Referendums Galore - 2018 Municipal Elections

First, you need more than $100 billion USD just to compensate the displaced humans. (That’s 11 zeros btw. In yen, it’s in the tens of trillions.)

Then there’s the cleanup, also estimated at over $100 billion USD, and no-one knows how many decades it will take. Of course, no-one knows when the next force majeure will occur either.

But there’s always a silver lining. :robot: :rainbow:


That would be convenient for anyone wanting to play down the social freedom angle – do your own thing – and play up the economic freedom angle – buy your own thing (if you can afford it) – but it doesn’t add up.

Life, liberty & property was a phrase already in circulation. If they had been satisfied with that, they would have used it. But they didn’t, because they weren’t. If they really just wanted to avoid legitimizing slavery via that one word, they could have chosen a synonym. If the problem was not the word property but the very concept of property, then hey, you can’t have it both ways: either you change it, or you don’t.

The claim some make, that in the 18th century happiness still meant property rather than emotional contentment, does not hold up against the evidence. Etymologically it means luck(iness), but it acquired the modern meaning no later than the 16th century and has never lost that meaning. It hasn’t entirely lost the original meaning of luck (and therefore fortune and therefore wealth), but the rise of the modern sense was well underway by the 18th century.

America was set up based largely on the ideals of John Locke.

Oh my, the Anglo-Saxons aren’t good enough anymore? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: