Post Alpaca Lips Posts

 Raising our ideals higher. Photo by   Cristina Gottardi   on   Unsplash . Originally published on Medium . . History tells us inequality is a main reason for the collapse of civilizations, or any massive social disruption.   The Roman Empire , and the   nation states of ancient Greece , were forever battling their cases of undulating generational inequality. Their aristocrats continually amassed all the wealth, then ran into major problems with the   lower   classes. Class warfare was the common result of such wealth concentration bubbles. Hostilities over inequality only ended when a decent amount of leveling imploded the extremes. . Economic conservatives are always touting “free” markets as if they   free   up everything for the perfect meritocracy Olympic Games.   Survival-of-the-fittest   is also trotted out as the reason for determining who should   win,   and who should   lose . That nothing else really ...

Photo by   krakenimages   on  Unsplash First published on Medium . . My feelings about “capitalism” were benign most of my life. Of course, my concept of it was mostly the hard striving business, competing against similar businesses in a generally fair,   decently   refereed, economy. Although in high school, I had read about Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, and as a 20-something consumer, I   experienced   the chopping up of AT&T. . My perspective began changing somewhere between the dot com boom, and the 2008 crash. The housing collapse, and stock market crash solidified my current negative perception of capitalism. Ironically, this happened during the high point of my small business’ boom that lasted about four years, or until 2010. . As millions were losing their jobs in late 2008 and all of 2009, my business was doing better than it ever had. Conversely, I was the same age as my father, 48, when he had the worst couple years of his life, caree...

(Photo by   Vladimir Fedotov   on   Unsplash ) First published on Medium . . Notice how the movie makers regularly come up with scary systems, or A.I. that will someday, somehow control human society?   HAL   from   2001: A Space Odyssey   did it.   The Matrix,   and   Skynet   from   Terminator   also took over humanity.   Why are we allowing such a thing to happen, even if it is only in movies?   It is because the   They   figure we are mostly chumps, and consider the great bulk of Americans a democratic   mob . . Not sci-fi or screen writers necessarily, but the way our political system always ends up getting more convoluted, and self damaging. The   They   is a nebulous entity   We The People   originally formed, and now have little real control over. While politicians and the wealthy have much of the power, even their control is limited. The   They   slowly tie up...