Smith is not that good a prognosticator. He's better than Howard Kunstler, who, despite having his finger on the pulse of certain recent trends, has completel

Smith is not that good a prognosticator. He's better than Howard Kunstler, who, despite having his finger on the pulse of certain recent trends, has completely misunderstood the underlying factors causing those trends. Smith is much the same way--a Boomer who has a Boomer world view. To be true visionary, you have to be able to effectively set aside your own biases, something which we are all guilty of having difficulty with. You have to let the clues take you to conclusions that you aren't comfortable with--something that today's liberals are exceedingly bad at doing. Their indoctrination does not allow them to chart a different course, they end up headed straight for the rocks. I think the smartphone fad is going to die down. The uptake rate of purchased apps has got to be kind of dismal right now. It had novelty, now it doesn't. Frankly, these phones are nothing but a pain. My 9-year old son has a phone, he doesn't care. My teenage daughter uses some social media but the kids are very wary of all of it having heard the horror stories and lived a few of them. Telemarketers have utterly wrecked voice to the point where I never hardly answer my phone anymore. Their bullshit has cut us off from each other instead of bringing us together. Either it dies or we die. His other point, financialization, is correct. But the issue there is that all these companies were created to chew up money, not to better humanity. Our priorities are what are all out of whack here. We could have spent all the capital far more wisely, but it got allocated to sexy "disruptive" ideas like Uber and Airbnb instead. Meanwhile, air travel sucks, traffic jams are way up, and honestly, the US is headed to a 3rd World nation status because we haven't invested in the things that really matter. Thus, in the midst of this extravagant tech expansion, we have very little to show for it. Just money down a hole. A kind of Keynesian money-sink situation. Uber does stand out as terrible disruption. Cab companies had it coming, but every day now I drive amongst these asinine Uber/Lyft stickered vehicles and it just seems so...amateur. It's amateur hour. The tech behind it was cool, but the actual, rubbe-meets-the-road aspect looks so completely idiotic to me. For people who drive so much, they sure as hell aren't very good at it, either!