On New Year’s Day, Colorado legalized marijuana for recreational use, but now Coloradan lawyers wonder if the taxes and regulation are choking the law’s significance and potential benefits.
As conservatives so rightly say, we live in a post-racial society. This means that national news anchors need to be up in arms about the skin pigment of a fictional character.
The Article: Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014 Were Eerily Prescient. Except for the Internet. by Jerry A. Coyne in The New Republic.
The Text: Roughly 50 years ago, on August 16, 1964, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted in The New York Times what the world would be like fifty years hence. (He was inspired by the World’s Fair of 1964, to which my sister and I were taken by our parents.) It’s a longish piece, and concentrates on the problem of increasing population as well as on the ability of technology to deal with that pressure and to improve our lives.
I’ll highlight just three of his predictions, one mostly right, one partly right, and one wrong.
This is what he got mostly right:
In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000.
After praying to her stony bust for eons, it seems that Randians around the country have had them answered: the longterm unemployed have lost their last shred of dignity!
And since most of the countries in which we use drones are too poor or fragmented or afraid to retaliate as a unified body, terrorists do…yes, the very threat the the drone program seeks to remove actually advances it. Who would have thought that violence begets violence?
