This makes me think of the economic prediction from the start of Snow Crash: Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model

This makes me think of the economic prediction from the start of Snow Crash: Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — you know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery I especially like his use of the Invisible Hand in that. Of course these days (courtesy of Sterling), it is the Invisible Crazy Robot Hand - http://www.wired.com/2010/05/the-invisible-crazy-robot-hand/ http://www.wired.com/2010/05/the-invisible-crazy-robot-hand/