GQ: How 2000ad Predicted The Future

[Frank]

DRESS NORMAL

SOMEWHERE between the New York and Paris collections, a new word crept into the fashion lexicon. "Normcore", defined as a bland anti-style, was bandied around everywhere, from the front row to Twitter and New York Magazine. The notion of dressing in an utterly conventional, nondescript way struck a collective chord. But what is normcore, and where did it come from?

http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2014/03/21/normcore-fashion-vogue---definition

Peacocking, patchworking trends and making a statement with not just your necklace, but your bag, shoes and sweatshirt to boot, has been the order of the day (but) thanks to that more-is-more approach "Everyone is so special that no one is special". As with anything that grows too popular, the backlash has already begun, and blending in is the new standing out. As New York put it in February, normcore is "fashion for those who realise they're one in seven billion".

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/normcore-fashion-blending-in-is-the-new-standing-out-in-latest-catwalk-nontrend-9738736.html

[japandroid]

Stogie!! Electronic ciggies! I gave up 4 years ago by reading the Alan Carr book and going cold turkey. If E Fags had been around then I'd probably still be smoking now.

[Steve Green]

It did make me smile when I saw John W smoking an e-pipe at Lawgiver.

It didn't walk and talk though...

[Frank]

As recently pointed out here, it really doesn't pay to dwell too much on which particular part of Stogie's robo-anatomy Sam Slade used to suck on as he exclaimed ¡ay-ay-ay, Señor!  Worth remembering that Stogie wasn't just another example of the way everyday objects in the Robo-hunter-verse were mechanised - his purpose was to get Slade to cut down on his nicotine intake.



* and quell IPC's outrage at having a character smoking in a kids' comic

[japandroid]

E Smoking is probably the worst and most harmful invention of the 21st Century. As with Stogie they are meant to lower nicotine intake but are more used as a means to smoke in public places.

[Frank]

They do solve the problem of smoking looking cool, though. Nobody is ever going to get laid because they were chewing on a bic biro full of bong water.

[japandroid]

Yeah right. When I first saw one of those mammoth chaps I thought it was a bong. The evil of the world are yet again making a killing out of nonsense.

[Frank]

An answer to the question that troubles me most - HOW DOES MEGACITY ONE'S ECONOMY FUNCTION IF NOBODY ACTUALLY WORKS?

Paying everyone a basic income would kill off low-paid menial jobs | Paul Mason http://gu.com/p/45cey/stw

You take a large chunk of a country's tax revenues and pay people a few thousand pounds a year to do nothing. That's the essence of an unconditional basic income scheme – and it took less than a day for the Green party's version, at £3,744 a year, to be emphatically slapped down.

The "unconditional basic income" has a long history in economic thinking, with proponents on both the left and the right. For conservatives it is a way of radically cutting the administrative costs of means-tested benefits, and subsidising low-paid work. For those on the left, who embraced it after the 1960s, it is seen as a way to alleviate inequality. But if the basic income has any relevance to today's economy, it is as a solution to a much bigger problem: the disappearance of work itself.

In 2013, researchers at the Oxford Martin School predicted that in the next two decades 47% of US jobs would be in danger of being lost to automation. McKinsey Global Institute research suggests that 140 million knowledge workers worldwide are at risk of the same fate. Most policymakers do not even want to think about the prospect of mass automation, because it is unlike any change we have seen before.

In every previous technological upsurge, deskilling and job destruction went alongside the creation of new, high value jobs and a higher-wage consumption culture. But automation disrupts that pattern: it reduces the need for work in one sector without necessarily creating it in another.

If you paid every adult in Britain – including pensioners – say, £6,000 a year, with no requirement to seek work and no means test, it would cost around £290bn a year.

You would abolish the basic state pension (currently around £6,000) and basic unemployment benefits, keeping only benefits targeted to extra needs such as child support or disability, which come to around £30bn now, so the overall cost might come to £320bn a year.

That is a huge amount of money. The current welfare bill in Britain is £167bn – of which two- thirds goes to pensioners. Its eats around 23% of government spending. A true, subsistence level basic income would close to double that. But it is imaginable, in the short to medium term, if you factor in the benefits.

The first would be to eradicate low-paid menial work. Why slave 10 hours a day with mop and bucket for £12k when you get £6k for free? Corporations would rebalance their business models towards a high pay, stable consumption, low-ish profit world, and the tax take would rise as a result. All tax relief for the poor would end.

The second benefit, though less tangible, would come to the spiralling healthcare budgets of western societies. Drugs are dear, collaborative networks of peer educators and self-help groups come for free, at least in theory, once everyone is being paid simply to exist, and has the time and freedom to contribute. This is the view taken by the prophets of peer-to-peer economics, who envisage a new, collaborative production sector. My fag-packet logic tells me it would mean tens of billions in lower healthcare costs, and savings in other areas too.

The rest of the fiscal gap would be closed through raising tax – so this is not a cheap or easy solution. It would be a pathway to a different kind of economy. But for both left and right it would challenge the last vestiges of what Gorz called "the utopia based on work" which has sustained us for two centuries, but may no longer.

Paul Mason is the economics editor at Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews

[JOE SOAP]

HOVERBOARD

[JayzusB.Christ]

HOVERBOARD

Finally.  It's the future now

[JOE SOAP]

Fat Acceptance Movement

[Hawkmumbler]

I'm all for acceptance of fat people. What pisses me off is the fact they deny the negative medical implications.

[Frank]

NUMBER FOUR CARTRIDGE!

The US Army is to test a new weapon that can hit enemies shielded by cover.

The shoulder-fired XM25 Counter Defilade Engagement System, has a laser rangefinder and soldiers can programme exactly where the "smart" ammunition detonates. Known as "The Punisher", its range is 2,300 feet.

The makers, Orbital ATK, believe it will be able to take out soldiers hidden inside doorways, behind trees, in trenches or bunkers.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/army-test-new-weapon-punisher-6634715

[sheridan]

I'm all for acceptance of fat people. What pisses me off is the fact they deny the negative medical implications.

Agreed - I don't know the exact context of the (real life) protest pictured, but I one of the placards did start off 'health care for ...' - the first step in your general health is to take some responsibility for your own health instead of trying to palm it all off on medical professionals.   The 'glandular condition' defence annoys me as I used to know someone who actually did have a glandular condition which caused her to be morbidly obese.  She was the mother of a now-ex-girlfriend who I no longer have contact with.  She probably died about ten years ago, due to her condition.  Thinking about it it doesn't annoy me so much as upset me when large amounts of people claim they have relatively rare conditions rather than admit the true cause of their weight (judging by the frankly stupid fad diets people I know try every now and then, this is something need to admit to themselves).

[Hawkmumbler]

I'm all for acceptance of fat people. What pisses me off is the fact they deny the negative medical implications.

Actually this wasn't what I meant to say at all. Fat acceptance is a good thing, poor health isn't. Metabolisms, knowing your own body limits yaddayaddayadda.

I'm not a doctor or anything so really shouldn't have commented in the first place.