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> Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read

I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...

Cool idea, but I don't completely understand the interface. It's not clear what the 1-5 buttons up top are: does clicking on it record my rating of the claim?

What are the numbers next to each of the links in Pros and Cons? They look like they correspond to the ratings above, but I didn't understand how those were derived.

You're on a link that's my opinion, so the numbers next to each link are my ratings. Clicking the buttons on top saves your rating to local storage, and makes a 'You' link to your opinion, where you can put pro/con arguments with your own ratings.

Putting your ratings on the site requires a paid account. I'm making this in my spare time and would have a hard time controlling spam if such accounts are free. I still think the free version is useful for exploring your own opinions.

There's some good ideas here.

Reminds me of arguman https://en.arguman.org/

Yeah, there's definitely a resemblance, also a resemblance to kialo. Notice how arguman had to temporarily shut down due to bot accounts. This is a major reason why howtruthful requires payment to be used socially. https://en.arguman.org/blog/new-user-registration-disabled-s...

> 5. Decentralized Internet is a pipe dream.

I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.

Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.

It happened long ago. We had a decentralised Internet, with end-to-end communications the norm. Money is more easily made with centralised control of users, though, so money is more readily spent on centralisation of services.

Ultimately, Discord/Slack/Whatnot succeeded over Jabber because far more money was put into services that can be commercialised than was put into something that's very hard to make a buck out of.

The run-out of IPv4 has massively exacerbated the problem, because with carrier grade NATs now the norm, protocols have to work via a central server to connect two end users. There won't _be_ a new decentralised killer app.

Well, if social unrest gets really bad across the globe we might see something like mesh networking with a mesh social media system spring up, I suppose.

I do think nuclear will have a resurgence. You don't have to make nuclear as safe as clear air to use, only reasonably safe with a plan to handle the waste. Nuclear is already safer than coal in terms of people killed by power generation.

Finland is building the world's first long term storage depot for nuclear waste and I think the same could be done in many other places.

Plus, all the push for nuclear is for new nuclear with better efficiency in the fuel used and passive safety futures. I don't think that a significant part of the grid will be powered by nuclear in 2030, but the newer models should be coming online by then.

I think nuclear will have a resurgence... in some places. I keep hearing that nuclear is safer than coal but coal won't make entire regions uninhabitable if something goes REALLY wrong. I'm thinking terrorist attacks, natural disasters, missile strikes, etc.

I have mixed feelings about the predictions; I get the sense that significant change is in the air, at least in the US, whatever direction that takes. I see some of these things as being realistic, especially on a global scale.

That said, I think he might be wrong about (3) (among other things) and (5) is related in my mind. China is certainly growing, in part because of problems in the Euro-American world, but it is also brewing problems and unrest with increasingly autocratic behavior, and a number of other economic problems are showing.

I do see increased adoption of decentralized technologies, in part because of increased political volatility and mistrust of involved centralized IT corporations. That is, I see (5) happening in part because I think (3) might be a bit of an overprediction.

It won't just be China though, and hasn't been. People will increasingly be dealing with censorship and monitoring, and trying to bypass it, and will also become increasingly distrustful of things like Facebook, which correctly or incorrectly has been implicated in things like Russian-UK-US subterfuge. Adoption of decentralized tech is already happening with Hong Kong and Catalonia protests; I suspect it will grow to become more mainstream.

I don't see the traditional centralized internet going away, but I do see people gravitating toward a more hybrid system. Maybe where more critical, and more intimate communications with close others moves to more decentralized architectures, along with other stuff that doesn't depend on speed so much, whereas other mass communications remains more centralized.

> 3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best.

I think the reason would be that most countries that make short-term decisions are ones that have democratic elections every few years and need to avoid pissing off too many people. China's authoritarian system may have more leeway with short-term pain for longer-term strategic initiatives not resulting in societal upheaval.

People seem to overrate Xi's standing in the long-term. It is easy to keep a population docile with double digits economic growth. Once that trend terminates though...

Our evidence from the 20th century shows that the only countries that are successful are democratic. The list of authoritarian countries that crashed and burned is longer than the list of democratic countries that did the same.

Happy to consider other examples, but it does feel like the combination of China's capitalistic reforms while maintaining its authoritarian rule and the state control of information is fairly unique in the 20th century.

And any comparables likely failed due to war with democratic countries, and that seems unlikely given China's role in the globalization of trade as well as it being a nuclear power.

Qatar has been doing rather well, I’d say.

Qatar and most middle eastern countries are anomalies in that they have access to the world's most important resource.

China is a kind of democracy and a very meritorious one at that already.

Just because they aren't copy cat 100% clone of US/UK democracy, it doesn't mean they aren't a democracy.

Also countries like Great Britain, France and all other big European powers made bulk of their super power status when ruled by Monarchs. The democracies later carried the inertia of those eras. Which is understandable. Once you build a sound educational ecosystem, with a great economy with an industrialized economic base, democracy works like a charm. There is a long term supply of good leaders and educated masses to vote for them.

Also democracy is not a process designed to produce good leaders. It's only a process that elects them in a system where they are already present, with a populace that can recognize.

Singapore is fairly authoritarian and they've had outsized success going from third world to first.

I think the root cause is pretty simple: having no checks and balances lets you move faster, no matter what direction (either up or down), and it's a lot easier to mess things up than it is to do everything right.

Again, countries like Singapore are poor models to follow simply because of their size and population. It is drastically easier to govern a country you can cycle across in a few hours, than a country like India or China.

I think that's certainly a factor but your initial claim was:

> the only countries that are successful are democratic

And you're supporting it by excluding all counter-examples. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "most successful countries are democratic".

And since you mentioned China and India, India is a democracy, China is ruled by an authoritarian single-party. Both have huge populations, yet China has grown its GDP better? Assuming good economy = successful here. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/china-vs-india-economy.ph...

Let me present an alternative thesis: democracy has little to do with good governance. It acts as a buffer against discontent, it's in many ways moral, but it is not by itself sufficient to create prosperity.

I don't think he knows enough about any of these things to make big predictions. He should stick to his day job. Not that I'm better, but I see these themes come across from my wide selection of Twitter followers and regularly see highly convincing arguments which would go against them. And that's no me seeking out an answer, it's just scrolling.

Actually, one more significant problem with nuclear power is that there isn't enough manufacturing capability to build reactor cores. Most existing reactors are decades old, and although we have a lot of theoretical knowledge on how to build reactors, how to build more modern reactors than the existing ones, we globally lack the practical know-how, there's no assembly line that we can just pick up reactors from. So the cost of a new reactors is almost unknown. How much does it cost to build the factory that builds the reactors?

Handling nuclear waste is much easier, because we're actively working on that problem, there's practical know-how in spades.

"Modern" reactor designs would indeed solve many problems with nuclear energy. But nuclear reactors are for the most part extremely expensive projects with high risks, so only conservative designs that are well tested are actually being built. This has been a problem for the last four decades, and I don't see why it would suddenly change. If anything risk appetite probably decreases as civilian nuclear reactors stop making financial sense.

I believe that China has the appetite for it and will pursue new reactor types unlike the luddites that we have here in the USA. Luckily they will probably sell them to us for a profit.

Luddites or not, I fully expect this pattern to repeat in every country that has any kind of an accident/disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#/media/...

Cheaper power would just lead to greater consumption of power. If cheaper solar and wind power replaces fossil fuels in some areas, the fossil fuels will just get used in others instead. Such as bigger vehicles and more long-distance tourism.

Edit: perhaps coal would be phased out, without government intervention to save it. I don't think oil production would go down on its own.