As far as I can tell, the contingency plan is to continue pushing places like Dubai as a tourist destination and business hub. And, honestly, as long as that place continues to function as a major regional air-traffic hub, that might actually work.

Following the path of other regimes around the world, the USA builds their own “great firewall”, segmenting most people here away from the global internet. At around the same time, personal VPNs become explicitly illegal. We might also see the government seize control of at least one certificate registrar, if they don’t fire up their own, thereby “owning” TLS online.

On the upside, there’s a chance we will see more grass-roots efforts to reboot a lot of institutions that were co-opted by the rich. You’re just never going to hear about that through conventional channels. For instance: local newspapers with real journalism behind them. Or more small businesses with the intent to last, rather than sell. It’s possible that more of those things will be co-ops, union shops, or even Mondragon inspired. Either way, there’s a path forward for more community, real communication, and eventual prosperity, provided folks keep their heads and take things offline where necessary.

As someone who just picked through the Zig docs (take this with a mountain of salt), Zig has a few things going for it:

• spec is simple and closer to C in scope
• modern language design, toolchain, and overall ergonomics
• Go-like struct & interface system
• 1st-class C interoperability

Go foists co-routines on you and the runtime, and Rust has the borrow checker. Both of these things deeply impact language design, standard libraries, and the overall developer experience. So Zig might actually be a “more modern C” in many ways which makes it a contender. That said, it’s not a 1:1 comparsion since it lacks everything else that C++ does: you’d have to re-envision your software designs as something other than OOP if that’s what you’re used to.

The Dialer.

• Comes with every phone
• 10+ digit number instantly connects you with millions of people, services, and institutions
• 3 digits connects you with life-saving emergency support
• Very low-latency voice support
• High quality audio (most of the time)
• No ads
• No obnoxious UI

All kidding aside, I’m routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.

Mesh networking is a good way to get a functional enclave going. NYC is going hard on this right now. It’s built to be a on-ramp for the internet, but also hosts its own services.

The hard part is that suburbia (where I assume most lemmings are) is more or less built to make any kind of community, let alone a radio network, really hard to pull off. Urban areas have an outsized advantage due to population density and that most folks live multiple stories above ground; everyone is already in a tower. It’s not impossible in a flatter environment, just harder.

Long-distance links… well, I don’t have an answer. In theory people could pool their resources and get a few satellites up to do this. I suggest satellites since it’s way easier than the other models, although maybe fiber links are cheaper to lease these days? Either way, keeping that model going (maintenance, support, etc) would require cash-flow. Outside of something like Patreon, this would just reinvent the existing ISP model and should be approached with caution.

There are probably a lot of scientific applications (e.g. statistics, audio, 3D graphics) where exponential notation is the norm and there’s an understanding about precision and significant digits/bits. It’s a space where fixed-point would absolutely destroy performance, because you’d need as many bits as required to store your largest terms. Yes, NaN and negative zero are utter disasters in the corners of the IEEE spec, but so is trying to do math with 256bit integers.

For a practical explanation about how stark a difference this is, the PlayStation (one) uses an integer z-buffer (“fixed point”). This is responsible for the vertex popping/warping that the platform is known for. Floating-point z-buffers became the norm almost immediately after the console’s launch, and we’ve used them ever since.

This didn’t go down well.

IT consulting pro-tip: Customers would rather pay for your time and expertise, than be made to feel stupid that they didn’t think of something so simple themselves.