Posted on 09/05/2011 9:49:48 PM PDT by Bratch
The welfare state has created generations of dysfunction and dependency and overpopulation under its umbrella.
Here’s the scary part of the welfare state: the other side of the dependency mountain.
(1) Countries like Haiti aren’t going to “adapt” to the end of Western charity. Just imagine what is going to happen to Black Africa when there are no more European liberals around to dump charity on that continent.
Is the piracy we see in Somalia any indication?
(2) Here in America, the dependents of the welfare state are going to “adapt” to the end of the welfare state through the mechanism of the gang, through the “flash mob,” through stealing and using force to take from others, and using guns to shoot people and rob businesses ... the familiar form of barbarism.
Liberals have spent the past 50 years destroying the family, destroying the community, destroying tradition, destroying character, destroying the nation in the name of “progress” ... now comes the next 50 years of the consequences.
What do you think the Goths and the Vandals and the Vikings were? They were essentially migrating flash mobs of barbarians who were pushed out of Northern Europe for various reasons.
(3) Of course as Wall Street and Washington, who are in league with the European central bankers, finish off the American economy and plunge the world into what will first appear to be a “depression” ... THEN we get to see how “diversity” and “multiculturalism” and “interdependence” and “tolerance” really work under stress.
A fad? You are predicting an 80% crash in the human population here.
When you need to be close to the hardware, because you have a heavily computation bound task, it’s hard to beat C and subsets of C++ (full C++ is a pig in the way it allocates/deallocates arrays on the heap) — unless you go to assembler. Angry Birds doesn’t need to produce 3-dimensional graphics, so it would be happy enough in Java.
There aren’t many new ideas in the world.
“Globalization” is hardly a new idea. It has been tried many times before. This is only the most extreme example of globalization in world history.
Suppose you live in a small town in Tennessee. You spend most of your time buying what you need at Wal-Mart. Where does it come from?
Most of the manufactured junk seems to come from China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and so forth. The textiles come from Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras and so on.
The capitalists then beat their chests and brag about the “superior” system they have created. Yeah, but it comes at the tremendous cost: the cost of being dependent upon vaguely hostile foreigners who live far away, the cost of losing the know how to produce things nearby, the extraordinary cost of vulnerability in some kind of crisis.
Again, we have become more dependent upon foreigners for literally everything: not just the manufactured crap, which we could produce here if we wanted, but dependent upon the energy reserves of foreign countries, dependent upon foreigners to finance our debt addled “post-reality” lifestyle, increasingly dependent upon foreigners to come here and prop up the higher sectors of our economy.
Americans sheepishly go to the gas station and fill up with regular unleaded at Citgo. They go to the supermarket to buy food that is shipped in from god knows where. They invest their deposits in banks which does god knows what with them. They go to the Wal-Mart to buy stuff that comes from vast distances.
Let’s see how long it works! Not long, I bet. And when that system unravels, it will produce a very familiar type of chaos.
Say no more, say no more :-) Thanks for the responses.
Great screed. Look up Smoot Hawley. How’d that work out?
Tell Americans jocks to put down their wrenches and shovels, and toss away outdated visions of muscle-fueled manufacturing greatness. Ask them to sit in front of a keyboard and learn OOP and C++. The future is theirs.
Software writing and verification is actually the easiest to outsource to foreign countries. All it takes is a high speed data line.
I worked with US CAD companies that wrote and checked code on a 24 hour basis. Three separate teams working in three time zones - US West coast - France - India. The code modules just kept getting passed around the world according to daylight working hours.
The higher level design concepts may be US, but the actual bodies/workers writing the code can easily be world-wide.
Corporations get a cost benefit with lower foreign wages as well as a time-to-market benefit.
Very little if anything that we do is confined by our realm of personal experience.
For example, how do you know what the constitutions says? How do you know what, for example, Jefferson thought, and Washington thought, etc.
You probably read a book written by a constitutional expert.
If you do have a copy of the constitution and have read it how, do you know that the copy you have is the correct one, what is the provenance?
Skepticism is healthy, and I understand what you are saying here, but this stop and go is very slow. At some point you have to ask yourself the question, is this the best way of going about and doing things?
Yes, I trust my banker. Yes I trust the grocer and the owner of the gas store not to cheat me, or to make me sick. I make about 10 decisions every day to trust people, because I simply have no choice.
“Not so long ago, we made all the shoes and clothes we wore, the motorcycles and cars we drove, the radios we listened to, the TV sets we watched, the home and office calculators and computers we used. “
I guess ole Pat never heard of Gucci, Chanel, BSA, Triumph, Rolls Royce, or Jaguar. Hell, Isotta Fraschini was a hot import in the 1920’s. VW’s have been coming in since shortly after WWII. Radios and TV’s from Asia have been imported to the U.S. for 60 years. The best watches were from Switzerland.
How about we don’t exaggerate there Pat?
Uh, plenty of nations outsource food production to large countries with low population density.
Places, like, I dunno? Iowa?
“These are growth segments of our population. They are not going to be software engineers.”
We have to be the only country (other from Europe and Britain) that has an underclass that outbreeds the high achieving. I have no idea what will have to be done wiht them since we are close to having small caches of safe places with safe people, while the rest of the underclass gorws and grows and grows.
I have to admit it feels that way.
But I still have hope. I think the jury is still out though time is clearly running out.
If that “underclass” had to work to fill their tummies it would keep them a little busier doing productive things.
How is Pat a moron?
We’ve had decades of “free trade.” This economy is the result. This is the “free trade” economy.
Good point. In the 1950s Europe, Russia and Asia were ruined, in ashes from WWII, Africa was a mud-pit, S. America was recovering from numerous dictatorships. The US was the only real industrial state around.
As the W. Europeans and Japanese caught up in the 60s and 70s, we kept moving, but they moved faster (as they were starting from nothing and perversely, because they were destroyed, they had no legacy architecture)
Then in the 80s, the Asian tigers and then the Celtic tigers came up.
But then in the 90s, a completely game change -- the two sleeping giants: India and China awoke, communism collapsed. in the Naughties we see Eastern Europe, India, China removing the shackles of socialism slowly and building
As Myrddin pointed out, the standards and regulations and unions that we put in place in the 50s have put us at a severe disadvantage today.
Not everyone can learn OOPs, C++, Ruby on Rails, PLSQL, etc. — it requires a different skillset, heavily logical mindset. Most are not built for that.
C and C++ are useful, very powerful languages - Java's "program once, use anywhere" is not completely true and its creation of a virtual engine, never-ending sequence of libraries, and not completely compiled status has advantages and disadvantages
C has its uses and is still heavily used in POS machines.
More to the point, COBOL, MVS, JCL, shell-scripts etc. ARE the languages to learn and know. A lot of the core stuff for most transactions are still COBOl
And I suspect Angry Birds has a C core and guess they use some OOPs language for the rest, but don't know. I think it has some .lua files, but...
Ruby-on-Rails, on the other hand, while easier to get things ready to run (development time in weeks) is not scalable to enterprise level -- it's like the programming language version of MySQl -- useful to a point.
Not gonna happen. At a random guess I think you need to have at least a 120 IQ to be able to design and code. Below that, it's an "html programmer" :-P
And that's only 10 to 20% of the population.
There has to be jobs for the other 80%.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.