Slashdot Mirror
The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
Other than KIM HASTREITER (Co-founder and co-editor of Paper magazine) who is just fuckin' around, CAROL WILLIS (Founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum; curator of the exhibition "Future City") who is showing some common sense, KATE KAPLAN (Seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park) who actually has some intriguing ideas (Portable chip toilets? How would that work?) - other predictions are just a case of "Have hammer - will nail everything."
PAUL NURSE (President of Rockefeller University) is also nailing things with his hammer but at least he is using some common sense not to nail jello to the wall.
Only rich will live in New York? Who will serve them? Robots? Then how come there are poor if robots do our work?
And if you think that the point of being served is to get things handed to you so you don't have to get up...
Serving is about commanding other humans.
Robot that says "How high Sir?" when you tell it to jump just ain't all that fun.
$200-300 barrels of oil? Conservative...
Wasn't there some mention of about only 50 more years of oil? And with dollar going so far down... Why not $200.000-300.000 a barrel?
Detaching oil from dollars and all those dollar bills in the world used by countries solely to trade for oil "coming back home" - what else besides guns in people's faces will make them use your printed paper instead of someone else's to trade in valuables?
Now... Germans seem to have learned their lesson in forcing the world to do stuff they want of it - by using guns.
It took them only 2 world wars and 40 years of the country divided by other people's cold war.
So far, Americans don't seem to be catching on.
I sure do hope that they do. And soon. Or we all as a species might be fucked.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
#2 and #4 are having it both ways. If the Aryan race goes extinct, then the beliefs of present-day French Aryans will have no more relevance to the future residents of Frankistan than the beliefs of the Anasazi or Yavapai people have relevance to Americans today. The present-day French will just be a minor footnote in history textbooks: "Ancient Frankistan was once populated by a violent race of cannibal Gauls, who later converted to Christianity, but lost their Christian identity and went extinct".
6) What's wrong with Buddhists? Buddhism has easily got to be the single most inoffensive religion on the planet.
A look at the history of Buddhist countries will reveal them to be every bit as violent as European or Middle Eastern countries.
p.s. I am not white.