Zeitgeist addendum, project venus

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tombo
Posts: 334
Joined: Fri May 09, 2008 1:10 am
Location: Washington USA

Post by tombo »

I'm not all that worried that civilization will collapse.
I certainly was worried when I was 16, 20, 25 or so.
But, I've been through enough cycles by now that I don't take all the chicken littles at face value.
It could certainly get ugly for a while but we made it through the cold war and our parents made it through the 30's and 40's with only major psychological damage that will probably be pretty much healed by the time of my children's generation.
Actually I think that some real issues to deal with would help our lazy fat asses immensely.
Our republic is one of the longer lived governments in history already.
And I expect it to last a lot longer especially if the community of western democracies helps keep us honest. And we listen to them.
We certainly live in interesting times.
-Tom Boydston-
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?" ~Albert Einstein

Nanos
Posts: 363
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:57 pm
Location: Treasure Island

Post by Nanos »

> Supply and demand determine salaries

I'm not so sure of this..

What I've seen is that people getting paid a lot for their jobs, its not because they are really good, but because they lie well, or in the case of local government, a case of my friend scratches my back, I'll scratch yours..

So we'd really be worse off if we paid all these people minumn wage ?


> In 1939 who could afford a TV set? In 2008 who can't? In America
> they are free. Same question: in 1975 who could afford a computer
> with a 1GB disk storage? In 2008 who can't?

Great, so we have cheap TV's and computers, but no one can afford a house to live in...

Why has house prices gone up so much when you might imagine they would go down..


> You would think that the haves are stealing from the have nots

Thats generally how all my rich friends made their money, from being a drug dealer to property developer, its all about exploiting the labour of those below you, not in the least about a fair wage for a fair days work, they squeeze every penny/cent out them, not because they need to, to stay in business, but because they can.

Suggesting to them (And I do enjoy debates with them.) that they should pay their workers a little more and they laugh, loudly.. "why would I do that ?!?" they'd say, they'd much rather have a £11 million pound fortune than a £10 million pound one and happier workers..

Me, I'd rather have happier workers, for those workers are your neighbours, and the people trying to steal your hubcaps or mug you on your way home..

Though as many of my rich friends point out, when your rich, you don't live near people like that...

Why can't we all be a little rich, then we could all get along without having to worry about keeping away from the people we just screwed over last week to make a fast buck..


> I'm not all that worried that civilization will collapse.

Maybe not civilization as a whole, but my neighbourhood, if we go just a few days without electric and petrol/gas, I'm sure there wouldn't be a house standing from the riots and fall from grace that would follow.

With our, just in time warehousing efforts, our lack of training people for jobs so one man gets hired across countless countries to do his job because no one else alive understands how to fix the gizmo put into service 20 years ago..

The majority of people are usless at anything beyond cleaning their own bottoms, and even then.. once a few cracks hit our system, be it a fire at an oil depo, a flu pandemic, or Y2K hitting our electric grid system, then like Rome, we could burn..

Every year I see we are more fragile than the year before (You only have to look at what happened in New Orleans to see the US isn't immune to problems in its own backyard..) and is one of the reasons I want to build my own community of earth sheltered concrete bunkers thats as self supporting as it can be, just in case..

MSimon
Posts: 14334
Joined: Mon Jul 16, 2007 7:37 pm
Location: Rockford, Illinois
Contact:

Post by MSimon »

The really high salaries you are worried about amount to biological signaling.

i.e. a company is displaying its "fitness" by paying outrageous salaries.

In other words it is advertising.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

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