Chitaly.... What a nightmare! I don't want to visit.
I'm just riffing here, no ethnic offense intended.
A small country. A huge population. Producing stunning, beautifully
designed things, manufactured for practically free, that don't work to begin
with, never mind after you get them home. But, the in the people's paradise,
unlike the USSR, the workers can at least afford the goods. Can't feed the
population--must rely on food imports.
A computer industry completely based around illegal clones of the VAX-11/730,
running in PDP-11 compatibility mode, which have to be water-cooled.
(Digital had a nice head start in China, because after trade became possible,
buying the real thing was apparently cost-effective. I don't quite know how
this advantage was lost.)
A completely democratic system that is totally irelevant to the actual
running of the country, which is done by a corrupt oligarchy. Most of the
actual economy is underground. Chicolina (the porn star) keeps her seat in
Parlaiment, of course, in this version of reality. Every now and then
someone forgets and the show elections just aren't held. A bit more
frequently someone proposes that the elections should be eliminated as a
budget drain and waste of time, but they tend to disappear.
A nuclear power which elects not to develop ballistic missles, based on a
realistic fear of where they would be most likely to land.
Total dominance of the auto-racing world acheived by entering dozens of teams
based around cheaply produced, very stylish, cars, driven by illiterates
raised from birth in driver's seat simulators on collective farms.
The embalmed body of Groucho Marx forms the spiritual center of the state
religion.
Actually, disregarding the above, I think the basic conflation gives you
something like Japan!
I still haven't fixed my doggone Italian dual-beam hinged cantilever
art-object halogen reading lamp, where the transformer (now toast) was an
integral part of the structural design. It's real pretty. In the back of my
closet.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:26:10 PDT