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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crabbe who wrote (3296)	1/13/2006 2:39:29 AM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 219660

Buster ;o) I agree with that. This was mentioned years ago on the original thread. The cycles get longer because the effects of productivity keep increasing...societies need to change or their are just too many of us... Al en.wikipedia.org

To: Crabbe who wrote (3296)	1/13/2006 2:41:19 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 219660

Crabb, I thought it was cute too! I imagined us all sitting around all day like a bunch of chimps and thought it seemed quite pleasant; but why should we scratch government backs when they don't scratch ours? With the cost of everything very low, we'll groom farmers [all five of them] now and then and they'll provide food for us all. Same for car makers who run the robotic factories. Same for steel mills with no operators and a few shareholders. For decades, no, wait, centuries, automation has been going to do away with people doing work, but there are now billions more of us than when the industrial revolution kicked off and the number of hours worked each year is not decreasing. I know that theoretically, we should all be unemployed now due to automation, but we keep inventing new things to do to use up our energy. Then spend the money on something so we have to go back to work again to give our vacuous lives meaning in the great, dark, threatening cosmos which simultaneously ignores us. Some of us even take on loads of debt to ensure that we have to keep working and feeling needed and belonging. We old geezers will scratch each other's backs, as you won't be able to get a young nubile to tend your scaly old hide in return for a blind grope by arthritic paws. <Intel is building new "lights out fabs" nearly no employees. > That's so cool. 20 years ago, nearly, I showed a niece around the industrial part of Antwerp and it was quite eerie, with nuclear power stations, railways, chemical plants, car factories and so on all feeding each other with few people in evidence, all humming and glowing in the night. It was quite ghostly and when I first really realized just what was going on and not just in imagination. Unemployment in the USA is only around 5% of so and GDP per capita is huge and the cost of stuff in hours to work to buy is wayyy below what it was 20 years ago, if the stuff even existed. You can buy a cyberphone now which can thrash Gary Kasparov in chess. Such an idea couldn't exist in 1970s [it could, but only in science fiction]. All around the world, people are getting richer, stuff is getting cheaper and better, wars are vanishing, pollution is thinning, lifespans are increasing [AIDS and similar glitches notwithstanding in some parts - and let's pretend H5N1 is just for geeks]. Things have never been so good for so many people and they are getting better faster than anyone can imagine [nobody can keep up with more than a tiny fraction of the tsunami of developments]. Non flippantly, Mqurice