The public needs to know about these budgets. Now we have no way to know the growth rate of this budget over the years and we have no real way to know if these agencies get enough money or too much money. So what good is a vote? One can not vote with any clarity when important information is held back.
Sadly most people simply are not suited for higher education. Many nations have confronted that fact in history. In pre WWII Hungary there was a separation of children after about our sixth grade level based upon past school performance. Those who did not show academic promise were sent into very good trades training. That training often lasted until the young person was about 22 years of age and was extensive. So they ended up with really good chefs, cabinet makers and machinists.
There are two ways to evaluate a person in education. We could take a teacher and require them to list their ten best students in every class and take only those students who made that list from all of their teachers into our colleges. The next group of ten who we could judge as being in the middle could be trained for trades. The bottom ten could be assigned to menial labor. One benefit is that school age kids would not be deceived about the importance of academic success. I have seen a high school top honors student absolutely fall apart when confronted with the requirements of a good university. The American system of secondary as well as university education is in deep trouble.
Thank God we have a person like Al Gore among us. His efforts to confront the problem of global warming may enable the saving of many lives. This is a man we desperately needed as president who was cheated by the corrupt slime of the right wing. And mentioning hurricanes has public value as well. Wind speed alone does not inform the people at risk to the degree they need to be informed. We also need some sort of local tag that can inform people as to other dangers from a particular storm. For example some hurricanes dump overwhelming amounts of rain and the degree to which a storm is "wet" is urgently important in some areas. Thirty miles from me we have a dyke at Lake Okeechobee and anyone near that dyke needs to know the risk as we have had spill overs in the past that killed thousands of people. I'm near the beach and simply knowing the time of high tide and whether it was to be a strong high tide combined with the time of landfall can tell people whether they need to run at any cost. So if we had a system that said wind level IV with a B rating for area 531 we could convey life saving information to millions of people. As it stands we really only hear about wind speeds.
I would say our cruise missiles and drones are wonderful examples of just how well robots can work right now. And those Google cars driving about are neat as well. Then we have a very sleek drone that sort of looks like a flying saucer that lands itself on an aircraft carrier better than human pilots can. The Navy is also working on large ships which are robotic that can carry and deploy drones in large numbers. Sometimes robots are around us and we just don't think of what they really are.
Although this article is a spoof it should point to another issue. We are well aware that robotic transport is close at hand on a large scale. And this is a perfect example of an issue that no one is confronting. As it has occurred in other trades we will see misery applied to a very large number of professional drivers. They will simply be out of work, permanently. And then there is a ripple effect. The diners that serve truckers, cab drivers and others will close or lay off workers. Motels will do the same. Even sales of items such as CB radios could take a hit.
I would not be overly shocked to learn that robotic vehicles displaced five million workers in the US. Although nobody is entitled to earn a living we will have to create an economic system that makes certain that all people are well paid without regard for whether they work or not. People without good pay checks can not purchase nor can they pay taxes. Unemployment and under employment will shift the tax burdens to those who work and it will also collapse or limit the income of businesses leading to an ever deepening, chronic poverty.
We are now confronted with a social reality that forces a sea change in our economic and political beliefs. We have no options at all other than to create a very socialistic society. Human labor, whether physical or mental, is in decline as far as value is concerned. I strongly suspect that our youth have glimpsed that which explains their lack of concern with education and their willingness to participate in activities likely to destroy them whether that be surfing a thirty foot wave, racing a motorcycle or shooting heroin.
In the US he would win as the truth is an absolute defense. But Canada is quite different and I'm not so sure he would win in Canada. His degree of upset may be deemed unreasonable and his actions irresponsible to the hotel. Also in the US we can report on issues that are in litigation. I'm not certain that Canada allows reporting until after the case is settled. In the US fear of publicity tends to force settlements.
Carbon dioxide works great on bed bugs. If you can seal off the room and fill it with CO2 they are dead meat. Or if you can get the heat up to about 140 degrees the devils will perish as well.
Dry Ice is a bit pricey but if you covered the area with blocks of dry ice and then put a tarp over the bed and upholstered items and carpet that should knock them down pretty hard.
Sadly bed bugs are awfully good at finding little paths to get from room to room. In other words you may have to fight the battle more than once.
This idea is upside down, inside out and down right perverted. The very notion that the percentage that graduate indicates quality is absurd. I really hate to say it but the best educations come from schools with huge drop out rates and lots of suicides. When an academic environment is so demanding that even some high quality students can not make it you have a school that will produce great geniuses. They may come out a bit odd but they will be brilliant and exactly the type of people that history books admire.
Compounding this error is the false notion that employment should be a goal of education. Lord Byron, Leonardo, Mozart or Newton were not trained to make a living. Poe starved. Money is not a concern in education. For parents who want their kids to make a living just send them to trade schools or teach them how to repair plumbing. Keep these folks out of college as they do not belong there.
Make note that schools with unusual academic demands as well as strict honor codes produce wonderful scholars.
Anyone care to bet that they are former agents? How about planting these folks in the computer industry to a degree that back doors and methods will exist to make it convenient for government to keep an eye on people? Your trusted encryption program may well have been written by the CIA or God knows who else. There is also a problem in that foreign powers just might put agents in American companies to accomplish exactly the same thing.
Perhaps good software could be written to seek out unusual lines of code within other software such that illicit items could be ferreted out.
Apparently they have found a marker for suicide in bipolar and schizophrenic individuals but we should not assume that most suicides are among the mentally ill. It might be wonderful if we could test in the schools and locate individuals who will bloom into schizophrenia or mania so that treatment can come well before the signalling event. Manic depression will be quite an issue as people with this disorder tend to resist proper medication ardently. They tend to love the high side of the disease.
Most people probably do not know that the Keys are islands with one road in and one road out. Many of the keys have no other road on their island at all. So it is US1 or swim for it. That makes it super easy to get every single vehicle on cams and makes it known exactly when the vehicle enters and leaves the key. This can help to catch criminals but it can also help keep false convictions from taking place. Florida also has other places with high quality surveillance and the bad guys know it. We have had incidents where attacks by boats have been staged on homes of the wealthy.
Perhaps a 24 hour hold on all transfers would take care of much of the problem. By having a built in delay any institution could judge normal traffic by running software designed to notice unusual transfers. It is rather like a credit card situation. Many card holders are very consistent if shopping close to home exclusively. So why not have software that red flags when a person suddenly seems to be hundreds of miles away and have stores carefully check IDs or get a phone conversation with the card company. After all, they do have purchase histories that should indicate habits of spending.
The cops will have legal wiggle room on this one. For example when guns are confiscated they are normally destroyed in the US. The US considers encryption programs munitions and regulates encryption as a matter of law. The material on those drives will be called stolen and the claim could be that there is a danger in storing such sensitive materials and the degree of danger was such that the drives had to be destroyed.
It is all fluff and nonsense but the courts are in the hire of government. Frankly exposure to such information to the public may be exactly what all nations need. We live in times in which secrecy in and of itself is a hazard to other nations and the keeping of secrets can in itself be a violent act. Secrets force other nations to endlessly strive to keep up with potential threats and causes economies to suffer as well as populations who see their nations wealth dispersed in trying to keep their heads above water.
Have you considered that in order to protect Ultra that we had to allow ships to sail into certain death? If we did not allow some losses they would have known that we had broken their codes.
There is no way to compare. In WWII we certainly killed a large number of people. It was probably greater than any ancient army ever killed. But it was justified and even more complex is that surely more would have died if we had not jumped in.
That said we still must find a way not to be the police force for the entire world.
This is a troubling issue. We want criminals to be caught and put in prison. Yet we also want a fair process. I suspect that such arrests are usually made in order to protect either an under cover agent or an insider who decided to give information. I have seen this done with the excuse of a brake light flickering.
Perhaps it could play out this way. The arresting cops get a phone call from an anonymous caller. But the snag is still there. The bad guy will know that he has an informant inside his organization. But the reality might be that they had a microphone planted in the bad guys home. Admitting that would void the arrest.
It seems to take a lot more than having a great new product to get it into public use to any great degree. For example the US Navy released Nitinol about 30 years back so that anyone can use it without patents. Despite being an amazing and wonderful product it sees very little use in the market place. We have some expensive eyeglass frames made of it and also some bras use memory metal to restore their shape every time they hit how water. But really we don't see it used much at all. How about car fenders that snap back to perfect shape when exposed to heat? A motorcycle gas tank could have a dent removed just from a hair dryer blowing hot air on it.
We are seeing this in battery designs as well. Several new battery designs are superior and more seem to pop up rather frequently. Industry fears investing in better batteries simply because the next big breakthrough could be just after they invest in a billion dollar factory.
One wonders if the medical industry is the same way. If a better cancer drug was created it could kill the sales of existing products owned by the same company. If the medication were cheap and easy to produce it would be hard to justify a high cost.
The music industry just saw a $150. plastic trombone introduced that plays as well as trombones that cost about $1000. . The product has certain great advantages but you can bet the band instrument industry hates the new product.
A starving black man reached through a screen door in Mississippi and took a loaf of bread to keep his family alive. The terror of the state was shown when after 25 years in prison some lawyers got him out. Life for the first tiny offense seems impossible. Yet the people in Mississippi were so frightened of the potential for black uprisings that these types of sentences were not all that rare. The man was set free about 1969.
In some towns in Mississippi in that era a black person had to be well thought of just to make it to a jail. A simple issue like getting drunk and loud often resulted in cops taking black folks to some deserted place and killing them instead of booking them in the jails. One needed to be a "good" and well thought of negro to have much chance at all of staying alive back then.
I would hope that a company that takes reasonable steps to secure data is not liable for leaks. But if the leak is an exploit of software that is not open to study by the public then the creator of the software should bear the expenses involved. Open code should relieve liabilities.
Unless you camp like a sissy with lots of fancy equipment nature won't help you a bit in South Florida. First the heat will kill you. The insects will drive you mad as a March hatter. You will be miserable. Snakes, alligators and human psychopaths are more than a tiny issue and to make it worse we have wild boar that will kill you in the blink of an eye. One long weekend in our natural environment and you'll drop on the first air conditioned concrete slab you come to and sleep like a rock. You will feel like a victim of torture and may never be the same again for your entire life. You will most likely gain religion as much of your camping experience will be spent begging Jesus for the misery to let up.
Since people in different places have different views as to what is disgusting different approaches are required. Insects might be turned into pellet like feed for chickens or for fish farms with good results. We do not have to directly ingest a resource.
However since we are over populated we could feed newborns to pythons. The skins could make lovely clothing or shoes and the meat from the pythons could be used to feed hogs or catfish or alligators. Human infants are clearly over abundant. Producing food while reducing population is the only way to go.
Once it is known that the hack can be done many people will quickly create programs that do the same thing. The cat is out of the bag the moment that people know it can be done. In a way exposure of the vulnerability is a public service. If a hacker did not report this how many millions of cars would be built using the same defective security feature. VW owes the hacker a hige thank you and should write him a check for providing the service.
I strongly suspect that people are already suffering from future shock but have not put a finger on what is going on. Technology is a huge cause of job and social displacement at this time. It is not just the economy that is causing such chaos but the fact that less people can do a lot more work due to technology. Very fast and very smart computers will accelerate this pending upheaval. I am all for it but we need to be paying attention and doing triage on the wounded and displaced and even learn to identify changes that we do not tend to see clearly. One example is the tendency of youth to take wild risks lately. It is as if their future is hopeless therefore they feel they might as well destroy themselves. Radical stunts on skateboards are an example. For teens to seriously damage themselves over and over again and think that it is funny when they really do permanent injury to themselves is shocking. It even extends to risky drug use and teen suicides as well. They can not sum it up but in essence feel that they are worthless as they see no reasonable place in society for them in the future due to technology-computers-robotics making human labor less and less important. This has gone so fat that even education is questionable as a negative expense in that usually more education will not be enough to change anything in the lives of teens or young adults. We absolutely must get social policy to advance as quickly as technology. We really are not very far from replacing humans for truck and service driving. There go millions of jobs. We also are on the edge of fast food joints that no longer need humans in the cooking areas.
These days even the powerful officials in China may wonder if they would not be personally better off if communism shifts more towards gentle socialism with a bit more capitalistic activity. It is one thing for the common person to ponder such things but when it gets to the point that the rich and powerful have similar thoughts things really might change.
What all nations seem to need is a more realistic formulation of the value of labor so that an economy does what it is supposed to do which is the just and fair distribution of wealth. The US version of right and just is sort of like it was written by Klingons in that what we excuse as competition is more like a pool of sharks murdering each other over a bite of food.
We actually see government as a potential ally against big business. Yet we also realize that the government can and does send jack-booted terrorists against some citizens. So far business rarely sends thugs to kill customers although they surely would if we allowed them to. So the government is a huge buffer that aids the citizen. That makes government much like the Mafia or organized crime. The Mafia buffers against a society that has fallen apart and can not provide reasonable pay checks for citizens. The Mafia also limits the power of business, also modifies the power of government, and employs large numbers of people indirectly. Are we having fun yet?
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The public needs to know about these budgets. Now we have no way to know the growth rate of this budget over the years and we have no real way to know if these agencies get enough money or too much money. So what good is a vote? One can not vote with any clarity when important information is held back.
Sadly most people simply are not suited for higher education. Many nations have confronted that fact in history. In pre WWII Hungary there was a separation of children after about our sixth grade level based upon past school performance. Those who did not show academic promise were sent into very good trades training. That training often lasted until the young person was about 22 years of age and was extensive. So they ended up with really good chefs, cabinet makers and machinists.
There are two ways to evaluate a person in education. We could take a teacher and require them to list their ten best students in every class and take only those students who made that list from all of their teachers into our colleges. The next group of ten who we could judge as being in the middle could be trained for trades. The bottom ten could be assigned to menial labor. One benefit is that school age kids would not be deceived about the importance of academic success. I have seen a high school top honors student absolutely fall apart when confronted with the requirements of a good university. The American system of secondary as well as university education is in deep trouble.
Thank God we have a person like Al Gore among us. His efforts to confront the problem of global warming may enable the saving of many lives. This is a man we desperately needed as president who was cheated by the corrupt slime of the right wing. And mentioning hurricanes has public value as well. Wind speed alone does not inform the people at risk to the degree they need to be informed. We also need some sort of local tag that can inform people as to other dangers from a particular storm. For example some hurricanes dump overwhelming amounts of rain and the degree to which a storm is "wet" is urgently important in some areas. Thirty miles from me we have a dyke at Lake Okeechobee and anyone near that dyke needs to know the risk as we have had spill overs in the past that killed thousands of people. I'm near the beach and simply knowing the time of high tide and whether it was to be a strong high tide combined with the time of landfall can tell people whether they need to run at any cost. So if we had a system that said wind level IV with a B rating for area 531 we could convey life saving information to millions of people. As it stands we really only hear about wind speeds.
I would say our cruise missiles and drones are wonderful examples of just how well robots can work right now. And those Google cars driving about are neat as well. Then we have a very sleek drone that sort of looks like a flying saucer that lands itself on an aircraft carrier better than human pilots can. The Navy is also working on large ships which are robotic that can carry and deploy drones in large numbers. Sometimes robots are around us and we just don't think of what they really are.
Although this article is a spoof it should point to another issue. We are well aware that robotic transport is close at hand on a large scale. And this is a perfect example of an issue that no one is confronting. As it has occurred in other trades we will see misery applied to a very large number of professional drivers. They will simply be out of work, permanently. And then there is a ripple effect. The diners that serve truckers, cab drivers and others will close or lay off workers. Motels will do the same. Even sales of items such as CB radios could take a hit.
I would not be overly shocked to learn that robotic vehicles displaced five million workers in the US. Although nobody is entitled to earn a living we will have to create an economic system that makes certain that all people are well paid without regard for whether they work or not. People without good pay checks can not purchase nor can they pay taxes. Unemployment and under employment will shift the tax burdens to those who work and it will also collapse or limit the income of businesses leading to an ever deepening, chronic poverty.
We are now confronted with a social reality that forces a sea change in our economic and political beliefs. We have no options at all other than to create a very socialistic society. Human labor, whether physical or mental, is in decline as far as value is concerned. I strongly suspect that our youth have glimpsed that which explains their lack of concern with education and their willingness to participate in activities likely to destroy them whether that be surfing a thirty foot wave, racing a motorcycle or shooting heroin.
In the US he would win as the truth is an absolute defense. But Canada is quite different and I'm not so sure he would win in Canada. His degree of upset may be deemed unreasonable and his actions irresponsible to the hotel. Also in the US we can report on issues that are in litigation. I'm not certain that Canada allows reporting until after the case is settled. In the US fear of publicity tends to force settlements.
Carbon dioxide works great on bed bugs. If you can seal off the room and fill it with CO2 they are dead meat. Or if you can get the heat up to about 140 degrees the devils will perish as well.
Dry Ice is a bit pricey but if you covered the area with blocks of dry ice and then put a tarp over the bed and upholstered items and carpet that should knock them down pretty hard.
Sadly bed bugs are awfully good at finding little paths to get from room to room. In other words you may have to fight the battle more than once.
This idea is upside down, inside out and down right perverted. The very notion that the percentage that graduate indicates quality is absurd. I really hate to say it but the best educations come from schools with huge drop out rates and lots of suicides. When an academic environment is so demanding that even some high quality students can not make it you have a school that will produce great geniuses. They may come out a bit odd but they will be brilliant and exactly the type of people that history books admire.
Compounding this error is the false notion that employment should be a goal of education. Lord Byron, Leonardo, Mozart or Newton were not trained to make a living. Poe starved. Money is not a concern in education. For parents who want their kids to make a living just send them to trade schools or teach them how to repair plumbing. Keep these folks out of college as they do not belong there.
Make note that schools with unusual academic demands as well as strict honor codes produce wonderful scholars.
Anyone care to bet that they are former agents? How about planting these folks in the computer industry to a degree that back doors and methods will exist to make it convenient for government to keep an eye on people? Your trusted encryption program may well have been written by the CIA or God knows who else. There is also a problem in that foreign powers just might put agents in American companies to accomplish exactly the same thing.
Perhaps good software could be written to seek out unusual lines of code within other software such that illicit items could be ferreted out.
Apparently they have found a marker for suicide in bipolar and schizophrenic individuals but we should not assume that most suicides are among the mentally ill. It might be wonderful if we could test in the schools and locate individuals who will bloom into schizophrenia or mania so that treatment can come well before the signalling event. Manic depression will be quite an issue as people with this disorder tend to resist proper medication ardently. They tend to love the high side of the disease.
Most people probably do not know that the Keys are islands with one road in and one road out. Many of the keys have no other road on their island at all. So it is US1 or swim for it. That makes it super easy to get every single vehicle on cams and makes it known exactly when the vehicle enters and leaves the key. This can help to catch criminals but it can also help keep false convictions from taking place. Florida also has other places with high quality surveillance and the bad guys know it. We have had incidents where attacks by boats have been staged on homes of the wealthy.
Perhaps a 24 hour hold on all transfers would take care of much of the problem. By having a built in delay any institution could judge normal traffic by running software designed to notice unusual transfers. It is rather like a credit card situation. Many card holders are very consistent if shopping close to home exclusively. So why not have software that red flags when a person suddenly seems to be hundreds of miles away and have stores carefully check IDs or get a phone conversation with the card company. After all, they do have purchase histories that should indicate habits of spending.
The cops will have legal wiggle room on this one. For example when guns are confiscated they are normally destroyed in the US. The US considers encryption programs munitions and regulates encryption as a matter of law. The material on those drives will be called stolen and the claim could be that there is a danger in storing such sensitive materials and the degree of danger was such that the drives had to be destroyed.
It is all fluff and nonsense but the courts are in the hire of government. Frankly exposure to such information to the public may be exactly what all nations need. We live in times in which secrecy in and of itself is a hazard to other nations and the keeping of secrets can in itself be a violent act. Secrets force other nations to endlessly strive to keep up with potential threats and causes economies to suffer as well as populations who see their nations wealth dispersed in trying to keep their heads above water.
Have you considered that in order to protect Ultra that we had to allow ships to sail into certain death? If we did not allow some losses they would have known that we had broken their codes.
There is no way to compare. In WWII we certainly killed a large number of people. It was probably greater than any ancient army ever killed. But it was justified and even more complex is that surely more would have died if we had not jumped in.
That said we still must find a way not to be the police force for the entire world.
This is a troubling issue. We want criminals to be caught and put in prison. Yet we also want a fair process. I suspect that such arrests are usually made in order to protect either an under cover agent or an insider who decided to give information. I have seen this done with the excuse of a brake light flickering.
Perhaps it could play out this way. The arresting cops get a phone call from an anonymous caller. But the snag is still there. The bad guy will know that he has an informant inside his organization. But the reality might be that they had a microphone planted in the bad guys home. Admitting that would void the arrest.
It seems to take a lot more than having a great new product to get it into public use to any great degree. For example the US Navy released Nitinol about 30 years back so that anyone can use it without patents. Despite being an amazing and wonderful product it sees very little use in the market place. We have some expensive eyeglass frames made of it and also some bras use memory metal to restore their shape every time they hit how water. But really we don't see it used much at all. How about car fenders that snap back to perfect shape when exposed to heat? A motorcycle gas tank could have a dent removed just from a hair dryer blowing hot air on it.
We are seeing this in battery designs as well. Several new battery designs are superior and more seem to pop up rather frequently. Industry fears investing in better batteries simply because the next big breakthrough could be just after they invest in a billion dollar factory.
One wonders if the medical industry is the same way. If a better cancer drug was created it could kill the sales of existing products owned by the same company. If the medication were cheap and easy to produce it would be hard to justify a high cost.
The music industry just saw a $150. plastic trombone introduced that plays as well as trombones that cost about $1000. . The product has certain great advantages but you can bet the band instrument industry hates the new product.
A starving black man reached through a screen door in Mississippi and took a loaf of bread to keep his family alive. The terror of the state was shown when after 25 years in prison some lawyers got him out. Life for the first tiny offense seems impossible. Yet the people in Mississippi were so frightened of the potential for black uprisings that these types of sentences were not all that rare. The man was set free about 1969.
In some towns in Mississippi in that era a black person had to be well thought of just to make it to a jail. A simple issue like getting drunk and loud often resulted in cops taking black folks to some deserted place and killing them instead of booking them in the jails. One needed to be a "good" and well thought of negro to have much chance at all of staying alive back then.
I would hope that a company that takes reasonable steps to secure data is not liable for leaks. But if the leak is an exploit of software that is not open to study by the public then the creator of the software should bear the expenses involved. Open code should relieve liabilities.
Unless you camp like a sissy with lots of fancy equipment nature won't help you a bit in South Florida. First the heat will kill you. The insects will drive you mad as a March hatter. You will be miserable. Snakes, alligators and human psychopaths are more than a tiny issue and to make it worse we have wild boar that will kill you in the blink of an eye. One long weekend in our natural environment and you'll drop on the first air conditioned concrete slab you come to and sleep like a rock. You will feel like a victim of torture and may never be the same again for your entire life. You will most likely gain religion as much of your camping experience will be spent begging Jesus for the misery to let up.
Since people in different places have different views as to what is disgusting different approaches are required. Insects might be turned into pellet like feed for chickens or for fish farms with good results. We do not have to directly ingest a resource.
However since we are over populated we could feed newborns to pythons. The skins could make lovely clothing or shoes and the meat from the pythons could be used to feed hogs or catfish or alligators. Human infants are clearly over abundant. Producing food while reducing population is the only way to go.
Once it is known that the hack can be done many people will quickly create programs that do the same thing. The cat is out of the bag the moment that people know it can be done. In a way exposure of the vulnerability is a public service. If a hacker did not report this how many millions of cars would be built using the same defective security feature. VW owes the hacker a hige thank you and should write him a check for providing the service.
I strongly suspect that people are already suffering from future shock but have not put a finger on what is going on. Technology is a huge cause of job and social displacement at this time. It is not just the economy that is causing such chaos but the fact that less people can do a lot more work due to technology. Very fast and very smart computers will accelerate this pending upheaval. I am all for it but we need to be paying attention and doing triage on the wounded and displaced and even learn to identify changes that we do not tend to see clearly. One example is the tendency of youth to take wild risks lately. It is as if their future is hopeless therefore they feel they might as well destroy themselves. Radical stunts on skateboards are an example. For teens to seriously damage themselves over and over again and think that it is funny when they really do permanent injury to themselves is shocking. It even extends to risky drug use and teen suicides as well. They can not sum it up but in essence feel that they are worthless as they see no reasonable place in society for them in the future due to technology-computers-robotics making human labor less and less important. This has gone so fat that even education is questionable as a negative expense in that usually more education will not be enough to change anything in the lives of teens or young adults. We absolutely must get social policy to advance as quickly as technology. We really are not very far from replacing humans for truck and service driving. There go millions of jobs. We also are on the edge of fast food joints that no longer need humans in the cooking areas.
These days even the powerful officials in China may wonder if they would not be personally better off if communism shifts more towards gentle socialism with a bit more capitalistic activity. It is one thing for the common person to ponder such things but when it gets to the point that the rich and powerful have similar thoughts things really might change.
What all nations seem to need is a more realistic formulation of the value of labor so that an economy does what it is supposed to do which is the just and fair distribution of wealth. The US version of right and just is sort of like it was written by Klingons in that what we excuse as competition is more like a pool of sharks murdering each other over a bite of food.
We actually see government as a potential ally against big business. Yet we also realize that the government can and does send jack-booted terrorists against some citizens. So far business rarely sends thugs to kill customers although they surely would if we allowed them to. So the government is a huge buffer that aids the citizen. That makes government much like the Mafia or organized crime. The Mafia buffers against a society that has fallen apart and can not provide reasonable pay checks for citizens. The Mafia also limits the power of business, also modifies the power of government, and employs large numbers of people indirectly. Are we having fun yet?