Conversation

Reagan inauguration to today: ~40.5y Pearl Harbor to Regan inauguration: ~39.5y Wonder why the latter still feels longer. I think because a shitload of building happened, as opposed to trading.
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Pearl Harbor to Reagan: Cold War, nukes, space race, transistors, microchips, computers, Internet, Apollo, Voyager, birth control pill, green revolution, containerization... Reagan to now: PC revolution, consumer web, smartphones, human genome sequencing, Mars rovers, Bitcoin...
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Tough call as to which was more eventful, since one era built on foundations laid by the other, under a radically different economic system. The modern US has been the sole continuous superpower since about 1890. UK was company for 40y, USSR for another 40, China for 40.
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1850-1890, the US was in fact a superpower but hadn’t been recognized as such either by itself or others. So it was really 80 years US-UK as superpowers. I’m inclined to think China has been in 1980-2020 the way the US was 1850-1890. Undeclared, insecure superpower.
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