Mark Phil's Words

A place to record predictions. See also: http://twitter.com/markphilswords and http://reddit.com/r/user/philipkd/submitted

[markphilswords]

Children born today won't offend their parents by adopting edgy clothing or styles

This generation has absorbed the hipster subculture. Now, being on top of trends and subcultures is part of the everyday experience.

[markphilswords]

Expect a rise in serious book clubs.

Music will no longer have obscurity on its side, but there will still be obscure information. Books emphasize leisure time, so there will be radical indulgences of leisure time. So expect serious book clubs, not where middle-aged women find an excuse to have wine, but instead like voluntary reproductions of High School reading assignments.

[markphilswords]

While Basic Income would be the end of "work" as we know it, we would still have a better, pro-social societyWhile Basic Income would be the end of "work" as we know it, we would still have a better, pro-social society

Basic Income will disincentive certain activities, likely in the following proportions: * 1 out of 5 people will stay "employed" or have "jobs" * 3 out of 5 will actively contribute to society, whether it's helping out a non-profit, creating art, or inventing for the fun of it. * 3 out of 5 will be more active in the political process

[markphilswords]

Capitalists will care about the poor as a source for increased consumption

The silver lining in secular stagnation is that our attitude towards the poor will change, which arguably has already started happening. The poor will be viewed increasingly as an opportunity to expand consumption. A preview for this is in the extension of credit to the poor, whereas credit used to only be the purview for those with means.

[markphilswords]

There may be some miracle cure to consumption, though, in the form of brain implants or drugs that increase attention-span

Perhaps there will be some miracle in consumption, via something unexpected, like brain implants that help us multi-task better, and therefore, consume more. But if our capacity to consume were to change, then potentially our whole understanding of the meaning of wealth and value will change.

[markphilswords]

The Cure for Cancer will take many intermediary forms before becoming the equivalent of vaccination shot

Today, the cure is of the form, "Live long enough for the cure for cancer." This is for patients with unremovable tumors, that haven't spread, i.e. aren't metastatic. Chemotherapy plus rotating between targeted therapies is enough for these patients to last for 3-5 years, and in the mean time, new clinical trials open up, and they can keep extending their lifespan. And every year, there is some probability that one of the trials does apply to them, and they are now on maintenance mode, like Herceptin, where those cancer cells, while present, are perpetually supressed.

Next, "Live long enough for the cure for metastatic cancer."

Then people won't have to "live long enough," but they'll still have 1-3 years of drug rotations and testing until something sticks

Afterwards, most people with a cancer that's detected early will be cured with one test, and one drug. For dire cases, they'll need still need a one-year battery

Finally there will be the insta-cure

[markphilswords]

If 1870-1970 is the century of great invention, 1970-2070 will be the century of great financial engineering

The grasp for growth, which started during the end of the great century (1970), all comes down to financial engineering. This was Reaganomics. This was the New Economy hysteria. This was the credit bubble. This was quantitative easing. After every bust, the remnants of the financial engineering that got us there remained as a permanent part of the financial structure. The government and the capitalists will continue this trend for another 30 years, in a desperate grab for growth. Basic Income, perhaps, will be introduced to spur consumer spending. Consumer spending will grow, sort of, but after it stops growing, you won't be able to remove Basic Income.

The end game is where financial engineering has maxed out, and remain as permanent fixtures. Crazy priced tech stocks to make an interesting market, credit everywhere, basic income everywhere, banks eased to the hilt. All of this to aid the capitalists who want to increase their returns, and then they'll have no returns, or the returns will feel sick. Eventually, the world will be really run by two poles, the final human laborers who are working the farms and sweatshops, albeit with even more help from robots, and the "masters of the universe" at the top keeping the economic wheels going.

Everybody in between will just focus on art, inner experiences, leisure, getting obese, participating in politics, etc.

[markphilswords]

The future belongs to passive men and the women who love them

Many have posited as such, but Steven Pinker set the record straight in the tome Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has declined, that by all measures, from homicides to war, the world is getting more peaceful and exponentially so. The big counter-argument is the World Wars, but the deaths in them are low relative to the size of the world population at the time, plus the 19th Century was filled with more wars that could be classified "World Wars", and if we use an Earthquake-frequency chart, it does permit occassional spikes, but what matters is the ultimate trendline running through all the data, which is down.

His book received a take-down from the New Yorker, but then he responded, point-by-point. The impact of the takedown and the response, which is common now in the way we develop ideas, that the theories in his book are a wash or somehow murky. A simpler argument for the peace theory can be found in Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling by XXX. 150 years ago, a guy like me would have had to prepare for the real possibility of having a duel with someone. Even by chance I somehow avoided having to duel, it would still matter whether or not I had a coward three generations back who backed out of a duel. The lack of honor today, and that nobody cares whether or not my grandpa fought in a duel, is proof enough that we are in greater times of peace.

Men are getting less masculine and less aggressive over time. Schizophrenic men with occasional violent outbursts living in the Wild West would have been tolerated or even elevated to Sheriff in the Wild West or any anarchy condition. Now such people are institutionalized.

Again, we turn towards Japan, where the thin, effete male, with great talents in other areas, such as playing Starcraft, are lauded. Sumo wrestlers not withstanding, in main cities in Japan, it's the thin, effete male, with great talent, such as at playing Starcraft, is attractive. At one point, in the US, a figure like John Lennon, slender with glasses, i.e. professorial, was attractive.

Both sexes as a whole are flexible in their taste in the opposite sex, but less on an individual level, and more on a group level. There are women who love aggressive men, and there are women who love more passive men. The future belongs to the passive men, and the women who love them. Those will be the ones coupling. The other will belong to the fringes. The brutes will remain single, which in a paradoxical way, makes them more violent. Perhaps the terrorists (both the ideological kind, and lone kind) are the marginalized men, who cannot find that their aggression appreciated. Another possible result is a greater interest in Mens Groups.

[markphilswords]

The future belongs to the flamboyant, male sex addict

Sexual dimorphism is divergence in traits between the sexes. If you look at the animal kingdom, in most species the male and female are the same size. Can you easily tell the difference between a male and female dog, for example? For humans, relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, we have an incredible amount of sexual dimorphism. Men are much larger than woman. Men and women have different intellectual faculties specialized. The dimorphism derives in large part due to the differences in resources each sex allocates to having children. Simply put, women have few eggs, while men have many sperm. The theoretical upper limit to the amount of children a man can sire is in the tens of thousands, while as for a woman, it is in the low single digits.

Fertilization technology may change this. For example, there is the fertilization doctor Bertold Wiesner who sired 1,000+ children by using his sperm. And in vitro fertilization may increase the chance that a woman could have quntiplets frequently. Although, these will probably be fringe cases.

At first it seems like we were headed towards a reduction in this alpha male model, with the nuclear family in the 1950s. The rise of single mothers of late tells a different story. There's never been a better time to be a single mother. In the US maybe not as much as Europe, but the employment opportunities for women as well as the support via state-sponsored healthcare makes it easier (not easy). A player at the bar could sire hundreds of children, whereas 50-100 years ago, he would still be scoring easily at the bar, but those pregnancies would have been terminated, or the children would have had a higher infant mortality rate due to infanticide or neglect.

However, with the reduction in aggressiveness for men, we may not recognize the new player. Those extra muscles, in the Serengeti, were used by men to intimidate and fight off competing mates. Nowadays, we may either see an increase of the sex addict model, like David Duchovny's character in Californication, or the peacocking model. The sex addict model is simply the man with a one-track mind. He otherwise keeps basic appearances, such as a normal job and clothing, but he excels in his devotion to scoring. He simply tries every door knob, disregarding social norms, and gets lucky very often. His appetite is unlimited, and his ability to orgasm is unparalleled.

Male peacocking, such as with flamboyant dress or special talents, may rise. Mystery, which is the name of Erik von Markovik who is a pick-up artist, is all about wearing totchkes or performing magic tricks. His techniques say less about his particular brand of pick-up artistry as it does about what works out there. Both sexes have a capacity for peacocking, and in different ways (women with dress, men with conspicuous consumption), but men may push for the dress side. See Kanye West, for example. Or the metrosexual.

Perhaps a combined persona will emerge, like Benjamin Franklin, a flamboyant dandy who loved many women.

[markphilswords]

Enterprise blockchains will likely become a high-level Saas

Perhaps, implied in enterprise blockchains are that multiple parties must keep nodes running all the time, which again, could be conceptually reduced to having redundant cloud backups services. And these p2p servers would have their own uptime issues, patching issues, hacking issues, privacy issues, etc. So I have a feeling, that the enterprise blockchains startups are essentially experiments, and then once one has a stable solution surfaces, Oracle or IBM will buy them out, and own the scene. There's a lot of sensitive data out there, and so it makes sense for a large services player who can sell $1M+ software.

[markphilswords]

As long as property is important, so will monogamy

Property initially seems related to consumption. You want a couch so you can sit on it, or you want a vase so you can enjoy it. The question is how much of consumption is related to class and status, and how much is intrinsic. The growth of intrinsic consumption seems to have no end in sight. Everybody could stand to have more toys, more leather in their car, more this or that. The whole fascination with tiny houses has less to do about doing with less, and more with creative compression of one's consumption. Either way, consumption is still the raison d'etere. So as long as consumption is high, so is the interest in property.

The big wrinkle, of course, is digital property, which ends the scarcity of goods. When movies depict teenagers in their rooms, they’re shown with large posters of favorite bands or shelves full of toys/dolls and other collectible totchkes. Now, the depiction of a teenager is one glued, drooling over a small 4 inch screen. So, perhaps the generation that came-of-age after smartphones were introduced, could conceivably care less about property as it relates to intrinsic consumption. Imagine that same teenager. Would he care about whether his friends got a shiny new red Camaro, or whether or not they created something new worth checking out in Minecraft. A few years later, when everyone is in beige self-driving cars, they might shrug and feel no nostalgia for the era of American Graffiti when their grandparents cruised main street in muscle cars.

So digitization of consumption may weaken the importance of some forms of intrinsic consumption. But the transition to pure digital consumption as a whole seems gradual because there’s so many areas where real-world consumption is getting ever finer detail. See above, for example, about the interest in daily luxe dining. We have to eat, and if we can make our meals better we will spend that extra GDP doing so.

Conspicuous consumption is another driver, and that depends on how much importance we play on status and class. Class is on the way out, thanks to the rise of the creative class, which is creating this ever-expanding melange of a middle-class classlessness that eventually consumes everybody. However, people will still mate and affiliate with quality, leaving status-seeking to completely take over the role that classism once provided. So a growth in conspicuous consumption seems like it’s to continue unabated.

But another big wrinkle is the possibility of government intervention. All this conversation applies to the United States, not continental Europe and Quebec, where social welfare systems are so vast, that women don’t feel like they “need a man” as much as they do in America. I saw an admittedly surface segment on how marriage in Montreal isn’t the same in the U.S., where it’s more like a business partnership, and the depiction of marriage in NBC’s Welcome to Sweden also shows as much.

There won’t be much change in the world of polyamory. The polyamorists like to think every year is going to be the break-through year, and some trends make it seem like the world is moving in that direction. (Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I discovered that TIME magazine recently put polyamory on their cover). But if dabbling in multiple or looser sexual ties are on the rise, it may have to do more with this generation delaying marriage.

For alternative heterosexual lifestyles to rise in popularity, our attitude towards property would have to change completely. Burning Man’s gift exchange economy notwithstanding, people care about property more than ever. The discussion about wealth disparity, and the anxiety that the topic induces, shows just how much of a concern it is for people. Sure, wealth disparity has negative political implications, but the bulk of the irritation is that the middle-class is having trouble accumulating much wealth.

The thing with polyamory is that we all, somewhere in our minds, think it would be great in an ideal world. My stance is that whatever we collectively dream as being the ideal world, will eventually happen. But, depending on how you define “eventually,” that could be a thousand or fifty thousand years from now. After all, I’m certain some optimistic Ancient Egyptian opined that we would one day all be free from poverty, simply because that’s what we collectively want, and today we still have a long way to go.

But even if it takes polyamory a long time to arrive, it may have spikes in growth in the mainstream vanguard. This ties in with my predictions about the successor to hipsters above. There’s polyamory the subculture, and there’s the polyamory that is talked about in mainstream society. Those conversations are going to happen more in the open (see that TIME story), not in hushed tones, just like we are rapidly becoming comfortable with talking about transgender people. So it may seem like polyamory is having a breakthrough, as more people will feel safer coming out of the closet as polyamorists, and that will of course have some knock-on effects in increased membership, but as a whole, it’ll still be a fringe interest because of our strong attachment to property.

We've been hearing more sentences in the past decade of the form, “The United States is the worst among the developed nations in XYZ” whether XYZ is healthcare spending per capita, life expectancy, or prison population. These sentences could either be prescriptive or descriptive. If they're prescriptive, it means that for whatever reason, the U.S. just fell behind, but otherwise has the necessary conditions to bring about the same social welfare system that arrived to Europe. The support for this theory comes from the idea that post-war Europe and Japan did a tremendous amount of rebuilding and soul-searching, and that's when most of these institutions were put in place. The United States, which didn’t have as much of a radical restructuring after World War II, is just late to the party.

The second theory, that this is descriptive, comes from there being something necessary capitalistic about the United States. Perhaps its necessary that the leading superpower has to be capitalistic, or rather that the capitalism and militarism of the leading superpower is what permits all the support states to relax and enjoy the social welfare benefits. NATO could be conceived as a giant war machine, with the United States being the hectic capital and the other countries the placid suburbs. Or it could just be that the top superpower gets to the top by having its top climb over everybody else. The U.S. and China are jockeying for world supremacy, and anything like social welfare that could slow it down has to be set aside for the great race upwards.

Probably why we’re constantly being guilt-tripped about not being like the other developed nations is that the American middle-class is simply demanding more. But the history of nations is the story of the least the upper-class can give to the rest of us while promoting themselves. So the middle-class will get some crumbs here and there, like the Affordable Care Act, but nothing like the radical restructuring that Europe got. In other words, the second theory will likely prevail, and the U.S. will remain or become more capitalist

In conclusion, property’s hold on our imagination will weaken in some areas, but to say as much, is to say that an aging whale is shedding some of its barnacles. The point being that the whale is still a whale, and growing with age. And wherever we find an interest in property, we find an interest in monogamy.

[markphilswords]

Pride will be replaced by modesty for the LGBTQ community

LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning), is in many ways, the original subculture that first emerged in cities. Before cities, I imagine our tribal ancestors lived in an unpredictable soup where everybody could establish their own social mores every generation. If you happened on Adam and Steve getting it on in the bush, you wouldn’t know whether what they were doing was condoned or not by the elders in your tribe, because there would potentially have been no precedent to condemn before, nor was there any text to say so. In many ways, the tribal world was post-modern before we got post-modernism, since everybody could interpret every sign however they wanted it. They did have a lot of piercings and tattoos, and nobody got all wound up about that.

Although, there were some taboos in tribalism, homosexuality probably never reached enough critical mass for it to be expressly forbidden. Or you may have been the lone full-on homosexual, whereas your potential compatriot was maybe a mix, maybe the Q in LGBTQ, or bisexual, and had inactivated homosexuality. The point is that, it seems like alternative sexuality as a subculture may be over. This is either a win or a loss, depending on where you stand. This could mean the gradual decline of Pride parades, or where Pride parades simply become Tolerance weekends, for good family fun and carnivals. In which case, the U.S. becomes closer to Brazil or India in their treatment of alternative sexuality. Those places have their known beaches and hot spots, and simply mix in their subcultural expression with mainstream ones, such as Carnival.

Having said that, I won’t come down clearly on whether or not American acceptance of alternative sexuality will increase or not and we as a whole become like Brazil or India. Democracy makes strange bedfellows, and the alts have been a convenient target for political reasons for a long time. What I am saying is that the cultural handling of alternative sexuality has entered a new phase, where the subcultural aspects of it are becoming eliminated or blurred.

Caitlyn Jenner, to the mainstream public, for example, was rapidly shocking then immediately not. It took decades for the mainstream to finally even get comfortable with homosexual characters being a fixture of the media. Then, when transexualism hit the front page, there was a “Now this?” moment, and then Caitlyn Jenner became the most viewed page on wikipedia (guessing), and everybody got their education, and moved on.

None of this is to say that discrimination of transgender or homosexual individuals is on the decline at all, nor will it be any less shocking or difficult for families to deal with alternative sexuality in their own ranks, but rather the mass handling of these topics in moving towards non-issue territory. The 2016 election is notably absent much discussion about gay marriage.

Because of this new environment, conservatives will have to adapt their messaging of their values. Homophobia is passé, so a non-bigoted resistance to homosexuality might emerge in its place. The suppression of homosexuality is an ancient battle, and motivated parents will continue producing environments that discourage homosexuality. Homosexuality could wind up classified as an “adult” topic or not family-friendly, something that children should be shielded from. “Out and proud” might be replaced with modesty. Privacy could become a larger part of the gay conversation. Currently, right-wing libertarians justify lifting legal restrictions on homosexuality less because “gay is okay” but more to “get the government out of the bedroom.”

Some members of the homosexual community may ultimately aid in the new obscurity. Pride was necessary to counteract the notion that homosexuality was bad, evil, or illegal. But once the legal victories have been checked off, the revolutionary justification for emphasizing acceptance may weaken as well.

[markphilswords]

Yuccies won’t be a relevant subculture, but it may be a relevant label or descriptor

David Infante, writing for Mashable, had an epic article on The Yuccie, which I wish I had written. He’s saying that the successor to the hipster, to be found in young Millenials, is almost a post-modern hipster, one who alternates between commercial and non-commercial, snobbery and not. He or she is more concerned with cultural bang for their buck, and doesn’t care that they see a lawyer skateboarding by them on the way to work. You get yours and I get mine.

In a way, I don’t think this is the successor to the hipster, because it doesn’t sound like a subculture, but rather a description of the general attitudes of the creative class, just confined to the self-conscious young part of it. The precursor to hipster was the indie rocker in the 1990s, and the successor to it, will also be a subculture that has to define itself in distinction to the mainstream in someway. That is becoming increasingly difficult, thanks to vast amounts of leisure time afforded to the creative class, combined with the Internet, who can find any bit of obscurata easily. What can really be “underground” anymore?

In which case, that’s why I suggested that the end of the hipster was the end of that germ-line of subculture, because it’s becoming impossible to be the lone smug guy in the room who happens to know all the hot bands or where the hip restaurants are. Your middle manager knows what Pokemon or Adventure Time is, too. In which case subcultures become relegated to what they’ve predominantly been, which is that which has major barriers to entry, such as goth or punk, bronie or juggalo. Social penalty and subculture have gone hand-in-hand for awhile.

[markphilswords]

Shake Shack is the future of luxe consumption, not Chipotle

Evidence for the rise of luxe consumption is often found in the rise of Chipotle and the decline of McDonald's, but perhaps that's just the early warning shot. Chipotle's food isn't objectively great. Shake Shack's is, though, so maybe their ascendancy might represent the real beginning of franchised luxe dining, where every burger tastes great, kind of like it does in Japan.

Of course, not every industry will have its Shake Shack. Creatives only reluctantly get into mass consumerism, but when it comes to food, efficiencies of scale do reduce costs in a meaningful way, and eating is a large part of our monthly budgeting, so I expect both chains and local restaurants to do well. Or perhaps there will just be a lot of local chains. Again, I hate to keep using my home town as an example (but it really is a prism by which to view up and down American), there are many local-only chains, such as P. Terry’s hamburgers and Alamo Drafthouse theaters, which both blur that line between local and corporate (as of today, P. Terry’s is at odds with permitting issues on Austin’s treasured South Congress Ave., and Alamo Drafthouse theaters are all over Texas and other parts of the U.S. now).

“Local” has lost a lot of its meaning, just like a lot of words at the dawn of the creative class. “Hipster” is another one. Every subculture that goes mainstream has to reach a post-modern-like death where all meaning is suspended. In the case of the co-opting of the hipster, every token on that subcultural Christmas tree has become just now flair that ordinary people do.

[markphilswords]

TED talks represent a passing middle-brow phase

Despite the outcry over teens and texting, the Internet has been one of the largest booms in literacy, depending on how you define it. If you define literacy as not just the ability to read words, but the spread of words, and all that comes with it, ideas, culture, etc., then the Internet has been rocket fuel. This is why the bar for quality television shows have risen so much, people are overwhelmed with so much content that they can be selective.

But this also raises the bar for what is and isn’t middle-brow. The fascination with TED talks may, in retrospect, be viewed as a relic of “early” Internet, whereby the bite-sized packaging of stimulating thought-pieces filled a vacuum of the newly expanded appetite for good content. People may then quickly graduate from watching those talks to reading long-form non-fiction, where ideas can be more substantially examined. Despite all the cries of the downturn of publishing, The New Yorker readership is up, The New York Times is doing well, book sales are up, etc.

It’s like when the paperless office was supposed to be the death knell for paper. Instead, people need paper so much more than ever. Information consumption as a whole is up, but it’s just been aggregated so well, that the old way, where content hit people in the long tail of local papers or local programming, has dried up, and now the real, meaningful pillars of content will shine through.

[markphilswords]

The cure for cancer is really around the corner this time

The problem with the Cure for Cancer is that it gets announced every 5-10 years. And the more often a grand prophecy doesn't come true, the more we ignore it. The problem with previous pronouncements, such as after Halstead's radical masectomy in the early 1900s (XXX) or the discovery of chemotherapy (XXX), is that they occurred in a black box. We didn't know anything about how cancers worked. We thought they were typical infections, like tuberculosis, and all they needed was the right key to unlock them. This is why single studies in the past seemed to hold so much promise. With every other disease, a single lab cure could be generalized.

Cancer cures can't be generalized because cancers, as we now know them, are specific. Yes, they have a general expression—the tumor—but beneath that they are composed of a chain of 30-60 cancer-like engines. These engines are the oncogenes, which are embedded in our genomes, and under normal circumstances, they help cells perform basic functions, like move around, reproduce, and grow. When they mutate, our cells behave abnormally turning ordinary cells into monsters.

The result is that "cancer" is a bit of an abstract word. The word itself comes from the idea of a crab crawling underneath the skin. So one prediction is that the word "cancer" will eventually go the way of "consumption," "The Vapors" or "Old Age." Or rather cancer will be elevated to the same position as the word "infection" or "disease," i.e. it's own high-level class of pathology.

The cure for cancer isn't a silver bullet, at least not for the foreseeable future. It's a collection of knowledge about how cells misbehave, and a collection of techniques on how to stop them from misbehaving. That's it. Or more technically: genetics and targeted therapies. Through the field of "oncogenetics" we are profiling every specific cancer gene and how it makes cells behave badly. Cancer screening will eventually be similar to the $99 personal genetic sequencing service from 23andMe. We will take biopsies of our tumors, send them to a lab to be sequenced, and everybody will have their own personal onconome report emailed to them.

Targeted therapies detect signatures of specific oncogenes and disable cells that express them. For example, some oncogenes help cells move around, and as a result, they have little arms, which have a peculiar protein structure. Targeted therapies then know how to attach to those arms and disable the attached cell. There are somewhere on the order of 30-60 features about human cells that cancers abuse, and we are in the process of targeting each of these behaviors. The pioneering cure in this field was herceptin in XXX. You can take a test for the oncogene HER2, and if you have it, get a prescription for herceptin. Patients who are on herceptin have their cancer cells suppressed. It's a maintenance cure, but they are surviving cancer.

The evidence that the Cure for Cancer may already be here or is truly around the corner comes from drug data. The number of drugs for targeted therapies that are in FDA approval were on the order of 10-20 in 2015, whereas the year before it was under 10, and before that just a few every year. But even without looking at FDA approvals, just one visit to clinicaltrials.gov shows a mountain of Phase II clinical trials available for cancer patients. Phase I is when a new drug is tested for dosage safety. Phase II is when the drug is ready for testing on a larger group of patients. This flood of Phase II trials will soon lead to flood of FDA-approved drugs.

Ten years ago, the most aggressive cancer patients would demand that they have access to clinical trials. Today, oncologists are so optimistic that no demand is needed. The typical pillars used to just be three: chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Now clinical trials is the forth.

Cancer appeared in my family recently, so I had to immerse myself in research. There I encountered both large helpings of optimism and skepticism, which made be better at countering both.

[markphilswords]

Outdoor festivals will still represent a technologically degraded affair, despite increases in connectivity elsewhere

In 2005, we had the EDGE network. Since then we've had two major leaps forward: 3G followed by LTE. The advertised speeds for the latter two both services varies significantly, and the penetration of these technologies is also spotty. By 2025, we should therefor be two steps further, i.e. LTE+2.

However, growing networks are capital intensive (just like laying fiber for home broadbands), and so the ROI is delayed, keeping the justification for connecting rural areas difficult. So while in 2025, on LTE+2, you should be able to stream Netflix crystal clear with no buffering in good parts of town, expect to still have dropped connections on road trips. There probably won't be as many dead zones across the U.S., so expect everybody to feel like they have Internet always, everywhere, the floor will still be semi-unusable levels of service. So, this means that everybody can use Facebook and texts everywhere, but maybe video streaming will still be spotty in places.

Because of LTE 3.0, network resources can be rationed during heavy usage, so we may see the end of the problem of festivals. Festivals are notorious deadzones due to the high density of Smartphone users. However, because of the rationing, it'll still be the case that festivals will represent a technology degraded affair, so people will have trouble with live streaming video there.