It's not unique to democracy, any power structure can be abused by those who manage to seize the reigns. It's possible that a democracy could produce a system with limited power structures and diffuse responsibilities if its constituents desired such.
Cheating senescence is kind of the ultimate adaptation. If we can crack this then I'd expect designing other artificial adaptations to be quite tractable in the future.
Better stack your chips too. At this point I think there's a fair chance massive life extension will be available before I die, but I likely wont be able to afford it.
I reckon this would be self-correcting. If the average person could reach retirement in such a small fraction of their lifespan, then the vast majority of the population at any given time would be non-productive retirees. The economy would slow until your interest was zero and you'd be forced back to work. Eventually an equilibrium would be reached, wherein the average Joe could look forward to a rewarding and fulfilling career of, say, 450 years or so.
Or work 30 years on, 15 years off or similar. Build a career from scratch, fulfil what you want, then have a sabbatical, then return to a new career in a different field.
Crazy that we can think about immortality and singularity, but capitalism end is out of question. Humanity will probably be extincted in these scenarios and we are still talking about work. Hilarious
I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had about all the crazy, albeit possible, futures that may come. But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism. It must bind alongside their religious adherence receptors. Because it I SO damn entrenched. Like a neural block of sorts.
Pretty ironic to come in here and claim everyone is closed-minded because they were talking about something other than your preferred topic.
> But there is such a definitive hard stop when trying to discuss a shift from capitalism.
But nobody was trying to discuss that. We were discussing how our current systems might adapt to such a huge change as people suddenly living 500 years. You know, because it's a fun thought experiment. People do that. Not everyone lives their entire life on a soapbox.
1. Is that a serious question? Your entire comment embodies that sentiment. Read it again.
2. Your "shift from capitalism". Seriously? Do you not know what you wrote?
3. Buddy, there was no "utterance". If you want someone to consider your thought experiment, it helps to actually bring it up as a topic of conversation. Instead you showed up out of the blue to whine about how nobody spontaneously started talking about it in your absence. Why the hell would we be talking about it?? You weren't here to mention it! You could have said, "hey, consider this", and had a conversation about it, but instead you came out of the gate bitching about how everyone is talking about the wrong thing because we're a bunch of narrow-minded proles.
I can't imagine why your attempts to talk to people about this get shut down. Truly a mystery.
^ Precisely the kinds of folks that simply cannot even begin to begin to think about something alternative to capitalism.
Sorry, that in a thread about possible futures you got your jimmies rustled when some people mention moving away from your deity. Forgive my blasphemy. Please continue your wonderful day.
Show me one single word where anyone has objected to your topic. You are trying so hard to make this conversation about that, but you can't, because it is not your topic, but your shitty attitude that puts people off.
Refuse to acknowledge that all you want. You are doing it at your own expense.
Apersonally I can’t see doing the same thing for more than 40 years. Maybe I’d be an actor, then have a statically, then next time be a sculptor,
Or maybe dig into physics.
But I can also invest in companies? If the population keeps growing, because less people die, the economy might just keep growing. Also if you can get 500 you might want to get more kids. So it will be exponential growth. What could go possible wrong?
> Why? If you can live 500 years just focus 20 years on compound interest hard, then retire for 400 years?
The first version of this technology will only be available to billionaires. So if you reach 70 when it’s invented and are not a billionaire, you’ll never get to try the 500 years of compounding trick
We’re likely to see this stuff get invented in our lifetimes (I’m 38), maybe practical, but we’re def all too old to see it become widely available.
Then again, life extension will not be a singular technology. You could argue antibiotics and vaccines were the first big step and those became affordable within a few decades of invention
In designing my own portion-control diets, I found this to be an important lesson. The very size of our dishes and plates and glasses control for how much we are served, to begin with. So, if you've got a family-sized bag of chips or cereal, dole it out into a small bowl. Even if you overeat, you will consciously see how much you have eaten during that sitting, and it should have a psychological effect on you. In contrast, sitting on the sofa with the Netflix on and plunging your hand into a bag of Doritos while you gulp directly from a 2L Cherry Pepsi bottle, not going to win any diet awards. Seeing how much you will eat, seeing how much you have eaten, and reaching the bottom of the dish, needing to get up and refill it, these are all inflection points, and opportunities to pause and consider.
Dieting as a bachelor presented challenges. Your frozen meals and pizzas are often one size that's too large or small. Your recipes are not going to be calibrated for one person, one meal, one sitting. Literally, every can in my pantry is too much soup or fruit to prepare for a single meal...
Restaurant eating makes portion control so difficult. Delivery, doubly so. The only recourse is to find a place that has tapas, appetizers, small plates that can be likewise doled out.
And yes, I am certain that food is engineered to foster addiction and dependencies. It's right there in the slogans, yes? "Once you pop, you can't stop!" "Betcha can't eat just one!"
The average dinner plate today is 11.5 inches. Fifty years ago, it was 9.5in. A hundred years ago, it was 9 inches. In the 1700-1800s, it was 8 to 8.5 inches. For centuries before that, the common "trencher" was 4-6 inches square. And say ~2000 years ago, food was served for the entire dinner party on a single 12-16inch communal platter.
Dinner plates have gotten huge, historically speaking.
My diet would verge on the definition of extreme by most people given the lengths I go to avoid UPFs, additives and microplastics but that doesn't mean I don't like eating. If I have a bag of chips I'll easily gorge the whole thing before even making it back to the couch so keep them out of the house, out of sight and out of mind.
Snacks are truly a sin - they're just seasoning sprinkled on empty calories, engineered to deliberately leave you not satiated. Such a waste to blow your calorie budget on them while also eating a laundry list of chemicals - I'd rather hold off and eat more pasta or steak at dinner.
And if I really can't hold off, there are plenty of easy snacks you can prepare at home like eggs or toast. "a slice of buttered toast" is rated pretty high as a final meal...
An apple, banana or nuts also does pretty well if you can deprogram yourself from the conditioning of the snack industry.
I don't know. Was just referring to "While working on this clock, I also invented a new time scale: GTC. It blends the concepts of GMT and UTC" But I might not be getting something in https://niklasroy.com/gtc/#gtc
100%. The other day I needed to record a small snippet of audio so I installed some random audio recorder app from the app marketplace. It worked fine, but I could only see and replay my audio clip from inside the app, so the first thing I did was "share" it to my email which thankfully arrived as an attached .m4a file I could actually work with.
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