[jacobwilliamroy]

The Big One is coming. This is just gonna be a recession, no one is going to lose their retirement or social security this time. Still, big banks like American Savings and Chase are going to be buying up lots of property ("seizing" is probably a better word for it). When The Big One comes, we will all have to forfeit our property to the Federal Reserve, and they will start the cycle all over again.

I think the cycles are getting shorter, because of computers and the internet which allows this manipulation of the economy to literally happen at the speed of light.

It is possible to maintain our current standard of living without the work of the Federal Reserve, but such would require drastically cutting military spending and other uneccesary expenses (conversation for another time). One way to cut the military budget, without actually reducing our firepower would be to merge all branches together into one command structure to facilitate interoperability between machines. For example, military contractors will sell the DoD 3 different copies of the same helicopter with slight differences which make it hard for them to interoperate; you would need 3 different mechanics/computer techs, with 3 different sets of parts and tools.

[_bxg1]

Specifics about how to make the military more efficient are probably out of scope (and out of depth for anyone here), but I agree we should spend less on it (and I think we could, without making any other changes, and still remain the dominant power by a wide margin)

[jacobwilliamroy]

I think there are a lot of ex-military, active duty, and military contractors using HN at the moment.