Honest Question

Originally posted by Very Rusty
Ooops...I was so impressed I forgot.


There is your GD rec, now all the best to you and yours in the New Year.

VR, hope you have a happy, great, socially exciting NY evening. I myself will visit my mom's with the wife and kids visiting a niece who's in town from Florida.

Next, I'll call it an early evening I'm willing to bet.

Best wishes, I'm also out of the office soon.

P-

Originally posted by Phlabibit
VR, hope you have a happy, great, socially exciting NY evening. I myself will visit my mom's with the wife and kids visiting a niece who's in town from Florida.

Next, I'll call it an early evening I'm willing to bet.

Best wishes, I'm also out of the office soon.

P-

Have A Good One!!

Originally posted by Phlabibit
I'd like a new Renaissance focused on society (our new small flat world) getting along better and a movement away from the use and collection of oil (a limited resource) that's causing much of the trouble we see today.

Plus a leveling, the US anyway has become two classes... rich and poor and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Trickle down i ...[text shortened]... ren or sleep on park benches. That's no good.... it screams "Let them eat cake".

P-

Progress all too often seems to equate to consumption....Let's start our own Renaissance Island....of thinking as well. I would give living off the grid a shot if I could seriously afford it.

Wouldn't that be fun, Phlab?

Originally posted by mlprior
I see.

We need to revert to the barter system then and do away with money all together.

No difference.
it's the same thing.
Money just cleans up bartering.
Except the useless people with nothing to barter starve unless they recieve charity.
Because if we all depended on bartering they wouldn't get any free money from the government.
Be carefull what you wish for.

Originally posted by Great Big Stees
I heard, recently, that Canadians spend 45% more than they make. I'm saving my money to be able to get a bargain basement price on the very large mass of land that is Canada. Anyone else want to join my quest?

Watch 'Into the Wild' before you decide on your awesome affordable future.

Originally posted by mlprior
I thought I would spew some recents thoughts out to the RHP masses.

Why do people always talk about "progress" in terms of selling more cars, building more houses, obtaining more market share, making and selling more things? I don't understand why this is considered progress to our society?

The dictionary defines progress as:
"advance of human soci rld is trying to progress faster than the others and for what? What does the winner get?

These are questions that almost everyone with even half a conscience has asked themselves at some point. It is a valid but complex question to answer. The truth is that there is no simple answer. Some say 'socialism' and the idea is good, but it's not a global answer. Some say 'barter' but the haves still have all the bartering material while the have nots lose. Some resort to nationalism and say 'we should take care of our own before we give jobs to those guys'. They fail to see that we are all part of the same problem.

National distinction leads to 'Somalians' with their pirates and an essentially ungoverned country. National distinction leads to the United States having near unilateral decisions over who the 'bad guys' are and who the 'good guys' are. So long as humanity is divided there can be no equality.

It's similar to a 'joke' I was told by a teacher once. Hell must be of an equal temperature and an equal pressure because otherwise one damned engineer would find a way to build an air conditioning system. The idea is basically that where even the slightest difference exists, a greater difference can be created.

Believe it or not, the slow, grinding gears of humanity are moving slowly, but inexorably towards the uniform human existence. One may disagree with the World Bank, with the Eurozone, with the United Nations, with the Schengen states, with the IMF, etc. but globalisation is an inevitable result of humanity existing in such prominent populations around the world. The haves are already finding that they are not guaranteed the things they have.

Progress is slowly, but surely, being defined not by what we can own, but by what we can save. We are that piece of history where that begins, and one day our human (as opposed to black, white, irish, american, chinese...) descendants will read about the times when this was even in question.

Which doesn't invalidate the question. We have to keep asking to make the gears keep grinding, but fiery rhetoric and angry questioning are not the way to make these things happen - those cause separation between liberals and conservatives, democrats and republicans, socialist and fascists, the free and the detained, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick...

Ask the question, find your own answer, then do something to support your part in this slow machine.

Originally posted by mlprior
I thought I would spew some recents thoughts out to the RHP masses.

Why do people always talk about "progress" in terms of selling more cars, building more houses, obtaining more market share, making and selling more things? I don't understand why this is considered progress to our society?

The dictionary defines progress as:
"advance of human soci ...[text shortened]... rld is trying to progress faster than the others and for what? What does the winner get?

The winner gets squat. Progress is an illusion. Civilization an oxymoron.

God is dead. Everything else is at the worst a lie or at the least a megalomaniacal delusion.

You live on a fragile ball of mud hurtling and disturbing speeds through a rather cluttered cosmos. The atmosphere you breath is a veritable smear acros the surface of our mother earth. In comparison to the age of the universe the sentience of mankind is but an eye blink. We gamble unknowingly with disaster everyday. The genus blattaria will outlast us and trample on the ruins of our broken dreams.

Burn Baby Burn.

Originally posted by st00p1dfac3
Watch 'Into the Wild' before you decide on your awesome affordable future.

Christopher McCandless lived his life without the need for monitary things and without the need for societal acceptance.

He lived and died by the rules of nature, the rules that every other creature of this world must follow, expept man who has conveniently changed the rules to fit his own selfish needs.

Edit: Why aren't you playing games anymore?

Originally posted by mlprior
Christopher McCandless lived his life without the need for monitary things and without the need for societal acceptance.

He lived and died by the rules of nature, the rules that every other creature of this world must follow, expept man who has conveniently changed the rules to fit his own selfish needs.

And he died through ignorance.

Originally posted by Hand of Hecate
The winner gets squat. Progress is an illusion. Civilization an oxymoron.

God is dead. Everything else is at the worst a lie or at the least a megalomaniacal delusion.

You live on a fragile ball of mud hurtling and disturbing speeds through a rather cluttered cosmos. The atmosphere you breath is a veritable smear acros the surface of our m ...[text shortened]... enus blattaria will outlast us and trample on the ruins of our broken dreams.

Burn Baby Burn.

Is there not an optimistic bone in your body?

Hmmm...Perhaps that was the wrong way to phrase that talking to you.

Originally posted by st00p1dfac3
And he died through ignorance.

I admit, he could have been better prepared and he could have chosen a more forgiving environment to test his wits against mother nature.

Originally posted by Sunburnt
Progress all too often seems to equate to consumption....Let's start our own Renaissance Island....of thinking as well. I would give living off the grid a shot if I could seriously afford it.

Wouldn't that be fun, Phlab?

Ha Ha!

Phlabs would have to roll his own cigarettes, and grow his own tobacco at that!

Originally posted by Hand of Hecate
The winner gets squat. Progress is an illusion. Civilization an oxymoron.

God is dead. Everything else is at the worst a lie or at the least a megalomaniacal delusion.

You live on a fragile ball of mud hurtling and disturbing speeds through a rather cluttered cosmos. The atmosphere you breath is a veritable smear acros the surface of our m ...[text shortened]... enus blattaria will outlast us and trample on the ruins of our broken dreams.

Burn Baby Burn.

But what will Blattaria do with no human houses to invade and scrap for food in?

:'(

Originally posted by mlprior
Christopher McCandless lived his life without the need for monitary things and without the need for societal acceptance.

He lived and died by the rules of nature, the rules that every other creature of this world must follow, expept man who has conveniently changed the rules to fit his own selfish needs.

Edit: Why aren't you playing games anymore?

Christopher McCandless was an idiot and squandered his life. Hell, the boy died in a bus a short walk from a major road. He was, at the very least, mentally ill and most certainly a foolish child. He died badly.

Originally posted by Very Rusty
Is there not an optimistic bone in your body?

Hmmm...Perhaps that was the wrong way to phrase that talking to you.

Hope springs eternal. I have a reasonable expectation that I'll make it through tomorrow. Next week is still up in the air though.

The odds favor the house and I'm playing too many hands to expect my luck to hold.