The world employment (according to ILO) has been basically flat since 2004. 60% of people above 15 years old are employed (40% are unemployed, retired, in school, self-employed, or not looking for work). The US had an increasing employment rate up to 2007 (62%), fell through the crisis and has slowly grown since to 58% in 2012. EU hasn't shown any such recovery and is basically back at 2004 levels (51.5%).
It is much better to be wealthy or educated and unemployed than being poor, uneducated, and unemployed. Basically today's unemployed are better off than yesterday's employed, to the dismay of some economists who think the unemployed don't suffer enough and thus aren't forced into the work marked.
We still have a demographic bulge worldwide of better educated, but still basically uneducated/unskilled, workers entering the work market. A lot new jobs have to be created, and a lot new jobs have been created.
Automation will take over as the bulge dissipates (there will be more potential employees in Africa and Afghanistan, less everywhere else), but if I should venture a guess it would be that the employment rate will stay essentially flat in the next 16 years as well, that the world employment rate in 2030 will still remain at around 60%.
I have to admit that in my mind, Rwanda still lingered as one of the most war-torn countries on earth. Clearly a lot has changed and improved.
In this sense it is good news. War breaks out, frontline news. Peace breaks out, nobody notices. That gives the impression that the world is a more violent place that it is.
It isn't all yay! though, the bloody conflict in Eastern Congo is partially fuelled by spillovers from Rwanda (and other states). However, I see improvements rather than attaining perfection as good news, so this is good news (maybe not for CAR needing AU peacekeepers though).
Individual Empowerment: Where did they detect this? A megatrend no less??!! Depends on their definition, I suppose. If loosening employment laws, enabling mass layoffs, is the definition of individual empowerment, then I have to agree.
It is expounded in the paragraph, as well as the report itself:
Quote
poverty reduction, growth of the global middle class, greater educational attainment, widespread use of new communications and manufacturing technologies, and health-care advances
All of these are real, and easy to document. The growth of a global middle class is indeed a megatrend (though I dislike that word, well blame Naisbitt).
That refers to this, the current arc of countries racked with young people below 25. Young people are violent and dangerous, they cause most violent crime, they are quick to riot, they are easily led into armies. In short they cause instability and suffering to the world around them.
This youth infection will be mostly contained to Africa and Afghanistan by 2030.
It seems time to repost the reminder from the original thread. It had a lot about Muslims, Vivaldi is still running on beer, and this thread has taken an environmental turn. All fine, but it should be about the world starting 15 years 11 months and 3 days from now.
Quote from: jax
Keep in mind that this thread is supposed to be about the world in 2030, not the world in 2013 or 1913 or 1813. If you want to banter, try to figure out where USA or Glasgow will be in 2030.
As it happens the US National Intelligence Council has done just that (completely ignoring Glasgow's role in the scheme of things incidentally), in their report Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. From the preface:
Quote from: NIC
Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds is the fifth installment in the National Intelligence Council’s series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about the future. As with previous editions, we hope that this report will stimulate strategic thinking by identifying critical trends and potential discontinuities. We distinguish between megatrends, those factors that will likely occur under any scenario, and game-changers, critical variables whose trajectories are far less certain. Finally, as our appreciation of the diversity and complexity of various factors has grown, we have increased our attention to scenarios or alternative worlds we might face.
We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency. Our effort is to encourage decisionmakers—whether in government or outside—to think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.
In other words megatrends are major changes that will continue unless interrupted, gamechangers are interrupts, and potential worlds are some outcomes.
Quote from: NIC
MEGATRENDS
Individual Empowerment: Individual empowerment will accelerate owing to poverty reduction, growth of the global middle class, greater educational attainment, widespread use of new communications and manufacturing technologies, and health-care advances.
Diffusion of Power: There will not be any hegemonic power. Power will shift to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.
Demographic Patterns: The demographic arc of instability will narrow. Economic growth might decline in “aging” countries. Sixty percent of the world’s population will live in urbanized areas; migration will increase.
Food, Water, Energy Nexus: Demand for these resources will grow substantially owing to an increase in the global population. Tackling problems pertaining to one commodity will be linked to supply and demand for the others.
GAME-CHANGERS
Crisis-Prone Global Economy: Will global volatility and imbalances among players with different economic interests result in collapse? Or will greater multipolarity lead to increased resiliency in the global economic order?
Governance Gap: Will governments and institutions be able to adapt fast enough to harness change instead of being overwhelmed by it?
Potential for Increased Conflict: Will rapid changes and shifts in power lead to more intrastate and interstate conflicts?
Wider Scope of Regional Instability: Will regional instability, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, spill over and create global insecurity?
Impact of New Technologies: Will technological breakthroughs be developed in time to boost economic productivity and solve the problems caused by a growing world population, rapid urbanization, and climate change?
Role of the United States: Will the US be able to work with new partners to reinvent the international system?
POTENTIAL WORLDS
Stalled Engines: In the most plausible worst-case scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase. The US draws inward and globalization stalls.
Fusion: In the most plausible best-case outcome, China and the US collaborate on a range of issues, leading to broader global cooperation.
Gini-Out-of-the-Bottle: Inequalities explode as some countries become big winners and others fail. Inequalities within countries increase social tensions. Without completely disengaging, the US is no longer the “global policeman.”
Nonstate World: Driven by new technologies, nonstate actors take the lead in confronting global challenges.
Common sense says this was so all along. Facts say we recycle less than ever before during history. There's no organised mining of waste. Only the homeless do it, or try to - there are fences to prevent them.
Facts say the opposite.
It used to be only poor countries did "urban mining" as a kind of cottage industri, until China scaled it up. Now several of the Chinese billionaires have made their billions on recycling, and on a smaller scale internal migrants have made very good money on recycling. The industry is becoming more professional, large-scale, capital-intensive, specialised, automated, and less damaging to the local environment and health. Recycling is still a dirty, polluting industry, but gradually less so. It is also, especially for metals, energy-intensive.
By 2030 it would be much more automated and large scale, but we are moving into a recycling economy slowly and backwards, even by 2030 we wouldn't really live in an recycling economy, but as resources become more valuable and the technology more advanced we will.
20-25 years ago the Czech Republic (or Czechoslovakia back in those days) used to have massive dead forests due to pollution, primarily from SO2. Now that forest has recovered. A much more serious deforestation of the Bohemian forests happened about 500 years ago from intense glass production, when the Bohemian forests largely were burnt, that too recovered. On the other hand Iceland is still deforested after the forests being cut down nearly a millennium ago.
Finns and Swedes have pretty much depleted their own forests for paper production and gone to ravage Northern Russia.
That's news for me. I have moved to Sweden, and there is forest as far as the eyes can see, and the saw mills are doing well. Virtually all forest is managed forest, and sustainably so, there is very little virgin forest. There are no "depleted" forests in Sweden, Finland, or Norway.
I am not too concerned about local pollution and even deforestation (obviously these are very important concerns, but these problems have also been solved; having been solved doesn't mean will be solved, though, vigilance is required), but am more concerned global industrial fishing. This is basically hunting/gathering, an activity that is hard to do sustainably.
Because first you would bore me, then you would annoy me, which isn't very good if you want to attract me to this place. I might stay away on spite.
I am not sure if there are any more people left to attract, but if there are it would be more constructive to be active on the forums, and then by contagion get them here.
Agreed!! -- Been there, doing that, & I will step up my bombardment suggestive posting until the very end, or my banishment ...... whichever comes first!
At this level of bombardment it has turned into spamming, and that is counter productive. All your posts are now advertisement for this forum, and most recent posts at My Opera are yours. If I were a My Opera member that for some reason hadn't made the switch, I would be peeved. On the other hand advertisement works, thus I suggest no more than half your posts should be ads, maybe no less than a third. The rest should be regular posting.
Final checkups before morning flight to Stockholm (via Zurich of all places) in a few hours. The advantage of early Sunday morning flights is no traffic (a rarity in Beijing), the disadvantage of early Sunday morning flights is early Sunday morning flights.
I did, and absolutely enjoyed, The Longest Journey. As Funcom is an Oslo company, I've visited (most likely the former) premises, and several Funcom employees started to work for Opera, I probably would have tried it anyway, but it was good. The gameplay was fine, like adventure games generally you do get locked in from time to time, but it played out well. More importantly it built up an atmosphere, initially it seemed a bit meh/cliche, but it became more engrossing as you played on. I would compare a bit with Myst, which gameplay-wise was almost pure problem-solving, but the atmosphere was unrivalled, but in a sense Myst had it easy as there were nobody there.
Dreamfall I bought, but I don't think I played it, and don't know if I have a version of Windows any longer.
How does a century egg taste like? I don't suppose it tastes like ordinary eggs?
There is a taste of eggs to it. The (no longer) white has a fairly neutral gelatinous taste to it, while the yolk is creamy and kind of savoury. It is not difficult food, it is quite nice, but it is a little bit odd with somewhat unusual flavours. They usually come with vinegary condiments.
A more familiar egg dish would be tea eggs that taste exactly as expected, boiled eggs with a tea flavour. Much nicer looking and tasting than regular eggs.
If you don't trust the software company, it doesn't matter the number of steps is one, two, or more. In either one they can install what they please. Software like browsers are going to be online a lot anyway, they will grab what they need. If you don't trust the software company a better approach is to do network analysis to see what downloads and uploads are done, and when.
. You may be more right than you know, this is classic Opera, or classic any browsing or software company for that matter. A software company has to assume that it knows what it is doing (and of course know what it is doing). If it does, it has a chance for success. If it doesn't failure is certain. A software company that isn't in this sense arrogant has no right to existence. Arrogance shouldn't be not listening to the users, but to what users do, not what they say. You must have noticed that all browsers have become simpler, that is because the user interface and user experience people are in the ascendancy.
There have always been quarrels about installers, the one piece of software that actually does no browsing and has no functional role. The Mac people, the Windows people, the Linux people generally preferred to do it the OS way, the default way. There have been a huge number of bugs and issues on installers thoughout history, having more than one means more complexity, more time, more testing, and still more bugs.
Well, to us, windchill is an indication that, even though it might only be X temperature, it's freezing out there on your face, which is always exposed to the weather. It also can be so cold in the windchill that frostbite is an issue but not very often. It's rare for it to go below -10 here for any length of time.
You don't use scarves over there? If it is seriously windy, snowy, or cold outside, I would expose no skin to the weather anywhere except for eyes (behind glasses) and probably around mouth/nose to avoid soggy clothing.
If for some reason I couldn't I would watch my boots or walk backwards, depending on wind direction.
All, well most, browser makers have periods where they realise that offline is important. It never lasts long. Developers tend to live in a bubble where they are never offline, and offline functionality and other functionality they don't use like e.g. printing are simply esoteric. Being offline is thus so 1995.
As I said, at least Opera and Firefox, even IE, has had offline as a priority from time to time (Google is abysmal at offline, one reason why using an Android phone can be so frustrating), but the drive has never been sustained.
Raining a lot - temp heading to plus 9 C then down to minus 9 C tomorrow. Another quick freeze. Ugh.
Reminds me too much about Oslo. Wintertime the temperature hovers around freezing, and has a depressing tendency to be just above freezing during daytime and below freezing at night, to ensure a fresh new layer of ice to slip on. Also the city is vaguely bowl-shaped, colder/more snowy towards the rim/hills, so on a walk to or from the centre there will always be at least one thaw/melt zone on the way. For perfection add a thin sprinkling of fresh morning snow to hide any evidence of the surface below.
You get in touch with your inner balance artist this way.
We had a blizzard yesterday - about 40 cm of snow and -12 C most of the day with wind chill of -30.
I have always found wind chill temperatures to be of dubious value, especially in winter weather. Wind chill is supposed to indicate temperature on naked skin, and you will not see a lot of skin in a blizzard. It is somewhat relevant if wearing a wind-permeable outer layer of clothing, but no sane person does that either.
