When will Atlas shrug?

[1969912 0]

Next ten years? Next twenty?

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[nanook 1]

when the fountain head is complete? (j/k). I don't think An Rynd's grasp on economics and finance is quite strong. Makes a good reading though.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[1969912 0]

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when the fountain head is complete?

Pretty good

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[RhondaLea 4]

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Makes a good reading though.

Gah!

Y'know, I read very fast. On a rainy day when I'm just lolling around in bed drinking tea, I can get through five or six normal science fiction novels. Non-fiction takes a little longer, but not much.

It took me two weeks to get through Atlas Shrugged. Two weeks. Lo these many years later, it remains the most poorly written, deadly boring book I have ever read.

I don't think much of Rand's philosophy either.

I worked for an attorney who knew her. He said she was as shitty a human being as she was a writer.

rl

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from. Gullah Proverb

[1969912 0]

Long book. Crime and Punishment took me a while to slog through.

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[MarkF 0]

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Crime and Punishment took me a while to slog through.

Compared to The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment is a short, sharp, to the point, exiting tale...
For bigness you've gotta go with Peter F Hamilton. That's "big" in physical size, scope, plotlines and a cast of thousands...
Ooroo
Mark F...

[1969912 0]

I found an annotated copy of Nabokov's Lolita. The annotations cover, in part, his wordplay such as "spoonerisms". Kinda interesting.

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[kbordson 8]

I have to disagree. I thought Ayn Rands writing in Atlas Shrugged was great.
It was long, I'll grant you that. But I thought the concepts were thought provoking. She had enough personal stuff in it to make it interesting without being too much of a romance novel. And I liked the detail that she included in the descriptions.

When will Atlas shrug though.... probably never. It would be hard for me to stand back and let it all fall apart and I'm sure that feeling is true for many.... so the system will remain broke. (but at least I feel justified and less guilty for being annoyed by the burden)

[1969912 0]

I agree with nearly all of her philosophy. The "shrug", if it happens, may be much slower than in the book. Very bright woman, but kinda strange re: her personal life.

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

[RhondaLea 4]

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I agree with nearly all of her philosophy. The "shrug", if it happens, may be much slower than in the book. Very bright woman, but kinda strange re: her personal life.

She was a patholgical narcissist and her mental disorder is clearly reflected in her writing.

rl

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from. Gullah Proverb

[reverend 0]

Everybodies got to be something.

[micro 0]

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Makes a good reading though.

Gah!

Y'know, I read very fast. On a rainy day when I'm just lolling around in bed drinking tea, I can get through five or six normal science fiction novels. Non-fiction takes a little longer, but not much.

It took me two weeks to get through Atlas Shrugged. Two weeks. Lo these many years later, it remains the most poorly written, deadly boring book I have ever read.

I don't think much of Rand's philosophy either.

I worked for an attorney who knew her. He said she was as shitty a human being as she was a writer.

rl

lol! God, I love you, woman!! That sums up my ideas of Ms. Rand as well. A shame her books are so bloody popular again.

I miss Lee.
And JP.
And Chris. And...

[lurch 0]

He already did. The planet is massive however and takes time to fall.
All joking aside...
I've been a fan of Rand's work since high school, with qualifications. She had the basics right I think, the underlying lessons...you can't eat what you didn't produce, and the world is going to hell largely because of people in power freely granting themselves the right to help themselves to as much of YOUR income as they feel like, all in the name of a diseased form of altruism.
Her image of economics and reality was strangely rudimentary, though. Almost childish. Kinda like a cartoon or something, it left out all the billion other factors involved in politics and economy... and all her characters....all of them....seem to be reflections of her own mind. They all think the same way, use the same terms patterns and perspectives.
But you know she was dead on accurate in a lot of ways. The job I'm at now is the latest in a long line of collapsing factories I've worked at, which all died due to either enron-style management looting, or being dependent on a company that died that way. And the people with brains are making themselves scarce, leaving plants staffed and run by incompetents. The motors do in fact wind up stopping because management thinks they can do without expensive brains and replace trained techs with illiterate Mexican gangbangers who run around writing their names on the walls and peeing in the corners. I'm one of the last techs left at THIS plant and its dying the same way, eerily reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. Go figure. Bummer theres no techno-atlantis in the mountains to run to.

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[SpeedRacer 1]

what you're describing is a bit different than what's in the book.

In the book (I'm about half thru it now) it seems to be that the really smart, high-achievers are slipping away, and allowing the whining losers to make the government put more and more laws out to shackle the best achievers. A sort of socialist-inspired universal dumbing-down of the whole system.

what you've described is incompetent management within the company itself.

---

anyway, I find that I agree mostly with Rand's position, it's just that she drags things out sometimes & really seems to overdo it & try to pound her message in with a lead pipe, over & over again.

Speed Racer
--------------------------------------------------

[lurch 0]

Agreed on all points. But you don't just see that incompetent management in companies, its the default state of most politicians. The fact that an honest politician is an astonishingly rare thing, even a joke, says it all. The default expectation is corruption, usually "for the children" or "to help the disadvantaged". People who think it should be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" are EVERYWHERE and that scares the shit out of me. I have a bunch of family members elsewhere who personify that mentality, living off the system by choice. The result is always another new tax or an increase in one, or some "give you back a buck then take two for a different reason and tell you you're saving money" bullshit. Argue against it and you'll be accused of not wanting to shoulder "your fair share" of someone else's expenses.
Oh and as for the lead pipe? You said you're about halfway through. You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till you get to the central lecture of the book, John Galt's big radio speech... all seventy-odd nonstop pages of it as subtle as a brick in the face. Reading it is the mental equivalent of heart surgery with no anesthetic... fascinating, technical, agonizing. You'll collapse in relief when its over and desperately want to go do something totally mindless that doesn't involve words. Ayn Rand's personality was... unique.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[JaapSuter 0]

I'll agree that she's certainly not the most talented writer that has ever walked the surface of the planet. She did write some thought provoking stuff though.

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I don't think much of Rand's philosophy either.

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about the money speech in isolation? Ignore the rest of the book, ignore the website it is hosted at, ignore Rand's objectivistm and ignore the author and her personal life; just tell me what you think of the speech's content.

Thanks,

Jaap

[happythoughts 0]

Unfortunately, her writing style was to take a point and repeatedly beat it into the ground. Not all philosophers are great storytellers.

The premise of book was that people would tire of it and quit working.

In San Fran, after the dot com bubble burst, 30% of the software people were unemployed. They went and got other jobs. People need to eat, live, and put clothes on their kids, even if they don't agree.

The work force can be anywhere in the world now, the pool of workers isn't going to dry up. Textiles to Surgeons.

news clicky
Further more, the CEOs of the companies don't care.
Bill Gates plans to invest $1.7 billion in India over the next 4 years. IT growth in the US is supposed to be zero.

Developed countries have lost low-skill jobs to less developed countries.

Now they are losing the skilled labor jobs.

Rand couldn't have anticipated that workers would have no jobs to go to.

[RhondaLea 4]

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I'll agree that she's certainly not the most talented writer that has ever walked the surface of the planet. She did write some thought provoking stuff though.

If the woman is one-dimensional, her writing will be one-dimensional too.

The whole thing felt like a Potemkin Village to me.

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I don't think much of Rand's philosophy either.

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about the money speech in isolation? Ignore the rest of the book, ignore the website it is hosted at, ignore Rand's objectivistm and ignore the author and her personal life; just tell me what you think of the speech's content.

[Dolph 0]

I don't know about harsh. It's pretty much the same I got out of that book.

I have no basis to comment on her personally (Objectivism and objectivism aside) bút I found Atlas Shrugged as pretty hard to get through, not because of the intellectual content but because of the style it was delivered in.

The money speech had a part comparing gold to paper money (something about destroyers or something-something iirc). When I read it, I went "dude, WTF. As if gold doesn't have some arbitary value given to it by - well, humans. Birds would shit on gold as much as on paper. Gimme the next point, please, and stop that nonsense.". Essence of moral is to make money was the next point, after which I threw down the book in favour of a reread of Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. The latter at least didn't pretend to be serious.

Then again I don't like Hemingway either

[jumper03 0]

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Makes a good reading though.

Gah!

Y'know, I read very fast. On a rainy day when I'm just lolling around in bed drinking tea, I can get through five or six normal science fiction novels. Non-fiction takes a little longer, but not much.

It took me two weeks to get through Atlas Shrugged. Two weeks. Lo these many years later, it remains the most poorly written, deadly boring book I have ever read.

I don't think much of Rand's philosophy either.

I worked for an attorney who knew her. He said she was as shitty a human being as she was a writer.

rl

WOOHOOO!!!! I am so glad to see I am not the only person that thinks she cannot write

She took 500 words to say what anyone else can do in 10...

I made it half way through atlas shrugged and said fuck it, I got better things to do and read.

S

Scars remind us that the past is real