Doctors’ salaries should be way lower and we should be paying them out of pocket instead of relying on insurance to do so. The original intent of insurance seems to have been lost - it was supposed to be there in case something catastrophic happened, not for “standard maintenance” of the body and/or controlling chronic conditions.
Caviar is disgusting and I’m convinced people who like it but say it’s an “acquired taste” only began eating it because it’s rare and expensive.
Oh, yeah - some modern art is ridiculous and boring. When I walk into our local museum and see the big red dot or a bunch of splatters on canvas, it pisses me off to think of how many millions of dollars it’s worth, and I think people who claim to see the “meaning” in it are pretentious asshats.
The US is pricing itself out of existence. Despite the numbers shown for various inflation measures, normal people cannot afford life here, and it’s getting worse.
If you have the time, here’s a really interesting article on “cost disease”, and how everything’s getting way more expensive, with no real increase in value. Housing, education, medical care, child care, and the other normal, everyday expenses are becoming impossible for the average family to handle.
In addition, it’s impossible for everyday folks to follow all of society’s “rules” any more. If you add up all the accepted wisdom on career, education, child rearing, home improvement, diet, exercise, health, and personal development, there isn’t enough time in one’s life to accomplish it all. No matter what you’re working on or doing, you’re failing according to some group’s standards. It seems we’ve adjusted our norms in such a way the even moderate success is no longer possible.
I’m not sure of this, but I’d be willing to bet that below a certain income threshold, it’s actually impossible to live legally. Some required fee or license or payment or housing code must always be skipped to afford basic needs, and some are forced into minor criminality just to survive.
Sorry about the depressing tone, but it seems like it’s increasingly difficult to live a normal, moral life any more. You’re always failing somewhere.
Despite government support for electric vehicles, it will be another twenty years before they become popular, and traditional gas vehicles will still be common.
I think the quality, affordability, efficiency, and ease of charging will continue to improve and eventually become predominant, but 20 years might be a good guess. The problem with electric vehicles that you rarely hear people talking about is that electricity is often generated by methods that aren’t much better than burning gasoline. If they are going to be truly environmentally valuable then we have to switch to cleaner ways to make electricity.
After a few accidents, insurance debacles and wanna-be terrorist attempts, the self-driving movement will fizzle.
I think the opposite, that the tech will continue to improve until they become everyday cars. You’re also going to get self-driving cross-country semi trucks.
A cheap way to manufacture quality diamonds will be found in ten years, causing prices to decrease and leading to ridiculousness (teeth implants, huge tennis bracelets and incorporation into clothing).
Never. Manufactured diamonds are already cheaper and higher quality than natural ones but the diamond marketing machine has convinced people that natural diamonds are still worth more. Just like they convinced people in the first place that diamonds are actually valuable. The whole diamond jewelry business is based on a scam.
Diligent scientists will finally discover a cure for Donald Trump. Won’t you help fund this important research? For just pennies a day, less than the price of a cup of coffee, we will find a solution to this nattering nabob of narcissism.
I’ll pass on this one but note the irony that you have used a quote from one of our most corrupt national elected officials to criticize Trump.
It will be another twenty years before we really understand the basics of viruses, nutrition and the popularity of “Love Island”.
Basics? What don’t we understand today? Viruses replicate their own DNA by hijacking our cells; we need amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates, and essential fatty acids; and the television-viewing public will watch anything.
Cyber concerns become so widespread that there is a return to archaic paper records when any degree of sensitivity is involved.
We have been marching irreversibly towards digitization. There will always be an arms race between the white hat hackers and the black hat hackers. Short of a nuclear Apocalypse we’re never going back.
In ten years, a cheap medicinal cure for dental cavities will be available.
IANAD but cavities are a mechanical problem. You would need something that could cause the enamel to regrow. I think there could be a genetically engineered virus that could do that but it will take more like 50-75 years.
In medicine, machines will be able to read X-rays and other radiographic images as well as specialists. And identify skin rashes as well as dermatologists.
There is a good chance that AI can do that if it’s not doing it already. I would imagine that a radiologist would have to confirm any reading because I don’t know if it will be able to do it “as well as specialists,” and there would probably be legal liability ramifications, but this could make the process much more efficient. Then again, it would be an improvement over drunk pathologists.
It is truly impossible to live these days without the Internet. It should be considered an essential service and be priced accordingly for the needy. There are probably too many laws and guidelines and no one knows them all.
We don’t know that much about viruses at all. (see my thread from March 30; Viruses Are Profoundly Strange). We know more about general nutrition, but not about what is best for a specific person. Our knowledge of psycho pharmacy and neurology is also very basic (from the perspective of 30 years from now).
Folks could be right about self-driving cars and diamonds. Just an unpopular opinion. Cavities are a bacterial infection, in essence.
The people who might improve AI to do what I said have the least incentive to do it. But if I took the ECG at its word every time the machine made a printed (mis)diagnosis, I might have treated dozens of cases of AIVR or pericarditis with clot-busting medicines that can and do kill people as a side effect.
I, on the other hand, feel like I hear about this way too often, particularly since it isn’t true (though you weaseled a bit with the “aren’t much better” language.)
I think the main focus is on CO2 emissions. EVs win too clearly on other pollutants. So let’s compare a 25 mpg gas car against a 3 mi / kwh EV. The gas car emits 19.64 pounds of CO2, or 8.91 kg. So per mile, that’s 356.4 g.
Now, let’s look at the EV: coal emits 2.21 pounds of CO2 (depending on type of coal and type of plant, but that’s an average for the US) per kwh, which is basically a kilo. So the EV is going to emit about 333 g for its mile.
So the EV is better than the typical gas car even if you assume the grid is 100% coal. But coal only produced 23% of US power in 2019 (and is dropping.) Gas, which is around 500 g / kwh, was another 38%. That gives you a weighted average of 420 g / kwh, which drops the EV to 140 g / mi.
You can buy a car that does better than 25 mpg, but even if you go for a Prius - let’s assume 55 mpg - you’re still looking at 162 g / mi.
This is just armchair stuff. In the real-world, there’s line losses on electricity and emissions to product, refine, and ship the gas, and non-CO2 greenhouse gases to consider. But to a first approximation, EVs are already better than the best gas car you can buy in terms of CO2 emissions, using a US grid average fuel mix. And it’s only going to get better every year as coal’s share of the grid falls.
I’m all in favor of doing this more rapidly, just to be clear.
Climate change is the hot button so I won’t argue your CO2 argument, but coal also emits mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, heavy metals, and arsenic. I know that gasoline produces some of these too, but I haven’t done the A-B analysis mile for mile.
No need to prove this to me. I lived in Moscow for a year. Caviar is disgusting, and watching people eat it is disgusting. When you go to any sit-down, table-service restaurant, they bring bread, unsalted butter, and caviar.
In Russia, they eat the bread sliced thickly, buttered thickly with the unsalted butter, and with caviar on top of that. They say that butter alone is too “plain.” Just freaking put some salt in the butter.
The pretentious asshats who claim to see meaning in it are the ones who put me off modern art for a long time. I don’t really pay attention to how much money something in a museum is worth - there are probably a lot of other pieces that are just as good by lesser-known artists that aren’t worth millions. I just approach every piece with an open mind and I often am able to appreciate it just on aesthetics.
I do have my limits, though. Art that is just a copy of something else or a repurposed ordinary unchanged item just doesn’t strike my fancy, and neither does performance art. Probably because the only way to appreciate these is for their meaning, which I deliberately do not look for (although occasionally I can find meaning in modern art when I am not looking for it.)
I don’t know. I really enjoyed when a woman artist of my acquaintance took a photo of her very Catholic grandmother’s family when she was a child, all lined up by height in matching outfits-- 9 children, 8 girls and a boy (the youngest), in identical dresses, except the boy was in overalls of the same fabric, and they matched the skirt and jacket the mother was wearing…
There are plenty of folks who believe that the modern art marketplace is just a good setup for money laundering. Who is to say this blot of paint isn’t worth $100 million? If that is true, then there is not only no need for a modern art to ‘make sense’ or ‘look like something’ or to ‘demonstrate some skill in applying paint with precision,’ but instead it works better if the piece doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t look like anything, if it doesn’t take precise skill.
Though it’s important to appreciate that hype itself is a talent. It’s not like anybody can become a zillionaire from art work.
There’s no doubt that after all the hype, art lovers are looking at these art works and seeing all sorts of deep meaning in them. My issue is just that I don’t believe the deep meaning is inherent, but rather that you can find deep meaning in any random thing if you use enough imagination, and as a result of the hype surrounding these art works, people are motivated and enabled (in the form of helpful hints as to just what meaning might be found) to imagine it there.
[I would also reiterate that in my personal opinion it’s not just modern art but all art. IOW, I believe that if you took a thousand people who had never heard of the Mona Lisa and showed it to them, that they wouldn’t find it any more captivating or meaningful than something found on the cover of some random Hallmark card. It’s only once people know that this is one of the Great Artworks of the World, and know that all this meaning is there and that all educated and intelligent people can see it that they’re motivated to “see” it themselves. Remarkably similar to the Emperor’s cloths, now that I think about it.]
Mmmm, are these a thousand adult humans, in our world, in 2020, who’ve never seen the world’s most famous painting? I’m not sure I trust their judgement on art. Or much else.
If we’re talking hypothetically— a Yesterday (the movie) sort of situation, where La Gioconda never existed and someone paints her tomorrow — you would still be wrong, but much less wrong. Some people out of the thousand would find it “more captivating or meaningful than something found on the cover of some random Hallmark card” because a random thousand people will include some artists or students of art who would admire its extremely skilled composition and execution. As did contemporaries of Leonardo. With reason. See the beginning of the “Legacy” section of the Wikipedia article for examples of early admirers: Mona Lisa - Wikipedia
Sure, it’s not the most famous painting in the world because it’s the best painting in the world — but neither is it the equivalent of a Hallmark card. Its fame is not fully earned, but it’s not fully unearned either.
(None of this should be construed as a defense of the insane market for fine art, which as someone mentioned above seems in large part to be a big excuse to launder money or shelter it from tax.)
I’ve never seen it in person, because that would require me to travel to a different continent and fight through a massive crowd and then try to hold a place in the front of that pushy crowd long enough to appreciate the subtle nuances of shade and brushstroke.
I’ve seen pictures of the picture and it’s a seated woman.
I’ve seeb pictures of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and View From The Asylum Window. They are but pale imitations of the real canvas viewed close up and in person
