I think it was Vivek that started this, on Tucker Carson on Fox News.
Predict the future thread
- Thread starter TK3600
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nobody can really predict what will happen to the USA in 20 years' time.
however, what doesn't bode well for the US is the unraveling of its Government, political system, state of finance/economy, and the fabric of society.
America's woes lie in Greed, Decimation of the Middle Class, Political Correctness, Violence (foreign interventions and domestic), and gargantuan Debt. And the list goes on...... What's holding the country together in the future may be the military only, and that's also becoming increasingly doubtful.
regards,
Let's just shorten the time span so that we can make things easier, and hopefully my points become easier to see.
In the next 10 years where do we really think America will be? And by the tone you can probably tell that what I'm really trying to say is does anyone actually believe that America will reverse its current course of decline right now?
What's the theorem for America being able to reverse its course. Not change it, but straight up full blown reverse it.
Because look what's happening ever since Trump started the trade war, and more importantly ever since the Pandemic.
1) Reverse brain-drain is happening, and they're also just straight up banning or blocking Chinese high performers...people who absolutely are an extremely important and HUGEEEE cause of why American technology, science, industry, etc. was so superior in the past. Exploiting Chinese talent.
2) Debt...no more needs to be said.
3) Education getting worse and worse by the second. Children are always the future, and right now America's children are straight up retards. No nice way of saying it so best to just be blunt. Hang out with teachers and around teachers' forums (not just Reddit either) and you'll see that almost all of them all over the country in all types of schools are consistently saying that their kids are fucking dipshits and the schools keep passing them b/c it makes the administrators look bad if they fail them. Stupid children grow up to become Fei-Wu-Dens...worthless, useless schmucks.
4) Political correctness is going to get worse and worse and worse. Boomers are the only Americans left who are majority Republican, red, or conservative...and barely. They are dying by the thousands every day. Only to accelerate. Gen Z and Gen Alpha on the other hand are shown to be increasingly even more extremist liberal/politically correct. It's so cringe how much of a pussy they are, and I know this sounds like an old man complaining, but I can't find the words to describe just how much they HAVE TO BE OFFENDED AT EVERY SINGLE THING UNDER THE SUN! For fuck's sakes sometimes YOU are the one being whiny and making a big deal out of nothing. But this is getting worse.
5) Wages will get worse and middle class will lose out even more. Look at how the 'middle-class' and working class in America have been dealing with their problems in wages and pay. Basically nothing. They are like some kid who acts badass and tells everyone about how he's totally not going to take shit from anyone...promptly bends over, spreads his butt cheeks, and takes the blubbery fat but small chode cock of Corporations and wealthy elites right up the ass. They still haven't realized that 'pR0TesTiNG' isn't enough. Striking like what the UAW, WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and even Teamsters are doing is not enough, 'oRGAnizinG' is not enough. You want your elites and overlords to actually give you fair compensation? You need to FORCE THEM. If that means doing what unions did in years past like destruction, rioting, and violence then obviously it's what needs to be done. Yet they don't do it. Because they are too meek, too afraid, and too cowardly to do so. All while telling the whole world how badass they are and how they'll never take shit from anyone. Lol ya OK whatever you say bro.
6) Dragging on again, but I'll address the last part you mentioned. That the country is only being held together by force essentially. This. Is. 100%. NAILING. THE. FUCKING. HEAD! Non-Americans don't realize just how truly bad the divide really is. Even Americans don't realize it mostly. No other country basically hates each others populations this much. No other country has this few similarities between people. Let's just look at countries in the past who have split up. Czech Republic and Slovakia. 2 countries that share common ancestry, common religion, similar language, common history, common government, similar culture, and both white central/eastern european countries. Split apart. Belgium and Netherlands. Basically the same but split apart. Swiss and French. Incredible similarities and split apart. Germany and Austria...basically the same and split apart. The list goes on. Now look at America. Very diverse (compared to white European countries for sure)...means no common racial/ethnic/national bond, vastly different sub cultures based on geographic location, extremely differing political views and opinions, no central or official religion, significant chunks of America do not speak English or fluently at least, and the list goes on. Long story short my pooint is that countries far more tight-knit and closer together with more kinship have split apart in the past. Sometimes violently. Sometimes peacefully and amiably. If even those countries split apart, then the chances of America splitting apart are for sure much higher than theirs.
And all of this is in the next 10 years.
So do we really think that another 10 years will somehow reverse this course?
The Hong Kongification of America basically. Poetic...
US might be divided but comparing Belgium is a poor example. Belgium is an artificial country forcefully carved from France after France lost Napoleonic war. If US split it will be internal reason.
Agreed with all your points. Let me add a few,
1. Hollow out of our manufacturing base. Every year since Obama, we have been coming up with one set of initiative after another to do reshoring with nothing to show for it. Some may argue that we are having some success, like TSMC Arizona plant (still a very big question mark and severely delayed). To measure how much reshoring we did, there are some very simple metrics, steel usage, electricity usage. If you care to dig for these stats, you will find that both have been declining over the decades since Obama was talking about reshoring.
Manufacturing is hard work with low profit margins. The financialization of America and the booming high tech industry means money and talent are going to finance and high tech. High inflation and high interest rates now means it is more attractive to simply park money in the bank instead of investing in manufacturing that has low returns.
Once manufacturing left our shores, all the trained skilled workers and designers go away. New technology for manufacturing, such as AI, are happening in China instead of here. Over time, this builds up a insurmountable technological gap between the cutting edge in East Asia and what we have.
Regaining the cutting edge requires huge investments, investments that private funds are unwilling to commit and for good reason. Even if the government is willing to persistently invest huge sums of money for this, we cannot create a virtuous cycle to make the investment work. It will forever exist only due to government largess. Even if we are going to close our borders and incur the incredible pain that comes with such a move, the Chinese market plus the rest of the world will always be much larger then the U.S. market. Even through Herculean effort, we got one or two industries to near the cutting edge, we still depend on the rest of the manufacturing web which are still missing or outdated. You cannot have one industry be in the cutting edge without also the related manufacturing web be in the cutting edge, plus best in class transportation and best in class workers. The political cost of closing our border to all goods from everywhere (The Chinese are using Mexico to get over sanctions) is also unbearable.
2. The quality and quantity of the work force is atrocious. I just saw these videos from YouTube
It is heart breaking to watch. In the Appalachias, there is rampant drug abuse. By their own informal estimate, 50-70% of the people are on drugs. Drugs robbed them of their will to work. In addition to the cost that society bears due to law breaking and property damage, there are simply not enough young people that are willing to work. In the first video, there is a fellow working in the coal mines. He is working long hours, 12 hour shifts and all the overtime he wants. He looks to be in his fifties. This tells me that there are simply not enough young people willing to work even if there are jobs. For the uneducated, the coal mines had been a way to make a decent living. Virginia's dying legacy industry, the coal mines, are not able to find enough young people to fill their ranks. Instead of working, many feint illness with diseases such as anxiety disorder to get government checks. Good luck trying to set up manufacturing of any sort here even though the local income was 20K a year.
Certainly, Appalachia is one of the worst afflicted in the nation, but large part of the Mid West, even both coasts and many rural areas are also afflicted with drug problems and lack of motivation to work by young people in general. In the schools, many shy away from STEM fields because it is hard. Even in the defense industries like ship building, they are complaining about not able to get replacements for the soon to be retiring skill workforces. We would be lucky to keep the industries we got.
Continue :
3. The spoil system. Democracy for a society fractured along racial, wealth and other lines means we have a spoil system. Each political group that represents a power block get something. As many eluded to here, we had a severe distortion of our education system due to this spoil system. The damage for our future competitiveness is incalculable, but I won't belabor the point. Lately, this spoil system has taken even more ominous turns. Certain groups of people, with a hugely disproportional crime rate, has taken to talk of defunding the police. Here in the Bay Area, San Francisco has gone from the jewel of the West Coast to a criminal hellhole. Rampant homelessness have driven the hotels out of business. The district office's unwilling to prosecute any shoplifting with value less than a thousand dollars has driven a string of major shopping malls out of business. How much worse can this get? We can always look to Detroit for the answer to that question. Here we have auto making plants with sunk costs for the initial investments, should be very profitable to continue business as usual. The cost of high crime rate in Detroit drove even these existing businesses elsewhere and now nature is reclaiming large swaths of this once glorious city. The remainder of the city is mostly on government handouts. How long until the rest of the nation become as dysfunctional as San Francisco and Detroit? This spoil system will have even more absurd display in the future as the centrifugal force become stronger and stronger.
4. Political leadership is MIA. There used to be people like FDR who can can many steps ahead in the chess game. Today, we can't get our politicians to do the blindingly obvious. When Covid hit, Trump could have averted the catastrophe by spending a few billion to track down and isolate the initial group of the infected, but it would require that he works across party lines. Biden sleepwalked into Ukraine war without considering any concerns that the Russians might have about their security situation. We have a president who have demonstrated momentary lapses of coherence due to his advance age, yet he is still the front runner for the next term. Both parties are spending like drunken sailors while our deficit and debt soar. Surely, there are many competent people in this country, but we only got these clowns running our government. I think the biggest folly throughout different administrations has been that there is no awareness of the limits of our resources and no discretion on the exercise of power. W and Iraq is a case in point.
3. The spoil system. Democracy for a society fractured along racial, wealth and other lines means we have a spoil system. Each political group that represents a power block get something. As many eluded to here, we had a severe distortion of our education system due to this spoil system. The damage for our future competitiveness is incalculable, but I won't belabor the point. Lately, this spoil system has taken even more ominous turns. Certain groups of people, with a hugely disproportional crime rate, has taken to talk of defunding the police. Here in the Bay Area, San Francisco has gone from the jewel of the West Coast to a criminal hellhole. Rampant homelessness have driven the hotels out of business. The district office's unwilling to prosecute any shoplifting with value less than a thousand dollars has driven a string of major shopping malls out of business. How much worse can this get? We can always look to Detroit for the answer to that question. Here we have auto making plants with sunk costs for the initial investments, should be very profitable to continue business as usual. The cost of high crime rate in Detroit drove even these existing businesses elsewhere and now nature is reclaiming large swaths of this once glorious city. The remainder of the city is mostly on government handouts. How long until the rest of the nation become as dysfunctional as San Francisco and Detroit? This spoil system will have even more absurd display in the future as the centrifugal force become stronger and stronger.
4. Political leadership is MIA. There used to be people like FDR who can can many steps ahead in the chess game. Today, we can't get our politicians to do the blindingly obvious. When Covid hit, Trump could have averted the catastrophe by spending a few billion to track down and isolate the initial group of the infected, but it would require that he works across party lines. Biden sleepwalked into Ukraine war without considering any concerns that the Russians might have about their security situation. We have a president who have demonstrated momentary lapses of coherence due to his advance age, yet he is still the front runner for the next term. Both parties are spending like drunken sailors while our deficit and debt soar. Surely, there are many competent people in this country, but we only got these clowns running our government. I think the biggest folly throughout different administrations has been that there is no awareness of the limits of our resources and no discretion on the exercise of power. W and Iraq is a case in point.
Because the one-person-one-vote system will only elect demagogues or drama queens supported by the rich. i.e. Trump and Trudeau
solarz
Brigadier
The problem with the American discourse is their lack of a historical perspective. They have literally only experienced a rise, and have no idea what a fall looks like.
Sure they may think they know, from studying the fall of the Roman empire, but when it happened to another culture, there are always plenty of ways to rationalize away the signs.
In contrast, the darkest period of recent Chinese history is still within living memory. The fall of the Qing dynasty is still fresh among the nation's collective consciousness. In addition, we have centuries of dynastic cycles to guide us with signs of rise and decline. Even when I was but a child, a mere 10 years after the end of the most destructive period in PRC history, my mother was telling me with no uncertainty that the 21st century would belong to the Chinese people. China's rise came as a surprise to the rest of the world, but not to the Chinese themselves. We knew it as certainly as we knew the sun would rise the next day.
Any system can be gamed and corrupted given enough time and resources. That is the folly of believing in an infallible system.