This shall not stand. Probably.

Do you think the world has too many people?  I mean, we have a *lot* of people.  Many of them live in desperate poverty.  Many don't have access to clean water, or even clean air!  Too much pollution from too much industry, too many cooking fires, just too much everything.

I don't want to die soon, of course, but I think a big old round of plague would solve a few problems.

The same problem we have here (a few immensely wealthy people, and then everybody else) applies on a larger scale around the world. A few immensely wealthy countries, and then everybody else.  And the trickle down effect never does seem to trickle all the way down to the bottom.

You'd think at some point, something would have to give.  I guess it has, in places.  The USSR took a shot at leveling the playing field.  I'm not sure how well that worked out.  I mean, I know millions died.  But I'm not sure if the daily life of the peasant was better or worse afterward.  Probably the daily life of the rich guys that didn't get killed was about the same.

I think the US is effectively a giant theme park, compared to much of the rest of the world.  There's huge excess.  It's all shiny and it keeps getting upgraded.  It's not based on anything real.  We don't make that many products anymore, I mean.  "Finance" is a very large chunk of our economy.  Not something you can smell, or taste, or feel.  We effectively pay our best and brightest to make wagers on what might or might not happen.  Weird.

By an accident of birth I live in a house probably 30 times the size of the shack that I might have lived in elsewhere on the planet.  (The yard, however, would need to be a lot larger if I were doing subsistence farming.)  And this house isn't big by US terms!  It's ludicrous when you consider it.  I very much doubt that I work harder or am more deserving than people all over the country, and yet here I sit in the American middle class.

It all seems unworkable, and yet it keeps working.  Perhaps that's why we have such a huge (and expensive) military - to keep all the other guys from trying to make us share our wealth.

Ludicrous.  Not the military (well, maybe the military), but the disparity in the lives of people all over.

All those immigrants who came here and struggled and sweated and endured racism and classism, so their children could have a chance at a better life?  Totally made the right call.  Maybe not those coming here today, because I don't think it's as easy now as it was a hundred years ago.  Our lower classes seem to be staying low.  But those guys in the first couple of hundred years vastly changed the lives of their descendants.

I wonder what will happen in the lives of ours.