There are a number of things to be thankful for in our modern world, even as we work through the ramifications of $4/gallon gas; I saw that barrier breeched here in Lexington today, as the station I stop at to buy some two-liters of pop at had gas at $4.15 per.
This laptop I'm blogging on is one of those neat things. It's WiFi enabled in such a way that I'm automatically logged into Sullivan U's wireless system when I'm on campus and on an internal network at home. We're starting to take WiFi for granted, and that's a bit sad. The next step might be city-wide wireless at affordable rates; the cell-phone companies are moving in that direction and may wind up competing with DSL and cable for home-based customers in the not too distant future.
Also, the one-gig flash drive that I carry around in my left pocket (or slide into a USB slot at various computers at work and home) is a little marvel. Back in 1996, when I started my computer store, a 850MB hard drive was a viable bargain hard drive for a PC, with 1.2 Gig being normal and 1.6 gig being a bit souped up.
Speaking of cell-phones, what did we do without them? Miss a lot of calls and use pay phones a lot more. I recall speaking from I-10 in the bayous of Louisianan to one of my grad students who was checking on a grade while on vacation last month, and it didn't feel odd. What brought the cell phone to mind was my fielding an appointment-reminder-call from my doctors office as I was leaving for campus just now; in the old days, I'd have had to of hustled back into the apartment to field the call rather than coolly grabbing the phone out of my left pocket.
People often complain about the US losing ground; in many areas, it's more the world catching up, which isn't bad for the US. Those richer and more competitive countries can afford more stuff, some of which will be American stuff.
So, if the rest of the world is giving the US a game in basketball, it's a credit to the world, not a debit to us. If we have a Swiss guy and a Spanish guy going mano-a-mano for five hours in the Wimbledon final, it means that tennis is no longer a purely Anglospherian thing, or that the Anglosphere has expanded out to cover a lot of the world.
We're also getting older better. We're seeing a 41-year-old mom breaking records in the freestyle sprints in swimming and a 35-year old guy still competitive in the 50 free; normally, you'd see the long-hairs hanging in there in the distance events and leaving the sprints to the young'ens.
We're sending all those folks off to Beijing; a still nominally-Communist Beijing, but one that has far more freedoms that we would have expected three decades ago when Mao passed on. One of the reasons we have such high oil prices is that the Chinese economy has grown rather nicely under Deng and his successors, who still keep politics and religion under a short-to-microscopic leash but allow for a lot of economic and cultural freedom; that freedom has had many folks trade in their Mao suit and bicycle for a car and designer clothes, and they're competing for that worldwide oil supply.
We're still the world's melting pot. Watching the US gymnastics trials a couple of weekends ago was interesting. One gal was the daughter of a Soviet gymnast, another was the daughter of a German gymnast, while a third was the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese immigrants; to top it off, a Chinese immigrant was coaching a couple of the top gymnasts and a Romanian immigrant was overseeing the whole US team. The guys weren't as diverse, but the son of Indian immigrants just missed making the men's team.,
The glass isn't full, but it's far from empty.
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