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On Sun, 8/3/14, Knapp <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML]Request
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Sunday, August 3, 2014, 11:28 PM

 On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 3:58
 AM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
 wrote:

 On 4/08/2014 12:59, Kelly St. Clair
 wrote:

 On 8/3/2014 5:48 PM, Rupert Boleyn wrote:

 immobile people tied down by possessions and crops they

 can't up and leave can be forced to pay taxes, to
 provide labour, and

 this allows specialisation, and once you've started down
 that road you

 can't really go back.

 It takes a very long time before farmers are, on an
 individual level,

 better off than hunter-gatherers, though a small segment of
 the

 population has it pretty good from even the earliest
 days.

 And I, for one, am willing to make that tradeoff - even
 though I'm not

 even the top segment (though I may be close, depending on
 where you

 start drawing the curve).  Hunter-gatherers make up stories
 about the

 moon; specialists *go* to it.

 I wouldn't want to be a hunter-gatherer either.
 We're well past the point where everyone can be better
 off than that. However, our ancestors suffered quite a bit
 to get us here.

 -----

 I would challenge you to go out and
 try the hunter-gatherer life for your two week vacation and
 see how it really is. Don't bother learning, fire making
 or bow making or stone knapping just learn to shoot some
 food and gather some plants and try it out. Are we really
 better off? Not saying that we can go back but I think we
 are not that much better off, perhaps mostly worse off but
 we are very unaware of what could really be. Also what
 percent of the Earth's current population is better off?
 Clearly everyone with a computer is better off that most of
 the people of this Earth even in nice places like
 India.

 --
 Douglas E Knapp

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Been there, done that, won't do it again, but, of course & as always, YMMV.

BTW, you'd be surprised how many folks living in hovels all over the world have to a 'computer' along w/ the WWW, using a smartphone.

And as someone else said, "They only get to think about the moon, we can go there".

Now, of course, it obvious by now that most people really don't care very much about space exploration, at least not enough to make it priority, which was what the old L-5 Society was all about, but there's a big, big difference 'tween *deciding* not to do something & not be able to do it at all...
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