What page of AS are we on right now?
Every so often I like to assess where I am at with respect to my career and personal goals. It is time for that for me with respect to the Gulch.
With the Seattle businessman named Price insisting we "need" to provide all employees with salaries of at least $70 K, we definitely are at least p. 321 with the Starnes heirs to the Twentiech Century Motor Company.
This thread is a variant of
Atlas Shrugged - Now Non-Fiction.
Please cite incidents in real life and in AS to tell us where we are at. I am learning with each year just how tough it must have been for the producers. I am not sure I have enough patience.
With the Seattle businessman named Price insisting we "need" to provide all employees with salaries of at least $70 K, we definitely are at least p. 321 with the Starnes heirs to the Twentiech Century Motor Company.
This thread is a variant of
Atlas Shrugged - Now Non-Fiction.
Please cite incidents in real life and in AS to tell us where we are at. I am learning with each year just how tough it must have been for the producers. I am not sure I have enough patience.
Rand anticipates Open Source socialists. This idea that no one invents anything is the standard argument of collectivists, but it does not stand up to scrutiny. Why has inventing been concentrated in the last two centuries in relatively small populations of the U.S. and western countries?
:
but I often re-read the Money Speech:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkivn...
I agree, KH.
$
Invention succeeds in countries where intellectual property is not only valued, but protected.
As far as "what page are we on?" I think reality has noticeably diverged from Rand's prediction, if you regard AS as a prediction. In particular, big companies with government connections have more control than even the government itself, to the point where we're living in a cyberpunk novel, maybe John Shirley's Eclipse.
We are interested in protecting not only the product of the software inventor but the ability of the inventor to use his own creativity to invent new products.
(ed. I just realized that although open source has not been advocated in the discussions on copyright vs patent some people have advocated Linux which is open source)
I understand there is a large open source movement but I think developers should be able to make a living off of their work, not work at McDonald's and write software in their free time.
Difficult to say. The events, or their equivalents are coming out of order relative to the novel, but they are stacking up. Ultimately the timing of the end game will likely play out differently as well... Unless we get on another track before the bridge collapses it will still end badly. Past time for a new beginning.
Regards,
O.A.
For both my work and my own personal interest I keep up with current events. This weekend I was thinking that if Atlas Shrugged is as accurate as it appears we are pretty much doomed as a nation. In our own lives, my family is scaling back, tightening the reins on our assets, studying other places to live - having discussions with a growing group of like-minded families. There is certainly a quickening now, as I thought there might be in this leader's second term. Here on the left coast there is a very fervent effort to trample basic rights. We're seeing a simultaneous effort in DC...in some sort of "pincher movement", I think. Most citizens are happy just being able to play on their cell phones and run up their credit cards. Perhaps this decline will just blow over soon. But, I don't think it will.
We were looking at it in the office and marveling over the low expenses. He did have $33 in reimbursable expenses, at .07 a mile, $1 a day in per diem etc. Money was worth a lot more in 1969.
Putting together a very high end, non professional car for some drag racing in one of the local towns was what the money went to. That care cost 28k when all was said and done, the same kind of car today would be close to 100k. The car has tripled and the wages have doubled. That is the result over time of the Keynesian economics model every central bank in the world follows today. Inflation of wages at about 2/3 the rate of inflation of goods. Add in a graduated tax schedule and you have a built in tax increase.
No wonder governments love it so much
OK if freely done so by its owner; evil if done so against its owner's wishes: unspeakably evil if prescribed as "virtue."
I believe in a few years polymers with graphene/carbon nano-tubes will revolutionize the transportation and material handling industies so long BHO doesn't due damage to the oil industry through the EPA.
Today the "hinge-pin" is Electricity. Imagine what would happen if the power grid went down? Almost everything will come to a stop. Every form of transportation we have is dependent on the power grid. That is the Achilles Heel of Civilization today. If you want to know where we are at in the book, that is where to look.
It is no wonder that businesses lease everything from buildings to computers. Remove the assets and reduce the taxation. I wanted a business I owned, from the pencils to the buildings to every asset we had and used. That is just not practice in many industries with the taxation being what it is.
I simply decided to work for others running a segment of there business. It was required for my sanity because if I did not separate myself from dealing with the government to some extent I may have pulled a Cheryl (spelling) and ran off the proverbial pier.
A few specifics I can think of, the Boeing case that settled about a year ago where the feds attempted to stop Boeing from building a new plan in a different location (non-union state) in order to keep the jobs it would create in the union. The suite was eventually dropped but it delayed construction for about 7 years. Creating a huge backlog for dream-liner 777 planes and preventing a 20,000 job plant from building during the recession. Not quite forcing companies to stay in New York and not move to Colorado but a definite attempt to pull off the same.
The Boeing case was mentioned by someone else recently. +1
For what she accomplished with that novel, written at that time she was rationally prophetic. The basics are all there. But some of the flavor or the face of the manifestations she could not have nailed down that close. The rise of the environmental movement was yet to take full shape, with all of its ways and means of tentacleizing collectivism into the nations fabric.
And perhaps the degree of international collectivizing globalization entanglement has progressed to a degree that she would just shake her head over.
But where she nailed it was in the principle of it all. Looters, moochers, and politicians, indeed.