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."
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends: - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.
Welcome to the future of America.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The big NYC financial houses are already selling themselves to Arab and Chinese investors. This trend will continue. NYC will become a UN of finance, a place where the various world financial powers can meet and make deals. There will be no middle class in NYC. The population will be the uber-wealthy and the low paid service workers they employ. America will still be the place where the rest of the world sells their stuff, but they won't be selling it for US dollars. Americans will be on the dole or working in foreign owned sweatshops, and buying shit on credit. You won't retire, you'll work till you die, if you work at all.
Ex-president Chelsea Clinton's granddaughter will be running for president against a Saudi prince whose last name is Bush. American Idol will still have more voters and generate more interest than the presidential election. Canada and Mexico will complain about US citizens illegaly immigrating to their countries.
The New England Patriots will be working on a 1900 game winning streak, and Bill Belichek's head will be in a jar on the sidelines. Athletes will be grown in axoltl tanks. A new Slashdot ID will be a very large number. Windows 2108 will be late, bloated and buggy. The Linux kernel will still be licensed as GPL v2, and will be at version 2.6.something.
Apple will issue an update to the iPhone that breaks the hacks that let people install third party applications. Time Machine will let you restore files you haven't created yet. My iMac will be getting its 2000th logic board replacement.
This post will have been moderated into oblivion, but my clone will still think it was funny.