16 ms·

2020 had some significant silver linings

106 points by apsec112 6y ago

anovikov 6y ago
Also remember that U.S. has finally become fully and truly energy independent this year. And, return of U.S. human spaceflight and final, completely American victory over any real competition in space launch technology, which will result and already resulting in many other positive developments.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  was that by backing carbon based fuels such as fracking and also by wanting to sell their gas abroad (see Nord Stream 2). the future is not extract resources until a lucky few can escape to space, it's to fight together for climate goals (US failed here) and find a way for humanity to live sustainably with what we have.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Don't you think this is a bit hyperbole?
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Unfortunately, no.
      - the-dude 6y ago
        Well, predicting the end of the world and promising an unbearable heat for the non-believers sounds very non-atheist to me. Actually, it sounds very familiar. So far, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last ~70 years have come to fruition. Actually, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last 2000 years have. We will adapt.
        pmiller2 6y ago
        Well, okay. Read this article and the 6+ academic papers linked therein and tell me what you think after that: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-ci...
        anovikov 6y ago
        If it is already inevitable, then why worry? Just learn what will consequences will be, and put money where it will make profit THEN (like, buy land on high latitudes where it is currently almost worthless, and short land on low elevations and/or low latitudes).
        _jfoi 6y ago
        All about profit for you. Such a shame .
        itsthefnlacctdn 6y ago
        We are on an investor's newsboard, these fat cats dont know any other way to live.
        pmiller2 6y ago
        Because, if you read the article, it's actually not "inevitable." What it would take is drastic, coordinated action, lead by the United States, within the next 10 years to reduce emissions to zero or near zero in order to prevent the worst case scenarios from being realistic. This can be done, but not without the cooperation of the top climate polluters, almost all of which are American corporations. Oh, and also the US government is one of those top polluters.
        Leherenn 6y ago
        Do you think it can be done? I mean realistically, not theoretically? I see this as far too demanding for everyone, and far too short for viable alternatives to come up to be a realistic target. On the other hand, this year has shown that people are far more prepared to make huge sacrifices for what we think is the greater good than I would have expected just a year ago.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    We shouldn't "fight for climate goals". Eventually renewables will outcompete fossil fuels by becoming cheaper, let them do it, but till then, name of the game is to pump and burn as much of the cheap fossil fuels as possible - this is the last chance ever to do so, for our children, vast majority of fossil fuels will be inaccessible because of energy costs - driven down by renewables - will be too low and won't pay for extraction. As for climate change, just let it happen. It will happen anyway because if someone reduces their carbon footprint they only leave money on the table for others to grab - and those others will produce MORE carbon for the same amount of goods produced, because their energy efficiency is lower - so any attempts to "fight for climate goals" is destructuve and counterproductive. Just do a fair assessment of future climate changes and proceed with regulatory actions to mitigate them (for example, ban any new capital construction on land which will be flooded in case of 4C temperature rise).
- andybak 6y ago
  Isn't "victory" over competition a bad thing?
  - rjknight 6y ago
    Yes - victory leads to stagnation, and competition leads to progress.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  Why are the greatest achievements of 2020 the things most beneficial to the parochial interest of the United States? The rebalancing of the US energy sector to natural gas has locked it into a new fossil fuel economy, at the very time that we need breakneck renewable investment. Oncoming carbon regulation, consumer reaction against gas, and the declining price-point of renewables, mean that the US is sitting on a carbon bubble waiting to explode. One of the real silver linings of 2020, conspicuously absent from the Vox article, is that South Korea, Japan and China all committed to reach net zero emissions by around mid century, while the EU also brought forward it's targets. I would add that the Iranian nuclear deal is now being revived, breaking the power of militaristic hardliners in Iran, and quashing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Note that both were achieved despite the US: it left the Paris Agreement and reneged on its commitment to the Iranian nuclear deal.
  - 3131s 6y ago
    > I would add that the Iranian nuclear deal is now being revived, breaking the power of militaristic hardliners in Iran As far as I know Biden has not taken any step toward this so far, but many House Democrats are urging him to do so. At the same time though powerful lobbying interests are pushing for the deal to be renegotiated under stricter terms, so I wouldn't count our eggs too early. More importantly, I would think this is entirely negated by the fact that we just murdered two of their country's most prominent public figures. Diplomatic relations might improve, but I have to imagine that a lot of Iranians would be radicalized by these events and not really care which particular administration is responsible ultimately. Trump might catch the blame, but these type of targeted killings in Iran of scientists and other civilians go back much further than just the last term.
    - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
      An article was published under Biden's name in the May/April issue of Foreign Affairs in which he explicitly committed to rejoining the deal. It is almost certain that he will try, and just as importantly, the EU is onboard. It was supposed to be a legacy achievement for the Obama-Biden administration, it's obviously in his interests to revive it. Iranian contempt for the United States is nothing new. It didn't block an agreement in both party's interests last time, and it doesn't have to now.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > ... final, completely American victory over any real competition in space launch technology... No technology victory is ever final and complete, especially not between nations. What we have done can be copied. China has shown itself to be really good at copying, and they have some really smart people. They certainly can do it, if they choose to.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
6) We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty I think we have always known what works, we just weren't willing to do it. I doubt that has really changed.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  We've known for a long time how to fight not only poverty, but hunger, homelessness, wealth inequality, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and, a host of other issues -- even pandemics. There is just no political will to do the things necessary to save us from ourselves.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    Part of the problem is that among the social issues you listed: poverty, hunger, homelessness, wealth inequality...to a large portion of the population theses are not bugs. These are features of not working hard enough. Incentives to join the workforce and do Bullshit Jobs [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  - okthenletssee 6y ago
    OK - how? Safe for killing everybody, I am not sure what you have in mind? If "we" know, why do these things still exist?
- Zenst 6y ago
  What might play out is more localised/micro food production and government drive to make more basics self-sufficient. Things like that do have a trickle down effect.
- Guthur 6y ago
  Yes of course we do, poverty has been consistently driven down over the last 100 years. It's driven down by increase economic activity, would imagine that's pretty obvious by now.
  - 6y ago
jimbob45 6y ago
#7 is the big one for me. Commercialized artificial meat would render much of the world unrecognizable to a time machine traveler.
- telesilla 6y ago
  For me also, as a life long abstainer from mammal and bird products. I wondered on reading this, would I try this meat? Probably, (though in small pieces, I understand vegetarians don't have the gut flora to process meat and it could be uncomfortable). I absolutely am in favour of lab grown meat. I cannot wait for the day when people complain about not being able to afford real pork, fish or chicken because it's too expensive, when we have such strong laws about animal welfare that only the rich or those who farm their own can consume what was a live animal. I'm sure a black market will exist but on the greater scale, it will be a blessing for the earth. Imagine if, one of the labmeat companies becomes so powerful that they bribe the president of Brazil to make deforestation illegal, and so limiting the amount of land available for cattle and cattle food. I'll happily accept this as a weird side effect.
- 3131s 6y ago
  Agreed. The loss of plant and animal species is primarily driven by animal agriculture, which along with the welfare of the animals themselves is above every other concern for me.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Yesterday I cooked oatmeal burgers (oatmeal, onions and eggs) and my parents told me that they tasted better than meat ones. To manufacture artificial meat is more difficult than artificial milk and eggs, and I think it is a better venue to go.
bawolff 6y ago
> we are now ready for the next pandemic Doubt it. Its not like the next covid is going to happen next year. By the time its relavent people would have forgotten all about it just like how right now the spanish flu is a distant chapter in the history books.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Sars was 17 years ago, and East Asian countries responded much better to Covid as result of their lessons learned, with Taiwan being the star pupil. My expectation, though, is that the US will never reach such levels of life-saving, due to our cultural differences.
  - makomk 6y ago
    The thing is, much of the approach that worked for Sars shouldn't actually work for Covid - in particular, Covid has characteristics that make it much less amenable to contact tracing than Sars. (The UK, US and I think most other western countries used the same contact tracing early on that kept Sars out of those countries. It didn't work. You also don't see this discussed much, because it doesn't fit the narrative - except to attack the UK government for discontinuing the contact tracing once it failed.) The one thing that did work well early on is restrictions on travel, which the WHO, China and the press in Western countries campaigned against. The only Western country I know of that applied reasonably sensible travel restrictions early on is the US, and very soon it's going to get a new president who campaigned on the extremely dubious claim that those restrictions made things worse which went basically unchallenged by the press. (In particular, Italy's travel restrictions - which are often pointed to as proof the US ones were stupid and pointless - only blocked people from travelling directly from China, so they could just travel via other countries and Italy had no record of where they came form. I know the UK's government-funded experts concluded that was much less effective than banning people who'd visited China recently.) Those travel restrictions also wouldn't work for any country geographically or geopolitically close to Italy - they were still reporting basically zero cases at a point when a substantial proportion of the population was infected. This probably put countries which were closer to China than Italy at something of an inherent advantage.
roenxi 6y ago
> 6) We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty Claiming 2020 involved lessons in fighting poverty is a lot like walking up to someone, breaking both their legs, giving them crutches and claiming we've made great leaps in walking. "Fighting poverty" should involve creating large groups of people where it can't really be imagined how they could be impoverished because they are too resourceful and motivated. 2020 was in large part asking farmers, builders and the productive types of the world to support everyone else sitting around at home. That isn't fair and making it a long-term thing ... it might work, but it is going to lead to some pretty severe tensions.
0x70run 6y ago
god i fucking hate vox
protoman3000 6y ago
So how come we don’t see hyper inflation with this excessive government spending? For decades politicians had one stable message: Turning the highly “balanced” and austere fiscal machinery system towards spending yields only hyperinflation. They said look at Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Germany etc. And the worlds supposedly best economists produced models that legitimize this view, making it dominant in education and discourse. We now gave people basically a UBI, got many people out of poverty with, but all the issues they have been saying would appear and all the false excuses they put on the table have not materialized. Isn’t one very big scandal of 2020 that all of these people have been lying to the population? That we had the tools to fight poverty and create better living conditions all along but deliberately didn’t chose to do so? It appears they just want to bully and abuse people by artificially creating a bad situation and then bully and shame them that the people are in a bad situation.
- digitalengineer 6y ago
  > So how come we don’t see hyper inflation with this excessive government spending? Because the $ is the worlds reserve currency... The US moves the burden to ROW (rest of world). However there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma “The Triffin dilemma or Triffin paradox is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. “
  - protoman3000 6y ago
    EU Countries have similar excessive spending programs and the Euro is not the worlds reserve currency, yet we don’t see Venezualian Hyperinflation. How is that reconcilable with this theory?
    - dismalpedigree 6y ago
      The money is not going into productive use in the hands of most recipients. Its being used to pay down debts owed to the creditors in large scale. Debt loads have decreased significantly with the money distribution. Those who end up with the money struggle to find assets to invest it in, which is why the stock market, private equity markets, and all other asset markets are heavily inflated now. The money had to go somewhere.
dudul 6y ago
> 4) Our digital infrastructure for remote work was tested — and passed This is pretty funny because ISPs have been using the excuse of "protecting their infrastructure" to justify data caps for years. Now that we've all seen that it's total BS, they just say they want to be "fair" and just charge people who "use more" and go over the cap.
- gns24 6y ago
  The actual load on ISPs has changed very little due to home working. Compared to the evening Netflix peak, the daytime usage increase is pretty small.
  - dudul 6y ago
    Agreed. The network activity of working from home is a rounding error compared to video streaming or online gaming.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      In my persional experience online gaming is <50mb/hr. Zoom meetings, meanwhile, are basically a bunch of concurrent livestreams. I would rather say that online gaming is a rounding error compared to WFH and streaming.
      - 10000truths 6y ago
        Depends highly on the game. From what I've read, most multiplayer games use around 80-100 megabytes/hour, but I've read numbers as low as 50 and as high as 300. A Netflix 4k video stream has a bitrate of around 6.75 gigabytes/hour, and a Zoom call will use somewhere between 500 to 1500 megabytes/hour for a one-on-one (and somewhat more for group calls). So work-from-home is an order of magnitude more bandwidth hungry than online gaming, but still reasonable for a country with good Internet infrastructure. High quality video streaming is the real killer indeed.
  - baskire 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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ilaksh 6y ago
They didn't mention that Waymo launched their self-driving taxi service to the public in Phoenix this year. And if you look at the most recent Tesla FSD beta versions, it's progressing fast and already quite amazing. I also personally think that the size of the Starship prototype made that belly-flop and landing maneuver pretty significant.
- Ottolay 6y ago
  I missed it. There was really little news that this happened. Google's anti-hype approach to Waymo is interesting.
barnacled 6y ago
It continues to astonish me the degree to which a literal concentration camp operating totalitarian state can get away with barely a mention after unleashing a pandemic which has killed 1.5M people. Historians will look back on this with horror. However the virus broke out, China knew full well after SARS 1 that wet markets and e.g. traditional Chinese medicine were huge pandemic risks and did nothing. After SARS 2 broke out there was a very well evidenced cover up and misinformation campaign which apparently without which could have saved 95% of cases. But instead of the media keeping that in collective consciousness we get pieces like this. As they rightly say the next pandemic could be considerably worse. The absolute lack of any political or economic pressure on the country most likely to cause it directly informed by a media who appear to no longer care about that fact will be a big factor. If you think I am being unreasonable, just do the thought experiment and imagine the US or UK had done what china did. You would not hear the end of it and sanctions and actions against them would be instant and severe. But don't worry, at least zoom seems to work ok.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Sanctions on the US are inconceivable regardless of what the US does. The pardoning of war criminals goes by with a mere eyeroll.
  - barnacled 6y ago
    I think it's precisely an attitude like this which is the problem. The US/UK and China are incomparable. For example, you can say what you just said without consequence. Try that in China. There is no rule of law there, prosecutors get a 99% conviction rate and political opponents are disappeared. The communist government system has killed over 100M and China actively organ harvests political prisoners. the US and UK may have done terrible wrongs but they are held endlessly to account. I don't want to get into a dreadful endless debate about foreign adventures (I am not a fan of the Afghan or Iraqi wars by the way) but there is just a world of difference between a totalitarian state and a democratic one. Imagine the police turning up and arresting you for that comment and you disappear never to be heard from again. That is the reality for many Chinese dissidents. Don't undervalue the freedoms gifted to you by the imperfect state in which you live.
okthenletssee 6y ago
Wait, their "solution to poverty" is to take out a Trillion Dollar loan, give everybody 1000$, then make a statistic showing everybody had at least 1000$? Yeah that's a brilliant scheme, it definitely looks like we solved poverty now.
gdevenyi 6y ago
Great. Look forward to having the worst year in modern memory to be voxsplained to me.
jbb67 6y ago
Yeah it has a few mildly interesting points, and then starts going on about lab grown meat as if that's a thing anyone wants. Proper food please for me.
baskire 6y ago
Article forgets the biggest of them all. Peace in the Middle East. Not once in my life did I think 2020 would be the year when many middle eastern countries sign peace deals with Israel. Heck there’s already Israeli Jewish weddings in Dubai!!! The us government who helped broker these deserves a peace prize. If not with their help and assistance these peace deals would not have occurred. I look forward to what 2021 will bring with the Middle East better aligned to future industrial and cultural growth.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I agree, though I would say "several" instead of "many". There are, I think, four countries. That leaves 10 or 20 to go, depending on how you define "middle eastern".
  - baskire 6y ago
    Fair enough. Even a single peace deal would have been a huge accomplishment. The fact there’s multiple in one year is awesome. Gives me hope than we’ll see a peace deal with the West Bank and Gaza Strip within the decade.
- bryananderson 6y ago
  Which war was ended by the signing of these peace deals?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  No, the chances for real, long-lasting peace in the Middle East have actually ended with this year (or at least, this presidency). While 4 years ago there was some hope, it is now impossible to imagine that: (1) there will ever be a peaceful 2 state solution to the Palestinian crisis (2) there will ever be another deal between the US and Iran The fact that a handful of arab states have agreed to join Israel's side instead of Palestine's is in no way an end to the threat that the conflict between the two creates. And let's not forget that the war in Yemen is still ongoing, with US military support for the aggressor, Saudi Arabia.
- jedberg 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
Some of these are a bit of a reach, but maybe some reaching optimism is just what we need right now.

106 points by apsec112 6y ago

Also remember that U.S. has finally become fully and truly energy independent this year. And, return of U.S. human spaceflight and final, completely American victory over any real competition in space launch technology, which will result and already resulting in many other positive developments.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
was that by backing carbon based fuels such as fracking and also by wanting to sell their gas abroad (see Nord Stream 2). the future is not extract resources until a lucky few can escape to space, it's to fight together for climate goals (US failed here) and find a way for humanity to live sustainably with what we have.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Don't you think this is a bit hyperbole?
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Unfortunately, no.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      Well, predicting the end of the world and promising an unbearable heat for the non-believers sounds very non-atheist to me. Actually, it sounds very familiar. So far, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last ~70 years have come to fruition. Actually, none of the catastrophic predictions from the last 2000 years have. We will adapt.
      - pmiller2 6y ago
        Well, okay. Read this article and the 6+ academic papers linked therein and tell me what you think after that: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-ci...
        anovikov 6y ago
        If it is already inevitable, then why worry? Just learn what will consequences will be, and put money where it will make profit THEN (like, buy land on high latitudes where it is currently almost worthless, and short land on low elevations and/or low latitudes).
        _jfoi 6y ago
        All about profit for you. Such a shame .
        itsthefnlacctdn 6y ago
        We are on an investor's newsboard, these fat cats dont know any other way to live.
        pmiller2 6y ago
        Because, if you read the article, it's actually not "inevitable." What it would take is drastic, coordinated action, lead by the United States, within the next 10 years to reduce emissions to zero or near zero in order to prevent the worst case scenarios from being realistic. This can be done, but not without the cooperation of the top climate polluters, almost all of which are American corporations. Oh, and also the US government is one of those top polluters.
        Leherenn 6y ago
        Do you think it can be done? I mean realistically, not theoretically? I see this as far too demanding for everyone, and far too short for viable alternatives to come up to be a realistic target. On the other hand, this year has shown that people are far more prepared to make huge sacrifices for what we think is the greater good than I would have expected just a year ago.
- anovikov 6y ago
  We shouldn't "fight for climate goals". Eventually renewables will outcompete fossil fuels by becoming cheaper, let them do it, but till then, name of the game is to pump and burn as much of the cheap fossil fuels as possible - this is the last chance ever to do so, for our children, vast majority of fossil fuels will be inaccessible because of energy costs - driven down by renewables - will be too low and won't pay for extraction. As for climate change, just let it happen. It will happen anyway because if someone reduces their carbon footprint they only leave money on the table for others to grab - and those others will produce MORE carbon for the same amount of goods produced, because their energy efficiency is lower - so any attempts to "fight for climate goals" is destructuve and counterproductive. Just do a fair assessment of future climate changes and proceed with regulatory actions to mitigate them (for example, ban any new capital construction on land which will be flooded in case of 4C temperature rise).
andybak 6y ago
Isn't "victory" over competition a bad thing?
- rjknight 6y ago
  Yes - victory leads to stagnation, and competition leads to progress.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Emma_Goldman 6y ago
Why are the greatest achievements of 2020 the things most beneficial to the parochial interest of the United States? The rebalancing of the US energy sector to natural gas has locked it into a new fossil fuel economy, at the very time that we need breakneck renewable investment. Oncoming carbon regulation, consumer reaction against gas, and the declining price-point of renewables, mean that the US is sitting on a carbon bubble waiting to explode. One of the real silver linings of 2020, conspicuously absent from the Vox article, is that South Korea, Japan and China all committed to reach net zero emissions by around mid century, while the EU also brought forward it's targets. I would add that the Iranian nuclear deal is now being revived, breaking the power of militaristic hardliners in Iran, and quashing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Note that both were achieved despite the US: it left the Paris Agreement and reneged on its commitment to the Iranian nuclear deal.
- 3131s 6y ago
  > I would add that the Iranian nuclear deal is now being revived, breaking the power of militaristic hardliners in Iran As far as I know Biden has not taken any step toward this so far, but many House Democrats are urging him to do so. At the same time though powerful lobbying interests are pushing for the deal to be renegotiated under stricter terms, so I wouldn't count our eggs too early. More importantly, I would think this is entirely negated by the fact that we just murdered two of their country's most prominent public figures. Diplomatic relations might improve, but I have to imagine that a lot of Iranians would be radicalized by these events and not really care which particular administration is responsible ultimately. Trump might catch the blame, but these type of targeted killings in Iran of scientists and other civilians go back much further than just the last term.
  - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    An article was published under Biden's name in the May/April issue of Foreign Affairs in which he explicitly committed to rejoining the deal. It is almost certain that he will try, and just as importantly, the EU is onboard. It was supposed to be a legacy achievement for the Obama-Biden administration, it's obviously in his interests to revive it. Iranian contempt for the United States is nothing new. It didn't block an agreement in both party's interests last time, and it doesn't have to now.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> ... final, completely American victory over any real competition in space launch technology... No technology victory is ever final and complete, especially not between nations. What we have done can be copied. China has shown itself to be really good at copying, and they have some really smart people. They certainly can do it, if they choose to.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

6) We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty I think we have always known what works, we just weren't willing to do it. I doubt that has really changed.

pmiller2 6y ago
We've known for a long time how to fight not only poverty, but hunger, homelessness, wealth inequality, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and, a host of other issues -- even pandemics. There is just no political will to do the things necessary to save us from ourselves.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that among the social issues you listed: poverty, hunger, homelessness, wealth inequality...to a large portion of the population theses are not bugs. These are features of not working hard enough. Incentives to join the workforce and do Bullshit Jobs [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- okthenletssee 6y ago
  OK - how? Safe for killing everybody, I am not sure what you have in mind? If "we" know, why do these things still exist?
Zenst 6y ago
What might play out is more localised/micro food production and government drive to make more basics self-sufficient. Things like that do have a trickle down effect.
Guthur 6y ago
Yes of course we do, poverty has been consistently driven down over the last 100 years. It's driven down by increase economic activity, would imagine that's pretty obvious by now.
- 6y ago

jimbob45 6y ago

#7 is the big one for me. Commercialized artificial meat would render much of the world unrecognizable to a time machine traveler.

telesilla 6y ago
For me also, as a life long abstainer from mammal and bird products. I wondered on reading this, would I try this meat? Probably, (though in small pieces, I understand vegetarians don't have the gut flora to process meat and it could be uncomfortable). I absolutely am in favour of lab grown meat. I cannot wait for the day when people complain about not being able to afford real pork, fish or chicken because it's too expensive, when we have such strong laws about animal welfare that only the rich or those who farm their own can consume what was a live animal. I'm sure a black market will exist but on the greater scale, it will be a blessing for the earth. Imagine if, one of the labmeat companies becomes so powerful that they bribe the president of Brazil to make deforestation illegal, and so limiting the amount of land available for cattle and cattle food. I'll happily accept this as a weird side effect.
3131s 6y ago
Agreed. The loss of plant and animal species is primarily driven by animal agriculture, which along with the welfare of the animals themselves is above every other concern for me.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Yesterday I cooked oatmeal burgers (oatmeal, onions and eggs) and my parents told me that they tasted better than meat ones. To manufacture artificial meat is more difficult than artificial milk and eggs, and I think it is a better venue to go.

bawolff 6y ago

> we are now ready for the next pandemic Doubt it. Its not like the next covid is going to happen next year. By the time its relavent people would have forgotten all about it just like how right now the spanish flu is a distant chapter in the history books.

jmchuster 6y ago
Sars was 17 years ago, and East Asian countries responded much better to Covid as result of their lessons learned, with Taiwan being the star pupil. My expectation, though, is that the US will never reach such levels of life-saving, due to our cultural differences.
- makomk 6y ago
  The thing is, much of the approach that worked for Sars shouldn't actually work for Covid - in particular, Covid has characteristics that make it much less amenable to contact tracing than Sars. (The UK, US and I think most other western countries used the same contact tracing early on that kept Sars out of those countries. It didn't work. You also don't see this discussed much, because it doesn't fit the narrative - except to attack the UK government for discontinuing the contact tracing once it failed.) The one thing that did work well early on is restrictions on travel, which the WHO, China and the press in Western countries campaigned against. The only Western country I know of that applied reasonably sensible travel restrictions early on is the US, and very soon it's going to get a new president who campaigned on the extremely dubious claim that those restrictions made things worse which went basically unchallenged by the press. (In particular, Italy's travel restrictions - which are often pointed to as proof the US ones were stupid and pointless - only blocked people from travelling directly from China, so they could just travel via other countries and Italy had no record of where they came form. I know the UK's government-funded experts concluded that was much less effective than banning people who'd visited China recently.) Those travel restrictions also wouldn't work for any country geographically or geopolitically close to Italy - they were still reporting basically zero cases at a point when a substantial proportion of the population was infected. This probably put countries which were closer to China than Italy at something of an inherent advantage.

roenxi 6y ago

> 6) We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty Claiming 2020 involved lessons in fighting poverty is a lot like walking up to someone, breaking both their legs, giving them crutches and claiming we've made great leaps in walking. "Fighting poverty" should involve creating large groups of people where it can't really be imagined how they could be impoverished because they are too resourceful and motivated. 2020 was in large part asking farmers, builders and the productive types of the world to support everyone else sitting around at home. That isn't fair and making it a long-term thing ... it might work, but it is going to lead to some pretty severe tensions.

0x70run 6y ago

god i fucking hate vox

protoman3000 6y ago

So how come we don’t see hyper inflation with this excessive government spending? For decades politicians had one stable message: Turning the highly “balanced” and austere fiscal machinery system towards spending yields only hyperinflation. They said look at Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, Germany etc. And the worlds supposedly best economists produced models that legitimize this view, making it dominant in education and discourse. We now gave people basically a UBI, got many people out of poverty with, but all the issues they have been saying would appear and all the false excuses they put on the table have not materialized. Isn’t one very big scandal of 2020 that all of these people have been lying to the population? That we had the tools to fight poverty and create better living conditions all along but deliberately didn’t chose to do so? It appears they just want to bully and abuse people by artificially creating a bad situation and then bully and shame them that the people are in a bad situation.

digitalengineer 6y ago
> So how come we don’t see hyper inflation with this excessive government spending? Because the $ is the worlds reserve currency... The US moves the burden to ROW (rest of world). However there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma “The Triffin dilemma or Triffin paradox is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. “
- protoman3000 6y ago
  EU Countries have similar excessive spending programs and the Euro is not the worlds reserve currency, yet we don’t see Venezualian Hyperinflation. How is that reconcilable with this theory?
  - dismalpedigree 6y ago
    The money is not going into productive use in the hands of most recipients. Its being used to pay down debts owed to the creditors in large scale. Debt loads have decreased significantly with the money distribution. Those who end up with the money struggle to find assets to invest it in, which is why the stock market, private equity markets, and all other asset markets are heavily inflated now. The money had to go somewhere.

dudul 6y ago

> 4) Our digital infrastructure for remote work was tested — and passed This is pretty funny because ISPs have been using the excuse of "protecting their infrastructure" to justify data caps for years. Now that we've all seen that it's total BS, they just say they want to be "fair" and just charge people who "use more" and go over the cap.

gns24 6y ago
The actual load on ISPs has changed very little due to home working. Compared to the evening Netflix peak, the daytime usage increase is pretty small.
- dudul 6y ago
  Agreed. The network activity of working from home is a rounding error compared to video streaming or online gaming.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    In my persional experience online gaming is <50mb/hr. Zoom meetings, meanwhile, are basically a bunch of concurrent livestreams. I would rather say that online gaming is a rounding error compared to WFH and streaming.
    - 10000truths 6y ago
      Depends highly on the game. From what I've read, most multiplayer games use around 80-100 megabytes/hour, but I've read numbers as low as 50 and as high as 300. A Netflix 4k video stream has a bitrate of around 6.75 gigabytes/hour, and a Zoom call will use somewhere between 500 to 1500 megabytes/hour for a one-on-one (and somewhat more for group calls). So work-from-home is an order of magnitude more bandwidth hungry than online gaming, but still reasonable for a country with good Internet infrastructure. High quality video streaming is the real killer indeed.
- baskire 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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ilaksh 6y ago

They didn't mention that Waymo launched their self-driving taxi service to the public in Phoenix this year. And if you look at the most recent Tesla FSD beta versions, it's progressing fast and already quite amazing. I also personally think that the size of the Starship prototype made that belly-flop and landing maneuver pretty significant.

Ottolay 6y ago
I missed it. There was really little news that this happened. Google's anti-hype approach to Waymo is interesting.

barnacled 6y ago

It continues to astonish me the degree to which a literal concentration camp operating totalitarian state can get away with barely a mention after unleashing a pandemic which has killed 1.5M people. Historians will look back on this with horror. However the virus broke out, China knew full well after SARS 1 that wet markets and e.g. traditional Chinese medicine were huge pandemic risks and did nothing. After SARS 2 broke out there was a very well evidenced cover up and misinformation campaign which apparently without which could have saved 95% of cases. But instead of the media keeping that in collective consciousness we get pieces like this. As they rightly say the next pandemic could be considerably worse. The absolute lack of any political or economic pressure on the country most likely to cause it directly informed by a media who appear to no longer care about that fact will be a big factor. If you think I am being unreasonable, just do the thought experiment and imagine the US or UK had done what china did. You would not hear the end of it and sanctions and actions against them would be instant and severe. But don't worry, at least zoom seems to work ok.

pjc50 6y ago
Sanctions on the US are inconceivable regardless of what the US does. The pardoning of war criminals goes by with a mere eyeroll.
- barnacled 6y ago
  I think it's precisely an attitude like this which is the problem. The US/UK and China are incomparable. For example, you can say what you just said without consequence. Try that in China. There is no rule of law there, prosecutors get a 99% conviction rate and political opponents are disappeared. The communist government system has killed over 100M and China actively organ harvests political prisoners. the US and UK may have done terrible wrongs but they are held endlessly to account. I don't want to get into a dreadful endless debate about foreign adventures (I am not a fan of the Afghan or Iraqi wars by the way) but there is just a world of difference between a totalitarian state and a democratic one. Imagine the police turning up and arresting you for that comment and you disappear never to be heard from again. That is the reality for many Chinese dissidents. Don't undervalue the freedoms gifted to you by the imperfect state in which you live.

okthenletssee 6y ago

Wait, their "solution to poverty" is to take out a Trillion Dollar loan, give everybody 1000$, then make a statistic showing everybody had at least 1000$? Yeah that's a brilliant scheme, it definitely looks like we solved poverty now.

gdevenyi 6y ago

Great. Look forward to having the worst year in modern memory to be voxsplained to me.

jbb67 6y ago

Yeah it has a few mildly interesting points, and then starts going on about lab grown meat as if that's a thing anyone wants. Proper food please for me.

baskire 6y ago

Article forgets the biggest of them all. Peace in the Middle East. Not once in my life did I think 2020 would be the year when many middle eastern countries sign peace deals with Israel. Heck there’s already Israeli Jewish weddings in Dubai!!! The us government who helped broker these deserves a peace prize. If not with their help and assistance these peace deals would not have occurred. I look forward to what 2021 will bring with the Middle East better aligned to future industrial and cultural growth.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I agree, though I would say "several" instead of "many". There are, I think, four countries. That leaves 10 or 20 to go, depending on how you define "middle eastern".
- baskire 6y ago
  Fair enough. Even a single peace deal would have been a huge accomplishment. The fact there’s multiple in one year is awesome. Gives me hope than we’ll see a peace deal with the West Bank and Gaza Strip within the decade.
bryananderson 6y ago
Which war was ended by the signing of these peace deals?
tsimionescu 6y ago
No, the chances for real, long-lasting peace in the Middle East have actually ended with this year (or at least, this presidency). While 4 years ago there was some hope, it is now impossible to imagine that: (1) there will ever be a peaceful 2 state solution to the Palestinian crisis (2) there will ever be another deal between the US and Iran The fact that a handful of arab states have agreed to join Israel's side instead of Palestine's is in no way an end to the threat that the conflict between the two creates. And let's not forget that the war in Yemen is still ongoing, with US military support for the aggressor, Saudi Arabia.
jedberg 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

Some of these are a bit of a reach, but maybe some reaching optimism is just what we need right now.