I wonder what modern day ideas are considered utter insanity in 70 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
edit: Change tone to be less snarky/combative. It was unintentional if I came across as rude.
The policy could be updated "we will sell the creepiest of the creepiest data on you and your friends. Hell your friends don't even need to sign up." And it would hardly change usage patterns.
Cambridge was a tiny distraction of the week that had no lasting effects.
Gain-of-function histological research a close second.
God willing, modern economic theory.
Economists and mathematicians will eventually have a conversation which upends all known slogans of economics, forming a new school. It happens every few decades.
The era of antibiotics is drawing to a close, as antibiotic resistance continues to grow. Meanwhile, phage therapy [1] is still being discovered but likely will give us a route to a kind of antibacterial and antibiotic therapy which is not as broad-spectrum as our existing drugs. Similarly, chemotherapy may give way to more targeted ways to deal with cancers, and eventually we might see some of these harsher treatments as akin to the overuse of radiotherapy during the era of radioactive quackery [2].
High fructose corn syrup may yet have its reckoning. Strangely, before 2020, this wouldn't have been thinkable, but we know from history that the Great Depression and World Wars changed the composition of dishes all around the world and even in industrialized recipes. The pandemic may yet change peoples' diets in ways which we won't understand for a decade or two, and the proper nutritional correction may take another few decades after that.
Our children may be sincere about dealing with climate change. If so, then they may fly less, shrink standing armies, forbid the import/export of oil, drive less, set the thermostat a couple degrees hotter, or take many other relatively minor changes to parts of society which we usually imagine not changing at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
The essential main problem with the planetary model is in the word "planetes" or "wanderer"; electrons are not exactly point charges whizzing about the nucleus at high speed (although they kind of are, because of gold's color and other properties) but more like smeared-out across an orbital. Think of soft electron-butter being spread by a galactic butter knife.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene
Indeed they may. And we can either teach them to encourage it or ignore them and not even do that small part.
It would be sad if their reaction is this pathetic. We need much more drastic changes than that right now, let alone 18 years from now.
The thermostat matters fuck-all compared to modernizing the insulation and getting renewable power to the house.
Really it sounds more like some ploy to keep America using less oil, without outright saying that, and, well... the idea must date to before we became one of the top producers in the world. I guess it could work for Europeans if they’re really, really willing to suffer for it (and it does spite Russia, which isn’t nothing in terms of European geopolitics)
I understand what you're reading into, but the main reasons to limit oil exports and imports are simpler than that. First, as you say, the USA is a massive oil producer. We compete directly with OPEC. We are also one of the largest oil consumers. Unsurprisingly, politicians like Bernie therefore have reasoned that it would be a sane protectionist and mercantile move to limit oil exports, keeping USA oil in the USA and thus limiting the need for oil imports. It's just cheaper that way; while not all oil is alike, crude oil is fungible enough to make this feasible.
Also like you say, spiting Russia is important, although OPEC may fall apart before too long. There's a lot of handwaving here and anything could happen.
If it really was cheaper that way, there would be no need to intervene.
But maybe some of the expense is caused by regulations which don't make sense. Could I get you to consider repealing the Jones Act so that it's legal to ship oil between different ports in the US using tankers? (Technically it doesn't make the tankers illegal on the face of it. It just requires them to be US built, owned, and crewed by citizens, like all other use of boats in the US. There are no tankers built in the US today; there aren't many boats built at all. Puerto Rico and Hawaii suffer in particular as a result must import key supplies from outside the US.) Yeah, you'd still be burning oil to move oil, but it's not like sending it in trains and pipelines is free either.
Once we are 50 years in the future I think both of these will be regarded as stupid/backward.
“Daddy, why do we live under water if we breathe air?”
“Darling, it’s just because of natural variability.”
Governments are testing how many idiotic rules can they make us follow, preparing for the switch from democracy to surveillance-based totalitarism.
The actual mortality rates are not enough to justify all those limitations - most people infected by coronavirus don't even have any symptoms, majority of those who have symptoms will get through them as they would through a normal flu. If anything, we should order the old people (say 70+) to stay home, as they seem to be the only real risk group.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_d...
Getting there is the easy part. Building a self-sustaining ecology on Mars is harder - much harder. And if you look into the research, you'll see there's much less than you'd think.
Also read an essay where the author claims the biggest mistake of the last 10,000 years was basing our food crops on grasses.
Guns, Germs, and Steel goes into this a great deal and the conclusion there is that in many ways precursors to today’s wheat is the miracle that gave birth to modern civilization.
Potential alternatives would need to provide similar nutrition (esp protein), be easily amenable to “naturally” providing selective breeding for choice traits, be easy to sow and harvest for hunter gatherers to become farmers, and be resilient enough to provide a model for civilizations around the globe.
What I remember is the advantage of grasses is as annuals you can selectively breed productive strains quickly. And that's true of other annual crops. Downside is they require a lot of nutrients and water because the whole plant needs to regrow from seed every year and they have shallow roots. That leads to energy and environmentally damaging agriculture.
Potential solution is perennial shrubs and trees. Perennials have deeper roots and require less water and fertilizer. And don't require the land to be plowed every year.
The latter is a real problem. People talk about global warming, less well known is the world is very quickly losing topsoil.
I'm soooo hoping that CRIPSR and the like help out with cancer and other diseases that use chemo as treatment.
Seriously, fuck cancer.
Edit: I don't like the phrasing I used in this first paragraph. To be more clear: The fact that the government publically funds an effort to teach children to examine the government's official declarations, question their authorities, and study the power structures which control them, is a surprising success of critical theory.
Phrenology is roundly countered by basic genetics; pedigree collapse directly implies that humanity forms one single race. Similarly, we have studied skulls enough to be confident that phrenology has no predictive power. What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory?
The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia [0], but I don't think that you are talking about either of them. (Those criticisms are that critical theory is insufficiently Marxist, and that it lacks praxis.)
Critical theory is not critical thinking
> The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia
That's quite a bold claim, how often are the best criticisms of anything listed on Wikipedia?
> What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory
Well, it is explicitly not concerned with evidence, the thing you are attempting to appeal to in this question.
Hacker News calls upon us to assume good faith, so I'll stop here.
Typically, we refute philosophical positions by some sort of evidence. Without evidence, there's only opinions, and those are cheap and limitless. Indeed, in this very thread, basically all of the links and evidence have come from only one side. The only claims you've made with any substance are about phrenology and "millenials" in "institutions". I tackled the former; the latter is easily handled by remembering that critical theory started as an academic endeavor, and never really has been foreign to higher education. Although, as I describe this latter position, I'm reminded of the belief in the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. I don't know why people believe this; Marxists are pretty open about studying labor and power, and the fact that critical theory is a decades-long multidisciplinary research movement rather than a single meeting would suggest that it is not hiding some cryptic agenda.
It sounds like you think that critical theory ought not exist at all, but we would have to remove an entire score of history and philosophy from our discourse in order to do so; you'd have to prevent the First World War somehow. See [0] for a reasonable introduction to the Frankfurt School and critical theory. You might also like the second and third videos from the playlist [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g5_tuXwOUg
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbAN...
Now that the reproducibility crisis is shining light on this modern tea leave reading, hopefully the groundwork is being laid for overhauls of these fields.