Seriously, we're nearing the end/beginning...

M52NICKERSON

Saturday, October 29, 2011 5:58 PM

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Originally posted by Kirkules:

Any objective look at the numbers clearly shows that the amount of opportunity created by those at the top of your chart is miniscule compared with that created by those at the bottom.

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Originally posted by Kirkules:If you take the combined GDP of Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway they only add up to about half the GDP of France. France alone created more wealth than four of your top five combined. US GDP is almost twice all countries on the chart combined.

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Originally posted by Kirkules:You actually think that 80% of Danes in the service sector make their wealth providing services to the 20% in the remaining sectors. They make their wealth selling wooden shoes from Norway, Candy from Sweden and Lederhosen from Finland to rich Germans tourists.

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Originally posted by Kirkules: If you compared those with equal education and skills you would find that workers in US are just as upwardly mobile as those in Denmark. Their small population and homogeneous culture make their population more educated and skilled on average than most other countries. This may make a slanted look at the numbers show more upward mobility, but it actually just shows one of the benefits of a fully assimilated society like we had in the past when people came to the US to become educated Americans. Comparing dependent economies with the diversified, self sustaining economy of the US is just silly in my opinion and shows the statistics of desperation.

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DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:36 AM

Only because I'm here right now and it's Chris...


Sorry man, I gotta disagree

1. It's not the end. It's a cyclical return to the historical norm. This will have no serious adverse effects on mankind or life on Earth. Sure, humans are helping, but humans are insignificant overall, except in the far more direct impacts they're having, destroying species, ecosystems, etc.

2. No, the price of food is being manipulated for selective distribution purposes, but the earth produces a hundred times what we can consume in excess foodstuffs. There's no way to sustain a human population on Earth that would even be capable of running out of food, there are more serious problems that would hit first, like disease critical densities, but still, I can see an Earth with a trillion humans without much obstacle. We're hardly a significant Earth biomass, nor a major energy consumer.

3. True, but we're fighting it, and we can win. Strangely I don't think folks like Auraptor are the problem, even when they're on the other side. It's us, and the degree to which we fail to organize and get things done. Rap doesn't really want to destroy the planet, but on occasion he listens to right wing ideologues who might try to convince him that something like fracking is an energy source, which it's not, it's a ponzi derivatives scheme and a form of ethnic cleansing against rurals, but even if the powers that be convince all the uninformed that there's no threat, those people are still not going to stop us from defeating the threat, it's us, and our inability to organize as those who *do* understand, to face the threat. If you crush a threat, Auraptor will not stop you, because he's not the threat, he's just a person who does not believe that, say, mass contamination is a threat, the same way you and I don't believe that islamic terrorism is a threat. Still, if Rap stops terrorists from attacking the US, we don't try to stop him in that task, we probably don't even notice that he's done it.

4. I really agree. I would go further. The economy is dead. I urge the abandonment of the entire system en masse. If a small elite can create more wealth by juggling numbers than the entire productivity of the entire workforce of the country, the economy is dead. If the wealthiset worker at a company can buy all of the lives of all of his employees with his spare cash then the economy is dead. If you can not take the wages from your hour of work and hire an hour of equal or less skilled labor to work for you, than the economy is dead.

Lots of things killed the economy, but most of it was either financial products or taxes, but it doesn't matter now, it's dead, it's been killed. It can't possibly get better unless we start over, so I see no point in waiting...

Still, that said, yes, do more with less. And yeah, Rap shoudl wake up and defend his country against a real threat, and if he doesn't, he is among the all of us that the enemy will kill, but maybe the better take is to just ignore him and move on to those you can actually get to, and actually do something. PN posted something about this a while back.

But don't buy into the end times. It's not the end, we're just losing what little we have, and the more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we lose.

ETA: Ya left one out: civil liberties. This is something we're losing fast.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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