3 ms·
> ... there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power. I disagree. There are strong limit
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> ... there doesn't seem to be much in the way of limits our ruling class has in what they're willing to do to retain power.
I disagree. There are strong limits on what our courtier class is willing to do. Those limits are not even particularly objectionable. The problem is that the limits are beyond what it takes to provoke a strenuous response from the average person.
Our government is unstable. If it were to move one millimeter beyond public toleration, a vicious cycle of escalation would start. The last straw would be something seemingly trivial, like a flippant speech about how hungry Americans could just eat cake. (A scenario that is actually plausible, given Washington, D.C.'s obsession with paying their cronies to turn corn into transportation fuel.)
The most disturbing thing about the courtiers' obsession with espionage is how careless they are being with operational security. They are using espionage to score PR points but neglecting the basics of opsec: mandatory access controls, cryptography, competent background checks, etc. If some Booz Allen yahoo could rifle through NSA documents, then other countries already had everything.
- electromagnetic 13y agoWhat's worth pointing out with the corn->ethanol issue is that it would take 1 acre of prime farmland to run your average F150 for 5 weeks. That acre would be damn close to perfect nutritionally (IE mixed diet, animals actually use more land but can feed on relatively infertile but pasture-able land) feeding one person for a year. However, in actuality one bushel of corn averages 50 ears, the national corn harvest average per acre is 123, which means 6150 ear of corn, which means ~16.8 ears of corn a day. 110 calories for your average ear of corn, meaning 1800 food calories a day for a full year. On one tank of gas for your average commercial vehicle. I do not get why anyone would want to turn corn into fuel, because even fuelling a statistically insignificant portion of the market would literally mean removing hundreds of thousands of peoples food from circulation. And it is food grade corn that goes to make ethanol, because unsellable ears of corn are already spoken for and sold for animal feed. One of the main reasons I want to buy land is so I can become as close to fully self sustaining as possible.