Out of Pod Experience

true, but don't forget that there's like a fuckton of stockpile of China-made products outside of China.

I grew up perched one block North of 8-mile road. For the last 10 years, I commuted to work Downtown, just a few minutes walk from the river front and the Ren-Cen. My mother was a school teacher at a high school in the shadow of the incinerator Downtown. I've watched Detroit die, and I had to leave it.

The race hustlers promise to make the evil white suburbanites pay like they ought to, because it's all their fault. They get elected time and again to city council. They line their pockets from no-bid contracts. The school administrators use DPS funds to buy swimming pools and new cars, and the moldy classrooms go without air conditioning or sufficient chairs in some cases.

Education should be the silver bullet. It should help the children restore the city, starting with their own lives. But most of them would tell my mother, "I don't have to listen to you, I'm not gonna use any of this stuff anyway. I already have a way out. I'm gonna sell drugs and make more money in a week than you make all year."

Education could be the silver bullet, but it depends on whose in charge of the schools, and whether the parents give a damn.

We can teach the kids that they're all victims... or... we can teach them that they're inheritors of a system designed to preserve freedom and opportunity.

We can teach them that it doesn't matter what they do because they live in an evil land intent on holding them back... or... we can teach them that they can make a way forward for themselves that doesn't end in violence and death.

Of the two options, we constantly deal them the left-hand side of that dichotomy. So those city politicians get a captive voting block, that listens only to what they say and never examines what they do because they are so busy living with rampant violence and crime. The politicians are quick to tickle their ears saying "it's someone else's fault, it's those rich people, they took all the pie." The lie reverberates everywhere.

But economics is not a zero-sum game. One person becoming rich does not make another poor. At least when the parties involved are buyer and seller. When a politician becomes rich through corruption, they make everyone poorer. They dam the river upstream from the mill and everyone is left wondering why there is so little bread.

Sorry for the rant. I loved Detroit, and I hope it comes back. But hope is not a strategy.

The power lies in the hands of the majority
the majority that vote those politicians into a position of responsibility

only it's not anymore
the politicians have usurped our authority over them

tbh,
I don't care how many secretaries and/or interns an mp porks behind his wifes back
I do care that the internal laws that have been passed have stripped me of my authority over them
I do care that they are largely un-accountable for their actions
yes, there have been a few sacrificial lambs over the expenses scandal, but they are still allowed to gorge from the trough

getting them removed from office as a civilian is damn near impossible
they have shown themselves to be incapable of self regulation time & time again, and we have no means to enforce regulation over them


every government system in history has risen and then fallen
the corporate conglomerate & financial market backed system we have currently will fall, it's inevitable and its got such a long way to go down.

I just want to point out that she did not say public education. Education is the answer not matter which way you cut it.

I agree that State controlled education is broken.

If we do not educate our offspring people will be slave to whoever captures their 'minds'.


Also, I do not currently have the gumption to look up the success stories that are occurring in Detroit that you are speaking of as I am a firm believer that good news is harder to find than bad news as the powers that be love to perpetuate the doomsayers and bury us in negativism. So I ask for you to link a few of the stories of the success you speak of. I do not doubt you at all and I am a firm believer that things would be better if 'things' were run on the thing called personal responsibility. I am not one who has given up, I am just usually too busy educating people on personal responsibility and trying to get them to shake the we are victims hat, but that is my job and it is more than a full time one

EDIT: What makes things worse is that with so much information at our finger tips, so much more accessible then anytime in the past, there is less reading occurring than ever before.

For Example Project Gutenberg

That has to be one of the oddest posts I have ever had directed towards me.

Care to elaborate?

As I figured it would be and why I asked

Thank you for the links.

issue here is that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that "amoral" is not "immoral"

business-for-profit is amoral. it's not the process that is bad, it's most likely the practices that sometimes emerge from it. as long as it's "inside" the law, any business isn't doing anything wrong. that's what business is for: profit generation.

"immoral" is, however, when you run a business built on corruption and less-than-healthy practices.

government-offered services aren't wrong either per se. the issue here lies on mankind's condition: if you give wide and free (or little more than free) access to services, people accommodate and take them for granted. in time this will pretty much snowball, because if it's easily accessible, why not use it? you hire more people to make ends meet, and so you need more tax revenue to keep the new numbers. because it's a stable and relatively high pay job, your employees start to put people they know inside the machine and your working mass quality levels drop due to a less-than-optimal hiring system., system starts to spiral down on the service quality and it becomes a lumbering mass of rust that needs to either be retired or thrown away.

Profit is the value earned in excess of that expended to produce another good or service. It is nothing more than an indicator that natural competition should come and compete for the difference themselves. The natural state of a free market competes profits to very low levels. The reason profit has a bad name is because it's attached to firms with state privilege who can protect high profit margins by artificial barriers to entry, favorable tax rates, or just plain mandated monopoly.


Define less-than-healthy. A firm selling a good or service which isn't a state protected entity has to please their consumers and abide by all laws and contracts governing their conduct. They are also libel for the damages they cause. This is frequently distorted by the state incorporation system, but if you look at a sole proprietorship or partnership today it's very similar to what all business would be in the absence of state coercion.


I would argue there is both a deontological and consequential basis for disproving that. Firstly, theft and kidnapping are immoral and second, the needs of mankind are best met by voluntary interaction which both minimizes conflict and generates far more wealth for everyone involved.


Another reason why public services are consequentially worse than private services.


The decline of Detroit can be followed roughly along those lines. The state provides a service which has to be paid for (tax) whether or not it is efficient and the cost of those services always rises as quality falls (when a public utility is under budget, their budget is cut, so they have an incentive to keep spending high and productivity low). Because state jobs are stable and require no increased productivity over time they are highly desired. More people move to the public sector (Detroit had one of the largest per capita) and the net tax-recipients quickly out-strip the net tax-payers.

As the system "spiraled down" (good choice of words) the demands of those public sector workers increased as the tax burden needed to fund the machine necessarily went up to pay their own wages. Thus you have imminent collapse.

The state in-general functions on this same paradigm. The economy is rapidly pushed into the inefficient public sector because the parasite needs to grow. This growth in state influence, regulatory burdens, and prowess of office generates even more of a burden on the few who remain outside in the private marketplace trying to earn enough to pay off these people who are providing ever-decreasing value in their public services.

It therefor follows that having anything but a bare minimum state apparatus is completely suicidal economically, and in practice the necessary growth of public sector influence condemns the entity entirely. So if we are to conjecture on the condition of mankind, I would say that very condition precludes any argument for the state and its coercive power being a net benefit to anyone but the political establishment.

anti-consumer, monopolized and/or, yes, usually state-protected business that provides benefits only for the ones inside the machine, or unscrupulous practices, or engaging in corruption to get ahead.

healthy business practices, in my view, is when you have several companies competing in the same sector and thriving by being able to provide quality products at a sane price. However, it must be said that usually you end up with a very small number of companies, having all the others either absorbed or going out of business.


granted voluntary interaction is the best bet, but mankind is conflictual by nature. that's why communism doesn't work, at the very least at medium to large scale, because even if it has the best intentions in trying to develop a community, truth is, there will always be some slackers, or people that take advantage, and the rest of the population follows suit.
hell there's a theory that in a ant's hive, 10 to 15% job of the population is to be a slacker for the rest of the hive.

summing up: you need freedom to evolve mankind, but to keep it productive, you need authoritarianism, lest it kills itself in a ball of fire.

That's a pretty bold statement from someone who has contributed nothing to the discussion.


On Topic: The Empire Strikes Back!