People get what they deserve, and the world apparently deserves the US monitoring all of its communications. My only hope is a complete collapse of their government.
America collapsed in four waves. 1913, 1930, 1971, 2001.
By almost any metric you could measure, America has lost substantial ground over 40 years. The late 1990s or early 2000's was the peak of the visible projection of "superpower" status, but it was mostly a fraud. Even the temporary budget surplus was a fraud, made possible by an extreme economic bubble and stealing from social security inflows.
The real US standard of living has declined since the late 1960s. And that huge standard of living was only possible due to the rest of the world having been blown up in WW2; America was left with half the global manufacturing base by default, with little competition for two decades.
In the most straight-forward of terms: America got rich with manufacturing, and poor with consumption; one creates wealth, the other eats it. China is now the one getting rich off of manufacturing, along with a few other nations.
We've been floating on borrowed time for 30 years in the form of ever cheaper credit, sustained by the military reach of a superpower that convinced the likes of Japan and China to buy trillions of dollars of worthless paper. The dollar, as the global reserve currency, has been living on a reputation it hasn't deserved for many decades, namely that it's good as gold.
The end of cheap money has arrived. You can easily guess what happens next. US national debt has a mere 64 month turn over period to it. Countries like China have shifted most of their treasuries to short term holdings. 5% * $20 trillion = $1 trillion in interest alone. See Japan for an example of what happens, they currently pay half their tax revenue toward debt interest.
The proof as they say, is in the pudding.
By the time the world stops letting you get away with massive debt binging, it's too late and you're screwed. Exactly as we are today. Which is why our central bank has to 'print' in order to fund the government or it would instantly be insolvent. The QE programs are primarily about debt monetization (which is what quantitative easing was always about historically) to keep the Federal Government from collapsing.
Net exporting is how you create rapid domestic wealth: you sell manufactured goods to the rest of the world at a profit, and consume less than you earn. Just ask China about their massive increase in national wealth built on the back of net exports.
1) The real US standard of living has declined since the 1960s? What? What is "the real US standard of living?" How is it measured and where is the evidence it has declined? Here's a quick list of vast improvements since the 1960s, all contributing to standard of living: civil rights, medicine, commercial flight, computers/phones/internet, globalization, declining crime rates. Those are just a few.
2)America got rich with manufacturing, poor with consumption? Sorry, this is just not how economics works. There are not simply two types of economies that equally add and subtract from each other. There are more kinds of exports than "manufacturing," and consumption drives manufacturing. Also, explain to me why the Chinese government is making a concerted effort to transition into a consumption economy, if it is so bad?
3) You mak a good point about currency. But understand how much of the world economy, not just the US economy, depends on the dollar. US debt is not only a US issue. Almost every country, especially China, has a vested interest in the success of the dollar. That fact alone will keep it afloat.
- National debt skyrocketing to extreme imbalances; it's so extreme now, America can hardly afford 1% interest on the national debt
- A hundred trillion in entitlement liabilities that can never actually be paid for, with social security already bleeding out negative flows, and there is no actual SS trust fund
- Significant erosion in the labor force participation rate, even as the population expands and a lot more households in which both parents work versus in the 1960s or 1970s
- Welfare dependency has soared
- Food stamp usage has soared
- Big surge in part time jobs; and 2nd & 3rd jobs
- U6 (aka real) unemployment has soared, now at 14.3%
- Trade deficits continue at extreme levels
- Federal Reserve has to buy 75%+ of all new US government debt to keep the government from becoming insolvent, leading to a guaranteed fiscal downward spiral that is already happening
- Economy requires permanent 0% interest rates, and trillions worth of QE stimulus just to stay flat lined
- Massive long term manufacturing job losses
- Huge plunge in return on invested capital by corporations over 40 years
- Unsustainable imbalance between consumption and manufacturing, leading to an explosion in consumer debt over 40 years
- Hyper implosion in the savings rate
- 76% of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/index.h...
- A trillion dollars in student loan debt that didn't exist just 20 years ago; larger than all credit card debt, and guaranteed to either drown this generation, or require a massive printed bailout; with no jobs to match the loan debt
- Primary job growth exists in services, specifically the hospitality industry; aka consumption jobs; and that's only doing ok due to the Fed inflating the stock market, so rich people are spending on hospitality
- Significant plunge in full time jobs as a trend; 240,000 were lost last month alone
- Huge shift in financial inequality in every respect
- Minimum wage falling by 70% over 40 years
- Huge decline in real disposable income
- Balance of equity to debt in home ownership
- Balance of equity to debt in car ownership (2nd most expensive thing consumers buy)
- Income per capita, 1960's vs today, relative to all other major industrialized nations
- Massive erosion in the dollar since 1970 has stolen a huge amount of standard of living from the bottom economic tiers who are least able to adjust to even modest amounts of inflation
This list is very long and it keeps going
I have to say, I don't really care any more. I have had enough. Yeah, I don't like what the US is doing, but my lot are in it up their necks, and are literally proud of it. My people don't care, my media don't care, no one cares. So I am the odd one out. Fine, we live in a so called democracy, so the people can have what they damn well deserve. My only hope is that I see this get really out of hand, and "normal" people start to get hurt by this. Then I can just stand there and laugh my sweet behind off at them, asking, "who did you vote for?".
As for me, I'll be a lot more careful, increasingly use security and simply act in a more aware way. Its all I can do. :(
(1)I say "real" because the "troubles" lasted over 30 years with sustained attacks of many kinds were successfully launched through that entire period, including the bombing of our entire government. Way worse than anything evil Muslims have done to the UK. I was indirectly involved, I know real terror. A one off attack is NOT terror. 30 odd years sustained, damn well is. Oh, a lot of it funded by Americans who saw the IRA as freedom fighters.
The problem with a lot of civil liberties situations is that while the consequences of being the victim of a deliberate abuse or simply a mistake can be severe for the individual, the probability of being such a victim remains low, particularly if you're a good little citizen and keep your head down. This allows the kind of "it would never happen to me" mentality that Pastor Niemoeller tried to warn us about.
Realistically, the expected damage to an individual citizen from (for example) a busted economy or poor healthcare or low quality education really is much higher than the expected damage from a government failing to respect the civil liberties of its citizens, so the "meh, got bigger things to worry about" crowd do have a point here. It's just unfortunate that there is a lot of danger in the world and most people don't have the time to expend on every possible danger to them or their loved ones, so they naturally favour concentrating on the dangers they perceive to be the biggest threats.
We're supposed to have representative governments as a way to balance this problem, so that the people who are there as professional public servants have more time to consider the issues that aren't numbers 1-N on the list. Alas, numbers 1-N on the list then become the deciding factors in the elections that determine those representatives instead, and anything from N+1 on down can be handled or mishandled as the representatives and whatever special interest groups have their ear see fit.
I'd like to say I have a solution to this, but it seems to be an inherent problem built into typical modern political systems. However, it's deeply ironic that many governments' own actions in these cases seem to be doing exactly the opposite, letting the fear of a high-impact, low-probability event like a major terrorist attack dominate their agenda rather than dealing with vastly more important issues like the ones I mentioned before. I still don't quite understand what's really in it for them to constantly perpetuate the fear of crime and terrorism, nor for the media to collaborate in doing so. Surely spending all that time and money and public attention on high-profile, high-value projects that would actually make a difference to a lot of people's lives would give them more political capital come election time, but at the moment it seems as if the political classes have lost all perspective.
Hopefully the protest will be repeated soon. This was kind of bad timing, because now politicians all over the world are also going to start their vacations, and it's summer and people don't want to think about "serious issues" anymore. But I agree it's still depressing.
Declare the East Coast US States independent and be done with it; I am tired of waiting.
How does that solve this problem? I mean, I can't even guess which side of this issue you think the "East Coast" is on.
Now one may argue that that is already defined in the Constitution and that even if it wasn't, more local politics could be enforced by law by reducing the reach of the federal government. But I doubt either of us are that naïve.
The USA have proved that democracy does not scale well. And that is why it has moved to centralise power ever since the Constitution was signed.
It may not be a victory for privacy, but it would be a victory for democracy.
One of the few plausible ways out of the mess we find ourselves in right now is a strong movement towards states rights. Nominally, the states have a lot more power in our system then they are currently exercising, so it doesn't require any new law, just some assertions of what already exists (albeit in the form of Constitutional Conventions rather than simply asserting laws, which would be simpler). It's not my perfect ideological solution by any means, but it's one of the few practical ones, inasmuch as it does involve walking up to a group of people and asking them to go grab more power as competing interests, rather than asking people with power to unilaterally disarm, which is pretty much a "fat chance" option.
Secession is in some sense the ultimate State's right extreme, but I wouldn't advocate it until more normal avenues were tried and failed. It has... proved hazardous, to say the least.
I imagine it would be like this; a state (or more) announce that they will hold a referendum on independence, months (or even years) before the actual referendum will take place (similar to how it will take place in Scotland). This will give the President and the Federal Government time to react without having to sort to arms right away.
Furthermore, a referendum is particularly what will set it apart from the American Civil War; this will be the will of the people (of that state, obviously) and not merely the will of the state (which was the case during the American Civil War, it was merely the legislatures that decided to secede, and not by referendum).
This will make it much harder to justify for the federal government to intervene with military. Seeing as the process will open and peaceful, it would be seen as a considerable overreaction by the federal government to strike down with force on a seceding state.
In addition because war has gotten so much more terrible, and I doubt you'd even convince the army of doing so.
In short; I do not believe that you should be afraid of a military response to an independence, as long as you play fair. That's just intimidation. It would be sad to see that the only thing keeping the American states united was fear.
However, I do agree with you that independence should be the last resort. But considering the last few decades, it seems many things have already been tried.
scnr
He rejected it for his own reasons.
I think it is a safe bet that they knew what Snowdens values were before making the offer and they fully expected him to turn it down. Or they knew it for certain...
America used to be the place where things like this could happen, but that's not so much anymore. There's still innovation, but the trend doesn't look good and most of the world just doesn't care.
The George Washington willing-to-cede-his-throne type will be just as rare on Mars in 2095 as it is today, as it was throughout history.
In any case, it would be a bold experiment. To go in with the intention of building a better social contract, or to rethink what that even means, is something that we should keep in mind. Mars shouldn't just be a joyride in 0.4 g, but an intentional effort to rethink society.
Well congratulations. You now live in a tube or box in a freezing, unbreathable, radiated, barren desert. The only way you can go outside is by donning a bulky environmental suit and breathing apparatus. You may have brought a dune buggy of some kind along for exploration, but you can't go very far. If something happens to it, your spare parts are numbered and you probably won't survive the night out there, spending your last moments staring at yet more sand and rocks.
You don't have real mining or manufacturing capabilities and a resupply takes years. At best, you might have a high-end industrial 3D printer for parts, but your (specialty!) raw materials will run out very quickly, and you can't 3D print truly complicated things.
The remainder of your life now depends on you maintaining a delicate, miniature artificial ecosystem inside, so you can produce food and oxygen indefinitely. This is a feat which, when we tried it back here on Earth, failed miserably (Biosphere 2). That was with the luxury of Earth-based construction, at atmospheric pressure, without having to ship materials out and in of two enormous gravity wells. Environmental integrity was a question of science, not one of life and death. Besides, there is no reason to believe that Earth's ecosystem itself is stable long-term, never mind an artificially picked subset of it.
Once the honeymoon period is over and you've settled in, you will slowly come to understand what it means to be truly alone. You will never again see the people you left behind. You cannot move away if you get into irreconcilable conflict. Your survival depends on maintaining social cohesion above else, despite none of the usual comforts being available.
If, above all odds, people manage to not go insane on their own, there's always Dunbar's number: a suggested upper limit on the size of stable social groups. In case of ideological rifts, it is impossible for people to move away and start over: unlike on Earth, a new colony can only be started with the full and unconditional cooperation of an existing one.
If you want to try new things, Mars is the last place to do so. Whoever goes there will be clinging to the way things were.
We already have a vague approximation of colonizing Mars anyway: Antarctica. Go read about life on McMurdo base for example, or this: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/big-stink-brews-in-anta...
The point is that I'm not talking about a society a year or even a decade into a mission. Once the groundwork is laid, though, the possibilities emerge. The colonies didn't revolt until 169 years after Jamestown was founded. I'll finish by saying that your pessimism is unfounded, as very smart people have figured out solutions to most of the problems you have presented. Furthermore, just because you personally do not find such a situation to your liking doesn't mean that others feel the same way.
"We need a new planet so we can try new things, create new ideas, and generally liberate ourselves of traditional conventions."
Of all the places to try out 'new conventions', the harshest frontier in human history does not sound like a good idea. And I agree, BioSphere was terrible, but the important thing is that it failed (mainly) for human reasons, not scientific ones. I think it is entirely possible we lack the capacity as a species to thrive outside our world.
I don't think the scientific problems are impossible to overcome, but I do think anyone who flies there with any notion of romantic exploration and a new beginning is going on a suicide mission.
Ironically, this is exactly the mindset behind statements like "I don't care" and the 50+% of pepole who don't even follow such things.
If the same money was put in to health, road safety, gun control, and so on, they would be much more secure and safe. Real lives would be saved, not hypothetical ones. But since they are high on terrorist stories fed to them by the terror dealers in government, via their media runners, they will never know that, so their sense of security is utterly false.
PRISM will not save them from the real statistical dangers in any way. It will not ever give them a quiet life.
The fact that the priorities of most people are not necessarily aligned with reality isn't the fault of someone explaining the status quo. This gets missed, I think sometimes, in these discussions.
A quiet life free of safety concerns is NOT a right, and attempting implementation thereof via government necessitates serious violation of other fundamental rights. A "proper" totalitarian police state is the only means to that end - and not something many of us are going to put up with.
(No, I didn't downvote it, but understand why one would.)
Why do they deserve this, and not to be told that the life and safety you propose is not possible to provide? I would further argue that safety and quietude are not basic rights, and while I'm open to having my mind changed on the topic, I have never been able to find evidence that what you say is so.
They were scheduled to take place on the fourth of July. I understand and appreciate the symbolism, but the date makes a large turnout unlikely.