Being an observant survivor, who learns from history --- isn't a case of "deciding in advance to be unhappy with everything"..
One does become a little cynical or harder to fool or please after experiencing 7 decades of bullshit from politicians...
Is is more a case of seeing the Emperor has no clothes and not indulging in hero worship of those who haven't yet earned that worship.
It appear that most folks are satisfied with less than what is required....
The nation has undergone decades of lower standards and lowered expectation's.....
As a result, our candidates have rushed to the bottom to satisfy the demand..
There are many folks in our Congress today, who couldn't have been hired to ANY position of public or private trust, just 40 or 50 years ago....
I look at the current list of candidates for President --- and feel a cold fear for the Republic..
This technological advancement allows Americans to produce more which SHOULD allow companies to make more money AND Pay their workers more. The fact that we only see marginal increases in profits and standard of living is ONLY because of the democrat party and their growing of government over the last 100 years. Even with the government regulations and government burden capitalism is still advancing technology at an amazing pace. Computer processing power is increasing at an exponential rate thanks to Intel ,AMD and other chip makers. Notice no governments are advancing this technology but private companies are. Government is the problem. Thank you Bush and GOP congress for not cracking down on these companies like Democrats would have. This is why we have this great economy.
There is only one problem though . And that is that government continues to grow. And government becomes a burden on businesses and people. And of course government threatens to take it all away and turn us into slave standing in all day long lines for a loaf of bread as in the communism of the Soviet Union. All we have to do is reduce the size of government. get government out of the way and let our businesses and us live our lives and increase technology. And building a fence on the border would help too.
The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray KurzweilAn analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.
The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel--took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century.
The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today's rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.