I like to base my stories on an actual calendar. It helps me keep Sunday from following Tuesday and gives me a frame of reference for school years, vacations, holidays, and even birthdays of the characters. I read a story once in which I'm sure the main character had three birthdays in one year. In fact, I have an entire Outlook calendar devoted to each storyline I write, including "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins". Often the calendars are for years past, but occasionally they stretch well into the future. For example, in Yelloweye, this week marks the high school graduation of Caitlin, Phile, and Mandy and the beginning of some of their most intense adventure. And I wrote that a few years ago.
I've also noted that Double Time begins on July 8, 2019. That means everything I've written for the rest of the series not only takes place in an alternate version of our world, but also in the future.
One of the fun things about writing about future events is that you don't need to be consistent with any current history. My prognostication is strictly from my imagination of what might happen, given the state of our world and the few things I've changed historically in Jacob's world. The big and obvious things that have changed in this timeline, of course, include the National Service, the absolute no tolerance traffic laws that levy time-fines rather than monetary ones, the complete lack of non-profit exemptions in the tax laws and flat tax, and the enforcement of absolute equality under the law. With those few changes to history, I'm not projecting my imagination into the future.
So, you can pretty much bet that I'll get most if not all of it wrong if you are comparing Double Time to our current reality. As the story progresses, the timelines will become more and more separate. So, maybe it's not necessary to critique my adherence to what is real in our world. By the same token, I don't think it would make any more sense to praise it when I get something "right". It's all just a story and I'm having fun making shit up.