Tag Archives: United States

Freedom in the modern age.

Business, concepts, Government, Inspiration, The World, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Well I have never talked on here about entertainment before but here is one that is good.  If you do or do not know there was a show called Jericho.  Last night was the last episode of it.  It was a really great, well written show.  It lost some people because for a while it went a bit slow, and most shows with arc don’t last once you miss a episode or too and the network changed it’s time slot at a very critical time in the development of the show.  (Arc is when a show is a story from one episode to the next so you have to watch them in order to understand fully what is going on.)  Basically they did not give it the chance they should have and it failed.   It was canceled after the first season, but the largest fan outcry in TV history made them bring it back.  They did so with little advertising and fanfare, and had a second season of only 7 episodes that mostly concluded the entire story.

The reason this show was special is because it touched on subject that are almost never talked about on TV in this way.  Maybe it made some of the corporate people unhappy with the direction it was going.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER.

Basically the story goes like this.  There are bombs that go off and destroy the 23 largest cities in the US except New York.  Communication and power stop.  Food runs out and people in rural Kansas start fighting to survive.  Well equipped mercenaries raid towns and take all the resources and kill many people.  At some point a goverment is put in place.  The old US has the east, TX is independent and the west forms a new nation.  The nation formed in the west is totally controled and financed by a huge mega corporation, the same one that ran the war in Iraq for the US and hired all the mercanires that the US used worldwide before the attack.  The corporation quickly takes part of everything.  They take away freedom, they surround each town with checkpoints so that only products that say can get in or out.  They rush a new constitution that takes away all the power of the people and gives it to the corporation.  Everything is unfair but they have all the resources and power.  Soon the people start to revolt, and by the end of the show all the viewers are calling for revolution.  The last episode is the start of this revolution with Texas shooting down airplanes from this new western nation.

Much of the show focused on the trap of giving corporations too much control of the government, which in turn takes rights away from the people.  This is something that is happening right now in the United States.  There are so many ways that our freedom has been taken.  The government is fairly corrupt.  They spend way too much, and take way too much.  They also spend so much more than they take in.   Who said the federal goverment should secure travel?  Who said they should put so much control on what we eat?  Who said that the government should run the school system in such a poor way?  We tax people so unevenly but yet the government mails out billions of dollars in checks.  The show Jericho showed how this line of thinking will only result in loss of freedom, and at some point the people will revolt.

If you told anyone 20 years ago the things that are going on in this nation right now they would have said you are crazy, that could never happen.  That is way overstepping the role of government.  I guess they are doing it just slow enough that most people don’t notice.   The education system has failed the public by creating the dumbest population this nation has ever had.

People in our nation now expect to carry ID everywhere, go through government checkpoints to travel.  It took me over a year to have our federal government allow my wife to enter the nation, they have no right to say who I can and can’t marry.  People expect to give a personal ID number every time they talk business on the phone.  People expect their information, privacy, and rights to be disrespected.   Most of them are so miseducated that they simply believe what they are told by the media, they have no idea how to think for themselves.

If it goes much farther down this path I will really start to fear for the future success of my country, the United States of America.  Most of the nation and the decisions are totally out of the control of the people, and most of the people disagree with many of the decisions.  Most people think we are not to be the world police, they think we spend way too much and should not carry debt.  Everyone I know thinks the tax system is crazy and needs to be replaced, but yet every year it gets more complex.  When will the craziness end.   Maybe only with revolution.

The world is changing forever. It is getting flat, feel the pressure yet?

concepts, Entrepreneurship, Money, The World, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The world is changing forever.  Well this has been a true statement for as long as history has been recorded.  The pace of this change is much faster now than it has ever been.  The problem is that many people are stuck in their way of thinking.  The learn things one way and most people, at some point stop keeping up with the changes and start to fall behind, way behind.

So how is the world changing right now?  Well we are in the middle of a few major changes.  The key to most of these changes it the spread of technology.  Because the United States was first in most everything we had to go slow, create standards and design from scratch.   Other nations have had the gift of just being able to copy our progress.  Think about advances in computers, medicine or cars.  The high tech developed nations have designed the improvements but everyone; even those in the poorest nations get the benefit.

Now having the same, standardized protocols methods for doing things all over the world, along with an instant, worldwide communication system things REALLY have changed.  Now people from anywhere can communicate instantly, they can chat, they can talk.  And now it is everywhere and so cheap that people with almost nothing can still go to a public computer lab and join the global work force.  With just a small investment an office can be opened anywhere to do most things.  This allows the work to be done in the location where the labor is the cheapest.  This premise is called the Flattening of the World.

When I was in Asia for much of last year I still had an Arizona phone number, I was able to control computers in Arizona just as if I was sitting at the keyboard.  I was able to send email, create web pages, move money from account to account, write checks online, order parts and have them shipped to our production area, as well as sell products to customers.  I could do 90% of what was required to manage a company.  For the other 10% I delegated it, and was available on the phone to help the person out.  This is happening all over the world.

No longer do the super smart people from all over the world want to move to the US or western Europe so that they could be apart of the global high tech work force, they now can do it from home, in their native country.

This change is HUGE, and it will never be reversed.  It will FOREVER deeply impact the way the world works.  Most jobs are now at risk and the jobs will be given to the person who will do the best job for the best price.  If you keep your job the price pressure of the rest of the world will make the wages you are paid go down.  This is great for the people who see it coming and create a system to take advantage of this new shift.  It will be the worst thing for those that don’t keep up, and those that expect things not to change.

People who are in lesser developed nations will also gain, they will be the target of huge amounts of education, and capital.

There will be a new definition of the middle class, the definition will be MUCH lower than what is currently considered the middle class now, maybe a family income of $15,000 per year.  world is flatBasically what we see as the middle class in the United States will be much smaller than it currently is.  And millions of people all over the developing world will be moved out of poverty and into their definition of a middle class.

If you want to learn much more about this there is a really smart guy named Thomas L Friedman, he invented the term and latterly wrote the book on this subject.  This book is one of the most important books of our current time, and those that understand it will be much more successful in life.

No matter what happens it is huge and will affect you.  So it if your choice get educated about it and take advantage of the change, or just wait and be sideswiped by it.