The Future

So far from what I'm seeing and reading..its gonna suck.

 

That sounds terrible. You can go ahead and enjoy that while I buy 1,000 acres in Montana and build a WWI style biplane to fly around and a pre-WWII Bentley for ****s and giggles.

 

I'm going to keep doing what I love. That's all I got

 

The Singularity as promoted by Ray Kurzweil and others can be a somewhat convincing vision of what the future could be though I imagine some of it will take a bit longer that expected. Read a bit on "The Singularity" and then pick up Jaron Lanier's book You are not a gadget to put things back in perspective.

 

+1

 

As Mike Tyson said once, "Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face". I imagine reality will always have a way of bringing everyone back to reality.

 

Keep in mind I'm not predicting or advocating living in a cardboard shack and ****ing in a bucket, but I do think there are several irresistable forces that will shape how we live in the next 20 years or so.

1. We will become less mobile. Petroleum will continue to become more expensive and thus many forms of convenient travel will be priced out of normal people's reach. Air travel will go back to being a luxury. Long commutes will no longer be affordable. Vacations will either be less frequent or closer to home. A car at 16 will be a rarity as teens cannot afford to fill up the tank. Electricity also becomes more expensive, so a plug-in hybrid is not the answer either. With respect to housing there are a host of effects on home location and size that will be altered from today because of this.

2. Point #1 will be mitigated by more effective tele-commuting and shopping from home. Imagine your 3D television/internet portal where you can view thousands of products, rotate them in 3D for your inspection, order them from home and have them delivered to your door. Amazon and Ebay will be the new Wal-Mart. Many employers will encourage tele-commuting where feasible.

3. The concept of private health insurance will vanish. Not to get political but the die has already been cast. Once rates are unaffordable the system will collapse on itself and devolve into a huge system similar to the VA hospital system.

4. Taxes will go up, services/entitlements will go down. Living on borrowed money nationally will become untenable as interest rates are forced to rise. We will have no choice to balance the budget. This means taxes for all will go up, and things like Social Security will have diminished benefits. Young people should plan on working until 75. At a minimum.

5. China and the Euro will more or less collapse. China has overbuilt manufacturing and retail space and is in the middle of a huge housing bubble in major cities. I read the other day the average 1000 sq ft apartment in Beijing is $277,000, or 20X earnings of the average resident. Impossible to continue as it is now, in other words. We are just starting to see the effects of Euro distress, and it has become clear that an economic union without a political one is doomed. If Germany pulls out, the Euro fails. If Italy or Spain defaults, the Euro effectively fails. A house of cards that will be drastically altered within the next decade.

6. Manufacturing returns to the US (or at least North America) Several years ago GWB said illegals "did the jobs Americans do not want to do". With roughly 10 million citizens out of work and out of hope, I wonder if their threshhold has been lowered somewhat? Protectionist tariffs are on their way, and people are wising up to the need to actually make stuff in your own economy. With a willing and eager workforce, natural resources, and developed banking system/transprotation infrastructure, the US will be seen again as the ideal place to make goods for US consumers.

7. Mass amnesty for illegal residents, but paradoxically better relations with Mexico. In the next two years, before Obama attempts to get re-elected, there will be a bill for amnesty. Hopefully the Republicans accept the inevitabilty of this and actually attempt to influence the eventual bill with changes that would provide the "best" compromise we can hope for. I am not optimistic, as recently they seem like mindless children who can only shout no rather than actually executing their responsibility to influence policy. The current covert war with drug cartels in Central America will come to head, with the US and Mexico working together to eradicate these murderous vermin once and for all. Corrupt officials in both countries will be lead out in handcuffs.

8. Continued migration from the North to the Sun Belt. With the cost of heating your home constantly going up, with local snow removal services spotty at best, and with new opportunites/factories opening every week in places like Georgia/California/Texas, people will continue to move to more temperate localles. Detroit will be a wasteland, Chicago will lose population.

9.The US pulls out of Iraq/Afghanistan and closes many other bases globally Partly due to budget cuts, partly as an attempt to improve relations with "friendly" countries we currently occupy, and partly due to an increasing isolationist mindset, the US military will scale back operations globally. Once Korea is reunited, Okinawa will be the first big base to close. Those in Europe will be next. We beat a hasty retreat from Iraq and Iran-Iraq war 2 erupts. We eventually leave Afghanistan despite $1T in mineral deposits discovered in 2009. Afghanistan lives up to it historic name as the Graveyard of Empires.

10. We focus more on friends/family and achievement of personal goals, not materialism/status. Once the Greatest Depression of the 21st century is over, people look back and realize what made it bearable was those closest to you, not the latest trinket from China. A new mindset regarding materialism sets in that people really think about what they buy with much fewer impulse purchases. The focus for consuming will be on quality, not really the cheapest or biggest package. There will still be a market for high-quality luxury goods for those that can afford it (Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes, Ducati, Kobe beef, Sauza Tres Generaciones, Gulfstream, etc). For everyone else, it will be a question of "how long will it last" rather than "how cheap is it".

 

The future I envision for myself is in a fortress w my harem

 

YIKES....

Give me Liberty or give me death. I want no part of that type of socialist comune society.
It sounds like the way all those fat slobs lived in the movie Wallie.

 

I don't think this Utopian society so many dream about will be as great as anticipated.

I'd like in the future for the PC and safety police to back the &%*$ off.

 

i'm hoping for a post apocolyptic world like in mad max. cool clothes and hair dos.

 

Best vision for the future I've heard in a long time. If Montana gets too crowded, there are some beautiful and remote places in central Idaho.

 

Jeeeez................cant wait.

 

Here is the problem with that plan. If the world really does go Mad Max having that land and stuff will not protect you. If desperate people think you have something they need to survive, all they have to do is get within 400 yards with a high-powered rifle and it is game over.

 

Okay, well maybe you have to have a few close friends of the family guard the front gate to the compound.
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I'm getting ready for that too
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Off topic, but I've always loved that quote. I laugh every time I read it...

 

If the world truly goes Mad Max, I would MUCH rather be up there in a rural setting than almost anywhere else. Where would you prefer to be under such circumstances?

 

On a military base, preferrably in charge.

I absolutely do not think things will get that bad, however. At least in the US there will be more property crime, perhaps more violent crime, but you will not have a Thunderdome.

We have a ****load of guns and ammo in this country. We also have a mindset that allows us to put up with a lot, but when we have had enough people will react. Say a violent gang, MS13 for example, decides they will take over San Diego and hundreds of gang members pour in from Mexico. The city is bankrupt and the police force has been disbanded. Eventually the normal citizens would have enough and gang members would start getting ventilated from hundreds of yards away.

IMO, there are rough areas in most cities because subconciously we accept some areas are unsafe as long as it doesn't really intrude into our part of the city. Police and laws perhaps actually hinder vigilante justice in these instances. If there were no police and everyone was packing there would be far more Bernie Goetz types.

 

That doesn't count.

I completely agree. The US isn't going to implode.

 

Something like this . . .
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I see plenty of areas ready to be armed with weapons.