Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start
forbes.com
forbes.com
Of course, I realize he's talking about defining events that delimit major changes between the previous century and its successor. And more specifically, major changes in what Thiel cares about, like financial markets, start-ups, monopolies, and money in general.
But, really, we're only 20% into the century. Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 even within the parameters of what matters to Thiel. You know, like climate change, the second coming, asteroid hitting the Earth, quantum computing, "the singularity", etc... Who the F knows? There's no utility in this kind of thinking. Just take it for it is and what it becomes since starting on Jan 1st, 2000.
Did WWI define the 20th century, or was it WWII? I think WWI demarcates the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events. I suspect Covid-19 could be the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events.
I'm not going to try to predict what history will look like 80 years from now, or whether 9/11 or covid will be considered more significant by then, but this does raise an interesting question of how people in 1913 perceived the nascent 20th century.
Obviously things happened over those 13 years, but whatever they were, history ultimately decided that they were inconsequential enough for the "20th-century events" Wikipedia article to not even mention anything before WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events
WWII isn't really a single war as much as it is a collection of several wars, be they wars of territorial expansion (e.g., Germany, USSR), ideological civil war (e.g., China), non-ideological civil war (e.g., France), or random local conflicts (e.g., Yugoslav coup) which are all occurring in the context of one another. In many places, it's often a three-way war, with all parties equally at odds with one another, instead of the simple Axis v. Allies it's usually presented as. Start including the full context of these conflicts into the timeframe of WWII, and you push its start date back arguably to 1931, only 8 years after the last cleanup war of WWI (the Russian Civil War).
Viewed from an international relations perspective, combining WWI and WWII into a single period of flux makes sense. WWI makes the death of great power influence, but the attempted resolution afterwards (League of Nations) was impotent and unable to have any major effect on the international crises that arose, unlike the great power conferences preceding WWI. Instead, the end of WWII ushers in the era of superpower relations, where essentially the USA and USSR drive international relations for the rest of the world.
"It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100"
I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage.
What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...
It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is defined as the ordinal year since the approximate birth of Christ, beginning with AD 1, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
In other words, I'm not "counting from" anything. I'm describing the decimal year number in a manner that's natural for the radix.
I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.
And the idea that you could actually do serious date calculations that count backwards all the way to AD 1 while maintaining a precision of 1 year is also ridiculous. There are error bars around the year numbers from that long ago of something like 2-5 years.
I understand the basis for the [1901-2000] definition. However, I really don't think its defense outweighs its huge downsides, especially the split-decade problem.
I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century.
The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.
In contrast, the 2020 pandemic is presently not sharing the spotlight. Maybe something of comparable impact will happen. Or maybe it'll be forgotten regardless. But I don't know that the 1918 pandemic's status is all that illustrative.
I suspect that COVID-19 will replace the Spanish Flu as the "pandemic everyone talks about when there's a pandemic concern," but this is the sort of mention that requires explanation because it's not really part of the expected repertoire of history the same way the Black Death is.
With this latest surge per-capita deaths from covid19 just passed the low end of the 1968 flu estimates.
It was pretty bad. The flu has all the long term complications for some people that covid does - the lung problems, heart swelling, brain problems, etc.
I talk to people who were alive in 1968. It just wasn't really on anyone's radar. Rarely made headlines in the U.S.
Of course we don’t know the long term effects Covid is going to have yet, we’re still in the middle of it.
The only alternative to getting most of those technologies is some kind of global crisis that significantly sets back humanity. So we either have crazy powerful technologies that upend status quo way of life or a catastrophe that destroys everything.
The pandemic is more immediately disruptive, but I think it's impact will be largely erased within a few years of it "ending", just like previous pandemics.
The late great Hans Rosling of TED Talk fame had (has?) a fantastic website with a pretty good interface into such data: https://www.gapminder.org/
The key takeaway for me is that by 2099 Africa is going to get ~3B more people and India ~1B more. And they mostly going to be 'middle class' income earners (not poor anymore). Their consumer preferences are being made as we speak (Coke v Pepsi, Chevy v Ford, etc).
The Indian Ocean is going to be as big a trade hub as the Atlantic was and the Pacific is today. The time is ripe to invest in eastern Africa.
Controlling the belief system is more powerful than controlling the resources, which is more powerful than controlling the machinations of a single company, which is more powerful than controlling the product itself.
Once that's understood, I think people are free to make their own judgement calls regarding this opinion of his.
Right now I think the biggest potential bubble is top-tier city real estate where residential is more than 10X median family income. Commercial real estate is probably in a bubble too, at least in those "hot" cities.
What crash? SP500 hit an all time high on Friday.
I'm curious - are you speaking speculatively here or do you have reasons why you believe that will be the case?
https://www.dailyhandle.com/the-government-has-printed-40-ce...
Expect all-time-highs in many things as 40% inflation goes trickles down, now that the velocity of money has stopped crashing:
Definitely is a strong reason stocks are so overvalued though, yeah.
Except that looking at the Fred graphs, now that the worst of Covid seems behind us, it's starting to.
Even if it doesn't go back to 2000 levels, it's certainly going to get to 2019 levels - meaning not just overvalued stocks but inflation too.
It's gonna hurt, but as it will also fix the student loan crisis, it could be overall a good thing!
It's good that the vaccines are starting to be distributed but it was only a week ago that my state sent out an emergency text for the first time ever stating that statewide hospital capacity was 90% used up.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
I'm not sure this will even be the case, depending on your perspective. Yes, we appear to be seeing a correction in commercial class A office space in major metros - but I'd argue that was a long time coming regardless. We may see a correction in residential real estate in those same major metros, but out here in rural America we're seeing an influx of people looking for better value than they were getting in coastal cities and it's driving our markets upward.
Which is hilarious as the latter combined with a lighter could be a potent improvised weapon.
The threat is using the airplane and its occupants as unwilling kamikaze weapons as in 9/11, and with the armored doors on the flight deck now it's unlikely the aircrew will allow the aircraft to be hijacked no matter what you bring on board. There's a reason the flight attendants stand in front of the door when the pilots have to use the washroom; it's so that you have to kill or incapacitate them first which buys the pilot(s) time to close and secure the armored door.
Incidentally, passengers kicked the shit out of the would-be shoe bomber too.
Perhaps that's the stated reason, but I think you and I both know it's security theatre, just like the "no phones in flight" rule.
COVID will be gone in a year or 2, but the economic damage may cause things to be worse.
My best hope is a reform of the medical cartels, but that is wishful thinking in the face of a billion dollar lobbyist group.
I remember reading at the time that it is typical for there to be populist right wing movements after economic calamities, same as happened after the great depression.
That's what it said. I assumed they were talking about how bad economies led to people like Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and since then maybe Thatcher and Reagan, also Putin, and more recently Brexit, Le May, Orban, the leaders of Poland, Brazil, Philippines, etc. Nobody's propaganda did all that. Bad economies and folks scared about change and their future did.
A very interesting book I read called "The Republican Brain" posited that people are born with a lot of their left/right thinking as part of their personalities, but that when the shit hits the fan a certain amount of left-thinking people will become more conservative.
Either you aren't discussing in good faith or ignorant of left wing populism.
Sorry, I ended up passing along what I remembered reading, and didn't think enough about your comment. Maybe I misremembered, or it would have been more accurate to say populism, without the left/right qualifier?
I agree, that makes sense to me. Populism is not unexpected after a certain amount of economic calamity.
I'm curious if there's a left/right distinction in this context, but I have no idea.
I'm more curious what caused the wave of populism in the late 2010s.
• History has a cyclical pattern (according to many. Toynbee, Hegel, etc) and the West was just rife for such a period. The people who experienced the negative outcomes of authoritarianism back in the 1940s died or entered nursing homes en masse in the 2010s.
• Social networks, and other internet phenomena, advantage sensationalism and division.
• The actual state of the world is bad enough that people stop voting for the status quo. By the 'state of the world', I mean things like the 'forever wars', terror attacks, the migrant crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China, etc.
The more I think about it, though, the less I think the actual state of the world matters. My reasoning there is that the way people interpret both their own station in life, and the events of the world, depends largely on the zeitgeist. With a little effort, I could imagine a world where people interpreted the same political and economic situation in vastly different ways.
I should add a disclaimer that, when it comes to this subject, it's possible I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm not a real historian :)
2020 really is a year of phase change (or in Thiel-like terms, a node point through which a number of trends pass through).
If you can correctly predict which issues will not revert to status quo ante (retail, remote work, delivery, retrograde fear of science, class stratification, or something nobody else yet sees) you can have influence, riches, and/or a lot of fun.
and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He is genuinely a nut in the John McAfee class.