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No? It’s not 2026 yet
Is the year 2020 part of this century?Edit: am dumb
Yes but 2000 was not.
Sorry, I meant 2000, and thinking about it, yes I guess that’s correct
Found Arthur C. Clarke
Whoa. People born around this time will (hopefully) live to the year 2100.
mind be blown.
In 2100 I will be 126 so I hope not. Not unless they have massively improved geriatric medicine.
But imagine a worst reality, what if they do invent immortality drugs, and then we’re stuck with these idiots forever? What if it’s just century after century of the flat Earth conspiracy theorists (despite us clearly having a moon colony) and Andrew Tate.
Your take is not the correct one, longevity treatments (immortality drugs isn’t something that can be made) will roll back your physical age by reparing you. Not just forcing life to stay in a decaying body.
So at 126 you’ll run around playing basketball and listening to heavy metal, if that’s what you like.
Well you can give me a new heart but unless they do something about the brain there isn’t any point.
The brain is “just” cells too, they regenerate and so forth. No specific problem keeping it in a young state.
I’m 36 and it’s not impossible that I’d see the year 2100 so yeah.
I feel this negative outlook isn’t very healthy. Yes there are problems, as there have been at any point in history. That doesn’t mean nothing good happens or can happen.
Go make some nice things happen to yourself or someone else.
Obviously not everywhere but marriage equality made great strides.
I met and married an amazing person this century, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice.
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
I like having a smart phone, but maybe that’s just me.
Firefly
You know what, fuck you man, 'cause time’s gonna tell in that one. I’m sure some respected producer like J.J. Abrams will pick it up and have us enjoy some four or five more seasons.
Yes. The fediverse wouldn’t get much awareness if it wasn’t for Twitter and Reddit absolutely shutting themselves. I wouldn’t even be here if that never happened.
That’s technology in a nutshell. We moved off of one platform to join another.
If we didn’t, we’d still be sending each other messages on AOL and join chatrooms to have discussions.
At least this time around there’s no central server that can be shut down killing everything that exists in that platform. Obviously AOL Instant Messenger and many other popular messaging apps from that era suffered from this exact fate.
Haven’t thought of AOL in years but recently it’s been coming up at random. On a TV show last night somebody’s neighbor said “Check your AOL” because they sent an email that morning and the person hadn’t replied yet.
Assuming you meant “shitting themselves” - Lemmy is doing that too, it just wipes better, at least for now.
It’s a better description than mine.
Well yeah, I’ve got a better job and my country inflation is finally going down. That’s good in my books!
yes. a lot.
God when are people going to get tired of this disgusting, useless, tween angst attitude toward life?
When there’s less shit to be angsty about.
Really? In the history of the world, there hasn’t been a time more safer, healthier or better for mankind then now.
Don’t stare yourself blind only on the scary stuff. That’s what the media wants, to make you obedient, scared and consuming.
Instead, why not engage and talk with people? For every ugly person in the news, there are 100 good people in real life.
Break the cycle of negative echo chambering. Please.
It depends on what you mean by “ugly”. Seeing so many people worldwide vote for harsh xenophobic policies made me realize that I consider most people sort of ugly.
Perhaps they are just afraid, but it paints the real world picture. I don’t think people are good or bad inside, just egoistic. Me included.
Still I try to see the good in people and I tend not to whine, but I do understand the pessimistic views.
Conservatism has dragged America fifty years behind in tech progress and wasted all of our resources on destruction over building. I wish this country would get fucking NUKED. America is a dismal failure on every level
Describe the 50 years of tech progress that we’ve lost or you’re full of shit.
We could be driving electric cars and having solar panels everywhere.
We could be having the fastest wifi network.
We could have high speed trains.
Medical advances as well. I don’t even want to go into the vaccine territory.
All of those things were considered problematic by the old guard, who conservatives supported. One side continues to protect the yacht owning class. Conservatives would still be fighting marijuana if the rest of the population didn’t tell them to fuck off.
And if you think this is all wishy-washy speculation, get the fuck out of America for a minute and look around the rest of the world. American cities are no where near other international cities in terms of living, quality, tech, support. You have to be dumb as fuck to not recognize how often Conservatives vote against tech initiatives to line their own pockets.
Ehh looking at semi conductor & solar panel production I see what this persons saying. “Losing 50 years of tech progress” isn’t quite accurate definitely, however the US has decayed its tech lead compared to the space race era, for example.
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
If the same amount of passion and resources was poured into the space program for the last 50 years as it was during the moon landing we would certainly be much further ahead, but no one would be able to tell you where would we be.
How do expect someone to describe something that hasn’t been invented yet?
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
There are some cases where you can know where you’d be if priorities were different. Hence the most frustrating graph in the world:
Very revealing if it’s true. Fusion is the perpetual “20 years away” poster child.
Here’s a PDF of the study, seems legit
Oh I totally believe it, I meant assuming all those figures on the graph were true, which I do. Been following fusion for decades. Frankly it looks more and more like the fusion industry has taken the same approach to fusion that drug industry take with disease - don’t cure it, just keep treating it forever.
Turns out electric companies aren’t too interested in electricity that’s too cheap to meter.
Best graph I’ve ever seen
My dude, only 24 years have elapsed in this century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century, the 25th year has only just started. Try again next year.
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Extreme poverty worldwide is down from 38% to 8.5% since 2000. Global median income has doubled in that period. And yes, that’s adjusted for inflation.
Oh, and renewable energy generation as share of the global energy mix has consistently beaten expectations during that period, too. Solar, specifically.
Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise. The extreme poverty crap is propaganda by the world bank who lowered the poverty line for no other reason than to make capitalism look good.
That stuff about renewaple energy is simple greenwashing. The only year since 2000 when CO2 emissions went down was in 2020 thanks to COVID.
Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise.
You are one of the many who has equivocated the ‘wealth gap’ with the incidence of poverty, when there is no direct casual relationship between them at all.
All the wealth gap essentially is is just a label of who has the most wealth. But you don’t need to be anywhere close to that to be stable/comfortable.
Fact: if everyone on Earth was poor, the wealth gap would be zero. A small/non-existent wealth gap does not equal things being in good shape.
Fact: The correlation between the size of the gap and the incidence of poverty in world history is negative–in other words, long ago, the gap was smaller, and many more people were desperately poor.
Fact: It is absolutely possible for there to be a wealth gap, even one as large or larger than the one we have presently, while no one is poor. Further, it’s extremely unlikely that the hypothetical total eradication of poverty would shrink the gap at all, or even slow its growth.
Fact: If you waved a magic wand so that everyone in every county of the US, for example, had their income raised to the median, essentially wiping out poverty nationwide, the size of the wealth gap would literally be unchanged–the gap from broke to comfortable is nothing compared to the gap between comfortable and ‘wealthiest on the planet’.
New wealth is created constantly, it is not zero sum and never has been. And there will always be someone who has the most.
P.S. The World Bank’s poverty line has never been lowered that I can see, only raised, most recently in 2022 from $1.90 to $2.15 per day. So no idea what you’re talking about with ‘lowering the poverty line to make capitalism look good’.
Interesting video, thanks. I think the main point is that most (historical) data has a lot of gaps and wrong interpretations / extrapolation. People like Pinker seem to (perhaps just ignorantly) somewhat cherry pick data and use it as an argument for their optimistic statement.
Doesn’t look that way to me, given that the change has been pretty smooth and shows up on specific regions and adjusting for outliers and inflation (and matches the rise in median income).
More importantly, it’s not incompatible with global inequality on the rise. Different stats measure different things.
Renewable energy beating expectations is the opposite of greenwashing, it specifically compares actual generated renewable energy against previous projections. If you want to poke holes into it for the sake of… denying anything good has ever happened, I guess? you should instead point out at how disproportionately that growth is driven by China.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
The only reason to care about renewables is if they prevent climate change. Why am I supposed to be happy solar panels exist, if CO2 emissions are increasing?
Because more solar means that the increase in CO2 was much less than it would’ve otherwise been without solar. An ocean liner doesn’t turn on a dime. First emissions increase less than they would’ve, then they increase at rates lower than years past, then they stop increasing, and then finally they can begin decreasing
Because those are two separate parameters. Less solar panels don’t mean less CO emissions, they mean more. You are cutting down on one metric even if you’re not reversing the trend.
That is an absurd question, by the way. Why are you supposed to be unhappy we’re making more solar panels in this scenario? What is the downside?
More plebs suffering under capital owners = global poverty rate went down
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I guess that’s why America has so many school shootings 🤡
Name another country with the same problem
I don’t know too much about the median income, but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off. Also, at least according to Wikipedia, the latest definition of extreme poverty was made in 2015, before the recent inflation spikes.
And “beat expectations” is just a non-statement. What were the expectations? And how does it matter if we’re still on track for a climate catastrophe? We’ve crossed the 1.5°C target.
but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off.
That’s what happened. The bimodal world income distribution has become unimodal as the working class of East Asia has seen a lot of improvement. Inequality in the first world went up since a lot of working class jobs left their countries while the wealthy were able to get richer.
Hey, I’ll take poor countries getting a bit better off before any benefits to any American any day. That’s good news, so point made.
As for “beat expectations”, I was going off a specific study showing multiple official forecasts and how far behind actuals they all were, but unfortunately I don’t have it handy.
But the data is the data, so here’s another example from an Australian blog post: https://evcricketenergy.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/2030-renewables-in-australia-forecast-2024-update/
And some data on renewable generation overtaking fossil fuels in the EU: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/09/Report_Wind-and-solar-overtake-EU-fossil-fuels-in-the-first-half-of-2024.pdf
I don’t know why people look at this as such a binary. Climate change isn’t an on-off switch. This has to happen regardless. Faster is better than slower. Climate catastrophe or not, we need to figure this out, it’s about how bad things get before we do and how much extra work and impact we have to deal with from going over certain thresholds. Going over 1.5 doesn’t mean we can give up now, we still have to get the renewable transition done, even if now we also have to deal with a bunch of humanitarian crises that wouldn’t have happened had we transitioned sooner.
But energy use is way up and AI data centers have erased all gains from renewables.
Care to source that statement? What’s the global consumption for AI compared to production by renewables?
Cool, but that’s unrelated. We need the energy transition to happen anyway. Energy consumption is still climbing regardless, so we still need to move things over to renewables on top of whatever other actions we take. When it comes to climate stuff people tend to want a silver bullet or claim that anything short of that is useless, which I find kind of infuriatingly counterproductive.
Also, data centre power consumption has been up on aggregate on a very smooth curve since the 2000s. AI or no, those things have been burning through an increasing amount of energy over time. They need to generate that energy from clean sources in any case, which requires a faster energy transition.
Incidentally, I don’t know if AI datacenters have “erased all gains”. I don’t have a direct comparison handy, but the numbers I see around for those two things seem an order of magnitude apart. If you have good sources I’d love to take a look, though.
I suspect the claim that AI has consumed all gains is hyperbole, given that it used to be applied to crypto.
Regardless, those assholes are still using too much power, privatising the benefits, and socialising the fall out.
Sure? But, again, the question is whether there have been positive changes this century. Separate negative changes are not a counterpoint.
AI power consumption would have been AI power consumption. The unexpectedly fast adoption of solar is there regardless.
Obviously, that depends how you’re counting.
In the year 2,000, if you projected solar adoption, you might now be pleasantly surprised.
However in the year 2,000 if you projected progress on climate change, you’d probably now be horrified.
Solar adoption wouldn’t be a positive if not for climate change.
That’s the best part, though, solar adoption has beaten forecasts consistently over time. Most revisions upwards have still been too conservative.
Now, is that fueled by an energy crisis in turn caused by war, making self-generation and energy independence more appealing? Maaaaybe. But still, sun power!
That doesn’t address my point though.
Solar is only good because climate change is bad.
You can’t say “solar adoption is good” and ignore the climate deteriorating faster than expected.
Lord of the Rings (movies) came out this century. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
JRR Tolkien would like a word.
I know the sorts of words he likes, and I just haven’t got that kind of spare time right now.
