Well alright it's 2020. The Chinese have totally rebuilt their country. New cities coming out of their butts, That, and high speed rail everywhere.
We got shit. Our 1950's infrastructure is literally collapsing around us. Frankly our country looks embarrassing. It's one pile of wet shit after another. We have 50 miles of high speed rail...on old track so they can't go top speed. China 20 years ago had zero miles...now it's measured in thousands.
We've got 20 year old robot jalopies driving around Mars. Others are planning to send folks there, and to the moon. The damned Chinese just sent rovers...fucking new ones to the far side of the moon. Guess what,...they planted wheat there, and it grew. These guys have plans. We just collect rent.
There's a world encompassing info net we are all connected to. That, and we use it to watch porn send thoughtless messages to people we don't like, and google cat videos. Yet with all this, and more there's 'still' nothing good on TV. Only now there's nothing good on 1000's of channels.
The poles are melting an ignorant venal insane man is president we mapped the human genome Nano crap is happening, and will one day consume us.
The mass of the population is uneducated stupid selfish, and superstitious.
We individually have devices with computation power more than all of NASA when we went to the moon,...in our pockets. You hear that. ...it's in our pockets.
That, and as I say we use it to form hate groups watch S&M porn send anonymous hate mail to our neighbors, and make digital viruses for fun just to fuck with folks.
Welcome to the future.
Btw this is the 'good' part. It gets rather worse from here.
Happy New Year.
The future isn't what it used to be.
ReplyDeleteThere's good news about China. They'll probably have a crash in the next few years. They've been making much the same mistakes as us, overextending and getting into too much debt; their export model of shipping cheap manufactured goods is slowing down significantly. Also it appears they're making some mistakes militarily, investing heavily in obsolete carrier groups. Not that I wish to indulge in too much schadenfreude, but I'm not eager for them to become the next big hegemon all that quickly, which in time they probably will anyway.
Manned Moon and Mars missions are just a waste of money. But it's true our infrastructure has gone to shit. Also, our people are indeed ill-educated and not very bright. 150 years ago even people who left school at fourteen had a better understanding of English than many modern college graduates. You can see it in the newspapers of the time, which were read by all classes. Oh, yeah - and our economy is indeed rentier. There's far too little genuinely productive activity. Once the petrodollar goes belly up there's gonna be a whole nuther dipensation, and most of us won't like it.
I don't like it already.
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