Even though I've left the site and don't want to post here anymore, I'll make an exception for this thread. I've respected Mafoo for a long time, and if you're still there Mafoo, I wish you a great life in New Zealand. I don't think I'll ever leave the country, since just about every nation in the world right now has some major economic problems (trade imbalances, high national debts,  government budget deficits, etc). Some nations, like the U.S., have a severe combination of all of these. Still, as long as you can carve out a successful niche, you can be well off in just about any country.

As I see it, the U.S. has too many strengths and advantages to truly collapse. Sure, we may hit an immense economic collapse, but it will likely be a good thing in the long run (look at post-Soviet Russia, for example). The near future seems pretty dim, but the time beyond it could be truly promising.

Actually, I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm a bit out of practice when it comes to forum posting. Point is, I wish you a great life Mafoo, and just like the Fellowship of the Ring, I hope you have an amazing time in New Zealand.

since youve been a think tank in the military i expect you to know that presidential ellection is completely rigged. And the ones with power in the country are setting up a system that stiffles self growth and depleting the middle class.

Thanks Montana. And yes, I love the US and what it has stood for, for over 200 years. Life today is not that bad. I am not leaving because my life today sucks. I actually have a good life here. But when I look at what the future holds for the US, I can't see a path to anything good. We are getting farther and farther from where we need to be every day.

If I had to use a personal finance analogy, I would use this example.

Let's say I made 2,000 a month, and I had 4,000 a month in bills. Someone thought I was good for a loan, so they gave me a 24,000 loan that I didn't need to make payments on for a year, but then I had to pay it off in two years.

For that first year (where we are today), things would look pretty good. I was living above my means, and I found a way to keep doing it. Now the year ends, and I have run out of the 24,000. I now have 5,000 a month in bills, and still only 2,000 to pay it. So, I go get another loan, but this time, the guy says no (china, india in the US's case).

Now life, VERY FAST, goes from great, to horrible. This is where we will someday be. Today life is good, but I don't expect that to be true in 5 years.

This might not happen, but if it does, I don't want to be here to find out. If the US some way changes for the positive, then great, I hope with all my heart it does. In fact, I hope for every Americans sake, I am completely wrong.

The sad thing, is I have been on this site for 3 years, and have predicted everything that has happened (unemployment, economy, stock market not recovering, etc), so if my view of economics has been accurate so far, nothing is telling me I should put faith in being wrong this time. The safe bet for myself, and my family, is to find more stable place to live.

I will be on this site though, and will have internet in NZ, so from your perspective, I won't be going anywhere :)

Great hearing from you again Montana, don't be a stranger! Post more often!

This is what I am talking about. This is what's wrong with the youth of America. It's the view of many people, that the rich must be evil, that to get rich, you have to have done something negative to someone else.

In the old day, people used to aspire to be rich. Being rich was looked at as the side effect of greatness. Today that's not the case. The socialist  movement did there work well.

Let me ask you this:

Let's say I invented some cool way to generate power from the contaminates in water. So you pumped ground water into something that took a AA battery to run, and it powered your house for 6 months, and at the same time cleaned the water.

Now, I start selling these things. Because I might be a nice guy, and see myself as somewhat if a humanitarian, I sell them for $300 each (even though I could make 10,000 off of them). To the consumer, they pay for themselves in 3-6 months, and then after that, there lives are much better off then they were without me.

I sell everyone in the world one. I would then be the richest man in the world. Who did I fuck over? Who's lives did I screw? How was I an evil man?

The truth is most rich people in this country are good people. They got rich, by providing a great product or service for less money then the next guy. You hear stories about rich evil men, but think about the rich people you know. How many of them are assholes? I know none that are (and one of them is is one of the top 10 richest men in the US).

Oh, and just so you know. I am not rich. I am not leaving because I have obtained some huge wealth and am taking it with me. When I leave, I will most likely take 20,000 in money, and of course the things I own, that have some value.

I am not poor, but I am no where near rich.

1st, while we have never really seen eye to eye on anything I like you as a poster and am sad to see you go. May I ask why?

To mafoo-

I am a fierce economic conservative and I too do not like what I see. I am currently a logitics officer in the Army, and I believe my position gives me a good prospective.

The US is not in good shape, but, most of the rest of the world is in worse shape. I agree the main issue is mindset. There used to be a prevailling mindset that was something like You need to work to eat... at a base level.

People now, moreso than before believe for some reason the government owes them something. I think if we look at just about any case where people are giving something, they will lose the will to achieve greater things (Native American on reservations case in point)

Governments job is to protect the people from outside threat, and each other. Thats about it. Now those two things are very broad and you could make a case for just about anything thing in one of those 2 categories. Well, I am tired and will probably make little sense so I shall stop.

I hope you find happiness at your new home.

Thanks for the pep talk, but I have been on this site (and in my community) for years talking about this, and I don't think I have changed more then a handfull of peoples minds. I live in a small midwestern town, and they are very much like minded thinkers. Not much local I need to do to keep the spirit around here.

Not that I think anything that's going to happen is remotely this bad as what happened in Germany in the 1930's, but I am sure there are some percentage of Jews that wanted to leave in the late 1920's, but didn't because they loved there country so much, so they chose to stay and try and make it a better place.

If I was living in NZ and the US was attacked by, say, China, and the US needed able bodies to fight, I would go back and fight for the US, but I am not going to stick around and watch my own country destroy itself.

Good to hear you have been successful at improving your community. The difference with your situation and this one, is you don't see every media outlet, and people in political power telling your community that being gay is bad, any the only people who are pro gay are evil. The people around you just don't know any better, and all you have to do is educate them on the truth. I have to contradict the White House,  Congress, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Time, and the movie industry. How am I to compete with that?

Who do the extreme rich fuck over?  Well, when I see CEOs getting paid ridiculous sums like 300 million a year, I don't believe they can possibly be doing work that's 1000 or 10000 times more valuable than other employees, and I know that most of that money COULD be going to some of those other workers, some of whom probably don't get paid as much as they deserve for the work they do.  Or to the shareholders, or to the customers via savings (contributing to the competitive benefit of the company), or just to pay off debt the complany may have, or what have you. 

That's just one example.  And yes, I'm aware that the market has apparently created a situation where that kind of thing happens, and no, I don't want to just legislate a cap on CEO salary, but it's still ridiculous. 

@Mafoo: Well if it makes you feel any better, you changed my mind. And I'm glad you did. I probably won't move out of the country, but if I did, it'd be somewhere much cooler. This summer weather doesn't agree with me.

Bigjon: Thank you. I feel like we used to be classic enemies, but I'm over that now. I appreciate the encouragement. I really don't want to make too many posts (kind of ruins the point of leaving the site), so I'll try not to go on for too long.

I look at this site, and I see many of the problems with it that Mafoo has with the United States. This site tries to change in so many ways and ultimately it was best at its roots. We've seen all these new features and editors and a completely redesigned site and ultimately Vgchartz (according to Alexa) is far less popular than it was 2 years ago. What the hell is with that?

I've been with the site since 2007 (which I'd say makes me somewhat of a veteran), and I've seen it change in a lot of ways, but it never really needed to. VGC 2.0 was shit and so is VGC 3.0. For all the effort, 3.0 is just as much of a disorganized clusterfuck as the last redesign. Where's the progress?  VGC 1.0 wasn't perfect, but it was much simpler than 2.0 and 3.0 and it worked a lot better. I mean, look at Gamefaqs (which is one of the most popular videogame sites in the world). One of the biggest reasons for its success is its simple layout and accessibility. Anything you'd want to find on Gamefaqs (that can be found there) is fairly easy to find and get to. I still don't know my way around Vgchartz 3.0, and this new color scheme is just as ugly as the last one. So we've substituted white and green and a lot of fancy graphics work over a crappy Gamespot ripoff? WHAT WAS THE POINT?

And the site is still fairly slow. You would think this would be the most obvious thing , and for a successful site, but this site is still slow as hell. I have FiOS (and I'm a college student, I have my priorities ), and Vgchartz can still be a bit slow for me at times. I know it's not easy to make a speedy site, but why doesn't the staff just streamline the content much better? All that work and it's still a mess. *Sigh*. I mean, just look at the news section. It's terrible. And don't bother complaining to the overly defensive staff about it either. 

Like I said, I've been here for years, and in all that time, the only real new thing we've gotten regarding numbers is the "Others" charts and the Preorders charts (and maybe some other things). Those are the sorts of things people come to the site to see. Information. Sales numbers. Not videogame news they can find somewhere else. Not booth babes articles that are a dime a dozen. If the team spent half the effort they did coming out with pointless things than they did organizing new info, we could have had a PC chart and a bunch of other interesting info by now. But alas...

Ahh, whatever. This rant has gone on too long. There's nothing for me here. I don't want to contribute, I've lost all interest in the database, and when VGC 3.0 came out, I wasn't even told how to edit polls (you know, since I was the only one doing it and they got thousands of votes). Why? Am I just worth THAT little to the administrators? Sure, you could claim they were really busy, but no one is really that busy if they're spending hours at their computers. No one is really so busy as to not be able to spend a minute or so sending a PM to a staff member and long time member. Not that I am those things anymore.

Fuck this site.

But... if there was a giant conspiracy to control the US if anything you'd want a strong middleclass that the poor could think they could strive for to keep them complacent.

I mean what would destroying the middleclass do other then take away the transition from rich to poor enraging the poor into revolt?

Youtube now trumps all of those sources of information.  People want someone to show them the right way.  They just don't know where to look.  Maybe with your connections you can start a think tank and air it via Youtube so that the masses can see that insight.  I have long been hoping that someone with some economic and political brilliance made a "show" on the internet where they can give non B.S. answers to major issues.  Maybe you can be that guy.  If you are smart enough i'm sure you could monetize it for yourself as well.  

You don't even have to live in America to broadcast the good message. It could be the beginning of a new counter culture.  That is normally how societies tend to change attitudes right. A small but visible culture of people who believe and act in accordance with their beliefs that eventually become socially accepted.

Not to mention that most of those news outlets are in decline because consumers are indifferent to their messages that are too controlled by party lines and anyone who is smart realizes that real answers aren't going to come from one extreme or the other.