And another.....The Unbearable Costs of Empire

Post #166,682 by dmcarls 7/29/04 4:42:07 PM Reply	And another.....The Unbearable Costs of Empire [link\|http://biz.yahoo.com/bizwk/040729/nf200407299971_db045_1.html\|http://biz.yahoo.com...9971_db045_1.html]
Post #166,683 by FuManChu 7/29/04 4:43:30 PM Reply	It pays to be number 2. :/ Canada is looking awfully attractive lately.
Post #166,684 by deSitter 7/29/04 5:04:56 PM Reply	Re: It pays to be number 2. :/ We could be #1 and solvent - we made these problems for ourselves with stupid, asinine foregin policy and wasteful use of our own people in the name of idiotic, bullshit, Puritan "order". We have frozen out all our creative impluse in the manic, insane effort to force PC crapola and law&order down everyone's throat - in other words, we're committing suicide by pointless, groundless abstraction. A country like this deserves to fail. "Thou shalt not commit hubris". -drl
Post #166,687 by FuManChu 7/29/04 5:26:00 PM Reply	Part of me wants to agree. ..but a larger part of me is rapidly approaching the conclusion that any group larger than 50 million people is inherently unstable. Hmm, that's not quite right--more like: the larger, the more unstable, but the 50 million-mark might be critical mass. From a big enough perspective, it always reduces to "only a matter of time".
Post #166,690 by ben_tilly 7/29/04 5:33:35 PM Reply	The critical size is much smaller than that Much smaller civilizations have destroyed themselves. For instance Easter Island cut down all of their forests, even though they knew that they would inevitably starve after they did so. You have instability in any group which is large enough that most people (through a tragedy of the commons) are willing to spend virtually no energy on public goods. Cheers, Ben To deny the indirect purchaser, who in this case is the ultimate purchaser, the right to seek relief from unlawful conduct, would essentially remove the word consumer from the Consumer Protection Act - [link\|http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1246&Page=1&pagePos=20\|Nebraska Supreme Court]

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