Disoriented

Sometimes I'll check the news feeds from your time. It's a good way to remind myself that humans in the future do not become dumber over time. To remind myself, in other words, that we've only really cared about celebrity news stories for hundreds of years now. There's lots of parallels, and the introduction of alien species into the human media consciousness served only to increase the magnitude of gossip out there. But I digress.

One of the things I noticed the other day was the increasing worry over China's surplus of trillions of dollars' worth of US currency. The concern centers around the possibility of China's exported goods and services becoming more expensive, as well as the threat of China releasing all that moolah into the public sector as response to any aggression from the US government.

Let me assure you that your fears are misplaced, people of my somewhat recent past. The Chinese government is much more sneaky than your journalists and economists think. You see, what they ended up doing with all the money was this--they started paying reasonable wages for labor within their own country. This took innumerable workers from US-run sweatshops where, in earlier times, laborers worked for wages well below US averages (while well above local averages). This meant that US companies had fewer options for outsourcing labor to cheaper resources (the entirety of Mexico would abducted by the Glornians in 2055). As manufacture of goods was forced to localize more and more to the American mainland, decisions were made all around to limit production to the most necessary of items: clothing, musical instruments, bug zappers, etc. One of the major losses of this time period was that production of little vending machine toys--you know, the ones in the little plastic capsules--halted almost completely. Jumbo sticky hands are now a highly-valued rarity, as many early archival collections were destroyed by archivists' inability to refrain from playing with them.