What does the Tek team think of the future of the USA?

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

ATTN: FIRST PART CONTEXT, QUESTION(S) AT END

This question is for Logan, Wendell, Qain and maybe Pistol, if she wants to answer. As I'm sure you folks know, since you guys are pretty smart and seem to belong to the 'reality-based community', unfortunately the United States has a lot of very dysfunctional social and political issues. The far right is hell-bent on destroying civil society and enacting a sort of neo-feudalism, which is patently obvious if you study what they say and do. And a shocking number of Americans seem to be willing to support this, even though it should be obvious to them that they're being used. (if you want, I could dig up some sources for this thesis). What I see this leading to, if the republicans succeed in their agenda, is the social and economic collapse of the USA in 20-30 years. 

This would be a very very bad thing for us up north, since we would get swamped in hordes of refugees, many of which would have... you could say 'less than savory' voting and cultural tendencies from the perspective of Canadians. And the logistical disaster would be bad too. I really really want to see a prosperous, progressive America where quality of life and income would be sky-high. This would be great for us, and the rest of the world too, because Capitalism. But after seeing so much horrible news over the years, my hopes have been stomped on so often by seeing the absolute evil of the extreme right succeed and enjoy bewildering levels of support, that I don't really think that better future will occur, at least not for another 15+ years post-economic-collapse, when the venomous villians finally lose their support after people see what they've done. If you want to know, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was seeing the rise of the teabaggers. Obama seemed much less like a snake-oil salesman and fake progressive; and he's still (in my opinion) 1000 times better for the US than romney would have been.

 

There's also an important technology aspect to this, since so many leading Technology, Software, and R&D companies are US-based. A collapse of the US economy, or complete civil breakdown, that made the Great Depression look like a picnic would be extremely bad for Humanity as a whole.

SO, HERE IT COMES:

Do you still have hope for a good future of the United States, and if so, why? And if you don't think my nightmare scenario would come to pass, then why not?

 

(apologies for gratuitous run-on sentences)

 

2

don't worry... they will have annexed your country long before then. lol

3

I'm wondering where the whole world is going. Not only the US.

4

Who knows, they clearly arent happy with the lack of progress on the infrastructure. In my opinion it is becoming a New Mexico, economically and demographically, except with worse education...Its a complete mess, between the:

  1. Racially motivated sectarian conflicts
  2. The endemic growth figures and declining international competiveness due to lack of economic freedom
  3. Poor-outdated and aging infrastructure that is litterally on the verge of collapse (look at the official figures for bridges for example and the motorways built in the cold war,, they are about too all need to be replaced at once)
  4. The demographic crises
  5. Possible derivative bubble
  6. A dollar that is just waiting to collapse (when it stops being a reserve currency)
  7. Chinese Yen which is going to drastically appreciate in value over the next decade or so.
  8. The rising wave of international terrorism financed by america, and armed with the latest weaponry, resulting from failed foreign policy (i.e Mujahudeen/Taliban and then the latest waves in Syria/Libya), isis now have maybe 40K soldiers, a few months ago the number was maybe 1/10th that. This could completely blow out of control and seriously threaten oil supplies.
  9. The threat of all out war, from agressive EU/USA foreign policy targeted against russia/china.

 

I am sure the hyper-rich will flee to canada though, which is becoming an asian country, ironically. Perhaps america will try and drag china down with it, who knows. The USA is teetering on a demographic crises, soon the baby boomers will start retiring all at once, not just in america but throughout the entire western world, this will trigger what will probably be the greatest economic collapse since at least the great depreciation. And there are just too many other factors rolling with it, it is going to be the perfect storm unless something changes. This could in all seriousness could eclipse the Dark Ages.

It may be possible to mitigate this too a degree by rising automization, but then we still have a large basis of consumers being wiped out. A big issue is that alot of the specialization we have now might not be able to be supported with much smaller populations, people will have to migrate to a smaller number of settlements. And those businesses that survive may not be able to sell what they can produce and go out of business, which fuels more economic collapse, as the consumers can no longer buy thing from other producers, as a domino effect.

Even worse is that it is entirely possible that what people remain, given that these will be predominantly mexican which have lower rates of economic output, and younger people which are going through americas awfull education system, will not have the skills required (especially hands on technical skills) to replace many of these workers, and by this time these people (which allready get paid high wages in other countries), will have wages comparible with america, infact there will probably be a shortage of them in places like china.

5

Also cannuck Economic Freedom is the biggest single determinant of growth identified so far, and people, even the poor are better of in comparatively richer countries than poorer ones. In america nearly everyone, irregardless of how poor they are has a mobile phone, internet, cable tv, airconditioning, a car, and almost no one goes hungry. Compare this to places like Eastern Europe, which did not enjoy the levels of economic growth america did.



The democrats do not believe in economic freedom, they believe that the less sucessfull people in society have an entitlement to the money of those that are more succesfull, that it is equality of outcome that is important not opportunity. This is fundamentally flawed, it is flawed not just because this ultimately makes us all worse of by destroying economic growth, but because the problem isn't that some people are being really sucessfull (which is good, we need ellon musks), it is that there are some people that are doing really poor.



Rather than taking the difference in income from the most succesfull people and giving it to the poor, which incidently eliminates all incentives to be more productive, it makes far more sense (intuitively) to focus on why some people are not doing as well as others. This is akin to giving people fish instead of teaching them how to fish. That is fundamentally a bad attitude, and just plain stupid (incidently, it is the foreign policy of many governments to send food to africa, instead of teaching them how to farm!).

7

wat

8

The corporate empires will carve up the USA 1st and then take the rest of the world.  

Nation states are an outdated idea. Corporate hegemonies all ready control most things. It is just a matter of time till when they take physical territory.

 

9

I agree that people should stop looking at others, and should sweep the boardwalk in front of their own front door. That's the only thing that works to make things better. People live their lives way too much by proxy, they delegated the control over their lives to corporations and politicians.