I register as an unaffiliated voter, but that makes it impossible to then work to try to get acceptable candidates nominated in the primaries of EITHER of the two major parties. A third party vote virtually ensures that my vote does not count in the Electoral College (which, as we all know, is where the real presidential election is made). So as an unaffiliated voter, I can register with the party I most disagree with in order to try and get a better (worst of two evils) candidate of only one side of any election. This is the result of a "winner-take-all" counting of the electoral vote, which is how most of the states have chosen to count their EC results. From my viewpoint, neither party represents me and my vote in the primaries, where my so-called choices are picked in the presidential elections, even if I try to pick the worst of evils from the only two choices that have a chance at winning in the actual Electoral College count. Either way, my vote does not count for my true political choice. So much for the fallacy of American Exceptionalism.
"And every time they tried to oppose something Obama wanted they were called racist or obstructionist."
Perhaps because they WERE being racist and obstructing the will of the people!
Or perhaps that was just the media clap-trap that was foisted upon the dumbed-down public in the 30 second sound bytes that get repeated over and over again by the media that is controlled by a few mega corporations, which take on the shifting roles of protagonist and antagonist as the political winds demand. It all becomes a battle of the spin-masters, and bad feelings seem a lot easier to generate than good feelings, especially when the public is content to watch sports masquerading as reality-show circuses, and unaffordible bread and organic recipies are the grist of the mid-day cooking shows for every major network. No wonder the viewing public is so easily deceived by Breitbart's fake news! No wonder Hillary's comprehensive plans for reform were derailed by Russian-provided Wikki-leaks, repeated by the AM radio alt-right lies repeated ad nauseum on many rural talk-radio shows. The electoral college should serve as some leverage for the smaller rural populations against the tyranny of the more populous urban and suburban areas, but it should be up to bipartisan negotiations to arrive at good laws that take those disparate demographic needs into account. Instead, we have the tyranny of the minority throwing our elections.
If wealth is the accumulation of LABOR, then why aren't LABORERS wealthy?
The flaw in the argument is that wealth is the accumulation and overvaluation of the role of CAPITAL in the social contract between the owners of capital and the laborers hired to do the actual work of production. As the gap between the wealthy and the accumulation of non-productive wealth (ie, playing financial games with the symbols of wealth, things like unearned capital gains and huge stockpiles of funds in the control of fewer and richer individual entities (super corporations and super rich individuals) the rules of capitalism break down, and the mythical invisible hand of the market no longer provides for the needs of real people. Instead, we ge a government that reinforces and serves the needs and desires of the wealthy while providing only minimal lip-service to the needs of the more numerous providers of labor. This effect is further compounded by the advances in robotics and AI into every facet of our technology and by the pre-eminence of the financial industry, which can enrich itself by playing games with the imaginary symbols of value (AKA money), while using the resultant political (governmental) power to prevent labor from forming unions, to capture the regulators in government to limit and quantify the cost of pollution to their corporations, and to ignore such things as the inequality of the distribution of the basic needs of life for clean water, pure whole foods, and unpolluted air.
Democracy and the rights of the workers (LABOR) are messy, difficult to control things, and do not have the binary certainty of machine-driven trading of financial assets. Suppressing competition is one of the ugly facts of capitalism, and the bigger or more wealthy the capitalist entity, the more power they can wield in the halls of government, especially when the most wealthy use the topmost echelons of the upper middle class to insulate them from the unwashed masses, through the use of zoning codes, school vouchers, and high tuitions to the best schools for their progeny, who have the best access to the best jobs, due to their lifelong access to better schools (a symptom and result of the reliance of public schools on the tax base of the real estate values of each school district. Federal funding for schools is fought over as the funding mechanism of last resort for the poorest of public schools, while for the richer neighborhoods, that same funding is merely icing on their already privileged cakes. I could go on but the truth of what I write should be apparent to any critical thinking person.
Seems like a solution would be to have samples of "expired" drug stockpiles randomly sampled and tested every year. This would allow their expiration dates to be extended or reissued by lot numbers. Perhaps a secondary market could be established in the case of drugs that become less potent, so the "reissued" drugs would be prescribed at a different dosage level.
If the business can not operate without screwing their workers, then perhaps it should not be working at all. The economic system is already heavily weighted in favor of capital and slights the input of labor by design. This is the key problem with valuing capital above the value of labor. The problem will only get worse as AI and robotics take over more of the traditionally "thinking" positions of business. Our government has always favored money and property above human needs and values. No wonder our society is heading for a huge crash!
#54815867, you ignorant slut!
Where do you suppose those "city-owned" watersheds are, you bozo? Who manages the land that sheds that water into reservoirs maintained (or left to fall into ruin, as their urban owners skimp on maintenance of the infrastructures)? There IS NO FREE MARKET FOR AGRICULTURAL GOODS! Natural resources are being stolen by the extraction industries who plunder the nation's commons with sweetheart deals which only charge 1880s rates for extracting mined, non-renewable materials from public lands. Ranchers have come to expect to graze their cattle on public lands for next to nothing, (ie: the "checkerboarding" of land in Arizona that disperses 1 square mile blocks of public rangeland amid 1 square mile blocks of private rangeland, and makes it the private owners responsible for fencing off their land if they don't want to use their land to feed any livestock that might wander onto their property).
This country is set up now to benefit only those with wealth and power. Individuals without wealth are held down and forced into being employees, who have seen their collective bargaining rights eroded away, while large and wealthy entities get subsidies and tax breaks that the non-wealthy can only dream of. The poorer economic groups get the worst schools because they live in the poorest school districts, and can not afford to save enough to afford the educations that could be the stepping stones to a better life, execpt for a few extraordinary individuals that become poster-children for the conservative narratives that still insist that this is all "fair and equitable" and only the lazy ingrate losers end up remaining poor, due to their own failures, while the well-off, well-schooled progeny of the upper middle-class kids forge ahead, "paying their own way".
The U.S. American Way is a fiction and a travesty of justice.
Annonymous Coward appears to believe that "rural" is a monolithic thing, that farmers can actually set prices when it is the collusion between government and large ag-Business (and Wall Street futures brokers) that writes the scripts for selling agricultural goods. Ag-Biz EMPLOYS a lot fewer workers, who no longer own the land, or get anything more than the lowest wages possible from their URBAN overseers, who set the prices and control the huge capital expenditures required to run a modern hi-tech Ag-Biz operation. Government/Ag-Biz is designed to keep food prices as low as possible in the U.S. so that more consumer dollars can be spent on more IMPORTED goods from international lowest-cost labor (including lowest cost agricultural goods), so the lowest end of the economic scale continues its downward slide, while the GNP shows PROFITS going to the.01% of the wealthiest in the world. ALL of the old economic models are faulty since they only track the money spent, not who benefits from the wealth generated, and who is hurt by the process. Government policy decided to use the US "Green Revolution" to bankrupt the 3rd world farmers growing food crops by swamping their marketplaces with subsidized US Agricultural goods while encouraging subsistence farmers to grow cash crops at the lowest possible cost, leaving them holding the bag when droughts or other crop failures (or political turmoil) left these countries unable to support their own dietary needs, since they were now dependent (as is most of the US population) on IMPORTED food instead of local food production. The ONLY winners in this set up are the big-money Ag-Businesses that now control the world's food distribution networks. Without this constant importation of food from the globalized suppliers, city dwellers only have a 3 day supply of food on the supermarket shelves. None of this is sustainable, and at some point, it will all collapse like the grand Ponzi scheme that it is.
"This isn't like car airbags because Windows is not safety-critical. Your life is not threatened if your Windows PC stops working."
That statement assumes a lot, i.e. that your computer is not used to run critical systems that could be controlling things like traffic lights, industrial processes, or medical equipment. You can not know to which use a computer may be tasked.
" In addition to vast improvements in agriculture, plastics and by products have also improved the quality of life."
Your characterization of plastics as "improving the quality of life" is highly subjective. Plastic waste is responsible for a marked degradation of the quality of life of numerous ocean species, polluting our land, waterways, and producing huge gyres of floating refuse in all of the planet's oceans. Discarded plastics litter our countryside, and are not broken down and consumed by any of the natural scavenging processes found in nature. The chemicals in plastics are highly toxic when burned, which causes detrimental health effects to those who are exposed to the fumes, usually in poorer 3rd world countries.
... of an economic system that owes its entire existence to a rape and pillage mentality. As long as human beings continue to pursue this obsessive compulsion to value imaginary things like money over real human needs, the outcome is so predictable. Stupidity will rule until humans despoil and poison themselves to death. Good riddance. Fuck off and die.
You are already too late if your involvement begins with voting for or against the candidates that the parties present to you.
The key is to regain control of nomination process, which is where the real power lies: Look towards anything that will level the playing field and encourage more independent candidates, then make sure by requiring open books on campaign financing.
Our governmental systems serve money and power institutionally over and before any consideration for the lesser mandates of the Constitution to, "...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...". The Constitutional checks and balances set in place to protect the weak and less successful have largely been supplanted by the arcane rules of the legislative bodies and party politics that manipulate them for political ends. Does the original capitalization give us any insight as to the relative importance of the terms and the intent of the document that followed?
The interesting times that beset us now are like a pustulent boil, the long-dormant volcano of underlying infection of injustice, misuse of privilege, and a crippling starvation of access to the basic necessities of a technological civilization.
To expect an upswelling from the public to vote the scoundrels out is to ignore the long-term indoctrination and atrophy of the US American voter, softened by years of servitude brought on by an economy of personal and institutional debt, which keeps us all enslaved to the global financiers who derive their profits from our continued blind servitude to a rigged and uncaring marketplace.
Do you really think a trained spymaster like Putin would just roll his eyes and smile sheepishly and tell Kelly, "Aw, shucks! You nailed me, fair and square!"
But it seems a chorus of Republican and conservative pundits are all-out to back up this narcissist, paranoid, megalomaniac no matter what all the investigations find. In the age-old response of every politician to bad news: throw up a smokescreen of counter accusations and diversionary activities to delay and deflect.
Hopefully, these information wars will make everyone stronger and smarter, and less likely to be confused by demagogues and would-be petty dictators and their supporting cronies.
Housing is so expensive because the developers & builders make more money wasting resources by building huge, energy wasting "palaces" that only the rich or obsessively over-leveraged can afford. HOAs exacerbate the problem with wasteful regulations for the sake of boosting property values. The average person, especially millennials, have nothing to buy if they could, because the so-called marketplace does not serve them. The marketplace only serves the wealthy and those concerned with amassing wealth. It does not solve society's problems.
Why must we produce STUFF? Most of the economics talk is predicated on producing STUFF, which is often only brought into existence to serve as an object for sale for the purpose of showing a profit: the producers have done their jobs, showing the success of a sale. In reality, this viewpoint has encouraged the wonton destruction of the planet by basing success on amassing imaginary value: money. We need to change the game so that our use of the physical game pieces (the planet's natural resources) is reduced to levels and processes that respect the natural systems that have evolved to support all life on the planet: We just have to change what we base the games of "sales" and "profits" on, by not allowing our obcession with amassing fortunes to interfere with how the species must sustainably use resources in order to physically survive at a level that our technologies can now supply. Look at all the "convenience" that the affluent urbanized human species have in our daily lives which involve the momentary use of some physical resource, which then becomes a piece of waste: a problem to be disposed of. I contend that it is a flaw in the mental development of the species, which is at the crossroads of our ability to direct our own evolution or allow our obscessions drive us and life as we know it on our planet into extinction. Our "throw-away" lifestyle, with no accountability for the destruction of the planet's natural systems, which we call the free market and capitalism, must be fundamentally restructured and built around the competing necessities driven by the best and worst of our human natures. How can we self-evolve the human species and change the whole game?
Perhaps a truck driver should invest in self-driving software & technology that would allow one driver to supervise a train of semi-trucks on special interstate lanes x-country & in "delivery/service" lanes in urban areas: more trucking and specialized delivery services, smaller trucks, drone delivery vehicles. Human supervisors to handle customer events...
Powering implanted devices, such as insulin pumps (while we still need them) pacemakers and other monitoring devices.
The implantable cellphone/computer becomes another step closer.
Perhaps a two-way communication between the brain/body and various technologies, HUD's, visorless VR environments... who knows?
The human species is dooming itself to extinction by accepting the premise of throw-away products as a convenience and to raise sales. We will be buried by our overconsumption.
Once again, we've let our perverted obscession for profits to override self-preservation of the species. The downfall of using capitalism as the only tool of economics.
This thread forgets that the Office of President and Congress are pitted against each other by the Constitution:
Party politics does not make the party in power automatically play nice with a controversial President, no matter what the party affiliations may be. Gives me some hope that we can still exercise some leverage over our local politicians, no matter what their party. Politicians do not lie, they make non-deliverable promises, and the voters choose to fall for them. But since the Citizens United SCOTUS verdict, only people with money to spend have any influence on our elected mis-representers.
For our lack of aristocrats, consumers (moo!) in the USA sure want all of their trappings: Everyone wants the most kingly thing to have: rapid door-to-door conveyance across their realm, at their beck and call. Rapid Transit can not hope to satisfy this deadly fascination with luxury at any cost.
What remains to be discussed is how alternatives to the ICE can better provide the energy resources required to feed the real national obsession: an individualized transit experience. The complete transformation to renewable ELECTRICITY-BASED energy systems will not only produce more jobs than ICE-based machines, the machines themselves will be a part of the energy storage possibilities, also including many high-temperature, full-time industrial processes.
The whole biofuels from food products industry is not helping in the long run. As usual, the politicians are at least 20 years behind the power curve.
Muvh to do about a silly typo. Vompounded by a lavk of simple proofreading before sending. (v=c)
Has led this thread to risk potential accusations of prejudice on several levels, even though locker room humor is apparently back in vogue in the USA.
Dark matter might just be the byproduct of gravity's troubled youth? Perhaps this is just this Universe's way of expunging a bad mistake? A Universe redacted, as it were...
Slashdot Mirror
I register as an unaffiliated voter, but that makes it impossible to then work to try to get acceptable candidates nominated in the primaries of EITHER of the two major parties. A third party vote virtually ensures that my vote does not count in the Electoral College (which, as we all know, is where the real presidential election is made). So as an unaffiliated voter, I can register with the party I most disagree with in order to try and get a better (worst of two evils) candidate of only one side of any election. This is the result of a "winner-take-all" counting of the electoral vote, which is how most of the states have chosen to count their EC results. From my viewpoint, neither party represents me and my vote in the primaries, where my so-called choices are picked in the presidential elections, even if I try to pick the worst of evils from the only two choices that have a chance at winning in the actual Electoral College count. Either way, my vote does not count for my true political choice. So much for the fallacy of American Exceptionalism.
"And every time they tried to oppose something Obama wanted they were called racist or obstructionist." Perhaps because they WERE being racist and obstructing the will of the people! Or perhaps that was just the media clap-trap that was foisted upon the dumbed-down public in the 30 second sound bytes that get repeated over and over again by the media that is controlled by a few mega corporations, which take on the shifting roles of protagonist and antagonist as the political winds demand. It all becomes a battle of the spin-masters, and bad feelings seem a lot easier to generate than good feelings, especially when the public is content to watch sports masquerading as reality-show circuses, and unaffordible bread and organic recipies are the grist of the mid-day cooking shows for every major network. No wonder the viewing public is so easily deceived by Breitbart's fake news! No wonder Hillary's comprehensive plans for reform were derailed by Russian-provided Wikki-leaks, repeated by the AM radio alt-right lies repeated ad nauseum on many rural talk-radio shows. The electoral college should serve as some leverage for the smaller rural populations against the tyranny of the more populous urban and suburban areas, but it should be up to bipartisan negotiations to arrive at good laws that take those disparate demographic needs into account. Instead, we have the tyranny of the minority throwing our elections.
If wealth is the accumulation of LABOR, then why aren't LABORERS wealthy? The flaw in the argument is that wealth is the accumulation and overvaluation of the role of CAPITAL in the social contract between the owners of capital and the laborers hired to do the actual work of production. As the gap between the wealthy and the accumulation of non-productive wealth (ie, playing financial games with the symbols of wealth, things like unearned capital gains and huge stockpiles of funds in the control of fewer and richer individual entities (super corporations and super rich individuals) the rules of capitalism break down, and the mythical invisible hand of the market no longer provides for the needs of real people. Instead, we ge a government that reinforces and serves the needs and desires of the wealthy while providing only minimal lip-service to the needs of the more numerous providers of labor. This effect is further compounded by the advances in robotics and AI into every facet of our technology and by the pre-eminence of the financial industry, which can enrich itself by playing games with the imaginary symbols of value (AKA money), while using the resultant political (governmental) power to prevent labor from forming unions, to capture the regulators in government to limit and quantify the cost of pollution to their corporations, and to ignore such things as the inequality of the distribution of the basic needs of life for clean water, pure whole foods, and unpolluted air. Democracy and the rights of the workers (LABOR) are messy, difficult to control things, and do not have the binary certainty of machine-driven trading of financial assets. Suppressing competition is one of the ugly facts of capitalism, and the bigger or more wealthy the capitalist entity, the more power they can wield in the halls of government, especially when the most wealthy use the topmost echelons of the upper middle class to insulate them from the unwashed masses, through the use of zoning codes, school vouchers, and high tuitions to the best schools for their progeny, who have the best access to the best jobs, due to their lifelong access to better schools (a symptom and result of the reliance of public schools on the tax base of the real estate values of each school district. Federal funding for schools is fought over as the funding mechanism of last resort for the poorest of public schools, while for the richer neighborhoods, that same funding is merely icing on their already privileged cakes. I could go on but the truth of what I write should be apparent to any critical thinking person.
Seems like a solution would be to have samples of "expired" drug stockpiles randomly sampled and tested every year. This would allow their expiration dates to be extended or reissued by lot numbers. Perhaps a secondary market could be established in the case of drugs that become less potent, so the "reissued" drugs would be prescribed at a different dosage level.
If the business can not operate without screwing their workers, then perhaps it should not be working at all. The economic system is already heavily weighted in favor of capital and slights the input of labor by design. This is the key problem with valuing capital above the value of labor. The problem will only get worse as AI and robotics take over more of the traditionally "thinking" positions of business. Our government has always favored money and property above human needs and values. No wonder our society is heading for a huge crash!
I hear you. But then, who actually reads the EULAs? LOL!
#54815867, you ignorant slut! Where do you suppose those "city-owned" watersheds are, you bozo? Who manages the land that sheds that water into reservoirs maintained (or left to fall into ruin, as their urban owners skimp on maintenance of the infrastructures)? There IS NO FREE MARKET FOR AGRICULTURAL GOODS! Natural resources are being stolen by the extraction industries who plunder the nation's commons with sweetheart deals which only charge 1880s rates for extracting mined, non-renewable materials from public lands. Ranchers have come to expect to graze their cattle on public lands for next to nothing, (ie: the "checkerboarding" of land in Arizona that disperses 1 square mile blocks of public rangeland amid 1 square mile blocks of private rangeland, and makes it the private owners responsible for fencing off their land if they don't want to use their land to feed any livestock that might wander onto their property). This country is set up now to benefit only those with wealth and power. Individuals without wealth are held down and forced into being employees, who have seen their collective bargaining rights eroded away, while large and wealthy entities get subsidies and tax breaks that the non-wealthy can only dream of. The poorer economic groups get the worst schools because they live in the poorest school districts, and can not afford to save enough to afford the educations that could be the stepping stones to a better life, execpt for a few extraordinary individuals that become poster-children for the conservative narratives that still insist that this is all "fair and equitable" and only the lazy ingrate losers end up remaining poor, due to their own failures, while the well-off, well-schooled progeny of the upper middle-class kids forge ahead, "paying their own way". The U.S. American Way is a fiction and a travesty of justice.
Annonymous Coward appears to believe that "rural" is a monolithic thing, that farmers can actually set prices when it is the collusion between government and large ag-Business (and Wall Street futures brokers) that writes the scripts for selling agricultural goods. Ag-Biz EMPLOYS a lot fewer workers, who no longer own the land, or get anything more than the lowest wages possible from their URBAN overseers, who set the prices and control the huge capital expenditures required to run a modern hi-tech Ag-Biz operation. Government/Ag-Biz is designed to keep food prices as low as possible in the U.S. so that more consumer dollars can be spent on more IMPORTED goods from international lowest-cost labor (including lowest cost agricultural goods), so the lowest end of the economic scale continues its downward slide, while the GNP shows PROFITS going to the .01% of the wealthiest in the world. ALL of the old economic models are faulty since they only track the money spent, not who benefits from the wealth generated, and who is hurt by the process. Government policy decided to use the US "Green Revolution" to bankrupt the 3rd world farmers growing food crops by swamping their marketplaces with subsidized US Agricultural goods while encouraging subsistence farmers to grow cash crops at the lowest possible cost, leaving them holding the bag when droughts or other crop failures (or political turmoil) left these countries unable to support their own dietary needs, since they were now dependent (as is most of the US population) on IMPORTED food instead of local food production. The ONLY winners in this set up are the big-money Ag-Businesses that now control the world's food distribution networks. Without this constant importation of food from the globalized suppliers, city dwellers only have a 3 day supply of food on the supermarket shelves. None of this is sustainable, and at some point, it will all collapse like the grand Ponzi scheme that it is.
"This isn't like car airbags because Windows is not safety-critical. Your life is not threatened if your Windows PC stops working." That statement assumes a lot, i.e. that your computer is not used to run critical systems that could be controlling things like traffic lights, industrial processes, or medical equipment. You can not know to which use a computer may be tasked.
" In addition to vast improvements in agriculture, plastics and by products have also improved the quality of life." Your characterization of plastics as "improving the quality of life" is highly subjective. Plastic waste is responsible for a marked degradation of the quality of life of numerous ocean species, polluting our land, waterways, and producing huge gyres of floating refuse in all of the planet's oceans. Discarded plastics litter our countryside, and are not broken down and consumed by any of the natural scavenging processes found in nature. The chemicals in plastics are highly toxic when burned, which causes detrimental health effects to those who are exposed to the fumes, usually in poorer 3rd world countries.
... of an economic system that owes its entire existence to a rape and pillage mentality. As long as human beings continue to pursue this obsessive compulsion to value imaginary things like money over real human needs, the outcome is so predictable. Stupidity will rule until humans despoil and poison themselves to death. Good riddance. Fuck off and die.
You are already too late if your involvement begins with voting for or against the candidates that the parties present to you. The key is to regain control of nomination process, which is where the real power lies: Look towards anything that will level the playing field and encourage more independent candidates, then make sure by requiring open books on campaign financing. Our governmental systems serve money and power institutionally over and before any consideration for the lesser mandates of the Constitution to, "...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...". The Constitutional checks and balances set in place to protect the weak and less successful have largely been supplanted by the arcane rules of the legislative bodies and party politics that manipulate them for political ends. Does the original capitalization give us any insight as to the relative importance of the terms and the intent of the document that followed? The interesting times that beset us now are like a pustulent boil, the long-dormant volcano of underlying infection of injustice, misuse of privilege, and a crippling starvation of access to the basic necessities of a technological civilization. To expect an upswelling from the public to vote the scoundrels out is to ignore the long-term indoctrination and atrophy of the US American voter, softened by years of servitude brought on by an economy of personal and institutional debt, which keeps us all enslaved to the global financiers who derive their profits from our continued blind servitude to a rigged and uncaring marketplace.
Do you really think a trained spymaster like Putin would just roll his eyes and smile sheepishly and tell Kelly, "Aw, shucks! You nailed me, fair and square!" But it seems a chorus of Republican and conservative pundits are all-out to back up this narcissist, paranoid, megalomaniac no matter what all the investigations find. In the age-old response of every politician to bad news: throw up a smokescreen of counter accusations and diversionary activities to delay and deflect. Hopefully, these information wars will make everyone stronger and smarter, and less likely to be confused by demagogues and would-be petty dictators and their supporting cronies.
Housing is so expensive because the developers & builders make more money wasting resources by building huge, energy wasting "palaces" that only the rich or obsessively over-leveraged can afford. HOAs exacerbate the problem with wasteful regulations for the sake of boosting property values. The average person, especially millennials, have nothing to buy if they could, because the so-called marketplace does not serve them. The marketplace only serves the wealthy and those concerned with amassing wealth. It does not solve society's problems.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Or is it: The beatings will continue until morals improve. Damn, I should know this stuff...
Why must we produce STUFF? Most of the economics talk is predicated on producing STUFF, which is often only brought into existence to serve as an object for sale for the purpose of showing a profit: the producers have done their jobs, showing the success of a sale. In reality, this viewpoint has encouraged the wonton destruction of the planet by basing success on amassing imaginary value: money. We need to change the game so that our use of the physical game pieces (the planet's natural resources) is reduced to levels and processes that respect the natural systems that have evolved to support all life on the planet: We just have to change what we base the games of "sales" and "profits" on, by not allowing our obcession with amassing fortunes to interfere with how the species must sustainably use resources in order to physically survive at a level that our technologies can now supply. Look at all the "convenience" that the affluent urbanized human species have in our daily lives which involve the momentary use of some physical resource, which then becomes a piece of waste: a problem to be disposed of. I contend that it is a flaw in the mental development of the species, which is at the crossroads of our ability to direct our own evolution or allow our obscessions drive us and life as we know it on our planet into extinction. Our "throw-away" lifestyle, with no accountability for the destruction of the planet's natural systems, which we call the free market and capitalism, must be fundamentally restructured and built around the competing necessities driven by the best and worst of our human natures. How can we self-evolve the human species and change the whole game?
Perhaps a truck driver should invest in self-driving software & technology that would allow one driver to supervise a train of semi-trucks on special interstate lanes x-country & in "delivery/service" lanes in urban areas: more trucking and specialized delivery services, smaller trucks, drone delivery vehicles. Human supervisors to handle customer events...
Powering implanted devices, such as insulin pumps (while we still need them) pacemakers and other monitoring devices. The implantable cellphone/computer becomes another step closer. Perhaps a two-way communication between the brain/body and various technologies, HUD's, visorless VR environments... who knows?
The human species is dooming itself to extinction by accepting the premise of throw-away products as a convenience and to raise sales. We will be buried by our overconsumption.
Once again, we've let our perverted obscession for profits to override self-preservation of the species. The downfall of using capitalism as the only tool of economics.
This thread forgets that the Office of President and Congress are pitted against each other by the Constitution: Party politics does not make the party in power automatically play nice with a controversial President, no matter what the party affiliations may be. Gives me some hope that we can still exercise some leverage over our local politicians, no matter what their party. Politicians do not lie, they make non-deliverable promises, and the voters choose to fall for them. But since the Citizens United SCOTUS verdict, only people with money to spend have any influence on our elected mis-representers.
For our lack of aristocrats, consumers (moo!) in the USA sure want all of their trappings: Everyone wants the most kingly thing to have: rapid door-to-door conveyance across their realm, at their beck and call. Rapid Transit can not hope to satisfy this deadly fascination with luxury at any cost. What remains to be discussed is how alternatives to the ICE can better provide the energy resources required to feed the real national obsession: an individualized transit experience. The complete transformation to renewable ELECTRICITY-BASED energy systems will not only produce more jobs than ICE-based machines, the machines themselves will be a part of the energy storage possibilities, also including many high-temperature, full-time industrial processes. The whole biofuels from food products industry is not helping in the long run. As usual, the politicians are at least 20 years behind the power curve.
Muvh to do about a silly typo. Vompounded by a lavk of simple proofreading before sending. (v=c) Has led this thread to risk potential accusations of prejudice on several levels, even though locker room humor is apparently back in vogue in the USA.
Dark matter might just be the byproduct of gravity's troubled youth? Perhaps this is just this Universe's way of expunging a bad mistake? A Universe redacted, as it were...
Sounds a lot like a built-in peer-reviewed Wikki