There were plenty of doofuses that spent high school throwing a pencil at the kid in front of them. Trade school is good for them.
Actually, no. Prison is a great place, or adult day care, or pumping gasoline, or McDonalds...
I did the 2-year voc tech telecom thing, to get a real job, which paid for my 4-year degree, etc etc a pull yourself up by your bootstraps approach.
The "throw the pencil at the kid in front of them" crowd didn't survive more than two months of AC/DC principles, although a couple shocked themselves during lab building half / full / bridge rectifier power supplies and several believed themselves nobel prize winners for inventing the smoke emitting diode while in class. The idiots all dropped out before the first midterm.
Now admittedly some of my fellow voc tech were not the most intellectual people you'd ever meet, I think I was the only student to ever pass thru the doors who "read books for fun" etc, but the truly anti-social types and the unmotivated idiots didn't last long.
Basically a 2-year voc tech telecom diploma was a 4-year EE minus 32 credits of liberal arts and minus most of the math. They taught us exactly what a class AB power amplifier was and crossover distortion etc, but I didn't get the mathematical Fourier analysis treatment of crossover distortion until EE type classes much later.
Eh, my HS in the 80s was a combination vocational and academic school, servicing 3 towns in Massachusetts. Academic kids could take vocational courses as electives if there was room, I did 1 year of Electrical shop. If I'd had the room in my schedule I would've done a semester in Auto shop too, to learn how to work on my car better.
In the extremely early 90s I took what we called high school voc-tech drafting. That paid off big time over the course of my engineering career. Early drafting classes are all about learning what the correct symbol to use for a duplex outlet box, or the correct line type for architectural diagram of the data center, how to visualize blueprints in 3d, proper dimensioning, layout block standards, etc. I'm sure memorizing 1990s autocad would have been useless but I never "advanced" into those classes, so I only learned the useful stuff.
Because this is what a trade school is, they educate people to take up some sort of trade. Many developed countries, at least in Europe have schools like this all over the place for students that aren't considered college material.
How will the big banks make tens of thousands of dollars of interest off government guaranteed student loans, if we admit that some kids should go to trade school instead of college? Sacrilege! All kids need to go to college and take out huge unrepayable loans...
Of course they could bump the tuition of our local 2yr trade school up from $1000/semester to $2500/semester so the kids and retrainees need lucrative (for the banks) loans... Oh wait, thats exactly what they've done! Brilliant!
Where in India is "NYC"? Isn't that where all the software jobs are?
I would think the worst possible place to compete with a country having a cheap cost of living would be in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so I hope they aren't talking about new york city, new york state...
Would you want your kids to attend?
Heck no, my generation is the last one to get a domestic programming job. Kind of like coal miners don't let their kids become coal miners.
My mystification is what is the venn diagram intersection of mysql server, virtualbox, and oracle 11G? Without any details I'm guessing a package signing key got owned?
I'm guessing there's an intermediate step where the short term climate change means more/less domesticated birds, and/or one season's winter being more or less severe means more or less travel and more or less snow days.
Dude in China can't catch bird flu from a bird that he didn't keep because feed is so expensive, and I can't catch it from my coworker if I'm trapped at home in a blizzard, and/or its so dang warm I can't catch it at the mall because I'm playing outside in the beautiful weather.
They basically are charging you for the ability to redownload music and the convenience to autodownload all your files onto all your devices (rather then having to manually transfer it).
No, that's basically a description of the free google music system. It works pretty well if you have the patience to upload (it has a cap of 20000 songs and I've calculated that would take me something like 6 months to upload at my current measured real world upload rate)
I thought the advantage of paying for itunes match was you get to automagically upgrade your cruddy 128K rips to 384K or lossless or whatever.
On a relatively modern linux desktop at home, google music manager uploads about 100 songs per day at 128 K limited upload (a fraction of my upload pipe, and I like to keep it that way).
Thats 128 kilobits per sec / 8 bytes per bit * 1024 bytes per kilobyte * 60 secs per minute * 60 mins per hour * 24 hours per day / 100 songs per day = 13.5 megabytes per mp3 file. Wait a second, somethings not right there. Hmm. I should be uploading more like 1000 songs per day at 128K upload but I'm only getting about a tenth that.
I can't run itunes (easily) on my linux desktop at home can someone advise me how fast itunes match "matches up"? I can't use it so I don't deeply care, but it is interesting in an abstract sense.
Maybe he means something like with SecureBoot, he will never be able to run linux again, so not having a filesystem driver won't matter, or something like that, so he's not switching?
So they are starting to catch up with the ext3 filesystem.
I thought it sounded pretty much like a dumbed down version of AFS... from the early 90s. The problem is I never use any of that extra stuff because I have no use for it. I don't remember if I can do sparse with AFS because I don't care about sparse. At home I do the openafs thing for linux, mac, and windoze and everything is in AFS, so I don't really care what windows uses natively, its just kind of a bootloader to get to my real files over afs.
I hope there is a way to disable file level compression, because nothing sucks worse than shoving pre-compressed media files into and out of another compressor. Also it screws CPU performance in favor of storage space... So my storage is limitless or its incompressible data, but my CPU gaming cycles are limited, I'm not seeing this turn out well.
Also I don't think we'd give up seattle without a fight, need a pacific ocean seaport.
Unless there's a MAJOR seismic event causing massive geometric shift, I don't think that a California cessation would have much effect on Seattle remaining within the US political boundaries... It's something like 500 miles away.
Well I was thinking more of domino effect. A dude in Chicago wants a pacific seaport. Don't much care where it is. California is a lost cause, but Seattle probably would stay in the union and if needed we could probably hold it under military law. They may want to go to a more civilized country with a better health care system like Canada. Frankly, I do too, if Canada "invaded and took over" the upper midwest I certainly wouldn't fight it, it would actually be a nice upgrade. Canada does have weird freaky gun laws which sorta work in a civilized area, but the 'hood in US cities is not civilized, so you do the math.
Maybe some place in Oregon could be held as our western seaport... Too far away from.mx to become part of.mx, too far away from.ca to become part of.ca, unless they get greedy, anyway.
No go. If you live in socal this won't work but up north just wear a coat and hat. Unless they have a human examine your picture before completing the order, you simply put on a ski mask.
Obviously they'll find my fingerprints all over my phone, after all I was using it until supposedly AliasMrAlias stole it.
Thumb scanner biometrics are soooooooo owned and easily falsifiable that they're meaningless. They're like lie detectors, people outside the business think they're god and people inside the business know they're utterly useless other than for intimidation purposes.
Whoops third reason is lemming like behavior. If your biggest competitor gets his complete stored credit card and customer list posted on the pirate bay as a torrent, or maybe on wikileaks, you can guarantee your boss is going to want a detailed explanation of why your data is not posted there too, isn't our company at least as good as the competitions?
So it doesn't matter, if you're lemming like boss wants to be just like X and X buys secureid, well guess what you're doing next week?
You pay them the big dollars because they're supposed to already know what they're doing and have good practice already in place the day you shake hands.
Actually you pay them because its faster / better / cheaper than doing it yourself, not because they are perfect. If 50% of the population is below the median, they only have to achieve a 50% median solution to capture about 50% of the market. The actual percentages are probably much higher, regardless they certainly don't have to be 100% perfect to make money.
The other reason you pay money is to have someone else to blame for the inevitable headaches. As long as your boss yells at them for an outsourced solution instead of you for an insourced solution, that was money well spent.
I could see sites like WebMD and others revived a bit with this kind of "premier" EMR-interpretation service
My fear is a EMR-interpretation service that is based on religious lunacy, or based on astrology, or whatever pseudoscience. The last thing civilization needs is "Import your medical records here, and get your computer generated custom homeopathic purchase recommendations here!". Or "import your medical records here and we export daily updated prayer recommendations based on your illness (while selling your data to the highest bidder using a click-thru release form you weren't paying attention to, of course)"
Now something I would like is my son has genuine medically diagnosed digestive issues resulting in vitamin deficiencies, imagine an OTC version of digital prescription system where I could just link his record to the vitamin supplier and he gets whatever dosage his pediatrician advises etc.
And don't forget, they will change interchange formats every few years for no reason and require you to purchase a new app (which well look just like the previous app but will have a different color scheme). Signed, Quicken User
Yeah, I'm waiting for them to screw up mint that way, but so far, so good.
Amusingly I stepped off the quicken upgrade treadmill and jumped on the mint because all I wanted was a snapshot and some reporting, and like a week later they buy mint. Grumble. But, so far, so good?
If you don't get out of the south at age 21, you are screwed.
Unless you live in Huntsville. I lived there for awhile in the 90s. Strange place, it was like everyone who knew anything went to Huntsville. Because of NASA and the missile development contractors etc. Everyone had a security clearance and was involved in something interesting. If you didn't want to be the only literate person in your rural village, but still wanted to eat grits and pecan pie, you moved to Huntsville and got a govt job building missiles and whatever. I donno what its like now, but it was a heck of a great place as a young technological man in the 90s. I still culturally attach myself to the hightech redneck meme or whatever, even 20 years later.
The culture, though, remains in place
It was a weird experience to tune the radio around and hear American Dissident Voices being broadcast. It can take some getting used to. Also, everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to go to church or lies and says they do and nothing but evangelical christianity for the whites, baptist for the blacks, and catholicism for the illegals exists, as in mentally provincially no other religious existence is even conceivable or expressible. Its not all bad, some of the nicest folks I've met have followed the southern gentleman ideal of hospitality and respect, and the brotherhood of hightech rednecks knows no limit, if you know how to program a microcontroller and cut threads on a metal lathe and you meet another hightech redneck its like you're insta-adopted into the family, which is nice and friendly but sure takes a bit to get used to for a frigid northerner.
Theres a couple reasons why you get a desert, and most of them relate to global wind patterns based on lattitude, which can change with climate, but a large part of it is fixed. Ireland, for example, is never going to be a desert.
Even there, among certain subcultures (cough, Catholics) the transmission rate is at or near zero. Eventually, the other subcultures, haven proven themselves unable to survive, won't.
Its interesting how on an individual basis we've tried to halt evolution and don't allow individual euthanasia. But on a cultural / subcultural level, if they as a group wanna fail, or self destruct themselves, we pretty much sit back and let them.
This is all based on the assumption that what is today, will continue forever, which is wrong.
California, which is the economic engine of the USA
As the acceleration of jobs leaving for China and India increase.... What is CA once the last manufacturing job moves to China and the last info/tech job moves to India? Well, they have a lot of farms, and...um...
I'd like to point out too that California basically feeds the USA as well. Their agricultural output is vast.
Hmm thats a slight exaggeration, probably because they produce a bit more than, say, Nevada, or New Mexico, but...
Once the aquifer dries up, wait for the next big drought so the rivers run dry, and that's the end of that. Which is not so bad, because you can rely on the vibrant factories and office buildings full of programmers, err, wait see above.
Sure, some big cities full of people. What happens when the big earthquake hits? Hmm. Well when a big hurricane hit N.O., we abandoned them and its still in a tailspin at a fraction its current size. After the cities in CA are perma-depopulated, what next?
There's no reason to conclude that the US wouldn't just simply use military force to preserve the union
What if "we" wanted to get rid of CA? You're assuming only a healthy vibrant state can/could exist. Imagine straight line extrapolation of no more agriculture, no more industry, no more people in the cities after the earthquake, everyone who can move, has left... We've bought land from other countries, who's to say we wouldn't sell CA to MX for barrels of oil? Or a 99 year lease agreement? Imagine a piece of land with no realistic future economic value mostly populated by citizens from a neighboring country, you need something from that neighboring country, they offer up a "lease" or "trade" or something like that, secession doesn't have to be violence from outside the power structure, it probably will be from within the power structure. Maybe we'll make a treaty that CA and the SW is "NAFTA-land" in general and a new province of.mx in practice, legally technically remains our land, outsource management of everything outside our.mil bases to.mx, in exchange we get first dibs on whatever oil they have left. I could see that happening. Not a shot would be fired, just a bunch of treaties and trade agreements...
100 years from now for all practical purposes we'll have just as many languages with over 100,000 speakers as we do today.
And COBOL programmers will still be in demand. No I'm not kidding.
Retrospectively, - in the eighties AIDS was said to be cured by 2000
Is that all so far from the truth? The outlook at that time was a global pandemic across all people, spread thru hospital blood transfusions, medical and dental treatments, maybe swimming pool water... Looking at the stats, now its sort of a chronic lifestyle disease of certain subcultures, like smoking, sorta.
From my personal perspective, in my social subculture, its basically cured by lack of transmission, and is not relevant for fearmongering or FUD.
Its probably going to end up "controlled" like malaria or TB rather than apparent utter eradication like smallpox, but for all practical purposes, its no longer a threat.
I think that's where global warming, and the melting ice caps comes in. When most everywhere else is underwater, the deserts should be getting plenty of rain to make them tropical.
deserts come from latitudinal trade wind patterns, combined with some mountain range rain shadows. Just heating it up isn't going to help any. Strengthing winds and burning out the plants on the borderlands will just make it worse if anything. Nevada is not going to suddenly turn into a rainforest.
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There were plenty of doofuses that spent high school throwing a pencil at the kid in front of them. Trade school is good for them.
Actually, no. Prison is a great place, or adult day care, or pumping gasoline, or McDonalds...
I did the 2-year voc tech telecom thing, to get a real job, which paid for my 4-year degree, etc etc a pull yourself up by your bootstraps approach.
The "throw the pencil at the kid in front of them" crowd didn't survive more than two months of AC/DC principles, although a couple shocked themselves during lab building half / full / bridge rectifier power supplies and several believed themselves nobel prize winners for inventing the smoke emitting diode while in class. The idiots all dropped out before the first midterm.
Now admittedly some of my fellow voc tech were not the most intellectual people you'd ever meet, I think I was the only student to ever pass thru the doors who "read books for fun" etc, but the truly anti-social types and the unmotivated idiots didn't last long.
Basically a 2-year voc tech telecom diploma was a 4-year EE minus 32 credits of liberal arts and minus most of the math. They taught us exactly what a class AB power amplifier was and crossover distortion etc, but I didn't get the mathematical Fourier analysis treatment of crossover distortion until EE type classes much later.
Eh, my HS in the 80s was a combination vocational and academic school, servicing 3 towns in Massachusetts. Academic kids could take vocational courses as electives if there was room, I did 1 year of Electrical shop. If I'd had the room in my schedule I would've done a semester in Auto shop too, to learn how to work on my car better.
In the extremely early 90s I took what we called high school voc-tech drafting. That paid off big time over the course of my engineering career. Early drafting classes are all about learning what the correct symbol to use for a duplex outlet box, or the correct line type for architectural diagram of the data center, how to visualize blueprints in 3d, proper dimensioning, layout block standards, etc. I'm sure memorizing 1990s autocad would have been useless but I never "advanced" into those classes, so I only learned the useful stuff.
Because this is what a trade school is, they educate people to take up some sort of trade. Many developed countries, at least in Europe have schools like this all over the place for students that aren't considered college material.
How will the big banks make tens of thousands of dollars of interest off government guaranteed student loans, if we admit that some kids should go to trade school instead of college? Sacrilege! All kids need to go to college and take out huge unrepayable loans...
Of course they could bump the tuition of our local 2yr trade school up from $1000/semester to $2500/semester so the kids and retrainees need lucrative (for the banks) loans... Oh wait, thats exactly what they've done! Brilliant!
Where in India is "NYC"? Isn't that where all the software jobs are?
I would think the worst possible place to compete with a country having a cheap cost of living would be in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so I hope they aren't talking about new york city, new york state...
Would you want your kids to attend?
Heck no, my generation is the last one to get a domestic programming job. Kind of like coal miners don't let their kids become coal miners.
I assume they're referring to:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/cpujan2012-366304.html
My mystification is what is the venn diagram intersection of mysql server, virtualbox, and oracle 11G? Without any details I'm guessing a package signing key got owned?
I'm guessing there's an intermediate step where the short term climate change means more/less domesticated birds, and/or one season's winter being more or less severe means more or less travel and more or less snow days.
Dude in China can't catch bird flu from a bird that he didn't keep because feed is so expensive, and I can't catch it from my coworker if I'm trapped at home in a blizzard, and/or its so dang warm I can't catch it at the mall because I'm playing outside in the beautiful weather.
They basically are charging you for the ability to redownload music and the convenience to autodownload all your files onto all your devices (rather then having to manually transfer it).
No, that's basically a description of the free google music system. It works pretty well if you have the patience to upload (it has a cap of 20000 songs and I've calculated that would take me something like 6 months to upload at my current measured real world upload rate)
I thought the advantage of paying for itunes match was you get to automagically upgrade your cruddy 128K rips to 384K or lossless or whatever.
Can /. give me a real world speed report?
On a relatively modern linux desktop at home, google music manager uploads about 100 songs per day at 128 K limited upload (a fraction of my upload pipe, and I like to keep it that way).
Thats 128 kilobits per sec / 8 bytes per bit * 1024 bytes per kilobyte * 60 secs per minute * 60 mins per hour * 24 hours per day / 100 songs per day = 13.5 megabytes per mp3 file. Wait a second, somethings not right there. Hmm. I should be uploading more like 1000 songs per day at 128K upload but I'm only getting about a tenth that.
I can't run itunes (easily) on my linux desktop at home can someone advise me how fast itunes match "matches up"? I can't use it so I don't deeply care, but it is interesting in an abstract sense.
Maybe he means something like with SecureBoot, he will never be able to run linux again, so not having a filesystem driver won't matter, or something like that, so he's not switching?
So they are starting to catch up with the ext3 filesystem.
I thought it sounded pretty much like a dumbed down version of AFS... from the early 90s. The problem is I never use any of that extra stuff because I have no use for it. I don't remember if I can do sparse with AFS because I don't care about sparse. At home I do the openafs thing for linux, mac, and windoze and everything is in AFS, so I don't really care what windows uses natively, its just kind of a bootloader to get to my real files over afs.
I hope there is a way to disable file level compression, because nothing sucks worse than shoving pre-compressed media files into and out of another compressor. Also it screws CPU performance in favor of storage space... So my storage is limitless or its incompressible data, but my CPU gaming cycles are limited, I'm not seeing this turn out well.
End users: We still live in a world of 8.3 filenames. Sorry. Till the last PC is burned in a bonfire...
You know what would be a funny graph of google data? How many are still serving up .htm files instead of .html files vs year.
20 years from now my grandkids are going to have to answer on Jeopardy why computer filenames are still in a 8.3 filename format.
There's really no money in defacing OpenStreetMaps
I have adblock plus so I don't know, but can someone verify if maps.google.com has ads?
Damage to a competitor results in more ad impressions amongst people not smart enough to use an ad blocker, leads to real money...
Also I don't think we'd give up seattle without a fight, need a pacific ocean seaport.
Unless there's a MAJOR seismic event causing massive geometric shift, I don't think that a California cessation would have much effect on Seattle remaining within the US political boundaries... It's something like 500 miles away.
Well I was thinking more of domino effect. A dude in Chicago wants a pacific seaport. Don't much care where it is. California is a lost cause, but Seattle probably would stay in the union and if needed we could probably hold it under military law. They may want to go to a more civilized country with a better health care system like Canada. Frankly, I do too, if Canada "invaded and took over" the upper midwest I certainly wouldn't fight it, it would actually be a nice upgrade. Canada does have weird freaky gun laws which sorta work in a civilized area, but the 'hood in US cities is not civilized, so you do the math.
Maybe some place in Oregon could be held as our western seaport... Too far away from .mx to become part of .mx, too far away from .ca to become part of .ca, unless they get greedy, anyway.
No go. If you live in socal this won't work but up north just wear a coat and hat. Unless they have a human examine your picture before completing the order, you simply put on a ski mask.
Obviously they'll find my fingerprints all over my phone, after all I was using it until supposedly AliasMrAlias stole it.
Thumb scanner biometrics are soooooooo owned and easily falsifiable that they're meaningless. They're like lie detectors, people outside the business think they're god and people inside the business know they're utterly useless other than for intimidation purposes.
Whoops third reason is lemming like behavior. If your biggest competitor gets his complete stored credit card and customer list posted on the pirate bay as a torrent, or maybe on wikileaks, you can guarantee your boss is going to want a detailed explanation of why your data is not posted there too, isn't our company at least as good as the competitions?
So it doesn't matter, if you're lemming like boss wants to be just like X and X buys secureid, well guess what you're doing next week?
You pay them the big dollars because they're supposed to already know what they're doing and have good practice already in place the day you shake hands.
Actually you pay them because its faster / better / cheaper than doing it yourself, not because they are perfect. If 50% of the population is below the median, they only have to achieve a 50% median solution to capture about 50% of the market. The actual percentages are probably much higher, regardless they certainly don't have to be 100% perfect to make money.
The other reason you pay money is to have someone else to blame for the inevitable headaches. As long as your boss yells at them for an outsourced solution instead of you for an insourced solution, that was money well spent.
I could see sites like WebMD and others revived a bit with this kind of "premier" EMR-interpretation service
My fear is a EMR-interpretation service that is based on religious lunacy, or based on astrology, or whatever pseudoscience. The last thing civilization needs is "Import your medical records here, and get your computer generated custom homeopathic purchase recommendations here!". Or "import your medical records here and we export daily updated prayer recommendations based on your illness (while selling your data to the highest bidder using a click-thru release form you weren't paying attention to, of course)"
Now something I would like is my son has genuine medically diagnosed digestive issues resulting in vitamin deficiencies, imagine an OTC version of digital prescription system where I could just link his record to the vitamin supplier and he gets whatever dosage his pediatrician advises etc.
And don't forget, they will change interchange formats every few years for no reason and require you to purchase a new app (which well look just like the previous app but will have a different color scheme).
Signed,
Quicken User
Yeah, I'm waiting for them to screw up mint that way, but so far, so good.
Amusingly I stepped off the quicken upgrade treadmill and jumped on the mint because all I wanted was a snapshot and some reporting, and like a week later they buy mint. Grumble. But, so far, so good?
If you don't get out of the south at age 21, you are screwed.
Unless you live in Huntsville. I lived there for awhile in the 90s. Strange place, it was like everyone who knew anything went to Huntsville. Because of NASA and the missile development contractors etc. Everyone had a security clearance and was involved in something interesting. If you didn't want to be the only literate person in your rural village, but still wanted to eat grits and pecan pie, you moved to Huntsville and got a govt job building missiles and whatever. I donno what its like now, but it was a heck of a great place as a young technological man in the 90s. I still culturally attach myself to the hightech redneck meme or whatever, even 20 years later.
The culture, though, remains in place
It was a weird experience to tune the radio around and hear American Dissident Voices being broadcast. It can take some getting used to. Also, everyone, and I mean everyone, seems to go to church or lies and says they do and nothing but evangelical christianity for the whites, baptist for the blacks, and catholicism for the illegals exists, as in mentally provincially no other religious existence is even conceivable or expressible. Its not all bad, some of the nicest folks I've met have followed the southern gentleman ideal of hospitality and respect, and the brotherhood of hightech rednecks knows no limit, if you know how to program a microcontroller and cut threads on a metal lathe and you meet another hightech redneck its like you're insta-adopted into the family, which is nice and friendly but sure takes a bit to get used to for a frigid northerner.
malnutrition due to corn intake leading to obesity is another form of malnutrition also reaching epidemic proportions.
Death by corn just takes longer than death by starvation.
Not.. exactly. Heres a URL for you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Formation_of_hot_deserts
Theres a couple reasons why you get a desert, and most of them relate to global wind patterns based on lattitude, which can change with climate, but a large part of it is fixed. Ireland, for example, is never going to be a desert.
Even there, among certain subcultures (cough, Catholics) the transmission rate is at or near zero. Eventually, the other subcultures, haven proven themselves unable to survive, won't.
Its interesting how on an individual basis we've tried to halt evolution and don't allow individual euthanasia. But on a cultural / subcultural level, if they as a group wanna fail, or self destruct themselves, we pretty much sit back and let them.
This is all based on the assumption that what is today, will continue forever, which is wrong.
California, which is the economic engine of the USA
As the acceleration of jobs leaving for China and India increase.... What is CA once the last manufacturing job moves to China and the last info/tech job moves to India? Well, they have a lot of farms, and ...um...
I'd like to point out too that California basically feeds the USA as well. Their agricultural output is vast.
Hmm thats a slight exaggeration, probably because they produce a bit more than, say, Nevada, or New Mexico, but ...
Once the aquifer dries up, wait for the next big drought so the rivers run dry, and that's the end of that. Which is not so bad, because you can rely on the vibrant factories and office buildings full of programmers, err, wait see above.
Sure, some big cities full of people. What happens when the big earthquake hits? Hmm. Well when a big hurricane hit N.O., we abandoned them and its still in a tailspin at a fraction its current size. After the cities in CA are perma-depopulated, what next?
There's no reason to conclude that the US wouldn't just simply use military force to preserve the union
What if "we" wanted to get rid of CA? You're assuming only a healthy vibrant state can/could exist. Imagine straight line extrapolation of no more agriculture, no more industry, no more people in the cities after the earthquake, everyone who can move, has left ... We've bought land from other countries, who's to say we wouldn't sell CA to MX for barrels of oil? Or a 99 year lease agreement? Imagine a piece of land with no realistic future economic value mostly populated by citizens from a neighboring country, you need something from that neighboring country, they offer up a "lease" or "trade" or something like that, secession doesn't have to be violence from outside the power structure, it probably will be from within the power structure. Maybe we'll make a treaty that CA and the SW is "NAFTA-land" in general and a new province of .mx in practice, legally technically remains our land, outsource management of everything outside our .mil bases to .mx, in exchange we get first dibs on whatever oil they have left. I could see that happening. Not a shot would be fired, just a bunch of treaties and trade agreements...
100 years from now for all practical purposes we'll have just as many languages with over 100,000 speakers as we do today.
And COBOL programmers will still be in demand. No I'm not kidding.
Retrospectively,
- in the eighties AIDS was said to be cured by 2000
Is that all so far from the truth? The outlook at that time was a global pandemic across all people, spread thru hospital blood transfusions, medical and dental treatments, maybe swimming pool water... Looking at the stats, now its sort of a chronic lifestyle disease of certain subcultures, like smoking, sorta.
From my personal perspective, in my social subculture, its basically cured by lack of transmission, and is not relevant for fearmongering or FUD.
Its probably going to end up "controlled" like malaria or TB rather than apparent utter eradication like smallpox, but for all practical purposes, its no longer a threat.
I think that's where global warming, and the melting ice caps comes in. When most everywhere else is underwater, the deserts should be getting plenty of rain to make them tropical.
deserts come from latitudinal trade wind patterns, combined with some mountain range rain shadows. Just heating it up isn't going to help any. Strengthing winds and burning out the plants on the borderlands will just make it worse if anything. Nevada is not going to suddenly turn into a rainforest.