Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

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Look at any businesses that stand to gain from cheaper energy. Not many will loose [lose] catastrophically from fusion. Most are diversified and in fact may be heavily vested in fusion by the time it comes online.

I think it will be the oil-producing countries, rather than than corporations, that will take the hit when oil prices fall. Some have invested in natural infrastructure and production unrelated to oil; others have not. In many, all the money has gone to the ruling families so that the general population has gotten little. Some, like Mexico, are deep in debt. That will require democratization under adverse circumstances to pull them out of it by developing other resources.

Yes, read up on “The Devil’s Excrement” some time; it’s a term for oil invented by the first secretary general of OPEC–from Venuzuela, no less!! 😆
Here’s a link to an article about S. Korea vs. the ME, and the relative payoffs of brains and effort vs. oil and sloth: South Korea.

The need to leverage and engage the interest and brains and initiative and effort of the young in oil-producing countries in productive enterprises is absolute. Perhaps FF will reduce the “barriers to entry” to enough fields that they will get constructively involved, rather than looking for stuff to rip and blow up.

The same may well apply to the culture of nihilism and anomie and condescending post-modern deconstructionism in the West.

To change at least one country’s entire culture is not an overnight process, no matter how well your PR/sales campaign is financed, planned, and executed. Changing attitudes about drunk driving and tobacco are two cases in point. Each has been in the works for over twenty years.

Be sure to watch for more sloth and luxury as energy prices fall. Just because people know about the Roman Empire’s fall doesn’t mean we’re immune to human nature- and history repeating itself over and over again.