Parzival99

Yes, agreed, it's definitely a much bigger network & economic problem than a technical one.

Blogs, discogs and national radio actually work a lot better for me for discovery, simply because, as you say, Spotify may not even have the input data in order to then help me discover better music. Thing is, I'm not sure there is a desire (perhaps economically driven) to improve that catalogue as they would need to.

Totally agree about discogs. For music outside the western world in particular, discogs is a godsend.

The premise (i.e., a singular 'music streaming' platform is what one should 'judge' Spotify against) is itself what I would reject in this case. e.g, for Indian classical, you're much better off with a whole constellation of blogs out there (and separately, certain music festival sites that host their recordings). Even national radio works a lot, lot better.

This might possibly be true for the types of music you named. Try it with world music in general (e.g,. south asian or middle eastern music) and you'll come across severe limitations and suggestions that simply do not work. Spotify doesn't even still carry even half the catalog of music from some of these regions. It's suggestions in (western) classical also have left a lot to be desired.

"Really brilliant people, the kind of people that can take different ideas from different sources and synthesize them into new things, they don’t read books in this way. They just read them. If they do take notes, it’s to check something with some other source or if it’s something they want to remember."

Ah yes, let me take a note of that and remember to mimic these "really brilliant people" who all operate in one way.

I think my own view is not too far off yours, oops, but the way you wrote it as a statement of fact (which is really like 4 propositions in one) made me chuckle.

lmao, feeling left out with no brown list then.

"know what you want to watch beforehand" - 100% this. Over at least the past few years, this is almost entirely what I do and it has helped youtube remain a good experience for me. In general, I rarely do research on youtube or twitter or even googling or even reddit. In most instances, I'm better served by just starting with the wikipedia page or some specialized encyclopedia (e.g., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and then going from there. On sites like youtube, I either go in knowing precisely what I'm trying to watch or to watch new videos from a select few channels I subscribe to (usually silly stuff like press conferences of football managers etc.).

Yes, fair. And I actually agree with you. But if on a technicality Modi isn't in power in 2032 and say Yogi Adityanath or someone is, I'd still treat your prediction as a correct one!

Not a bad attempt.

And I know this is all just a bit silly fun, but I'd prefer such predictions to reflect a world view/philosophy of how one thinks society will be designed (same or different) in that future. Some of these are too niche to reflect this - e.g., that London/New York will look the same. That doesn't really say much. Much more interesting would be some ideas about urban centers more broadly rather than cherry picking 2 which have already been relatively stagnant for a while.

And some are just not specific enough such that I'm actually confused. e.g., what does it mean to say that the leader of India in 2032 will be the same as in 2022. Do you literally mean that Modi will be India's PM? While India doesn't have a term limit for the PM, Modi will be ~82 in 2032. Or do you mean that the BJP party will still be in power? If so, do you mean that a RSS member of the BJP will be in power or a non-RSS member? Will the BJP be in power with a relative majority like it currently is, or with a particularly large coalition like in say the early '00s under Vajpayee (when the BJP won less than 24% of the vote but formed a coalition of 13 parties, as opposed to right now where the BJP has over 50% of the seats alone). The answers to these mean _very_ different things about India's direction come 2032.

Yeah, things are perhaps different in the developing countries markets in Asia (maybe even the developed countries).

In India, physical books have always been a lot more popular (and still are) since books are a lot cheaper than in the US (printed on very crappy paper though). But that's also meant that there's a lot more room for ebooks to grow into. The US might be, what, a 30-35% ebooks share at this point? In India, its less than 5% but growing very strongly.

BUT this is not accompanied by ereader sales. Majority of ebooks are read by folks on their phones. (I suspect China has been seeing something similar too with the proliferation of online reading platforms.)

This is a slippery slope I think (even letting aside the fact that frequently such a cost-benefit invariably comes down to 'hey, the cost borne is skewed more towards the poor, while the benefits are skewed more towards the rich / otherwise privileged'). If we then also don't tackle climate change as strongly as we otherwise might, or work less to improve living conditions all around the world (since we now have a magic pill), then the long-term net effect is still bad.

That we discount the geographically and temporally distant too much, and the local almost not at all is a) what helps us locally survive & b) what causes our long-term downfall.

Agreed.

Though, to be fair, even the CEO of Flexport initially dismissed this, saying "I assume they'll have it fixed in a day or two. And anyways there's such a backlog of ships waiting to unload at the ports of arrival that it probably won't even impact the transit times of the cargo." https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1374501965418352640

Jill Lepore discussed this in her New Yorker article when discussing Linda Colley's new book, The Gun, the Ship & the Pen.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/when-constitut...