Yours is one of the few posts that I'd mod up to 6: Unusually Keenly Insightful and Expressive.
One serious problem is that the American Empire is not willing to use its vast political power for the general welfare of its subjects (as opposed to before, when the American Republic was willing to consider the welfare of its citizens). That political power is instead used to support the elites which are quickly becoming globalist instead of American nationalist. In a sense, they are following the path of Empire much more quickly than the Empire proper can do itself.
A Secession of a sorts is occurring. The outsourcing and offshoring of work took a rather steep upward curve after 911. This shows the globalist (not nationalist) patriotism of the average corporate entity.
The Great Unwashed in America are generally the largest and most educated national populace on the planet. But those assets are not enough to stem the looting flows of wealth that hypercapitalist philosophy allow.
This all is probably more than a Econ professor is willing to admit in University... if he wants to keep his job, that is.
What can American engineers do to lower their cost of living in order to try to compete with 3rd world salaries?
That one's very easy: STOP CONSUMING LIKE A MORON.
I just saw "Matrix: Reloaded". Cost? Essentially zero. I got it at the library. Now, I'm aware that this movie came out about a year ago. But I waited. And if it's one thing that the middle class should have, it's TIME.
The average American consumer probably says "it's only a couple of dollars [more]" about 1500 times a year. Hence, $4000/consumer/yr is frivolously or unwisely spent. Over 10 years of this kind of lifestyle, there's $40K missing... and once you catch your unemployment phase of life, that's something you're going to miss.
Heck, for many single or couple folk, unplugging that natgas-guzzling water heater and converting to local electric heating (showerhead, kitchen faucet) can save $200/yr. Add on top of that converting the clothes dryer to hanging out your washing, and there's probably another $200.
I'm still doing things like this, and I'm never going back. The high-energy yuppie lifestyle is wholly unsustainable. Once the NORMAL un- and under-employment of life hits, you find that you had become a minute-by-minute waster of resources and end up nickel-and-dimed to death.
Sell the oversize house; get rid of that enormous, gas-guzzling monster of a car; and learn how to enjoy the simple things in life like a library book, a friendly cat, and the time with your wife and kids that you gave up for those 60hr/wk rat races that merely got you deep into debt. You traded much of your time for money, which you then spent; trade back that money for time, and then invest both wisely in your future.
1990s America allegedly had reached twice the standard of living as 1940s America. The 1940s weren't that bad at all for the American lifestyle, but instead of ratcheting back to 20-30hr weeks, Americans added that productivity gain to even more worktime to afford even more ghastly expensive stuff. Reduce, reuse, recycle... because all we're ever working towards is the grave anyway.
Your historical treatment of the current problem doesn't show the route out for permanent un- and under-employment. It relies on "hey, it happened before" and then pleads the Fifth on what happens next.
The actual extent of un/deremployment (let's call it impoverty) has been progressively hidden. Hence, it's more than current; it's been happening for at least a generation. The 2 forces of disability and imprisonment have hidden at least 4% of our impoverty, and various statistical methods -- which I can only call "fudging the numbers" -- probably hide another 2%. Pile these on top of the 10% straight unemployment in my area, and you can begin in all candor to see the extent of the problem.
The factories are leaving. When they started to leave, it was a big problem to begin with. The real extent of that pain was hidden by people shouting joyously from both coasts when they effectively burned investment capital for heat. Now the bonfires have guttered down to the real embers they represented, and we have to be honest about where we really stand.
Our stance now is pervasive impoverty. The heart of any sustainable economy is the manufacturing of capital equipment... you know, stuff that enables us to make more wealth, which also makes people's lives better in some combination of quality and quantity. When you get rid of that, your economy is in free fall. There is no such thing as a "service economy"... it just takes time for the shock of economic death to reach the brain from the belly.
I find it amusing that education is often touted as being a route out for impoverty. This is keenly funny since the more education you get, the more outsource-able and offshore-able are the skillsets you enter. In the predatory fog of globalism, education is a Republican myth.
The "next big thing" is probably biotech, and a Bachelor's is most assuredly the minimum for any such work, and said work itself can be easily done in China while the resulting products are shipped around the world... which still begs the question: Who are the customers for all this high-value production? Both the laid-off and offshored will be unable to partake in consumption.
Unless you have some idea of a marked increase in the mechanisms of consumer debt -- perhaps a Lifetime Credit Line that each citizen is issued, which can hide excessive debt for yet another generation -- then I don't see who will be purchasing all the stuff that globalism is gearing up to manufacture and ship. The stuff coming out of China for American common consumption is cheap crap that has no real economic value. Disposable consumer goods are very removed from the bases of wealth.
"You're {too|over}qualified" is a just modern AmeriSpeak for saying "you're too expensive". I've been there many times, and I've no degree at all. I'm sure many of the men in their 40s and 50s in IT have seen the same thing.
Why, biotech, of course. Note that the USA is entering a restricted regime for biotesting (at least as far as fetal tissue is concerned), and oh yeah, you'll need a bio-heavy degree. Maybe a Master's.
Of course, anything done in biotech can be outsourced almost as easily as computech. Get in early to get the maximum 8-year-career out of your 4- or 6-year degree.
(For those globalism-loving dittoheads, I was being sarcastic. Increasing education is only a means of entering a more outsourceable and offshoreable worker base.)
I didn't intend to romanticize anything. I took the initial position that perhaps pilots should wear these things, but there's always the balance of privacy issues to consider. Basically, if you're going to toss a pilot away, you should be fairly certain that he's too much of a risk. I'm not a pilot, and only barely know one, but I can sympathize with not considering these people superhuman.
Sounds disgusting and morbid, but ...
on
A Black Box for People
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... data is always useful, and if astronauts and pilots wear these, we can get a much better picture afterward of how they met their deaths. For the price of a silly dongle hanging off their belts, this can give us a better outline of the accident.
Remember a couple of years ago about that small passenger jet that went offline, cruised until it ran out of fuel, then crashed? The fighter pilots scrambled to intercept it reported that the windows were misted over, hence they couldn't tell anything about the crew and passengers.
On the flip side, a combat vet with thousands of flying hours can find his flight status revoked due to some health metric that the flight doc didn't like. Flying a desk is a living hell for these guys.
When talking about things like space exploration, I imply colonization. After all, there wasn't much point for Europeans to cross the Atlantic to exploit the resources of the New World without outfitting themselves to actually live there.
Hence, you may find my remarks incomprehensible. By assuming no colonization, you can correctly deduce that the investment in a Lunar manufacturing center will just be a waste of money, time and materials, and likely Human lives.
Beyond differences in opinion based upon sound assumptions, you are suffering from a clear lack of engineering knowledge. Living on the Moon doesn't have to be a submariner experience. Let me refer you to a good book that can educate you:
"Welcome to Moonbase"
Ben Bova 1987 Ballentine Books
ISBN 0-345-32859-0
People in the 45-to-65 age bracket have an enormous problem brewing in corporate America. The companies don't want to honor those longevity promises anymore (like "+1wk vacation for every 10 years you work", vesting, etc.). It's not so much a matter of competence; it's also a matter of judged overhead.
It will become very rare for a person to work at 1 company for over 10 years. 4 to 7 years will become the expectation for a new job. Then you get your ass booted out through subtle but direct methods of obsolescence, even the movement of departments and divisions across continents just to ditch the current batch of employees. Then you will have to find a new company, perhaps even a new career.
Good luck to us all if we think we can support mortgages on this kind of intentional churn.
Only an idiot would think that a Luna-to-Mars program would involve shipping everything up from Earth first. Luna is the proper system launch pad of Earth only for the various advantages which must be taken:
Low gravity compared to Earth.
Plenty of materials to mine and use.
Stable base to launch materals and ships from.
If you make the proper investment in a Lunar manufacturing center, you would then reduce Earth's continuing investment to shipments of Hydrogen, trace elements, critical parts and supplies, and of course the most critical equipment of all: people.
Honda et al understood this mentality this well enough when they opened and bought auto manufacturing plants in the USA. It made more sense all around to make the cars in the continent of usage.
Mars then Moon? What planet do you live on, anyway?
To get to Mars from the Earth, you have to ship up everything you need to make the vehicles, then their fuels, then their supplies.
To get to Mars from the Moon, you'd have to invest in a Lunar manufacturing base... but then you could use linear accelerators to put thousands of tons of aluminum, iron, and oxygen into at least Lunar orbit. You could build a MARS COLONIZATION FLEET that could stay on Mars indefinitely... permanently. You could launch the Mars fleet itself from much longer and gentler L.A.s, saving greatly on fuel.
Going to Mars from Earth is a showboat affair, and it will ONLY end up like Apollo did: rocks, memories, and gantries rusting in the Florida sun.
Sorry, but I have better plans for my tax money than throwing it away again like that.
Long term thinking and science are not assets in the youthful mind. To an important extent, that's always been the case, but we did manage to dispense with lynch mobs and civil war... so we can improve the youth.
However, I personally think it's over for America. Pulling the young out of the mass of stupidity traps laid for them by prior generations is looking more and more to just be impossible. My home state of Ohio is even seeing a push for adding "intelligent design" to the base school curriculum. You can't have a peaceful and critical analysis of anything in such an environment.
I'm a Moon freak, but even so, what you say is very sensible. Why can't private industy give it a go? Along with this question (or assumption of competence), I also take the position that space exploration can be much, much cheaper if it's a byproduct of a space-faring, industrial civilization.
We already know what is on the Moon and what we can do with it. We should stop piddling around and go back permanently with some real investors, brave engineers and guys shaped like fireplugs who don't take any shit. They'll build a Lunar civilization that will own Cislunar space by default, and will therefore control access to the rest of the solar system, including the ultra-mega-wealth of the Asteroid Belt.
Oxygen is a major ore fraction of the Lunar regolith. It'll have to be extracted, probably with heat derived from concentrated solar radiation, and/or with electricity from same.
You may not like "Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios", but anyone with real intellect calls it ENGINEERING. Just because no one on Earth has to bake rocks to derive Oxygen, doesn't mean it's impossible or even improbable on the Moon.
What the Moon lacks is the critical volatile Hydrogen. We are contemplating using the big H for fueling cars; surely it's not impossible to ship it to the Moon. It may also be possible to "mine" it from Earth's upper atmosphere. It is certainly possible to grab a passing comet and divert it into Cislunar space to mine its H.
The play-by-play illustration of the outage featured a couple of major lines running through Ohio, which tree limb damage managed to knock out. What about the maintenance records for tree trimming along those lines?
We all know the answer to that. Things like maintenance can be underfunded and frankly ignored for long periods without catastrophe... until a catastrophe occurs that the maintenance was designed to prevent or moderate.
Stop paying your mortgage, and for the first month, it'll be dreamy... until the serious repo efforts happen. By the 3rd month, you're looking at eviction... but with 3 months of the proverbial "fat cash", who cares!
Hypercapitalism is just disgusting. We need to put the people who do this on medication for their mental disease. (As well as stop buying cheap shit ourselves; we only encourage them.)
Not to quibble (Quabbin?), but if MA finds out you bought a $3K appliance in NH and not in MA, what can they say? More to the point, here's what you say:
I found the idea appealing myself, until I learned. I learned that a NST will just be laid on top of everything else.
For example, tax forms are a strong form of governmental control. Combined with the revenue from the income tax, they will never give up that power.
I have watched and watched people play up a new tax, and it's always either applied over all other taxes, or, it replaces the old tax in a such a way that it is more broadly applied. In my area recently, a third type of overtaxation has appeared: they just waved a magic wand and a lot of services were encapsulated into the general sales tax. Viola! (Of course, it would be very helpful if people stopped voting for tax increases, and for the politicians who support it.)
Please, please, don't advocate an NST. It'll be yet another tax we'll have to pay. Sure, they'll make it small, maybe even 0.1%... but that's the veritable foot in the door, and it will grow, and grow, until the day will come where people will pay it to ruinous levels without complaint since they will be "used to it".
Yet another fine post which is why I'm one of your fans.
As for the military-industrial complex thing, with each piece of information, we can see we never even know the half of it. For instance, a company I invested in tried to get the military to evaluate a new material, but found that the military gave the material samples over to the company's competitors to perform the evaluation. You know, that's illegal... but the military reps apparently just shrugged. It's the very definition of an uphill battle; either you are Lockheed Martin, or you're nobody.
Thank you for your anecdotes. As usual, I knew something like that was going on, but I still don't have all the necessary details.
I knew that since 1990, at least 2 million men have left the workforce early without tainting the employment statistics (like a similar amount in prison). They went into the disability system. I know one personally.
This disability system allowed men with wrecked backs or wrecked minds to coast the 10 to 30 years into their retirements. After things like severe or permanent downsizings and layoffs, these men had nowhere to go, while they had homes and families to support.
So the government allowed them to hide. Instead of having them in and out of jobs, paying them unemployment intermittently, causing all kinds of social problems, and generally making the American Nightmare all too apparent... they have been offloaded onto some sort of benefits payments.
What I felt hazy about were the sources of these payments. The one example I cited above is on a permanent mental disability through the insurance used in the factory he used to work at. In short, he went nuts, was unable to continue working his $36K job, and was instead being paid almost $1800 a month in disability.
But from your information, I can see that he can be shuffled onto the SS system for the rest of his life. And he's only 36.
I know another example of how SS was being used as a welfare system: a handicapped girl. For some reason, after the death of her father she received payments from SS until she reached 18.
It'll be harsh, but all of this welfare in SS has to stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Yours is one of the few posts that I'd mod up to 6: Unusually Keenly Insightful and Expressive.
... if he wants to keep his job, that is.
One serious problem is that the American Empire is not willing to use its vast political power for the general welfare of its subjects (as opposed to before, when the American Republic was willing to consider the welfare of its citizens). That political power is instead used to support the elites which are quickly becoming globalist instead of American nationalist. In a sense, they are following the path of Empire much more quickly than the Empire proper can do itself.
A Secession of a sorts is occurring. The outsourcing and offshoring of work took a rather steep upward curve after 911. This shows the globalist (not nationalist) patriotism of the average corporate entity.
The Great Unwashed in America are generally the largest and most educated national populace on the planet. But those assets are not enough to stem the looting flows of wealth that hypercapitalist philosophy allow.
This all is probably more than a Econ professor is willing to admit in University
What can American engineers do to lower their cost of living in order to try to compete with 3rd world salaries?
... and once you catch your unemployment phase of life, that's something you're going to miss.
... because all we're ever working towards is the grave anyway.
That one's very easy: STOP CONSUMING LIKE A MORON.
I just saw "Matrix: Reloaded". Cost? Essentially zero. I got it at the library. Now, I'm aware that this movie came out about a year ago. But I waited. And if it's one thing that the middle class should have, it's TIME.
The average American consumer probably says "it's only a couple of dollars [more]" about 1500 times a year. Hence, $4000/consumer/yr is frivolously or unwisely spent. Over 10 years of this kind of lifestyle, there's $40K missing
Heck, for many single or couple folk, unplugging that natgas-guzzling water heater and converting to local electric heating (showerhead, kitchen faucet) can save $200/yr. Add on top of that converting the clothes dryer to hanging out your washing, and there's probably another $200.
I'm still doing things like this, and I'm never going back. The high-energy yuppie lifestyle is wholly unsustainable. Once the NORMAL un- and under-employment of life hits, you find that you had become a minute-by-minute waster of resources and end up nickel-and-dimed to death.
Sell the oversize house; get rid of that enormous, gas-guzzling monster of a car; and learn how to enjoy the simple things in life like a library book, a friendly cat, and the time with your wife and kids that you gave up for those 60hr/wk rat races that merely got you deep into debt. You traded much of your time for money, which you then spent; trade back that money for time, and then invest both wisely in your future.
1990s America allegedly had reached twice the standard of living as 1940s America. The 1940s weren't that bad at all for the American lifestyle, but instead of ratcheting back to 20-30hr weeks, Americans added that productivity gain to even more worktime to afford even more ghastly expensive stuff. Reduce, reuse, recycle
Spoken like a true stockholder.
... you know, stuff that enables us to make more wealth, which also makes people's lives better in some combination of quality and quantity. When you get rid of that, your economy is in free fall. There is no such thing as a "service economy" ... it just takes time for the shock of economic death to reach the brain from the belly.
... which still begs the question: Who are the customers for all this high-value production? Both the laid-off and offshored will be unable to partake in consumption.
Your historical treatment of the current problem doesn't show the route out for permanent un- and under-employment. It relies on "hey, it happened before" and then pleads the Fifth on what happens next.
The actual extent of un/deremployment (let's call it impoverty) has been progressively hidden. Hence, it's more than current; it's been happening for at least a generation. The 2 forces of disability and imprisonment have hidden at least 4% of our impoverty, and various statistical methods -- which I can only call "fudging the numbers" -- probably hide another 2%. Pile these on top of the 10% straight unemployment in my area, and you can begin in all candor to see the extent of the problem.
The factories are leaving. When they started to leave, it was a big problem to begin with. The real extent of that pain was hidden by people shouting joyously from both coasts when they effectively burned investment capital for heat. Now the bonfires have guttered down to the real embers they represented, and we have to be honest about where we really stand.
Our stance now is pervasive impoverty. The heart of any sustainable economy is the manufacturing of capital equipment
I find it amusing that education is often touted as being a route out for impoverty. This is keenly funny since the more education you get, the more outsource-able and offshore-able are the skillsets you enter. In the predatory fog of globalism, education is a Republican myth.
The "next big thing" is probably biotech, and a Bachelor's is most assuredly the minimum for any such work, and said work itself can be easily done in China while the resulting products are shipped around the world
Unless you have some idea of a marked increase in the mechanisms of consumer debt -- perhaps a Lifetime Credit Line that each citizen is issued, which can hide excessive debt for yet another generation -- then I don't see who will be purchasing all the stuff that globalism is gearing up to manufacture and ship. The stuff coming out of China for American common consumption is cheap crap that has no real economic value. Disposable consumer goods are very removed from the bases of wealth.
"You're {too|over}qualified" is a just modern AmeriSpeak for saying "you're too expensive". I've been there many times, and I've no degree at all. I'm sure many of the men in their 40s and 50s in IT have seen the same thing.
There's a simpler question: Once you outsource and offshore the bejeezus out of your company, who do you expect your customers to be?
Why, biotech, of course. Note that the USA is entering a restricted regime for biotesting (at least as far as fetal tissue is concerned), and oh yeah, you'll need a bio-heavy degree. Maybe a Master's.
Of course, anything done in biotech can be outsourced almost as easily as computech. Get in early to get the maximum 8-year-career out of your 4- or 6-year degree.
(For those globalism-loving dittoheads, I was being sarcastic. Increasing education is only a means of entering a more outsourceable and offshoreable worker base.)
When you make demands like this, the next thing you know, you'll try to make them directly responsible for their corporate financial statements.
Personally, I'd like to see them constitutionally prohibited from reaching into my wallet, period.
Second Amendment (implied usage).
I didn't intend to romanticize anything. I took the initial position that perhaps pilots should wear these things, but there's always the balance of privacy issues to consider. Basically, if you're going to toss a pilot away, you should be fairly certain that he's too much of a risk. I'm not a pilot, and only barely know one, but I can sympathize with not considering these people superhuman.
... data is always useful, and if astronauts and pilots wear these, we can get a much better picture afterward of how they met their deaths. For the price of a silly dongle hanging off their belts, this can give us a better outline of the accident.
Remember a couple of years ago about that small passenger jet that went offline, cruised until it ran out of fuel, then crashed? The fighter pilots scrambled to intercept it reported that the windows were misted over, hence they couldn't tell anything about the crew and passengers.
On the flip side, a combat vet with thousands of flying hours can find his flight status revoked due to some health metric that the flight doc didn't like. Flying a desk is a living hell for these guys.
When talking about things like space exploration, I imply colonization. After all, there wasn't much point for Europeans to cross the Atlantic to exploit the resources of the New World without outfitting themselves to actually live there.
Hence, you may find my remarks incomprehensible. By assuming no colonization, you can correctly deduce that the investment in a Lunar manufacturing center will just be a waste of money, time and materials, and likely Human lives.
Beyond differences in opinion based upon sound assumptions, you are suffering from a clear lack of engineering knowledge. Living on the Moon doesn't have to be a submariner experience. Let me refer you to a good book that can educate you:
"Welcome to Moonbase"
Ben Bova 1987 Ballentine Books
ISBN 0-345-32859-0
People in the 45-to-65 age bracket have an enormous problem brewing in corporate America. The companies don't want to honor those longevity promises anymore (like "+1wk vacation for every 10 years you work", vesting, etc.). It's not so much a matter of competence; it's also a matter of judged overhead.
It will become very rare for a person to work at 1 company for over 10 years. 4 to 7 years will become the expectation for a new job. Then you get your ass booted out through subtle but direct methods of obsolescence, even the movement of departments and divisions across continents just to ditch the current batch of employees. Then you will have to find a new company, perhaps even a new career.
Good luck to us all if we think we can support mortgages on this kind of intentional churn.
- Low gravity compared to Earth.
- Plenty of materials to mine and use.
- Stable base to launch materals and ships from.
If you make the proper investment in a Lunar manufacturing center, you would then reduce Earth's continuing investment to shipments of Hydrogen, trace elements, critical parts and supplies, and of course the most critical equipment of all: people.Honda et al understood this mentality this well enough when they opened and bought auto manufacturing plants in the USA. It made more sense all around to make the cars in the continent of usage.
Mars then Moon? What planet do you live on, anyway?
... but then you could use linear accelerators to put thousands of tons of aluminum, iron, and oxygen into at least Lunar orbit. You could build a MARS COLONIZATION FLEET that could stay on Mars indefinitely ... permanently. You could launch the Mars fleet itself from much longer and gentler L.A.s, saving greatly on fuel.
To get to Mars from the Earth, you have to ship up everything you need to make the vehicles, then their fuels, then their supplies.
To get to Mars from the Moon, you'd have to invest in a Lunar manufacturing base
Going to Mars from Earth is a showboat affair, and it will ONLY end up like Apollo did: rocks, memories, and gantries rusting in the Florida sun.
Sorry, but I have better plans for my tax money than throwing it away again like that.
Long term thinking and science are not assets in the youthful mind. To an important extent, that's always been the case, but we did manage to dispense with lynch mobs and civil war ... so we can improve the youth.
However, I personally think it's over for America. Pulling the young out of the mass of stupidity traps laid for them by prior generations is looking more and more to just be impossible. My home state of Ohio is even seeing a push for adding "intelligent design" to the base school curriculum. You can't have a peaceful and critical analysis of anything in such an environment.
I'm a Moon freak, but even so, what you say is very sensible. Why can't private industy give it a go? Along with this question (or assumption of competence), I also take the position that space exploration can be much, much cheaper if it's a byproduct of a space-faring, industrial civilization.
We already know what is on the Moon and what we can do with it. We should stop piddling around and go back permanently with some real investors, brave engineers and guys shaped like fireplugs who don't take any shit. They'll build a Lunar civilization that will own Cislunar space by default, and will therefore control access to the rest of the solar system, including the ultra-mega-wealth of the Asteroid Belt.
Oxygen is a major ore fraction of the Lunar regolith. It'll have to be extracted, probably with heat derived from concentrated solar radiation, and/or with electricity from same.
You may not like "Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios", but anyone with real intellect calls it ENGINEERING. Just because no one on Earth has to bake rocks to derive Oxygen, doesn't mean it's impossible or even improbable on the Moon.
What the Moon lacks is the critical volatile Hydrogen. We are contemplating using the big H for fueling cars; surely it's not impossible to ship it to the Moon. It may also be possible to "mine" it from Earth's upper atmosphere. It is certainly possible to grab a passing comet and divert it into Cislunar space to mine its H.
If we just plan to run a few missions to Mars, it really doesn't seem very cost-effective.
Yes, that's true, but there's a more basic question here: why go to Mars at all if you only want to do it a couple of times?
What would be the point?
You put that so diplomatically. I feel otherwise.
... until a catastrophe occurs that the maintenance was designed to prevent or moderate.
... until the serious repo efforts happen. By the 3rd month, you're looking at eviction ... but with 3 months of the proverbial "fat cash", who cares!
The play-by-play illustration of the outage featured a couple of major lines running through Ohio, which tree limb damage managed to knock out. What about the maintenance records for tree trimming along those lines?
We all know the answer to that. Things like maintenance can be underfunded and frankly ignored for long periods without catastrophe
Stop paying your mortgage, and for the first month, it'll be dreamy
Hypercapitalism is just disgusting. We need to put the people who do this on medication for their mental disease. (As well as stop buying cheap shit ourselves; we only encourage them.)
- Allows the wealthy to escape taxation.
- Allows the politicians to bribe the poor.
Like with fiat money, once this kind of thing starts, it'll take a civil war or other social collapse to end it.Not to quibble (Quabbin?), but if MA finds out you bought a $3K appliance in NH and not in MA, what can they say? More to the point, here's what you say:
"I bought it for a friend in NH."
I found the idea appealing myself, until I learned. I learned that a NST will just be laid on top of everything else.
... but that's the veritable foot in the door, and it will grow, and grow, until the day will come where people will pay it to ruinous levels without complaint since they will be "used to it".
For example, tax forms are a strong form of governmental control. Combined with the revenue from the income tax, they will never give up that power.
I have watched and watched people play up a new tax, and it's always either applied over all other taxes, or, it replaces the old tax in a such a way that it is more broadly applied. In my area recently, a third type of overtaxation has appeared: they just waved a magic wand and a lot of services were encapsulated into the general sales tax. Viola! (Of course, it would be very helpful if people stopped voting for tax increases, and for the politicians who support it.)
Please, please, don't advocate an NST. It'll be yet another tax we'll have to pay. Sure, they'll make it small, maybe even 0.1%
Yet another fine post which is why I'm one of your fans.
... but the military reps apparently just shrugged. It's the very definition of an uphill battle; either you are Lockheed Martin, or you're nobody.
As for the military-industrial complex thing, with each piece of information, we can see we never even know the half of it. For instance, a company I invested in tried to get the military to evaluate a new material, but found that the military gave the material samples over to the company's competitors to perform the evaluation. You know, that's illegal
Thank you for your anecdotes. As usual, I knew something like that was going on, but I still don't have all the necessary details.
... they have been offloaded onto some sort of benefits payments.
I knew that since 1990, at least 2 million men have left the workforce early without tainting the employment statistics (like a similar amount in prison). They went into the disability system. I know one personally.
This disability system allowed men with wrecked backs or wrecked minds to coast the 10 to 30 years into their retirements. After things like severe or permanent downsizings and layoffs, these men had nowhere to go, while they had homes and families to support.
So the government allowed them to hide. Instead of having them in and out of jobs, paying them unemployment intermittently, causing all kinds of social problems, and generally making the American Nightmare all too apparent
What I felt hazy about were the sources of these payments. The one example I cited above is on a permanent mental disability through the insurance used in the factory he used to work at. In short, he went nuts, was unable to continue working his $36K job, and was instead being paid almost $1800 a month in disability.
But from your information, I can see that he can be shuffled onto the SS system for the rest of his life. And he's only 36.
I know another example of how SS was being used as a welfare system: a handicapped girl. For some reason, after the death of her father she received payments from SS until she reached 18.
It'll be harsh, but all of this welfare in SS has to stop.