Couple of US Things

don’t really understand this post.

as for the wired article, i don’t know you mean by “advanced government services” or what government websites or celluar phones have to do with a nation’s overall level of technological advancement. small countries like sweden and japan use cell phones more because, being tiny, it was easier and cheaper to cover them with cellular tower coverage than it was to cover the enormous US. canada’s cell use is stunted for the same reason.

US government websites tend not to be very slick because the US. government’s revenue intake as a percentage of gdp (excluding defense) is tiny compared with a lot of other western countries. there’s no welfare state and less bureaucracy, so people don’t really need the government for all that much.

cell phones and government websites just don’t seem to matter that much when you hold them up against things like having invented computers and the internet, silicon valley, m1a1 tanks and stealth bombers, being the global hub of info, culture and finance, etc.

as far as china goes, it’s pretty likely that china will become a superpower in about fifty to a hundred years, but no sooner. china has almost 5 times the population of the US, so they only have to be about 1/5 as productive to match the US’s gdp, and they aren’t even close to that yet. what you don’t realize about that quote is that the US has held the power to fuck up any country’s economy by witholding investment for about sixty years now. one other country starts to develop enough in order to have the same power, and holy shit! the US’s reign is over! well, not quite.

it is true that china’s economy, if it keeps growing at 8 or 11 percent or whatever it’s at now, will overtake the US economy at its current rate of growth by like 2025 i think? but the thing is, china’s economy WON’T keep growing at that rate for the next 20 years. this is a case of the ;fallacy of eternal trends.’ china’s economy is exploding, booming. things will slow down in a few years when the bust comes, especially once authoitarian government strong-arming starts getting in the way of private enterprise.

also, china is by no means a “communist” country. even though it’s still ruled by an entity called “the communist party,” the free market reforms have come so far now that their economy is probaby a little less socialist than canada’s.

really, i think this trend of forecasting the end of the US’s global preeminence owes itself to a peculiar quirk of history that we’re in right now. the US has been the world’s most dominant power for as long as pretty much everyone can remember. few alive today have actually seen one country take another’s place as the strongest, so we don’t really know what it looks like. you REALLY have to be paying attention to things carefully to realize that china’s rise, while impressive, doesn’t herald their ascendance to global dominance. at least not for the next hundred years or so. i think things are set up pretty well right now for the 21st century to be known as The American Century

The bulk of US debt – the money it borrows to float the economy and to pay for federal spending – is currently held by China in the form of T-bills. and US currency reserves. In fact, they have most of this debt.

If China decided to “foreclose” on our “store credit card” – it would cause an economic crash. There are some reports that this is planned.. It is leverage, in any case, over the US’ actions.

To address another point, web-enabled government is not about flashy websites. It has even less to do with spending or size of government. (Is this Republican Talking Point Hour? But I digress.)

E-government is about creating portals; using smart web applications to let citizens handle most of their interactions with municipal, state and Federal agencies online. The technology is there: the barriers are institutional.

You wrote:

“cell phones […] just don’t seem to matter that much…”

It was a cameraphone that exposed Abu Ghraib. Imagine if the entire crowd at Tiananmen Square in 1989 had had cameraphones.History would have been a bit different. And while you’re at it, look up “flash mobs.” Now, are you telling me cellphones not a powerful political tool?

And now I have to debate some of your following statements:

” when you hold them up against things like having invented computers and the internet, silicon valley,”

The history of computing shows the development of digital computers was parallel between the US, UK and Germany. And if a Brit working in a Swiss lab hadn’t come up with the World Wide Web, the Internet would still just be Arpanet, connecting a few university and military research labs at 200-baud speeds. Most of the silicon in Silicon Valley is actually made in Taiwan….

“m1a1 tanks and stealth bombers,”

You’re not really bragging about the size of your gun now, are you?

“being the global hub of info, culture and finance, etc.”

Debatable. Britain used to be all those things too. All the European powers had their turn and flubbed it. And before them? The Romans. Funny what happened to them in the end, eh? The US is surely not the global hub of culture for 1 billion Chinese and another 1 billion Muslims.

By the way, do you know which country owns Citibank?

An American-dominated century, or at least one that continues along its current path, is highly doubtful, because of Peak Oil – ask a geologist. Better yet, look it up on the CJR’s Project Censored – it’s number 18.

The current US domination cannot be sustained without cheap energy. The ability to project power globally is simply going to come to an end in the next 50 years. Combine that with the issues of debt that are outlined above, and you basically have the recipe for…well…massive change.

The developed world will be concerned with how to feed ourselves with permaculture and renewable energy, living locally, trying prevent famines caused by the lack of petroleum and gas-derived fertilizers. We simply won’t have the resources to send overextended armies overseas.

This does underline your last point, yes, that China will face this as well (which is troubling for another reason – having to fight them for the scraps). They will not dominate, at least not for the reasons we think they will now. Most likely, by 2100, no-one will dominate. At least, I hope not.

All this is not to bash the US, if you think I’m doing that.

I’ve been all over the States, have relatives everywhere, and I love it dearly. I rebut your points because all the evidence just points in the opposite direction. Physics, geology, and economics are not on the side of an energy-intensive civilization.

You said:

“sorry, i don’t get the first few paragpahs about cell phones and “e-government.” some things you said there are true, others are false and yet others are inchoerent to me, but they’re all fairly irrelevant to what we’re talking about here, so i’ll skip them”

No, they’re completely relevant to the point Patrick originally made: that technological advancement is relative.

And you’re not allowed to skip points you don’t like, sorry.

Objectively, among developed nations North America has the least advanced cellphone infrastructure; Canada has only a slight edge over the US in its early adoption of GSM to supplant multiple standards like TDMA, CDMA and the like.

But overall, Asia and Scandinavia are way ahead. They consistently produce the most desirable and innovative phone form factors, and deploy the newest and most advanced features, networks and services, like video calling and m-commerce. In Korea you can get phones with 5 megapixel cameras on them; I doubt we’d see those before 2008.

Similarly, many countries also offer much more advanced e-government initiatives, precisely to do more with less, to be more efficient, and to serve their citizens better.

Your response to that point was:

“US government websites tend not to be very slick because the US. government’s revenue intake as a percentage of gdp (excluding defense) is tiny compared with a lot of other western countries. there’s no welfare state and less bureaucracy, so people don’t really need the government for all that much,”

I mean, where to begin with that one?

It’s not about slickness: I doubt anyone would care if the site had the aesthetic appeal of an Excel spreadsheet, as long as it was easy to use, and that they could do all their e-government activities there, such as the examples I gave above.

I’m at a loss as to why you would bring up the supposed low revenue of the government – the government that’s blowing $200 billion on its war of choice has no money?

Government revenues are irrelevant – if much smaller countries like the Netherlands, with correspondingly smaller real revenues can produce workable e-government solutions, that’s an issue of priorities, not one of cash.

You then go on to make unsupported, on the face of it patently false statements about ‘no welfare state, less bureaucracy, people don’t need the government.’ Gosh, didn’t Newt Gingrich say that once?

If people don’t need the government, then why is there: Social Security; Medicare; The Food and Drug Administration; the Securities and Exchange Commission; antitrust legislation; the Departments of Education and the Environment; the department of Transportation? And most of all, the Department of Homeland Security?

Yeah, scrap ‘em all. Let the free market rule.

Maybe some people will get sick from mad-cow hamburgers or Ebola, or die old and poor, having lost their savings in a stock swindle, because they never learned to read. Maybe only a few hundred or so will get depleted uranium poisoning from a weapons plant, or lose their memory because the river they fished in was poisoned by pfisteria from a hog farm waste tank spill, or get blown up by Bad People. And cities? Well, they vote blue, so screw ‘em.

But look how much money they get to save compared to countries with high taxes – like Sweden!

As Senator Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts. The US government is now the largest, the most deficit-ridden and expansionist it has ever been in history, and plans on expanding during W’s 2nd term, according to this recent WaPo story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9307-2005Feb8.html

Finally,

A laundry list of US consumer products and franchise chains sold worldwide does NOT equate to global culture.

No, really. It doesn’t.

By your reasoning, because I can get frozen Indian food at every Loblaws, and Indian movies from a store in my neighborhood, and use partly-Indian-written software on my computer, and call India for tech support, and that there is an Indian travel agency on the corner, and a new restaurant up the block, and because I saw a woman in a sari on the street the other day, and Gwen Stefani has a bindi and a nose ring, and that I can find these things in any decent-sized city, means that in fact North America looks to India for its culture!

Oooh. Sorry. The answer we were looking for was “Who is David ‘Bobo’ Brooks, Alex?”

Here in Quebec, we have every chain franchise (except Taco Bell, for some reason) and US consumer product imaginable—and our culture is radically different from Ontario’s much less that of the States.

Whyzzat? Did we not read the instruction manual right?

If you really think we’re all alike because of the presence of some transnational corporations over which citizens exert little control, I suggest you read Environics pollster Michael Adams’ book “Fire and Ice.”

And yes, I’ve been to India, all over Europe, all over the States. I have family everywhere (literally), and friends all around the world thanks to the Internet.

From my own experiences, what I read and what they tell me, cultures thousands of years older than ours are not easily changed by the presence of new shiny baubles.

Other nations take our products and adapt them to their own cultural contexts, in ways that sometimes go counter to what we would expect or even desire. That is something you don’t see if you don’t speak the language or bother to look below surface details.

As for energy..well…the two strains of thought are prudent conservationism that is proven to work, or reckless “cornucopianism” that depends on a lot of technological and political ifs to maintain the most energy-intensive culture imaginable.

As an analogy, consider the logic of a rational, lower-calorie diet and a long-term commitment to daily exercise, vs. eating all you want now – in fact, overeating – because at some point in the future, someone might invent an instant slimming pill.

You’ll die of a heart attack, or starve because you ate more than your share, before that pill ever comes to be.

Applied to societies, that’s the basic premise of Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse, and also the Annenberg exhibit of the same title which you can visit here. Some interesting lessons for the West, I think.

http://www.learner.org/exhibits/collapse/

And on Peak Oil – here’s Texas energy banker Matthew Simmons’ latest. He advises the W. White House on energy policy. His latest energy papers are available here:

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches

and he’s coming out with a new book called, ooh, can you guess: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047173876X

Check out the related books, too, particularly Deffeyes and Heinberg’s.