[OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs

[Chris Olson]

From: Fred Smith 
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 6:22 PM
To: An Open Discussion Forum on Just About Everything,Especially for Techies. 
Subject: Re: [OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs

> If only we had some sort of way of measuring how much people's work
> was worth to others

I should make a point here, Fred, that I rather strongly believe - there are some people that live in big cities that aren't City Slickehs.  But they're few and far between.  In my way of thinking, though, the main reason people live in big cities is to depend on the infrastructure.  You don't have to have your own well for water, you don't have to have your own septic system for waste, your garbage gets picked up at the curb for you, and so on.  It's convenient, but wasteful and polluting.

Big cities, as the world population continues to grow and moves to them, are unsustainable long term because we have to rape the planet to support them and keep their infrastructure intact.  I've said this before - we could seal off all the large population centers in the world - nothing or nobody goes in or out of the big cities.  No food, no fuel, nothing - they're sealed off.  All hell would break loose inside those sealed off big cities in a matter of days.  The majority of the people in them would die.  Meanwhile, those of us living in the rural areas would notice little difference in our quality of life.

When you so totally depend on the infrastructure and other people to sustain your way of life, there's a problem.  And that's why we have disasters like New Orleans.  The Cajuns living in the Louisiana bayous got hit by Katrina harder than the city of New Orleans, and those people didn't even bat an eye - their life was pretty much back to normal the next day.  And I think that's an important thing - self sufficiency.  The whole large population center model needs to be reconsidered because way more of mankind's resources goes into them than comes out.
--
Chris