America is a sick society

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2018, 03:07 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 04:05 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1.  Small towns don't need to have old jobs return. Since lots of high tech jobs can be done remotely, it doesn't matter where you live. Folks can have the benefits of small towns like no traffic, cheap housing, and fresh food, once agriculture has to scale down. <-  Big AG is doomed by resource depletion like all things big. Oil will get more expensive.  Oil won't run out, but it's gonna cost.   So, the young ones can get on-line and learn the skills of whatever sized companies , chuck cars even, and enjoy a less hectic small town life. Yeah, cars are so over rated. Tesla's a joke. Why mess with cars when one can replace big ugly freeways and airports with train stations for regular and light rail? Meh on corporations. The way I see it, there are no US based corporations. All big corporations are transnationals that owe no allegiance to  anyone but the bottom line and need a smacking by anti trust laws.  

The people in rural red America feel stuck, and have no access or education to those high tech jobs. There may well be bridges to build there as Kaplan said. Mostly young people may be able to bring high tech to rural red America. But not very many young people in urban blue America want to do that. So it will be up to young red rural Americans to move to blue America, and then come back; I suppose.

If they get the education necessary for high-tech jobs, they must leave the rural areas for the cities where such jobs exist. This is also true in small cities of failure such as Lima, Ohio, where people are well prepared for an economy that no longer exists and probably never will exist again.

Aside from people whose families have substantial holdings in agribusiness, the only professionals that small towns can attract are medical personnel... cheap golf? cottage by the lake? Those used to be available to the working class, but they are unqualified luxuries now. Entertainment is largely cable TV programming available anywhere, recorded video, or what books or music one gets from somewhere else. That leaves hobbies, church, civic groups, fraternal lodges, and families -- and to really fit into a rural area, one must be there from childhood except for a stint in the Armed Forces.  The human relationships can be rich, but one does not form them after childhood. Rural communities are clannish in the extreme, and even more exclusive than the havens of extreme wealth and privilege.

Quote:Rail needs to come back, but cars are helpful. I don't live in an urban core anymore, and like many other suburbanites, our place is built for cars. So Tesla is no joke. But I agree; anti-trust the hell out of corporations. I hope it happens in the 2020s if and when we get our government back. For now, it is lost, and it will take drastic action indeed to get it back. It's a 4T; anything is possible.

Rural areas are even more dependent upon cars. The medical specialist might be fifty miles away. Where I live, the nearest K-Mart or Kohl's is 25 miles away; the nearest Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, Sears, and Target are each about 40 miles away; the nearest JC Penney and Macy's are about fifty miles away. Small towns used to have vibrant commerce, but that is vanishing. The kids whose parents owned profitable stores didn't want to stay in retail. The business sector is getting sleazier with rent-to-own emporia, 

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Quote:2. I'm not worried about corporate globalism lasting. It's gonna collapse due to climate change, population overshoot, and mass poverty. It's a one way trip to a new dark ages man.

3. I just want my little country to escape as much of the mess as possible. That means fewer people to match the carrying capacity. 

"Our little country?" Which country did you say you're from, again?

What we are forgetting, is that we had a chance to create a new Renaissance when the wall came down. There is more peace and prosperity in the world than ever before. We just don't know a good thing, so we prefer to keep our heads glued to crap and our politics filled with sewage.

When the economic foundation of the System collapses, so will its institutions. That includes schools and hospitals. Life could again be nasty, short, and brutish as Thomas Hobbes says the state of primitive anarchy was. I am reminded of what Barbara Tuchman said in The Proud Tower of the age ending with the start of the First World War: that people who lived through the First World War may have recalled that time as one of wonder and glory after the war and the disappointing reality -- but not when that time (earliest thirteen years of the 19th century)  was going on; besides, truly glorious times do not yield the seeds of their destruction.

Should things go similarly bad a century or so later, people might look upon the last twenty years or so as wondrous times for the high-quality entertainment and some glorious achievements in culture and science. But people don't love this time; it has too many insecurities, too much inequity, too much corruption, too much madness, and horrible politics. Our time, due to the aforesaid faults, has planted the seeds of its own destruction.

Musical illustration: La Valse, by Maurice Ravel (1919-1920). Written just a year or two after the end of the "Great War", it recreates the superficial attractiveness of the world of The Proud Tower with a suggestion of its underlying and ultimately self-destructive rottenness.





(My favorite version was a performance in a 70th-anniversary concert of the Israel Philharmonic... I wonder what cultural differences between Israel and the rest of the West might have made that performance more gut-wrenching... irony intended).  

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Quote:4. Jobs no Americans will do. That's dumb.  If you shut off the cheap labor, companies can either raise wages and improve working conditions so Americans will do the jobs or else they can just shut down.  It's their choice and since they fucked over American workers, tough shit to them.  I'd pick lettuce if I got paid $30.00/hr plus benefits. Lettuce prices go up, but oh well. This is what I keep telling you. There's no need for more people, because resources will become more scarce. I don't want to import elite labor either. If companies want to do business here, they need to support our education system more.  They sure as hell need to have a must do reason to do that.

But the immigrants are not doing those jobs. Residents don't do those jobs, no matter what the wages are, and wages for them are not going to ever go up to $30 an hour. So the immigrants aren't bringing anyone's wages down. The cheap labor is abroad, not coming from abroad to here. The jobs that were lost in the red America that Kaplan saw were not farm jobs; they were industrial jobs, and immigrants did not take them. The companies shipped them and their factories abroad, or consolidated and mechanized their jobs out of existence. Free trade allowed foreign companies to out-compete companies with high-wage American workers. Unions were decimated. Immigrants had little or nothing to do with those lost rust belt jobs; they didn't even go there. But Trump still exploits white resentment, and brainwashes them to vote for his anti-immigration measures. It's easy to create scapegoats; Republicans, not Democrats, are the expert scapegoat creators, unlike what Classic Xer says. "They're not sending their best; they're bringing lots of problems... They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists." -- Donald the Drump. Misdirect blame, and then you can keep doing what you're doing to hurt the people.

I will say this: the Latin-American immigrants impress me far more than similarly-poor white people for

(1) staying clear of crime
(2) not getting hooked on meth and opiates
(3) encouraging their kids to do well in school
(4) rejecting superstition and pseudoscience
(5) taking care of their own

The meek may not inherit the world, but the competent will.

Quote:Supporting our education more, yes. The companies do need more people to do educated jobs already. Arousing hatred and resentment of poor immigrants? Not needed. Educated jobs are not threatened by them. No doubt wages and working conditions need to be raised. Maybe forcing farmers to raise wages much higher is a solution to immigrants taking cheaper-wage farm jobs, but the immigrant bashers are not interested in that solution; it hurts their bottom line.

Unless all of our economic bounty ends up going to rapacious, grafting elites who use it for sybaritic indulgence (including castles and palaces) in a new aristocratic order, we will need more education just to figure out how to use the large number of non-work hours. The End of Scarcity implies that we will need to work fewer hours just to stave off obscene poverty. There's nothing wrong with STEM for work, but even with that we will work less. We had better know how to use the time that appears as leisure. The need to teach people how to be good citizens implies that people will need to learn more about art, literature, music, and cinema to know what to do with more time on their hands. More physical fitness and appreciation of nature so that they can enjoy hiking, boating, camping, and other wholesome activities? Ditto.

Quote:Mistreatment and injustice hurts everyone. We can have a fair immigration system that allows people to come here legally in reasonable numbers, and screens out terrorists and criminals, without separating families and without calling everybody who crosses the border seeking asylum a criminal and a rapist. It's not true. The USA was built by immigrants. Borders are imaginary lines only. Fair immigration policies were proposed already and shelved by Republicans. Trump's policies are racist and un-American and won't work.

Good people will be fleeing Syria because under either the Assad crime syndicate or the Islamists threatening to take over and establish their own criminal syndicate in the form of a government, good people will be uncomfortable. Criminals from among the defeated will want to come here simply to avoid just retribution. Maybe we can do what India did with Froduald Karamira, who disseminated hate speech against the Tutsi people, including his infamous "It is time to harvest the tall trees", referring to the Tutsi being taller than the Hutu who largely did the killing; India stopped him on entry in Mumbai and deported him for trial (and ultimate execution).

Borders delineate legal authority and usually little else. Within the Schengen Zone, some borders are virtual irrelevancies in people's lives. Some people might order Food in a restaurant in the Netherlands and step barely outside the restaurant and dine outside -- in Belgium. A thin painted line might have "B" on one side and "NL" on the other.

Quote:More people per se does not threaten the economy or jobs. It creates jobs, and young people whom parents brought here (the dreamers) who graduated school and have aspirations will create jobs and be good customers. Better economies and freer societies abroad will reduce immigrants and refugees. The USA can help and thereby reduce illegal immigration. Building a wall and deporting people for no reason will not stop it.

The only bad effect that I can see is that a larger population in any area drives up the cost of rental housing. This applies whether the increase comes from immigration or from births. High rents make life more costly and less satisfying for renters. As for births, owners of urban apartments are among the most reactionary interests in America; look at Donald Trump as an illustration. They have an interest in a population explosion from even an abortion ban and especially a ban on contraception.

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Quote:5. There will be no need to connect to a world that's like a petri dish full of bacteria.  Humans ain't no different. We'll keep breeding until our population crashes in our own waste. Trump's a bit off wrt shithole.  The whole world's becoming a shithole full of microplastics, fertilizer fueled red tides , and just plain trash.  Trump is off wrt shit holes. The whole world is becoming a shit hole. The US is a literal shit hole due to homeless problems, Mr. Trump. The flood tide of human shit means the whole world is a shit hole. Now that's one thing that's global, human shit, all over the place , regardless of race, it's something whether we like it or not we'll have to embrace, face to face.

Right; we'll need some global solutions and well as national ones to fix that. It can be done, and if millennials learn to vote as well as complain, then the job will be easier.

Zero Population Growth worldwide is a good start. Trump and his political lackeys are making America into a fecal pit.