Gov't Report Predicts Cyborgs, Rise of China for 2030 219
colinneagle writes "Yesterday the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which is made up of 17 U.S. government intelligence agencies, released the 140-page report Global Trends 2030 Alternate Worlds. In all four of the alternative visions of the future, U.S. influence declines and it may be regarded more as a 'first among equals.' By 2030, the West will be in decline and Asia will wield more overall global power than the U.S. and Europe combined. 'China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030,' the report states. 'Megatrends' include an overall reduction of poverty and the 'growth of a global middle class.' NIC also sees a potential world of scarcities as the demand for food and water increase as the world's population swells from 7.1 billion to 8.3 billion people. Advances in health technologies will help people live longer, but 60% of the world's population is expected to live in an urban environment. The report also addresses technological augmentation: 'Successful prosthetics probably will be directly integrated with the user’s body. Brain-machine interfaces could provide “superhuman” abilities,enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.'"
Flying cars? (Score:4, Funny)
Not yet? Then fuck it.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-V [wikipedia.org]
Expensive, but at least it's viable.
Food and fresh water (Score:2)
We have plenty of both, and usually the means to get a lot more if pressed. Where you might run into problems is if you were unwise enough to build a few cities in desert areas and then attempt to irrigate them from faraway sources.
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"Where you might run into problems is if you were unwise enough to build a few cities in desert areas and then attempt to irrigate them from faraway sources."
Like, say, Los Angeles?
'growth of a global middle class.' (Score:2, Flamebait)
Signed,
Corp. Amerika
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Not only will the global middle class grow, and everybody will be richer... But also there will be less food and water available for everybody!
I know that kind of report is an assembly of several different scenarios, that obviously have different characteristics. But it is not very usefull to claim that "In 2030 we'll be all rich, well, unless we are all poor or things stay near the way they are now", "also, a famous personality will die".
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Perhaps if we get rid of the grammar nazis there will be room on this planet for more middle-class people.
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Perhaps if we get rid of aliterates there will be more room on this planet who read enough not to need grammar nazis!
(BTW, that is no more serious than your post; I know at least two people who are not only aliterate, but illiterate Few people read books, even when they have the ability).
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i'm sure there are plenty of sources that say you are right about the misuse of an apostrophe in a possessive pronoun, but there are also probably as many sources that claim you're full of shit
Well, first, there's American English and British English. America spells it "check," Britain spells it "cheque." But the thing is, the rules matter to one who reads a lot. Written language is far more precise than spoken language, and poets have used this fact for centuries (let's all get up and dance to a song. That
is WW3 coming? (Score:2)
prior to WW1 and 2 the US was powerful, but not as powerful as Europe. the two world wars is what made the USA the superpower that it is today. the europeans went to war with each other one too many times. seriously, france/england/germany/russia and a few other countries have been at war with each other almost continuously for the last 1000 years. the sides changed every few decades but the frequency of the wars has been fairly regular.
its one thing when all your people do is farm, but once industrializati
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War has become useless.
The new "wars" are economical.
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Not likely.. (Score:2)
Sorry to say, but the way things are going, that sounds overly optimistic.
Food/Water correlates with technology (Score:2)
You can't both simultaneously predict that technology would rise in all areas and predict that technology will not have risen in regards to food production.
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Nearly all our advancements the last 200 years is tied to oil and/or cheap energy.
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Our food supply is highly dependent on oil, from the machines plowing/harvesting to the fertilizer made from petroleum byproducts.
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Economy (Score:2)
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It will all eventually settle, and we'll have three dominant world economies: Asia, Europe, and the Americas (North and South).
If the wealth really redistributes remember that Asia is well over four billion people, Americas and Europe less than a billion each (in that order). And that's a pretty wide group of countries, depending on whose definition of "western" you use like for example Huntington [wikipedia.org] including the US, Canada, parts of Europe and Australia then the western world is less than a billion put together. Given that, it's not unlikely that the Asian economy will become at least as big if not bigger than the western one. Of co
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
More people + less resources = less poverty
Fail.
Debt will certainly cause decline in the West. It's happening now, and poverty is increasing considerably.
Countries running account surpluses will be the largest economies over time.
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More people + less resources = less poverty
Fail.
Less resources + more equitable distribution = less poverty
Debt will certainly cause decline in the West. It's happening now, and poverty is increasing considerably.
The "poverty" you're most likely referring to is the result of short-sighted austerity measures, which are panicked reactions rather than long-term systemic changes.
Larger expenditures + larger revenue = lower deficit when delta-revenue > delta-expenditures
Countries running account surpluses will be the largest economies over time.
Countries running account surpluses are too short-sighted to make long-term investments with those surpluses.
What, don't you think China is running a deficit?
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Basically, that means that *you* are in decline and debs, and *only you*.
Rebuttal: PIGS [wikipedia.org].
The thing in the EU is grown on your shit
It would have happened anyway. The EU real estate problem was at least as leveraged as its US equivalent. The collapse just started in the US. Ask yourself why Australia got off light when the US and EU got into trouble.
That's assuming... (Score:3)
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If people are wondering what real docs like this read like try the old classic from the mid 1970's
National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interest
http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbins/legacy/memo%20200.htm [plattsburgh.edu]
What was the view that: poor regions are breeding up, their young will be smart and wont just export raw m
It must be said. (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our new stronger, faster, older, hungrier cybernetic overlords (made in China).
Decline of labor/rise of automation (Score:2)
Obviously new jobs arise (Score:2)
does it factor in the massive employment losses that automation is going to continue to produce? How will this global middle class actually be able to afford anything if there isn't enough employment available to pay people a living wage?
You are totally ignoring the ripe wages the robot repair people will make.
Also the prosthetics yielding super-human abilities will give rise to a class of vigilantes that earn money through rewards for stopping crime.
People will figure out how to make money, I'd not worry a
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I don't think there will be massive employment loss. At most there will be a temporary dip if people can't catch up with the transition, but nothing permanent. I imagine global manufacturing will steadily transition from large companies employing thousands of people to individuals or small groups of individuals. As automation increases, more and more people will take up service roles like design and engineering. One person or a handful of people will make their living designing products for a niche of a few
I'd like to read the report from 20 years ago (Score:3)
Also there were lots of protypes of the web around, none dominant. I would not have predicted it would have grown that fast into the public world.
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The report from 15 years ago is here:
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Global%20Trends_2015%20Report.pdf [dni.gov]
I found that link to download VERY slowly, and the PDF appears to be rasterised pages? Ick ick ick ick.
Anyway, suffice it to say that they missed a fair few very important trends. Like the social network platforms and social media that would emerge. The upheavals in the petroleum market, the shift towards gas, etc.
No civil war in China? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is widely believed that China needs 8% growth in order to maintain domestic stability. There is no way they can maintain this through 2030. They got this far by draining Western economies through aggressive exports. The Western economies are already faltering and internal consumption is heavily dependent on a real estate bubble.
Great track record. (Score:5, Insightful)
China is running a trade deficit with most other countries supplying it with raw materials. It runs a surplus only with a few western countries. And Japan-China hatred goes back several centuries. These complex interactions do not lend themselves to extrapolation on a graph sheet easily.
Anyway, even if it does come to pass, it is just reversion to pre 18th century world power balance. Till about 1750s, 25% of world GDP came from India and another 25% from China.
Dyslexia's a bitch (Score:2)
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I thought it said, 'Successful prostitutes probably will be directly integrated with the user’s body," but then maybe that was just wishful thinking...
the Singualarity will be here in 20 years? (Score:2)
Environement? (Score:2)
Every prediction more than 5 years ahead (Score:3)
is almost certainly bullshit.
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National Geographic's 7 Billion Series (Score:5, Interesting)
It would take 200 years to count from 1 to 7 billion.
7 billion steps would take you around the globe 133 times.
It took thousands of years to get to 1 billion, but just 130 years to double that, and just 44 years to double that. In the last 12 years, we've added a number of people equivalent to the entire global population in 1800.
1800: 1 billion
1930: 2 billion
1960: 3 billion
1974: 4 billion
1987: 5 billion
1999: 6 billion
2011: 7 billion
It's leveling off, but we may still hit 9 billion in 2045.
Every second 5 people are born and 2 die. There are over 100 more people on the planet now than when you started reading this post.
In 1960, the average person lived to be 53. In 2010, the average was 69.
In 2008, for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
In 1975 there were three cities in the world with populations of over 10 million: Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo. Now there are 21 cities that size.
By 2050, 70% of us will live in urban areas, but we don't take up as much space as you'd think. Standing shoulder to shoulder, all 7 billion of us would fill an area the size of Los Angeles.
So it's not space we need. It's balance.
5% of us consume 23% of the world's energy. 13% of us don't have clean drinking water. 38% of us lack adequate sanitation.
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You can also compare the predictions of TFA with that of the famous "limits to growth" report and updates. [smithsonianmag.com]
The megatrends are missing critical issues... (Score:2)
There are going to be powerful influences impacting human population over the next 20 years, including growing resources for education, contraception, health resources and changing levels of autonomy for women. Add to this interesting problems in the first world involving fertility and questions about crowding causing a rise in homosexuality (there is significant evidence suggesting that mammals in crowded environments experiece increases in the percentage of homosexual offspring.)
Direct neural links will d
I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so (Score:2)
What does "US Power" mean? (Score:2)
People keep talking about the US losing its "power".
What the heck does that mean?
And frankly, do we really want "power"? I thought we wanted peace and prosperity.
But what? (Score:2)
"Advances in health technologies will help people live longer, but 60% of the world's population is expected to live in an urban environment."
Why is there a "but" in that statement? Shouldn't it be a period? Did I miss something? It doesn't seem like the report has any linkage between health and urbanization, so it seems the two are unrelated.
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going to war with france and germany every few decades didn't help the UK at all. losing millions of people in the two world wars along with your money producing colonies and having your homeland bombed isn't good for keeping power either
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GDP of China is almost equal to the US TODAY!
I'm not sure if my education was wrong, but I'd have to stretch to the point of lying to say that ~$6 trillion was about equal to ~$15 trillion.
Until Americans are willing to work for less like their asia counterparts
Yeah, because less money circulating is a great way to stimulate the economy.
after that and perhaps Vietnam in the next decade
Vietnam, hahaha. You have either been trolled, crutchy my friend, or you are bat-shit insane and didn't read his steaming shitpile of a post.
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Work for less pay? Does that include the outrageously exorbitant compensation CEOs and upper level management have, or just us plebs below them?
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1% of America's population owns 40% of the wealth, plus whatever share of that wealth lies undocumented in tax shelters. The percentage could reach as high as 1% holding 80% depending on how pessimistic reality is.
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Which delusional place are you from? Unless you meant "better" than China which is a different story, the following countries have
a higher standard of living than the USA:
- France
- Switzerland
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Luxembourg
A couple of those might be debatable and one can bring the population/area into the equation but if you want to go superlative, you better do your homework
Go to France (Score:2)
Abe: "You should go to China."
Joe: "I'm going to France."
Abe: "I'm from the future. You should go to China."
- Looper (plot holes like a block of swiss cheese, but a fun movie nonetheless)
Re:What do you mean by 2030? (Score:5, Informative)
My Canadian and Australian friends get paid more and have a much better standard than here. IT wages (just 1 example) have not risen at all in 10 years. In Australia you can net 6 figures like it is 1999 again after only 10 years! I see people with 10 years here who make maybe 65k. They can get homes that are more affordable too.
In Canada you can make up to a huge $40,000 salary fresh out of college! States? Here is your headphone set for your call center job. The pay is $10/hr or $17k a year! I do not know anyone who makes as low as Americans if you do not have experience not to mention the college costs are 1/8th of here so you do not have to live at home with Mommy and Daddy with $900 a month student loans while you work as a doorman at BestBuy to pay for it. ... and they do not have to pay healthcare costs which save another $500 a month too on top of that. The US is crap man unless you are a middle manager to CEO. Everyone else is fighting for scraps it seems since 2002.
I am right now about to take a new job that pays more than my 2000 did. About damn time and yet sad after 12 years. For the average Joe we are certainly in decline and poorer as inflation that is not counted as health care costs, gas, food, mortgage, rent, auto insurance, and other things have gone up a very LARGE margin in 12 years.
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Wow, that sucks. The minimum wage here in Australia for full-time work is currently $606.40 per week (so, multiplying by 52, roughly $31,532.80 per year is the smallest possible salary you could be given for any job, graduate or not). Note that the USD, CAD and AUD are all within a few percent of each other in value, so while the figures aren't directly comparable, they are close enough that we can get away with not converting currencies I think.
$40k incidentally was exactly what my graduate wage was here i
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capital gains is probably the stupidest thing we can do
Bullshit. Capital gains taxes only hit when you sell your assets (stocks, bonds, businesses). When Reagan slashed them, workers suffered -- including me. It promoted an orgy of hostile takeovers by guys like Romney who were buying out businesses and selling the assets. I worked for Disney at the time, and our hours (and pay) were cut 25% to fend off the parasites who wanted to carve up Disney and sell all its assets.
And we don't have to work for
Re:What do you mean by 2030? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that people *can't* work for less. Inflation has been way ahead wage growth for decades now, and isn't going to change soon. China gets away with it because, as a nation, they seem to be rather accepting of having 98% of the population living in literal poverty. That won't fly here in the U.S. and a lot of the political unrest we've had in the last 10 years is one side effect.
As for bond investors leaving the U.S. market, that's also not going to happen any time soon because, as bad off as we are, there are still no better alternatives for bond investments. It doesn't matter how economically powerful China gets, there's still way too much government corruption, lack of fiscal transparency, and a propensity to mess with their exchange rate to suite their needs. That's not an ideal alternative. The UK failed because the U.S. was right there ready to step in and take over, with an emerging democratic economy and a thriving industrial base.
Simply put, America becoming a stronger economy was beneficial to the rest of the world, including China, partly because is created a strong consumer-driven economy. China becoming a stronger economy won't have that effect because they lack any sort of middle class; the super-rich can only consume so much. Like it or not, as the U.S. economy tanks, the rest of the worlds will follow (and is following) until either we right our ship, or another similar economy is ready to step up and be the dominate consumer-driven economy, or the world economies all start to fracture and become more isolated again, at least for a while.
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Look at it this way. There is an island with 3 guys. Each one has its job as they try to survive. The Asian's job is to catch the fish and bring it home. The European's job is to spend just an hour finding bait and consuming the fish, the American's job is to eat the fish.
That is how the world economy is functioning right now. America does not produce. THey only consume and give away their wealth to Asia while charging for it. In time the Asian will say fuck this. I will just get my own boat and eat my own
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Well Bush redefined McDonalds workers as manufacturers. Until you take out the food industry we do not get an accurate picture. I do not own anything in this room that is made in America. Except perhaps a water bottle and a single book out of many others.
I have not seen a single factory except in the 1980s and I have lived in several states. All I see are are places that are service jobs or offices that are consumption based which make everyone poorer. Not anyone that produces anything of value.
Until I see
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Until you take out the food industry we do not get an accurate picture.
All food production counts for only 8.75% of the industrial production total (source [federalreserve.gov]).
You might be happier to look at New Orders for Durable Goods (DGORDER) [stlouisfed.org].
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Even though American manufacturing is in decline, America is still the world's largest manufacturer
How is American manufacturing "in decline"? We are producing about 7% more than in 2000, and are just 2.8% down from the all-time industrial production high in 2007 (coming up from a 15% drop from 2007 during the recession). (data [stlouisfed.org])
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Until Americans are willing to work for less like their asia counterparts and be a creditor nation rather than a debtor nation the slide will continue.
You sound like a trio of economists that taught an undergrad class I started to take in the late seventies who tried to say that by 1990 we would be earning no more than those in a third world country. I'd just gotten out of the Air Force and had spent a year in Thailand. At the time, Thailand was a third world country, dirt roads, no gas or electric infrastr
Re:Load of Crap! (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the scarcity line more. Everything we need in terms of material (many metals, oil, etc) is being consumed at a crazy pace. Usually with these mining scenarios, you go from super high grade (ore) scenarios to poorer and poorer ones. Think about all the gold rushes where the miners initially found huge nuggets fairly consistently and up in Alaska I was told it was so rich right off the bat it was $2,000 a shovel full to lesser and lesser grades until we're using several loads from a caterpillar 797s to get a fraction of an ounce while we turn mountains into holes in the ground.
It's not so much that we can't keep getting the same amount of material needed, but it consumes ever more energy to do so.
That wouldn't be so much of a problem if our oil wasn't starting to look like every other resource. The conventional oil is the rich ore, with initally 1 barrel oil needed to get 300 out (say, like the Ghawar oil fields when first found) and now the ones we have are around 8-15:1. As that is dwindling and not meeting our demands, we're going to fracking and tar sands that have lower yields still (and likely a lower field life as well).
And yeah, we have Natural Gas. But that's a lower density energy form. In human history, we always went for higher density stuff, from wood->charcoal->coal->oil. Ever see an NG gas tank? Or the trunk of the car using it?
The middle class may grow but it will have a lower standard of living than a generation or two previous. It will denote more a relative position than an absolute one.
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We've gotta leave this egg before we run out of food and we die as a chicken.
(Ok, you may think I'm albumin idiot for using this metaphor, but *somebody* had to raise it.)
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Thats whats been wrong all along - its been bugging me. We in the West have been working on "Survival of the Fattest", having missed the typo. Sheesh. :P
Fittest, who woulda thunk it
Re:Load of Crap! (Score:4, Insightful)
We already recycle most of our metal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_recycling [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Recycling [wikipedia.org]
In the future, scarcer metal supplies will probably lead to even better recycling technology and more incentive to save or even recover already disposed of metal.
Fully recycling plastic and producing synthetic oil and oil products is expensive, but quite possible. Once extracting oil becomes expensive, we'll lean on and improve these technologies more and more.
Material isn't the problem, energy is...and really that's not too big of a problem between nuclear, coal, natural gas, solar, and eventually fusion.
The main potentially troublesome thing is our environmental impact (especially if we don't use nuclear and thus end up leaning heavily on coal), as this issue is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation, and we humans are terrible at dealing with those.
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Not always the case. Up by the small mining town of Tower, Minnesota, is a mine. To science geeks, the mine is notable for detecting neutrinos fired from Fermilab (near Chicago) in a long-running physics experiment.
It's rather rich in hematite, with high grade ore, some so high grade a magnet will stick to it.
The mine closed down decades ago. Ores nearer to the surface, even low grade ores such
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My Ford Ranger truck has a dual gasoline/natural gas system with the tank in the trunk. I can recharge natural gas for free in select stations but then again I don't live in the US and even regular gas is extremely cheap here.
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NG for vehicles is pointless without liquifaction technology. It can be compressed, but holds nowhere near as much energy per volume as LP gas, much less gasoline or diesel.
Some progress has been made with carbon nanopore tanks for high density natural gas storage at much lower pressures, which allows for smaller tanks which can also be shaped to fit better without all the wasted space of stacks of gas cylinders.
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Skynet will be needed by the Cyborgs.
Perhaps a Cyborg army will be created to deal with the Chinese, but instead will turn against all humans.
That's my prediction for 2030, and no... I most certainly do not welcome any new Cyborg overlords.
I think the prediction is conservative. Consider the drones we already have deployed and the advances in autonomous devices in the past decade, the hardware is pretty much here, it's just getting the programming down pat. For all we know the programming could be pretty close already, but nobody with it is going to tell you they have prototypes of 'cyborgs' which can fly or amble about, recognise your face and decide the best way to eliminate you if necessary. No lasers needed, bullets are still pretty da
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I agree that the hardware is pretty much here, with the major exception of reliable, long-term, non-damaging, high-capacity, biology-to-machine interfaces. That's going to be the hard
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Anyone with an air conditioner is already using 'cybernetics'.
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It would only make sense as an infiltrator (as in the movie) and would be easy to detect anyway.
I do think add-on mental components are eventually likely though, eg I would consider buying mods for fast calculation, perfect memory, improved senses, faster reflexes, etc.
Re:Skynet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Skynet (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Skynet (Score:5, Insightful)
I most certainly do not welcome any new Cyborg overlords.
Speak for yourself; if they all look like Summer Glau, I can't wait!
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I most certainly do not welcome any new Cyborg overlords.
Speak for yourself; if they all look like Summer Glau, I can't wait!
Only on Slashdot would this be modded "Insightful"...
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Yes, I know. I was being deliberately obtuse, merely as a light-hearted jab at the US-centric nature of Slashdot.
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It's funny how Americans are so afraid of losing their place as the most powerful country.
You realize that almost one fifth of the human population is chinese?
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It's funny how Americans are so afraid of losing their place as the most powerful country.
Why is it funny? Seems like a pretty standard human response to me.
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People will eventually learn that they should work to earn money instead of rioting and asking for the governments to compensate them for their bad business decisions.
Re:Predict this (Score:5, Insightful)
People will eventually learn
That's where you're wrong.
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Exactly.
The presence in Afghanistan (the western neighbor of China), south east Asia and Japan is mostly to contain China.
In the few past decades US and West tried to surround USSR (Western Europe, Scandinavia, Turkey and then Islamic ideologies in Afghanistan and Iran). In my opinion the Islamic revolution in Iran (providing media access to Khomeini including full-time BBC coverage of his speech, providing support and an Air France plane to return to Iran, ...) and the long war in Afghanistan against USSR
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Containment does not need to be using military. If you control the resources like oil, neighboring countries (i.e. electricity, pipe lines, land transport, land based communication links, trade etc.) you can contain a country.
Plants get their resources from both soil and air. Cut or reduce any of them and it will die or stop growing.
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they watched some science fiction? I cannot believe any of this.
Well, most of TFA seemed to be bullshit, but the cyborg part is right. I'm a cyborg, and many people I know are cyborgs, as well. Most cyborgs are geezers like me, and you couldn't tell them from any other geezer.
Hell, the previous Vice President of the US was a cyborg.
As to the rest of your comment, are you trolling or just on crack?
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