09-07-2018, 04:06 PM
(09-07-2018, 01:15 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-07-2018, 10:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-04-2018, 10:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(08-27-2018, 05:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Maybe we will be in the Regeneracy once and for all when quality matters more than identity. We have plenty to solve, beginning with poverty. We have much obsolete infrastructure. If you want to speak of highways, then I can think of plenty of highway projects, including transforming one of the busiest rural expressways in America from two lanes in both directions to three, and replacing one of its cloverleaf interchanges (horrible accident waiting to happen when a truck jackknives going too fast for conditions, which can result from some fool cutting off an eighteen-wheeler). If I tell you what state and part of the state it is in I will give much away.
We are going to need more water and more energy. Solar power, anyone?
I can think of something far better than some wall resembling the Berlin Wall wall along our border: a freeway along US 83 which would connect a big chunk of America badly served by current highways. Rural freeways stimulate local development along them; urban expressways can wreck urban areas.
Well, you aren't going to solve poverty with more welfare programs and a more generous welfare system.
There will always be people in need due to their infirmity, mental or physical. The Hard Right seems to believe that if the economic elites can demand more and crack the proverbial whip harder, then every one will find a magically better world in which people bask in the glow of the ostentatious indulgence of those elites. Their ideal for Humanity is that people toil or die, as in a fascist labor camp.
God help you if you like that.
Big infrastructure projects create jobs for construction laborers.
Big infrastructure projects create some jobs for some construction laborers for a relatively short amount of time these days. The blues seem to forget that we don't do things the way we did things during the past and the things that we do don't nearly take as long to complete as they used to either. I don't view people like you as being the type of individuals who would be willing or interested in a job that requires the use of a pick and shovel like the good old days when the use of large sums of low tech manual labor was required and expected by those who were in need of a job or interested in working at the time.
I'm 62, and I have a bad back, I just had back pain so bad that a physician sent me to the ER to treat a possible coronary. It turns out that the EKG, chest X-ray, and blood tests came back negative on a heart attack. It is likely that I will need back surgery just to prevent another trip to the ER for back pain that mimics a coronary. It is also unlikely that I will ever do hard physical labor again.
We have far less need for unskilled labor than we used to. We also have far fewer high-school drop-outs, the sorts of people who typically filled the great pool of unskilled labor. It is obviously far less time-consuming (and labor-hiring) to lay out a road-bed by machine than by human labor.
People might be less interested in work requiring the use of pick and shovel, but the pay for operating construction equipment is very attractive. But that takes some formal training.
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.