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The most striking thing about the thread is how little of current importance was even mentioned: - Bitcoin would become the decade's best investment by far -
by aazaa 7y ago
The most striking thing about the thread is how little of current importance was even mentioned:
- Bitcoin would become the decade's best investment by far
- the President of the US would conduct foreign policy through Twitter
- electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.)
- the sharing economy would threaten the taxi and hotel industries (AirBNB and Uber)
- escalation of school shootings
- the explosive growth of quantitative easing
- negative nominal interest rates on sovereign debt
- revelations of mass surveillance by the US government
- streaming video services would begin to produce content rivaling major studios in quality
- Amazon would become the everything company
- DNA testing would become a major recreational activity with numerous judicial and social implications
- the US would approach energy independence, driven largely by a boom in oil extraction technologies
Also interesting to consider how all of these ideas would have seemed more or less ludicrous in 2010.
- tim333 7y ago"C'est la vie", say the old folks It goes to show you never can tell
- martincmartin 7y agoFor those who don't recognize the reference, it's the chorus of a song made famous by Chuck Berry: https://genius.com/Chuck-berry-you-never-can-tell-lyrics https://genius.com/Chuck-berry-you-never-can-tell-lyrics
- jonahx 7y agoObligatory: https://youtu.be/WSLMN6g_Od4?t=85 https://youtu.be/WSLMN6g_Od4?t=85
- newguy1234 7y agoNow just to predict what will be the big thing in 2030 so I can get rich :)
- spectramax 7y agoOne more to add: - Hong Kong's protests on scale that world has never seen
- rodolphoarruda 7y agoAnd the collapse (in a matter of weeks) of Chile as the most prosperous, richest, free/open society in Latin America.
- andrepd 7y agoChile has massive income and wealth inequality. What good is being "rich" in terms of raw GDP if in practice that wealth goes to a small elite?
- dash2 7y agoApparently quite a lot. Poverty has gone down six-fold in a generation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?end=2017&locations=CL https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?end=2017&lo...
- badrequest 7y agoI wonder how much more it would have gone down if Chile had a more equitable economic system.
- rattray 7y agoI think many economists would argue it'd have gone _up_ rather than down due to the counterintuitive nature of capitalism. In any case, many economists argue over this question :)
- kortilla 7y agoNot much. The thing about inequality is that it makes the top more powerful politically. The amount of money held by the top 0.1 percent is irrelevant to moving the income/wealth needle for the rest of the population. There is a reason those who don’t like inequality had to come up with new measurements to highlight it. There is little impact on the mean, median, and mode if the rich get richer.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago> escalation of school shootings Bubble thought. School shootings are down from previous highs and are actually very rare [0]. COVERAGE and willingness to use any incident to promote a very specific narrative are up. [0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-one-of-the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/ https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...
- calcifer 7y ago"No Way To Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
- slothtrop 7y agoThey've moved the goalpost from this to "the deaths are statistically insignificant".
- alamaslah 7y agoWhere did they get that idea from? [1] Amusingly... it was likely their opposition. This is why you should hold yourself and those you align with to high standards. It only stengthens your position...even if you are completely wrong (although only a little bit) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism
- ancarda 7y agoOn that thought, is there any way to prevent shootings without making guns harder or impossible for citizens to own? Seems many will not disarm in the US, so should we be exploring other options rather than repeatedly saying the US should be more like other countries?
- jonny_eh 7y agoIs it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car? Simple licensing would go a long way to reduce the risk of guns. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20861019/gun-solution-background-check-licensing https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20861019/gun-solution-backgrou...
- coleifer 7y agoHonk-honk!
- buboard 7y agopeople tend to make optimistic predictions. A lot of predictions were correct, and many of them were right on subject, but predicted the positive instead of the negative turn of things. Interesting views regardless, but i cant help to notice that tech progress was nothing like 2000->2010.
- y-c-o-m-b 7y agoI feel like enormous cultural and technological hardware advancements were made between 1990-2010 that affected people on a national or global level. The advances were revolutionary. I have a hard time associating the last decade the same way. To me, the 2010-2020 decade has been stagnant. My overall sentiments, more or less: 1990->2000 we went from very few people owning personal computers to wider adoption of PCs and broadband was gaining traction (I personally had @Home cable internet in 1998). 2000->2010 mass adoption of cell phones, starting with the flip phones to pocket PCs to the first iPhone in 2007. Social media (MySpace, The Facebook). Peer to peer networking, piracy (The Pirate Bay). Laptops. The first tablets. 2010->2020 mild improvements on the stuff from the previous two decades EDIT: I'll give the last decade Uber (although I've only used it once) and AirBnb since that was a huge shift as well, but my overall feeling remains the same.
- pmohun 7y agoThere is a tendency to undervalue recent advancements because they haven't had the same amount of time to demonstrate an impact on the world. I would point to the 2010's as the rise of two phenomena: - Social networking and meme culture - Explosive growth of software These will prove to be just as important as the developments of the 2000's, but haven't had the time for other developments to build on them.
- icebraining 7y agoElectric cars really started gaining traction in the 2010s, with the Leaf, Model S, Zoe, etc.
- ksec 7y agoCopying my answer from another thread I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most important innovation in modern history. 2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users ( iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14 in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC and Internet to a much wider audience. I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and opportunities.
- mbesto 7y ago> - electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.) Valued at a billion dollars by venture capitalists. I'd be genuinely surprised if they are anywhere near a $B in revenue
- vjktyu 7y agoRegarding escalation of school shootings, it seems plausible, but only because (here is an unpopular opinion that will get 20 downvotes) the rich want to disarm the poor and use school/kids/safety as an excuse. And that's understandable: if I was rich enough to afford private schools for my kids in a classy neighborhood, I'd want to keep weirdos with guns far from my family, while at the same time Id have 24/7 former-marines guards armed with full auto weapons.
- ljw1001 7y agoHow does your list not include climate change as a thing of current importance? It wasn't mentioned much in the original either - though i saw one comment calling it "FUD" - but they were making forecasts ;)
- jgtrosh 7y ago> Hopefully network analysis/data mining laws/politics will be handled with a little less FUD, a little less grandstanding, and a little more efficiency than we're seeing with climate change politics... They were clearly describing the handling and discourse (I suppose on a large public scale) of climate change as FUD, not climate change itself.