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Blog Comments posted by Moonlapse
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If there is, I think that it would take at least as long to undo as it has taken to get to this point. I think that people should purposely put themselves in control of their lives - there needs to be many more entrepreneurs to compete with corporations, people need to make sure that they and their children get an intellectual education (stay away from the TV, read some challenging literature) and always try to improve upon it. Spending more time providing guidance and insight to your kids should be your foremost obligation when you have them - intended or not.
How much of a child's day is taken up by school, homework and television/games? How late in life, if ever, do people learn financial responsibility? How many people try to find fulfillment in self-sufficiency instead of just aquiring the objects they see in advertising?
The thing I've learned to cherish most in my life was spending part of my childhood on a farm. I entertained myself using whatever I could find and even though I despised it at the time, the manual labor that I was expected to do as a part of the family educated me more than school ever did.
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It was the twilight zone between my little scope of reality and reality.
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I think RDRAM was only used with Pentium 4 chipsets. You could always go for a quad-core Mac Pro with the 30-inch Cinematic HD display, then for Christmas you can upgrade to 16 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage, and an additional NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with a second 30-inch HD display. lol
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In the current circumstances, yes... monolopies can become too powerful. This wasn't the case prior to the dissolution of independent agrarian families. The current system can't exist without fine tuned centralized controls, otherwise it would fall apart. Its a matter of being the master of your existence along with all the risks and hardships, or forfieting your mastery for the comfort of a utopian ideal. If there had been no controls on oil companies up until now, do you think so many people would be hopelessly dependent on cheap oil? How many independent innovators would develop homegrown alternatives? The fact that the government regulates before the citizenry take serious action reinforces the corporate state.
Do you think that ethanol is really the answer to oil, or does this sudden push for this particular solution have more to do with ADM... ever wonder why corn syrup is in everything instead of cane sugar? Ethanol absorbs water into fuel, is much more inefficient than gasoline and currently uses as much - if not more - fossil fuel energy to produce than the energy it creates.
True, war may accelerate invention, but the modern 'mother' is probably the positivist method. You don't necessarily need genius when you have a proven method. I tend to think that if the purposeful effort to bypass democracy in order to organize and control society as a whole in the nineteenth century has not happened, progress would necessarily have been made on a more individual level and at a more even pace. What I mean is that when society is readjusted to corporate methodology for the sake of progressive efficiency - factory schools, factory jobs, cubicles, mass media - then capital gets far more concentrated, increasing its widespread effectiveness - good or bad.
If you support social insurance, you necessarily support the corporate state - they are part of the same system and always will be. That is the utopian system where the eventual goal is to eliminate any real hardship from life. If you support self-sufficient family units, you necessarily support the complete disintegration of the economic-social-state bond and the idea that surviving, overcoming challenge and passing real knowledge and tradition to the next generation is one of the fundamental meanings in life. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the essence of the lives of our founding fathers.
Would you rather be the wild animal or the one in the zoo? Not everyone will answer this the same way.
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Aye aye, Capt'n!!
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First of all, I am very critical of state empowered capitalism. My view points are laissez-faire in the sense that capital should not influence state function and state function should not influence capital. My specific views on specific topics tend to be a long time in the making since I really need some sort of concrete affirmation which is time consuming.
Anyways, here are some of my extremely generalized thoughts:
The Civil War essentially started a homogenization process. Coal, the steam engine, new methods of steel production, and an influx of migrants were ideal for the spread of railroads. Railroads really progressed the homogenization. Before, trusts were mainly localized due to the logistical limitations of horse travel. The potential of capital spread with the railroads.
Another key element here is the popularization of the idea of purposefully structured, mechanical society a la Prussia. Much of this ideology finds its way into the legislative process and it remains there to this day. Why does the social structure of the pre-Civil War days, a purposeful departure from the English class system, morph into a pseudo English class system?
The point is, the corporate methods of management infiltrated society by way of government. Society is actually much more efficiently used and predicted when it is homogenized and stratified into different functional parts. Think about school, think about work, think about government, think about society. There's a common thread that was introduced in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Anyways... this shift, by design, allowed a previously unseen concentration of wealth to be efficiently used to make progress, to make newer product. The way I see it, the people themselves would have eliminated the monopolies eventually, either through violence or coordinated non-violent efforts, or whatever. This would basically undo the 'progress' made since the Civil War. However, if the state assumes the role of overseer and manager of economic and social aspects, this dilemma is diffused.
This is actually to the advantage of corporations. The social transformation, by joint effort of state and corporation, continues and we all go through school, segregated by age and social group, managed by an authority figure who tells us the information we should know and has us answer the questions we are supposed to ask.
If we want to succeed in life, we need to succeed in this psychological factory and assimilate. We become excellent consumers, bits of predictable and easily influenced machinery in the regulated whole. We contribute to the concentration of capital instead of the diffusion, in order to make more innovative progress. We have a fundamentally unjust welfare system because the state has replaced the function of the family prior to the Industrial Revolution.
So essentially, I think anti-trust is less about equality and more about the transformation of early America into the wanna-be utopia of modern America. The casualties of this process were not Rockefeller, Carnegie or Morgan. Capitalism is fine, it works. Just don't mix it with authority.
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LW, they will ALWAYS change! Don't make the mistake of waiting too long...
I agree, get something under your belt - it'll probably help you determine what you want to do. If you do find a passion later, at least you'll have the earning potential to fund more education.
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Aggg... wisdom teeth. I had all four out when I was 16 and had a prescription of Tylenol with codeine for pain... well codeine makes me vomit violently (twice, because I was a retard and didn't realize I was reacting to medication) and I ended up reopening the sutures. I won't divulge the particulars, but it gives me the willies just thinking about it.
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Follow-up #1
It was there to begin with and has been purposely removed... in my opinion, that is.
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It's taking me a while to get through it, I like to find additional information on the covered topics as I read.
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Top or bottom of the pile?
Doesn't matter as long as you have a beer hat.
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Don Tomato
Ahahaaaa!
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Another thought... do you have a crawl space beneath the house? Is there a furnace down there?
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I prefer http://www.1001freefonts.com/.
Moonlapse, I hate those "idiots" book. I'll just ask my mom, she used to be a banker and knows her way around $$
Even better.
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Do you have a dog or know someone with a dog? You might use its superior olfaction to your advantage...
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Oh thanks! I made it from a fractal. Could not resist using my new fonts I am addicted to fonts.
I don't want to kill anyone, either. I don't really care about money all that much, if I have it great, if I'm not rich, I can survive.
Pick up an 'idiots guide to investing' book, then talk to a few financial advisors, and start planning things now. Starting now instead of when you're comming up on 30 (like me, doh!) will put you far ahead of the game. It WILL come in handy when you want to further your education, make a down payment on your own house, take a European vacation, whatever...
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Hmm, well, what if I just swiftly jab a paper clip into the wall outlet?
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Thanks for this valuable insight.
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Please plug your pie-hole and pass me a pilsner.
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Is this counteraction on a 1:1 ratio?
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Wrong city. Its a minor league stadium. That would suck to live in downtown Denver.
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It was pretty far away.
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If you like...
I did so on the previous set of icons, I didnt realize so many were added by updates. I know it can be tedious for the animations. I'll get around to it eventually, but if you want to, help yourself
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These emoticons sure do suck on a brown background. :mummy:
Life's Surprises
in Moonlapse's Private Blog
A blog by Moonlapse in General
Posted
He's an ex-corporate executive...
Anyways, the other Triumviri remarked that these occasions can sometimes turn out to be fortunate, and it seems that this is indeed the case.