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I know it's polular to predict a dystopia future that resembles 1984; but I'm much more inclined to believe we are more heading into a Cyberpunk future where co
by RubenSandwich 8y ago
I know it's polular to predict a dystopia future that resembles 1984; but I'm much more inclined to believe we are more heading into a Cyberpunk future where corporations hold the real power and nation states are more puppets for their will.
- craftyguy 8y ago> we are more heading into a Cyberpunk future where corporations hold the real power I believe we're more heading into an Idiocracy future where corporations also hold the real power (e.g. "Carl's Jr machine: Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother.")
- setquk 8y agoI agree. They already sell Smartwater. Because it has got electrolytes.
- code_duck 8y agoI think that comparison is a little fuzzy.
- jessaustin 8y agoThat's what plants crave!
- berbec 8y agoNo, plants crave Mountain Dew
- kipchak 8y agoUnrelated aside: 1L Smartwater bottles are rather light and durable for reuse in backpacking.
- ahtu123 8y agoI like them on flights too since they actually fit in the little pocket on the seat
- craftyguy 8y agoYea totally, Sawyer filters fit them nicely too. They're VERY durable, as in I've got one bottle I've carried probably hundreds of miles by now over several trips and it's been dropped and squeezed thousands of times. Looks like a bear chewed it up, but it still does not leak. Pro tip: you can replace the O-ring that comes with the filter for a durable rubber one used for garden hoses for a real nice fit on the smartwater bottles, and have some extras because the worst is if you lose that seal (or it is damaged) and you are out in the wilderness.
- code_duck 8y agoWe have seen this coming for a long time. The thing is that 30 years ago, we thought it was going to be a technologically sophisticated, slick ultra-IBM type corporation that managed everyone's lives. Now, it seems like it's going to be more like a television station's advertising department manages your life.
- oldcynic 8y agoRoughly what Neil Postman thought around 30 years ago then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- code_duck 8y agoRight, more like Brave New World than 1984, I reckon. But that's not to say either style has to be dystopic.
- slowmovintarget 8y agoBruce Sterling: Distraction ...also Heavy Weather
- acct1771 8y agoI...have you read those books?
- galieos_ghost 8y agoMost likely, low IQ people reproduce at around 2x the rate of the high IQ individuals who subsidize their existence through taxes.
- skygazer 8y agoShort parents can have tall kids and vice-versa. Smart parents can have dumb kids and vice-versa. Genetic inheritance is complicated. Effective IQ can be downwardly influenced by factors such as nutrition. Reality is far too complex to be captured by your pithy sentence, or my pithy paragraph.
- staticautomatic 8y agoI think it's fair to say in some instances that a person would have had a higher IQ but for some thing, but the term "effective IQ" is semantic jibberish. The score simply is whatever the test says it is.
- skygazer 8y agoFair enough, it was a term I just made up to concisely convey the notion you described: “were it not for these factors, the results of the test may have had substantive differences.” Perhaps I failed, but I think my failure was an unfortunate distraction from the main point which you seemed to apprehend anyway. So there’s that.
- sctb 8y agoWe've banned this account for consistently violating the guidelines. If you'd like to use this site as intended, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- beenBoutIT 8y agoPresident Trump's experience with the World Wrestling Federation qualifies him as the literal embodiment of Idiocracy's Wrestler President. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc
- tytytytytytytyt 8y agoLike the show Continuum?
- adventured 8y agoWe've already been there. The 18th and 19th centuries were largely like that. The great wars of colonial Europe were heavily financed by private money. Corporations held the real power in the US from ~1870 - roughly the beginning of the industrial revolution - until the vast Federal expansion of power and taxation of the WW2 build-up and thereafter. Rockefeller single handedly stabilized the finances of the US Government by pledging his wealth as a support prop to JP Morgan. That premise is laughable today. The Federal + State governments spend the equivalent of a Jeff Bezos fortune every week. Meanwhile the US military is radically larger and more powerful than it was a century ago, as are all the agencies of the State. If you think corporations are powerful today, the reality is they're hilariously weak compared to what they were a century ago. Further, back then there were very few regulatory restraints on corporations, while the giants were simultaneously drastically larger in comparison to the Federal Government and as a share of GDP. Most of the state governments barely even existed financially.
- DougWebb 8y agoYour assertion seems off... Sure, the US federal government may spend far more money than any individual corporation or mega-wealthy person today, but who controls the spending? Corporations and wealthy individuals are simply using leverage today, buying influence with legislators via lobbying and campaign donations, to guide government spending.
- dmix 8y agoRegardless the power has still fundamentally shifted from the private domain into public top-down control. Just because there are areas where lobbying has been influential in getting gov to help them doesn't make this not the case. If anything the corporations are then not private corporations as they were in the 1800s/early 1900s, but merely an extension of the government. They are being handed monopolies/oligopolies top-down, much like state owned corporations are sanctioned market power centrally. So no, it's not the same. The corporation in a modern state-capitalist context doesn't have to provide value to the public to gain power and wealth, merely influence the right people in politics. That's way different than private industry, and potentially far more destructive and wasteful of resources (see: "private" prisons which depend completely on government for survival and have little of the benefits of market functions like competition and growth via customer value). Not to mention special interest groups, unions, influential individuals, etc also have significant pull in the government as well. It's not just corporations. There have been plenty of economic intervention by the government, politicians have hardly been monopolized only by (pseudo private) corporate interests.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y agoYou're literally re-iterating the comment above you
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoSo, a different kind of dystopia then?