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samrus 3 hours ago

I wouldnt call those people smart. They might be playing a game optimally in the short term, but they are ruining a long term system. And i dont mean centuries, but decades. They need the general population 20 years from now to have grown up in a safe and prosperous environment with good education accross the board and the country to have the global influence necessary to maintain all that. They're throwing all that away for more cornering more of a market for the next 5-10 years. Its kinda dumb

ifwinterco 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those people aren't really "Americans" in any meaningful sense, even if they happen to hold US passports.

Once they're done with the US they'll just move onto the next country, same as they moved onto the US once the British empire was done.

They're just locusts

BLKNSLVR an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I don't disagree that they're locusts, but 'American' has been leaning heavily in the same direction as locusts for a long while. That's why they currently hold US Passports, the most fertile breeding ground.

anonymars an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

From Network (1976):

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West.

There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

binary132 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The prevailing mentality seems to be that if we don’t win in the next three quarters it will be such a catastrophe that there won’t be a future at all.

deadbabe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At any given time, there are large numbers of influential people with no long term horizons, only a short one that is rapidly approaching. For these people, a good 5-10 more years may be all they really need. That’s why we need to invent life extension tech that gives elites more incentive to think long term, even if most regular people only live normal lifespans.

pjc50 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely not. The only thing saving us from these people and their senility is the knowledge that they will eventually die.

(Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)

jmward01 an hour ago | parent [-]

This is why we need term limits everywhere. People are living longer. Without term limits on every position democracy won't survive.

coldpie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There are pros & cons to term limits, but I think an age limit would be an easy win. It gets you most of the same benefits with a lot less resistance. Anyone who will be over 65 when entering a position should be ineligible to be elected or appointed to that position. Judges with lifetime appointments should be forced to retire on their 65th birthday. It's a clean, easy to understand & enforce rule, and provides plenty of time for people to make a succession plan before their brains turn to mush.

budman1 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

72 ?

coldpie 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

Huh?

undersuit 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

We need election reform but I'm against term or age limits.

Encourage younger voters and politicians. Remove the current age limits as we're obviously not using them. Make state positions something a young person can live on, right now they have to keep their job and hope the boss is ok with them campaigning for months to just do a short legislative session.

Change campaign laws, Citizens United has shoved so much money into the system, we campaign for months, reducing the effectiveness of elected incumbents and winnowing out the candidates who can't fund raise the entire time.

Uncap the House, they passed legislation in the 1920's to limit their number to 435. Meanwhile they are now granted staff based on the population of their state. We now have more legislative staff than we would have Representatives if we kept to the original 30,000:1 that George Washington did the first presidential veto to keep.

wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.

specialist an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yup.

Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy.

Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.)

eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.

elcritch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Military coups don’t often get led by generals or top brass. It’s usually colonels or mid ranked officers who lead coups.

Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game.

Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.

svachalek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

1 in 6 households in the US are millionaires. And they're nearly a mutually exclusive group with the underemployed and educated. These are very large groups of ordinary people who are very much not running the ship right now.

There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.

BLKNSLVR an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only billionaires can afford to pay to have their entire reality replaced with fantasy.

Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.

wat10000 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Extreme wealth decouples people from the game, especially in the modern world. You think the richest of the rich will suffer when it's time for the US to pay the piper? Of course they won't. It's all a game to them. Of course they're not going to lead a coup. They already run things, why would they need to?

GolfPopper an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite.

Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.

It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.

themaninthedark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck

BLKNSLVR an hour ago | parent [-]

"I supported this revolution, should I not get more than those who did nothing?!"

an hour ago | parent | prev [-]
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