This ti­tle came to mind when I saw in the news ref­er­ences to an ar­ti­cle in The Lancet about how in 2030 7 out of 10 deaths would be due to car­dio­vas­cu­lar, di­a­betes, can­cer, and chron­ic ob­struc­tive res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­eases.

The les­son most news­pa­pers get out of this is "whoa, we are a bunch of lazy, salt and fat eat­ing mo­rons and we are all gonna die".

Sure, we are all gonna die, and yes, more peo­ple will die of those chron­ic ill­ness­es in 2030. But that's most­ly be­cause we are not go­ing to die of many oth­er things that used to kill us ear­li­er.

So, eat more veg­gies, stop smok­ing and don't wor­ry too much.

Oh, and about cig­a­rettes and light­ning? I must con­fess I don't have the num­bers to prove it, but I would be very sur­prised if that was not the case. Af­ter al­l, smok­ing 40 cig­a­rettes a day should re­duce your life ex­pec­ta­tion, and the less you live, the less like­ly are you to be hit by light­ning. It's even a di­rect causal con­nec­tion!

Neal Stephen­son wrote:

There is some­thing new: A globe about the size of a grape­fruit, a per­fect­ly de­tailed ren­di­tion of Plan­et Earth, hang­ing in space at ar­m's length in front of his eye­s. Hi­ro has heard about this but nev­er seen it. It is a piece of CIC soft­ware called, sim­ply, Earth. It is the us­er in­ter­face that CIC us­es to keep track of ev­ery bit of spa­tial in­for­ma­tion that it owns - all the map­s, weath­er data, ar­chi­tec­tural plan­s, and satel­lite sur­veil­lance stuff.

Hi­ro has been think­ing that in a few years, if he does re­al­ly well in the in­tel biz, maybe he will make enough mon­ey to sub­scribe to Earth and get this thing in his of­fice. Now it is sud­den­ly here, free of charge...

And of course, I have just that very thing in­stalled in my desk­top. Not all the men­tioned da­ta is hooked in­to it, but hey, it is free of charge.

Hein­lein wrote about pri­vate cit­i­zens and com­pa­nies go­ing in­to space. He thought it was not any gov­ern­men­t's job. And that is go­ing to hap­pen in my life­time. I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who went to space pay­ing for it with his own mon­ey.

Of course there are no fly­ing cars or rock­et back­packs (those were good ideas... not!)

What's the dif­fer­ence be­tween Gib­son's Idoru and Go­ril­laz, ex­cept that it's cheap­er to pay mu­si­cians than it is to build Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gences? Can you tell me what's the point in build­ing an AI, any­way? Aren't me­chan­i­cal turks cheap­er and bet­ter?

Asi­mov wrote about a foun­da­tion of schol­ars writ­ing an en­cy­clo­pe­dia to be con­stant­ly up­dat­ed, con­tain­ing the whole of hu­man­i­ty's knowl­edge (we got wikipedia in­stead. Good enough!)

Our phones are much nicer than Star Trek's com­mu­ni­ca­tors (for ex­am­ple, the loud­speak­er is op­tion­al)

It's as if most of the ideas of sci­fi got fil­tered through a pu­ri­fi­er and what made sense came out on the oth­er side. I like liv­ing in the fu­ture. I want to see the next one.

A few days ago, the last video rental in the neigh­bor­hood closed. It was a Block­buster and since it's bank­rupt in the US it's hard­ly sur­pris­ing that they killed the Ar­genti­na op­er­a­tion.

But Block­buster had, years ear­lier, killed all the oth­er video rental shop­s. So now there aren't any, at al­l.

So, how does any­one with a DVD play­er ac­tu­al­ly use it? Well, he can buy DVDs in the news­pa­per stand­s. That's ex­pen­sive be­cause it's buy­ing and it's late. Who will want to spend $35 to watch "Due Date" at home 3 months af­ter the the­atri­cal re­lease? There is no Net­Flix here!

And of course, you can do what ev­ery­one was do­ing any­way: downoad it, or buy il­le­gal copies. They are of­ten bet­ter than the orig­i­nals any­way, at least in this sense:

And re­al­ly it's amaz­ing. The whole movie rental in­dus­try has ba­si­cal­ly ceased to ex­ist, and the com­pe­ti­tion is il­le­gal. They sucked so much at its busi­ness that they could­n't com­pete with a "busi­ness" that can't do com­mer­cial­s, has no qual­i­ty as­sur­ance.

Some­times you got a very bad il­le­gal copy, filmed from a seat in the last row, full of peo­ple talk­ing over the movie you can bare­ly see... and stil­l, peo­ple pre­ferred to buy that for $7 in­stead of pay­ing $10 for a "qual­i­ty" rental.

It's a tale of in­cred­i­ble in­com­pe­tence. Quick­ly, can some­one find me one ex­am­ple of an busi­ness that got killed by il­le­gal and crap­py com­pe­ti­tion?

There are crap­py and/or il­le­gal medici­nes, but phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals still work. There are il­le­gal (un­li­censed) places to eat, but restau­rants still make mon­ey. There are il­le­gal cab­s, but re­al cabs are in busi­ness.

This is not even bad, it's just em­bar­ras­ing.