I find the tying up the phone line only comes into play if you're online long enough for it to make a difference. Believe it or not, a lot of people still only go on line for a few minutes a day if that... just long enough to check email and get the news or whatever.
I know some people who live in a rural area, where they have no cell phone service. They can't get cable either. Have to get satellite television. Broadband is pretty much out of the question.
I'm a pretty avid movie fan and I still think video games are far cheaper and a better bargain. I probably buy two or three videogames per year but I play them pretty regularly. Movies are only fun for the two hours running time and maybe an hour after that of conversation. that's three hours of enjoyment for 20 bucks (two people seeing a movie + parking, snacks etc). I dare say I get a lot more value for my 40 - 50 bucks worth of video game with which I probably get an uncalculable amoutn of play time out of. Defintely more than 100 hours worth per game. That's an excellent deal. And I've seen plenty of movies in this past year that were borderline terrible and I have yet to say the same about any game I buy. Maybe I should just see less movies.
I have a strong feeling the person who likes IM better than voice phone is much younger than you are. No big deal.
He / she will just be the one bitching to their kids... "In my day we had to use the phone. We didn't have any of this IM stuff broadcasting to chips implanted in your eardrum!"
Well, first off I think the first-person-running-around-in-a-world kind of game is played out. All these games are basically just descendants of Doom and variations on the same themes... run around, get lost, find stuff, jump. I'm tired of this genre. The last game of this kind I had even a fraction of interest in was Alice and that had more to do with seeing how they'd interpret the Alice & Wonderland story than the game itself.
I personally enjoy strategy and SIM games. I'd love to see a strategy game that could reproduce a battle like in Two Towers... thousands of troops fighting. As for SIM games I'd love to see really great AI... where it nearly seems like the NPCs are alive. Next I think a huge area that's got room for improvement / innovation is multiplayer gaming.
What does this mean, games are no fun? Gee, then I must be having a miserable time and not even knowing it. If a person can't find a game that's fun, I dare say there's something wrong with them and not the gaming industry. First of all, they're probably not looking very hard for a game they would like. Second, they have some stereotype about what games are, leading them to just write them all off as something they're not into.
Of course, there is a large demographic of people who are simply never going to get into a video game. But I would dare say these are the same technophobes that are frightened of computers in general. The people for whom checking email is a chore they can't deal with on a regular basis. And these people are by and large, older people who aren't going to be in the picture in thirty years. The younger generation is overwhelmingly into technology and computer games.
And I've even seen exceptions to these situations. My mother never got into Street Fighter or Doom but played quite a bit of Mario, Tetris and Final Fantasy. These games are not too complex. I would even say a strategy game like WarCraft is not any more complicated than learning how to crochet. My GF who totally hates most modern games loves playing older videogames like Frogger and Galaxian via MAME. And if someone's a total stick in the mud why not boot up a video game version of Scrabble or Chess on the computer? Does anybody here hate Chess?!? It's just a difference of what people choose to spend their time figuring something out. And nobody would be trying to learn how to play more complex games if it weren't fun. Maybe that's part of the fun!
The game that I think has had the most mainstream appeal in the past few years is definitely the Sims. There were women at work who played this game, and would talk about their Sims as if they were family members. It is true that the most mainstream games to cross all demographic boundaries have been the more simple, straightforward, maximum "fun" games. Like Myst, PacMan, Tetris, Mario, Sims. These games are harder to come by and probably only come about every few years or so. But their abscene right now at this moment in time does not mean all other games are no fun, nor does it mean there won't be another mainstream game right around the corner.
How much do you think he's pulling in through donations? Is it enough to keep him over the poverty level? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would imagine if he's able to do this, he's a single guy with no kids and low expenses.
I think the web (as I posted below) is most suited to strip comics. Not graphic novels or comic books. But collecting, I agree, is a huge deal to many comic book collectors. There is no value in an "issue 1" of a website comic, if it's been blasted all over the web. I don't even know how one would begin to value jpgs and gifs. Will the print versions always be more valuable just because of rarity? What if there is no print version?
The comic book store is another story. While for the average comic book reader, the comic book store is part of the experience, I think a lot of people are afraid of comic book stores. Seriously. the other day at a comic book shop two of the clerks were slapping shipping tape on each other's heads and drawing on them with magic markers. Don't ask me why. All I can say is, if that were going on in your local Barnes & Noble bookstore many people would say, the help there is retarded, we're not shopping there anymore. Only in a comic book store have I had clerks look at what I was buying and make inane comments like, "This shit scares me". Luckilly I'm used to that kind of crap so I keep going back for more (a couple of comic-cons will harden you up for that kind of banter). I've also had a few embarassing experiences when I take someone into a comic book store for the first time, and all they can focus on are the anime chicks with huge boobs. How many of them there are and how large are the boobs. So many potential customers leave the stores thinking most of the comics out there center around muscle-bound super heroes and over-sexed babes with huge boobs. And I guess, truth be told, this is actually an accurate observation. But many people just don't look beyond that to realize there's other kinds of comics out there.
I guess if you LIKE that kind of experience, then comic stores are enjoyable but my point is, I think in general the "comic book store experience" is detrimental to the comics industry and in fact is a barrier to comics gaining a wider audience. It's the image, the types of people that shop / work there, the attitudes of store owners that customers aren't a priority, etc.
Ah another comic thread on/. I really like the idea of web comics but the comic world is going to run into the same problems the music biz is dealing with. First off, there's a lot of people saying, let's do a comic on the web, it's so cheap, we'll get more of an audience, we don't have to go through a publisher. Well, then there's the whole issue of how do artists get paid, how do artists keep their work from getting ripped off, etc. but I think a lot of these topics miss a key element of web comics... is the medium even appropriate for the type of comics that you create?
I think the type of comics that are most suited for the web are strip comics like the dailies in your local newspaper. Reading a graphic novel on a computer screen via the web is, frankly, a huge pain in the ass. I don't care how you present it, panels to fit the screen, no scrolling, click on the image to go the next page, I just find it tedious. The content is too long for the medium in my opinion. And I WANT to read graphic novels... it just seems like, not on the web. I think what needs to change is, higher resolution monitors.
So I think graphic novel type stuff CAN work on the web, it just needs to be created with the web in mind from the beginning. Make the pictures standard screen size, use nice readable anti aliased fonts, make the art appropriate for web reading: large, not tons of tiny characters that look like blurs, and LENGTH. I don't really want to click through 100 images and bore myself to death.
And, I would argue, as soon as you start thinking of putting multimedia geegaws like audio, just go Flash all the way and animate your whole project.
If you are an artist and think your album stands up as a whole unit, do this: release your whole album as one track. On iTunes have it downloadable as one huge 40 minute song. Problem solved.
True, but this pack-rat-ism manifests in different ways. The difference between the pack rat that collects thousands of cds on their bookshelf vs. the pack rat who collects thousands of Mp3s or ripped DVDs is merely a matter of which media they prefer. I find the younger generation is not as hung up on the physical CD or DVD, and ultimately they are the ones that will move the market. And if you're not really paying for these files in the first place, well, that kind of trumps the whole idea of renting not being enough. Of course it's not enough. So people own the bits.
While I agree that CDs sound better than Mp3s I find for most music I listen to, this difference is negligible. Meaning, pop music doesn't benefit that much from the higher quality. Is it really that important to hear Johnny Rotten scream at CD quality audio? For an audiophile probably so, but that person is likely buying gold cable and measuring the walls in his / her listening room to get optimum acoustics; I don't think they'd be bothering with mp3s to begin with.
Cars are getting more automated and automatic all the time. So people become lousier drivers, and the car companies will take this to mean MORE automation. At the rate we're going they'll put the cars on autopilot. You just tell 'em where to go and the car will take you there. Whether you like this or not is kind of besides the point... crappy drivers will necessitate this kind of driving, and soon people will become so soft they'll prefer it. Maybe along the way there will be some not too subtle hints, like, if you insist on leaving the auto pilot off and driving the car yourself with a non-auto pilot car, your insurance rates will be jacked up accordingly.
You're kind of car afficionado... saying you like a 1920 model T and a car that drives well without all the automatic crap. My guess is, you like to open up the hood and know what's going on. I think you're in the minority. Most of us just want to get from point a to point b and that's it.
come up with a way to put gps devices in parking meters that kick in when the space is empty. then anyone in a car with a gps unit can see where they are.
Seeings how people like downloading their music, movies and books for free off the web, I don't think your prediction has much hope of coming true. There will be tons of artists out there, probably even more than ever before, but they won't be making nearly enough money to make ends meet.
There are some times when I really would like automatic check out. say I'm in a store to just buy one item and there's a line around the block with people, carts full of crap, and the person at the register is filling out a check.
Sometimes I want people to help me, sometimes not. It would be nice to have the choice. I don't agree with replacing all the clerks by any means, but there are many a time when I just want to get in, get out, and I could ring myself up a lot faster, and I'd do it. I'm the type of person, that if there isn't a clerk bagging the groceries, I step in and do it myself.
On one hand we get people claming that they like the personal contact, they want a clerk or cashier to talk to and help them out. I find the people who feel this way are usually older people, and they'll be out of the picture soon. Younger people are totally at ease with computers and prefer them to some extent.
I can't remember a time without ATMs. Now on the few days I have to actually stand in line to talk to a teller, frankly, it's a pain in the ass. I can easily see how your McDonald's experience would be similar. The thing that annoys me the most about dealing with a human at a cash register is that sometimes they screw up. When they get your order wrong, when they give you the wrong change, etc.
Scooters. I could literally guess the number of IPOs that had gone through the week before by the number of goateed laptop toters who'd get off the CalTrain and whip out a razor scooter to zip off to work. Man I hated those things.
Whiny Artsy Fartsy tech worker: Seems every company had a few of these sneak in, whether they were.com or not. You know, the people who went clubbing, wore tortise shell glasses, had a couple piercings and the aforementioned goatee and razor scooter (maybe an off shoulder GAP bag), and seemed more intent on cultivating their indie MP3 collection and bitching about the selection of free fruit juices than anything else. I think a lot of them were art directors, web designers or in marketing.
The Battle For Rent: Trying to get a place to rent back then was a nightmare. I swear it was like auditioning for television. Your prospective room-mates would interview you for half an hour, asking all kinds of invasive questions, down to what kind of websites do you visit. Then when I finally found a place, I saw what it was like from the other side of the coin. Placed an ad to get a new room-mate, bam, 250 applications. It was insane. I even got three or four "room-mate resumes" listing their achievements and why they would make an excellent room-mate. This lack of housing in SF even led to the evil room-mates who would charge their new room-mate 90% of the rent...
The Job Offers: I kid you not, people would offer you jobs via email. It was nuts. Every week people would be ditching the company to go to some other.com and get a big fat raise. I remember being hired by a company and seeing the person who hired me, who talked about how they'd stay there forever during my interview process, bail a few weeks later. At a certain point I was convinced a chimp who knew how to type could get a job at a.com. Maybe I thought this because of those aforementioned Scooter Riders in Marketing.
Some people have already been to college, and already are buried under tens of thousands of student loan debt. These people are likely not exactly enthused at the idea of going BACK to college and taking on more debt. Others simply don't have the qualifications to go to college.
I also know from experience that the Americorps and Peace corps programs are currently swamped with applications. Meaning, you apply and it's not like you instantly get swept off to safetly. You wait, for months to up to a year before you get to go.
Socialsim is not inherently bad in my opinion. I think society has an obligation to help people to a certain extent. You can't just let stupid people starve. But the difference I see on this board is how much help is really helping or just enable people to mooch off the system. I have to say from my years of experience I think people are overly ignorant of how people fall through the cracks. Everyone just assumes, you get fired, you go on UI, you get on welfare, someone will always take care of you. Not so, if you look a little deeper at the details.
Ask people what they consider to be "middle class". You ask people who make anywhere up to 200K+ if they are middle class and they will say, "yes, were not rich, we have to work for a living! And private school is so expensive!" If you don't believe me, go ask. Nobody wants to admit they are wealthy.
I know the solution to RIAA's woes, thanks to your post. Lay off all the recording artists in the states... and hire Indian musicians instead. Imagine the cost savings. No more paying a manager, agent, talent and producer six figures to record a cd, see it get pirated to hell and your profit is shot! Now you can record your cd for pennies on the dollar by having the whole production done overseas!
And... when the band goes on tour... hire some H1Bs...
If things really got that bad, following your train of thought, that there was a huge underclass and a 1% of super wealthy, hiding in their mansions, the shit would hit the fan and there would be a French Revolution right here in the states. America has a history of the masses getting active and raising all hell if a big majority feels like it's getting the shaft. Something would crack, be it riots, protests or just voting everyone who wasn't for job creation, higher taxes on the rich and worker's rights out of office until something changed.
At the very least, things might change so we move more towards socialism. If there simply aren't enough jobs to go round there will have to be huge taxes on the rich in order to support a vast amount of underemployed workers so they don't raise hell and riot. We become: Like Europe, where there's a large % of people on the dole, bored out of their skulls in the pub.
I think what you're getting at by saying "living standards will equalize" is that the standard of living in 2nd and 3rd world nations will improve while the standard of living in the 1st world will decrease, everyone averaging out somewhere in the middle (and with the vast majority of the world's population in the 3rd world the net result will be an increase). That being said, I think there will be a huge numebr of pissed Americans. Pissed spoiled Americans, who will suddenly bitch and moan because they won't be able to afford more than one car per family, more than one bathroom per home, and no, they won't be able to add a kitchen to the master bedroom and install a home theater in the basement...
Slashdot Mirror
I find the tying up the phone line only comes into play if you're online long enough for it to make a difference. Believe it or not, a lot of people still only go on line for a few minutes a day if that ... just long enough to check email and get the news or whatever.
I know some people who live in a rural area, where they have no cell phone service. They can't get cable either. Have to get satellite television. Broadband is pretty much out of the question.
I'm a pretty avid movie fan and I still think video games are far cheaper and a better bargain. I probably buy two or three videogames per year but I play them pretty regularly. Movies are only fun for the two hours running time and maybe an hour after that of conversation. that's three hours of enjoyment for 20 bucks (two people seeing a movie + parking, snacks etc). I dare say I get a lot more value for my 40 - 50 bucks worth of video game with which I probably get an uncalculable amoutn of play time out of. Defintely more than 100 hours worth per game. That's an excellent deal. And I've seen plenty of movies in this past year that were borderline terrible and I have yet to say the same about any game I buy. Maybe I should just see less movies.
I have a strong feeling the person who likes IM better than voice phone is much younger than you are. No big deal.
He / she will just be the one bitching to their kids ... "In my day we had to use the phone. We didn't have any of this IM stuff broadcasting to chips implanted in your eardrum!"
Well, first off I think the first-person-running-around-in-a-world kind of game is played out. All these games are basically just descendants of Doom and variations on the same themes ... run around, get lost, find stuff, jump. I'm tired of this genre. The last game of this kind I had even a fraction of interest in was Alice and that had more to do with seeing how they'd interpret the Alice & Wonderland story than the game itself.
I personally enjoy strategy and SIM games. I'd love to see a strategy game that could reproduce a battle like in Two Towers ... thousands of troops fighting. As for SIM games I'd love to see really great AI ... where it nearly seems like the NPCs are alive. Next I think a huge area that's got room for improvement / innovation is multiplayer gaming.
What does this mean, games are no fun? Gee, then I must be having a miserable time and not even knowing it. If a person can't find a game that's fun, I dare say there's something wrong with them and not the gaming industry. First of all, they're probably not looking very hard for a game they would like. Second, they have some stereotype about what games are, leading them to just write them all off as something they're not into.
Of course, there is a large demographic of people who are simply never going to get into a video game. But I would dare say these are the same technophobes that are frightened of computers in general. The people for whom checking email is a chore they can't deal with on a regular basis. And these people are by and large, older people who aren't going to be in the picture in thirty years. The younger generation is overwhelmingly into technology and computer games.
And I've even seen exceptions to these situations. My mother never got into Street Fighter or Doom but played quite a bit of Mario, Tetris and Final Fantasy. These games are not too complex. I would even say a strategy game like WarCraft is not any more complicated than learning how to crochet. My GF who totally hates most modern games loves playing older videogames like Frogger and Galaxian via MAME. And if someone's a total stick in the mud why not boot up a video game version of Scrabble or Chess on the computer? Does anybody here hate Chess?!? It's just a difference of what people choose to spend their time figuring something out. And nobody would be trying to learn how to play more complex games if it weren't fun. Maybe that's part of the fun!
The game that I think has had the most mainstream appeal in the past few years is definitely the Sims. There were women at work who played this game, and would talk about their Sims as if they were family members. It is true that the most mainstream games to cross all demographic boundaries have been the more simple, straightforward, maximum "fun" games. Like Myst, PacMan, Tetris, Mario, Sims. These games are harder to come by and probably only come about every few years or so. But their abscene right now at this moment in time does not mean all other games are no fun, nor does it mean there won't be another mainstream game right around the corner.
Your description of MYST is very accurate. Never thought of it that way.
video games definitely are competing with a lot of older media ... movies, music, books.
How much do you think he's pulling in through donations? Is it enough to keep him over the poverty level? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would imagine if he's able to do this, he's a single guy with no kids and low expenses.
I think the web (as I posted below) is most suited to strip comics. Not graphic novels or comic books. But collecting, I agree, is a huge deal to many comic book collectors. There is no value in an "issue 1" of a website comic, if it's been blasted all over the web. I don't even know how one would begin to value jpgs and gifs. Will the print versions always be more valuable just because of rarity? What if there is no print version?
The comic book store is another story. While for the average comic book reader, the comic book store is part of the experience, I think a lot of people are afraid of comic book stores. Seriously. the other day at a comic book shop two of the clerks were slapping shipping tape on each other's heads and drawing on them with magic markers. Don't ask me why. All I can say is, if that were going on in your local Barnes & Noble bookstore many people would say, the help there is retarded, we're not shopping there anymore. Only in a comic book store have I had clerks look at what I was buying and make inane comments like, "This shit scares me". Luckilly I'm used to that kind of crap so I keep going back for more (a couple of comic-cons will harden you up for that kind of banter). I've also had a few embarassing experiences when I take someone into a comic book store for the first time, and all they can focus on are the anime chicks with huge boobs. How many of them there are and how large are the boobs. So many potential customers leave the stores thinking most of the comics out there center around muscle-bound super heroes and over-sexed babes with huge boobs. And I guess, truth be told, this is actually an accurate observation. But many people just don't look beyond that to realize there's other kinds of comics out there.
I guess if you LIKE that kind of experience, then comic stores are enjoyable but my point is, I think in general the "comic book store experience" is detrimental to the comics industry and in fact is a barrier to comics gaining a wider audience. It's the image, the types of people that shop / work there, the attitudes of store owners that customers aren't a priority, etc.
Ah another comic thread on /. I really like the idea of web comics but the comic world is going to run into the same problems the music biz is dealing with. First off, there's a lot of people saying, let's do a comic on the web, it's so cheap, we'll get more of an audience, we don't have to go through a publisher. Well, then there's the whole issue of how do artists get paid, how do artists keep their work from getting ripped off, etc. but I think a lot of these topics miss a key element of web comics ... is the medium even appropriate for the type of comics that you create?
I think the type of comics that are most suited for the web are strip comics like the dailies in your local newspaper. Reading a graphic novel on a computer screen via the web is, frankly, a huge pain in the ass. I don't care how you present it, panels to fit the screen, no scrolling, click on the image to go the next page, I just find it tedious. The content is too long for the medium in my opinion. And I WANT to read graphic novels ... it just seems like, not on the web. I think what needs to change is, higher resolution monitors.
So I think graphic novel type stuff CAN work on the web, it just needs to be created with the web in mind from the beginning. Make the pictures standard screen size, use nice readable anti aliased fonts, make the art appropriate for web reading: large, not tons of tiny characters that look like blurs, and LENGTH. I don't really want to click through 100 images and bore myself to death.
And, I would argue, as soon as you start thinking of putting multimedia geegaws like audio, just go Flash all the way and animate your whole project.
If you are an artist and think your album stands up as a whole unit, do this: release your whole album as one track. On iTunes have it downloadable as one huge 40 minute song. Problem solved.
True, but this pack-rat-ism manifests in different ways. The difference between the pack rat that collects thousands of cds on their bookshelf vs. the pack rat who collects thousands of Mp3s or ripped DVDs is merely a matter of which media they prefer. I find the younger generation is not as hung up on the physical CD or DVD, and ultimately they are the ones that will move the market. And if you're not really paying for these files in the first place, well, that kind of trumps the whole idea of renting not being enough. Of course it's not enough. So people own the bits.
While I agree that CDs sound better than Mp3s I find for most music I listen to, this difference is negligible. Meaning, pop music doesn't benefit that much from the higher quality. Is it really that important to hear Johnny Rotten scream at CD quality audio? For an audiophile probably so, but that person is likely buying gold cable and measuring the walls in his / her listening room to get optimum acoustics; I don't think they'd be bothering with mp3s to begin with.
Cars are getting more automated and automatic all the time. So people become lousier drivers, and the car companies will take this to mean MORE automation. At the rate we're going they'll put the cars on autopilot. You just tell 'em where to go and the car will take you there. Whether you like this or not is kind of besides the point ... crappy drivers will necessitate this kind of driving, and soon people will become so soft they'll prefer it. Maybe along the way there will be some not too subtle hints, like, if you insist on leaving the auto pilot off and driving the car yourself with a non-auto pilot car, your insurance rates will be jacked up accordingly.
You're kind of car afficionado ... saying you like a 1920 model T and a car that drives well without all the automatic crap. My guess is, you like to open up the hood and know what's going on. I think you're in the minority. Most of us just want to get from point a to point b and that's it.
come up with a way to put gps devices in parking meters that kick in when the space is empty. then anyone in a car with a gps unit can see where they are.
Okay, you can wait in the longer, non automated checkout line. No skin off my back.
Seeings how people like downloading their music, movies and books for free off the web, I don't think your prediction has much hope of coming true. There will be tons of artists out there, probably even more than ever before, but they won't be making nearly enough money to make ends meet.
There are some times when I really would like automatic check out. say I'm in a store to just buy one item and there's a line around the block with people, carts full of crap, and the person at the register is filling out a check.
Sometimes I want people to help me, sometimes not. It would be nice to have the choice. I don't agree with replacing all the clerks by any means, but there are many a time when I just want to get in, get out, and I could ring myself up a lot faster, and I'd do it. I'm the type of person, that if there isn't a clerk bagging the groceries, I step in and do it myself.
On one hand we get people claming that they like the personal contact, they want a clerk or cashier to talk to and help them out. I find the people who feel this way are usually older people, and they'll be out of the picture soon. Younger people are totally at ease with computers and prefer them to some extent.
I can't remember a time without ATMs. Now on the few days I have to actually stand in line to talk to a teller, frankly, it's a pain in the ass. I can easily see how your McDonald's experience would be similar. The thing that annoys me the most about dealing with a human at a cash register is that sometimes they screw up. When they get your order wrong, when they give you the wrong change, etc.
Scooters. I could literally guess the number of IPOs that had gone through the week before by the number of goateed laptop toters who'd get off the CalTrain and whip out a razor scooter to zip off to work. Man I hated those things.
Whiny Artsy Fartsy tech worker: Seems every company had a few of these sneak in, whether they were .com or not. You know, the people who went clubbing, wore tortise shell glasses, had a couple piercings and the aforementioned goatee and razor scooter (maybe an off shoulder GAP bag), and seemed more intent on cultivating their indie MP3 collection and bitching about the selection of free fruit juices than anything else. I think a lot of them were art directors, web designers or in marketing.
The Battle For Rent: Trying to get a place to rent back then was a nightmare. I swear it was like auditioning for television. Your prospective room-mates would interview you for half an hour, asking all kinds of invasive questions, down to what kind of websites do you visit. Then when I finally found a place, I saw what it was like from the other side of the coin. Placed an ad to get a new room-mate, bam, 250 applications. It was insane. I even got three or four "room-mate resumes" listing their achievements and why they would make an excellent room-mate. This lack of housing in SF even led to the evil room-mates who would charge their new room-mate 90% of the rent...
The Job Offers: I kid you not, people would offer you jobs via email. It was nuts. Every week people would be ditching the company to go to some other .com and get a big fat raise. I remember being hired by a company and seeing the person who hired me, who talked about how they'd stay there forever during my interview process, bail a few weeks later. At a certain point I was convinced a chimp who knew how to type could get a job at a .com. Maybe I thought this because of those aforementioned Scooter Riders in Marketing.
Some people have already been to college, and already are buried under tens of thousands of student loan debt. These people are likely not exactly enthused at the idea of going BACK to college and taking on more debt. Others simply don't have the qualifications to go to college.
I also know from experience that the Americorps and Peace corps programs are currently swamped with applications. Meaning, you apply and it's not like you instantly get swept off to safetly. You wait, for months to up to a year before you get to go.
Socialsim is not inherently bad in my opinion. I think society has an obligation to help people to a certain extent. You can't just let stupid people starve. But the difference I see on this board is how much help is really helping or just enable people to mooch off the system. I have to say from my years of experience I think people are overly ignorant of how people fall through the cracks. Everyone just assumes, you get fired, you go on UI, you get on welfare, someone will always take care of you. Not so, if you look a little deeper at the details.
Ask people what they consider to be "middle class". You ask people who make anywhere up to 200K+ if they are middle class and they will say, "yes, were not rich, we have to work for a living! And private school is so expensive!" If you don't believe me, go ask. Nobody wants to admit they are wealthy.
I know the solution to RIAA's woes, thanks to your post. Lay off all the recording artists in the states ... and hire Indian musicians instead. Imagine the cost savings. No more paying a manager, agent, talent and producer six figures to record a cd, see it get pirated to hell and your profit is shot! Now you can record your cd for pennies on the dollar by having the whole production done overseas!
And ... when the band goes on tour ... hire some H1Bs ...
If things really got that bad, following your train of thought, that there was a huge underclass and a 1% of super wealthy, hiding in their mansions, the shit would hit the fan and there would be a French Revolution right here in the states. America has a history of the masses getting active and raising all hell if a big majority feels like it's getting the shaft. Something would crack, be it riots, protests or just voting everyone who wasn't for job creation, higher taxes on the rich and worker's rights out of office until something changed.
At the very least, things might change so we move more towards socialism. If there simply aren't enough jobs to go round there will have to be huge taxes on the rich in order to support a vast amount of underemployed workers so they don't raise hell and riot. We become: Like Europe, where there's a large % of people on the dole, bored out of their skulls in the pub.
I think what you're getting at by saying "living standards will equalize" is that the standard of living in 2nd and 3rd world nations will improve while the standard of living in the 1st world will decrease, everyone averaging out somewhere in the middle (and with the vast majority of the world's population in the 3rd world the net result will be an increase). That being said, I think there will be a huge numebr of pissed Americans. Pissed spoiled Americans, who will suddenly bitch and moan because they won't be able to afford more than one car per family, more than one bathroom per home, and no, they won't be able to add a kitchen to the master bedroom and install a home theater in the basement...