Life in the 21st Century: A Trade-Off
The photo here depicts a slice of life from 1905, before fire-fighting equipment had evolved into an early version of the trucks we have today. (To skeptics, of which I was one before I looked this up: both the source of water, the fire hydrant, and the modern battery to power the headlight were developed more than 100 years earlier.)
This is a reminder of how the last 120 years, due purely to improvements in technology, has made our lives safer, longer, healthier, more productive, and more convenient than they’ve ever been in the past. But, absent the improvement represented by developments in technology, many parts of our lives have gotten far worse.
In 1905, was it conceivable that today:
• The leader of one of our two political parties would be a criminal conman? Does any legitimate historian regard Teddy Roosevelt as a sociopath?
• The world’s #1 automaker, Volkswagen, which led #2 Toyota by over $32 billion in revenue as of June 2023, could have possibly decided, as a corporation, to rip off 11 million customers, and another 8 billion people on Earth who use their lungs to breathe, with its scheme to defraud emissions regulations?
• Wells Fargo, which was founded 41 years old before this bicycle was made, would be ordered to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and victims’ compensation for alleged illegal practices that caused thousands of the bank’s customers to lose their homes and vehicles?
We’ve made a trade, whether we want it or not, from moral decency to creature comfort and the gross abuse of the common American consumer.
All I can say about this personally, and I’m sure my thoughts are echoed by most of my peers who made their money in the late 20th Century, is that we were lucky to have lived and worked in a time in which business morality still meant something.
We’ve all heard the quote here attributed to everyone from philosophers to baseball coaches, but it’s a great piece of advice nonetheless.
At left are the words of the late British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, reminding us that science is always evolving in the direction of a better understanding of the universe around us.
In an earlier post I made the point that more than 90% of the January 6th insurrectionists who are serving prison sentences were sent away for assaulting police officers, but that Trump is referring to them as “hostages,” and promising to pardon them if he is elected.
Right now the mainstream media is making a fortune pretending that it seems like Trump and Biden are running approximately even, and that the people who recognize Trump as a sociopathic criminal should be terrified that he may be re-elected.
Fortunately for the United States, not all Republicans stand with the Trump and the MAGA extremists.
I responded to the reader who sent me the meme at left: Please forward the study from Spain.
Most Americans are searching for answers as to the popularity of Donald Trump among U.S. congresspeople. Virtually all our lawmakers are intelligent and highly educated; moreover they come from considerable wealth. So why are they so terrified of the prospect of withdrawing support of a criminal sociopath?
I normally don’t use ad hominem attacks in my posts, but I thought this was too funny to pass up.
