[thoughtgypsy]

(04-19-2016 10:28 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  

(04-19-2016 01:40 PM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  

I worked at a NASA center during the development of the Ares-V and Ares-I-X under the Constellation program before it was cancelled.

Holy crap, an actual rocket scientist!

Haha, well technically not a rocket scientist. Usually Aerospace and Mechanical engineers fill that role. NASA is also made up of other engineering disciplines like electrical (which handle power generation and transmission, communications, control systems, remote sensing), Systems engineering (which handle integration of the various systems, weight budgets, etc), and chemical and material engineering. There are also other fields that are of various interest in other missions such as geology and meteorology (for science missions), applied mathematicians (for calculating the orbital dynamics and flight paths of missions, or for calculating astronomical phenomena), physicists, chemists, and so on. You'd be surprised how many college students rotate through NASA as a result of their internship and CO OP programs. Most impressive of all are the Test Pilots.

[Dalaran1991]

So this is how you draw out the most intellectual guys in the forum!

Awesome contribution people thanks! And I'm just here reading on the Moon landing and the burning of Alexandria instead of being productive

On a serious note, this whole discussion on how easy it is to change history and wipe out "the truth" got me jumping. What if, in Roosh and Samseau's apocalyptic visions, one day all men are actually enslaved by societies and feminists and men's lives can be at the mercy of any fat whore at any moment (save for an elite minority) Lots of predictions like this seem crazy but at back at 300BC people would think you mad if you say Rome would one day fall *Not wanting to derail my own thread*

[Paracelsus]

(04-20-2016 07:07 AM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  

Most impressive of all are the Test Pilots.

Man, what I wouldn't give to hear the thoughts of a NASA Test Pilot.

[debeguiled]

(04-19-2016 09:27 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

I watched the Monuments Men film recently. It struck me as poorly-made, too diffuse, too much a collection of anecdotes, but it wasn't until roughly the final third of the movie that I realised exactly what its problem was: the moviemakers and the actors didn't believe European culture was actually worth saving.

Great insight. I don't remember having any thoughts after this movie except it made me curious to see the Ghent Altarpiece, which I knew nothing about, and I realized that even though this movie talked about art, it did very little to actually express a real appreciation of art.

In case you saw the movie, and feel you are missing out on the Ghent Altarpiece, here it is:



This is not the derail it seems. Maybe appreciation of fine art is on its way to being a lost technology.

[debeguiled]

(04-20-2016 06:52 AM)weambulance Wrote:  

As to the point of the thread...

I think there's a tendency to romanticize ancient works and knowledge and make it sound like the ancients knew all kinds of things that we don't. I don't think that's true at all.

There are many things we don't know the specifics of, like we don't know for sure exactly what Greek fire was, but it's not like we can't make waterproof, floating incendiary weapons with period materials. We don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, but it's not difficult to come up with valid theories for how they might have been built with the available resources. Scientists have replicated moving Easter Island statues without powered equipment. I'm sure if someone wanted to donate enough money to the effort, historians and engineers could build a small pyramid with nothing but muscle power.

Many ancient structures were better built than modern things because, I suspect, they operated on a longer time horizon than we do. And of course the structures that weren't well built aren't around anymore, so we're seeing only the best now. It's absurd to imagine that if we wanted to, we couldn't build structures that would last several thousand years*. But we don't want or need to. The world changes too fast and most people don't think beyond their own lifetimes, if they manage to think even that far ahead.

Everything is on a budget, built by the lowest bidder who will probably cut corners, and few things are expected to last more than a handful of decades. Why build a bridge that will last 100 years when odds are its traffic or weight capacity will be exceeded by the local community in only 20 years? Why do the roads in most of the US suck? I assure you it's not because we don't know how to build better roads.

I'm not saying knowledge hasn't been lost or that humans didn't experience civilizational setbacks because of it, I just think claims that ancient civilizations actually knew more than we do--and such claims are common enough--are sensationalist. We might not do things exactly the same way, but I've never heard of anything ancients could do that we literally cannot do anymore by any method, unless you count "look at species in nature that are extinct now".

I do lament the general lack of craftsmanship in the things I see around me, though.

This is a great point, and it is making me wonder if the important technologies we are losing aren't really the tangible scientific ones, but the big picture ones.

Is it too much of a stretch to say that something like a taking the long view, and thinking of generations that will come, counts as a technology, or is it more of a mindset?

It seems to me that, rather than asking what medieval Englishmen insulated their houses with and comparing it to the spun glass of today, it is much more important to ask ourselves why do we choose to build houses that (coincidentally) fall apart the minute the 30 year mortgage is paid?

Look at the roads and bridges, as you say, that are falling apart, and you are right, we have all the technology in the world, but they were built with the assumption that the economy would continue to expand forever and ever, so why not, along with the politicians, kick the can of rebuilding them further down the road?

These are far more intractable problems than comparing the roofing products of today with say, a bit of rope twisted from straw to hold up the thatching from Stuart England. (I saw a bit of this rope from the 1600s in a documentary. Because the thatch had kept it dry, it was still as strong as the day it was made, but that's a side issue.)

If family homes get abandoned by the kids at 18 as a matter of course, how are you going to interest people in paying for stairways like this:



Why not just slap up something like this:



I think a return to ideas of craftsmanship, and longevity are not only aesthetic ideals, they are practical ones. And if your kids don't want your carefully built house, you could just dismantle it and sell it to someone, as I am sure in the future, anything that is made to last will be selling at a premium.

[Parzival]

Whats more interesting, what did we achieve in the last 40 years? After we got to the moon, whats next? Not so much. Even more, whats the fastes plane in the world? Still an old one from the 70s the Blackbird. Sure our computers got faster and we have internet. But did this put on more value to our lives? We got rid of all the dirty labour, at least in some parts of the world, people live longer and poverty went down. With some of this modern technology, our minds still stick in the past of industrialisation. Thats how they plan and construct societies. The knowledge is not only technology, its wisdom. Did we gain more of this? We are just bigger apes with better rocks in our hands. With all the possibilities in some level we stay the same. The computers and the internet just create more pressure, we compare now with machines. We are not smart enough to use them to our benefit. Automation, Digitalisation, it could solve so many issues and still we think like 150 years ago.

[Paracelsus]

(04-20-2016 04:39 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

It seems to me that, rather than asking what medieval Englishmen insulated their houses with and comparing it to the spun glass of today, it is much more important to ask ourselves why do we choose to build houses that (coincidentally) fall apart the minute the 30 year mortgage is paid?

The shortest answer is planned obsolescence.

Take your average incandescent lightbulb. Edison is not the inventor or the only historical producer of electric bulbs; like Henry Ford, he's merely the guy who was the most successful at selling them and finding a bulb that would keep him in business. Edison's first lightbulb only lasted 13.5 hours, but in months he had built one that lasted 1,200 hours ... that is, three years of continuous burning.

But Edison's bulb is not the best. The best one is the one that's stood the test of time, the bulb that Adolphe Chailet built, one of which has been burning for more than a century non-stop. Note in the story that they trialed several different bulbs from several different companies with increasing voltage. While every other bulb -- including Edison's -- burst as the voltage increased, Chailet's bulb took it without flinching and just kept getting brighter.

How is it that the earliest light bulbs lasted for decades longer than they do now?

In brief, the Phoebus Cartel, something that sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel but which was deadly serious. The lightbulb companies got together in the 1920s, realising that as their designs got better and better, their sales dropped off further and further.

Per that page I've linked to:

Quote:

As technological advances improved and pushed out the life span of incandescent bulbs, sales volumes would be negatively impacted. Fewer, infrequently burnt out bulbs meant less need for replacements – less demand for their products. While price fixing was a natural result of cooperation in an imperfectly competitive market, the Phoebus cartel strived to do more than hike prices. They went beyond limiting product innovation – over the gradual course of a few years, manufacturers actively lower the life span of light bulbs. The industry standard of 2,500 hours in 1924 would eventually drop to 1,000 hours by 1940. Light bulbs were deliberately made more fragile, and competitors would be closely monitored (and if necessary, fined) to ensure strict adherence to product degradation. The Phoebus cartel would eventually dissolve due to increased external competition and the disruptions of World War II, but it had successfully demonstrated a very important point. Stifling innovation and product quality was a feasible means of sustaining consistent consumption and profits.

Couched within this time frame would be the Great Depression through much of the 1930s. Whilst the most famous economic contribution of the time would come from John Maynard Keynes in the form of Keynesian economics, one other man suggested an idea that would eventually be much more pervasive in our social mentality. In 1932, Bernard London proposed that to solve the Great Depression, all goods were to be produced with planned obsolescence – that everything would only be useable for a finite time before rendered obsolete. Obsolete goods would be forfeited to the government, and consumers would have no choice but to go and buy new goods, as a means of creating demand and stimulating the depressed economy. This farfetched proposal understandably failed to gain traction, due to its unpopular and rigid nature, but his musings did not fall on deaf ears.

What was shot down in the 1930s would adapt and come back stronger in the 1950s, thanks to industrial designer Brooks Stevens. With an ideology that centred on designs that felt ‘new’, his influential status in America directed the focus of consumers to the way products looked. Distanced from the notion of a product’s functional obsolescence, Stevens would rather push to instil in the consumer the willingness to chase the latest trends, to sooner abandon their old products in favour of the newest design. This propensity to purchase the latest novelties would be a big force in developing a consumerist society, one that has carried on to something we still strongly subscribe to today.

Planned obsolescence forces us to buy more shit earlier because it doesn't last as long, but Brooks Stevens' insight attacked the Western psyche and made us our own psychological slaves to planned obsolescence: he played on us not being forced to buy a new product when it burned out, but rather created/played on our thirst for something newer than what we have. This is where the loss of craftsmanship really lies: because we were fooled, as a society, into thinking that because something was new it was automatically better. You can see the results of that mindset in the idiot hordes who queue up for the newest shitty iPhone that does exactly the same thing the old one does. Planned obsolescene is one of the fathers of our consumerist society.

[samsamsam]

(04-20-2016 07:07 AM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  

(04-19-2016 10:28 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  

(04-19-2016 01:40 PM)thoughtgypsy Wrote:  

I worked at a NASA center during the development of the Ares-V and Ares-I-X under the Constellation program before it was cancelled.

Holy crap, an actual rocket scientist!

Haha, well technically not a rocket scientist. Usually Aerospace and Mechanical engineers fill that role. NASA is also made up of other engineering disciplines like electrical (which handle power generation and transmission, communications, control systems, remote sensing), Systems engineering (which handle integration of the various systems, weight budgets, etc), and chemical and material engineering. There are also other fields that are of various interest in other missions such as geology and meteorology (for science missions), applied mathematicians (for calculating the orbital dynamics and flight paths of missions, or for calculating astronomical phenomena), physicists, chemists, and so on. You'd be surprised how many college students rotate through NASA as a result of their internship and CO OP programs. Most impressive of all are the Test Pilots.

Nice try to humble your way out this one. Expect a PM from me when I try to recreate a V2 in backyard.

[Blobert]

Extinct animal species. Most clearly in domestic animals, the biodiversity of cattle breeds now compared to a 100 years ago is huge. A lot of breeds bred for survivability and toughness in adverse conditions have simply died out since they can't compete in a mass farm environment where you just sit on your ass all day.

Wild extinct species we've not had a direct hand in shaping, can count as a technological loss in a sense too - imagine your ancestor was a mammoth hunter and he ran out of mammoths, shit, he better come up with a new lifestyle. And he'll also forget what he knew about hunting mammoths, and how to treat one's corpse. When the shit hits the fan you might wish you had some Neanderthal pals to cover your back.

But who knows, maybe we can bring back some dead species in the near future, and of course create new ones much more efficiently with gene editing... Like some ancient engineer who created the Cheetah to be an ultimate pet.

[thoughtgypsy]

(04-21-2016 09:20 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  

Nice try to humble your way out this one. Expect a PM from me when I try to recreate a V2 in backyard.

I would not recommend that...





And something I'll pass on to my firstborn son:

[Dalaran1991]

Bumping this thread because I've been thinking a lot about human knowledge.

One thing that strike me is, in the event of another "fall" (apocalypse, huge world war, whatever), just how likely it is for most if not all the technology we have today to be suddenly lost?

A vast majority of guide and manual we have now is on the net, and let's suppose the net is gone, humans are scattered into small bands (so typically your vanilla apoc scenario)

Which one among us here knows how to jury-rig a radio? A phone line? A computer? A TV? Let alone building them from the ground up.
Again, let's suppose that you only have 1 radio / computer left and if you mess it up you are done with the tech.

We take our computer for granted, but if you look at it another way, a screen that lights up on commands, playing images and sounds is freaking magic to me. Sure, most of us here know the general theory about how it works. But take a computer all apart, and I mean taking even the smallest part on the motherboard apart, how many of us can reassemble it without a manual?

Inspired from this piece of warhammer literature which has become popular here:

Quote:

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-Fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare shithole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometers of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is fucked. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Towards the close of the Heresy, Rogal Dorn sent some Space Marine operatives to wipe the planet clean of all life. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The fucking Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seeking to kill you.

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

This is why they do not like ANYONE fucking with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to fuck with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, they never have, and they never will.

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire fucking military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed and a whole swathe of the logistical side of your society, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

[Leonard D Neubache]

There's a school of thought that if we suffer a serious decline that we can never recover beyond subsistence agricultural living again.

That's because all of the "easy" resources that we built our civilisations with are completely tapped out. You don't find oil at ten feet anymore, and if the drilling rigs all fall into disrepair then what kind of technology tree would you need to get them started again, and how is it possible when the energy surplus of an oil based society was what allowed us to drill to thousands of feet, miles offshore no less?

And that's just one of a thousand supply chain issues that a true collapse would bring about.

The theory goes that the inhabitants of a planet have just one shot to build a civilisation that will take them to the stars, and if they fuck that up then the next civilisation elsewhere in the universe which is successful will inevitably find the fuckups tending their fields as they'd done for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming their planet wasn't a radioactive wasteland).

[Svoboda]

It's not just ancient technology getting lost or in disuse. It's 14 years since the last commercial supersonic passenger flight. Concorde ran for almost 3 decades.

[debeguiled]

Do values count as technology?

[weambulance]

There are quite a few projects that are preserving human knowledge. The problem isn't knowledge, it's the supply chain, as Leonard suggests. I can design a (simple) computer from first principles, but that's not very useful if I don't have the materials to build it or the electricity to run it.

There's so much high tech junk made today that could be repurposed and reused that I think it would take multiple near extinction level events over multiple decades to really screw things up to the point where we couldn't recover, though. That is subject to change with time, as devices are made more disposable, less durable, and less maintainable every year in the name of continuous economic growth.

[Stanfield]

Never mind the lost technology. What about lost ancient wisdom, like women being stay at home moms and not voting?

[Dalaran1991]

(08-04-2017 05:06 AM)Stanfield Wrote:  

Never mind the lost technology. What about lost ancient wisdom, like women being stay at home moms and not voting?

Because it's beating a dead horse on RVF and literally 80% of the Everything Else and Politics sections are filled with gripes about modern women, and we dont want to turn a thread in the deep forum into another fuckfest orgy of arguments about how modern women are horrible creatures.

Please do not derail the thread. If you want to discuss traditional gender roles or how to remove women suffrage, head to the Politics section.

[Uzisuicide]

(08-03-2017 10:26 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

There's a school of thought that if we suffer a serious decline that we can never recover beyond subsistence agricultural living again.

That's because all of the "easy" resources that we built our civilisations with are completely tapped out. You don't find oil at ten feet anymore, and if the drilling rigs all fall into disrepair then what kind of technology tree would you need to get them started again, and how is it possible when the energy surplus of an oil based society was what allowed us to drill to thousands of feet, miles offshore no less?

And that's just one of a thousand supply chain issues that a true collapse would bring about.

The theory goes that the inhabitants of a planet have just one shot to build a civilisation that will take them to the stars, and if they fuck that up then the next civilisation elsewhere in the universe which is successful will inevitably find the fuckups tending their fields as they'd done for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming their planet wasn't a radioactive wasteland).

Yeah maybe their isn't much left for a second industrial revolution but look on the bright side. There is still a lot of coal left that's relatively easy to get to. At least we won't have to burn our building materials to keep our asses warm in the winter as we contemplate how bad our life sucks.

If you think about it, technology has given us time away from foraging for food and trying to stay warm and cool. That gave us time to make the Mona Lisa and other cool shit. Maybe it's better to return to foraging for food rather than for people to dye their hair blue and look for new ways to ass fuck each other. Everything eventually returns to the mean.

[Sancho]

Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that companies intentionally make it difficult to repair the technology we have right now and even equipment from 10 years ago.
Many companies like Apple do not want the consumer to perform repairs on their own property, even it's super simple like a hard drive swap.
So you end up having to buy a newer replacement or pay the company a premium repair cost for 15 minutes of work.

Thanks to all the specialization of the hardware, we can expect to lose the knowledge needed to fix older tech.
Not to mention the means to make it anymore.
What a shame that we can't expect to keep anything for a lifetime anymore.

[fiasco360]

I wonder how much information was lost in the library of Ashurbanipal. It's the oldest surviving library in history with a lot of ranging works of history, government, religion, creation, myths, science, mathematics etc. It's said through historical texts and cultural myths that Alexander the Great was inspired by this grand library and wanted to have one built that was similar.

It's interesting how throughout history from the sacking of Nineveh to now with ISIS attempting to destroy Assyria's history that it managed to survive at all. The archaeologists found the cuneiform tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh which if you're familiar at all with it you would know how many similarities it has with the bible and how it predates the bible thousands of years.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-p...ets-007127

http://www.ancient.eu/Ashurbanipal/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...Collecting

[911]

(08-04-2017 04:33 PM)Uzisuicide Wrote:  

(08-03-2017 10:26 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

There's a school of thought that if we suffer a serious decline that we can never recover beyond subsistence agricultural living again.

That's because all of the "easy" resources that we built our civilisations with are completely tapped out. You don't find oil at ten feet anymore, and if the drilling rigs all fall into disrepair then what kind of technology tree would you need to get them started again, and how is it possible when the energy surplus of an oil based society was what allowed us to drill to thousands of feet, miles offshore no less?

And that's just one of a thousand supply chain issues that a true collapse would bring about.

The theory goes that the inhabitants of a planet have just one shot to build a civilisation that will take them to the stars, and if they fuck that up then the next civilisation elsewhere in the universe which is successful will inevitably find the fuckups tending their fields as they'd done for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming their planet wasn't a radioactive wasteland).

Yeah maybe their isn't much left for a second industrial revolution but look on the bright side. There is still a lot of coal left that's relatively easy to get to. At least we won't have to burn our building materials to keep our asses warm in the winter as we contemplate how bad our life sucks.

If you think about it, technology has given us time away from foraging for food and trying to stay warm and cool. That gave us time to make the Mona Lisa and other cool shit. Maybe it's better to return to foraging for food rather than for people to dye their hair blue and look for new ways to ass fuck each other. Everything eventually returns to the mean.

Right, we have centuries worth of fossil fuel remaining, plenty of time to pivot to new near-free sources of energy like safer nuclear fission, fusion, or any other new technology.

Civilization is not failing, but it is definitely being artificially curtailed by the global ruling class. Humanity has not reaped much of the huge improvements in technology and productivity, the economic gains associated with this have mostly been siphoned off by the oligarchs.

60 years ago before the advent of computers, jet transport, microprocessors and the internet, the head of a household used to support his entire family with his salary, and enjoy a standard of living that is higher than that of the modern household with both parents working full time.

The reason for this is that the oligarchs control humanity through their complete control of a neo-feudal usurious fractional reserve debt-based financial structure which systematically siphons off wealth from the middle class to the 0.001%.

If you control the monetary system, you control wealth. And if you control wealth, you control the culture, and you also control technology. JP Morgan, who was a Rothschild junior partner, suppressed Tesla's technology, because while it would have greatly improved humanity with the prospect of energy "too cheap to meter", it threatened Morgan's energy and utility interests, along with those of the Rockefellers' oil-based empire. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers are the cornerstone of the aforementioned 0.001%.

Many of Tesla's potentially groundbreaking technological breakthroughs were suppressed. The task of taking them over and inventorying them after his death was carried over by Trump's own uncle John. Tesla was a great example of technology suppression by the oligarchs.

Going back to the paragraph above about cultural control, technology is downstream of culture, because culture is driven by the media, think tanks and academia, who are all shaped and dominated by the oligarchs. A lot of the boundaries on human progress are a result of the cultural bindings set from above, like the introduction of not just socialism, but other economic ideologies like open borders and the dogmatic belief in unrestrained free trade.

You can't deindustrialize N. America and Europe and gut its middle classes without the average schmuck buying into the notion that "those jobs aren't coming back", so most Americans believe that Detroit turning to a wasteland is a perfectly natural and inevitable process of modern economic evolution, never mind that Stuttgart or Ulsan (Korea) are auto boom towns in countries with high labor costs. Ulsan, site of the world's largest auto plant (Hyundai), is the richest metropole in SK, a middle/working class paradise with an avg GDP/capita of $80k.

Leonard's quote above falls into that same category of oligarch mythology, because it implies that men have been free to pursue their own destinies and full potential, and that a looming civilizational collapse is a result of their own failure, as opposed to the restrictions on human economic and technological growth engineered by the oligarchs. It also encapsulates the oligarchs main project for humanity: deindustrialization and transhumanism/ It's the idea that humanity is inevitably doomed to an archaic post-industrial dystopia, if it doesn't evolve. Of course in their plans only a select will "evolve", while the Beta and Gamma masses get left behind.


PS: If you don't understand the intricacies of the modern debt-based monetary system and how it is at the basis of not just economic problems, but cultural, political and technological limitations downstream, the two videos linked above are a great starting point.

[xmlenigma]

Greatest largest center of knowledge and Wisdom was burnt by an Islamic Invader .. It is said it burnt for 4-6 months.. Cant imagine how much Humanity lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda - Oldest Larges University

thread-64326.html - More info here..

[xmlenigma]

(08-04-2017 05:06 AM)Stanfield Wrote:  

Never mind the lost technology. What about lost ancient wisdom, like women being stay at home moms and not voting?

Actually it is said there was a time when Women were truly empowered but rights did not come above Responsibilities and Obligations and behavior norms in society..

Freedom cannot come without Discipline.. They go hand in hand..

[robreke]

Ancient Atlantis probably had some dope tech

[Diogenesis]

I want a superplastic yet very hard blade that's tough, resistant to shattering, and capable of being honed to a sharp, resilient edge. I want a blade with trace impurities of tungsten or vanadium and distinctive patterns of banding and mottling reminiscent of flowing water. I want a blade that's full of cementine nanowires and carbon freakin' nanotubes.

I want ... Damascus steel.



But instead, I have to settle for Cutco.