8 million and counting...

[miriam_e]

Wow! Live Journal's 8 millionth account was added over the weekend.
(See here for more info.)
Not too shabby for a business model based upon the premise that giving something away and letting people buy it if they want, will generate a healthy income and a great service. It has become a very successful business. Kudos to the people who have produced this wonderful, open-source, meeting place.

Comments

Re: China?

[revbob2.livejournal.com]

China isn't quite a dictatorship and the US and Australia aren't quite democracies -- OK, not by a long shot -- but they're close enough to those labels that the following truism applies to them: democracies have a lot more political inertia than dictatorships.

Which is to say, if dictatorships aren't crazy they can make the trains run on time. But if they're just a teensy bit crazy, a lot of really bad stuff can happen really fast.

The US and Australia would have to be a lot crazier than China for them to be as dangerous. Even the Bush-huggers have a little hesitation about declaring that Americans are racially, intellectually, and culturally superior to everybody else in the world, while the Chinese will pretty much tell you that any time you ask. In my book, that makes them pretty damn crazy. And, as hard as it is to believe, even crazier than us.

Re: China?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I wonder...

I don't know that labels like democracy or dictatorship really mean much anymore. The USA and Australia aren't democracies -- I've forgotten what the name for rule by a few corporations is. China is in a weird transition state. What probably matters most is the amount of freedoms in each. In the USA and Australia we have grown used to having a lot of personal freedom, and without using severe brainwashing it is really hard to take that away. Unfortunately there is a lot of brainwashing going on in USA, and quite a lot here in Australia. It is already very dangerous.

From my conversations with people in the USA, and because our media has become dominated in recent years by the USA I have become very worried for my friends over there. People in USA are often some of the most brainwashed people I've met, and it takes more than average strength to stand up to it. I can see the same thing starting to happen over here and it is very unsettling. I have an Australian friend who works on VR and he often travels to many places around the world. He loves visiting the USA, though lately when he returns from there he is more and more distressed and depressed. USA is dying. It is happening slowly because it has so much inertia, but it is something mostly visible from outside.

In many countries when a candidate steals rule through trickery and fraud there is general uprising against them. The USA is so brainwashed by their media that they just let it go. Even worse, when the elections are stolen a second time almost everybody believes it when they are told that the majority wanted it. An unjust invasion built upon a web of lies, taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people simply continues and people simply bow. People are turned against each other over stranger danger, first in the anti-commie purges, then the drug wars, then the pedophilia witch hunts and people believe it all, thinking they are in the grip of a rising tide of crime, when actually crime has been dropping for decades -- centuries even.

There is much more, but I won't go on. It is all starting to happen here too... most upsetting.

USA has at least a chance to turn it around. I don't know how likely that is, though I hope it can be done. Australia, I don't hold out a lot of hope for. Our politicians are such weasles, and our few big companies so corrupt, and the rule from afar so entrenched that I doubt things will change fast enough to avoid the trainwreck.

We'll see.

I still hope for robotics, VR, and replicator technology to swoop in at the last minute to save us.

It doesn't sound like I'm an optimist, but mostly I am. Maybe I'm just having a bad day. :)