What I learned on Nov. 6th 2012

[Guest sventvkg]

[quote name='AK Guy' timestamp='1352322512' post='841305']
I've heard the arguments back and forth on the moral decline of our society, the Judeo-Christian ethic, whether or not we were founded on Religious principles, and whether we were a humanist secular nation or a Christian nation and up to this point it was mainly academic with pointers going in both directions. Last night I saw it quantified.

How any one could vote for and not see through a thinly cloaked avowed socialist who has proven that his ideology is divisive and destructive can only mean one of two things. Either Americans are not very bright or we have ceased to be a culture that looked out for his fellow man and are willing to burn it all to the ground as long as we get our Union pensions, welfare, cell phone, government checks, and healthcare,

Two things that became reality last night:
1. We are no longer a Judeo-Christian nation and govern by the principles of our founding fathers and documents.
2. The secular-humanist now outnumber the conservatives.

You can argue that these are good things, but every part of our society that is measurable would refute that claim. You can argue that we are progressing, yet every quantifiable measurement would deny that. We only have to look at the history of those who have gone before us in Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece, France, China, England, Spain ...........

Argue what you may, but the moral decline in America is now quantifiable and present. We have stripped the values of our founding from the highest levels of authority and this is what we have been left with.

This is not fatalist, but I propose we let the socialist have full economic control and let them finish what is unavoidable. By fighting it we only prolong the pain and suffering that is inevitable. When it is in ashes and the people cry out for redemption, we rebuild from the beginning, fresh and new.

My 2 cents or 1/2 cent once inflation catches up.
[/quote]

I Agree..We are through..The Republic is DEAD..We will have to wait till it all burns down and rebuild but I see a Revolution coming. That's all I'm going to say on the matter.

[RobertNashville]

[quote name='sventvkg' timestamp='1352614300' post='843618']
I Agree..We are through..The Republic is DEAD..We will have to wait till it all burns down and rebuild but I see a Revolution coming. That's all I'm going to say on the matter.
[/quote]The problem with revolutions is that there has to be enough revolutionaries willing to fight and die for their principles; sometimes, even for a lost cause against insurmountable odds. Maybe there are enough folks out there to put it all on the line but I'm not sure there are enough folks left who TRULY value freedom and liberty enough to do that.

Few of us really understand just what our founders did for us...what it took to give us our country.

If I've heard it once I've heard it a million times this year; people complaining about how poor our choices in candidates was...running for office and changing our direction through peaceful means is much easier than a revolution and if men of good character are unwilling to even run for office today; why should we think that there are enough men of such character and bravery to truly lay everything on the line for an idea? Edited November 11, 2012 by RobertNashville

[Guest Lester Weevils]

[quote name='OhShoot' timestamp='1352406441' post='841978']
Much validity in that little essay, methinks.

The whole idea of the American business model is that profits must increase by x amount or it's failure. The concept of companies just kicking along in a stable fashion year after year, with a bottom line that only increases enough to keep up with inflation is a thing of the past. And of course this is driven by most big companies being publicly traded rather than being privately owned.

And of course this classic concept of Big Capitalism works fine until there's a crunch with the consumers. Then, instead of just kicking along with less profit, desperate measures are taken to keep bettering the bottom line, and of course labor is the first thing to go. It's more the "greed" of the investors driving the business than anything else.

Much different than the traditional concept of a true "small business", like your classic family business endeavor, that can do fine as long as it makes the nut it did the previous year plus enough to cover any inflation of product supply and living and operating expenses. During boom times, everybody makes more money, during hard times, they make just a little more money. But of course the mega corps undercut many small biz's pricing, so they fail too: the family store vs Wal-Mart or Amazon thing.

But there's another major force in evidence here, and it's one that folks don't consider much. It's the fact that every year, it simply takes fewer humans to provide the goods for [i]all[/i] the humans. Technology. The computer changed everything, essentially. And then the power of computer connectivity: the Net. So eventually you get to a point where the worker bees can't afford the products, because they aren't needed in the employment pool to make them. But of course the number of humans keep increasing, and the value of most all professions decrease either because of over saturation of people with a given training and skill set, or because the consumer base doesn't have the money to support ever increasing expansion, and hence value. Translates into surprising areas too: think medical doctors. Still plenty of demand for the profession, but less income per doctor hour of effort.

Of course, except for the[i] federal[/i] government these days, other government/public agencies are affected too. I myself was beneficiary of that in '97. After 21 years at UT, had settled into the "gonna stay until I retire mode", having turned down various other higher paying opportunities over the years, staying with the traditional ideas of job security and benefits. Right. Caught in combination of budget and internal political crunch, hasta la vista. Made the last 12 years or so of my working life very "interesting" indeed. Unheard of circumstances just a decade before, and of course I wasn't the only one.

Hmm..okay, turning into a bit of a ramble, but safe to posit that both US and world economy have turned into quite the vicious circle.

Which leads right into what I consider the overall main thing going on worldwide, what I call Environmental Economics. Not going into depth regarding that Gorilla in the Room again here, but suffice it to say that the upside down pyramid of the now [i]7 billion[/i] of us versus the finite resources is untenable. And like all things in modern civilization, the imbalance is translated into economic impact first. Mother Earth will eventually shake off billions of her fleas, and she has already set that in motion -- as an accountant.

- OS
[/quote]

"Player Piano" was one of Kurt Vonnegut's early novels, before he got "silly". A book that has very little in common with his later writings, so much that it would be difficult to find the "classic vonnegut" in its pages at all. The theme was a near-future world of almost total automation where only a handful of engineers and product designers have jobs operating the automated factories and delivery system, and the vast majority of people are unemployed on the dole, because "there isn't anything for them to do." The typical unemployed masses were "fairly poor" but got enough to eat, some gadgets, and crummy places to live "for free." But the typical unemployed person was not happy not having a job, and the typical person had rather shiftless irresponsible habits. Ignorant and uneducated, no place to go and all day to get there.

There has been a lot of such writing, some utopian and some distopian, but I mainly recall Vonnegut's Player Piano because it was fairly early in the 1950's and it didn't paint a far future of fabulous technology, more a grimy extrapolation of a fairly near-term future where the gov and economic principles had not changed, a welfare state where most labor had become superfluous, and people didn't seize the opportunity to be real creative with their idle time, but mainly vegetated and rotted with TV and booze and getting in trouble. Maybe there were drugs as well, haven't read the book since about 1960.

Predictions of automation so thoroughly replacing the need of human labor were somewhat premature, but we do see it happening, and has been gradually happening for hundreds of years. It is quite possible that sometime or t'other the basic institutions won't fit any more. As you say, some way to arrange it so that the whole house of cards doesn't depend on more work and more goods and more consumption year by year. Either it grows every year or it all falls apart and you have people starving in the streets.

Dunno the best way to go, but it may be necessary to change stuff around one way or t'other. Maybe 20 or 30 hour work weeks are not as absurd as it might at first seem when places like France implement them. The problem being that some jobs by their very nature kinda demand 60 hour work weeks for some folks rarely qualified for the position, even if "overall" it would probably be better to have lots of people flipping burgers 20 hours a week rather than half of em flipping burgers 40 hours a week and the other half either on the dole rotting away, or alternately in a no-welfare nation starving in the streets.

Something that never made a "huge splash" in all the economic/political movements, which might have a few more good ideas than bad, is the old C. H. Douglas concept of social credit-- [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit"]http://en.wikipedia....i/Social_Credit[/url]

Am not making "great emphasis" on Douglas except some of his ideas may be useful "pieces of the puzzle."

[quote]
Douglas disagreed with [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_economists"]classical economists[/url] who divided the [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production"]factors of production[/url] into only [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics)"]land[/url], [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_(economics)"]labour[/url] and [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_capital"]capital[/url]. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the “[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_heritage"]cultural inheritance of society[/url]” was the primary factor. [b]Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep “[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel"]reinventing the wheel[/url]”. “We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property"]property[/url] of all of us, without exception."[/b]
[lester's note-- Which is not drastically different in concept from Citizen's Dividend as currently practiced in Alaska and some of the "socialist" middle east oil rich nations.-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend]
...

Douglas claimed there were three possible policy alternatives with respect to the economic system:
[indent=1]
"1. The first of these is that it is a disguised Government, of which the primary, though admittedly not the only, object is to impose upon the world a system of thought and action. 2. The second alternative has a certain similarity to the first, but is simpler. It assumes that the primary objective of the industrial system is the provision of employment. 3. [b]And the third, which is essentially simpler still, in fact, so simple that it appears entirely unintelligible to the majority, is that the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services.[/b]"[/indent]

[/quote]

[mcurrier]

[img]http://cdn1.bigcommerce.com/server3200/90c91/products/2018/images/4191/LIBERALISM_SHIRT_FRONT__59757.1344516977.1280.1280.jpg[/img]-

[mcurrier]

[img]http://cdn.conservativebyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Stupid.jpg[/img]

[img]http://politichicks.tv/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/myans-300x300.jpg[/img]

[Guest HvyMtl]

To quote a certain GOP Governor, a Louisiana one, say a Bobby Jindal, in reference to the GOP, "Stop being the stupid party."

This is what the GOP hopefully learned.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/13/jindal-declines-to-rule-out-2016-white-house-bid/?hpt=hp_t2

[Oh Shoot]

Can't resist, here's a Chris Matthews Show vid about stupid GOP stuff. Unfortunately, there's some truth therein. (30 sec ad comes first, sorry):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#49795975

- OS