A part of me keeps going out of a sick desire to see what happens next. We're living in a period where the trends are relatively predictable, but the specifics change almost day by day. How exactly will empire collapse? Nobody knows, so don't touch that remote!

There's an old joke that you would curse a person by wishing them to live in "interesting times". Well, this is certainly interesting - but I don't feel all that cursed. Civilization has a 12 thousand year history, and we get to see what may be the single most interesting portion of that.