Ava
@Ava@piefed.blahaj.zone
- Comment on What is a Futurist? Why did Steven Spielberg hire a bunch of them for minority report? Didn't he just hire people with best guess and not set in any fact? 1 week ago:
A futurist is someone who has an interest in or studies the possible futures of our world, and who generates work related to their predictions of the same. It’s a pretty broad term, and would encompass certain academics, as well as writers and other enthusiasts. Their basis in evidentiary processes is obviously going to vary greatly, by it’s not necessarily accurate to say that they are simply guessing. It’s not a licensed term, but neither is “author” or “crypto-bro” or “politico” and yet one can certainly be any of those without any credentials.
There are certainly some elements of guesswork and hypothesis in any predictive field. Certainly there will be authors out there who might style themselves as futurists, but whose works are much closer to fantasy than speculative science fiction. I (personally) think it would be grossly inaccurate to call Star Wars a futurist work, for example. But I think one can easily look at the history of technological and social developments and create something that is a reasonable prediction of the future. I think Weir does a respectable job of portraying a mostly-plausible scenario in The Martian, by comparison. Asimov’s work has various examples that could probably be called Futurist, as well.
Why might a director or script writer consult with such individuals? Well, partially I suspect it’s to claim that they did. It’s a headline and marketing thing, of course. But also, because they’re making a piece of media that’s not necessarily in an area that they’re intimately familiar with. Even if you’ve made several science fiction movies before, I think it’s probably obvious that taking advice from someone who has spent thousands of hours considering the minor nuances and smaller details of something would have some useful insights.
- Comment on Streamline it 5 weeks ago:
These will all be football fields in the year 17776.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Only if you’re a shallow person who evaluates the partners of your friends solely on their sex appeal.
Thinking like this is telling on yourself.
- Comment on Top 10% of Americans Have Double Wealth of The Bottom 90% 4 months ago:
For those curious as to additional reading, the origin of the 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study, a finance research project from the late 90s.
Not to be confused with the Trinity Test, which occurred in the 40s and had very little to do with finance.
- Comment on Top 10% of Americans Have Double Wealth of The Bottom 90% 4 months ago:
I hate when these sorts of statistics point to “the top 10%” as the problem based on numbers like this. It’s simply much less broad than that. Of all wealth, the top 0.1% holds 14.5%. The next 0.9% holds 17.3%. The bottom 50% hold only 2.5%. The top 1% of households hold 12.72x as much wealth as the bottom 50%. And, notably, the bottom 10% of households have less than $1000 in net worth. The bottom 8% of people have $0 or less.
A household which is at the 90th percentile for Net Worth has a net worth of roughly $2,000,000, including equity in their home. You get to the 95th percentile before you double that to $4M. The 90th percentile has 1000x higher net worth than someone with $2,000 to their name, which seems obscenely unfair when described in that way. However, a net worth of $2,000,000 would provide a retiree a mostly-safe withdrawal rate (4% or $80,000) of around the median income of ~$84,000. (This doesn’t actually check out since it includes equity in the home, but as a simplification.) Retirees have access to social security and tax-advantaged accounts and the like, but someone who ends up with a net worth of $2M could live only a median lifestyle without working.
Is a net worth of $2,000,000 a very large number and a large chunk of wealth? Of course it is. But it’s not like, obscene wealth. If I gave a random American $2M it would change their lives profoundly, but the people who have a net worth of $2M aren’t the ones who are ruining our lives. They’re just not.
The top 0.1% hold 14.5% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 31.8%. The bottom 10% hold less than 0%. That’s the ball game.
Disclaimer: I have not rigorously cited my sources, nor verified all my figuring. However, most of this is pulled from the Fed data linked in the article. Other stuff is pulled from sources which cite the same, though I’ve not run a rigorous analysis of the maths. My work should not be cited as correct, it is intended to be illustrative. That said, I’ll happily remedy any errors that others might notice!
- Comment on Top 10% of Americans Have Double Wealth of The Bottom 90% 4 months ago:
The article links the source data from the FED, which has data since 1989 https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:144;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:levels
- Comment on Just a few 4 months ago:
The Ten Commandments, famous for being identical and consistent across varying versions of religious scripture and sections within the same!
- Comment on Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc? 5 months ago:
FFXIV probably deserves a spot on the list, the initial launch was so bad they just remade the game.
- Comment on You wanted the secret to getting rich? Here it is 11 months ago:
None of what I said is disagreeing with your point. You're reading into my response opposition that wasn't offered.
- Comment on You wanted the secret to getting rich? Here it is 11 months ago:
If you have $1m, you can draw something like $30-40000 a year reasonably safely. That's obviously a lot of money, but isn't what most people in the mentioned countries think of as "living large" if it's your whole income, especially for a couple/family. That puts you at about the median individual income for Japan and NZ, a bit above in Korea, and below for most of western Europe and Aus.
Obviously that's without working, but that's kinda the point. It's wealth, but not enough that most people in those places would be comfortable not working if that's how much they earned. Hell, in the US that wouldn't even cover childcare for a few kids in many locales.