Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Embedded itself in a car? That's much better quality than a "ninja stars" we'd buy from the weird store in the strip mall when we were kids. Those things couldn't embed themselves in Cool Whip. Of course, the fact that they were being thrown by 12 year old ninjas might have had something to do with it.

I want one...

Coolest bus ever takes to the roads and it's not around here. Put me in with the other people who remember seeing images of this a few months back and thought "oh that could look cool, maybe they'll build a few a them someday." I'll be waiting for the day it hits its first oversized truck though.

First thing that comes to my mind is something like thinking you're rolling backwards when you're not because the thing is all around you and moving. Imagine it'll take some getting used to at least. Seems like it'd be a weird experience.

Now to get it fitted with laser beams...

At first I thought it was awesome. Then I remembered it is in China where bridges, manhole covers, and escalators try to kill people on a regular basis.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2016 1:39pm by lolgaxe

Love how many of those are moving trucks...

Ironically was just passing the old hometown the other day when we came across a section of the freeway overpass that was removed. Turns out it was hit, yet again. If memory serves right it was one of those things that was struck at least 2-3 times a year badly enough to cause a traffic problem, despite it being well advertised as a low bridge. Driving under it you could look up and see all the damage caused to it over the years. Suppose it's no surprise they finally had to remove it.

People are special.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2016 11:13am by someproteinguy

Wife finally got in at a hospital. It's an hour drive away and has a bad reputation but it's a hospital nonetheless.

It's been about a month now since she got in, and she is already getting a $2 raise to her base pay. She gets bonus pay for pretty much everything she does. She gets 3 days off every week guaranteed unless she chooses to work extra days in which they will give her an extra $10 per hour just for showing up on her days off. She gets extra pay just for being a "floater" and moving between floors because the one she was assigned to was closed due to lack of patients. It's just pay on top of pay on top of pay. Just one night at work for her is equal to an entire two-week paycheck for me at any job I've ever had.

Before now, I used to think they were asking a bit much for a $15 minimum wage, but now I realize (more than before, if that is at all possible) what a ******* joke it is to work anywhere that doesn't offer at least that much in pay. All the time I spent filling out applications and working odd jobs while she was in school was a total waste of ******* time. We have truly become a nation of suckers. --when every job that still exists only exists because it demands a warm body to physically be there and can't be done for less in India-- what does that leave us with?

Every kid coming out of high school today is completely fucked barring they don't come from money and influence. There is no "just get a job" for the regular person anymore. It's over. My family might be moving out of our rat-hole apartment and into a decent life, but everyone else gets left behind. All of my brothers, my mother, my extended family and friends all still live in the third world within America-- barely making rent for their rat-hole apartments and barely scraping by without basic commodities. They all have "jobs" and work their asses off. Meanwhile, food stamps are harder than ever to get a hold of and give less and less, and "unemployment" is all but a myth. When did it get this bad? How did this happen? Who would I have to kill to make this right?

Edited, Aug 6th 2016 8:24pm by Kuwoobie

Been trending downhill for a while.

The United States benefited from a post-WWII boom. Which was mainly caused by people carpet-bombing the infrastructure of virtually every other major industrial power into the ground, while ours went largely untouched. We then spent the next couple of decades pushing out massive amounts of stuff for everyone, because we were the only ones that could do it. This meant lots of good money for people with minimal skills doing simple jobs. Meanwhile the rest of the world was busy dealing with the physical and psychological aftermaths of war. It takes a few years to decades to rebuild infrastructure even in a best case scenario, and psychological effects of war can take generations to alleviate as PTSD-related problems often get passed down to children via abusive behavior, impairing people long after the initial victim passes away. We of course had to deal with the psychological aftermath as well, but not on the scale of many other nations.

Nonetheless slowly but surely the rest of the world rebuilt, and many other countries modernized and raised their productivity as well, displacing us as the world's manufacturing giant. It's not that the U.S. went backwards really, the rest of the world simply caught back up with us after falling behind for a bit. Also remember there's a lot more people competing for resources in today's world compared to 50 years ago, and that has an effect on prices and buying power of your common person as well (though we're also much more productive than we were 50 years ago as well, and that offsets a decent amount of it).

In theory that's the most appropriate question. If we brought similar destruction to most of the rest of the world, on a scale proportional to WWII (we'd obviously have to kill/destroy more now simply because there's more people and factories in the world), and somehow managed to stay relatively unscathed through it all, we'd probably have another decade of prosperity before our lead started to degrade again.

Most "sensible" people don't see that as an alternative though.

Edited, Aug 8th 2016 9:50am by someproteinguy

It certainly wouldn't be in the same form, but simply cutting the productivity of the rest of the world would have an impact. Yes you're the one producing goods now, and not everything can be automated (even then you still need a few people to control the robots).

Beyond that though (and probably more relevant in our changing world), you're also now the one with the "good" schools. People are graduating college here, not hiding in bomb shelters when they're supposed to be studying, so you're supplying better trained labor into a world that'll have need for it. That may mean instead of your people working in the U.S. they'll have an easier time getting jobs oversees, but your citizens are still benefiting from it in the end. Your laboratories are the ones developing treatments for disease. The technological breakthroughs are now happening in your research institutions, not ones in China or Europe. This also means while the rest of the world is busy rebuilding their roads your society is upgrading its internet speeds, or taking advantage of whatever new technology you've developed.

Again it's not so much you "getting ahead" as the rest of the world falling behind. Rebuilding from war is a massive undertaking that will distract a society for many years, giving you a chance to improve things for your citizens without having to deal with as much competition.

Edited, Aug 8th 2016 11:17am by someproteinguy

Good plan. Make job openings in the bomb building sector.

There are various means of redistributing wealth from wealthy to poor if that's what you're after. Outcomes are generally inefficient, but they can increase the welfare of the common person. They're also potentially detrimental if they're too heavy-handed in the approach. We've tended to avoid those methods in the U.S. for various reasons, some of which have merit, and some of which are rather stupid.

In the end though, methods like wealth re-distribution don't address the root cause of the problem: that the country simply has to share the pie with more people these days. There's no way around that without either increasing the size of the pie (for example through new technologies), or by killing off your competitors so that there's more pie for you. The world only can support so many people, and historically (think like over the past 10,000 years or so) people have used the majority of their waking hours focusing on their survival. In more recent times (say the past couple hundred years) technology has given us breathing room to be able to afford to do other things besides barely scraping by. However as the world's consumption catches up with the resource potential again we'll increasingly be left with less free time and money as a result.

As a non-WWII example of this in action, those that survived the black death in Europe got to experience many years of plenty, and had an improved diet and lower mortality. Linky.

Who knows?

To make an educated guess the U.S. would probably have slowly continued to try and crawl out of the great depression through the 40's. We would have never been "the greatest country in the world" for a time, and at some point we'd probably be in a fairly similar situation to where we find ourselves now, but likely with a smaller amount of material wealth having been accumulated over the last 70 years or so. It's likely we would have never seen a strong middle-class grow and then slowly start to die away. It's not like the U.S. is a terrible place or anything in this scenario, but certainly not as wealthy or strong as it is otherwise. Remember the wealth concentration we see in this country is closer to historical norms than it has been for quite some time. Much of the late 1800's and early 20th century had a similar amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Not that this is necessarily an ideal situation, of course, but we're not in uncharted territory here either.

Clicky thingy

Honestly we'd probably be better off if we just admitted to ourselves that the post-WWII boom was an anomaly, and we shouldn't expect to see a situation like that again; at least without going through a similar global crisis.

Edited, Aug 8th 2016 3:49pm by someproteinguy

LOLRetro 3hard4u platformers from the Intellivision age instead of from the Nintendo age?

Imagine these floating overhead, dropping bombs on your land.

Hindenburg.

Edited, Aug 12th 2016 10:33am by lolgaxe

Today he'd be called a terrorist.