07-06-2020, 04:32 PM
(07-06-2020, 04:44 AM)nguyenivy Wrote: I was wondering too about automation & climate change really taking off as being the big things to consider policy around in the new saeculum. Just these 2 things alone need real leaders who can think long-term & make decisions that impact the future of our planet & humanity - not just the next round of elections. Automation being the economic elephant in the room (the crux of the matter is what happens to the 80% of us who don't program the AI but still need to survive?) & climate change addressing the very finite nature of our planet. The trend to buy experiences may continue but I wonder what that will look like if the pandemic lasts much longer. My generation seemed to have really got this going, with Instagram being filled with people showing off their trips to wherever before 2020. Perhaps this picks back up in the latter 2020s/2030s some years after the pandemic itself & pandemic mood is over.
The projections for climate change are quite varied, but most of them look like disaster with the most abrupg change happening about sixty years from now as the next Unraveling has almost completed what I call the Degeneracy that portends the Crisis at its ominous beginning. Where I live (southern Michigan) all projections have the snowy winters coming to an end fairly soon. Winters will be more typical of Tennessee than of what I recall here in childhood. I remember hearing some of my elderly relatives exaggerating him much colder thigs were (like having to walk two miles to school each way, both times up hill, through ten-foot-high snow drifts with polar bears following them all the way... it wasn't quite that bad. But it was colder a century ago, with winter snows often appearing in October instead of holding off until at least late November or early December,and April blizzards being commonplace. I have since known two "years without a winter" in 2011-2012 and the preceding one in which one did not need to get out the snow-blower.
Within a few decades, Indiana and Ohio will be cotton-growing states. The northern line of cotton-growing now goes through the southern tip of Illinois around 37 North. The line between Cfa (think of Atlanta) and Dfa (think of Chicago) climates will be crossing the lower peninsula of Michigan from about 2030 to about 2090. Around 1960 that line was going through Philadelphia and New York City.
One question will be rainfall patterns. Not that I would legitimately draw any inference from experience for one year and part of another, the summers following years with slight winters seem hot and dry. Although places with cool, rainy winters and hot dry summers can be great places for agriculture -- think of ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage with Mediterranean climates great for olives, grapes, cork oak, and livestock, something is missing to make such agriculture flourish in Michigan should it get a Mediterranean climate: mountains for catching and channeling winter rains and spring meltwater from snows. Michigan has at most rolling terrain andno narrow cannons for reservoirs. We would be in trouble here.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.