WTF.... ok....
If it's cheaper to harvest our resources, pay to ship them to china, pay their taxes and workers, and then pay to have it shipped back then it is to just do it over here in the first place, then there is a serious problem with the cost of labor on this side.
There's also a serious problem with the cost of living. Median income in the U.S. is around $26k, which is barely enough to support a small family on. Half the population is making less than that. And the answer is to lower wages to compete with people on the other side of the world? What's the point in working a job if it doesn't pay enough to live on?
I think the problem is that corporations do not pay their employees in proportion to the profit that they generate. I generate my entire year's salary in profit for my employer in less than a week. This is wrong.
Unless we get some super utopian socialistic society, there are always going to be people just trying to scrape by.
And when those people make up the majority of the population, society will always be extremely unstable. Better get to work on that socialist utopia.
I would reccommend doing something splitting like the rent with more people instead of just trying to pay for it all yourself. It would prevent another housing bubble, which started the whole downward spiral. It's not like the building can't accomodate more people, even if it would be inconvenient. Everyone gets a roof over their heads for a lot less money and it only costs a little space. Split the big bills with someone else who's willing, and just share it. It's like socialism, except everyone involved consents to it.
This blows my mind. It sounds to me like you're making a blanket statement about the poor not taking advantage of shared housing arrangements. You do realize that extended family homes are becoming a normal thing again, and a very large portion of young adults are living with their parents until their mid-30's, right?
I'm one of very few people I personally know of my own generation who is supporting a family in a condo on a single income. I've practically begged some of my friends to move into a place with us so we can share some of the burden, but all the people I know well enough to do this with are either already settled into a shared housing situation or couldn't contribute enough money for us to be able to afford a place large enough to accomodate us.
Trust me. People are doing this. But you make it sound like this is a solution to the problem, when it's nothing but a coping mechanism.
Scratch that, we need to augment the human brain (preferably by growing it instead of joining into some super bio-mechanical hivemind) so people can keep ahead of the machines. Augmenting the body tissue would be good as well, but takes a back seat to maintaining intellectual dominance over our machines. But this would lead to some huge barely related discussion if we get into it much further.[/color]
And... and... what is this I don't even! I'm not going to put much faith in science fiction swooping in to save us, especially something like a large-scale brain augmentation scheme.
1.
INFLATION!!!Just jacking up wages to even out income distribution will do little or nothing by itself. If more people have more money, than the retailers will just jack up the prices
because they can. As for the increase of wages as the company does better, how about if it does worse? Do you honestly think people are just going to accept a pay cut because the company isn't doing well? I'm not saying it doesn't work in theory, just that people would never go for it.
2. And you intend to trust that socialist utopia to who? The government? The same government that people failed to keep in check the first time? The people who mostly just don't give a shit until it's too late, and probably never will? The people who, while individually are fairly intelligent, turn into mindless drones when introduced to the group mentality?
3. Just a suggestion, not that it couldn't go even farther. I don't claim to know the actual number of people doing this. I just don't think they should have any loans forgiven because they were too stupid to understand their contract, or just thought the gravy train would never end and took a stupid risk. If you take a gamble and lose, don't bitch and try to weasel your way out of it. If you aren't 100% sure you understand the agreement, then smarter people are going to take advantage of you. This is a fact of life that will never, EVER go away. Don't enter an agreement you can't understand. And to all the people that said to themselves "If this doesn't work, I'll just appeal to the government to bail me out of my debt", you are the worst type of people I can imagine. So, what's your solution? To give the government more power? I think they have more than enough power to abuse.
4. I'm saying we need to figure out
some way to augment ourselves. Allowing our machines to evolve at lightning fast pace while we just plod along like a snail will see us become completely irrelevant next to them. Can you say "robot overlords"? How about if they don't just take over. What if they are subservient to us, still, but obviously much smarter and stronger? We are basically just babies, forever. I don't like that. I want the human species to matter.
Melding with the machines devalues what we are so much it's barely any better. Even then, we would eventually need to give up all of our biological components because they
still can't keep up.
Joining into one Borg-like hivemind strips us of all individuality, which I absolutely
detest.
Genetic engineering is an option, and better than the previous solutions (according to my ethical code, anyways), but fundamentally changes what we are. If we intentionally manipulate our genetic code, how can we even consider ourselves human anymore?
What I suggest is to use chemicals or techniques that utilize the DNA we already have. Not as autonomous as changing the DNA itself, but we are fundamentally unchanged.