07-10-2018, 10:45 PM
(07-10-2018, 11:32 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: You do paint a rather dark scenario of what our future may look like.
I have seen a darkening mood going into the 4T, some brightening, and now an even darker mode of history. It is difficult for most people to separate their moods from the overpowering reality, and I am no exception.
Quote:Back in the mid-1980s it was widely predicted that the transportation wave of the future was going to be in high-speed rail. It had already proven relatively successful in much of Europe as well as Japan. I had often questioned how well it would take off in the US where the private auto is king. HSR was supposedly destined to perhaps all but obsolete both the car and the airplane. Here we are some 30 years later and HSR is in places few and far between on the western side of the Atlantic.
High-speed rail depends heavily upon high population densities as in Japan and parts of western Europe. China might qualify. High-speed rail depends at the least on dense population centers as ultimate and intermediate destinations. It is expensive to build, operate, and maintain.
Quote:Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is: Are we ready to implement a revised life philosophy or path with renewed confidence? I really feel that we don't (at least not yet) have the will to make some of the changes that really need to be made. I have my doubts as to whether today's society will ever be willing to sacrifice convenience for the common good. This will only occur when the majority begin to take on the attitude that it's time to live what we believe and believe in how and why we are living.
We will be compelled to make changes should the Crisis shatter our world. Should the low-density suburbs be devastated in war, we will not restore them as such. Capital could be scarce, so we might be obliged to put up Soviet-style concrete-block apartment complexes... basically prefabricated slums... just to keep people from ending up homeless in the cold.
Quote:A few days ago I was in a somewhat oldies themed restaurant and this song came over the loudspeakers. Will all that is happening and what we read online, does it seem to you as though this song is still as relevant today as it was a half century ago when it was all over the radio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5znh58WITU8
Reality will shake our old myths and impose new myths.
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.