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

To: elmatador who wrote (34863)	5/17/2008 5:19:36 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 217740

You believe a culturally deprived high school dropout like yourself is superior to educated persons primarily because reading books at a young age deprives you of street culture and the related arts of theft and other criminal behavior. An interesting hypothesis. What do you believe are the primary advantages you have gained by avoiding traditional culture, the collective wisdom of past authors, and other forms of traditional learning? How has your early training in criminality affected your success or lack of it? .

To: elmatador who wrote (34863)	5/17/2008 5:42:33 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217740

That didn't answer my last question. What people like MQ and Elroy lack is culture. They had not delved into books at a young age and being communists/leftists/socialists when they had a heart for solving problems. "There's more than one way of solving problems. It depends on what side effects you consider acceptable. Communism is by far the worst in terms of side effects. But the same side effects can occur in far right systems - the super-rich pass by the sick beggar in their big black Mercedes sedan with the oozing leg wrapped in dirty bandages and do not even see them because of the tinted glass in the windows. That's not made up. That was Guatemala in 1978. I saw it myself. Elephantiasis. I saw people condemned for life to begging on the streets because they lacked $100 to get a broken leg set and cast properly. They had been injured in the bad 'quake a few years before. Now the upper and lower parts of the lower leg are at right angles to each other and they can't walk. What is $100 to a gringo rico who can afford to fly down to their country? To them it was almost life and death. Too late now, though. Life is not fair. But decreeing by law that it must be so doesn't work either. That's been tried more than once." (That's what TJ calls the knowledge acquired throught the musty dusty books.) "Because books are musty hardly means their authors were idiots." Of course we all forgot all that by the time we are 28 years old. "You can always relearn it and learn the truth of it. That's what a trip to a place like Guatemala City in '78 can do. (Not recomended, actually, unless other things have improved as a result of their civil war settlement. I got cholera there that nearly got me.)" But all those books that we read seeking the truth -or what we then belived it was truth- still guides us because they were writtent by the best minds we had in those last 2.000 years. "Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero were hardly idiots. And we see the gainseekers that would fit right in the executive suite or top offices on Wall Street such as Josephus. We have changed little if at all in that time." If you just gone to engineering school got a job and worked, you are at a disadvantage against epople who had acquired culture. "Define 'culture'. I went to engineering school and worked as one for decades. If all you have is 'culture', I know things you haven't even dreamt of. But that educational path doesn't mean that's ALL that crossed my path. In a field like that, you have to concentrate on the subject in college. Before and later there is time for other matters." It is not too late they still can read the musty dusty books. "I'm not sure they need the philosophers most. They need the economists and economic philosophers more."

To: elmatador who wrote (34863)	5/17/2008 10:10:40 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217740

It is not too late they still can read the musty dusty books. One might be inclined (as I am) to say that the internet is in good part ...musty dusty books at lightspeed... I find it hard to believe that those two have not had a fair bit of exposure to musty dusty books... albeit Mq's interpretations certainly disagree with mine many times... Personally I spent too much time on culture and not enough with the task at hand in university... Fortunately that was a serious error that I was able to overcome... but I'm told that I had a good time :O) Ah but I was so much older then.. I'm younger than that now.. ~ Bobby Z. The Black Swan OTOH by age 10 I had read two sets of encyclopedia ... that didn't hurt ;O)

To: elmatador who wrote (34863)	6/5/2008 1:38:36 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217740

If they had culture they would have known that today is a repetition of the late 70's. See Lester C. Thurow Zero sum society. Situation is not new. No one wants to have his income cut to the benefit of the whole. Leads to paralisy. Stagnation. Because no one INSIDE THE COUNTRY can have his income cut, the solution was to cut Brazil's! Thus we have been screwed frequently to portect the icnome of the zero sum society. The new thing, today is this: that now we -my generation- learned how the game is played and we are turing the table on the zero summers. No refinery? No new airport? No bullet train? no drilling? Fine. The problme is that now they want to impose on us the zero sum thing: cast in gypsum the economies and let's all hybernate in this frozen no-growth economies. It is not going to happen... Good thing to be home and have my 28 year old book to read.