A commenter, “banjoboog,” on Michael Moore’s website said the following amazing thing — I’ve shortened this a little and bolded the fun bit:
banjoboog – – – Posted May 29th, 2010 11:51 AM
America has become a good lab experiment for other countries to look at and see what NOT to do. Science and technology are going to rule this century, and it will be supplied to the world by the Chinese, Indians and western Europe. Here’s an example of what the Chinese are up to: [link to yet another interstellarly awesome Chinese megatechnology project showing they are the new Lords of Creation whatever]
… and that’s just in the field of transportation. Communications is a whole other area where America is either getting or is going to get it’s ass kicked.
It seems to me the choice is to get rid of every bible-thumping bonehead politician you’ve got and elect people with brains … fast, or get ready for a life of slavery, where America becomes the cheap labour pool the Chinese, Indians and Europeans need to build their products.
What a brilliantly inspired speculative leap into the future! (How I wish I’d thought of it first!) Some day these fast-ascending countries are going to OUTSOURCE: that is, seek cheap labour amongst chronically-unemployed Americans; surely the day will come when they can offer such Americans a marginally better deal than American welfare — especially after America can no longer afford welfare. (See the excellent video Meltup: Preparing Americans for Hyperinflation for one highly plausible worst-case scenario.)
In the meantime, to prepare for the interesting times ahead, I have a suggestion. The future American employees of foreign outsourcers should start changing their habits and lifestyles so as to compete effectively with all those Third-World workers who have taken their jobs over the past couple of decades. We all know that those foreigners are paid much less and have much less benefits and so on than American workers — that’s why the jobs went overseas in the first place. Well, Americans can do anything once they put their back into it — they’ve proved it so often in their history that it’s pretty much taken for granted even by their worst enemies — so now it’s time for out-of-work Americans to beat Third-World workers at their own game, and so get their jobs back.
This means very simply that Americans will have to provide more incentive for Chinese, Indian, etc. companies to hire THEM than, say, rural Chinese, Indians, Africans, and so on. Americans need only prove that they can live on less than any other prospectively employable people on the planet, and jobs will flow to them from throughout the ascending world.
It’s probably a safe guess that the first generation of such post-welfare workers, in order to out-compete the rest of the world, will be paid in nothing but food. But most working people in the Third World live on much less food per day than any identifiable group of Americans — except ANOREXICS, and once again, this is where the resourcefulness and tenacity of Americans will show itself:
American anorexics, the most dedicated and highly motivated in the world, with their matchless command of the most advanced nutritional information, not to mention decades of collective experience, all available via the Web — are the most efficiently and CHEAPLY nourished people on the planet, and yet most are perfectly capable of working, and of living long enough to be attractive to employers. To your genuine American anorexic, an Indian coolie’s single daily meal of rice and onions is extravagant and easily reducible. Anorexics will be among the great teachers of survival in a post-welfare, jobless America.
I will leave it to others to graphically describe all the other frankly very unpleasant details of what Americans would be required to do in order to make themselves attractive to Chinese employers, but I just want to point out one very obvious potential benefit: The problem of obesity (at least, among the chronically unemployed) would vanish as quickly as it possible for human beings to shed weight.
There are already people who’ve taken up a calorie reduction with optimal nutrition diet, believing that it will extend their lives. I’ve been looking into it, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t go insane or something.
http://www.optimal.org/peter/mycron.htm
Some say that after a year or so, you don’t feel so horribly hungry anymore, but I don’t know anyone personally who’s on it, so I don’t know how much of what they say is hype and recruiting, and how much is real.
I too have heard of these severely calorie-reduced diets, but the only thing I’m interested in is the bottom line: Who would be cheaper to feed? The American on a trendy calorie-reduced-diet kick, or a Hindu ex-farmer living in Gujarat?
Something tells me these calorie-reduced diets have optimal health as their priority, NOT minimum expense, and that therefore, the Gujarati would still win this grim contest.
And besides, to any genuine anorexic, the trendy low-cal diet would be a total pigout.
Thanks for good info 🙂