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This claims not to be an April Fool's prank, but it has to be a little bit tongue in cheek. To earnestly make predictions based on assumptions about the world m
by karaterobot 3y ago
This claims not to be an April Fool's prank, but it has to be a little bit tongue in cheek. To earnestly make predictions based on assumptions about the world more than 500 years in the future implies at least a wink when coming from a serious scholar.
It reminds me of a claim I heard as a kid that I still think about today. This was a few years after Elvis died. It went something like "before his death in 1977, there were less than 100 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1980, there were more than 10,000. If this trend continues, the entire biomass of the Earth will be composed of Elvis impersonators by the year 2000". This was obviously a joke, and is not even pointing out a fallacy relevant to the subject of the article, but I thought it was cute.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoIt was actually about to happen, but thanks to a heroic effort from 1995-1999 we did avert the "Y2K Elvis Problem"
- throwup238 3y agoI did my part! I was working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the time and wrote a script to update 10 million rows in their occupation database from "Elvis impersonator" to "software developer" (I think that's what started the dot-com boom) Now it's just a cron job they run once a month.
- sobellian 3y agoSo that's why they say software is eating the world...
- 082349872349872 3y agocompare "Why are we not all called Smith?" https://books.google.ch/books?id=wUdtVHBr-OQC&pg=PA413&lpg=PA413&dq=körner+%22why+are+we+not+all+called+smith%22&source=bl&ots=d7wyrj6YyA&sig=ACfU3U1WSr9dkb6HUhCTjxZs6AstZCO8Kw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjY49uOy6GFAxUq9gIHHaxWDNcQ6AF6BAghEAM#v=onepage&q=körner%20%22why%20are%20we%20not%20all%20called%20smith%22&f=false https://books.google.ch/books?id=wUdtVHBr-OQC&pg=PA413&lpg=P...
- tivert 3y agoThere are big gaps in the preview for that chapter, but I found this marvelous quote, which I think describes some big elements of Hacker News perfectly (emphasis mine): > However, endless population expansion has not been possible for animal species in the mast, and only the kind of wild-eyed enthusiast who frequents science fiction conferences and a certain kind of economics department believe it will be possible for the human race to expand endlessly.
- junar 3y agoAnother article mentions: "The project is a part of a campaign, designed to coincide with April Fools’ Day, to raise awareness of the implications of not amending the law requiring married couples to share the same surname." https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/04/01/japan/society/sato-surname-name-rule/ https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/04/01/japan/society/sato-...
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago> If this trend continues My favorite one is that half the US labor by mid-XX century would be telephone switchboard operators. (Fuzzy numbers.)
- ptx 3y agoThe impression I got from the article is that it's a gimmick to bring attention to the law that forces married couples to adopt the same surname and get that changed.