11-20-2016, 06:15 PM
(11-19-2016, 05:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-18-2016, 08:33 PM)disasterzone Wrote:(11-18-2016, 12:42 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I don't understand this thread title. Most assume the 4T started in 2008, so we are 8 years in. The nominal length for turnings is 22 years and the last one lasted 24, so lets use 22. This forecasts the start of the 1T around 2030. Isn't a little early to be talking about the 1T?
The last 4T lasted 16 years and so could this one. This one might end early because Trump is a loose cannon willing to use nukes
According to the timeclock I use, the last 4T started a bit late, and ended early because Hitler shortened the war with his lousy strategy. However, given that contingency that you point out, it could end more quickly; in which case the "1T" will be one in which the living may very well envy the dead.
(11-20-2016, 06:08 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Bad times promote bad solutions like fascism, Marxism-Leninism, revivalist fundamentalism, and systemic racism. It should hardly surprise us that the parts of America in which economic distress is most severe have been the homes of sundry KKK movements.
Nobody wants to be a loser, but severe inequality makes far more people losers -- people struggling just to survive despite competence within a productive economy.
When I was a child I was told "Don't fear technology, for it will create more jobs than it takes." Anyone with the capacity to do trade school or college would have opportunities at jobs paying better than manually entering transactions onto a pegboard ledger or making repetitive calculations. The technology came, but the jobs disappeared.
To be sure we were all told, "to get a good job get a good education", which was basically "don't drop out of school". Unskilled workers, typically high-school dropouts, would be out in the cold. Technology would bring more opportunity and make life better for all but the dullest of dullards, just as in the Gilded Age. Tough luck dullards -- just get your lazy derrieres on welfare, and try to find some meaning in life.
But something got in the way -- the income from augmented production did not trickle down as pay for even the knowledge-based workers who were to prevail in the new, glorious age. Knowledge workers eventually competed for fewer jobs, and even at times the 'dumbest' of jobs, the ones that used to be relegated largely to dullards. Economic elites took all the net gain.
Instead of knowledge-based and manual (or low-skilled) workers joining in solidarity against the economic elites that have exploited everyone, the elites have turned the middle class and the working class against each other in economic competition in a drive to the bottom for wages and treatment. Donald trump is not the cause; he is the symptom.
Hate to say this but sometimes the wrong side wins in the 4T. The 1T is about creating order and establishment. It doesn't have to be a good order or a good establishment.