format_quote Originally Posted by
Karl
A tribe is different from a clan. A clan is a family like Clan Macleod or Clan Fraser. A tribe is more of a group of people with similar genetics.
Well, both are about having a common ancestor. Tribes do too. The common ancestor may be dead for millennia already, such as Yavuth ("Jacob") and his four wives, but still, tribes do have a common mythical ancestor. In fact, their marriage practices -- especially cousin marriage -- almost guarantee that it will really be like that. The Arab tribes also claim a common ancestor (Ismael, son of Hagar, half-brother of Isaac), but I somehow suspect that they just like the idea of explicitly giving such common ancestor a name, and therefore would even invent one if need be -- or why not -- grab leftover stories from the Jews and handily re-purpose them. ;-)
format_quote Originally Posted by
Karl
Yes it is but it is the only thing that works
No, not true. Government by slaves works absolutely fine too. The Ottomans did it like that. The Mamluks too. Government by slaves is more than a practical joke. They managed to keep that going for almost a millennium, without laughing their heads off all the time! ;-)
format_quote Originally Posted by
Karl
And when technology gets so advanced the rich wont need the poor anymore.
Actually not really true, because self-defeating. Wealth is the possession of things that other people generally need, so that you can trade with them in order to acquire what you would need. In the absence of such trade, you are not wealthy, because there is nobody who would need that of which you would have much.
You see, before people start whining about unemployment, someone first needs to explain to me why it is so impossibly hard to find a plumber, electrician, or carpenter, who has five minutes of spare time to work on things that I would need? Of course, the hoi polloi do not want to learn plumbing, electricity work or carpenting, because they want to push paper in a post office instead. But howdy ho, what if what we need, is a plumber, and not a paper pusher? Seriously, I am sick and tired of all these aspiring, unemployed paper pushers whining about the dearth of jobs in the paper-pushing industry.
Even in my field, say, software in general, we are not worried about any possible unemployment, but about who exactly is supposed to maintain in the future all the systems that we have built already, let alone improve them or even build brand new ones? Around 80% of the work is in maintaining and operating existing systems. All calculations and predictions say that we are even going to run out of available resources in India, and that the proverbial dirt is going to hit the fan quite soon. Seriously, on a global scale, over 50% of all programmers were drafted out of India, and we are busy exhausting whoever was still available over there. Millions were drawn in, and the entire stock is pretty much gone now. Furthermore, nobody in our field was born rich. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on. The list is endless. Who of these people were born rich? They just rolled out their otherwise weird idea, and then the users -- in large numbers -- wanted to use it, and started using it. So, the money just came falling out of the sky. So, if these people accumulated too much money, who is there to blame? The users, of course. For example, who forced the users to start using mobile phones by the billions? Nobody that I know of.
At the same time, there are millions of positions going unfilled, for jobs that do not amount to just useless paper pushing. There are also lots of self-employed positions not being filled, for people who prefer to work on their own. Almost every industry is facing shortages, but obviously only of people who would be doing something useful. The number one reason why not to do something nowadays or not to invest in a project, is simply because you would have to hire un-findable people to do it.
The real problem is that everybody wants a paper-pushing job at the Ministry of Useless Affairs. Hear them whining and complaining because they cannot find this dream job of theirs!
Furthermore, concerning unemployment, let's not forget that approximately half of the human population could perfectly-well survive just by producing reproduction services. Seriously, the most common business model is to make children with a particular man, obtain resources from him to do that, and otherwise not bother to do anything at all, in an economical sense. I do not see why we would go out of our way to invent other jobs for people who actually already could have one? In that sense, there is no unemployment or such problem for them, actually. If they do not want to fall back on the always available backup plan, then they can look for something else, but why would we see it as a problem that it would be hard for them to find something else? Where is the urgency? I really do not see any.