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Pastimes : Home on the range where the buffalo roam -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (10192)	2/15/2001 12:46:41 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13572

Hi Selectric II, You ask some interesting questions. When the world is populated with geezers...... Where will we house everyone? How old-fashioned of you. We won't, we can't and we'll devolve to a make do situation with every old tired Winnebago and SUV in the country up on blocks and warehousing geezers who haven't been clever enough or lucky enough or smart enough to have provided for their housing needs well before retirement. Because there's no way in the world that Social Security has the do-re-mi to keep folks in traditional housing once two workers are requested to support one retiree, as will be the case in US by 2025. Imagine the revolutionary thoughts going through the minds of Gen Z, if they are allowed to have an education, when they realize what FDR saddled this nation with when there were 50 workers for every one retiree and no one dreamed the system could morph into the huge wealth suckhole that it appears destined to become. We are impoverishing the youth of America by transfer their wealth to the oldest 20% of the population, who are the richest quintile that have ever lived on the face of the planet, and the least grateful. Listen to AARP, it's a "handful of gimme and mouthful of much obliged." How will we produce enough food to feed everyone? First, there really is no foreseeable crisis in food production. Distribution is another matter, and since starvation is a tool of war, it will always be with us. We'll lose some arable lands at the margin in the next century to salinization and desertification, but by and large the world will continue to be able to feed itself indefinitely. Just not as we'd like to become accustomed to. We are in the process of killing the oceans today in no uncertain terms. The collapse of the cod fishery of the North Atlantic, the diminishing average size of harvestable fish and shellfish, the devastation of the coral reef environment, the pernicious trawl of great swaths of the ocean bottom are all insults that the environment cannot tolerate. On land, we will be forced either by economics, good sense or both to eat lower on the foodchain. Meat products will be seen as anathema to healthy diets. We'll consume the grain that once was so profligately wasted fattening cattle in order to fill our arteries with cholestoral and saturated fat. We can triple the number of humans on the planet with the same foodstocks we have today, as long as we find ways to avoid the huge waste built into the system. How will we transport everyone? Where will anyone want to go? The cities will become subject to perpetual gridlock with random terror and crime the norm, and those who've made the escape to rural environments or who've never migrated to the cities and can afford to do so will find solace in a crowded world by avoiding the maddening crowds. Who will pay the social security and medicare when there's 1 person working for 3 retired people? Gen Z will resusitate that old Beatles tune as an anthem --"You Say You Want a Revolution". What will the quality of life be when people live to 150 years old but their brains and bodies slow down? Ask Ron Reagan. Apparently, the mental twinkies among us are generally a pretty happy lot. I won't be sticking around to find out. I figure that half of 150 is plenty. Are things really going to be better, or will they be worse? --just pondering. For whom? For the likes of Vinod Khosla, Jim Clark, John Doerr, Allan Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and their ilk, life will be full of exciting adventures and the opportunity to win. For the guys who just got laid of the third shift at the Chrysler plant in Belvedere, IL.... well, they may well have seen the their world as good as it gets for them. Those jobs may not be coming back for a very long time. And for the 3 billion or so of us who live on less than one dollar a day, well, muddling through is about all they have to look forward to, I'm afraid. Best, Ray