computers, it seems as though they ave predicted a lot. Maybe not quite the social impact of them however.
What will change in 2122?
If we have successful Fusion at scale, it could change a lot of things.
If not, maybe it won't be that different: longer lives, more fashion. Maybe we figure out Climate Change and get plastics out of he ocean, but we'll probably still be arguing about 'what is normal'
Eventually, we'll be able to colour our skin, eyes, hair very readily, we'll have cosmetic limbs (i.e. pair of wings that don't to much but flap a bit).
And maybe mechanical uterus - where you provide the eggs and sperm and it will make a baby in 9 months. If the identity wars are a bit complicated now just wait.
We will send a probe to Alpha Centuari and they'll be a small station on Mars, but it will be boring and young people won't even care.
Reduced population in the West and massive population booms in Africa and some other spots will crate some odd international dynamics. Africa will be much better off, but mostly still corrupt with crackpot leaders and nuclear weapons. One of them will use one on their neighbouring country.
> They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much.
honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting back on the general time overhead of working in an office.
I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've become less enterprising due to class immobility. but we do seem to be getting more efficient with our time
>honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right.
This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great privilege. Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc.
The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that has benefited enormously from recent economic trends, a benefit that is not distributed evenly. Many (most?) people are working more then they ever did for an increasingly smaller piece of the pie.
Once people have certain comfort they cease to be productive and look for ways to while away their time. Sometimes its neutral, sometimes it may be a productive hobby and sometimes it's detrimental (as in they know what needs to change in the world and they will make it so).
It's also telling that at the dawn of the XX cent, the US was not a wealthy country. Per capita we were more or less on par with countries that are today still "developing". Out position isn't a foregone conclusion and needs active development to remain there.
What terrible phrasing is "they cease to be productive and look for ways to while away their time."
We don't live to work, we work to live. Once less work is required to live, more living can be done. Some people may 'while away their time', others do valuable things that don't produce monetary value.
Already in 1918, shortly after World War I, when
everybody talked about peace and many international organizations
were created to secure that peace, Gesell published the following
warning in a letter to the editor of the newspaper "Zeitung am Mittag" in
Berlin:
"In spite of the holy promise of all people to banish war, once and
for all, in spite of the cry of millions 'Never a war again,' in spite of
all the hopes for a better future, I have this to say: If the present
monetary system, based on interest and compound interest,
remains in operation, I dare to predict today, that it will take less
than 25 years for us to have a new and even worse war. I can
foresee the coming development clearly. The present degree of
technological advancement will quickly result in a record
performance of industry. The build-up of capital will be rapid in
spite of the enormous losses during the war, and through its over-
supply will lower the interest rate. Money will then be hoarded.
Economic activities will diminish and increasing numbers of
unemployed persons will roam the streets; within the discontented
masses wild, revolutionary ideas will arise and also the poisonous
plant called "Super-Nationalism" will proliferate. No country will
understand the other, and the end can only be war again. (28)"
The only good news is that our fractional reserve system is not as rigid as a gold standard. I.e. we will get a silent depression rather than a great depression.
In the context of conquering "the land" from East to West, I think the articles sentiments are spot on. The conclusion that Americans would settle long term is open to debate. The frontier discussed in the article is a physical one, conquered by hard labor and sweat. And while Americans did succeed and enjoy (physically) lighter days now, the author failed to predict we'd find a new frontier, a digital one. The hard labor is now done in the mind, even if we spend too much time binging Rick & Morty.
> Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving.
You can see this today with the anti-work movement and the overindulgence in tv shows, movies, porn, junk food, social media, and video games. All these things are corrupting the future generations of kids.
The corporations that create these have made them too accessible. Once kids start indulging at a young age, it's harder to control when they get older. Their lives will revolve around gaining short-term pleasures, and the world will lose out on the potential long-term creative value they could have contributed.
Some, no doubt, will choose a less creative path, but we also have evidence in history that people, who have the privilege of not worrying about their daily bread, also choose to spend their time in pursuit of sciences, arts, etc and many things not practical for them in regular employment and that advance all people.
I remember reading the same back in the 1990’s. America’s growth will flatten.
That was a terribly wrong prediction.
I don’t disagree that American’s economic expansion won’t flatten at some point. But as long as the brightest and most entrepreneurial keep going to the US, the growth will continue.
I mean where else will they go in the future? China?
>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods.
This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these.
>It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will roll by their side.
Well Soylent do exist so that's not far fetched either.
> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these.
Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries.
But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother is usually there too so I have someone to cook for.
I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at home even once during those years.
> My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries.
> But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day.
The incentive to cook yourself instead of ordering food is multi-factorial, but a significant part is financial. People who only cook "touristically" like you describe are people for whom daily food expenses are a rounding error, whether ordered or cooked by themselves. This could include single well compensated people or very wealthy families. This is further amplified by the fact that food consumes a smaller portion of household income than it has historically.
In contrast, when working and middle class families decide that they need to save more, the first place they usually economize is in their restaurant expenditures.
> Why should I, when I can just as easily order in?
Because
> I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it
?
Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.
I feel tossing together some basic meal is so simple I can't bother to go pick anything from outside even though I live in the middle of great restaurant concentration. A bit of frozen veggies heated on pan, with pasta or couscous on the side. Takes literally ten minutes and costs less than one euro.
Or a large casserole that takes an hour to cook but gives eight portions. Quick heat-up for lunch during the week saves time too, and you stay in control of the salt intake unlike with ready meals. So cheaper, healthier, faster. Downside is that those meals are pretty basic and repetitive, but then again eating out feels a bit more special if you don't do it every day.
I do cook "real" recipes too with more steps and more flavor, but only with my partner as I don't care to do it just for myself for weekday meals.
I live in a place were I could easily order / go out for every meal as well. If I cook ~2-3 times a week for myself and box up the leftovers, I get high quality meals for $2-5/meal vs $10-30/meal. This can save ~$8k per person per year just cooking 10 meals a week.
This may not be worth it for some, but I've found the time savings of ordering in/carryout is marginal or actually worse than cooking and reheating leftovers. Waste and grocery trips generally sort themselves out in a couple weeks as you figure out a schedule. This obviously scales with number of people so for a family of 2-4 you'd save $16-32k/yr for little extra effort.
These sort of home economics seem to have really fallen out of favor in my sphere, even in 2+ person households where $40k+ in maintenance/service/food costs can be saved (factor in childcare/education and I image the number can get to $100k+). I don't understand why people leave so much money on the table. There aren't many ways you can make $16k/year for a <5hr/week moonlighting position.
---
> That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
You have to cook larger batches and eat the leftovers. I've had bad luck with bread too tbh. I might just start making my own smaller loafs, because the quality is also just bad.
EDIT: it’s also worth pointing out that savings values are post tax
I guess it depends on the location and wealth. Eating healthy is wayyyy more expensive than cooking healthy in some cities, even when you can buy a meal virtually everywhere.
People often overlook how wasteful (both time and food wise) it is to cook for single person, except for non-fussy eaters who don't mind eating leftovers.
The “lunch will be a pill” stuff is always funny to me. There’s a major volume issue unless you’re gonna have me eat chunks of uranium or neutron star or something.
This was my initial reaction too: it doesn't seem to pass basic conservation of mass.
But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet.
Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm.
Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
> I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook.
I think there is a distinction here between people who buy meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They generate a lot more plastic waste, as well.
The idea of communal kitchens is nothing new. Young unmarried professionals weren't cooking their own meals a hundred years ago either. In urban areas you'd have landladies providing supper, food carts, delivery boys, even subscription meal plans. So not much has changed in that regard.
It's important to remember that 77 percent of U.S. adults take dietary supplements. We all eat "corned beef hash and pumpkin pie" yet the majority of people already use supplements as pill as needed. Living in the north, everyone I know uses Vitamin D pills. This is a must to survive the winter and I can't imagine how it would be if that wasn't as available.
> This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these.
The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
That was one of the most striking differences I noticed when I saw a bunch of photos from c. 1970 of my hometown (Toronto). Everything that wasn't freshly painted was grubby in a way you don't see anymore here.
For some reason aesthetically I prefer the coal-covered limestone buildings. They are just pleasing to look at. So in a way I find it strangely disappointing that they get pressure washed.
Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you.
We may have met :-) It was actually hard to find a good example on street view today - the whole centre is washed now and Cheap/Westgate aren't black for over a decade.
I live in a suburb with a power station that was converted from coal to gas in the 70s. My older neighbours have told me that they had to careful when hanging clothes out to try, lest they got so dirty that they'd have to wash them again.
Years ago (1986) I worked on a project for one of the bigger power stations in the UK. We created a digital display which showed which way the wind was blowing so they could choose which coal to burn. They had been getting complaints about the dirt on peoples line dried clothes.
That link doesn't work for me, I get an infinitely loading spinner (in the address bar, behind the overlay, it says something about intent://) and the back button doesn't work so I have to kill the browser. Probably because I'm not using official chrome or something but a foss webview browser, it pops over and disables the app I was coming from but the content never loads. Can someone translate it into a regular link, or a screenshot of the content?
There was a great picture of I think Manchester before and after a ban on wood / coal and a good cleanup, it went from black buildings to a place that looked pretty decent.
When he mentions the lack of cables, he's pretty close with most of them being underground. But also he's incredible close if you consider the mess of cables that was the Stockholm telephone tower, functioning until 1913 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-stockholm-telephon...
It is an excellent article, I agree. However, it strikes me that the author was more likely female than male. (gender deliberately obscured in the author's name, 'W.L. George', for instance.).
If a male writer, the article is even more impressive given the clear sensitivity to, and awareness of, women's issues and the likely impact of technology and social changes on women.
That said, the author was likely a person of privilege rather than someone more representative of the population of 1922. A starving writer was unlikely to have been so focused on the challenges of hiring good household staff.
But it is unlikely that women will have an achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.
Going to be "that guy" and say that almost everything he accurately predicted was already commonplace or on the rise in the 1920s.
- Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were even successful transatlantic flights.
- The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had careers and even unions.
- Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of the world.
- Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing.
In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions – food pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right now).
I once put a stool on a coffee table to put up a few curtains and the leg of the stool went through the surface of the coffee table. That surface is more or less paper mache by my book.
Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by some adhesive.
Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice.
Well, the author does say that he's not making wild predictions, but only extrapolating trends that are already in motion and well-known to him and his 1922 audience.
"It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily "makers of men". Most fit women will then be following an individual career."
...
"But it is unlikely that that women will have achieved equality with men."
Alimony and child support do apply to women as well as men in the US, though it's obviously not equally distributed today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. For example, any or all of the following could cause that in a fair system:
* wage earners are still disproportionately men
* women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) custody of children
* women tend to be less likely to work outside the home
While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - because it is and always has been a common ocurrance.
I don't think he did. My mother paid child support to my father after the divorce. I think in most instances, it's simply more convenient for the mother to take the children in a divorce, or the kids are too young to choose, so it ends that way by default. There is no rule for it though.
This is surprisingly accurate, reserved and balanced through the lens of society as well as science. I was expecting something more fanciful like flying horses or whatnot.
These are better than 99% of predictions because the author has a good eye for what will change (technology, transportation, consumer goods) and what won’t (human nature).
> I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822).
If you think about what they didn't have in 1822 that they did have in 1922:
- Radio
- Movies
- Motorized Rail Transit
- Airplanes
- Blimps
- Recorded Audio
- Electrification (esp. lighting)
- Telephony
- Cars
- Subways
- Fax
- Early Television
- Telegraph
- Skyscapers
- Underwater tunnels
- Air Conditioning
- Elevators
- Modern Hospitals
- Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war
- Stock Tickers
- Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.)
- Modern Steel Manufacturing
I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s.
I’m really unsure about this. In 1822 canning food was new technology. 1822 didn’t have electrical generators but 1922 had radios, and the TV was clearly on the horizon. 1922 has the Model-T and airplanes.
The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve.
We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953
Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It’s the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is individually transformative in a way that space flight will probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue racing forward and this current moment will look analog in comparison.
Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else.
The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was.
I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
> Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else.
> The reality is that we do not know
Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later?
I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly.
Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline.
If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.
> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone
Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” - Nicola Tesla, 1926
In none of the hard Sci-Fi I read as a child did they say "I needn't worry for light, as I had my portable cellphone"
Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight.
Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.
70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
> The reality is that no such projection is plausible.
It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century.
> the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate
There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next).
BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg.
So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.
Over the broad arc of history things have gotten better over the long term. I'm not sure that's always the case though. Exponential growth of technology, or anything else, physically can't last forever. What does it look like when it stops?
I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.
Readit News
Especially with regards to this passage::
"In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day. Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving. They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much.
The effects of this, which I am sure sounds regrettable to many of my readers, will, in my opinion, be good. It was essential that the American race should be capable of intense labor and intense ambition if it was to develop its vast country. But one result has been haste, overwork, noise, all of which is bad for the nerves. In 2022 America will have made her fortune and will be enjoying it as well as she can."
Let me translate
“you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.”
I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research why it was created - not just wikipedia, get some books published between the 20 to 60s. When was public education first introduced at scale? When was eugenics promoted in the United States?
The 1910s - 1920s was the beginning of the major authoritarian and progressive movements in the United States. Read about the history of Woodrow Wilson.
At the end of the day, the United States during the 20s was losing its independence already. It was openly talked about on higher-class circles.
In that context all these predictions are really aspirations.
That said, I think the United States is still one of the most free and diverse countries on the planet. Has its issues and can 100% improve. But the same people and families who are part of the WEF are the same families / people in the 1910s - 1920s promoting the same general ideas.
The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.
It is impossible to consider that the whole of society has been created and planned in advance. To think that the upper classes manage everyone (they always did), that the schooling system produces people that are incapable of seeing the outside the box (and yet believe that they are free, nay - they 'know' it), that finance is the main weapon in the wealth extraction, that it is planned for us to move to technocracy (with a bio-medical-wallet-etc-id, tracked everywhere in spy-cities, not allowed to even leave your 110sqft micro-flat unless the computer says so), that all the disasters we face have resulted in incremental steps towards this aim (911, covid). Its a lot to consider!
That we have been harnessed and put to work creating someone else's heaven on earth (and hardcore slavery for the rest) is a bitter pill to swallow. And the techies here have recently been the greatest driver of this change. Their livelihoods do depend on it.
Anyway, good on you, for bringing some of these issues up.
"The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman's office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.)"
"Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-...
By what metric? More importantly by what magnitude?
Would "in the top 20" count? Axross 200 world countries maybe, but to patriotic Americans who speak about freedom abstractly, knowing that they are 16th in democracy [0], 44th in press freedom [1], and 20th in economic freedom [2], probably wouldn't cut it as "one of the top".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking?wprov=sfla1
[1] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom?wpro...
You can think what you want in the US but you cannot express it publicly if you have a significant following. You will get blocked, censored, ridiculed etc.
Maybe you mean something else with freedom? Freedom to carry out work and get payed for it? Sure.
Energy crisis, like running out of heating gas is already hitting Europe. And shortages of fertilizer will be here this spring. China and Russia are not exporting. US doesn't make enough. Farmers will be planting without it. Expect higher food prices and possibly food shortages.
Things are running short in the supply chain, from chips to little bits and pieces. When things break, they will break fast. Make a plan B people. The wave is coming.
And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.
And what 'freedoms' have you lost?
Well, there's more taxation.
And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.
And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.
You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job.
What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?
Do you have any sources on this? I’m not trying to degrade your point though, just curious about the topic.
You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism. It allows you to own things. For example, the Web disrupted AOL, MSN, Compuserve, cable channels, radio stations, journalism, etc. But then, people started to just make their own "private" sites bigger. "I built it -- I own it!" OK, so Mark Z owns facebook, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, and so forth. Our public discussions take place on "privately owned" platforms (really, owned by Wall Street bigwigs, but even they can't vote Mark Z out, they try and fail every year).
So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism. That iPhone and Kindle can yank the apps and books you "own" out from under you. That Alexa and Siri listens to whatever you say all the time. That car you "own" will also soon have a bunch of software downloaded to make sure you are limited in what you can do -- which is probably the scariest thing because some sleeper attack can make all cars suddenly crash into gas stations at once.
In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things, and not giving them to you (infrastructure, backend software, AI data sets, you name it -- even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights).
This IS a feature of capitalism, that we might want to rein in. Perhaps there should be a principle that courts would enforce private property less and less when it came to scale. So on a small scale (enforce my right to chattel property, my first 3 houses etc.) it's fine. But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"? The land used to belong to some natives hundreds of years ago, or some other group that the current group just "took" from them. What moral system are you going to appeal to, that would allow unlimited private property ownership? Even John Locke's "homsteading" concept had a "proviso" saying that you should only own that which you can reasonably use. Even Adam Smith writing about the "invisible hand" was actually writing about how the Rich are led by an invisible hand to distribute goods equally (in his time) because they can only eat so much.
We see this pathology in online systems as well. Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow sending unlimited amounts of money in a fixed time for a fixed fee, this necessarily causes a bottleneck somewhere (proof of work miner, for instance, or everyone storing everything, leading to "flash loans" and other crap on the "world computer"). Actually, they charge the maximum fee for every transaction (even sending 5 cents) because the entire network secures everything. It's built for really huge transfers.
It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.
Deleted Comment
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'.
The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have the opportunities others have, they live in a system that is not suited to exploiting them. They are happy in their version of he US, they're family oriented, patriots - but not going to college or after the white collar trades like migrants from 'everywhere else'.
Those two cohorts make the US 'very different' in terms of social mobility, and so you have a situation a bit akin to Brazil etc..
Canada and Australia are 'Immigrant States' without those cohorts, and newcomers do reasonably well or somewhere approaching 'normal' after one or two generations.
I'll bet social mobility among non-African American and Latino Americans, is about on part with Canada or Australia, and maybe even a little bit better than UK, and most of Europe (even Sweden) which also have vestiges of class.
Some indicative data here [1]. You can see mobility gap between Black and White in the US, it's very crude and subject to interpretation, but it does line up with PISA standardized testing results which show the same, that non-Black/Latino America is actually 'a lot like' Europe or Japan in terms of so many outcomes. 2018 PISA test scores here [2] (download the PDF).
FYI I'm not 'endorsing' or 'supporting' any kind of system here, just pointing out that the the US has a 'multi system dynamic' different than other places and it's essential to understanding how it works esp. on a comparative basis. FYI a lot of E/S European countries are poor, and represent similar kind of 'isolated communities' which is why gini coefficient etc. for the entirety of the EU is much worse than it is for any individual EU state.
From 1922 until today - most of our progress has been incremental. Other than satellites, and maybe computers, it seems as though they ave predicted a lot. Maybe not quite the social impact of them however.
What will change in 2122?
If we have successful Fusion at scale, it could change a lot of things.
If not, maybe it won't be that different: longer lives, more fashion. Maybe we figure out Climate Change and get plastics out of he ocean, but we'll probably still be arguing about 'what is normal'
Eventually, we'll be able to colour our skin, eyes, hair very readily, we'll have cosmetic limbs (i.e. pair of wings that don't to much but flap a bit). And maybe mechanical uterus - where you provide the eggs and sperm and it will make a baby in 9 months. If the identity wars are a bit complicated now just wait.
We will send a probe to Alpha Centuari and they'll be a small station on Mars, but it will be boring and young people won't even care.
Reduced population in the West and massive population booms in Africa and some other spots will crate some odd international dynamics. Africa will be much better off, but mostly still corrupt with crackpot leaders and nuclear weapons. One of them will use one on their neighbouring country.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/02/14/no-room-a...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm
I wouldn’t necessarily take anything they say as fact. Lol
honestly, with remote work, seven hours a day seems about right. A lot of that isn't even lost productivity, it's cutting back on the general time overhead of working in an office.
I don't think that Americans are so prosperous that we've become less enterprising due to class immobility. but we do seem to be getting more efficient with our time
This is, with the most possible respect, a position of great privilege. Most people in the US are not remote workers that get to work 7 hours a day. They are expected to be physically present doing things like retail service work, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, etc.
The average HN user is in a very specific demographic that has benefited enormously from recent economic trends, a benefit that is not distributed evenly. Many (most?) people are working more then they ever did for an increasingly smaller piece of the pie.
Once people have certain comfort they cease to be productive and look for ways to while away their time. Sometimes its neutral, sometimes it may be a productive hobby and sometimes it's detrimental (as in they know what needs to change in the world and they will make it so).
It's also telling that at the dawn of the XX cent, the US was not a wealthy country. Per capita we were more or less on par with countries that are today still "developing". Out position isn't a foregone conclusion and needs active development to remain there.
We don't live to work, we work to live. Once less work is required to live, more living can be done. Some people may 'while away their time', others do valuable things that don't produce monetary value.
"In spite of the holy promise of all people to banish war, once and for all, in spite of the cry of millions 'Never a war again,' in spite of all the hopes for a better future, I have this to say: If the present monetary system, based on interest and compound interest, remains in operation, I dare to predict today, that it will take less than 25 years for us to have a new and even worse war. I can foresee the coming development clearly. The present degree of technological advancement will quickly result in a record performance of industry. The build-up of capital will be rapid in spite of the enormous losses during the war, and through its over- supply will lower the interest rate. Money will then be hoarded. Economic activities will diminish and increasing numbers of unemployed persons will roam the streets; within the discontented masses wild, revolutionary ideas will arise and also the poisonous plant called "Super-Nationalism" will proliferate. No country will understand the other, and the end can only be war again. (28)"
The only good news is that our fractional reserve system is not as rigid as a gold standard. I.e. we will get a silent depression rather than a great depression.
You can see this today with the anti-work movement and the overindulgence in tv shows, movies, porn, junk food, social media, and video games. All these things are corrupting the future generations of kids.
The corporations that create these have made them too accessible. Once kids start indulging at a young age, it's harder to control when they get older. Their lives will revolve around gaining short-term pleasures, and the world will lose out on the potential long-term creative value they could have contributed.
Dead Comment
I remember reading the same back in the 1990’s. America’s growth will flatten.
That was a terribly wrong prediction.
I don’t disagree that American’s economic expansion won’t flatten at some point. But as long as the brightest and most entrepreneurial keep going to the US, the growth will continue.
I mean where else will they go in the future? China?
Anecdata – I'm on of these people. I live in central Stockholm, Sweden, and almost any hour of the day I'm able to either order in or go out and buy a meal. I don't even recall last time I cooked at home. Last time anyone cooked at my place was when a friend of mine who's also a chef stopped by for a visit. My kitchen is fully equipped, there's no want for tooling or space. I more or less never go grocery shopping, and when I do shop it's for whatever snacks and fruits I might want at home. Sometimes I buy bread and other things to make sandwiches, but that's maybe once every couple of months and it's the extent to which I shop for groceries.
But when I go to my summer home on a small island with no grocery store, I cook every single day. I think it's a combination of necessity (you have to buy groceries and anything else back on the mainland, and it's a trek) and the fact that usually I'm not alone in the summer house, my brother is usually there too so I have someone to cook for.
I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it and I don't even mind the tedious tasks like peeling potatoes or chopping onions and other things. I just never do it at home, for myself. Why should I, when I can just as easily order in? That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
It's odd, but for me it really is very location dependent. It was the same when I lived in London, I don't think I cooked at home even once during those years.
The incentive to cook yourself instead of ordering food is multi-factorial, but a significant part is financial. People who only cook "touristically" like you describe are people for whom daily food expenses are a rounding error, whether ordered or cooked by themselves. This could include single well compensated people or very wealthy families. This is further amplified by the fact that food consumes a smaller portion of household income than it has historically.
In contrast, when working and middle class families decide that they need to save more, the first place they usually economize is in their restaurant expenditures.
Because
> I really enjoy cooking, I can spend hours doing it
?
Also if you are even just an average/mediocre cook, you can usually cook more tasty and interesting food than what you typically find on Uber eats, unless you order from a different high end restaurant every single day.
Or a large casserole that takes an hour to cook but gives eight portions. Quick heat-up for lunch during the week saves time too, and you stay in control of the salt intake unlike with ready meals. So cheaper, healthier, faster. Downside is that those meals are pretty basic and repetitive, but then again eating out feels a bit more special if you don't do it every day.
I do cook "real" recipes too with more steps and more flavor, but only with my partner as I don't care to do it just for myself for weekday meals.
This may not be worth it for some, but I've found the time savings of ordering in/carryout is marginal or actually worse than cooking and reheating leftovers. Waste and grocery trips generally sort themselves out in a couple weeks as you figure out a schedule. This obviously scales with number of people so for a family of 2-4 you'd save $16-32k/yr for little extra effort.
These sort of home economics seem to have really fallen out of favor in my sphere, even in 2+ person households where $40k+ in maintenance/service/food costs can be saved (factor in childcare/education and I image the number can get to $100k+). I don't understand why people leave so much money on the table. There aren't many ways you can make $16k/year for a <5hr/week moonlighting position.
---
> That way I don't have to throw out groceries that inevitably go bad because as a single person it's hard to shop just what I need, everything is in large multi packs. Even a loaf of bread will go bad before I'm able to eat it all.
You have to cook larger batches and eat the leftovers. I've had bad luck with bread too tbh. I might just start making my own smaller loafs, because the quality is also just bad.
EDIT: it’s also worth pointing out that savings values are post tax
But actually how much mass must you necessarily lose to stay alive each day? Most of it is probably water, so if we allow "four pills plus as much water" at a meal then it's harder to rule out the pill diet.
Maybe a better way to bound it: apparently we exhale around 1 kg of CO2 each day, which has 370g of carbon in it so unless we can radically reengineer our metabolism I guess you need a minimum of 370g daily to maintain carbon levels. 370g / 3 meals / 4 pills = 30g per pill. Even with the density of diamond that would be (picking a convenient rough number) 8 cm3 or 2x2x2cm.
Which is... a hard pill to swallow. Maybe not impossible though.
It doesn't have to be a completely self-contained solution.
[1] Also armed forced with deployed troops would love this too as it makes food logistics much easier.
I think there is a distinction here between people who buy meals-and-snacks as opposed to people who buy ingredients. When my partner and I shop, apart from the fruit and similar, there are very few things that you would directly eat. When my niece and her partner shop, there are numerous packets of biscuits and other snacks as well as prepared ready meals that can be microwaved / oven heated with no other effort required. They generate a lot more plastic waste, as well.
Deleted Comment
Isn't that just having servants?
1971: https://www.blogto.com/upload/2014/03/20111020-royal-alex-f0...
2009: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Royal_Al...
We phased out most coal in the 70s with the last eliminated in the early 2000s. I do not miss the vibrant orange sunsets in summer.
Edit: it works in Firefox (Fennec), here is the content in a normal picture: https://snipboard.io/uxGWaZ.jpg
If a male writer, the article is even more impressive given the clear sensitivity to, and awareness of, women's issues and the likely impact of technology and social changes on women.
That said, the author was likely a person of privilege rather than someone more representative of the population of 1922. A starving writer was unlikely to have been so focused on the challenges of hiring good household staff.
But it is unlikely that women will have an achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.
He's definitely on point 100 years later.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Allm%C3%...
Ex: http://www.simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/by_procession_1920.jp...
- Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were even successful transatlantic flights.
- The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had careers and even unions.
- Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of the world.
- Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing.
In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions – food pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right now).
Wait till you find out what that Ikea crap is made of. :)
Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by some adhesive.
Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice.
However, having just recently replaced a couch from a chain retailer, I can attest that they are pretty much made from paper mache.
Paper mache furniture no but disposable furniture, yeah, kind of.
Private dwellings you could maybe stretch to make some sort of comparison to rates of renting vs owning but that is a stretch.
On nationalized industries and trust busting we seem to have gone against his prediction.
Regarding "no more opportunity" I think the possibility of The Information Age was not even in the same dimension as this guy's RADAR.
But only now, but less so during the 80s
"It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily "makers of men". Most fit women will then be following an individual career."
...
"But it is unlikely that that women will have achieved equality with men."
Alimony and child support do apply to women as well as men in the US, though it's obviously not equally distributed today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. For example, any or all of the following could cause that in a fair system:
* wage earners are still disproportionately men
* women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) custody of children
* women tend to be less likely to work outside the home
While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - because it is and always has been a common ocurrance.
Dead Comment
You don't know what you don't know so there's nothing about computers here, but most of this article was really well done.
> I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822).
I don't know about that statement.
- Radio
- Movies
- Motorized Rail Transit
- Airplanes
- Blimps
- Recorded Audio
- Electrification (esp. lighting)
- Telephony
- Cars
- Subways
- Fax
- Early Television
- Telegraph
- Skyscapers
- Underwater tunnels
- Air Conditioning
- Elevators
- Modern Hospitals
- Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war
- Stock Tickers
- Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.)
- Modern Steel Manufacturing
I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s.
We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue the shift was greater.
We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953
The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was.
I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
> The reality is that we do not know
Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly.
https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor...
Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline.
If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.
Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.
Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight.
Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
I'm not actually very confident about that last part...
It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century.
> the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate
There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next).
BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg.
So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.
Yes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.