(12-19-2016, 10:51 AM)tg63 Wrote:(12-17-2016, 10:28 AM)Odin Wrote: Technology is advancing too quickly for people to culturally adapt. A big reason for the angst in rural America and in the Rust Belt is people simply being unable to comprehend automation and it's ultimate end-game. Americans are raised to believe that one must earn one's money through hard work, and that ever since WW2 we have been raised to expect a good-paying job to be our birthright, even for those people who are not capable of higher education.
At the same time, a lot of these people are stuck where they are, their wealth is tied up in their houses and good luck trying to sell a house in a small rust belt town, nobody want to move to those places, which makes all the talking points about how they should just move downright tone-deaf and just increases the resentment against the "educated elites".
Then mix this together with people having chronic pain as a result of a lifetime of blue collar work, which then leads these people to end up addicted to opioid painkillers.
My mother grew up on a small-medium sized farm in central Canada with 5 siblings. Eventually all the kids went to the city for work. When their dad could no longer run the farm he moved to the city with one of his kids. They didn't sell the farm as it was virtually worthless. They just stopped paying taxes & the municipality took it over. They bulldozed the small house & it sits as vacant land today. I recently looked at it on google maps, it's just random bushlands.
Much the same is about to happen in America. My parents bought a house for $105K and now that they are deceased the house is a white elephant. My brother and I will be lucky to get $65K for it. The town I live in has no attractions -- some sweatshops and roadside services, but nothing for anyone with a three-digit IQ. Wal*Mart culture. Lots of meth and opiates.
Quote:Parts of downtown Detroit are similar now. I suspect in another few decades there will be wide swathes of neighborhoods across the midwest that look similar.
Lima, Ohio. Youngstown, Ohio.
Quote:Adaptation will have winners & losers. But everyone gets to vote.
Are you sure that Americans will have choice in their voting in 2020? Having a vote means nothing if one does not have a meaningful choice. Iraqi citizens under Satan Hussein always had the right to vote.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.