Between that and the transience of city life, Yang views her own chances of starting a family as remote. Her duties lie elsewhere and, eventually, she will have to return home.
But alongside that hopefully distant prospect, another anxiety has recently troubled her. It was something unthinkable when she received her first pay packet as a teenager fresh from the provinces all those years ago. Work is drying up.
While Yang’s earnings have been rising every year since she arrived in the city, something few people her age in Europe or North America can say, the foreman continually makes jokes about robots taking her job. Although Yang usually ignores him, the illicit trade unionists in her workplace say similar things. According to them, wages are no longer competitive because foreigners overseas have become accustomed to earning less than before. While the trade unionists see little chance of China losing its industrial eminence, that inevitably means some jobs will go abroad while others are automated. Of course many jobs will stay in China – there will always be work – but conditions won’t stay as they are. Yang even read on the internet how the company she works for, Foxconn, has started to build factories in America.
Chris
When President Obama ratified the SPACE Act in 2015 it was a historic moment, at least for Chris Blumenthal. That legislation, while attracting little coverage in the press, recognised the right of private companies to make profits in space. American capitalism had a new frontier.
Today marks the anniversary of that event, and Blumenthal couldn’t be happier. Alone in his condo, he watches a Falcon Heavy booster rocket alight somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Its successful landing not only makes a manned mission to
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fully automated luxury communism