Four Horsemen / US Shutdown (again)

[DooMAD]

I'm sure someone told me to watch this ages ago, but never got around to it until now. Certainly something to think about. I bet if everyone watched it, there would be much less scapegoating around things like immigration and welfare. It's the ideology that's all wrong.

[DooMAD]

I was going to start a new thread, but as it's on the same topic:

US narrowly avoids shutdown (again)

But at what cost?

Firstly, how many of you can think back to a time when one of these votes was needed every year to keep your country from falling off a cliff? How long before you start needing more than one vote a year? How long before it's every month? It's not like you don't know this little game of extend and pretend can't carry on forever. You know it's not good for you, but like some sort of heroin addict, you need another fix to make it through the day.

Secondly, "by the way, you can now throw even more money at us to pass the laws you deem profitable" and "actually, no, we won't put the banks on a leash, let them run riot". I honestly can't tell if you're even pretending to cling to the delusion that you're still a democracy.

[Mr. Freeze]

Isn't this more gold standard bullshit?

[DooMAD]

Mr. Freeze said:

Isn't this more gold standard bullshit?

This is more of a "what we have at the moment is bullshit". I'm guessing you didn't bother to watch the video? Although, in fairness, at least two of the people in the documentary are clearly goldbugs. It's called four horsemen because it highlights four different problems. Money is just one of them (that's how fucked we are).

If there's one sentiment I'd like to convey in this thread, it's that I honestly don't care what solution people think is best, just as long as you all recognise what the problem is. The world is heading in completely the wrong direction and the US just took another massive step in that wrong direction.

If I created a brand new system where I told you I was trying to achieve perpetual growth and the fuel for that growth is something that also has to grow perpetually, you would quite rightly call me mathematically illiterate. We want economic growth, which is fuelled by money and money grows perpetually. That's the system we find ourselves in. Add on top of that multiple layers of corruption. Then on top of that dwindling resources.

Perhaps you could argue that economic growth isn't fuelled by money, but by production. But you'd still have to concede the system isn't set up to emphasise that. Maybe that's another part of the problem with all the focus placed on the financial sector who don't actually "produce" anything useful. Also, the fact that we chase "growth" as a priority to begin with is something that needs to be looked at more closely.

It's a clusterfuck and we're chasing numbers we can't ever hope to achieve. I can't see how anyone can possibly deny that.