Millions Dead And People Accept It As Perfectly Normal

reply to post by crimvelvet

You spell it out real well. I've spent some time thinking about free market ideas and how government fits into all of it. I've come to a similar semi-conclusion that humans concentrate power because of self-preservation. Inevitably, a company wants to survive and will gobble up its competitors. Eventually, you will end up with only a few of them running the show. It would be logical to say that this must mean that this one company is the most evolved and fittest company so how would it be bad for it to run everything? Well, it's bad because now the market is only owned by one company. Companies are set in their ways just like people. Some people excel, like bill gates, while others don't. If you want a society that represents everyone then you need to prevent monopolies from forming and you need a government that can represent everyone, not just a portion of them. Who would want to live in a society where they cannot be what they want to be because somebody else far more powerful owns the market? This will lead to a decline in innovation. Even the best person gets old. Similarly, even the best company gets old. We need to break up companies every once in a while to breed new competition so that we have a new generation of conflict to weed out the ineffective producers.

I think that greed expresses itself through self-preservation. We have to realize that even the best members of society, the smartest and most confident among us, even they cannot exist alone. Their behavior and genetics depended on all of the others who failed to produce. Without all of the failures, there would be no successes. Out future needs diversity and innovation just as much as it needs our best and brightest. We cannot have a world where only the mediocre rule, nor can we have a world run by the most powerful. We need a changing, understanding world.

By letting the most able lead, we're exercising eugenics. By letting the weak lead, we're crippling ourselves. I don't see balance on either end. I see it in the middle; mutual agreement.

This is a grand evolutionary experiment, as I see it. This universe is like a giant brute force computational unit. Intelligence is derived from trial and error. Essentially, everything is tried over and over and from the mess of computation an answer starts to emerge. The multiverse pumps out these individual universes. Some succeed and produce life and some don't. And each universe produces different kinds of life. Some of the life is successful and some isn't. In the grand scheme of things, we're like individual sensors that sense light or do not sense light. If we survive, then we sensed appropriately. If not, then we failed to sense correctly. That's really all we are. Not a pretty thought, but as long as we don't ever notice it's not a problem.

That's why they say the smartest people have made the most mistakes. You have to find what works then store it away for future use. Then you can pass it on to your children and they will use it or lose it dependong on what happens. I believe this is the key to how intelligence formed and how our universe appears to have precise conditions for life. These things happeend through a grand computational evolution of sorts. It's beyond imagining. We can get a grasp of it by looking at lifeforms on our own planet and seeing how they change states and survive conditions on earth. The amount of memory and processing involved here is mind /boggling. We have nothing to compare it to. Our memory and processor systems are astronomically insufficient.

Another words, the Matrix (the movie) is a long, long ways off. If we model it after the lessons learned here on earth then we might have an approximation. After all, you do not need to compute the whole universe, you only need to trick the human mind into believing false things - which is easy to do. But if we intend on repeating the successes and failures that brought us here to this present time, in total, for an accurate replication of all that is, we would need many universe(s) of available memory and computation to arrive at the desired outcome.

Personally, I think the most successful people might also have the most innate confidence. Think about it. The more things you try, the more mistakes you make. From that pool of knowledge, you start to find answers. The least confident by nature will stick to what is familiar and will inevitably decline and fall from the ladder. The most successful will keep going up the ladder until their rate of trial and error falls short. If you were a super being, you would eventually even overcome death, if that was your only hurdle. I don't think there's a hard a limit. I think it's a soft limit.

A successful man who makes a mistake, doesn't give up, he proclaims, rather loudly:
"I'm just gettin' started."

Another point to think about is how they will bill you. Do you think there will be a booth at each end of every road? That's not cost effective. What they will do is TRACK YOUR EVERY MOVE. "All we have to do is install this little thing in your car and that's it! Now...Wasn't that easy?? Hmmm?" Where you go, when you go how long you were there. I can see them "partnering" with the local grocery store since that will be generating traffic on their roads Hey...Then that way they can target you with some really specific advertising on all those billboards you know will go up plus they will have access to your purchasing habits to sell to other "partners"! Yippee! I just can't see a down side to privatization!

It will be factory farming...The people become the cows and our money is their milk...Count me out.

reply to post by ReluctantBlossom


So how do you think the government makes you pay for roads currently?

Do they send assessors to your home and auditors to your place of employment?

Do they force you to file a tax return that could potentially incriminate yourself if you make a mistake in filling it out?

Do they offer electronic tracking tags for publicly owned tollways?


Which is worse?

Voluntarily accepting a tracking device to use a private road that only transmits data to a single private entity or having the government comb over every aspect of your financial life?

Do you use an ATM card voluntarily today? The banks know exactly where you were at when you used it. Isn't that exactly the same as using an electronic toll booth tag?

reply to post by mnemeth1


But it wouldn't be voluntary and it wouldn't just go to one private entity...It would be sold to all their partners and anyone else who wanted to buy it for whatever reason. It would be used to target ever more invasive advertising. "Oh...looks like she went to the Dr. so she must be sick...Better up her health insurance, quick!" I can also choose to use cash instead of my ATM card if I want to. I can come and go as I please. That freedom would be gone because they'd have to bill me for it.

No-The government isn't perfect, some parts of it are downright evil, but the majority of its purpose is to make sure that society runs smoothly so people can get to work and do their jobs and raise their families and pay their taxes so it all keeps going on and on. "To promote the general welfare" and all that. Corporations have shown again and again that they will do anything to anyone in pursuit of profit. They feed us poison. They contaminate community water supplies with their fracking.They get tax breaks, subsidies and incentives and even millions in tax refunds and instead of reinvesting in the country and the people that made them successful, they strip us of our rights as workers and ship the jobs to other countries and still it isn't enough for them.

It will never be enough for them.

reply to post by ReluctantBlossom


What are they going to sell?

Information about how often you use their toll road?

They wouldn't know anything more about you than any other shop vendor would, and they certainly would know far less about you than your bank or the government does today.

Toll road operators are not Facebook.

They don't have a record of everything you "like".

The government uses threats and violence to make you pay for roads that you may or may not use. Private toll road operators only make you pay for using their road for the time you are on it, and they don't threaten people who don't use their roads.

Do you really think they will have a tollbooth operator? That isn't cost effective so they won't do that.
There will be tracking and every time you enter or leave private property it will be tracked. They WILL partner with businesses on their streets---businesses that you will use and they WILL sell your info to one another. "What will they sell?" you wonder? EVERYTHING. What you buy, how much you spend where you go. Just like on the internet only you can't turn it off and go to bed. They will know what you "like" because everytime you buy "it" they will know because the store you bought "it" from is one of their partners and that info will be storable and sellable. Your doctor's office is on a street so he will have some kind of deal with the owner of the road...What if they want health info because maybe another partner somewhere is an insurance company? The tentacles just never, ever end...And this baloney about how "you may or may not use" the roads..EVERYBODY uses the roads...Whether or not you drive on them, if you own anything at all, odds are it was shipped to you over the roads. Unless you live in the middle of a forest in Siberia and never, ever come out- YOU USE THE ROADS. And at least the way it's done now is fair...For the most part there are no "premium streets" for the rich and "budget streets" for the poor--ALL the roads suck everywhere.
And what makes you think a corporation won't use threats and violence if you can't pay your bill? They would NEVER do that! (Rolling eyes)

reply to post by ReluctantBlossom


You are right. Look at the incredible job the central government control has done for our schools versus the education done by private schools. The government has always been so perfect and without corruption. Look at the incredible job the DOE has done to reduce dependency of oil imports. Look at the fabulous job that the Great Society programs have done for the black communities.The only solution is to nationalize everything as soon as possible so no one makes any money except the government that always has the people's best interests at heart. Mao, Stalin and Hitler proved long ago that total control by a central government run by a dictator is preferable to any privately held enterprise.

reply to post by billyjack


I'm not saying that the government should control everything...I think that's a horrible idea too. We need to have a blend between government control and private ownership to really make things work for everyone. The road system is just one of several things that should be maintained by a strong central government for the good of all of us with the reasons I pointed out just being a few of the bigger problems privatization would create.

I know there are major problems with our system right now-things we all feel powerless to change and that need to be changed before we all go to Hell in a handbasket...But handing everything over to the control of giant corporations who have shown us time and time again that they are willing and even eager to to abuse, exploit and destroy anything or any person to increase their profits would doom everyone but those at the top. As corporations have gained more and more power over our elected officials things have gotten worse for everyone. They have spent the last 25 years defunding the parts of the system we all depend upon and then using the inevitable results of that to justify still more cuts and then say that the only way to fix things is to privatize them.
If I had to choose between the government, which still is beholden to ALL of the people, and a corporation that is beholden only to it's investors, I would choose the government where at least for now, I still have a voice.