Thanks, BTC, for your several cogent posts in this thread. This whole deck of cards isn't sustainable, particularly at the higher levels of this insanity. Sooner or later (and sooner is looking more likely every day), we are going to have (as another poster said) something equivalent to the dot.com bubble collapse, except this time the system will not recover as many of the dot.coms did. This is kind of thing that once the downward spiral begins it takes on a life of its own. Remember the fall of the USSR? Very few saw it coming, but once it started to crumble there was a new crevice that developed every day, which made for that day's headlines. One of the few that I recall that predicted this demise was a French academic, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, who wrote a book a number of years before the breakup started that was entitled the "Decline of an Empire," in its English translation. Whose sounding the clarion call now?
Re the fall of the USSR. 1989. One by one the dictators of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria abdicated bloodlessly. Fueling those abdications was a speech tha Gorbachev gave in July of that year at the Council of Europe. He stated that one nation shouldn't interfere in the internal affairs of another. Listeners were shocked. Many thought they had misunderstood his words or that the translations had been screwed up. Nope. They had heard correctly. Then in December of that year, protesters in Romania withstood Ceaucescu's bloody crackdown attempt. And the so-called Big 6 were no longer.
In late July of 1989, I was visiting relatives in then "West Germany" when thousands of East Germans were pouring into West German embassies in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw seeking asylum. A couple of my aunts, uncles and cousins had just come back from Bulgaria where many Germans use to vacation on the Black Sea, because of the incredibly cheap prices the communist state offered for a beach vacation. They told me they had met dozens of East Germans who said they couldn't wait for the day when they could escape. I wondered allowed if the regime could last until 2000 because of all of this. My aunts and uncles chucked saying even a young 20 something like me would never see that happen. Hard to believe the wall came down in a little over three months. The moral of the story is when something is unsustainable it's end often comes quicker than we think, no matter how hard it might be to imagine. Yes, this even applies to exorbitant salaries for college coaches and professional athletes and coaches.
Last Edited: 11/4/2019 8:40:22 PM by cbus cat fan