To: Ilaine who wrote (72705 ) 4/3/2011 3:15:14 PM From: Maurice Winn 2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217802 The good old human zoo: <I like to joke that the toxic lenders then sold the toxic loans to the Chinese who paid for them with the money we paid them for toxic toys. Ha ha. Not completely false, not all that funny. > That's like the old joke about Russians in the communist system = they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work [also not funny when actually enmeshed in such a system]. Good point <As for "houses halved in value," depends on when you bought. > And it's not really "value". I should have written "halved in price". Our house [a real estate agent told me, subsequently confirmed by government valuations and reading about house prices] had pretty well doubled in price a few years after we bought it. I thought that was crazy and decided we should sell. But my wife likes to own a house and I decided that she is right and it's still our house doing exactly the same thing, worth exactly the same to us as previously and it didn't really matter to me what somebody going down the road thought it was worth. [Of course we don't have a mortgage which would have been quite a different matter altogether]. In fact, prices still haven't done what I thought they should [drop 30%] so it has turned out to be okay to stay in it rather than having a load of NZ$ and wondering what the heck to do with them [buying gold would have been an option and that would have been a good thing to do though I'd have had to give some of that gold each month to a landlord]. Indeed, where life is the usual struggle, women produce [as you mentioned in China]. In traditional life, men do the hunter gathering, inventing, gang-based enterprising, while women breed, manage the home fires, harvest crops and produce plenty of children. But even in those societies, the men bring home the bacon and the women carve it up. It's pretty well instinctive. Women rule the living room and house. Men patrol the boundaries of the real estate. In modern democratic societies, the whole city becomes a living room/house and women run it like normal. Men are heading off into the wild blue yonder of Cyberspace, leaving women to run the temporal world of politics. As my mother pointed out decades ago, when an occupation is declining in status, women are taking over. Bank tellers, teaching, pilots, doctors, lawyers, science - women filling the ranks. But have a look around Cyberspace and it's wall to wall men, Geeking and hacking. Julian Assange is a bloke. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Irwin Jacobs, legions of them, rank and file, marching off to battle in the new realm. Politics in the olde world of 3D geography is for women. Sic Hillary onto Gadaffi. Maggie Thatcher would whack him with her handbag. Did. The USA got excited about having somebody with good levels of melanin as president. Soon they'll be excited if they get somebody with a missing Y chromosome. <Living in sagebrush country probably makes it hard to find meaningful work, unless you have a ranch.) (Or maybe someday, a windmill farm or a solar farm.) > Living in the hinterlands is just fine. All that's needed is a fast internet connection. Even satellites do that. O3B [other 3 billion] plans to provide pretty good access to remote locations such as Rarotonga, which would be a very nice Geek location during northern or southern winters. Similar to Hawaii [which is where Cook Islanders went long ago, before Americans took over]. Swarms of Geeks are spread around the world. They don't need to be close to each other [contrary to the silly ideas of China's bosses] and despite the popularity of Silicon Valley locales. They can be in Omaha [beach area north of Auckland], Rangataua, Papamoa, driving in a van, or parked, or at sea. Soon they'll be able to be flying in airliners. Countries are basically communities of interest based on age-old chimpanzee values. Cyberspace is a horde of people and devices with a community of interest which increasingly conflicts with the interests of 3D bludgers who live inside beltways, forcibly extracting loot from their citizen serf hostages. The end of history is yet to be written, contrary to the idea that democratic capitalistic public private partnerships are some kind of idyllic end of history. I'm busy writing it. So far, so good and it's an interesting plot with fascinating outcomes. It's also a lot of fun, and profitable. The battles have begun, with private Manning in gaol and murderous Luddites like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin threatening death. As they say, generals prepare for previous battles. Aircraft carriers aren't much use in Cyberspace. China is trying to get a grip on the situation, but will fail. That's because their choice is to live like Africans, in backwardness, or get with the programme. It's like the original Luddites smashing looms - that doesn't stop the revolution. Mqurice