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A Malaise Speech for the Current Time
#29
(11-01-2018, 02:50 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:
(05-31-2017, 07:07 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:
(04-07-2017, 09:53 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: I would argue that if your intention is to preserve the environment then you should want to limit deficit spending.  In short deficit spending is consuming resources now at the expense of future generations.  Therefore, the best method would be to limit federal revenues to primarily tariffs.  Which will also limit consumption by raising prices on imported goods, not to mention providing greater employment in manufacturing here.

We are going to see an economy much more based upon services and less upon the production of material goods. Food and fuels are the only physical commodities that one can expect to keep up in demand with a growing population.

Here's the model: figure that the growth in the economy will largely be in intellectual property. Sebastian J. Bach* is a musician and makes much music -- let us say fugues. Adam Ansel is a photographer and takes lots of photos of Yosemite. Sebastian J. Bach can't get enough of Adam Ansel's photos... and Adam Ansel loves Sebastian J Bach's fugues. Because they can't cheat each other by stealing intellectual property or cheat the tax authorities by bartering, they can pay in credits of some type, and the taxing authorities get their cut. But there are no physical copies.

Is wealth created when the creative exchanges happen? Yes.

*No, I do not refer to the original creative people...

Do you envision forms of bartering to come back into vogue especially as robots and other high tech consume more and more physical and mental jobs? And I wonder if now we have a chance to release old wounds, some probably going back as far as the last so-called malaise? For example, think of how many old wounds were released with the #MeToo movement and the comeuppance of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein among others. Two very big fish were obviously fried here. Emotions run hot here for sure. And while we're at it, what do you feel the long-range outlook might be for movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Will enough tap into the energy of the former movement to bring about the demise of the "boys will be boys" culture, and for the latter the permanent death of movements such as the KKK?

Craftsmanship will become more important in imputing human qualities into efforts. The line between mental and physical work is not so clear as it sounds: is hairdressing physical work or mental work? Really-good carpentry is at least as much mental as physical.

I forget what author (it was in the science-fiction category) suggested that poor people would satisfy themselves with shoddy, unremarkable manufactured goods while elites would insist upon crafts. The shoddy stuff includes fake antiques of the sort that one sees in Hobby Lobby: fake books that one can use to cover an iPad, clocks that look 150 years old until one sees a cheap mechanism to run the minute and second hand, and furniture seemingly fit to hold a big-screen TV as if it were designed for such, and even distressed to fit the slightly-discerning eye that doesn't have much of a brain behind it. The real antiques were not made to fit modern ways. Fake ones, by some amazing coincidence (marketability), do.

People will want paintings and custom furniture. Computers will not be good at creativity, the definitive human touch. 

Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein got away with stuff that few people could because they were able to produce great value for the entertainment industry. Much of America's value-added comes from intellectual property which is now more lucrative than any commodity that anyone can imagine. The problem is, that one must be in the cream of the cream of the crop to really produce something valuable. Not many people want to see a home movie filmed in a garage in Ohio.

I do not feel sorry for Cosby or Weinstein. The tragedy is not that their lives are ruined; the tragedy is that they messed up so many lives and got away with it.

...#Me Too and Black Lives Matter will persist so long as the perception remains that some powerful men see any pretty female as a 'piece of @$$' as a perquisite of wealth and power, and Black Lives Matter will not vanish until cops get less trigger-happy around young black males -- unless some government successfully suppresses them.

The KKK? White losers who have nothing but whiteness as cause for pride are going to find it attractive. It is a Hydra -- cut off one piece of it, and another Hydra forms. Unless miscegenation makes whiteness largely irrelevant, some manifestation of the KKK will be around to exploit resentments. It may not disappear until it is formally outlawed as was its ideological comrade, the German Nazi Party, which shared much the same hatred and proclivity for violence.
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.


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RE: A Malaise Speech for the Current Time - by pbrower2a - 11-01-2018, 11:42 PM

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