Let's talk about your feelings. Just imagine there is a couch here. Why not just lie down and relax? Tell me about your feelings of sadness and badness. Why do you feel sad and bad for me? It's seems you've made a judgement: Good1's life is meaningless and empty. Let's talk about your judgment, and/or your ability to judge rightly. Are you sad because you feel (you've judged?) that i may spend an eternity in hell? Let's talk about that hell a bit. Go ahead and describe it, as you have imagined it to be. Does this description do honor to a Divinity that is GOOD?
I've been known to say that what we've been proudly calling "the world" is actually the proverbial "hell". Does this engender fear? It's not supposed to. I've also been known to say that future hell is another way of saying: 'If you always think what you've always thought, you'll always get what you've always got.' Does this engender fear? It's not supposed to. There's another type of message, however, that says you'll go to a place of excruciating punishment for eternity, should you not conform to a minimal standard of believing something both specific and general at the same time. Does this engender fear? It's supposed to. Does it retard a mind's ability to figure out what it really ought to believe? Yes, you better believe it!
40 years is a long time into the future. If they were telling you about it, you would think they would say shit that doesn't make sense yet. For instance...if you went back in time 40 years and said to someone "buy Apple one day because they are going to make these cool ipods and iphones and you can text and send email and use 1000s of apps" The person is going to look at you like you are speaking another language. They will have no idea what Apple is other than a fruit, no idea what an ipod or iphone is. No idea what a text or email is, and no idea what apps are. It would be like me telling you guys. "Ok, you want to make money in the next 40 years...heres what you do. Wait for eclads to come out and pick up about 1000 of them. When they synthesize to your maglo, resell it to the polethians who will buy it at a 1 million percent markup because they pay in monulos and we know how much people in New America want monuloses!!! You'll be totally set for life! You will be able to buy all the skav you want!! Wont that be awesome?"
I'm not buying your argument here. 40 years ago was 1972. In 1972 they had mainframes and terminals. They even had remote mainframes connected to local terminals. You wrote your basic program on your Teletype model 33 (if you're names were Bill or Paul), typed RUN, and your code would be sent back to the mainframe and forth to your terminal. That's the basic concept of email. So if you talked about email it would not be all that foreign. Same with apps, because for the scenario just mentioned to work, you'd have an interpreter (an app) installed on the mainframe. I've only addressed those things they mentioned that are near enough to be trade-able. They've mentioned other technologies that are somewhat familiar, but for the most part, unbelievable at this time. One of those techs would be the space cargo elevator. It would lift cargo straight up via a cable that stretches into space. From there, the cargo can orbit over to another cable in another location, where it can be downloaded (ha ha) at a cost much cheaper than shipping or airfreight. Another tech would be the ability to travel long distances via...i can't even think of the word. It's what Scotty used to beam up Captain Kirk all the time. In this way, we will be able to explore farther. We may be around to see the beginnings of the cargo elevator, but i don't think we will see the beam-me-up-Scotty technology. I didn't mention them because there's no way to tell if these are predictions based on information that transcends time, or just wishful science fiction. The techs i mentioned might have been predictable to Jim Cramer in 2000, or whenever they were made. But the different directions USA and Europe would go in this regards, i don't even think Mad Money Jim could have predicted. And, as mentioned before, it would have been difficult to say for sure - like in a book - whether the president of Iran would enter office, and/or still be in high office in 2012.
The average person had no idea about computers or how they worked in the 1970s. All they knew about computers was what they saw on TV. They had lots of lights and reel to real tape. If you were in the computer industry(a very small industry in the 1970s), then you might have an idea of what email is, but if you said the word email to the average joe, they likely would not know what you are talking about. If you said the word ipod to anyone, I guarantee nobody would know what that was. Or if you said "google" They would just think its a number with 100 zeros behind it. I think people in the industry back then didnt even have the foresight to see how big the role of computers would get in our lives. Look at Bill Gates. He once said "No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody." FCC commissioner in 1961 said There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States. Another one bill gates said was "We will never make a 32 bit operating system"
So what is your point, exactly, as it applies to the source of information from the future, as mentioned at the beginning of this thread? Let me guess! You don't think the predictions are valid because they talk about things we've already conceived of. If the predictions are valid, they'd talk about things we've never even heard of, let alone conceived of? What is the connection between future tech that you haven't heard of, and the validity of a prediction about that future tech?
So i think i may have figured out what your *premise* is. You seem to be saying that every 40 years, our nations vocabulary is completely exchanged with terms we've never heard of whenever we are talking about technology. So, if someone were to talk about 40-year-in-the-future technology, we should not be familiar with any of the terms they are using. You also seem to be saying that whenever talking about the future 40 years off, a prophet must use terms yet to be used, from 40 years in the future. You seem to be saying that describing the concept, whatever it is, with current terms, disqualifies the validity of a prediction. And so, because we are not familiar with the terms, therefore they are speaking the truth. If we are familiar with the terms, they are lying. Is this really your argument? If so, it seems to me that while you've been able to take the current focus off of a psychological analysis of ElectricSavant's belief system (and therefore his feelings), the argument is over-reaching in it's attempt to prove wrong what the book has said so far.
http://youtu.be/4Tpl2D7Gris I think this short talk, gives much better future investing ideas. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4Tpl2D7Gris" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>