Put yourself in the place of an owner and think about it. You're young and educated and have (hopefully) acquired the knowledge and thinking skills to achieve a measure of freedom. Free people make decisions about how they wish to live and many of them will choose to do something other than what the owners want them to do.

California built one of, if not the, best education systems in the world and made it free to residents for a generation. That one generation of Californians changed the world in virtually every field. Philosophy, Medicine, Sociology, Science, Technology, Politics, Art, Literature, etc. They intruded on and forever exposed a world that had been the exclusive province of the ruling class. Worse, they rejected just about all of the notions that that system of authority is based on. They proved that the commoners were not only equal in capability, but that through sheer numbers produced more and better leaders than the established ruling class. One generation from one large state threatened the entire social order.

So what better way to control the young, than to saddle them with large, inescapable debts that will force them to limit their options?

so small, and the effort nearly nonexistent, as American politics.

This is one of his main points and it's a very important one.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again last night and, since it's been probably 20 years since the last time, I was struck by how far we've fallen and how pathetic we've become as a people.

We no longer strive to achieve great things, we just grub around looking for fictitious symbols of debt as if they are of any substance. Sure, we got out of our gravity well for a minute and we littered the moon a little, but Clark wrote his book by looking at how far we advanced in the forty-some prior years and extrapolating that same pace forty-some years into the future.

My great grandmother (1881 - 1980) was born in a sod house with a hand-pumped well and an outhouse and saw the advent of electricity, flight, workers rights, women’s suffrage, space flight, the civil rights act, networks of paved roads, skyscrapers, cars, computers, the double helix, fatal diseases eradicated, the ability to produce enough food to end hunger, telephones, refrigeration, moving pictures, talkies, unions, radio, television, atomic power, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a thousand other things we don't even imagine living without.

Do you think any of us will see anything that even approaches that kind of progress? I'm at least half done with my life and the greatest advances I've seen are computer networks and propaganda being elevated to a science.

the cusp of this nation's most critical junction since the Civil war.

As a small child I grew up in a nation of hope and opportunity. Watching man set foot on the moon is one of my very earliest memories. As a teenager, I saw this nation make a specific, deliberate choice to turn its back on the future and embrace a fantasy created by the most bankrupt, evil men on earth, and here's the most important part, I saw tens of millions of people that absolutely knew full well that what was being done was pure evil, and they went along with it for the chance that they could get rich along the way. They sold their souls and our future for a BMW and a 3-piece suit. They turned their backs on their fellow human beings and ignored their suffering and deprivation.

Since then I have watched this nation literally disintegrate, while most of those around me developed the capacity to purposely blind themselves to what was happening all around them.

It permeates this site and DU is, believe it or not, better than the overall reality. Small, mean, minds that take a perverse pleasure in making everything that they can influence, worse.

The racism, bigotry, the NRA, all that you mentioned and much more are merely symptoms of the underlying cancer that is consuming us all. America is the embodiment of evil in the world today.

while doing nothing but holding a series of public offices, accumulates a personal net worth in the $100M range, would be a sufficient clue.

when faced with the truth that destroys a cherished fantasy.

The Emperor Caligula was wildly popular in the beginning of his reign. He was replaced 5 years later with Claudius.

that is resulting in this story is not lost on some of us. I'm not quite a boomer (jones - x, I'm not sure and don't really care), but I was old enough to see and mostly understand what the line; "It was not the life he had envisioned as a young man in the 1960s and ’70s", implies.

Many of you were not alive, and some of us have forgotten, but this nation was far better and improving prior to the '80s.It was far from perfect and rife with problems in just about every aspect of society, but things were better and most importantly, on a trajectory toward enlightenment.

Racism was still rampant, but it was not acceptable in polite society. Your violently racist uncle was an embarrassment and not invited to parties.

Sexism was less prevalent than today and the "hey baby, nice rack!" asshole-on-the-street was just as likely to be confronted and ridiculed by a group of whoever was around as he was to be ignored.

Unemployment was high, but when you finally did land a job, it was far more likely to pay enough to live on.

Government was corrupt and likely as not to make things worse, but it strove to do great things, not devoted to lowering expectations.

Listen to the content of Jimmy Carter's State of the Union speeches. Any leader that tried to pass off "This sucks but it's the best we can hope for" as a strategy would not be the leader of anything the following week.

These people have lived the lives they are living, not because of some amorphous 'vision', but under the terms of a contract. That contract has not just been broken, its very existence is denied. Their future was stolen from them and simply handed to the very worst criminals around in exchange for nothing.

A black President. Wiccan symbols in Arlington. Gay marriage. Women in executive positions. Cars that get 40mpg and are able to keep you alive after a catastrophic accident. The computer or phone you are reading this on and the internet which links us all together. The list goes on and on, are all the direct results of what we were doing then.

What are we making today that we will have 30 years from now?

it is what we love to do, and make no mistake, you can make a good living doing it. It simply precludes the potential to become a billionaire by stealing other people's work claiming it as your own property and then reselling it forever.

The world has been moving to Linux for almost two decades now because of two basic factors; it doesn't lock you into becoming, what is for all intents and purposes, a permanent slave to a single corporate overlord that you must pay regardless of circumstance. And it just works.

As for my previous comment, and I don't expect that you are going to believe this, the urgent need for the so-called STEM workers is a myth. There has always been enough of us, more than enough, to fill the need. What they want is cheap and disposable and nothing says cheap and disposable like a bumper crop of new grads willing to work for as close to nothing as possible until they can be replaced by the next crop.

Reality is that technology has forever changed the world of the 21st century, but we're still supporting a 19th century social model and the beneficiaries of that old model want to keep their gravy train going as long a possible. Studying something that you really don't like simply because you believe that it will make finding a job more likely is a tragedy on several levels.

Employment is not a goal, it is a sentence.

not bad looking, possess a wide range of salable knowledge, experience, skills, and talents, I'll be just fine. In fact, all I have to do to be much better than fine is to stop seeing the world around me and succumb to the authoritarian BS you seem to have so thoroughly embraced.

I've just always wanted to help the people that always get the shitty end of the stick by giving them what they need to have a better life. Usually all they need is an understanding of how things actually are, rather than how they've been told and believe it is.

The Wall Street economy won.

Government won't enforce laws that major players break, no matter how egregiously, so there are ever shrinking chances of competing with them successfully, so there is less willingness to invest in the start up because the investors don't want to lose their investments. State and local governments, after giving away the farm to the corporations and thus, faced with decreasing revenues, are squeezing small businesses more and more to make them up.

Couple this with the fact that the number of individuals with sufficient assets to self-finance a small or even micro business is still falling and you have a negative feedback loop.

Nobody in power is working for us, there is no longer any refuge or support for people or businesses that are not the plutonomy.