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 away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:Well, we can scratch "high-speed pizza delivery" off the list:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Yeah, it's Domino's, but it's in the UK, not Silicon Valley.
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