[TheForge] Stock prices?

[Andy Vida]

Ries Niemi wrote:

> 
> We are still tearing down US steel mills and shipping them direct to
> China for reassembly.

	And a thrilling lttle game of economic Russian roulette
	it is, that we play.

> No shortage of places to point the finger,

	Which will solve nothing.  I would not advocate a return to 1880s
	industrialism, but exporting as much heavy manufacturing abroad
	as we have is wildly suicidal and I will not be surprised a bit
	if some of us live to see the day that the people of this nation
	wake up to find themselves third rate has-beens.  I'm neither
	advocate nationnalism, which is blind stupidity of the first
	order.  What I would advocate is some seriously positive action
	to restore a reasonable level of self sufficiency in basic
	industrial sectors so that the rest of the world will not be
	holding our nuts in their hands, which becomes more the case
	every year in some areas, steel being a prime example.

	Seemingly crappy circumstances such as these are almost without 
	exception fertile ground for new opportunities.  The trick is in
	seeing them and then actually peeling one's fat ass out of the 
	recliner and actually DOING something about it.

> I have heard it
> is making a big dent on the supply of old lathes and machine tools, and
> if it goes on for very long, the junkyard scrounging we have taken for
> granted for so long may change dramatically.

	This is the price we pay for our complacency.  Americans, by
	and large, are some of the most complacent people on the planet.
	I count myself in that shameful category.  We talk a lot but
	unless orders come down from some "authority", we don't move
	a muscle.  The First Amendment mentions separation of church
	and state, yet state has become the new church.  Huge masses of
	people prostrate themselves and pay homage to the great phallic
	god of the US government.  And how grave are the consequences
	should someone fail to make the required sacraments or otherwise
	manage to offend the Holy State?  Let someone explain to me
	how this radically differs from praying to some poor guy nailed
	up to a cross.  I say they are fundamentally one and the same with
	one set of deceitful jargon traded in for another.  I bet if you 
	translated all of this into topological terms, you would find the 
	forms and their relationships would be so nearly identical that 
	you'd not be able to tell them apart.

	One thing seems clear to me, given the position we find ourselves
	in these days, nothing will is likely to get better without some
	serious changes in the ways in which we think and behave.  I'm 
	just short of saying that cataclysmic change will be our only
	chance, anything short of that leaving us to decay.
	But what the hell... in a few more decades most, if not all of us,
	will be dead and these problems will be left to those that remain
	behind.  What will it matter to us at that point?