Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Strictly: Drilling II -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (23985)	12/22/2002 9:22:53 AM
From: BSGrinder	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 36161

But it was only a couple hundred years until Rome was sacked (476 AD). Then throw in the time compression that has been happening since the industrial revolution (where empires such as France and Germany rise and fall within two generations). Depending where you calculate the beginning of the transition from Republic to Empire (the Vietnam War and the abandonment of the gold standard? or the fall of the USSR and the invasion of Iraq?), you might figure we are currently somewhere between the reign of Trajan (around 100 AD) and Constantine (around 300 AD), with all the assassinations, corruption, currency debasement, elimination of the citizen army, military adventurism masking internal decline, rubber-stamp senate, political plutocracy, transition of small farmers into latifundia (agribusiness), and cynical use of religion to solidify imperial power. That would put us roughly half way to the collapse of the Western Roman empire in 476 AD. So if we assume the whole process of decline is now contracted to around 50 years, we have somewhere between 20 and 40 years before our empire is eclipsed. So you are probably right about a lot of us missing it. /Kit