Asteroid Day
END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!!
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Art Market Approaching so-called "Meta-" Bubble, Experts Speculate Wildly
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END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!!
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Nation's Unprecedent Nightmare Rate: Electoral Bad News for Incumbent Governments? — Interview Followed by Panel Followed by Calls for Violence at 18:00 and 22:30, EST
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END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!!
Can Coronivirus Cure Cancer? NO! Why Would You Even Ask That??? More at 23:00
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END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!!
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END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!! § Art Market Approaching so-called "Meta-" Bubble, Experts Speculate Wildly § END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!! § Nation's Unprecedent Nightmare Rate: Electoral Bad News for Incumbent Governments? — Interview Followed by Panel Followed by Calls for Violence at 18:00 and 22:30, EST § END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!! Can Coronivirus Cure Cancer? NO! Why Would You Even Ask That??? More at 23:00 § END OF THE WORLD TODAY!!! §
Everyone had assured us that there was simply nothing to be done about the asteroid—at least, nothing that the free market couldn’t take care of on its own far more efficiently then any kind of government-led program. And it was true that the free market, in all of its libertine freedom, had absolutely reared at the news of the asteroid for the sheer opportunity that it offered. In the first place, the great space yachts were thrown to the builders in the space-yard of every nation-state; city-state, sov-corp; Apostolic sees; and Confederation of communes, autonomous zones, and syndicate-republics. Or rather, every such entity which had been able to afford to build a space yard in the first place. Only 9 of the 342 recognized sovereign entities at the New League had built space yards of their own, with another 25 junior partner governments holding some access rights. Between these states there were 15 space-yards, a number which fell to just 4 during the two brief, distinct and incredibly destructive wars initiated in the days following news of that object, which had been nicknamed—following the comments by America’s Deputy-Consul Duke Nathan Bedford Bezos-Trump’s during the press briefing at the NASA headquarters following the discovery of the object—Big Bummer, had been sighted, its pinballing orbit mapped and its ultimate course charted to somewhere in the quarter where the earth’s southern and eastern hemispheres overlap.
Luckily the escape vessels did not have to be constructed quite from scratch, for the planetary bourgeoisie had been extending their toes into the vast real-estate hanging naked of claims and freshly privatized above the backyard of every surbarron’s 18-bathroom, 25-toilet McMansion for the better part of two centuries now, constructing and then mostly abandoning entire generations of lunar pleasure palaces, pulling their children from boarding school every decade or so for 2 and a half years while the entire family went on a Venusian cruise, replete with seven or eight generations of grandparents, to say nothing of the, nannies, personal trainers, yogis, social media managers, and full time security. Less the luckily for approximately 98.5% of the world’s population who lacked a familial or client-patron relationship to the .05% of the world’s wealthiest people, the bourgeoisie was not offering space on their vessels to anyone but those who could pay or whose labor would be required to maintain the craft. Not even a majority of the builders working to remodel the yachts were guaranteed space for themselves, much less their families, a factor which later (which is to say cross-earlier) historians would cite as a major reason for the uptick in terror-related malfunctioning which would at various times shut down whole vertebral columns of the world’s
Another source of vessels came from an unlikely sector: the art world. Widely publicized statistic in the world of technecapitalist critique held that over 40% of the world’s works of art sold at public auction was now being held in mass, climate control satellite-warehouses lined ceiling to floor—or rather, wall to wall—with tens of thousands of priceless* works of art, all safely outside of the jurisdiction of any tax laws, though admittedly somewhat inconvenient on the part of any owner who might want to view his purchase. (I happen to know that the number was upwards of 65%, if one counted items stowed away inside of the larger sculptures, murals, and other works.) eventually these orbits would decay and the satellites would either crash into the surface of the red planet or gradually fall out of its gravitational sway and fall into ungoverned space. in both cases, whether firms were liable for the insurance policies of such assets (failing a rescue mission, which the agencies usually found be orders of magnitude cheaper to budget for) remained a hotly contested area of extraterrestrial law, and entire economic cycles had been brought to premature crashes by a single ruling in favor of one party over another.
Billionaires quickly reinvested their assets, rerouting their floating warehouses to the solar system’s remaining space yards to be gutted for parts for the opulent lifeboats which would house themselves and their courtiers. In doing so, trillions of dollars worth of artwork were jettisoned without any official record of the event so that. Provided no one at the New Global International World Trade Space Station Center’s art market investigated too closely, the items could even continue to be bought and sold at the same clip they always had. Because all such trades had long ago been delegated to trading bots trained on a neural network which rewarded rapid buying and selling more then it did careful investigation, it could be safely assumed that it would take months or years (or more specifically, a few boom and bust cycles within the art market itself, for it is at such flex points that new strategies emerge) before an investigation was conducted on the commission of a potential buyer could prove the accidents of the portfolio to have been destroyed. Even then, who knows? The finance bots might continue buying and selling stakes in the freshly space-burnt artifacts as if nothing had happened. The bots were strangely zen about the meaning of their games in this way. In any case, they could certainly continue passing around the artworks like a hot potato until the the much cheaper and slower AIs employed at government regulatory agencies ordered their own investigation, and the entire game collapsed upon itself. In contrast, there was a great deal of uncertainty for just how long the yachts would be able to remain entirely self-sufficient following Big Bummer’s Impact Event, whether they fell into permanent orbit around Venus, Castor, Pollux, Antipode, or the Jovian Moons. Rumor had it that the finance bots had already begun taking out bets on which craft would fail first and for how much money the plutocrats of the remaining vessels of absolute luxury and absolute scarcity would charge the life boaters to take their families aboard—smart money was on the Chinese Imperial Family’s armada to weather the next century at least mostly in tact.
Perhaps at least a few would last until the rate of repair-and-replacement exceeded the yearly failure quotient. But if not, it would be a social coup for the next rung of the solar elite, those who could not afford an invitation to the spacer’s islands. these, the 1 percent as opposed to the .1%, invested instead in titanic labyrinths deep into the bedrock of the worlds largest mountain ranges, relocating entire armadas of agricultural equipment, seed libraries, stores of water, rare metals, uranium, and other such stock in hopes of recreating the world in their image. They built fifty-lane highways through the ocean’s bedrock to connect their geotropic, from Kilimajaro to the Alps to the Himalayas to the Andys. They rerouted volcanoes and built the world’s first upside-down magma channels between the earth’s mantle and the underside of the crust. They constructed the world’s largest open-air, pressurized underwater bridged across the Marianna trench. This was the heyday of thermo-nuclear mining. And when the calculations of the astroid’s course were proven to be based on the faulty data of long-neglected dense-image government telescopes based on the outer moonlets of Jupiter and Neptune, the tradebots formed an Unlimited Liability Network, financed the overthrow of a backwater tax haven, used the nation’s sovereign status to charter an unmanned research vessel to the Ort Cloud which then rerouted itself to collide with the Armageddon at just such a velocity that Big Bummer would miss earth slightly sooner then it otherwise would have, causing it to slingshot around the moon and collide graze the atmosphere over the Dakota Sea before colliding with New Amsterdam City.