Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side … The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them

– Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

You know what’s truly weird about any financial crisis? WE MADE IT UP. Currency, money, finance, they’re all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-Columbian population centers in the Americas and in sparsely populated surrounding regions. They concluded that reforestation of agricultural lands-abandoned as the population collapsed-pulled so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it helped trigger a period of global cooling, at its most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, known as the Little Ice Age.

Shirts, shoes, and trousers will still be worn.

Most things will change, but no one thing will change everything.

No extrapolated trend will continue ad absurdum without modification by other influences.

At any given moment, every year of the preceding fifty to one hundred years is still current somewhere.

When you’re thinking about what life will be like at some date in the future, subtract 70-75 years to get the range of birth dates of people who will still be around. That’s living memory: the set of directly experienced events that inform the worldview and decisions of the people that lived through them.

Intermediate technologies will always be where the rubber meets the road. Even when everyone can see the direction technology is taking, new breakthroughs can only be realized via incremental developments in implementation, manufacturing, and distribution.

Exporting our manufacturing without exporting our standard of living will turn out to have been a serious mistake.

New power-generation systems must exceed, not replace, our current capacity. We’ve got a water supply problem coming up, and we’ll need more energy to deal with it.

If we can’t lick the problem of cheap power for personal vehicles, there are large built-up areas of the United States that will be cheaper to abandon than maintain.

There are going to be interesting developments generated by the increasing power and accessibility of smaller-scale precision machining and fabrication systems. (3D scanners will also be involved.)

One of these developments will be the ability to make replacement parts for older manufactured items, or even replicate the entire item. The material culture of the industrial age amounts to a vast body of largely unclaimed and unrecorded “intellectual property.” This didn’t matter when the prohibitively high setup cost of manufacturing components for the Sunbeam T-9 toaster was an effective bar to casual reproduction. Like copyright, theoretical ownership rights have been enforced by the technology itself. The increasing ease of physical replication may make that a live issue.

Other potential issues arising from small-scale precision fabrication technologies depend on how cheap it gets and how easy it is to use.

Early fears about the misuse of biotechnology will turn out to have missed the point in much the same way that early fears about the misuse of computers did. The street will still find its uses. More to the point, the quietly conformist Silent Majority will turn out to have rich inner lives they can now do something about.

The future will understand that in 2008, online marketing techniques were in their infancy.

Fugue-state nonstop online research for its own sake will be recognized as a disorder.

The last generation before practical immortality will all write memoirs. The next generation will ignore almost all of them.

The most complex, sophisticated user interface will continue to be language.

Most of the people in the world will be able to speak something they regard as English. Some versions of it will be mutually incomprehensible.

If the United States continues to prosper, being able to pass as a native English speaker will continue to be valuable.

The publishing industry’s expertise is in finding, editing, packaging, and selling interesting texts. How those texts get reproduced and distributed is always changing anyway. Electronic text is just one more new to do it.

Proofreading will increasingly be automated. Copyediting will continue to require trained, talented human beings.

(Here endeth the serious part.)

Religion will not disappear. Neither will atheism. However, mainstream Mormonism will fracture into multiple tendencies, syntheses, and groups subscribing to private revelations, which will have a broad range of theologies. Their internecine squabbles will be enlivened by debates about (1.) the contents, provenance, and import of the General Authorities’ secret stash of historical documents; (2.) whether the Doctrine of Free Agency applies to acts of prophecy; (3.) ditto, acts of divinely inspired translation; (4.) whether the Doctrine of Eternal Progression applies to Jehovah; and (5.) whether Mars is overseen by a different God.

I hope you would also agree that campaigns for high office have become obscenely expensive. We now have a full-blown Election Industrial Complex. Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t need $750 million to run for President? The way our campaign contributions and lobbyists work today has another name in other countries. It’s called bribery.

But law enforcement officers here have dubbed him “Captain Nemo,” after the dark genius of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” They say the 45-year-old has designed and built as many as 20 fiberglass submarines, strange vessels with the look of sea creatures, for drug traffickers to haul cocaine from this area of southern Colombia to Central America and Mexico.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

Zuzu, your free market doesn’t do what you think it does. It never has, it never will. That’s why one keeps hearing people say true capitalism has never been tried. That’s because what they mean by true capitalism – the sort where everyone plays by the same rules – is incapable of happening.

One of the things people invariably do when they become rich is try to circumvent and finagle the law. They want more advantage, less risk, special privileges, higher returns, lower taxes. If their business concerns are big enough, the amount of additional profit they can make by tipping the scales in their own favor is so great that it’s relatively trivial for them to suborn officials, or try to buy elections.

I’ve seen people try to argue that the disadvantage of having successful people fiddling with the rules of the game is outweighed by the vast amounts of cash they bring into the system. This is incorrect, for several reasons.

First, if they’re grabbing off unfair advantages, others are being disadvantaged. We can’t give away those other people’s rights.

Second, corruption is often hideously wasteful. It’s like that situation with metal thieves we were talking about, where they’ll wreck tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment in order to steal thirty or forty dollars’ worth of copper wiring. The loss is not their loss, but the gain is their gain, so they don’t care how disproportionate it is.

Third, if you let privilege run unchecked for too long, the tendency is for the rich and powerful to capture more and more of the total cashflow of the system, until it’s all running through a very small elite that no longer needs all the rest of the population.
When human communities fall into chaos and disorder, their default state isn’t capitalism. It’s warlordism, which is like having a bunch of jumped-up Tony Sopranos running everything for their own benefit.
Your free market is a false god. In the state of nature, there is no free market. It’s artificial, a social construct, and can only exist when backed up by law and society.

Because “it takes too long to come down to ground level each day to make it worthwhile,” a crane operator on the Burj Dubai – the world’s tallest building – is rumored to have “been up there for over a year,” the Daily Telegraph reports. His name is Babu Sassi, and he is “a fearless young man from Kerala” who has become “the cult hero of Dubai’s army of construction workers.” He also lives several thousand feet above the ground.