How bad does it have to get for you to leave?
Straightlinelogic recently and eloquently stated that he wants his freedom back in a couple of different posts. This is why several of us are game planning for Atlantis. Some of us want a physical Atlantis to give us hope. Some would like multiple distributed Atlantises, and I am not opposed to that.
What I am asking you to rate on a scale of 0 to 100 each of the following:
A) Your hope for your current country (Please state either US or non-US as well;
B) What your hope would be if we built Atlantis; and
C) What your hope would have to be in order for you to be so desperate that you would have to leave.
Remember Atlantis won't happen overnight. Many, including myself, are not planning on going unless things get really desperate. I have as good a shrug position as I could ever get.
What I am asking you to rate on a scale of 0 to 100 each of the following:
A) Your hope for your current country (Please state either US or non-US as well;
B) What your hope would be if we built Atlantis; and
C) What your hope would have to be in order for you to be so desperate that you would have to leave.
Remember Atlantis won't happen overnight. Many, including myself, are not planning on going unless things get really desperate. I have as good a shrug position as I could ever get.
A-30
B-75 If I can farm;)
C-10
As long as there are people willing to trade value for value, there should be something on that list that will be of interest. If not, I am always willing to learn.
I may well be qualified for a laborer's job in The Gulch. If so, I will accept it, on terms agreeable to me and to any employer.
B. I think Atlantis already exists in our minds and I believe that only annihilation of the whole human race will prevent a rebirth if the failure is allowed to max out and the current leading countries are hit the hardest. Once started, I expect a desire for a new wave of producers to take hold faster than Atlantis can get fully established.
C. I am already past my tolerance and have shrugged mentally. This would seem to be a meaningless gesture since I am 73 however I have never spent a night in a hospital, take no medications, my 105 year old mother lives with my wife and I at my insistence and for my peace of mind but not because she needs my help. My father passed at 94 but he was a coalminer. I may not live as long as my mother (her grandfather lived to 112) but I have reason to believe I would have productive years ahead should I choose to do so.
I have things to see, books to read, music to enjoy, food and drink to taste and places to experience as long as the world is intact. When any or all of these pleasures are no longer accessible, this grasshopper will check around to see if the ants have a use for him and if not will choose an exit that seems meaningful at the time.
Ready to live in such a place.
My bags are packed.
B) 0- I have no expectations or need for an Atlantis. I prefer to hide in plain sight.
C) I am already looking into where I will go. I’m seriously looking at New Zealand. It’s not perfect, but it’s near perfect. What I like most is that people seem to forget it’s on the map. Even ISIS when tweeting a map of the countries they would take over with their caliphate left New Zealand off. Lol. I also like about NZ:
low population
strict immigration
english is the official language
beautiful landscape
air-cleansing tradewinds
Non-assuming people
surf always within a day’s drive.
What I don’t like:
No flying birds
The country is remote
Two reasons I feel I have to make the move in the next five years. (At the very least --buy vacation property there.)
1) I don’t want to get to old to do this (I am 52) and I don’t want to spend anymore of my 20+ years left complaining endlessly about how this country is falling apart.
2) I do think things are going to get real bad in the US over the next twenty years and it will be easier for my children and their children to get out if they want if I’m set-up already.
ETA: I also like how NZ is on the cutting edge of most advances. For instance: dd you know ATMs and debit cards were first introduced in NZ for study? That’s a benefit of a low population.
Atlantis in AS had the necessary natural resources, plus invisibility from its hostile surroundings, and the symbiotic human skill sets, predicated on a power source "invention" of science fiction proportions and pipelines into the outside world. Atlantis was a microcosm, a prototype, of what an ideal and dynamic society could be. Now how to get everyone else to see and accept those values on the larger national and global scale, by persuasion and without bloodshed?
Today we've run out of places to run to. All the locations you are examining are vulnerable to attack, siege, being overrun, and exhausting resources. True isolation without dependence on outside sources may be impossible to maintain in a hostile and envious world.
Outer space occurred to me as well and was the first suggestion my husband made. However, that environment is the least conducive for human survivability; and for locomotion you'll need technology we don't yet have. See if Richard Branson is interested.
A Gulch-inspired Atlantis, with jbrenner-qualified applicants, would, I am afraid, quickly devolve into the same kind of in-fighting that all too often appears in these galtsgulchonline threads. Would it need a "boss" or head of state to issue edicts, a tribal chief who promulgates rules for everyone else and can banish those who become persona non grata? Will all members be constantly on trial for potential transgressions? Will it become a "commune" where cliques form and seek to dominate? Will the one oath, "I swear by my life..." be enough to guarantee toleration of otherwise individual differences?
I have lived in 60 places in my life (part of a refugee family's travail), so relocating would not be a problem. I live on the road much of the year now. As long as gas stations operate, I can stay on the move.
However, I have successfully lived and productively worked for the last 40 years out of reach of the system, and spread individualist ideas in subtle and user-friendly ways. I have built a wonderful group of associates and freethinkers, and I have not given up hope of changing things from the inside. We need to stand our ground. So my answers are:
A) 99% (USA)
B) 50%
C) 1%
B) I would love there to be an Atlantis. Were there one, I would want to move there immediately. (I occasionally browse the internet to see if there is a country which is stronger in freedom than the US. I have not found one such - only countries in which one can more easily be obscure.) The desire for this is like a magnet that draws me emotionally. However, I must take C into account, and I do try not to make decisions with my emotions.
C) I have invested over 20 years into co-founding (with another Randist, please note) a small company that is now one of the world leaders in Laboratory Informatics. I have contemplated moving the company to Ensenada to get out from under Obamacare; I have considered moving the company to West Texas, if Texas is strong enough to resist Federal socialism (its not doing great at that, though better than CA!). My co-founder does not want to move anywhere anytime, and this is a problem - things will have to be dire before he and his wife uproot. Telecommuting might be a possible compromise position for me, but this requires a high-tech Atlantis.
I will have no problem in bringing valuable skills: My enthusiasm is nigh boundless. (I am also a Medical Technologist (ASCP), geek,...and I have this really nice piece of software I can bring with me as my AS dowry...) My current strategy is to Bug-In, make provisions as I may to come through the likely crisis in decent shape, and try to fight for freedom. It is not impossible to win against a country - especially when you are actually fighting 'for' the country...and there are still many people who value freedom.
Jan, takes the gloves off
As for the medical technology, my wife who is a nurse will be looking for a job in your clinic.
(Your link just took me to your gulch page - was there something in particular you wanted to point out to me there?)
Jan
I would agree that it is un-American to run away to a utopian mythical Galt's Gulch, but America ceased being America at some point in this millennium. My country left me first.
B. 75 and I hope I'm underestimating!
C. I could leave right now, no problems except to figure out how to get medications without a doc and stuck with Medicare... I really hope we won't have to shrug, and with this forum available to me, it's easier to plan and not have to jump quite so fast.
B) 65... IF it's either large enough or their are enough similar sites with people capable and willing to rebuild
C) 65. If presented with a plausible option, or I can figure it out, my wife and I are ready to go. We've positioned ourselves in the last 2 years for such an opportunity.
b) lanai is where I'll eventually move to and I'm already pushing a get maui cops off Lanai campaign. I'm not banking everything on that, it's just home base. I will either live in an RV or a boat and continuously roam. If Lanai were to end up as Atlantis, maybe I'd stay home more. 50
c) no level of hope, when I shrug, I will wander. 0
Edited to add #'s
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04...
I like the Bora idea, it's beautiful or a stone throw away in Tahaa. Guys commute on their 1 man Va'a others on a Jett ski. I bare boated a 36 ftr a few years ago and moseyed around Huahine, Tahaa, Raiatea, and Bora. Good stuff!
They have desalination plants on them.
With this administration you might be able to get one cheap and they are nuclear.
Not easy to automate the headcount down either.
As for Naval personnel, there are few who would "Gulch qualify" as well...too obedient and very few who truly think.
There are a LOT of vets in here, including myself.
Lanai has way too many deer so residents can hunt every day if they want, and you hunt with a rifle, dang shotguns got no range. Game warden goes out at night and knocks a few off, then just gives to who ever. My father in law is on the short list so every once in a while we wake up to deer hanging in the garage.
Love the cruise ship idea, after working on boats for 16 years, I love chilling on a cruise.
B) Probably only a 60 for a physical Atlantis, simply because it would take long enough and be expensive enough to build Atlantis that I wouldn't have that much time to do more than retire once it is built.
C) The US would have to get down to a 10 on a scale of 0 to 100 for me to leave. At that point, even my local paradise would drop from a 70 to a 30.
cmon in! the frog said...the water is perfect! ;)
As human history goes, the US at this time is place/time of phenomenal opportunity. Many development tools are FREE. Many marketing tools are FREE. Tools to sell products/services way down The Long Tail that would never justify shelf space are FREE. Taxes are high, but could be worse in other developed countries and other times in 20th Century US. There's a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. The gov't is stable at the moment, and as human institutions go, does a good job of enforcing laws and contracts without graft.
Things could we *WAY* better. In a hundred years, people will hopefully be shocked at the amount of taxes, graft, and rent seeking we tolerated. It won't happen without hard work.
It absurd to think someone's secretly promoting the ills of gov't and society, esp if his method of promoting them is to admit how things have improved.
If I told you things were miserable, hopeless, and I made an ass of myself today in public carrying on about it to strangers, suddenly I'd be doing something to fight the problems?
I reject the vague comment about monopoly money and anything that suggests there's no objective way to value a business based on its financials, industry, management team, etc
Valuing a businesses is important but trivial compared to the value of the progress humankind. At least for the moment, a lot of that progress happens in the US. People move fast and break things here. Facebook and Google were started here, and they've revolutionized the whole world of marketing, i.e. helping producers and consumers find one another.
GODS HAIRY BALLS
Right, but we're valuing businesses. So we have to note the price they charge and not the prices they pay. We're looking for profit with respect to overall prices.
Along with noticing how much the grocer charges me, I also need to notice the mechanic, my employees, and what rate *my wife and I are able to bill* without loosing clients. It's not just about other people's prices.
The notion that people would buy businesses without paying attention to the basics is silly. Of course you look at revenue, expenses, and profits. You look at the value of the assets the business has b/c it's those assets plus their secret sauce (or so called "unfair advantage) that generate profit, and you use profit and growth in profit to work out a valuation. I'm not an expert in this, but I know enough to know there are good models to work out the value of a business.
The monopoly is either a vague comment, a red herring, or an argument that I completely miss. I don't see any argument whatsoever. It's throwing up our hands and saying we cannot value a business b/c it deals in some unstable currency, which is the reserve currency of the world. It's nonsense. I don't even understand enough of what's being said to refute it. It sounds like a case of psychological depression expressed through a business claim. It may be something to complicated to express in a paragraph.
Circuit Guy, please read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin so that you learn how the Federal Reserve system works (for the looters and borrowers and against producers and savers).
There will soon be a time when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency. That time is coming soon. When it does, oh s***!
I think I know the basics from my one undergrad economics course, but I just requested the book from the library.
It sounds like you're saying you don't like the national bank buying debt instruments to expand the money supply. I'm fine with their free market operations to expand the money supply, but I don't like how the system is designed to be awash in debt. The theory is the financial institutions allocate capital to worthy projects via instruments of debt and equity, but it seems like a lot of debt is consumer debt in which consumers pay to have something a little earlier. You'd probably say they make that decision b/c they trust the national bank will expand the money supply in hard times, making the amt they need to pay back less; so with that "Federal Reserve put option" in place, they feel justified taking more risk. I'm not sure to what extent this happens, but it's what I like least about our monetary system. I think the biggest problem is people don't price risk well, but I don't know how much monetary policy is to blame.
" It has created fairly consistent boom/bust cycles"
We had a major bust centered on the railroad industry in the late 19th Century. History is full of speculative manias. I'm not knowledgeable about whether the Fed Reserve has made that better or worse.
"When a society has $17+ trillion in debt officially ($50000 per person) and over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities (> $300000/person), by all reason interest rates ought to be sky high. "
It won't last forever. We should fix this before it's a crisis. Right now we appear to be waiting for trouble; then we'll fix it.-- bad fiscal policy.
"Have you ever considered why AS characters insisted on being paid in Au? It is because the same amount of Au necessary to buy a suit 100 years ago buys the same suit now. "
I agree with this, but Au is a less predictable medium of exchange than the USD-- huge swings based on supply and demand. If I had a need to store value for 100 years and I were not allowed to have a trustee tinker with it, i.e. I literally had to bury it and leave it untouchd for 100 years, Au would be my first choice. I could buy 1oz for $1300 and know there will be roughly $300 - $3000 USD2014 there when they dig it up in 2114. If I were allowed to manage it in a conservative portfolio, I could turn it into roughly a half million USD2014 in 100 years.
It will be like when UK went from empire to ex-empire. In other words, US will still be a thriving place, but just not host the reserve currency of the world.
I like making things that serve other people's needs, in exchange for something I want. I don't care at all whether it's the yuan. By 2030 it will probably be something very different from what I use today. All the value is in how you serve people. What you trade doesn't matter.
Absolutely not. Businesses have value. Real estate has value. Consumer durables have value, but they depreciate. Capital equipment has value, but it depreciates. Currencies have value, but they depreciate. Consumer durables, capital equipment, and currencies are not bad. You need them for their intended purposes. They're not meant to be stores of value.
If it's that tenuous that one person can change it, maybe it should be worth less than it is. A buck will buy me 60 capacitors on cut tape. Maybe in a few years it will buy me 10. This may be a big deal for people in the monetary policy world, but I don't care. A business that generates $100k in profit and is worth $500k is the same to me as one in 2030 that generates 500 e-pesos and is worth 2.5 kilo-e-pesos, or whatever we're using in 16 years.
Every year I go into Quickbooks and select "Items" to update prices. It's very easy. I also go into ezPaycheck and update people pay-- very easy compared to 940,941, SUTA, Workers Comp, etc. Taco Bell updates their menu with new styles and flavors, so it's not a huge onus on them.
It's much much harder to keep track of the fact that the brits call mm "mils", while to me that means "thousandths of an inch." But engineers make up units for fun: 5 mils = 0.25mm = 1 bee's dick = 5 gnat's asses. I see nothing hard about fluctuating prices.
I thought that I had previously submitted this, sorry if I didn't. My email is the same as my name here, followed by @gmail.com, if you so choose to contact me.
It's the end of the industrial age and the beginning of a post industrial age in which machines do much of the work formerly done by humans.
Circuit Guy
Indeed, the US is still the best.
With more energy independence happening, financially the US will get better. If the pols don't expropriate. The whole hydraulic fracturing phemon is one more example of US technical excellence.
The issue is not to abandon the US. The issue is if enough smart people get together to make it better.
Harry M
America is no longer a republic, and the moochers who elect their looter masters/pimps outnumber us badly. Abandoning the US is on the table given that the voters doubled down on Obama crony socialism.
with it. It took a lot of effort to make the move but I have no regrets. Every day here is fun. I didn't want to live in a third world country. You have to be realistic about how you want to live. We rent a small city apartment and manage a beautiful farm.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Curaca...
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/2e...
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/11...
Scott de Sapio posted something about a strike by Chile's copper miners. Nationalization of copper is a serious concern there.
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/a2...
Chile did nationalize copper!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_nat...
There is also talk about nationalizing WATER there, but it got voted down this year.
http://www.bnamericas.com/news/waterandw...
On the positive side, the cost of living in Chile is about the same as the affordable places in the USA, according to what I found myself online. Santiago, Chile has the highest standard of living and the lowest crime rate in South America, and is not all that far from http://www.galtsgulchchile.com
One could fly into Santiago, and rent a car easily to check out the site.
Abaco started a thread on the Chilean economic situation here:
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/6e...
On a very positive note, things have gone well since they privatized Social Security.
www.thenewamerican.com/.../10521-chile-s... program-is-30-years-old-and-prospering
Chile is a nation to watch. It has improved substantially, but it probably needs to improve its politics before most of us would go there.
B. 0
C. 00
A:) 15 - US-New Mexico. Pretty far away from Mordor and most land in my area is state owned, not federal. Drops to 0 if Hilliary is elected.
B:) 75 - I would go for distributed, if all together, you would eventually get close to what we have now. Small communities are better.
C:) 10 - Little hope, chaos will come quickly and it will not be pretty.
B) Is it the place or the philosophy that matters most?
C) I think that there is one major thing to think about when situating Atlantis: power. Rand recognized it (briefly), but it is still the biggest concern. Without energy, there is no heat for houses and no fire for the forge. While the concept of Atlantis is tantalizing, I'd make sure that there is power first and foremost. The cart is important, but secondary to the horse.
*(I am NOT impugning anyone's intellect, ability or commitment. We just don't know each other and the quality of the habitants of Atlantis would determine any level of success possible)
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