Are we supposed to be surprised? When the shit hits the fan and the world economy implodes, of course they'll be ready. The 1% and the crazy survivalists with their gun stockpiles, that is.

Doesn't look like this thing would be capable of going very deep without imploding. Seems like it would be easier (and safer) just to go scuba diving.

Ain't gonna happen, it's a gang not a club.
The institution has become wholly corrupt and complicit with those who would observe and dictate to all how much free will they are allowed. Will only get worse until (if at all) people stop giving them more and more and more power.
Best bet for peeps in the states, since people give away their rights as humans with robotic fervor, is to GTFO before the shit implodes....because when Wiemar Republican inflation hits, many people in the U.S. will embrace their hind-brain survival-mode circuits, and it's gonna be dangerous and martial here, for a reasonably long, foreseeable future.

Why will peeps in the U.S.(UK) panic? Because a very small percentile of citizens have any survival skills beyond credit or commerce anchored in $$, and when that's gone shit gets uncooperative in large groups of hapless desperadoes.

I wanna be far, far away from idiots when it happens, with a clan of about 30, absolute motherfuckers....and their wimmins.

There was a tv series called the Ascent of Money with Niall Ferguson which featured the U.S. banking deregulation in one episode, and the tape of the senate hearing around the turn of the century was quite interesting. They realised that deregulating was trusting the bankers to do the right thing or the whole system could implode, and the bankers basically just laughed and said of course you can trust us...

The gentleman starting at 00:30 and the lady starting at 00:47 are the ones that make most sense by pointing out the obvious:
* Its is communism that has imploded, not capitalism. The USSR is dead, and China is essentially capitalistic.
* Since the end of the cold war, an astonishing two billion people have left poverty or extreme poverty (and not to mention the increase in the number of democracies since the end of communism). 'The West' might have stagnated, but humanity as a whole is much better off.

Which leads me to the drum I've always beat on the issue of heath and happiness in the land of Planet Chaos: The success of the health care anomaly in the U.S. is predicated on a chaotic decline in the overall health of the general population, that's how that machine makes ungodly amounts of money, as a partner-in-crime with insurance (mafiosi-style protection) companies and medical professionals (dealers/cleaners/fixers/hit-men) who, partnered with successful criminals like advertising execs and processed-foods concerns, insure for future generations a steady dose of being continually ill and feeling like they are about to die. Combine these psychotics with keeping peeps too distracted with $(illusion)$ and work to think clearly and the bulk of a country's population addicted to misdirection, newsspeak, and intentional reinforcement of intent and "responsibility" to the programming-arm (television, internet, regulated and controlled media ) of the above-described machine, and you have a bunch of robots thinking that they are about to die who are easily herded into the cattle truck of indentured-for-life, wage-slavery.

The best health care system is one where the majority of the population of a country is relatively healthy up and until the moment of cascading failures associated with time.

The system we have now or any fix, will only work to the benefit of all with a nation of fit people, not fat, lazy, ignorant globs of flesh who are incapacitated through the negative reinforcement described above, and the perpetrators of the same, eliminated....Or, put these criminals in a box or prison or otherwise not allowed to work their evil.

In other words, the United States health care system has been designed to implode upon itself with the criminals who built it, fleeing to their fortified compounds to be protected by dutiful armies and local constabularies, otherwise known as PAID BODY GAURDS.

That article you linked closes with a near-future scenario of the earth as a, "barely habitable scene of desolation"- Pause if you all will to consider how fortunate we all are to have had this incarnation when we did, in these the best and worst of times-Thank god for indoor plumbing, climate control, and access to way more spice than our smelly, culinarily-challenged forefathers, until it all implodes.

was it because she's not fitting into the neat box of either left vs right?

as the conservatives as we know it start to implode, we're going to see more shifting and it will blur the lines more. Conservatives will adopt less hard-line stances and become more liberal.

we're going to see more splinter groups like the tea-baggers, but it will run the gammut. some will be more conservative, some will be less conservative. Ideally I wish this would mean the death of the party system. but realistically it just means things will be chaotic for a while until things settle down into a new "left" and a new "right" but in the end, it will be somewhat more rational, if only minutely so.

Somewhere the Insane Clown Posse's heads just imploded.

OMG if it just would have been Hugh in the suit. << pow >> universe implodes

The internet morons absolutely imploded. It was the classic case of you have an idea in your head of Your Story, and you're the hero in it. And when someone points out how good you have it or you're really a bastard you react angrily to someone ruining your story.

Luckily for me I've always known I sucked, so it's very easy to go "Iraq war, yep that was my fault...slavery, that one was on me...Holocaust, well I am of German decent."

@renatojj may i ask a question?
why is it every time someone disagrees with your position or offers a counter-proposal you take it personally?

re-read many of the posts here concerning your comment.
they are actually agreeing with you in many ways but they diverge when it comes to how they may go about rectifying the situation.

this is basic "politics 101".all politics is..to break it down to its most base definition is "what should we do".
thats all...thats it.

your solution is to limit government and ( i assume) give more powers back on a state and local level.
others have proposed a different approach.
i say let it all build to a head and implode under its own hubris while i sit on my lawn chair and watch it all burn.

who is right?
which is the best path that will benefit all?
well of course you think you are right,otherwise you would not think and perceive things the way you do.

but you appear to be allergic to any contrary ideologies to your ways of perceiving and that my friend is absolutist thinking and it is dangerous.

@aaronfr pointed out (quite correctly) your basic misunderstanding of socialism and i would add that you are using the title of "libertarian" in the bastardized and twisted media-induced definition that has propagated like a disease in america.

i tell people i am a conservative libertarian socialist just to watch their heads explode,and the funny thing is....you most certainly CAN be a conservative-libertarian-socialist.
but if you are weaned on american corporate opnion/commentray news that terminology would make absolutely no sense.which @cosmovitelli alluded to.

you can have a socialist democracy.
you can even have a communist democracy.
because one is a system of government and the other is financial.
here in america we have been bludgeoned into believing that capitalism and democracy go together like peas and carrots.

marx is a GREAT read,as is adam smith,and BOTH have been bastardized here in america because BOTH warned of the perils of communism and capitalism.

here in america we have a supposedly laissez faire approach but in reality america is a corporate socialist state.
where corporations take the risk to gain huuuuuge profits and dump the loss on the general public.
and that my friend is basic socialism.
to big to fail and too big to jail.

and here we come to my main point:
i dont think anyone here is disagreeing with you.
it appears they all see the broken system which favors the wealthy and powerful and are angered that money=free speech.
they just have a different approach on how to fix it,this does not make them stupid nor naive,just different.

i actually agree with you that trying to fix the broken system by using the very system that is broken seems counter-intuitive.
you suggest limiting government.
i suggest letting it burn.
others suggest enforcing the rule of law.
while others may deem it fit to vote a whole new legislature into office.

all different approaches to the same problem.

engage with those that disagree with you because it forces you to re-evaluate and defend your position often and sometimes you may find while in those discussions a new piece of information,a new way of looking at a problem that exposes the weakness in your argument.
the intelligent person will immediately dump the former to adhere to the newer and more succinct paradigm.
the fundamentalist will not and will continue to bang the gong for a defunct ideology.

so dont take it personally when someone disagrees with you.
nobody is here to dehumanize you nor dismiss you.
they may make assumptions based on your commentary but you can clear that up quite easily.

on a side note :@dag is one of the smartest and open minded people i know from the internet.dont judge him too quickly.

Vacuum power is nothing to sneeze at. I've imploded a 55 gallon drum with a shop vac (loud). That glass plate at let's say 1ft x 2 ft under -25 psi has 7200 pounds of pressure on it. That's more than a car.

If I'm not mistaken, it imploded, yes?

First of all, I like your standpoint, nothing wrong with that. We simply don't know, maybe the big bang was an imploding black hole in another plane of existence, creating our own 4 dimensional reality. Maybe it was an omnipotent being looking like a giant spider with Panda bears instead of arms, maybe both.
Although Occam razor would suggest the first alternative (which on a grand scale sounds equally ridiculous to me), we still don't know.

And secondly ask yourself this (I don't mean you in special bobknight), "Is it even possible to consider biological evolution in isolation from everything else?". I don't think thats possible, first we need something like really huge stars to create heavy atoms (i mean everything with more protons than helium, that's not what a chemist would call heavy). We need smaller stars that don't burn up that fast and deliver energy, we need a planet in the right distance to this star. Ohh and the planet itself doesn't have the properties to sustain life from the beginning, earth also had to "evolve" to the kind of planet that was able to sustain life and therefore start the biological evolution. There are many more of these requirements and they also needed to "evolve" from this huge pile of energy called the big bang.