Bottom not in, economy wise. Bottom-hitting soon, for plenty of unfortunate citizens who made the right moves, the wrong moves, or no moves at all. Something this big, we have to metaphorize it with the largest forces of nature available to us to comprehend it, and even then most people don’t get it.
Growth is not coming back next year. This bloodletting wont be over for a while yet. Everyone jumped at a few things that went in a positive direction and ignored the IMF’s dire warnings of four more trillion dollars worth of fucked credit assets that needed to be let out of the system like blood out of a consumption-riddled Victorian-era poet stretching a metaphor out far too long. Once again unemployment is now near where the ‘worst-case’ scenario the .Gov has set for next year before the recovery kicks in. One more month of the same amount of job losses, the, what, 16th or 17th consecutive record setter no doubt, and we’ll be at the ‘worst-case’ scenario that they don’t expect for another 6 months.
You know how, in capitalism, the strong companies swallow the weak? What happens when all the governments of the world are fully capitalist and indebted to one another like our giant multinational corporations (practically sovereign unto themselves)? Will the strong government swallow the weak through debt slavery?
OH my what interesting times we shall be living in. At least science is giving is robots and nanotech and all crazy sorts of shit like glowing puppies. We’ve made jokes about shit like that in sci-fi because it’s so absurd no one ever seriously envisioned it, it was always just a joke about shiny glowing things. Then we found a medical use for it – studying how life makes light without lightbulbs – we think we’re such hot fucking shit but they’ve been making their own light in the deep long before we stuck a couple wires to distilled electrons in a vacuum. Now, some day, we may have patches at the tips of our fingers that light up when we’re working inside a computer so we can see what we’re doing. The technology is proven to be possible, it’s just a matter of refining it to finger-tip (or wherever) only applications – i.e. a question of how much money do we want to throw at the problem.
I fear the bust may stymie ultra-large-scale science funding for a bit, but now we even have people hacking plant DNA at home. I mean, Wired fucking joked about that in their Future Ads series (or whatever it was called) about getting your home DNA hacking kit – they were predicting it would be a fad in a few decades. Science really is the Box, you know, the one ol’ Pandora got in trouble with. Even if the large scale funding disappears, our clever minds will find other ways to solve the problems.
Hundreds of millions of years hasn’t stopped the DNA that coils inside us. This financial crisis? Grain of sand on a beach on a planet in a solar system in comparison.
Tags: depression 2.0, total cockup, trouble in paradise, wasted money