32 ms·

Oh, 2022

• zestyping 5y ago
  Ah, "feco-chiropteroid crazy" is my new favourite expression. Thank you, Charlie Stross!
• elkos 5y ago
  Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring for many hn users. I believe it could be interesting to discuss his (pessimistic) take on this year.
  • zestyping 5y ago
    And decade.
  • rcarmo 5y ago
    He is by far one of the most interesting bloggers on my RSS feeds, and I would also recommend reading the comments - in which he participates actively.
    • 41b696ef1113 5y ago
      For anyone else who went hunting for the feed[0] [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/atom.xml http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/atom.xml
  • jodrellblank 5y ago
    He's also a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
    • maxerickson 5y ago
      He'll block you on twitter for politely quibbling with his presentation of facts.
      • noah_buddy 5y ago
        Is there a deeper meaning to take from this? Some people block anyone negative on Twitter. He's free to use the platform as he pleases, I see no reason why someone should feel obligated to have or present an externally valid reason for blocking others.
        • cwmma 5y ago
          Stross just blocks nazis and terfs even when they are polite about it. This pisses some people off who see JUST ASKING QUESTIONS!
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
          • lazyasciiart 5y ago
            Polite about……being nazis? Good for him for not lending credence to the idea that civility makes anything acceptable.
        • maxerickson 5y ago
          No, I'm just petty and small minded. On the other hand, when someone confidently opines about a lot of things and then rejects mild corrections (I literally just said something like "thing isn't part of B, it's owned by the same parent company"), you wonder what facts are feeding into those opinions.
          • lazyasciiart 5y ago
            You didn’t though, you said something much much less useful than that -“you’re slightly wrong, here’s a Wikipedia article for you to read”
        • toyg 5y ago
          Some people also have a quixotic definition of "facts", and figuring out if that's the case can be exhausting for popular users with thousands of followers.
  • eu 5y ago
    programmer in a former life
  • BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Speaking of Accelerando, here's a similar retrospective of his about 2018 : https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-crazy-years.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra... (The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the future 2018.)
  • Ostrogodsky 5y ago
• voldacar 5y ago
  > Quite possibly the Antarctic ice shelves will be destablized decades ahead of schedule, leading to gradual but inexorable sea levels rising around the world. This may paradoxically trigger an economic boom in construction this is known as the broken window fallacy
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    No, the fallacy is "the economic boom is good, so climate change is OK". Noting the existence of the boom isn't the fallacy. Advocating for it is.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    I think this is the psychology behind a lot of investors. Breaking even after an unnecessary loss is seen as good.
  • kybernetikos 5y ago
    I don't think it is at all. It falls under the 'that which is seen' in Bastiat's original parable. > I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen. What Stross does not say is that because rising sea levels are good for the construction industry they are therefore good in general. That would be an example of the broken window fallacy. In most cases broken windows truly are good for glaziers, but that doesn't mean that we should break windows.
    • voldacar 5y ago
      Ok granted, yes. When I read it I thought he meant that an economic boom will result from all the new construction, but I hope you are right that he merely meant that a lot of construction will occur, to the benefit of the construction industry.
  • walrus01 5y ago
    comparatively "rich" countries might have a boom in seawall construction and coastal related construction, but I'm much less optimistic about places like Bangladesh.
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  These predictions are like puzzle pieces that don't fit together. If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to be doing the (building) work for a new economic boom? You can't seriously say "I'm going to make predictions - but let's just ignore the most important health event for over a century." So - mRNA vaccinations. If you can vaccinate against AIDS, flu, cancer (being investigated...), and the rest, you get a bimodal population where a fair proportion of those born before Vaccination Day are cripples, and potentially everyone born after is super-immune to many killer diseases. The important word being "potentially." Political implications? Just a bit. If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?) Can you even have a self-sustaining Moon base without relying on Earth. (Hint: not for a long time.) Cars: I really don't think many people are going to be thinking about cars in 2030-2040. Cars are useless if your roads/buildings are flooded/burning. Robots? Possibly. (See also: economic boom. Kind of) But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered? I'd like to believe we can beat the raccoons yet.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I'm with you 100%. I think Stross is just going for laughs. 2031 is way too soon for much of this, when you consider where we were in 2011 compared to today. Musk may shoot his load to the Moon or Mars for twitter likes, but in terms of funding and feasibility, I don't think he'll have the same billions to play with in 10 years, and NASA needs a decade headstart. China and India seem unlikely to shoot for Mars since they are focused on the global production (China) or their own capital boom (India).
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    The "Great Lakes megalopolis" is hundreds of feet above sea level and getting wetter with the warming. Lots of people will still be worried about cars for a long time.
  • gregmac 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• walrus01 5y ago
  Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial cablemodem DOCSIS3 segment in a randomly chosen house in a suburb somewhere, you might also see an average of 0.50% loss in many cities. For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing. The next big thing will be to see if they can really get satellite-to-satellite laser links working so that starlink service area and coverage is not limited by having multiple moving LEO satellites in line of sight of both the CPE and a regional spacex earth station at the same time. for instance if people wanted to put a working starlink terminal somewhere really difficult to reach like socotra, yemen.
  • arka2147483647 5y ago
    Do you know if this based on some technical aspect, or simply that has Space X not yet to saturated their network capacity?
    • walrus01 5y ago
      there was a 1-hour full outage at 0200 immediately preceding it. without inside info into what they're doing, I believe it's a combination of new cpe terminal firmware, satellite firmware/software loads, and more of the recently launched satellites being put into use at their intended orbits, so there's greater simultaneous satellite coverage over my area now.
  • gman83 5y ago
    Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?
    • 5y ago
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Asking because I have no idea - Will other mRNA vaccines have short-lived efficacy like the covid one does? Will you need an AIDS vaccine booster every six months?
  • evgen 5y ago
    This really depends on how quickly the virus in question mutates and what components of the virus the vaccine keys on for its protective features. HIV evolves quickly (it is a sloppy replicator and is a fast reproducer) but if the vaccine targets a pathway that all variants use it can end up being effective for a very long time, particularly if the pathway that the vaccine targets is one that is important in how the virus interacts with (or targets in the case of HIV) the immune system.
  • tialaramex 5y ago
    The purpose of all vaccines (including those built with mRNA technology, many current day vaccines using a "killed" virus and even those using a different but related virus whole like the original "vaccination" with cow pox) is to teach your body's immune system about something so that it might react appropriately immediately when it sees that thing, or something very similar in the future. The effect of teaching the immune system to attack something is difficult to predict because it is a natural system and we don't entirely understand how it works, only enough to get better at teaching it new things. In some cases it's so good at destroying related things that it produces "sterilising immunity" - a vaccinated person can't get the disease at all, even if directly exposed to it, in other cases, as seems to have been the case for COVID-19, you get something useful but much less effective. AIUI There's no reason we know of why the platform (the mechanism by which we tell people's immune system about a new thing to be attacked) would influence how effective the defence put up subsequently is. The vaccine is not in your body when you're attacked weeks or months later by a virus, what's left is a "memory" of what should be identified as foreign and destroyed. So, it would be expected to depend on how AIDS works, and perhaps on exactly what the vaccine is teaching the immune system to attack, not on how the vaccine is manufactured. Think about the difference between identifying wanted bank robbers with a hand-drawn picture of their faces, versus a still from a CCTV camera. It might be harder or easier to recognise the CCTV still, but we wouldn't expect them to do more or less jail time when identified by one method versus the other.
• gmuslera 5y ago
  Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones. Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.
  • walrus01 5y ago
    > Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? that depends, have you recently received any Signal messages from lobsters representing the moscow windows NT user group?
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      Them? I though the message was another tech support scam message.
  • cstross 5y ago
    I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!
    • doctoboggan 5y ago
      I recently read glass house and just started accelerando, great work!
      • shagie 5y ago
        If I may suggest dabbling in the BLIT short stories that the Langford fractal mentioned in the fifth decade of the century of wonders. https://ansible.uk/writing/t3_002.html http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm https://www.nature.com/articles/44964 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/ And following up from Glasshouse with Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams where the exploration of what could have been without the Vile Offspring and computers were harnessed without a singularity... but "tools" such as Curious Yellow are a part of the nightmare scenarios in the possibilities of war.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > will be going into the cocktail of childhood vaccinations that Christianist preachers like to rail against, along with HPV. I think he's being too generous.
  • sneak 5y ago
    No, he's just taking pot shots at the Other, playing to the crowd with jargon and winks. Doctorow does it so much better, and while keeping it focused on the class war instead of the culture war. It's always a little jarring to see others (who are generally good at writing) try to do it in that style and fumble it, because Doctorow and Stephenson pioneered that tone so skillfully.
    • lazyasciiart 5y ago
      What makes you say that? You haven’t seen parents forbid their kids from getting HPV vaccines?
• j0057 5y ago
  > low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more future-proof elevation. Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might.
  • walrus01 5y ago
    the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the world also trying to move to safety at the same time.
    • mooreds 5y ago
      Yup. It's about to get really really bad for refugees. Here's a PDF report talking about the challenges: https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=5866 https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=...
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      Not just inundated places. Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail. The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.
    • jaybrendansmith 5y ago
• aerovistae 5y ago
  Personally, I stopped reading after this: > If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. I It felt sensational to me to the point the I could no longer take the author's view seriously as something worth reading. We survived the bubonic plague and the author himself quotes these diseases as having far lower mortality rates than that, yet then extrapolates it to the extinction of humanity. Huh.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    I think that's what they meant by "civilizational" extinction, which they specifically mention in your own quote instead of species extinction. Maybe a little dire, but a disease with a 20% fatality rate in 2021 would have very different transmission characteristics than the bubonic plague in the 14th century.
  • counters 5y ago
    It might well be on the hyperbolic side, but I'm not sure your counter-example is really apples-to-apples. It isn't totally reasonable to compare the current pandemic to communicable disease outbreaks pre-globalization; in the 1300's, someone exposed to plague couldn't hop on a plane and be in a global transportation hub with millions of people passing through in just a dozen or so hours. Furthermore, the plague had a catastrophic impact on population - in just a few years it killed upwards of 50% of Europe's entire population! I wouldn't call that "extinction level" but it's really not something to shirk at so cavalierly. What would be the impact on civilization of losing half the world's population today over just a few years? Whether or not it would lead to a decline into extinction is kind of academic; undoubtedly, it would lead to a fundamental shift in society and civilization.
  • pja 5y ago
    The bubonic plague killed a third of the population of Europe. I imagine that felt pretty apocalyptic at the time & it had a long term impact on the entire region. A plague that killed a third of those infected spread by modern international travel would be catastrophic. Medieval Europe got to spread the impact out over decades. Killing a third of the population in a year or two would be much worse.
• ErikAugust 5y ago
  “If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a scary thought.
  • redisman 5y ago
    Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
    • andylei 5y ago
      > nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
      • redisman 5y ago
        Thanks- the site is getting a death hug so I can’t read the whole article
    • ErikAugust 5y ago
      “…be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later.” That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
    • wk_end 5y ago
      The claim seems to be that it's because we're "able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days [...] or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later". The latter certainly wasn't needed for SARS1, but the former...? At the time I was a high school student in Toronto, which was hit relatively hard by SARS1, and I remember there was lots of fear and anxiety around it, but it didn't affect my daily life in any way. Did we do lots of PCR testing and quarantining to keep it from spreading? Not sure. That wouldn't have been possible a few decades ago, anyway.
• supperburg 5y ago
  So wrong. “If” sars1/2 had gone pandemic. The reason they didn’t is because they don’t make you infectious in an asymptomatic way like cov19. It wasn’t an “if.” They never will. And also, covid 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It’s more like 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The real nightmare virus. It’s totally possible.
  • slg 5y ago
    >And also, covid 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It’s more like 0.02 percent lethal. We have had roughly 860k COVID deaths in the US. At a 0.02% fatality rate that would equate to 4.3b cases. So are you suggesting the US death total is exaggerated or that the average American has already had COVID 10+ times?
    • supperburg 5y ago
      The Stanford professor who I saw on a recent lex Friedman podcast confirmed what many people already suspected: the death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for Covid regardless of how the person really died. And also that cases were massively undercounted because of the fact that many people never have symptoms bad enough to justify any concern, testing or a hospital visit. That’s what he’s asserting and it’s true. He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like 0.02%. I’m sorry that it upsets you to hear something you don’t already agree with
      • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
        It's specious to claim knowledge of things unmeasured? Dial it back a bit there - maybe 'somewhat undercounted'. And is that criteria made up too? Show me.
        • supperburg 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sneak 5y ago
  > Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient, slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by Hacker News readers. It is always surprising to me to see apologies on websites for them going slow under load. There is a cheap and easy solution to such things that has been around for ages.
• Plaastix 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220109192632/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/01/oh-2022.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220109192632/http://www.antipo...
• aftbit 5y ago
  From the linked counterfactuals from 2017: >Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.) Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
  • Houshalter 5y ago
    Predicting the supreme court would become more conservative during a conservative presidency and senate was not a hard prediction. Ginsberg was known to be in poor health, but I guess you could count that as a successful prediction. But the other details are all wrong. There hasn't been a Protestant on the supreme court in awhile, let alone a fundamentalist.
    • lazyasciiart 5y ago
      Are you saying that Catholics can’t be pro-life fundamentalists? That’s definitely false.
      • LAC-Tech 5y ago
        Christian fundamentalism comes from the protestant tradition. Pro-life isn't limited to christian fundemantalism.
        • lazyasciiart 5y ago
          Catholic fundamentalism exists, and is remarkably similar to protestant fundamentalism despite having theoretically different theological arguments - they're the ones arguing that Pope Francis is wrong about things, and more generally they are the ones who disagree with the changes of Vatican II. https://religionnews.com/2019/11/19/the-rise-of-fundamentalist-catholicism-3/ https://religionnews.com/2019/11/19/the-rise-of-fundamentali...
• worik 5y ago
  Thank you, Charles and the universe (or in this context The Multiverse) for the concept of quantum bible changes. It made my day!
• JetSetWilly 5y ago
  > (We don't remember how awful chickenpox was because (a) we're generally vaccinated in infancy and (b) it's not a killer on the same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox. But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. There's a reason public health bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns against them Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is not vaccinated in the UK, and public health bodies in the UK choose not to do so deliberately because of public health. The reason is that older adults are vulnerable to shingles - which can be more serious - and being exposed to childen with chickenpox on the regular is thought to give them an immunity boost and prevent them from getting shingles or make it less serious when they do. Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this.
  • TranquilMarmot 5y ago
    I live in the US and got Chickenpox as a child, I think from a classic "Chickenpox party". I'm not sure if I was also vaccinated against it or not... I got Shingles at 25 (I'm 30 now). I didn't believe it at first because I thought Shingles was an "old person's disease". I remember going to the doctor the day it started, and he just prescribed me some painkillers. I said, "I don't think I'll need those I don't feel too bad." He just looked me in the eyes and said, "Oh, you will." It was awful. Some of the worst pain I've ever been in. I laid in bed for almost a week basically hallucinating. Apparently, Shingles can come up multiple times in your life. I wonder if getting exposed to Chickenpox again would decrease the odds... I don't spend any time around children, so I don't think that's likely to happen to me haha.
    • maxerickson 5y ago
      There's a shingles vaccine, though it's only approved for over 50: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/shingrix/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/shingrix/in... Doesn't seem to be much out there about whether that is because of insurance coverage or if that is the population they tested in or if there are additional factors.
• baud147258 5y ago
  > leading to a complete phase-out [of ICE] possibly as early as 2040 I have a hard time believing this, if it's something that's supposed to happen globally, including for all good transportation, which is a category where I don't remember seeing much electric vehicles. And as for it happening globally, that'd mean everywhere on the globe, there'd be enough electricity to supply all the needs for transportation and agriculture.
  • InvaderFizz 5y ago
    If you read it in a more realistic fashion, and see the implementations that are happening today, it makes much more sense. Governments are rolling out policies that vehicles manufactured after 2030/2035/2040, etc will not be eligible for vehicle registration. This makes much more sense than banning existing fleets, as the vast majority of any car fleet will be replaced over the period of a decade. (Average US car lifespan is 12 years). This serves as a slow ramp up time, as well as less political pushback. Will the electric grids be able to keep up? Mostly. Will electricity prices increase as a result of demand that is costly to build new generation sources to satisfy, almost certainly. Most of these "green" policies are taxing those with little upfront capital to invest (bottom two quintiles) and subsidizing those with capital. Are these policies going to impact me or my family? Not really. I'm specifically investing tens of thousands of dollars in my home to reduce my grid costs to negligible levels and make my home non-grid dependent. The grid is mediocre, at best, where I live. Also, there is no net metering, so I need batteries to service a large portion of my non-solar generating hours.
    • baud147258 5y ago
      so you really think that all motor vehicle in Africa will be electric? All in Middle-East, like Afghanistan or Pakistan? I'm not really talking about Western countries, where I can see it happen, but the rest of the world
      • InvaderFizz 5y ago
        No, but I also have yet to see their governments making announcements that they will be banning ICE vehicles. The long tail for ICE vehicles, even in western countries, will be decades after the last new one is sold. The 1992 Nissan Sentra was still being manufactured and sold in Mexico until 2017 as the Nissan Tsuru. It was finally retired as Mexico has moved upmarket enough on the global scale that the government can do things like ban a $7k car due to safety concerns. Similarly, I expect ICE vehicles to still dominate until such time as solar becomes so incredibly cheap and electric cars destined for Pakistan can be plugged directly into the PV array.
• soupfordummies 5y ago
  > (Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient, slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by Hacker News readers.) Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something like cnn.com for instance.
  • Ecco 5y ago
    Took over 30 seconds here. I wish all blog engines came with a decent caching system though…
    • Aachen 5y ago
      Or wouldn't need billions of computations to serve a single page.
  • divbzero 5y ago
    It is served using HTTP so it might benefit from public HTTP caches.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Do the rich, a ka "the klept" as he calls them, really suffer the most from unchecked immigration? It seems rather doubtful to me, as presumably immigrants would compete with and provide cheap labor?
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    Depends where we are in history. With functioning political and legal systems, police, public order, and general protection of property rights and taboo against violence, the rich benefit from immigration. It provides a more abundant, cheaper workforce, and societal institutions can prevent any negative consequences. If those political institutions collapse, there is nothing scarier than an angry mob of starving people who are united with each other through a common culture, but disunited from you.
    • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      Sure but "the klept" according to the article are doing their benefitting (stealing) now, according to the article. And the institutions are still kind of working. There would also presumably be enough poor already to form a scary mob, even without immigration.
      • rjsw 5y ago
        The current systems redirects the anger of the poor against the "other poor".
        • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
          The competition seems to be real, though?
  • xvilka 5y ago
    The "klept" word came from William Gibson's The Peripheral and Agency books[1]. Highly recommend. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/270911-jackpot https://www.goodreads.com/series/270911-jackpot
• elihu 5y ago
  > "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040." At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels. As far as I know, no one is planning to outright ban ICE vehicles yet. Headline writers consistently get this wrong, because making the policy sound more extreme than it is attracts ad views. > "As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious." Huh, that's a lot. If that's correct, it's a lot more than I would have guessed.
  • patd 5y ago
    Some cities in Europe are already banning old petrol and diesel cars from driving through them. With plans to ban more over time.
  • ip26 5y ago
    Cars don’t last as long as you’d think, on average. There will also be a knee in the curve where the ICE fleet drops below critical mass and gas stations start shutting down - and the harder it becomes to find a station, the faster people will switch.
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      They last a hell of a lot longer than they did when we were still putting TEPb in the fuel.
      • jeffbee 5y ago
        The lifespans of cars have been elongating rapidly. The median car on the road recently passed 12 years. Especially sensible cars with medium-displacement engines making little power through a CVT, these will go a million miles with ease. The long tail of model year 2030 Honda Civics is going to be almost impossible to eradicate without controlling the supply of fossil motor fuels.
• Houshalter 5y ago
  Just take the last thing in this article. It links to an obscure blog by some crazy person that hasn't updated in 4 years. What's the point of this? Cruelly mocking some mentally ill person's posts from years ago, as proof that "the future is unpredictable"? Or claiming brexit is economically worse than covid. Massively disrupting the world economy for 2 years is less bad than some regulatory changes in a single country? "A crewed moonbase by 2031"?
  • scatters 5y ago
    Stross is writing as a UK-based author; obviously Brexit is having a worse effect than Covid on the UK economy.
    • Houshalter 5y ago
      The UK is still under covid restrictions and went into a huge amount of debt during the crisis. The events are not remotely comparable.
      • scatters 5y ago
        The UK is not under any real level of restriction, and the (own-currency) debt taken on is not of a form that would harm growth. Compared to its peers the UK is doing abysmally; the distinguishing factor is Brexit.
        • Houshalter 5y ago
          So far as I have heard, the UK went way harder into lockdowns and other measures than the US. And from what I saw, what happened to the US was insane. Everything was closed down for months (or longer depending on the industry.) Supply chains were incredibly disrupted. The government went deeply into debt and inflation is skyrocketting. There are still shortages of many things for the forseeable future. Unprecedented numbers of people have lost their jobs. I literally can not imagine thinking this is comparable to any other economic event, since the world wars or great depression anyway.
• flyinglizard 5y ago
  Overly simplistic, populistic and alarming. The change against immigration is rooted in real problems found in immigration-heavy areas. See hotspots in Europe as an example. Countries have a duty to protect their borders and way of life, or else why have them in the first place? No oil cabal pushes up asset prices, it’s the common people doing it to each other (hint: check the proportion of private owners in home ownership). SpaceX is inconsequential, currently. Their effect on everyday life is nonexistent. What they did is launch for cheaper, not cheaply enough though as to make it a real commodity and drastically change what gets into orbit. Starlink though is potentially huge. That could end up as a whole new Internet of sorts. It was neither Koch nor Mercer who destabilized politics. It was Facebook and the greater internet which removed elitist moderation and gave the people what they want (vs, apparently, what society needed. My favorite quote goes like “Facebook gave the people the means to connect without stopping to think what would happen when they inevitably do”). There was money and influence of all sorts in politics long before Koch and Mercer. You had Murdoch and Soros and many others. Yet nothing came close to what social networks did. Trump was not the product of any single billionaire.
• xmprt 5y ago
  I think just as his previous article might have been overly optimistic, this one is overly pessimistic. As the pendulum is in the process of swinging to the other extreme, I think we will see a lot of negative events slowing down now that people are seeing the negative consequences of their actions and try to revert course. For example, even though the world is tending towards a worst place in terms of things like climate change, I don't think we are accelerating there.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Considering how US food policy continues pushing sugar consumption, driving mortality from secondary effects of liver disease (diabetes, high blood pressure, circulatory disease, cancer metastasis, obesity, gout) and tertiary effects of those, that makes COVID-19 look like, well, flu, he is not pessimistic enough. On the other hand, eliminating sugar (actually, just fructose, and then only with not enough accompanying fiber!) from the US, UK, and Indian and Pakistani diets could be overwhelmingly easier than getting and keeping everybody vaccinated against SARS. Doesn't mean it will happen, though. It is easier to pretend it is not a problem, and blame all the deaths on the tertiary effects.
    • xmprt 5y ago
      Vaccinating everyone is a near impossible task but as with most things, you can get almost all the benefits by getting an 80-90% vaccination rate and letting herd immunity take care of the rest.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        That might work if you could get all the animals vaccinated, too. But they are not being vaccinated at all, and won't be. They will continue innovating new strains on their own initiative. Herd immunity works only for microbes that have species preference. So, herd immunity turns out to be a fond delusion. We can only hope that the mice don't innovate a 40% fatal (in humans) strain as contagious as omicron. We certainly can't prevent it.
• Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  Meh, Stross has some interesting posts (although too verbose), I cannot stand his fiction and this post has nothing interesting to say. Saying nobody expected the COVID 10 years ago it is like saying nobody is expecting a big quake in the west coast of the US.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Tangential PSA on a lesser known work by CStross: Palimpsest, a novella that is one of the most interesting and original time-travel stories that I've come across.
• rob_c 5y ago
  Can we please stop linking to such long winded crazy ramblings? If this came from certain other news outlets it would have been dropped as spam
• mychael 5y ago
  This is incoherent rambling.
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  YMMV, but feels to me that cstross's Cassandra pessimism has increased rapidly each year, with good reason, but some of these pieces are overly-sensationalist. I still remember his whole bit in 2017 about how Hurricane Harvey was going to destroy Houston - how'd that turn out? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-what-are-the-long-term.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-... But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with grimmer and grimmer shades of beige*: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-differ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983 * a 2013(!) piece: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica... Populist demagogues and pandemics might come and go, but the automated, over-financialized, post-political bureaucratic intelligence state is here to stay so long as civilization looks the way it does now. That piece has a lot more deep, systems-oriented thinking. I'd say cstross' pre-2016 predictions still hold up so much better than the more "ripped from the headlines" attempts in these later pieces. His 2017 three-parter in particular has some embarrassingly sensationalist, hand-wavy stuff.
  • MichaelZuo 5y ago
    The trouble with blogs like antipope is that more often than not they read like GPT-3, or a more advanced GPT-4, where every sentence seems coherently linked with every surrounding sentence but there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right upon reflection. And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next hour.
    • beckingz 5y ago
      Doesn't seem quite right because we don't like the reflection that it entails.
    • bloaf 5y ago
      I kind of agree, its a bit too fragmented. I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out. Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space. Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe. AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly. I suppose that does not absolutely prove that it was predictable and not just unreasonable predictions being made by scientists and experts which just happened to be right by pure coincidence, but still. He also seems to say with the WWII example that it's not predictable if it can't be predicted to a very precise date. By that definition sure probably covid19 could not have been predicted to a date or even year. But he claims everything else is predictable, but he is making some pretty wild predictions with very vague timelines. So I don't understand his criteria for predictableness.
  • tessierashpool 5y ago
    > lots of people were predicting a pandemic yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.” for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics. (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)
    • sangnoir 5y ago
      > (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.) I suspect you (and parent) may have misunderstood him. IMO, he meant a pandemic (like COVID-19) - just like WWII - was predicted by a lot of people. What people could not predict (for both scenarios) was when it would happen.
    • halostatue 5y ago
      Would anyone have predicted that a sizeable minority of people would simply deny the existence of the pandemic and/or refuse to do the most basic precautions to protect society? Not ten years ago.
• nsonha 5y ago
  posts like this are the worst for meaningful discussion. Imagine a person comes at you and dump all sort of thoughts about everything under the sun in one go, most of the time mixing informed opinions with those on fields they have no expertise in. Who are you, the president? An activist with no agenda (all of them)? A generic "scientist"? A wise person? I would run from that as quickly as I can. I wouldn't assume a person doing that wants to have any conversation, they have a speech and just want a megaphone (an approving audience) to relay their speech.
  • rpmisms 5y ago
    With age (and accepted work) comes some amount of privilege to make broader statements with acceptance. I suspect Mr Stross is taking advantage of this quirk of sociology. I'd take the article with a pinch of salt—he's making some... interesting claims about COVID and the certainty of long-term effects, a little climate alarmism that's on the end of the bell curve, and a little bit more pessimism than I think is warranted. Weigh this against his experience, wisdom, and level of thought put into his work, and apply salt to taste.
  • archsurface 5y ago
    I found it all quite shallow and pointless I'm afraid. The space commentary for example, I would expect you can find that information in a BBC or CNN article.
• tomrod 5y ago
  > (Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient, slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by Hacker News readers.) Much as I like Antipope, this looks like blaming others for something that is easily remedied. I think his predictions on climate & politics are sound. I wonder if there is a listing of climate priorities for mitigation. Interrupting crops sounds like the top of the list.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  "until we develop a temperature-stable, cheap, broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine that is patent-free" "A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastrazeneca-covid-vaccine-research-was-97-publicly-funded https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    FWIW he claims that was due to manufacturing concerns, specifically that only AstraZeneca would be able to be reliable and consistent enough to reproduce the related vaccine in a way that wouldn't cause potentially catastrophic adoption issues (vaccines actually killing people due to contaminants, etc.).
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      Given his history, it's not worth much.
• chroma 5y ago
  I would like to remind everyone that Stross writes fiction for money. He does not make money off of accurate predictions. Here are some examples. Back in 2016, Stross was confident that Brexit would cause mass famine in the UK:[1] > I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s). Despite the UK leaving the EU's single market, the UK's currency has not plummeted in value and such famines have not occurred. Stross has also been calling bitcoin a bubble since before most people heard about it. You'd think after a decade of being wrong he would change his mind. Even in 2017 when BTC was a mere $10,000, Stross claimed it was a commodity bubble. After receiving criticism for that view, he went a step further and declared that when the bitcoin bubble burst, it would cause those who lost their shirts to become neo-nazis.[2] If this all sounds unhinged, that's because it is. 1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-o... 2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/unforseen-consequences-and-tha.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/unforsee...
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• winrid 5y ago
  If you move your comment threads off of being rendered by the server, that old Athlon will handle this traffic no issues: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fastcomments/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/fastcomments/ (Shameless plug - I created fastcomments) We have a SSR solution coming this week, too, so JS won't be required. Just reach out if you sign up and I'll give you a custom package between the two tiers we have today (the ability to do this yourself is coming soon as well).
  • jhgb 5y ago
    Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi 4 be faster than the old Athlon box anyway? I know that "Reuse, reduce, recycle" is a thing, but still... Reusing an old Athlon for example certainly does not reduce the amount of electricity consumed.
    • winrid 5y ago
      It may be an effort thing... or just fun reusing old hardware. I know I enjoyed running PIIIs up until 2012 or so as servers, and that was nowhere near energy efficient.
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  I always enjoy long term future predictions, because our human brains are obsessed with trying to resolve tension somehow, or rather assuming that tension will resolve itself. Specifically, in the political sphere the prediction that there's a) any intentionality or consistency in what's happening globally and b) that it'll have evolved into a "steady" state over the next ten years, one way or another. A possibly better prediction is that we're permanently past political "stability" such as what arguably existed in post WW2 America (I guess) and western Europe (I know even less about that). From maybe 2015 (or earlier?) onwards, forever, politics will stay complex, seemingly cataclysmic, and will seem as if the other shoe is perpetually about to drop. We've developed a permanent emotional complex around political discourse, where the boss music is playing all the time, even when we're just hanging out on our couch. By having the deluge of information about everything that we have now, any random thing can now become The Final Straw for whatever issue you'd like to pay attention to. Any given moment, any given news article can portend the doom of Your Favorite Thing, and it will be, truly, The End. If this is right, the good news is it's not actually going to get nearly as much worse as it always seems it's about to. The bad news is it's not going to get all that much better, either. Just small steps forward or backward, where progress is measured in decades, not years. Hopefully we get used to living in the tension, though it's probably more accurate that we won't, and that'll probably be okay.
  • pbourke 5y ago
    This posits that politics remains “politics” and does not devolve to widespread bloodshed. I don’t have a sense for how likely that is aside from “more likely than when I grew up.”
• shmoopi 5y ago
  Regarding politics, information overflow, and general increase in lunacy. To put it simply, it was expected the level of noise and sensation will rise after smartphones emerged. Loud lunacy seems to be a great way to catch public attention currently and this is well understood by both the media, politicians and vegabonds of wealth. Sensational journalism was always a problem, now add to that billions of people able to elevate the wildest stories, let alone create their own. If course we're drowning in digital noise and it isn't going to subside as long as it's effective. But there's good news. I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. If you find yourself constantly angry on Twitter, fighting endlessly on Facebook, and cussing at the news, it's entirely by design. The only way to win this game is by not playing.
  • beachy 5y ago
    > But there's good news. I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. This is good news in the same sense that it's good news that you can do your bit for the climate crisis by walking everywhere, switching to vegetarianism and wearing only hand-crocheted hemp clothing. i.e. it's not really good news at all because even if you do it, hardly anyone else will, and the world will carry on just as it is regardless. We the people have been gaslit by large corporates trying to pin the responsibility on us. It's time to fight back, and put the responsibility onto those that create these problems in the first place for their own profit.
    • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      While I'm a big supporter of alternative digital networks, I think you're being much too pessimistic. We've known that humans can produce written junk; that's what tabloids were in the past. The problem is that humans haven't developed the culture yet to safely deal with this amount of digital noise. If you tried to breathlessly talk about why the world is ending due to a tabloid article you read, you used to be laughed out of the room, but if you reblog/retweet/share a random social media post you resonated with where someone talks about how the world is ending, then your friends take it as gospel. I'm optimistic that humanity can eventually develop the cultural norms to deal with the era of everyone having a voice. Until then, it'll probably be very chaotic though, much like the Protestant Reformation was in Europe.
• jcoq 5y ago
  Long covid is definitely a scary prospect, but I think it's interesting that people also complain about long-term flu symptoms. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58726775 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58726775
  • xvilka 5y ago
    Influenza is widely underappreciated and causes many deaths, life-long traumas too.
• bbanyc 5y ago
  > Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious. I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. Solar and wind have increased in recent years but still have a very long way to go. We may just be relocating the engines rather than decarbonizing. (See also, New York City banning gas lines to new construction, requiring the use of electricity for heating and cooking, just after the metro area's sole nuclear plant was decommissioned and new gas plants were built to replace it... so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?)
  • klodolph 5y ago
    > ...so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it? My understanding is that the purpose of the ban was (1) increase indoor air quality and (2) reduce the amount of gas that leaks in distribution. Natural gas has something like 20x the GWP of CO2. Burning it at power plants reduces the amount leaking into the atmosphere. About 5% of anthropogenic methane emissions come from distribution. There are much bigger things we could be doing, but just because this particular change isn't reducing the CO2 impact doesn't mean it's not a positive change.
• ensan 5y ago
  “each time you roll 1d6 and if you come up with a 1 you get organ damage, cognitive impairment, and chronic fatigue lasting for years” So he’s claiming long COVID (what ever its definition) has 16.7% chance of organ damage etc. Except that’s not supported by the data at all.
  • pjbeam 5y ago
    I think you're reading that a bit too literally.
  • phs318u 5y ago
    Unless I'm missing something, the data for long-term impacts of COVID infection are still coming in - and will be coming in for years. The data we've got to date is for a definition of "long" that is somewhat short.
  • george_moon 5y ago
    "MERS/COVID19-Omicron hybrid—call it the Omega strain" The author is talking about the aforementioned omega strain not covid strains.
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• mikewarot 5y ago
  >Remember, this isn't a simple pneumonia bug. It's a virus that attacks the RAAS/ACE2 system, in particular all the epithelial tissues, and any other cells that express ACE2 receptors on their surfaces. It can mess with your kidneys. It can mess with fat cells, changing their response to insulin. It apparently shows up in brain tissue. Long Covid is my new normal. If 15% of everyone who gets Covid ends up like me, heck even if it's 1%, we're in for a wave of hurt. If we assume it becomes endemic, and we all just treat it like the flu, then assume 1% of cases for each new variant also end up like me. At one variant/year, we're looking at decimating the working population before 2030. This alone is a big enough shift, in our "just in time" world, to set of societal changes like the end of the feudalism and the beginning of the enlightenment. > it may have long-term sequelae, like Shingles, which only show up years to decades later. It is important at this point to remember that the first wave of the 1918 pandemic was much like the first wave of Covid, it mostly effected the old. The second wave of the pandemic was the one that killed more people than WWI, mostly the young and healthy.
  • drzaiusapelord 5y ago
    I had debilitating long covid for 18 months and honestly I thought it was going to be for a lifetime, especially when I read so many success stories of others getting over it after 3-6 months and reading online wisdom about it pretty much being CFS. I'm not sure what my body did but I'm thankful it healed itself and I now live in fear Omicron, which if caught might set off another 18 months for me. My brain is not nearly where it used to be and my body tires out very easily, but the bad brain fog, intense irritability, and incredible fatigue episodes are gone and I'm thankful. I don't think people realize how common this is and what it can do to you. The only reason I still have a job is because I was able to hide this because of work from home and some creative solutions on my part and a checked-out, mostly apathetic supervisor. I think I slept 1-3 hours of the workday everyday and maybe could have enough mood, focus, and energy to be productive for a window of maybe 60-90 minutes a day. I hope you recover soon.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    also interesting to think about, if people are not convinced by the health situation itself, what happens on the world stage and the distribution of power if some countries are able to protect and even improve the health of their populations while others just accept this long term degradation as inevitable or normal.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  > If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now...If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years. Huh? Losing a billion people in two years is not "brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction". I hate this kind of over exaggeration wrapped up in seemingly reasonable and scientific sounding statements. Truth is that if covid/sars had occurred a decade ago, it wouldn't have been much different in the infection and mortality stats. What might have been different is the population's reaction to the extreme authoritarianism displayed by governments.
• nameistaken 5y ago
  Go on Google maps and find any random middle of nowhere, small town USA, and I mean small. 3k-5k, 10k max. Go 20-30 mile radius out, pick a house. Then shop for internet. It's a travesty. I don't know where you live, or what kind of bubble you're surrounded by, but the situation out here is hot garbage. I'm currently on a 5g wisp, but $100/mo gets me 24/3 speeds. Which wouldn't be stable enough for 4k, and on the off chance it was, nobody else in the house could do anything. (I'm currently on a 12/3 plan for $60) I have to plan a day in advance if I want to play a new game with friends. A fresh backup takes months. When I was on DSL, 3/768k my phone's photo auto backup would basically render our connection useless. It was unfathomable for me to think about moving to some family gifted farmland to build on. Or a house even more remote to our current one. My wife and I thought about buying a large plot in Utah for retirement, after taking a trip there. We laughed because we couldn't survive without internet. But now, we have options. It is a game changer for stuff like this. To think otherwise is complete folly.
• xadhix 5y ago
  Could the link please be edited to used https?:)
• TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  *affects
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• drewm1980 5y ago
  I stopped reading when the author listed chicken pox alongside much more lethal childhood diseases. That said, I'm still pro vaccination for chicken pox, and went out of my way to get my child vaccinated even though it is extremely uncommon here in Belgium.
  • WA 5y ago
    Please take a guess why chicken pox is uncommon in Belgium.
    • Ichthypresbyter 5y ago
      The chickenpox vaccination is uncommon in Belgium- it's not on the standard list of childhood vaccinations, and fewer than 2.5% of Belgian children get it. Chickenpox itself is certainly not uncommon- estimated at 113,000 cases per year, which is essentially the same number as the birth rate. In other words, every Belgian child can be expected to get chickenpox at some point. Source here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/101/1/16 https://adc.bmj.com/content/101/1/16
  • neuronic 5y ago
    > Varicella is highly communicable, with an infection rate of 90% in close contacts. [1] Good call on the vaccination, chickenpox is no joke at all. The prognosis combined with the massive rate of infection if left unchecked is unsettling. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox#Prognosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox#Prognosis
  • yourusername 5y ago
    So odd to call chicken pox lethal. It's not in the government vaccination program in the Netherlands. 97% of kids have had it. I've never heard of someone dying from it. When i was a kid getting chicken pox was very much not a big deal and expected.
• donquichotte 5y ago
  > and political instability (in large part a side-effect of social media That is a little bit too simplistic, isn't it? First, there was political instability before social media. Second, it seems that a lot of people are dissatisfied with how things are going, which is of little surprise given huge wealth inequality and a general rise in totalitarianism and authoritarianism all over the world. The sentence also carries the connotation that political instability is inherently bad, hinting that the status quo cannot be improved. I'd argue against that - sometimes it's good to show the ruling class that they will not get away with everything and are being held accountable by the people whose fate they decide.
  • JulianMorrison 5y ago
    Very unfortunately, "a lot of people are dissatisfied with how things are going" is a circumstance which has a strong tendency to directly cause totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They vote for a Charismatic Guy who will Sweep Aside Loopholes and Smash the Evildoers.
• deleted 5y ago
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• Andy_G11 5y ago
  Climate change and associated socio-economic / political upheaval, ICE vs EVs, pandemics, and space colonisation are some of the headline points I picked up on in the article. But there are so many other things going on, too: 1. The aging population in many societies with the associated adjustment of services in some economies including medical and care homes, perhaps also reduced economic growth rates and strain on savings and pensions. Rise of the robo-attendant? Increased 'retirement estate' mode of living? 2. Medical advances to deal with age-related disease (telomere studies, stem cells, advances in treatment of alzheimers, cancer, arthritis, deterioration of eyesight, hearing and teeth, new prosthetics etc). 3. Increased wealth concentration - a natural outcome of capital accruing a faster rate of return than labour (see Piketty), and associated with reduced per capita and overall productivity. How to preserve high standards of living for the wealthy and increase the standards of living for the less well off whilst dealing with the tensions with the potential to turn this into a zero sum game. 4. Technological advances which may increase productivity, including AI and robotic process automation. Perhaps further labour shedding associated with the increasing automation of 'thought' and 'creativity' (i.e. brought under the remit of capital). And of course a raft of other things... Plenty of opportunity and risk ahead.
• makerofthings 5y ago
  50 years from now everything will be renewables, all the heavy industry will be on the moon and we’ll be using fleets of self-driving EVs. It’s going to be close, you can expect some turbulence, some coastal areas are going to get flooded, there might be the odd border skirmish, but 100 years from now nobody will talk about Climate change outside of history books. This is my optimistic hope for the future.
  • tlb 5y ago
    What are the advantages of putting heavy industry on the moon?
    • makerofthings 5y ago
      I imagine there is no need to worry about pollution, or carbon footprint or any of that. Stick nuclear reactors all over the place, nothing to really worry about if anything goes wrong with them. It’s just a big ball of rock with no atmosphere so it seems like an ideal place to stick all the dirty industry that’s messing the earth up.
      • CRConrad 5y ago
        If you're going to lift industry out of the Earth's gravity well, what's the use of plonking it down the Moon's? You'll only have to lift the finished product out of it again, in stead of just nudging it to drop from orbit.
  • Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Yeah, quick mass adoption of EVs combined with rapid tech logical development in a few other sectors has led me to get far more optimistic about our future. Climate adaptation technologies will bridge whatever gaps are left by the destruction we have on the environment that happened before we decarbonize the economy.
• LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Still no threads? Still being shat on by that seagull thing, or its derivatives?
• TonyRobbins 5y ago
  [dead]
• TonyRobbins 5y ago