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SHRED Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-15-11 10:51 AM
Original message
As our infrastructure crumbles...
...our schools house 35 kids per class, and we fight with each other over crumbs in this massive wealth transfer to the rich...the General Atomics of this world are expanding exponentially while siphoning off some good tech minds for their profitable death machines.

Can't we do better?

:shrug:
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elocs Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-15-11 10:56 AM
Response to Original message
1. A better question might be: "Will we do better?" Probably not.
This country is so incredibly polarized at this point in our history that any change will be problematic. Whatever party that did not propose any change will seek to block it.
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ensho Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-15-11 11:04 AM
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2. we have to get rid of our Barons before we can do better
nt
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Gregorian Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-15-11 11:50 AM
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3. I don't like asking this question, but... What are we willing to forfeit?
I've thought a long many years about this. When I read "infrastructure", I remember being in an engineering course where the professor left for a period of time to work with the DOT documenting the failing infrastructure of just bridges alone. And that was in the 80's. There was serious failure already.

But getting to what I wanted to say, I now believe progress is a trade-off. When we decided to hand over our tasks to industrial manufacturing companies, our lives got easier, but we traded that ease for some other problem. Often we postponed that inevitable problem. Some of the problems are unrelated. Such as giving away the power of production, or quality of the product.

There is efficiency in mass production. Everyone making soap, or having chickens in every back yard is problematic. And one of the driving factors behind all of what we are seeing with corporations is population. We can feed 50 people in a community. 50,000 people starts to become an issue. 50,000,000 need more chickens than is feasible on small farms. And suddenly we have huge corporations.

When I say forfeit, I mean that if we are to become smaller, and retreat back to community style sustained infrastructures, then we forfeit things that are not directly found within those communities. Communities near metropolitan areas, or university towns would benefit from the local educated population.

In a nutshell, we need to get smaller. Fewer people using fewer resources. Fewer people driving over roads. There are limits. We have passed all reasonable limits, and it seems no one is really addressing this issue. Until we do, we're faced with insurmountable issues, like bigger classrooms, crumbling roads, and monster corporations.

And cue the deniers...
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