• Orbituary@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    We got angry when Japan did this in the 60s and 70s. I’m going to paste part of the opening from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.”

    Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it – talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they 're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else

    • music
    • movies
    • microcode (software)
    • high-speed pizza delivery

    The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator ’ s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”