Still love fantasy, we do. :)

True but wages were also a lot less as well. In the late seventies I felt really good about making $30k in a business (roofing) I ran during the summers in High School. My dad was a general contractor or I would not have been able to do it. At the time 30k was more than most the people who worked for my dad made. I think average for a year was something like 22k.

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

Recently, on "Throw Back Thursday", Buzz Aldrin tweeted his 1969 travel expense form that included travel by government space ship to the moon and back. It made a bit of an internet splash.

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.

It's shocking when I look at the purchasing power my folks' generation had compared to my generation. Man...we're really sliding down the hill...

Graphene is a possibility, but carbon nanotubes will always be too expensive.

Tata Steel the largest Steel producer in Europe and India with the newest plants on line is producing continous cast rail of different configurations is only has added minor elements to the steel. It is the heattreatment and surface wash of the rail to enhance the capabilities of the metal. Most of US made steel goes to industry, refineries, construction and building industries. The US imports most of rail. So, there is very little change on how rail is made. It is far from Rearden Steel.
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.

As I have become more aligned with Objectivism over the years, one contradiction that I have not eliminated is my liking for the character of Yoda, an embodiment of mysticism. Hmmm.

If I were in the coal business (like I was in 1994-1997), I would do something like Wyatt's Torch this week!

That is an excellent point. In a way your company became like when Rearden was forced to split his company into a number of companies, owned by Paul Larkin et al.

The Boeing case was mentioned by someone else recently. +1

Electricity is indeed the linchpin in today's society, but rail transportation still is the cheapest way to ship large quantities across land. If one were to put a crimp in electricity by making coal-fired power plants uneconomical by an environmentalist ruling via executive fiat, one could put a serious damper in the US economy. Wait a second ... Didn't Obama deliver on that campaign promise this week?! In a way, that was coal's version of forcing Ellis Wyatt to put his torch on fire.

Ah, Next. I had forgotten. It reminds me that I should see The Pirates of Silicon Valley once again.

Likewise, The Creature From Jekyll Island bought the last 100 years of looting.

read "the Death of Money" if you want to see how they will get a nice big extension on there looter system. If the author is right when he proposes as likely to happen will start the cycle over on a global system, buying them likely another 100 years of looting (the 100 years is my conclusion rather than the authors).

The book of course is fiction (not a criticism, just a statement of fact). In the book the Rail system was the cornerstone of mans technological rise because of all of the progress that came out the technology we call transportation. The Rail system made it possible to move food from Wisconsin to LA, Coal to California, the list is endless, but almost as important was the movement of people that mixed ideas together to create the future we now live in. That era for the moment is gone, most transportation is now by plane. At the time it was the "hinge-pin" of civilization.

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.

I ran a business for several years, and as I became more successful with it, the state kept coming back and taking another piece. The point at which I quit the business was when the state thought they should have me inventory all my business assets annually to apply a tax to all my assets.

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.

OMG, I remember punch cards and punch tape. I went to school with the guy that came up with the "Dungeons & Dragons" video game along with the "Black Jack" video game. Once he got past the legal war over his owning it, he became wonderfully "filthy rich". What happened with Unix, was Steve Jobs. When he got the boot from Apple he started a company called Next. They were marketing a new operating based on Unix, but it was greatly improved (yes, it was and I did quite a bit of work with it). When Steve went back to Apple this was even more improved and became OSX. This was putting Windows literally on its ear at the time and with Bill Gates going through several other embarrassments at the time like the "Blue Screen of Death" and the "Pie in the Face", Microsoft decided they either had to get in the Unix line, or the unemployment line. The rest as they say is history. Mac or Microsoft fan (lets not forget Linux), you are actually running on Unix.

I like the whole concept that AS is now non-fiction. I'm just waiting for the lights to go out. Prepared? Sorta, but not really. I had hoped to be much further along by now. But Obubbleheads attack on coal may just be the straw on that one. Look at what Sally Jewell and the "Wild Earth Guardians" are doing to northwest Colorado and the Colowyo coal mine right now. Shut 'er down. Freeze in the dark while starving.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt7-W...

Ahh, Unix. That is an operating system I was glad to forget. I was in the last year of computing with punch cards as a freshman in college. A friend of mine told me that the best way to learn Unix was by learning a Dungeons and Dragons' variant called Nethack. Whether he was right or not, I got addicted to the game, and had to get rid of that before long.

You might take that one step further. Both Apple OSX and Windows are based on Unix, which is open source. Of course that was the choice of those that wrote the code and improved it over the years.

I am not a socialist, but do participate in several Open Source projects including Mozilla. And I even partly agree with Jim Taggart -- all inventions are derived from earlier ones. Which is not a good argument against rewarding invention, but is a good argument for not having laws that "lock down" somebody's invention for decades and prevent it being built upon by competitors. This especially goes for software, where even something as complicated as a new version of Windows will be obsolete and taken off the market in 5-10 years (but under current law cannot be taken and improved upon by competing writers for 90 years -- plus likely future extensions!)

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.

Logic and thermodynamics can dictate that certain things must occur, but there is no way to predict the timing (or the kinetics). When so many events happen in parallel, it is likewise difficult to say what will happen next either.

Hello jbrenner,
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.

The decline will not blow over soon. Too many looters in DC are empowered by such a decline.

Gee, I hadn't looked at it from that perspective, but you do have an excellent point.