There is incentive to for small countries to cooperate in peaceful endeavors. The LHC is built by a cooperation between countries. The space program is increasingly moving the same direction.
You make that sound like its a bad thing. On Star Trek, the Borg are villains, but the only thing that might be considered evil is that their assimilation is involuntary. If joining the collective were a voluntary decision, then it might actually be a good deal.
The distances only seem insurmountable because of the limit of human life spans. If we could develop a way to extend our life span indefinitely, then taking a trip to another star might be an interesting 50,000 year vacation.
Yes, it is difficult. Corporations are owned and operated by flesh-and-blood human beings. Anyone who owns stock is an owner of a corporation and practically all of us are employees of corporations. If I make a political statement, am I expressing my own opinion or the opinion that my corporation pays me to express? If I get paid $100k/year and just happen to give $50k/year to political candidates, am I making political contributions based on my personal beliefs or am I a bagman for the corporation I work for?
Creating a campaign and funding it themselves is practically the definition of a PAC. That's what the Citizens United controversy is all about. It does nothing to mitigate the problem of a candidate being indebted to a collective that helps get them elected.
Even if you fund campaigns from public money, what's to stop an unaffiliated party from expressing political views that may influence voter decisions? Are you going to ban Micheal Moore or Jon Steward from making political statements in the media? That's what the Citizens United decision was really about.
Not necessarily; to me, it sound like he wants to get rid of this stupid concepts that corporation == a person, and that money == speech.
Those are fine slogans for a bumper sticker, but difficult boundaries to make into enforceable law. You have to walk a fine line between closing every possible loophole and still protecting legitimate free speech. I have yet to hear any proposal that would actually achieve that balance.
A single paper with a novel result is just the beginning of the scientific process. If someone published a paper that claims X kills cancer cells in vitro, then the next step is to check if X kills cancer cells in mice. If the original paper is bogus, then follow up research is unlikely to yield any results. So the original paper doesn't get any citations and the next time that researcher makes a similar claim, they will be met with more skepticism.
It's true that the system can be gamed in the short run. And sometimes someone can be game it enough to get tenure. But without follow up and citations, they'll just end up in academic limbo of being an associate professor with no funding.
The follow-up papers aren't just repeating the previous experiment, but building on it. If I publish a paper that claims a method that accelerates stem cell development, that might get a splashy publication. But if other people try the method and their stem cells die, they're not going to cite my paper. Next time I submit a paper on stem cell development, someone who got burned using my previous method might be on the panel of reviewers and they won't take a favorable view.
There's never a point where someone officially stamps the work as "wrong", but unreproducible results gradually end up in the dust bin.
The concept of states keeping the Federal government in check hasn't been relevant since the Civil War, which demonstrated why the concept was flawed in the first place.
As for education, we have the most educated populace is the history of this nation. The college graduation rate today is twice as high as the literacy rate was 1820.
When Socrates talked about a Republic, he was thinking of governing a city of about 150,000 people. Looking to him for answers of how to govern a continent spanning country of 300 million people is exactly the scaling problem GP is talking about.
He can just stand up on a rooftop or a rock and tell a whole alien battle fleet to run away, and instead of him being immediately reduced to a pile of smoking ashes the powerful aliens actually run away!
In that particular instance, the alien battle fleet ran away as part of their ruse. The Doctor's arrogance was used against him.
There are a lot of complaints you can level at new NuWho, particularly deus ex machina resolutions, but the writing is a tad more sophisticated than you seem to think.
That mechanism has already failed. Modern scientific research is so expensive that even tenured professors have to carter to the whims of funding agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) in order to continue working. Intellectually autonomy doesn't keep the rat colony alive, pay the electric bill for servers or purchase chemical reagents.
You're dealing with a self-selected sample set. Of course, the ones who seek help are not homeless by choice. But some of the most visible "homeless" are Rastafarian twenty-somethings pan-handling in front of trendy bars.
That's a pessimistic point of view that is inconsistent with reality. In the past three decades, the global percentage of people living in poverty has plummeted. Worldwide poverty is about half of where it was in 1990. With continued effort, there's not reason it couldn't asymptotically approach zero.
What is the obsession with space tourism? Get a decent monitor and zoom out on Google Earth while riding a roller-coaster. Same experience.
Why not guided tours of the ocean depths instead? There actually is "alien" life down there.
The difference between orbital flight and airplanes is that airplanes are actually a practical means of transportation from one destination to another. There are no destinations in orbit. It's just a few minutes of sightseeing.
Moonbase Alpha is also not going to happen. A domed city in Antarctica would be more feasible and no less pointless.
You are actually making more than one assumption. There are two competing technology paths: personal scale 3D-printing and CNC technologies and industrial scale automation technologies. You are implicitly assuming that personal manufacturing technologies will reach maturity before factories are fully automated. Which I think is a bad assumption. If automated factories come first, then we are still going to have to face the ensuing labor/social crisis before we can get to your replicator utopia.
I think you are assuming this "replicator" will be a desktop or garage-sized device. What if it is a factory-sized machine that occupies thousands of square feet and requires a significant power supply? Such a device would still be sufficient to make human labor obsolete, but remain prohibitive for personal ownership or use.
Science is testing ideas with experiment and observation. Until we OBSERVE life that can evolve or exist without water, then speculation is non-scientific.
For example, there is a "park" that consists of something like 350 square feet of land, between two private parcels of land, in the middle of the Nevada desert, that the government owns because of a surveying error when the land was originally titled.
I would be very interested to know what that "park" in Nevada is. 86% of Nevada is owned by the various agencies of the US Federal government. 76% of the state is BLM land, which which is essentially unmanaged and unmantained. Nearly all of the private land is near the major cities. The only parks are Great Basin National Park (est. 1986) and Death Valley (est. 1994), both established recently enough that I doubt there were major, incorrectable survey errors.
My point is that there is very little private land in the middle of the desert, let alone two parcel of private land with a phantom park in between them. I'll grant the benefit of the doubt, but your story just doesn't ring true.
Slashdot Mirror
There is incentive to for small countries to cooperate in peaceful endeavors. The LHC is built by a cooperation between countries. The space program is increasingly moving the same direction.
You make that sound like its a bad thing. On Star Trek, the Borg are villains, but the only thing that might be considered evil is that their assimilation is involuntary. If joining the collective were a voluntary decision, then it might actually be a good deal.
The distances only seem insurmountable because of the limit of human life spans. If we could develop a way to extend our life span indefinitely, then taking a trip to another star might be an interesting 50,000 year vacation.
Yes, it is difficult. Corporations are owned and operated by flesh-and-blood human beings. Anyone who owns stock is an owner of a corporation and practically all of us are employees of corporations. If I make a political statement, am I expressing my own opinion or the opinion that my corporation pays me to express? If I get paid $100k/year and just happen to give $50k/year to political candidates, am I making political contributions based on my personal beliefs or am I a bagman for the corporation I work for?
Creating a campaign and funding it themselves is practically the definition of a PAC. That's what the Citizens United controversy is all about. It does nothing to mitigate the problem of a candidate being indebted to a collective that helps get them elected.
Even if you fund campaigns from public money, what's to stop an unaffiliated party from expressing political views that may influence voter decisions? Are you going to ban Micheal Moore or Jon Steward from making political statements in the media? That's what the Citizens United decision was really about.
Not necessarily; to me, it sound like he wants to get rid of this stupid concepts that corporation == a person, and that money == speech.
Those are fine slogans for a bumper sticker, but difficult boundaries to make into enforceable law. You have to walk a fine line between closing every possible loophole and still protecting legitimate free speech. I have yet to hear any proposal that would actually achieve that balance.
When elections are won or lost based a few percentage points, then giving a 8.7% boost to a campaign can certainly sway the outcome.
It's true that the system can be gamed in the short run. And sometimes someone can be game it enough to get tenure. But without follow up and citations, they'll just end up in academic limbo of being an associate professor with no funding.
There's never a point where someone officially stamps the work as "wrong", but unreproducible results gradually end up in the dust bin.
I am tempted to resort to ad hominem here because it's not very difficult to see where you are fabricating history to suite a delusion,
Sad to see someone swear off temptation and not even make it to the end of the sentence before giving in.
go study history instead of repeating propaganda
That statement is absolutely repeating propaganda
Any "teacher" will tell you that the system is failing and made to fail by Government policy and intervention
How convenient that everything that disagrees with your narrow worldview is propaganda.
As for education, we have the most educated populace is the history of this nation. The college graduation rate today is twice as high as the literacy rate was 1820.
When Socrates talked about a Republic, he was thinking of governing a city of about 150,000 people. Looking to him for answers of how to govern a continent spanning country of 300 million people is exactly the scaling problem GP is talking about.
He can just stand up on a rooftop or a rock and tell a whole alien battle fleet to run away, and instead of him being immediately reduced to a pile of smoking ashes the powerful aliens actually run away!
In that particular instance, the alien battle fleet ran away as part of their ruse. The Doctor's arrogance was used against him.
There are a lot of complaints you can level at new NuWho, particularly deus ex machina resolutions, but the writing is a tad more sophisticated than you seem to think.
That mechanism has already failed. Modern scientific research is so expensive that even tenured professors have to carter to the whims of funding agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) in order to continue working. Intellectually autonomy doesn't keep the rat colony alive, pay the electric bill for servers or purchase chemical reagents.
You're dealing with a self-selected sample set. Of course, the ones who seek help are not homeless by choice. But some of the most visible "homeless" are Rastafarian twenty-somethings pan-handling in front of trendy bars.
Just because a college education is free to the student doesn't mean that admission standards have to be lowered.
I have to agree. This is a 3 minute cartoon that was stretched out over much longer for no particular reason. Nothing that would be considered 'epic'.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/17/aid-trade-reduce-acute-poverty
What is the obsession with space tourism? Get a decent monitor and zoom out on Google Earth while riding a roller-coaster. Same experience. Why not guided tours of the ocean depths instead? There actually is "alien" life down there.
Moonbase Alpha is also not going to happen. A domed city in Antarctica would be more feasible and no less pointless.
You are actually making more than one assumption. There are two competing technology paths: personal scale 3D-printing and CNC technologies and industrial scale automation technologies. You are implicitly assuming that personal manufacturing technologies will reach maturity before factories are fully automated. Which I think is a bad assumption. If automated factories come first, then we are still going to have to face the ensuing labor/social crisis before we can get to your replicator utopia.
I think you are assuming this "replicator" will be a desktop or garage-sized device. What if it is a factory-sized machine that occupies thousands of square feet and requires a significant power supply? Such a device would still be sufficient to make human labor obsolete, but remain prohibitive for personal ownership or use.
Science is testing ideas with experiment and observation. Until we OBSERVE life that can evolve or exist without water, then speculation is non-scientific.
How are those examples different than anyone else who wastes their money on frivolous activities?
For example, there is a "park" that consists of something like 350 square feet of land, between two private parcels of land, in the middle of the Nevada desert, that the government owns because of a surveying error when the land was originally titled.
I would be very interested to know what that "park" in Nevada is. 86% of Nevada is owned by the various agencies of the US Federal government. 76% of the state is BLM land, which which is essentially unmanaged and unmantained. Nearly all of the private land is near the major cities. The only parks are Great Basin National Park (est. 1986) and Death Valley (est. 1994), both established recently enough that I doubt there were major, incorrectable survey errors. My point is that there is very little private land in the middle of the desert, let alone two parcel of private land with a phantom park in between them. I'll grant the benefit of the doubt, but your story just doesn't ring true.