The economy _is_ a zero sum game, when you're at the top. To understand, ask yourself this: "What good's being rich if nobody's poor?". The wealthy have enormous leverage over the non-wealthy. They can make us do what they please. They can control the military. They can have anything they want. But if we all had the basics (food, shelter, healthcare) we'd be a lot less malleable. How many people here hate their jobs? How many are planning to stop going tomorrow?

Basically, when you factor in the ruling class the economy becomes a zero sum game. One side (the wealthy) gain when the rest of us (poor and middle class) lose. You're just not thinking about _what_ they gain. Power. They gain power. And as we gain, they lose that power. Zero sum it is.

I think I lost a few IQ points just reading it. Anyway, in rebuttal:

1. You don't need very many smart people. Albert Einstein did all the hard stuff when it came to the atom bomb. Factories run with a 2 or 3 engineers instead of thousands of workers. Lotus 1-2-3 put thousands of accountant clerks out of work. Etc, etc. I suppose we can all go work at Walmart.

2. Fewer people means less people to leak. Also fewer jobs means people more afraid of losing what little they have. It means less idealism and more dog-eat-dog survival.

But hey, who am I point all that out. If we just keep telling ourselves the scary stuff isn't happening because it didn't all happen at once that makes it OK, right?

This is what I don't get. Was it Ford that said he wanted his employees paid enough that they could buy the cars they made? By then everything will be made with robots. Sure, it took a little longer than we expected. Computers had to catch up and there were some material science issues. But it's pretty clear that automation is (finally) coming. Heck, Boeing is on it's way back to the US bringing robots instead of jobs... So who, besides maybe 50,000 people at the top and another 200,000 of their bootlickers is going to be able to afford food, much less a car?

Spoiler Alert: It occurs to me that I ought to add that the "gross betrayal" experienced by more radical leftists in Spain itself, Anarchists and Trotskyists alike, eventually took a more direct turn than mere annoyance at the Communist's turning back the clock as regard farm and factory collectivisations. The leadership of the POUM in particular did not fare well in the face of Stalin's ire.

Since when to terrorists hold conference calls?

The conference calls are very real. NSA has since released the following intelligence:

Intel

Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.

Orwell never fought for the actual Communists (i.e. the Russian aligned Communist Party), he fought for the POUM (which was a Trotskyist group). The exigencies of Russian foreign policy (Stalin wanted an anti-fascist alliance with Britain and France) caused the Communists to be the conservatives on the Republican side. For example, everywhere the Communists (as opposed to various Trotskyist and Anarchist groupings) gained control, factories which had spontaneously been "collectivised" by their work force were returned to the hands of the prior private owners.

The musn't upset bourgeois Britain and France line (the vanity of which reached it's denouement at the Munich conference) being pursued, at Stalin's behest, by the Communists in Spain was natural perceived by more radical leftists as a gross betrayal. Orwell saw it as such. Orwell too perceived the danger of the requirements of State taking precedence over the liberation of workers. I'm not sure how you think he was being "delusional?!" Disillusioned perhaps, but then he obviously didn't hold the Communists in high enough regard to fight with them in the first place.

I recommend reading his Homage to Catalonia, not only because it clarifies the meaning of works such as Animal Farm and 1984, but because it's a damn good read.

In this case, you need to create a (written and involved to amend) constitution.

Ah, but who needs a written constitution when you are protected by golden threads?

That's a symptom of your political system being busted. The congressman should be worried about not being reelected.

And having worked in the private sector and moved up quite a bit over the years, it's just as bad there if not worse. I've watched companies waste billions just so nobody has to admit they wasted billions (e.g. not take the write off).

squeezing from the movie studios. I know they've been trying to get a cut of concessions for years now, and raising rates on movies in general. It probably doesn't help that it's damn near impossible for a small mom and pop to skirt the law and show stuff without paying full pop anymore. I've heard movies shipping on sealed, tracked DRM'd hard disks with their own network adapter that phones home these days.

Work harder for less. It's the American Way.

it would have taken years of preventative maintenance and care. With the way things are set up today it's too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy to get that care.

I just said that his reasons were mostly health related, and that with enough money his reasons go away. I think the money should be taken out of that equation. No one should kill themselves for lack of medical care...

with the exception of some of the Alzheimer stuff he mentioned every thing he described is treatable, and even a lot of the Alzheimer stuff is. That is, if you have access to the health care. This sounds more like a failing of our society than anything else.

not saying it _does_ work, but I think you'll find people are too busy living their day to day lives (work, family, kids, social networking) to monitor all the bad things companies do. There's a reason we started regulating companies. They did really bad things until we did.

we're going to do absolutely nothing. We're too busy living our daily lives. You're guard will slip as daily life grinds you down, and you'll gradually join the sheeple. My history teacher said it best. "I was a radical in high school. Then I got a job, a car, house wife kids, the works. One I had something to lose I got real conservative real fast".

Me? I pick my poison. I'd rather have a strong central gov't I can at least try to influence and use. Maybe if we can get the schools to indoctrinate kids on the importance of democratic participation instead of the intrinsic beauty of capitalism....