Pages, some stolen, some original

▼

Monday, January 13, 2020

Future Perfect

Stamford Raffles
William Gibson, presumably the William Gibson, has a short piece about Singapore on Wired. At first, before I knew who wrote it, I didn't like the writer's attitude, he sounded like a whining, liberal twerp. But about half way through he mentions that he writes science fiction, I check out the byline, and all of a sudden my attitude shifted from 'stupid twerp' to 'maybe there's something here'.

The whole place sounds a little bit like Star Trek, all clean and spiffy and well behaved, but boring. Of course, if you are engaged in intellectual pursuits, a boring physical world is good.

The best part is that I learned who Raffles was. In stories I've read, the name Raffles is attached to some venerable old hotel, but there was never any explanation. Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore around 1818.

Singapore might be capitalist today because the USA fought the communists in Vietnam.

Via Detroit Steve

at

2 comments:

  1. xoxoxoBruceJanuary 13, 2020 at 9:48:00 PM PST

    Seems to me if we had dumped 20% of the trillions we spend on that stupid war into those countries it would have accomplished the same thing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chuck PergielJanuary 15, 2020 at 7:20:00 PM PST

    Dumping a big pile of money on a poor country is a popular thing with rich countries trying to help poor countries. Unfortunately, the only thing it seems to do is to make a few fat cats rich. Doesn't really seem to help the country that is on the receiving end of this aid. It takes work to build a successful capitalist economy, and few people are willing to stick with it long enough for it to be successful. 20 years might get you started. 50 years to make some progress. 100 years to get it to the point where it can stand on it's own.

    ReplyDelete