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July 24, 2012, 05:04:28 PM |
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1. Fast food and soda pop are banned and heavily regulated. Marijuana is perfectly legal, though quite-heavily taxed, no one really cares about cigarettes anymore, most people are using liquid nicotine + vaporizers, but every so often someone rolls their own tobacco and gets caught in around half of the US states where it is illegal. In a fit of overzealousness in the name of science, homeopathic and chiropractic methods are made outright illegal in some states (California, Vermont, Massachusetts) but still practiced in secret. Cap and trade is in place, though no one really knows or understands how the state government is measuring CO2, and it varies widely from state to state and sometimes even within a state.
2. Most porn is already or becoming illegal, though most forms of softcore are still allowed as long as it doesn't promote "rape culture". Pretty much every other form of pornography is considered as glorifying rape, but "there are still some misogynists that think porn isn't rape." (The country is definitely heading in this direction, women in their 20s and 30s are finding it increasingly difficult to find husbands, and it's only a matter of time before they put two and two together and realize we don't get married because we quite simply don't have to. When the ultra-feminists take men's porn from them, no one is going to stand up in their defense, certainly not the unmarried women and not the married/divorced men paying child support, who don't like seeing men who have no financial responsibilities enjoying themselves)
3. The government now regulates the Internet. The first justification they used was that "evil corporations" were preventing bandwidth from flowing correctly to the top websites, like Youtube, Facebook, etc. And in fact, it turns out most ISPs did de-prioritize that traffic, for the benefit of their customers. After Network Neutrality is made into law, the ISPs are forced to lobby Congress to allow them to provide different tiers of access, perhaps even tiers with download and upload caps, which succeeds. Once the various Tiers are in place, the IP content holders then request from the ISPs for their records of who is on what Tiers and when it is shown that various individuals in the highest tiers are easily responsible for most of the IP theft, the Supreme Court dictates that ISPs must pay a set penalty per upper tier customer, which is then passed down to the customer for using an Internet connection "likely to result in IP theft". All this is done without revealing people's identities so every business is happy, but the number of people with really nice Internet connectivity drops considerably. Since any tier could be doing something illegal, all traffic is watched, but most people are using some form of anonymity service now, anyway, about half of which regularly report their customer info to the government, anyway, and justify calling themselves anonymous because they hide your identity from other businesses, even if not the government. The people who use these services are too stupid to care that their government is spying on them, they figure the government is already spying on everyone, so what does it matter.
4. Most people refuse to do business with people of an opposing political party, and very few will service Independents. Greens and Libertarians aren't illegal, but due to political machinations and the string of various domestic terrorists in the 20-"teens" (2013-2019) that associated themselves with these two political parties, they are not really considered political parties but rather breeding grounds for domestic terrorism. Partisan hackery dominate the TV and radio waves and most forms of journalism (more on this in a minute).
5. For education, you essentially have two choices, the newer Homeschooler Acts lets you choose to educate your child yourself or via someone within your local community that you trust, you also get to see your child at the end of the day. Or you can hand your child over as a ward of the state, where they are given education and you just check the boxes for whichever days of the week you want the state to continue to hold them. If new legislation passes, the options for them to be held over one weekend per month will be allowed, much to the chagrin of "all those nasty evil religious whackos".
6. Speaking of which, most churches are run like corporations now, they lost their non-profit status and well, "it's better this way" is often used as justification. Marriages are formal contracts bound by the church corporations as a third party, and most disputes are handled by the institution itself, though occasionally arbitrage fails and someone has enough money to lawyer it into an actual court case. Obviously the world is better with churches this way, since they are now also in the business of providing education to anyone that doesn't want to make their child a ward of the state. It probably goes without mention that there are pretty partisan lines between how you educate your children, with very few single (and often poor) parents choosing a religious institution, and very few married parents choosing the state.
7. After a slew of cities went bankrupt between 2012-2014, most of the states created provincial governments with appointed representatives from the state that took on the bankrupcy. A handful of state border disputes were even handled this way. Most of these loans were provided by the federal government to the states via the Federal Reserve, and they were given excellent rates on the loans, and the subsequent inflation that occurred eliminated many of the fiscal problems states had. California even recovered, though Illinois went through a radical internal shift as decades of the political machines heavily entrenched there were brought out in the open and subsequently destroyed, one political operative or insider at a time. Before long, everyone was turning on everyone, and it became difficult to tell who actually was guilty of what since nearly everyone was confessing that everyone else was guilty. In the end very few individuals were actually prosecuted, but most had a moratorium on political involvement within Illinois put on them, and many left for Europe or other US states to work there. The US dollar is still used, but Bitcoin is considered better by pretty much any private, non-government entity. The US gov't does not accept Bitcoin for taxes, and currency exchange between Bitcoin and the US dollar is taxed at a 3% rate. Every corporation, whether it does business in US dollars or via the blockchain is still required to post profits and keep clean books, the gov't considers it pretty irrelevant that people are using Bitcoin since tax laws are still laws. A handful (only a couple thousand) of early Bitcoin businesses that refused to adapt and keep clean records were fined, most of the owners fled the country instead of paying, occasionally one of them is stupid enough to come visit friends or family and gets caught and thrown in prison. GLBSE immediately complied to US government demands for US-based and most non-US based businesses when it became clear Nefario would either have to shut it all down, causing everyone to lose record of everything, or comply. He obviously chooses to comply.
8. Gun rights advocates are pretty much universally-shunned, despite being one of the mre bi-partisan issues of the day, the son of one of the prominent presidents of the national gun owners was found to be an actual Libertarian who later participated in open hostilities with the government, and began advocating the overthrow of the federal government. Eventually he was killed, officials say he opened fire first, but it was later found the weapon he used was planted, no one ever served time and most of the story was covered up. Still, a three-week pregnant DEA (he was raided in a joint DEA-ATF event) agent died. It is believed that most gun owners groups fund domestic terrorism, except the NRA, which avoided most of the blame by being as non-committed to gun rights as they've always been.
9. The vast majority of the press/media is independent and anonymous. At least, any of the media worth watching/reading. The rest of them are political and partisan hacks. Many of the illegal things talked about on TOR blogs and livestreams violate the law, but receiving the broadcasts or reading the posts are not yet considered illegal. The people that do watch the shows do so quietly and try not to even let their friends and family know for fear of...
10. The watchlist. A group of people that are likely to have a higher propensity for committing a crime due to their behaviors. It's just a list that the state and federal (and more often provincial) governments have that corporations are supposed to report any financial interactions with. Most companies dealing with these people are subject to audits, so they try to discourage these folks from coming around to them. In an odd manner, some people use being on the watchlist as a form of public protest, such as doing business purposely with certain entities who promote further state intervention in our lives so they are subject to more/additional paperwork. Even most federal and state gov't bureaucrats are starting to question if having a public watchlist is really in the best interests of the people, but it's been difficult for them to get rid of it because the provincial governments are making so much money from errors the audits reveal that they can't seem to get enough support to get rid of them.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of something that we could get to in 10 years time or so. I get detailed in some areas and less so in others, but it gives off dystopian while still being relatively believable. Not sure if all of these things will actually happen in ten years time, but I do think that certain political issues are about to start reversing.
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