lurch

Concrete Rebound Hammer will make you wonder why you haven't ever crushed a human skull, with your bare hands! Concrete Rebound hammer is the glitch in the Matrix you've been waiting for! Concrete Rebound hammer is never void, even where prohibited! Do not bend, spindle, fold or mutilate Concrete Rebound Hammer! With Concrete Rebound Hammer, you CAN touch this! Concrete Rebound Hammer should not be transported in any model year of Volkswagen Bug! (Shipping via stick insect is available in the US Virgin Islands, and all other islands that have had sex at least once in their lives.) Concrete Rebound Hammer is on a World Tour that's banned throughout the world! Concrete Rebound Hammer is compatible with neither Windows, nor Apples! (Do not use Concrete Rebound Hammer on doors or grapes. Pears and oranges are fine.) Also, Linux is right out. Concrete Rebound Hammer has NO cholesterol! Concrete Rebound Hammer is neither Vegan nor gluten free! Concrete Rebound Hammer is available in bottles, cans, and cute wicker baskets made by the hard working indigenous people of... someplace!

Concrete Rebound Hammer is back like a vertebrae!

Concrete Rebound Hammer will NEVER DIE!

FUCK, YEAH!!!!!

Wooooot!

-Lurch

Concrete Rebound Hammer may skip when subjected to shock.

Took me a bit to realize my sense of humor should be handling this.

The correct answer is, no, you haven't seen the suit. You've seen a picture of the suit.

Your opinion and credibility will be given equivalent weight to your knowledge and experience with a suit that size. There being only one of them, which you have never actually seen, by all means, please, tell me all about it.

I wonder if Luigi had to put up with this crap?

-B

Nope. Once you get used to it, it is surprisingly not-awkward. Flies just fine with airlocks open wide with little pressurization, (just gets a very wide fallrate range, makes it easy to fly it dirty with a flock) and flies like a dream with the airlocks totally closed, although fully closed renders it almost impossible to fly with other suits. I've had jumps where the fallrate never topped 38 mph whether I was trying to fall slow, or not.
-B

Quote

"but it's not a square"

You haven't seen the suit, have you?

-B

Have you ever tried to measure the surface area of a 3 dimensional object the size of a very large wingsuit? You'd need a nailgun to get it to stay put enough to measure properly and that doesn't count curves. Now let's see you do it on a suit wide enough to hang off both sides of a queen bed mattress.

When it was stretched out on the floor at Zhills, we took a Petra 69, folded it in half, and laid the Albatross II over it. It hid the entire canopy. We all looked at it and went, shit, that'd be a 35 square foot freakin' suit! And let it go at that.
Roughly measured by yanking various chunks of the suit flat and throwing a tape measure across it, the thing is at least 6 feet from shoulder to tailtip, 5 foot 5" maybe 5 foot 6"wingspan gripper to gripper depending on how tight you've got it pulled, and some additional surface area added forward of the shoulders by moderate forward rake. It takes the form of nearly a square with a bunch of minor detail features hanging off it. The grippers alone were 21". Best estimate given crude and unsophisticated measurements and available evidence against a canopy, I'm callin' it 33-35 square feet not counting me face.

You wanna argue with it, you come measure it. 6x5 would be 30. The A2 was 6x5 plus a bunch of big chunks of change when inflated.
The A3 makes even that look small. We lost some wingspan by making the forward rake, but made up for it in sprawled-out inflation, hung a lot more wing both forward and aft, on 24" grippers. There's spots where the thing is almost 7 feet from gripper held forward of my head to tailtip, and counting cell slack, stretches almost as wide as the last one did.

In the A3, the leading edge point of the aircraft isn't my head, it's my hands. The body position is a cross between flying squirrel and Superman. I don't GIVE a damn exactly how big it is. Just WHAT it is.
If the mechanic plays out as well as the last two did, the Albatross IIIa Expansion Pack gets built. The body position the A3 is built around, was done to enable supporting much, more wing area than even this. I'd like to see if I can push this to the mid-50's, low-60's.
-B

The goal is to develop a suit that flies like a canopy- in every way. So far, so good.
And no, these things (Albatross series suits) have to be flown very dirty for any other suits to stay with them, or for them, to stay with any other suits. Their native fallrates and forward speeds are wildly out of spec relative to how everyone likes to fly. Useless for competition. But what happens when I open it up at breakoff? Last flock, I broke off with everyone else- levelled off at 4,000 and started slowly burning off speed. Watched everyone else drop away and deploy. 20 seconds later, looked at my alti. I was still at 4,000-3800ish with about 10 seconds of power left till it was gonna stall. The suit IS an antigravity battery. Doesn't store charge for long, but while you've got power, you can all but stop dead in midair.
It's fun.

5 foot 10". If you're wondering about the 35 square feet, it's simple. We folded a Petra 69 in half and laid the Albatross II over it. The Petra disappeared. The A-II was more than half the size of a 69 even without being pulled totally flat.
-B

Next couple of weeks. We spent the better part of two years hammering this one out on paper. Jake absolutely nailed it in one shot. The fit is perfect. The grippers drop into my hands just right. The toes go exactly as tight as I want them to, when I want them to. The wingspan matches what we mapped out, so perfectly that at full span, I get exactly the tension in my thumbs holding the grippers just by fingertips, that I wanted.

Best estimate is 38-40 square feet. The last one was a solid 35. This is... more. A lot more. Feels totally flyable. The last one was. This was entirely designed around a skillset I built up over the last 4 years flying suits almost that big. The suit looks insane, but it's the apex of a very long and patient growth curve.

Should fly like a slightly baggy Albatross II, with improved range of motion and a much bigger wallop when flared.
-B

BryanCampau

Wow! I'd love to see that thing in the sky! That's crazy.

Not anymore, it's not.

The Albatross III exists.

The Albatross II is no longer the biggest suit in my fleet.
Not even close.

Use your imagination.

-B

What's the latest on that guy Antoine anyway? Any.of these things work, put any mileage on em? I'd love to know how some of his creations flew. He -is- still alive?

Totally got me on cool factor, man. My ride's cool, but my ride ain't got rockets. Your wingsuit actually has freaking rockets.
Rockets.
Damn.
-B

The A-II? I was flying it that way to keep it -down- with that canopy. If I had opened it out all the way with the leading edge -not- partially collapsed to keep that thing on a leash, it would have outflown the canopy and I would have had to fly it steeply head-down to get the CG right for a power level like that anyway.

The flight regime on display in that image is a controlled half-stall which is how you use a suit that big at the bottom edge of its power curve. I had to fly it dirty to keep it on a leash. To my knowledge there is no suit that can stay with it when it is opened all the way. It occupies a largely-unexplored range between normal wingsuits and canopies.
It may be useless for competition so far, but this line of research has resulted in a suit with more sheer annihilating air traction than anything else I ever flew. There are suits that fly faster, suits that fly further, and suits that fly longer. But there are no suits that do what this one does.
I do not care if I can win competitions with this thing. Learning to fly it is reward enough.
Special thanks to Tony for being willing to build me something -that- far off the map from a bunch of drawings. Suit worked, old man, it worked. The workmanship in that thing is as world-class as it gets, I want to fly nothing else.
I owe you one.
-B

I'd noted these guys a ways back... if I remember right, at first the stated goal was to apply all sorts of engineering techniques to design a wingsuit with a superior glide meant to win at the next world cup. Their release info included pretty pictures of graphics and simulations.

I paid attention briefly but without all that much interest because I was pretty sure I knew the fate of this one before they even got started. I've seen this approach before. It doesn't work. I was wondering how long it was going to take for these guys to figure that out.

There've been a few other attempts of a similar nature, usually loaded with as many trendy engineering-school buzzwords and jargon as humanly possible.

"We will use the latest in data acquisition technology combined with digital physics simulation and computational fluid dynamics to characterize the lift to drag ratio until we have grepped the succotash to a flux capacitor inhibiting boundary layer detachment leading to a mathematically proven superior suit design."

In every case it becomes more about finding ways to apply those jazzy engineering-school tools to the job regardless of whether or not it will be effective.

It never is. They invariably produce lots and lots of analysis diagrams and flow charts and mathematical gibberish and whatnot, none of which ever yields a detectable let alone decisive improvement in suit design. We aren't designing an Airbus, here, where all factors except the air itself are rigid and can be characterized and defined and analyzed and the improvements are black and white. The performance of a suit is far more the pilot than it is the suit. When the range of performance can vary by 30-50% depending on exactly how the pilot handles it, a 3% improvement in the aerodynamics of the suit, produced after months of designing data collection hardware, analysis protocols, doing simulations, designing your improvement, building the suit... Doesn't even show. At all. Lost in the noise to insignificance. A slightly better pilot in an inferior suit will beat it repeatedly.

Whereas, the direct route... Build a suit. Try it. See how it does. Think about how the suit flies, think up how you'd change it to improve it based on intuitive sense of handling and how far the suit actually flew, then just build another one and try it again...

That approach led directly from Birdman Classic 1 to the Tony Suits -Bird series not to mention Squirrel's current dominant offerings.

Last I saw they were working on their mathematically proven Athena helmet that was supposed to be the big magic improvement to beat everybody. I think everyone in the project probably graduated before producing anything except a swoopy looking helmet that looks just like other equally swoopy helmets designed without a terabyte of computational fluid dynamics behind them.

But, we demonstrated our ability to apply CFD to a physics problem, yay!
-B

Wolf, I very hope you're wrong about that outcome.
Unfortunately, you're right, I too see a distinct possibility of the whole thing turning out that way. That's the thing about chaos. You often see abrupt inversions of effects on very large scales.

Another one of the many reasons Trump was elected was because the left liberal culture war thing... once very necessary, to push for the rights of women, blacks, gays, succeeded too well. The narrative to the straight white male demographic slowly changed from "Us, too, dammit" to "Not you anymore, not at all, you the evil bad guy now, straight white males root of all evil must be cast down" to the point of colleges mandating indoctrination classes where white people learn about how evil and racist they are just for being white.

To the point that I cannot view any form of media for 5 seconds without being hit by -something- jamming race issues in my face and blaming it on white people.
The left overshot its goal of being a uniting force and slammed straight into being as divisive as possible, screeching, labeling, silencing and condemning anything not in enthusiastic agreement with its agenda.

What we all just saw was pushback. Trump realized he could gain at both ends... feed off all the screeching outrage while laughing at it and even taunting it in blatant public defiance of it and looking like a hero to every poor working class schmoe whose life has been wrecked by the system as it is now, (see that beautiful Michael Moore piece) represented by the same people accustomed to being able to destroy people by calling them racists.

Right now is still chaos while we see how emergent forces rebalance themselves. I'd hope to see the culture pull together... the left just got its ass kicked because it spent too much time screeching and playing social justice warrior and not enough time paying attention to actual issues like the former middle class wondering how to feed their kids. This should serve as a lesson that, ok, deadlock's broken, can both sides start trying to fix the stuff Trump got elected on?

The current rioting is ominous as fuck, though. The other likely Trump effect which the rioting may be the first signs of, is it took a whole bunch of already cracked social divides and crises that were just barely holding stable, and cracked them wide open all at once.

There are a whole bunch of social and economic stresses that were already stretched to a hair shy of the snapping point. Some, far past it, and the only reason they hadn't snapped, was it got that way gradually, frog in a jacuzzi style, or the way you can supercool a bottle of water far past the crystallization point if you do it slowly enough. It's only 21 degrees and still liquid so long as nothing disturbs it...

The seething resentment in the black community for one. The anger of working people about things like the obamacare individual mandate for another. "We're barely surviving here and now we're being told we will buy insurance at a thousand a month at gunpoint?" The entire generation that just got enslaved to college debt that didn't buy them anything because the jobs disappeared.

Then you thump that bottle. You elect Trump. And a wave of crystallization driven by excessive energy differential passes through that bottle and the entire thing freezes solid in 5 seconds.

When that happened in 1989 half the eastern bloc fell apart virtually overnight.

In human terms it means large scale violent change that occurs apparently out of nowhere, as large portions of the population get pissed off all at once and try to do something about it. Usually something destructive.

If it happens it'll happen fast. Given how far gone this system had to be for Trump to get elected, that violent change may last for some time, too.

Question is, is it gonna happen and what's the trigger? Maybe it's already been triggered, or maybe it won't be triggered at all. Maybe the election riots are the beginning of that wave, or maybe they're just a few cracked stresses resolving themselves and will settle to a new equilibrium.

Time will tell.

I'm still laughing days later just because of how unlikely, yet inevitable all this has been.

I don't do hatred. Hatred is weakness, a childish indulgence I don't have time for. But to the extent I'm capable of it, I hate that system. Everything that system is supposed to stand for was subverted decades ago to serve the interests of the people who run it. They don't "represent" the public, they view the public as something to be herded, controlled, manipulated and made to do what -they- want. Deceived into obeying the wishes of the pols instead of the other way around.

All my life I have known that the entire mess is so complex, the reasons and mechanisms giving rise to that state so convoluted as to be impossible to fix or undo without breaking that system. Ten million dirty deals, watered down compromises that render the solutions impotent or only serve the interests of the people behind the curtain.

Obamacare... supposed to help with intolerable medical expense, ends up literally selling the bodies of the american public to the insurance companies... Affordable, my ass, working man can't afford insurance, now the IRS is coming after him to fine him for not being able to afford it... legally -forcing- the poor to shovel their last dollars into the pockets of the insurance execs in exchange for empty promises of coverage that covers nothing... this is justice? This is sanity?

"Work within the system" sounds as nonsensical to me as the idea of looking at a car that has been shredded and crushed and optimistically but naively thinking, well, if we just all cooperate and work within the system of auto repair we can fix it right up. People polishing little fragments and congratulating themselves thinking they've accomplished something, ignoring the wreckage all around them.

That system, has desperately needed a reset, ctrl-alt-del forced systems crash.

I have just witnessed that systems crash. Trump didn't "work within the system", he broke it. While everyone chimped out screeching racist, sexist, homophobe blah blah every name in the book they were doing so because he was rejecting that delicate balance of corruption and substituting the kind of force necessary to break the decades-long gridlock designed to prevent actual change.

He succeeded. What we get is a soft-reset, a controlled system crash without taking the entire system down in disordered and violent collapse that would have cost so many lives.

If Trump had not been elected the alternative would have been a very, very violent collapse crash sometime in the next couple decades, when the last of the jobs vanish, the race war breaks out into a slaughter, the police state goes to open war against its own population, a population it can no longer control due to its own corruption, and the only solution it knows is to double down on that corruption and -make- the rubes comply... the last of the middle class destroyed and with nothing left to lose, the politicians walking away with the last of the golden eggs of american prosperity leaving the rest of the population to kill each other fighting over the scraps that remain.

Trump had to happen and he did.

We just saw the most unthinkable turnabout, ever. The republican party turned on their own frontrunner and united with the dems in opposition to him. He forced that system to break cover and reveal itself for what it really is... a one-party system with two faces designed to make sure it is never, ever voted out of power.

It just got voted out of power. For the first time in my life, I actually believe in that system, now. Because it WORKED.

When everybody gets tired of screeching in outrage about him and the dust settles, I'm looking forward to seeing how many things actually get fixed now that both parties have been defeated, the fake two-party system's power broken and their ability to prevent constructive change broken with it.

-B

Who said -I'm- angry? I think it's fucking hilarious. Personally I can't actually support putting somebody that unqualified into office. But I've thoroughly enjoyed the show.

The american people have finally grown so sick of being bought and sold, body and soul by their supposed representatives, that they were willing to break the system, by force, to stop it from having its way with them again. Against the combined might of the political establishment and the mainstream media, they succeeded.

To a political nihilist, this is the most awesome thing ever. Regardless of how stupid a choice Trump is, his election breaks the cycle. At long last I got to see something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime- Both political parties defied, both political parties defeated, frustrated, prevented from getting what they want.
It is the last great act of defiance of the american public. It is the revenge, of the american public against their politicians.
The american public voted Trump in just to force both parties to choke on him. Now we all get to watch them choke. They're choking.

And it has probably prevented World War III. Our political class got away with Iraq. They were narrowly frustrated in their ambition to move on to Iran only because having already spent the treasury dry on their last pet war without bothering to finish it, the public wasn't going to tolerate them charging off to start another.
Hillary never saw a war she didn't like.
This is a woman so amoral that she publicly stated that the incidental deaths of half a million Iraqi children was "Worth it." The political class was trying like hell to sign us up for war with Russia, a war neither side wanted but the politicians couldn't wait to set off. All those profitable weapons contracts!

Now, at least we can be pretty sure we won't be going to war with Russia. The american empire is still going down but maybe now we won't take half the planet with us out of spite. We'll be too busy trying to keep the clown at the helm from doing too much damage domestically.

Like I said much further upstream... the ruling classes have sold idiocy and trash glorified as virtue for decades because the ignorant, poor and desperate are easily manipulated, easily controlled. They never, ever considered that such a control strategy might backfire on them.

But, boy, did it. They wanted it. They worked for decades to create it and to bring it about. And now, they're getting it.
Good and hard.

I don't know what's going to happen now. Nobody does. The status quo just got broken. Chaos has been chosen over the certainty of corruption.
At least it won't be predictable, at least it won't be boring. And it certainly will, be interesting.
-B

I will now pop back in to a total necro thread just to say...

Yes. Yes, they are.
Angry people have broken the system.
We have just witnessed the biggest "Fuck You" vote in human history. The punch line to the greatest practical joke ever pulled.
Looks like the clown gets to drive.
It's the facepalm heard around the world.
Fasten your seat belts.
-B

Sorry, brother but I gotta weigh in with Matt and Doc, here. You're trying to pull data from a source that doesn't produce the data you want. I'm currently experimenting with an unusually large-surface-area suit with some unusually bizarre properties and an unusually wide range of flight modes, shapes and settings. It is an extreme example of the range of pressures 111 was referring to.
I can depressurize the thing until it is almost limp in flight, to reduce the drag and make it easier to manipulate the fabric areas, or I can zip it up drum-tight and it acquires the handling and feel of a raft dive, where most of its handling properties are dominated by sheer scale and inflation pressure. The internal pressure inside this set of wings has almost no relation to its airspeed. I can fly it fast with high pressure, which just puts a sharp speed limit on the top end due to drag, or I can fly it just as fast with almost no pressure, which simply allows me to fly it faster than that. I can fly it slow with no pressure, resulting in nimble handling properties, or I can fly it slow, while pressurized to the max and so rigid that deploying past it is a -major- technical challenge.

The range of internal pressures available bears almost no relation to airspeed unless I've stalled the thing to an almost complete stop. One setting might get me 5 PSI doing 40 with the zips shut... another setting might get me that same pressure with the zips wide open and the suit being flown so hard in a balls-out 170 mph dive that it's almost coming apart and a hurricane of airflow passing through the suit. An internal pressure measurement system is mostly just going to indicate how closed the winglock zippers are, with airspeed a distant second-place in terms of how much effect it has on the internal pressure.

This is complicated even more by the fact that that internal pressure is also variable at any given airspeed by the angle of attack I'm currently using and how much the air inlets are scooping air as a result. I could choke off the instrument just by changing shape and altering the presentation of the inlets to the airflow with no change in airspeed. Or by changing shape so that although the inlets are still presented the same way, my arms are occupying a different part of the armwing sleeve and allowing free-er airflow through the zips and out the sleeves. Simply moving around inside the wing will create more noise in the data and of a wider range than the data you're trying to measure.
You could set up something that was verifyably measuring accurately -when flown a certain particular way-, but that measurement could be made wildly inaccurate just by flying the suit differently. I think you're going to find that relative to any modelling you do, the best you're ever going to see is a few frames here, a few frames there, brief transients where the conditions happen to pass through the range where the device's specs, the suit pressure and the airspeed actually align and result in a measurement that happens to be accurate- for half a second. It'd be like having a speedometer in the car that is affected by everything from the speeds of other nearby cars, to the steering wheel and how fast you turn it, to whether or not you've got the windows open and how far, to the texture of the road you're driving on. Watching such a speedometer would result in a reading that was very visibly nonsense and would simply look like the speedo was broken. Too many uncontrollable and unquantifiable variables to calibrate around.
Besides, why reinvent the wheel? We already have a very good, lightweight and compact way to measure our airspeed. GPS.
-B

Bill, I've long believed this system so far beyond redemption, that "Get involved" is a bad joke. As the saying goes, "If voting actually changed anything, it'd be illegal."

Voting doesn't fix the spectacularly broken mechanisms. It instead diverts energy into endless rah-rah enthusiasm that which would have otherwise been used productively fixing things. It is a form of evolved-in resistance to change.

However, I look at the emergent political phenomenon that is Trump, and I see a spectacular agent of chaos, right when this system could use one the most. Right when it looked like we were dead on course for one of several rather predictable forms of american decline, and this joker comes along. Reality just hung a hard left into "whatthefuckville."

I've been a political nihilist my entire life because of the simple fact... vote all you want, doesn't change the course of the ship.

I think the behavior of the United States over the last 15 years or so since 9/11 has proven that ad infinitum. The US polity got so sick of Bush and the behavior of those rulers that they elected the guy as opposite to them as possible- Obama.

Not a DAMN thing changed in any way that mattered. My insurance still doesn't cover jackshit, but now I'm required to buy it by law, thanks, asshole! Just as many wars, just as many lies, just as much decline of what's left of the middle class. Priced out of reach of most and getting worse fast.

Trump's election may represent the only possible disruption to the phenomena involved with that large scale decline. I think the reason he is becoming the phenomenon he is, is that people see him, and they see a chance to actually change the course of the damned ship. This time, voting may well break the mechanisms designed to make sure voting doesn't actually change anything.

Hopefully, he breaks enough of the system to force constructive overhaul and repair.

I hope he doesn't destroy too much while he's at it. We had enough Stalins last century.

I love it. I absolutely love it.
I have despised this system and the way it works since I became aware of it. The bought and paid for pols, the endless mealymouthed lies meant to pander to whoever they think will vote for them... The system that has been thoroughly and seamlessly redesigned to ensure that all decisions are made not by what would be best for the country or the people but what would be best for the corporate campaign sponsors...

To a political nihilist, Trump is the best thing to happen to this system, ever. This article nails it. The sonofabitch has hacked that system and now, he's gonna make it eat itself, on camera. And the american public, long ago sick of being lied to and having their own asses sold to the highest bidder, are gonna back him like the latest all-the-rage reality TV show.

Trump is taking the entire circus and making it what it is... a circus, an entertainment spectacle- and the guest stars, the bad guys everyone wants to see get their comeuppance, are all the "establishment" candidates and the political establishment itself.

I think of Trump's ascendancy as, in essence, the revenge of the american people against their politicians. The politicians haven't represented "us" in decades, and everyone knows it. It's payback time, bitches!

I see this is a sort of comic-opera version of the french revolution. Only instead of dragging them out and guillotining them, in the 21'st century we subject them to reality-TV-style public ridicule. After Trump is elected it's going to be awful hard for the rest of the political establishment to take themselves so seriously. While Trump runs around playing rock star and winning, everyone else looks like droning boring bureaucrats with monotonous scripted lines and zero charisma.

I'm starting to think Trump is inevitable, and utterly unstoppable. The republican party has nobody and nothing even close as a viable alternative, and the democratic party offers us either "Hillary The Power-Mad Bitch" (Nobody trusts you, lady!) or Bernie "Recycled Socialism" Sanders whose pitch line is "Free stuff for everybody, at someone else's expense... yours!" Bernie, that shit got old back when the Soviet Union fell apart. Get some new material, champ.

I never saw Trump coming and neither did anyone else and that's why he's going to win. I think people are going to vote him in by a landslide as an act of mass defiance against the political establishment that sold us all down the river lock stock and barrel to prop up whoever paid for their election.

It's gonna be one hell of a show. For the first time ever, politics has become -entertaining-. I think half the country are sitting there earnestly hoping to see Trump shove all the other politicians' heads firmly up their asses, he's got the charisma, momentum and star power to do it, the more momentum he builds, the more people believe he can do it, and his election will be the big comeuppance for our political system, richly deserved and long overdue.

It's the biggest, best and most spectacular practical joke in recorded history and we all get a front row seat. I swear, if he gets elected the system itself is going to drop dead out of sheer outraged dignity. I can't wait to see this.
-B

I disagree.
I think the destruction of the american middle class has everything to do with today's government. That government, with all its red tape and arbitrary imposed expenses of legitimacy are what -make- it cheaper to run a factory somewhere else. I read somewhere that Denver considered itself "small-business friendly" because measures were taken to reduce the "taxes-and-fees-and-permits" load on starting a small business to "Only" two years and one hundred eighty separate permits taxes environmental impact studies and fees.

Meanwhile, in China, you want to start a small factory, you get a loan from the local crooks, pay off the local party bosses, rent a space, buy a couple of molding machines, hook up with a customer broker who will feed you contracts for X number of cheapshit knockoff widgets per month, and go into business... polluting freely, paying your people nothing... 1.3 billion people doing this turned China into the world's factory virtually overnight and resulted in the single greatest expansion of the middle class (in china) that the globe has ever seen.

I think the only thing that would hold those global economic forces at bay would be a return to American isolationism.

Build Trump's wall and cut off the Mexican and south American demographic invasion and illegals- Brutally fine anyone employing them. Put the National Guard to work actually guarding the national- At the border.
The problem with that approach is, it would work. Immediately. The system DEPENDS on its current level of functional corruption and exploitation of whoever is being exploited...

Half the nation's food producers, landscapers and meat packers would go tits-up overnight. Suddenly we'd be face to face with the hypocrisy of demonizing the illegals we depend on. Instead of sitting on their asses sucking up X-box Live, legally forbidden to be employed, let the kids who want the menial labor jobs, have them.

Then, massive tariffs on imports to make it more expensive to import your shit from china than to produce it here. Massive tax breaks to anyone still willing to operate here, put up with the insane bureaucratic task-loading and employ americans.

People DO want to make money... and it is cheaper to buy a few politicians to smooth the way for a profitable exit, than it is to make it competitive to make stuff here again. So General Electric offshores everything and legally kites out on 80 billion in taxes... while the IRS mercilessly hunts down and destroys a guy who tried to dodge a couple thousand in taxes so he could hang onto his home and small business for another year.

The government in this country of ours declared economic warfare on its own population a long time ago. That may not have been the intention, but that has been the effect. Nothing personal, it is just that it has been too profitable to do so, to simply leave it on the table unexploited. They killed the golden goose of american industry for short term profit. Used to be, there was no motivation. Henry Ford wanted to pay his workers a fat wage so they could afford to buy his cars! Not anymore. There's nothing to stop it, because now, with globalization, they'll just market their shit to whoever is the latest rising star economy. Who gives a damn if 100 million americans end up homeless, when you've got the combined markets of India and China to sell to?

It is a runaway positive feedback effect with no phenomena arising to hold it back.
The way it looks to me, our system is, in effect, a ver slow-motion nuclear chain reaction that has gone off and is in mid-detonation. The chain reaction has already taken off, is accelerating geometrically, and cannot be stopped.

Until this system is willing to address those effects, the economic mathematics are utterly without mercy. The standard of living of the rest of the world will rise, some places steeply, some places minutely- while all of the USA is slowly pounded back down to a pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity.

The next thing that history tells us ought to happen, is, we elect a completely insane tyrant who promises to protect us from all this.

Meet Trump. If he's not it, he certainly is the prototype. If he's not elected, an even worse wacko will be next time around.
-B

I don't want anarchy either.
And I don't want a collapse.
But that's what I -see-.
I'd like to see the factories come back, I'd like to see the return of the kinds of conditions this society had between the late 40's and the 80's, with explosive prosperity, explosive expansion of the numbers of people who aren't worried about where next week's food is coming from. The explosive reduction in the number of people living by the railroad tracks.

But I think you and I both know that's not going to happen.
I think we are going to see some form of collapse, I think we are already seeing it, in Bernie Madoff and Enron and hundreds like them, seeing it in Ferguson and Detroit. In Flint.

Like the Soviet Union, I don't see any way to fix the accelerating failure of this system without that happening. No politician has anything like a plan to actually fix the geometrically expanding debt. Their idea of "doing something" is to promote some watered down measure that may slightly retard the rate of expansion. Their idea of a budget "cut" is limiting their rate of expected -increase- in spending.

If you cut it all in half- every last bit of it, with no mercy to the weak, the sick, the dependent, the elderly on their pensions... The entire multitrillion-dollar boondoggle we call a government, and returned those dollars to whoever they were taken from, (or whatever distant descendant they actually expect to have to pay that debt) you might make the empire last a bit longer.

Come the day that simply servicing the interest on the national debt consumes more than the entire US GDP... when we owe more in just interest payments on our debts than all the wealth we even MAKE...
And the global financial system processes that fact,
We're fucked.

Can you think of anyone the US can elect, any action, at all, by anyone, that will stop this?

The only model I have for the future, is to look at how Russia turned out after the USSR fell apart. I think that's us. The country will end up run by whatever kleptocrats happened to be at the controls when the core of the system fails. Life will go on... but at a much reduced level of prosperity because the minimum price for entry into the middle class has hit a million or more a year.
What is it now, really? Close to a hundred grand? More? When I was a kid, $30,000 a year was enough for my stepdad to support 4 kids, a wife, two cars and one house while building another.
Now, $30,000 a year a single person could barely afford a CAR nevermind that many kids, homeownership...
$70,000 is still lean if you're trying to pay off a house or replace your car or raise a kid...
Even 100 grand a year, there's gonna be shit you need and can't afford to do. By now I think the borderline for income where you just don't have to worry about money anymore and can afford everything you need, not ritzy, just basic secure middle class prosperity where you can send your kids to school and have a decent house is somewhere around a quarter million a year.

If you've got any suggestions of anything that might slow or reverse these sorts of effects, I'd love to hear 'em.

I think we're looking at historical-scale forces. Not a damn thing is going to stop 'em. Automation will keep getting better and rendering ever-larger portions of the population obsolete, uneconomic to employ for anything. The iron laws of economics will continue to move jobs to the lowest paying places on earth for the greater and greater profit of fewer and fewer people. The poverty stricken people in these places will continue to try to migrate to where they think the money is. The southwest will become Mexico. Europe will be overrun by Islam and unstoppable population pressure from Africa.
Living standards everywhere we call "First World" will fall... as low as they can.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. I can't think of anything that will address THAT.
-B

Re: Cannot win...
Wanna bet? Never underestimate the insane behavior possible by a population maddened by parasites.

Billvon NAILED it and Won The Internet a minute ago. I think we have to elect Trump, because then, only then, will the population understand what happens when you try to take a reality TV-show and apply it to reality. Or LET reality be run by the kinds of rules you'd use to run a reality TV show... the greatest amusement for the largest number of profitable idiots.

"Dumb down everything" has been sold relentlessly to the american population for my entire life. Fuck Shakespeare, that's too challenging, give us Honey Boo-Boo and "Duck Dynasty"... when I was a kid it was Geraldo, Donhue and Oprah, trashy idiocy sold as virtue.

High school graduates who can't fucking read, let alone think. Meritocracy of intellect productivity and achievement has been replaced by meritocracy of the victim, meritocracy of mediocrity, meritocracy of trash.

And the people and systems responsible for this?
They wanted it, they worked for decades to create it, and now, they're gonna get it.

Good and hard.

Ayn Rand was an almost insane egotist, and taken to their logical conclusions her philosophies would end in genocide of the unproductive, but she had some wondrously accurate understanding of human nature and how human systems work. She saw today coming, and I have -watched- "Atlas Shrugged" play out in real life, but without most of the heroic industrial figures.

And as I watch reality march inexorably toward the inevitable and obvious conclusion of a society that runs like this one does, I am reminded of a scene in Atlas Shrugged during the accelerating collapse stage of that society where a distressed woman asks Francisco D'Anconia, "What is going to happen to this country?"

And he replies, "Exactly what it deserves."

That's us, that's Trump.
Case closed.

Look on the bright side: We all get a front row seat to the greatest show on earth. The truth is starting to sink in. The population is starting to become aware of just how thoroughly screwed, they really are. And now, they're mad enough about it to take the clown and put him in charge.
History has caught up with us at last. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.
-B

I'm apolitical, more to the point, I lean toward political nihilism- I believe the entire system is way too far gone to save or even be worth trying to. I have no party loyalties and opinions that span the entire spectrum from liberal and libertarian to hardcore conservative depending on the issue.

So I'm going to throw out what will no doubt be an outrageous point of view. Warning: Long political rant.

Hire the clown.

Why?
He is the joker in the deck. He is the first shot the american public has had at something other than what we are told we are allowed to choose. For decades we've had what amounts to a one-party system anyway with two different labels to create the illusion of choice. The rule imposed on the public by the political establishment has been, "You can pick corrupt politician A or corrupt politician B, but one way or another, you'll pick a corrupt politician of -our- choosing."

Back and forth it goes, republican, democrat, republican, democrat, they all make the same false promises they break as soon as their position is secured, and they all make policies that serve only themselves and the monied interests that paid for their campaigns.

The only way to stop it, is to break the system.
By the look of it, that is exactly what The Donald is doing.

He is thumbing his nose at political correctness- says the most outrageous things. He is -not- in fact, an actual politician. He is so inarticulate half the time he can't even assemble a coherent sentence. He has no smooth lines and prepared answers for things, when caught by questions he wasn't ready for, the best he can do is try to make politician-ish noises because that's what is expected at that time.

Which, I suspect is precisely why he is so explosively popular. The american public are TIRED of smooth liars. Trump may be a total asshole and a clown but he appears to be telling the truth as he sees it instead of spewing whatever prevarications he thinks we want to hear as determined by the PC multiculti touchy-feely marketers of bullshit who have never had to work an honest day's labor in their lives and have absolutely no concept of how their policymaking affects the real people subjected to it... and when informed of those effects, they don't care.

Now, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, I believe one should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by common human stupidity.
BUT,
I can't help but notice that the entire political establishment appears united in its opposition to his candidacy. That ALONE recommends him highly. I think half the reason for it, is that he is so damned wealthy that he can't be bought. They'd love to yank his leash and make him heel, and they can't, and it's driving them all batshit. The obedient media appear to be doing their damndest to discredit him by the usual subtle and nonsubtle sneaky tricks- most notably, the imagery.

Look at all the other politician photos you ever see in the media. They're all chosen to send an image. They all pick a picture of X politician looking stern, or statesmanlike, or noble, or dignified.

99.9% of the images of The Donald put up by the media are all selected to try to make him look anything but. They catch him at his most animated, pick the least-flattering image they can possibly find and publish THAT. Damn near every single image I see of him he appears to be in the middle of an apoplectic temper tantrum, red face scrunched up, mouth open, hair flying in mid-speech.

The least-unflattering ones where they don't pick one in which his face was moving when the image was shot, they try to make him look smug, instead.
That tactic has been so systematically applied that it cannot be accidental. Reps and dems are two sides of the same corrupted coin. Nobody actually gets voted out of office, they just take turns looting the public. Whoever and whatever actually makes the call behind the scenes... (Pick your boogeyman... Rothschilds, New world order, Koch brothers, Monsanto, conspiracy theory of choice... not the comic image of conspiracy theory fronted by our endless supply of loonies and whackos but whoever and whatever -actually steers this thing in reality-) does NOT want to allow him to be elected, or even considered, and whoever and whatever they are, are pulling out ALL the stops in a desperate attempt to stop him.

That alone, recommends him highly. I think THEY (whoever the fuck "they" are, and I know better than to think I know) recognize him as a bigger danger than WE do! "Oh, my, GOD, he could upset the entire corrupt applecart! Bring the whole unstoppable gravy train to an end! STOP HIM!"

And despite the use of every last possible dirty trick in the arsenal, "they", are FAILING. Every attempt makes him more popular than ever.

To me, his candidacy is the last great hurrah of american democracy. We don't even CARE how horrible he is. What we do know is that whoever runs things behind the scenes, a control that transcends the system itself, persists through election cycles, determines which corrupt politicians we get to choose from and is not accountable to the american public does NOT want us to have him and are doing everything humanly possible to try and make sure we can't.

And the american public are telling that force "NO." And they are making it stick. The american public, offered the customary choice of one of two bullshit sandwiches, "You can have the Democratic bullshit sandwich of our choosing, or the Republican bullshit sandwich of our choosing, but you have to pick one of those two bullshit sandwiches we chose FOR you" are telling that force, "Fuck you, we've had enough of this, we want Option C: He may also be a bullshit sandwich but at least he wasn't chosen FOR us." So maybe, just maybe, he'll actually do what's right for the country as best he understands it, not what's best for his corporate sponsors.

When Trump destroyed all the opposition in New Hampshire, the political establishment and its various mouthpieces went into paroxysms of outrage. Their message to the public was, "You can't do that!" The sheep are not obeying! One memorable quote I came across called it a "Full-scale revolt."

The political establishment is not used to being told "No."
Good.

So I say, fuck yeah, hire the clown. The fucking ship is sinking anyway, all the checks and balances have been hacked and defeated, methodically, over decades, to allow the politicians to do whatever the fuck they want regardless of the will of the american people. The bill of rights reduced to ink on a page, disregarded "whenever we feel like it Because Terrorism" our jobs and the entire industries behind them sold to China and Mexico "Because Globalization" when the real reason is, "Why pay middle class Americans actual middle class wages when we can exploit the crap out of desperate third-world labor for one-20th the cost and ten times the profit?"

And so you get Foxconn Iphone assembly facilities in China that have resorted to putting up suicide nets to keep their captive labor forces from killing themselves to escape the slave-labor prison conditions, while Apple gets to sit back and claim its hands are clean. You'd think maybe Foxconn's management would look at WHY their places are such hells that people want to DIE rather than endure another day of it, and maybe CHANGE it, but that's not how corporate and political authoritarianism works. It's not enough to forcibly commoditize the desperate masses into profitable slave labor by another name, to enjoy that power you must also make them SUFFER.

Till now, there has been nothing on the horizon representing any sign of any of these intractable system "features" being forced to change. The potential election of Donald Trump, and the utterly unhinged panic he is inducing in the vested interests who run things and do NOT want those profitable gravytrains brought under scrutiny or brought to an end, represents the one shot at ACTUAL democracy in the US I've seen in my lifetime. He may be a mistake, but he's OUR mistake to make.

The US has been hardwired to a commitment of ever-escalating debt until the whole mess collapses and takes what's left of the american middle class with it. The end objective of the bigger agenda as it has played out over the last few decades is the 99.9% in utter abject poverty competing for what few jobs are left and the .01% in possession of ALL the wealth, ALL the power, and ALL the control. Because people living paycheck-to-paycheck are far more easily controlled than 150 million prosperous middle-class people who have choices and options because they are neither desperate nor dependent.

I'm not saying Trump will fix all this. I -am- saying the public seems to think he might. At the very least, he'll try. He is a businessman, not a politician. He may just have half a shot at making the US -profitable to its people- again instead of being a globalization race-to-the-bottom profitable only to the .01% and a naked lootingfest of everyone else.

If uncorrected, the current course of the ship is total collapse Soviet Union style under hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt we weren't allowed NOT to sign up for. The entire will of the political establishment has evolved to -prevent- the course of the ship from being changed regardless of how destructive it is, because of how fantastically profitable it is, to keep it as it is, until it DOES collapse. Please note: The rulers of third-world hellholes, still live in fabulous first-world wealth. The rulers of the United States, are turning it into a third world hellhole, because they know damn well, even after the whole thing collapses, who cares? Whaddya gonna do about it? WE got all the money!

Trump's candidacy, is making people believe it may be possible to alter the course of that ship, if we hold a fucking mutiny, throw the officers overboard, grab some more-or-less successful schmoe -not- of the ruling class, and put him at the helm.

He represents massive disruption to a hopelessly broken system that desperately needs to be disrupted.

We as a body politic have got nothing to lose. It's as close to a revolution as the american public are capable of these days.
Let the clown drive. He sure as shit couldn't do any worse than what we've BEEN getting.
-B