Prepare to defend yourself, your family, your property, your food, your dog...

[EL PRESIDENTE]

Why would rich people resort to property crimes and assault? They're rich!

But when they're no longer rich they will be the first and foremost to commit crimes against their countymen, because they have been grown to think they are better than others and therefore more deserving. They have less moral fiber than someone who has had to struggle to survive.

52% of Americans have some college education, and 27% have a degree. Most of what they paid to learn there will be useless trivia when the only jobs are growing food, producing clothes, moving basic goods, and building shelter. We're not talking union wages either. In a depression, which is what is being intentionally orchestrated right now, "college-educated" indicates to most employers that the applicant is likely too soft, too slow, and probably very weak at trouble-shooting. In other words, unemployable. The poor and the illegal immigrants will be the work force. Most jobs that require a degree will simply not be needed. Who needs a doctor to be on hand if nobody has the money to pay him? The truth is without Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs paying for healthcare services, we'd have to lay off about 1/3 of the healthcare professionals nationwide right now. As more and more people lose their insurance less doctors will be needed. Lawyers? Only government employed (DA's and public defenders) will be needed. Financial Investment counselors? For whom?

For manual labor jobs, sure, having intelligence and knowledge is probably bad. For anything else in the world, it isn't. Being able to calculate and work a register, for example. One who is educated and has used computers extensively is more valuable than someone who did not graduate high school. The thing with college educated people is that they have worked through a system. They can read, they can write. they can problem solve.

 

[Ed O]

Premise? <goes back and reads Post #1>

Oh yeah, I forgot all that...well, do it my way...Just wander where you want to...

I'm arguing with El on who the coming Depression will hurt. He says only the poor. I say they'll survive because they're used to surviving on close to nothing, and that it's people with money who will notice a big difference.

Which is related, but not the exact premise of the thread...

Gotcha. I didn't mean to stop what you guys were talking about... just the initial post is more confusing to me than your ongoing conversation

Ed O.

 

[MARIS61]

I don't understand the premise of this thread.

The government has been protecting the middle class? And now there is no middle class? And when the government stops protecting us, then all bets are off?

It doesn't add up to me.

Ed O.

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticke...7.html?tickers=^DJI,^GSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA

Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

Not surprisingly, that was immediately after Reagan's war on the middle class.

 

[Ed O]

I actually read this quote earlier today:

"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."

That was written in 1933 about African-Americans, but for those who really believe an underclass (independent of race) is being developed then that quote seems particularly applicable to today.

Ed O.

 

[Ed O]

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticke...7.html?tickers=^DJI,^GSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA

Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

Not surprisingly, that was immediately after Reagan's war on the middle class.

That's a statistic that doesn't really mean much to me. The "poverty line" is just an arbitrary number. Poor kids still have access to free education, libraries, clean water, etc... I'd imagine most of them have access to Facebook and cable television and refrigerators, too.

Compare that to the "middle class" of, say, the 1700's. Today's poor are spectacularly wealthy in a variety of ways.

Ed O.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticke...7.html?tickers=^DJI,^GSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA

Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

Not surprisingly, that was immediately after Reagan's war on the middle class.

seems like the rich is doing well, investing, saving, etc and the poor...are having kids and spending money.

 

[MARIS61]

Poor people don't purchase consumer goods? Surely you jest. They are probably one of the higher volume consumers out there, which is why they remain poor and in debt. They buy material items instead of saving/investing. That's a gross generalization but its pretty well known that the poor often try to appear as they are not poor buy buying brand-name clothing, video games, spinning wheels and do 5 year financing on their automobile leases.

Haha. We clearly are talking about 2 completely different economic classes here.

By poor people I mean people who are poor. They have no savings, no insurance, no shelter that they own and often no food. Sporadic income at best. Auto leases or other credit is not available to these people, not that they could afford the gas.

You on the other hand keep talking about people who can buy cars and video games...

I guess I was dead-on with my earlier assumption.

 

[jlprk]

I keep my expenses low. Car is paid off and I live in rent-controlled housing in LA. My apartment is less than 500 square ft...A miniscule number of people are helped by social services? You're joking right? 1 in 8 americans get food stamps. 40 million people.

You pay less rent because the government controls your rent? Fucking socialist. Next thing you're going to say is that you drive your paid-off car on government-funded streets and roads.

Most of those 1 in 8 are children. The rest are their single mothers. I'm talking about half of America, the working poor. No, robots can't replace them. There will be few rich people and upper middle class jobs if there is no money to be made from the poor. They're the only ones doing any real work, the kind that no one wants to do.

You seem to think the Depression won't hurt you, so you don't care about it. Every job, including yours, and every rich person without a job, depends upon poor people.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

Haha. We clearly are talking about 2 completely different economic classes here.

By poor people I mean people who are poor. They have no savings, no insurance, no shelter that they own and often no food. Sporadic income at best. Auto leases or other credit is not available to these people, not that they could afford the gas.

You on the other hand keep talking about people who can buy cars and video games...

I guess I was dead-on with my earlier assumption.

The poor have PS3s, leased cars and designer clothes too. Go to the hood sometime.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

You pay less rent because the government controls your rent? Fucking socialist. Next thing you're going to say is that you drive your paid-off car on government-funded streets and roads.

Most of those 1 in 8 are children. The rest are their single mothers. I'm talking about half of America, the working poor. No, robots can't replace them. There will be few rich people and upper middle class jobs if there is no money to be made from the poor. They're the only ones doing any real work, the kind that no one wants to do.

You seem to think the Depression won't hurt you, so you don't care about it. Every job, including yours, and every rich person without a job, depends upon poor people.

Sure, they have shitty jobs. What's new. If that's real work, they can go ahead and do it. There's a reason shit jobs that no one wants to do don't pay well...someone will eventually do them, they don't take any kind of intelligence or skill and there will never be a shortage of available workforce because anyone who can stand up, lift 50lbs etc can do them.

The depression will hurt everyone. It will affect the poor more since the prices of goods and services, food and everything else will go up and be available for those with money. Jobs will go to those with skillsets, education, work experience. The true poor may work hard, but they have replaceable jobs, otherwise they would be paid more. It doesn't take a skillset to take out the garbage, unload luggage at the airport or pump gas.

 

[MARIS61]

That's a statistic that doesn't really mean much to me. The "poverty line" is just an arbitrary number. Poor kids still have access to free education, libraries, clean water, etc... I'd imagine most of them have access to Facebook and cable television and refrigerators, too.

Compare that to the "middle class" of, say, the 1700's. Today's poor are spectacularly wealthy in a variety of ways.

Ed O.

That's quite an imagination you have there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty

Poverty is the lack of basic human needs, such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter, because of the inability to afford them.

And you yourself would be a serf if the year were now 1700.

 

[jlprk]

The depression will hurt everyone. It will affect the poor more since the prices of goods and services, food and everything else will go up and be available for those with money. Jobs will go to those with skillsets, education, work experience. The true poor may work hard, but they have replaceable jobs, otherwise they would be paid more. It doesn't take a skillset to take out the garbage, unload luggage at the airport or pump gas.

So when the US devolves into a 3rd-world nation, and almost all jobs are gruesome physical labor, you take comfort in thinking that college graduates will be given preferential treatment and hired instead of big strong people who are mentally much tougher and used to such work.

Well, you're wrong, you won't get the tough jobs that will predominate. Even if you're right, those who currently aren't poor still will have their lives turned upside-down by the Depression, more so than those used to being poor.

80% of the pencil-pushing paperwork you call a job will disappear if the country can afford only the core of an economy. You're not using your imagination to envision the end of affluence as we know it. You think the class system will protect you.

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

http://www.usdebtclock.org/#

Just thought I would share this.

Ok, back to the mass labeling and gross overgeneralization.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

So when the US devolves into a 3rd-world nation, and almost all jobs are gruesome physical labor, you take comfort in thinking that college graduates will be given preferential treatment and hired instead of big strong people who are mentally much tougher and used to such work.

Well, you're wrong, you won't get the tough jobs that will predominate. Even if you're right, those who currently aren't poor still will have their lives turned upside-down by the Depression, more so than those used to being poor.

80% of the pencil-pushing paperwork you call a job will disappear if the country can afford only the core of an economy. You're not using your imagination to envision the end of affluence as we know it. You think the class system will protect you.

Sure the poor will have their world turned upside down. As prices of goods increase and as actual skilled labor continue to take their jobs, they will eventually be the homeless. The simple jobs like assembly, data input, call centers, help desks, etc will go to the college educated workforce. The manual labor jobs will go to Illegal immigrants who will work harder and cheaper.

The middle class will become the poor, the poor will become homeless.

I work and have worked with the squatter communities in mexico through a charitable program. These are what the poor are going to be...they will live in squatter communities (tent cities) and be jobless and will live off begging on the street.

 

[MARIS61]

For manual labor jobs, sure, having intelligence and knowledge is probably bad. For anything else in the world, it isn't. Being able to calculate and work a register, for example. One who is educated and has used computers extensively is more valuable than someone who did not graduate high school. The thing with college educated people is that they have worked through a system. They can read, they can write. they can problem solve.

It has been my experience that problem solving is not a strong point at all with people who spent most of their formative adult years in college. Just the opposite. Most of them don't understand how the real world works, are socially awkward in mixed-age settings, and aren't creative thinkers at all. They have been trained by rote to solve problems in their specific job/field, but that's a far cry from being able to think on your feet and act on the fly.

What they are is robots trained for a specific job. They know very little about anything else. And someday robots will replace them in that job and they will be useless to society.

They are emotionally under-developed and far less reliable as an employee than someone the same age who has been working to support a family for the last eight years.

 

[jlprk]

http://www.usdebtclock.org/#

What a site. Thank you. Look in the upper left. The annual US Federal Budget DEFICIT is now $1.3 trillion.

Check out when the US Federal Budget SURPLUS was a quarter of a trillion and growing fast each year. Back when the Democrats had licked the problem, and the future was golden. Before the giant tax cut for the rich and the elective wars.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/2000.html

 

[MARIS61]

Gotcha. I didn't mean to stop what you guys were talking about... just the initial post is more confusing to me than your ongoing conversation

Ed O.

It was written while I was forming the thought and I sort of changed my mind midpost what I was going after. I didn't mean to start an arguement about economic classes.

I was really more interested in how prepared other posters were in the event they had to defend themselves and their loved ones in a state of anarchy.

It appears nearly everyone here has never given it a thought nor prepared in any way for the possibility.

Which means they are actually relying on the Nanny State to protect them in ALL situations. F'ing Socialists!

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

They are emotionally under-developed and far less reliable as an employee than someone the same age who has been working to support a family for the last eight years.

So it has nothing to do with parenting? That is cool. I will save alot of money not sending my kids to school and tell them to gain real world experience by having a family they cannot support. I also guess I made a huge mistake by building up a big enough nest egg to be a stay at home dad without suffering a dropoff in lifestyle.

Seriously, what was I thinking?

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

Which means they are actually relying on the Nanny State to protect them in ALL situations. F'ing Socialists!

So instead of spending time instilling fear and paranoia, I spend time reading to my kids and making them productive members of society. If that is being a Socialist, so be it.

 

[jlprk]

Maris, so far this year 241,206 Subarus have been sold.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/auto-sales.html

College graduates are mostly a bunch of wooden-thinking nerds. Robotic inflexibility is what gets most of them through all those years of being a big bore. When I returned to college at age 30, I was confident that my new extrovert personality acquired in 5 years of office jobs would give me an advantage. I soon found that the introverts were geting the As, and I forced myself to regress to teenhood to pass my courses. A rounded personality doesn't survive in college.

When white collar jobs disappear, college graduates will have no advantage in getting the jobs that remain.

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

What a site. Thank you. Look in the upper left. The annual US Federal Budget DEFICIT is now $1.3 trillion.

Check out when the US Federal Budget SURPLUS was a quarter of a trillion and growing fast each year. Back when the Democrats had licked the problem, and the future was golden. Before the giant tax cut for the rich and the elective wars.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/2000.html

They also break down into state deficits as well. Someone's sig was (paraphrasing) "Everyone thinks the government is some magic box that you do not have to put any money or effort into while getting everything you want. Eventually that is proved wrong by going broke." Probably my favorite sig.

My second favorite sig is

You are responsible for your children until they are a credit to society. - Jovan Banjanin

which contradics alot of what MARIS61 preaches.

 

[jlprk]

214,213 now...that thing is actually keeping count!

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

214,217 now. Who would think there were that many people closing on Subarus this late at night?

 

[MARIS61]

My second favorite sig is You are responsible for your children until they are a credit to society. - Jovan Banjanin which contradics alot of what MARIS61 preaches.

How so?

 

[MARIS61]

That link says each citizen's share of the national debt is only $44,000, while each citizen has assets worth $223,000.

Seems about the proper ratio for a healthy economy.

Unless a small group of citizens is hogging all the wealth but refusing to carry their fair share of the debt.

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

Unless a small group of citizens is hogging all the wealth but refusing to carry their fair share of the debt.

Or, a large group of citizens that control the vote are too lazy to know what they are voting for. As said, they think government is a big magic box that requires no effort or financial imput yet pays for everything imaginable.

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

With the government doing absolutely nothing at all to create jobs on a meaningful scale, and now deciding to cut funding for millions of families barely surviving on unemployment insurance, you can expect a crime wave like this country has never before seen.

Home invasions, robberies and burlaries will become a daily threat for most big city folks, and the streets are rapidly filling with people who are off their meds.

Once you've lost your job, your home, your life savings, and can't afford healthcare for your family, the gloves come off and it's every man for himself.

This is why FEMA has constructed internment camps, why DHS has ordered thousands of drone aircraft, why TSA is photographing your body in detail for posterity, why every word you type and every call you make is tapped into. Why the House and Senate are legislating to make it illegal for you to plant your own seeds and grow your own food.

Because this "recession" was planned right along with the invasion of Iraq. It was needed to keep the general populace on their heels trying to survive so they won't have time to pay attention to the active overthrow of their country from within.

Are you prepared to defend yourself in combat against your countrymen and your government? Or do you have an exit strategy (Canada, Mexico, Belize...)?

All of these people that are supposedly going to become savages had parents too. You are saying that it is the government and ubber rich that are to blame. Your sig suggests that the situation could be avoided with better parenting.

Did not recieve as much as others growing up, but will always be thankful for the stories from my grandparents about how they survived during the depression. None of those stories involved going savage.

 

[EL PRESIDENTE]

It has been my experience that problem solving is not a strong point at all with people who spent most of their formative adult years in college. Just the opposite. Most of them don't understand how the real world works, are socially awkward in mixed-age settings, and aren't creative thinkers at all. They have been trained by rote to solve problems in their specific job/field, but that's a far cry from being able to think on your feet and act on the fly.

What they are is robots trained for a specific job. They know very little about anything else. And someday robots will replace them in that job and they will be useless to society.

They are emotionally under-developed and far less reliable as an employee than someone the same age who has been working to support a family for the last eight years.

Nope. They will be replaced by outsourced Indians, not robots. Its a generation X/Y thing, again with the whole entitlement problem. However, a college degree or specialty certification remains a barrier to most higher earning jobs out there.

 

[MARIS61]

However, a college degree or specialty certification remains a barrier to most higher earning jobs out there.

I agree, it's a barrier.

The really higher earning jobs are filled by dropouts.

Vulcan and Microsoft created and owned by college dropouts.

Here are some higher earning high school dropouts:


Bill Bartman........self-made billionaire American businessman, Joe Lewis........self-made billionaire British businessman, Carl Lindner.......self-made billionaire American businessman, Kemmons Wilson.......self-made multimillionaire American businessman; founder of the "Holiday Inn" hotel chain, Richard Desmond.....self-made billionaire British publisher, Sydney Poitier.....Oscar-winning actor (elementary school dropout), Richard Branson.....self-made billionaire British businessman; founder of "Virgin Atlantic Airways," "Virgin Records," etc.; knighted (United Kingdom: Sir Richard Branson), Anton van Leeuwenhoek....Dutch microscope maker; world's first microbiologist; discoverer of bacteria, blood cells, and sperm cells), Isaac Merrit Singer....American sewing machine inventor; self-made multimillionaire founder of "Singer Industries," "I.M. Singer and Company," etc. (elementary school dropout, Horace Greeley.... American newspaper publisher-editor; U.S. Congressman; 1872 U.S. Presidential candidate; co-founder of the Republican party in the United States, Philip Emeagwali....supercomputer scientist; one of the pioneers of the Internet, Peter Jennings, Julie Andrews, Lucille Ball, Andrew Jackson, Patrick Henry, Jack London, Ray Charles, Jimmy Dean, HG Wells, Robert De Niro, ...

It's a big list: http://www.education-reform.net/dropouts2.htm

 

[Charcoal Filtered]

I agree, it's a barrier.

The really higher earning jobs are filled by dropouts.

http://www.forbes.com/2003/07/28/cx_dd_0728mondaymatch.html

Going To College:

Average annual cost of a four-year private college: $26,070

Average time to get a degree (four-year private college): 55 months

Unemployment rate for bachelor-degree holders, 2001: 2.2%

Average income for full-time year-round workers with a bachelor's degree, 1997 to 1999: $52,200

Percentage of Forbes 400 members with college degrees: 66%

Average net worth of a Forbes 400 member with a college degree: $2.13 billion

Unemployment rate for high-school graduates, 2001: 4.2%

Average income for full-time year-round workers with high-school degree, 1997 to 1999: $30,400

Percentage of Forbes 400 members without college degrees: 33%

Average net worth of a Forbes 400 member without college degree: $2.27 billion

So on this list 2/3 of the wealtiest have degrees. The starting pay for a college graduate compared to a high school graduate is almost double. There is also a bigger disparity in wealth between the rich and poor in each degree designation. Since the withhout college degree members have on average more wealth than the college degree Forbes 400 members, the poor must be even poorer than the rich.

Of the four examples Forbes gives, it is not a surprise that 4 were dropouts? Do you think any of the time spent at each university had something to do with their success?