[ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki
Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2015 3:20 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

 

 

 

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 12:47 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net> > wrote:


Many of those reading this may live to experience what happens when a nation
lives on borrowed money for a long time.  Eventually the bills come due.  I
fear the outcome will range somewhere between extremely unpleasant to
horrifying.

 

### I am just as appalled by deficit spending as you are but I think we will actually weasel out of trouble thanks to AI and robotics. Economic productivity will keep increasing so fast that all the liabilities of the US government will be met by taxing the same slice of a much bigger pie.

 

At least I hope so. In fifteen years I will be eligible for social security... but I am making preparations to do without, just in case.

 

Rafał  

 

 

OK Rafal, I know you are making preparations to do without, so you and plenty of people will be OK.  But plenty of people will not.  Then what?

 

Perhaps someone here can enlighten me, but I have long wondered about those silly zombie apocalypse exercises we keep hearing the US military does.  We know they do exercises to train for every scenario, so what’s up with the zombie apocalypse?

 

Perhaps they are training for what happens if there is a nationwide power outage or some kind of civil unrest, and soon you have hordes of starving people, just wandering around looking for some means of staying alive?  

 

Could that be something the military would train to handle?  I don’t see why not; it has already happened.  Mikhail Gorbachev writes in his memoirs about the communists taking over and forming the Soviet Union.  In those days, the government handed the farmers a quota.  If the fields produced insufficient amounts of crops, the government would come in and take whatever they estimated was their fraction.  If the family had nothing left, oh well, so sorry.  They starved.

 

Gorby writes of seeing starving people.  He saw a man collapse and freeze to death near his home.  No one even retrieved his frozen corpse for three days.

 

There may be Europeans here whose families have seen Real Trouble, who can elaborate.

 

OK, I digress.  What happens when Social Security becomes insolvent, and can’t pay those who do not have any alternative means?

 

Do we get the zombie apocalypse?

 

spike 

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