But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again
Indeed. The Chinese and Indians laugh at us for spending so much time on such frivolous things and for even discussing these things in politics. Your abortion and gay marriage "rights" won't mean jack squat if in the meantime we stand by and watch as this once great nation circles the toilet bowl on its way down the tubes. In fact, I wish that people would just STFU about such things when discussing what sort of policies are best for the long term survival of our nation. People who make these things into voting issues are pissing away their futures while Rome burns.
Did you know one of the single biggest development indicators is women's rights?
For whatever reason, if you enforce gender equality and women's education, your country will be dramatically better then it's neighbors in the long term. Standards of living go up, crime goes, productivity booms.
Now, this doesn't really make immediate sense: without women's rights you've got an entire labor force who you don't have to pay. Surely, with all that free labor or low-cost labor, you'd expect an easy win over people who actually have to pay fair wages.
The reasons are complex, but the big one is this: cultural discrimination doesn't just effect the discriminated against group. It narrows the mindset and "acceptable" standard of behavior of the favored group as well. It leaks into science, business and the arts and closes up avenues of exploration because it effectively bans "types" of thinking. If you're a man, you're only favored provided you stay away from "feminine" things - which are implicitly not worthy of consideration. Your behavior must conform to whatever the expected norm is, lest you become a de facto member of the oppressed group.
Abortion is very much a women's rights issue in most respects, but it also has follow on consequences: if access to abortion services is easy for the poor (it's never a problem for the rich) then crime rates drop about 18 years after that happens. Gay marriage means you're not only removing yet another disenfranchised class (and thus promoting tolerance and general consideration and empathy within your population - you know, attacking a whole bunch of harmful social issues at once) but you're also ultimately addressing wider issues such as the social acceptance of people in unusual living situations (i.e. those with divorced parents, unmarried parents, single-parents etc.).
I assume you don't actually oppose either of these measures, but it's straight up non-sensical to think social policy has nothing to do with economic policy. There's a reason socioeconomic status is how we judge an area and not just "economic" status.
Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.
I feel like this needs elaboration, namely the "social suicide" part. Whatever are you talking about?
There's also the issue that for China, national pride and showing up America is pretty much exactly what their ruling class and population want from a space program.
I do imagine that when they go to the moon they're probably going to be pretty ambitious with for how long and what they want to do there.
Yet oddly enough they have produced some of the most amazingly capable launch vehicles in the world (seeing as how the US currently has to buy Soyuz launches to get astronauts to the ISS).
It's hit and miss. When a.NET app is created by an author looking to support Mono it can work great (although even KeePass has issues with Gnome I've found).
Conventional war starting. The supervolcano under Yellowstone possibly becoming active. Aliens landing. Asteroid threats.
Hell, even nuclear war matters: sure it sucks, but 10-20 minutes could be the difference between surviving and not.
Just because major catastrophes haven't happened yet, doesn't mean you shouldn't have a minimal fallback system to deal with them (and the national emergency broadcast system is pretty much the absolute minimum of "unknown threat" preparation you can do).
True, but we run international communications cables. It's certainly feasible to run cables between say, the US and Europe (which I guess you'd want to terminate in northern Africa) or the US and Australia.
Granted, you couldn't want to do so without using superconductors, but given the temperatures at the bottom of the Atlantic/Pacific ocean the thermal load on any refrigeration system would actually be lower. Of course, there is the strategic issue of being dependent on electrical power from foreign countries.
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2
I think you forgot about tillage.
What about that is implicitly dependent on CO2 producing means?
That's practically the easiest part to fix, since biofuel-substitute diesel is easy to make, and the quantity of tractors in the world is low compared to other types of vehicles (to address the comment you make on the use of biofuels as a general purpose fuel).
Except it's only true of some plant species, every plant species has a different optimum, and it's entirely dependent on CO2 being a limiting factor (or lack of CO2 making some other process a limiting factor). And then it would be dependent on drastic climate change not making some other input a limiting factor - for example your plants grow a few % faster, which is great news except your farmland has turned into desert!
Of course it's probably pretty cheap to build regional scale greenhouses, hence why everyone's doing it already...
Well, if you separate large generating areas by 12 hours, then it's always daytime at one of them (and in practice, if you were building a super-conducting transmission line, it would make more sense to put solar plants along as much of it as you could).
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2. All of them could be done more efficiently, or utilizing alternative power sources. Of course, he's also not covering the rather considerable issue that high-energy-driven intensive farming is doing a lot of long term damage to arable lands all over the world, and actively reducing their productive capacity. Changes to more sustainable farming methods would reduce the dependence of fertilizers and follow effects on marine ecosystems from run-off.
But there's no sense letting any of that get in the way of trying to co-opt global hunger as a perverse argument *against* doing anything about climate change.
That's still different though. It's not like a space missions is totally uncontrolled. The Apollo astronauts knew it would take 3 days to get to the moon as long as the ship was functioning correctly. And it had been done enough times before that as long as the ship was functioning correctly this would be the case.
Now while it's true that a Mars mission would be a definite "first" it's not like the trip is not well understood, given the volume of probes we send there.
Which is quite different to "you are trapped in an unstable situation which can't be fixed". Most of the non-fatal things which could happen to a spacecraft are somewhat fixable - even getting to Mars is still just gravity capture.
I think being a submariner is probably way closer to the type of danger involved then you're giving it credit for. There are many different grades of space-craft puncture - it's not like one nick and the whole thing blows up explosive-decompression style.
Dark energy and Dark matter are very different things which address very different problems in astronomy - the only thing they have in common is the term "dark", used because they are both describing forces and objects which are inferred to exist by - well a force we conventionally don't consider ourselves to "see" (gravity).
Your disbelief is essentially a limitation of human senses - we're EM friendly beings, particularly in the visible band but we pretend we can also understand X-Rays and Radiowaves by the same concept. However since we possess no finely tuned mechanism for observing gravity, clearly anything which is EM transparent might not exist at all!
If I had mod points I would give them all to this post.
This is exactly the problem almost every single "Mac-a-like" product endeavor suffers from. They rush to getting something that looks vaguely similar, by hacking together the base it runs on and produce something incredibly fragile and inconsistent.
In my experience users really don't care about the window dressing provided something works solidly, and has an intuitive and consistent interface.
Perhaps the single worst thing efforts like Gnome 3 and Unity represent is a solid move away from the Unix philosophy of combining a set of small tools that do one task very well in favor of being "Mac-a-like", rather then embracing that idea and presenting it in user-friendly way.
Needing FUSE would violate the "fast" part of the equation.
I've been listening to promises that FUSE was now fast-enough for years, but I'm yet to see more then 20mb/s performance from it. Which seems fast enough, right up until you need to actually do anything with it (there's also the observation that lightweight compression like LZO can easily beat that speed).
This has been true, but there are different levels of reasonable. Technically I can hack the kernel to fix things. But I'd really rather not.
Similarly, the Linux desktop should be a good deal higher in abstraction then that. Just because I can mess around with the way programs interact, doesn't mean I want to be doing so all the time. It means I'd like a set of sane defaults - or - a selection of default "flavors", presented to me in a way which makes sense.
Punch cards are pretty much as bad as e-Voting. At the end of the day the vote counting is done by a machine, not by hand - so all you need to do is compromise the machine.
The Australian electoral system is 100% hand-counted, with machine verification. The problem with any automated system is that it magnifies the effect of any one bad actor.
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But instead, people are more concerned about sex scandals, abortion, and gay marriage than making the changes needed to make the country great again
Indeed. The Chinese and Indians laugh at us for spending so much time on such frivolous things and for even discussing these things in politics. Your abortion and gay marriage "rights" won't mean jack squat if in the meantime we stand by and watch as this once great nation circles the toilet bowl on its way down the tubes. In fact, I wish that people would just STFU about such things when discussing what sort of policies are best for the long term survival of our nation. People who make these things into voting issues are pissing away their futures while Rome burns.
Did you know one of the single biggest development indicators is women's rights?
For whatever reason, if you enforce gender equality and women's education, your country will be dramatically better then it's neighbors in the long term. Standards of living go up, crime goes, productivity booms.
Now, this doesn't really make immediate sense: without women's rights you've got an entire labor force who you don't have to pay. Surely, with all that free labor or low-cost labor, you'd expect an easy win over people who actually have to pay fair wages.
The reasons are complex, but the big one is this: cultural discrimination doesn't just effect the discriminated against group. It narrows the mindset and "acceptable" standard of behavior of the favored group as well. It leaks into science, business and the arts and closes up avenues of exploration because it effectively bans "types" of thinking. If you're a man, you're only favored provided you stay away from "feminine" things - which are implicitly not worthy of consideration. Your behavior must conform to whatever the expected norm is, lest you become a de facto member of the oppressed group.
Abortion is very much a women's rights issue in most respects, but it also has follow on consequences: if access to abortion services is easy for the poor (it's never a problem for the rich) then crime rates drop about 18 years after that happens. Gay marriage means you're not only removing yet another disenfranchised class (and thus promoting tolerance and general consideration and empathy within your population - you know, attacking a whole bunch of harmful social issues at once) but you're also ultimately addressing wider issues such as the social acceptance of people in unusual living situations (i.e. those with divorced parents, unmarried parents, single-parents etc.).
I assume you don't actually oppose either of these measures, but it's straight up non-sensical to think social policy has nothing to do with economic policy. There's a reason socioeconomic status is how we judge an area and not just "economic" status.
How happy would you be to be on one of those planes that crashes before said airline goes out of business?
Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.
I feel like this needs elaboration, namely the "social suicide" part. Whatever are you talking about?
There's also the issue that for China, national pride and showing up America is pretty much exactly what their ruling class and population want from a space program.
I do imagine that when they go to the moon they're probably going to be pretty ambitious with for how long and what they want to do there.
Yet oddly enough they have produced some of the most amazingly capable launch vehicles in the world (seeing as how the US currently has to buy Soyuz launches to get astronauts to the ISS).
It's hit and miss. When a .NET app is created by an author looking to support Mono it can work great (although even KeePass has issues with Gnome I've found).
isn't there an energy crisis?
Not in the rest of the free world, and I thought the US had put Enron out of their misery?
Which would also apply for switching OS environments and learning a whole new system.
Conventional war starting. The supervolcano under Yellowstone possibly becoming active. Aliens landing. Asteroid threats.
Hell, even nuclear war matters: sure it sucks, but 10-20 minutes could be the difference between surviving and not.
Just because major catastrophes haven't happened yet, doesn't mean you shouldn't have a minimal fallback system to deal with them (and the national emergency broadcast system is pretty much the absolute minimum of "unknown threat" preparation you can do).
True, but we run international communications cables. It's certainly feasible to run cables between say, the US and Europe (which I guess you'd want to terminate in northern Africa) or the US and Australia.
Granted, you couldn't want to do so without using superconductors, but given the temperatures at the bottom of the Atlantic/Pacific ocean the thermal load on any refrigeration system would actually be lower. Of course, there is the strategic issue of being dependent on electrical power from foreign countries.
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2
I think you forgot about tillage.
What about that is implicitly dependent on CO2 producing means?
That's practically the easiest part to fix, since biofuel-substitute diesel is easy to make, and the quantity of tractors in the world is low compared to other types of vehicles (to address the comment you make on the use of biofuels as a general purpose fuel).
Except it's only true of some plant species, every plant species has a different optimum, and it's entirely dependent on CO2 being a limiting factor (or lack of CO2 making some other process a limiting factor). And then it would be dependent on drastic climate change not making some other input a limiting factor - for example your plants grow a few % faster, which is great news except your farmland has turned into desert!
Of course it's probably pretty cheap to build regional scale greenhouses, hence why everyone's doing it already...
Well, if you separate large generating areas by 12 hours, then it's always daytime at one of them (and in practice, if you were building a super-conducting transmission line, it would make more sense to put solar plants along as much of it as you could).
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2. All of them could be done more efficiently, or utilizing alternative power sources. Of course, he's also not covering the rather considerable issue that high-energy-driven intensive farming is doing a lot of long term damage to arable lands all over the world, and actively reducing their productive capacity. Changes to more sustainable farming methods would reduce the dependence of fertilizers and follow effects on marine ecosystems from run-off.
But there's no sense letting any of that get in the way of trying to co-opt global hunger as a perverse argument *against* doing anything about climate change.
No but I'd like FUSE to be a A LOT faster then it currently seems to be.
That's still different though. It's not like a space missions is totally uncontrolled. The Apollo astronauts knew it would take 3 days to get to the moon as long as the ship was functioning correctly. And it had been done enough times before that as long as the ship was functioning correctly this would be the case.
Now while it's true that a Mars mission would be a definite "first" it's not like the trip is not well understood, given the volume of probes we send there.
Which is quite different to "you are trapped in an unstable situation which can't be fixed". Most of the non-fatal things which could happen to a spacecraft are somewhat fixable - even getting to Mars is still just gravity capture.
I think being a submariner is probably way closer to the type of danger involved then you're giving it credit for. There are many different grades of space-craft puncture - it's not like one nick and the whole thing blows up explosive-decompression style.
Dark energy and Dark matter are very different things which address very different problems in astronomy - the only thing they have in common is the term "dark", used because they are both describing forces and objects which are inferred to exist by - well a force we conventionally don't consider ourselves to "see" (gravity).
Dark matter has been very convincingly observed in the bullet cluster, for example.
Your disbelief is essentially a limitation of human senses - we're EM friendly beings, particularly in the visible band but we pretend we can also understand X-Rays and Radiowaves by the same concept. However since we possess no finely tuned mechanism for observing gravity, clearly anything which is EM transparent might not exist at all!
That said, I am not opposed to a better separation of programs according to functionality, but bin/sbin never seemed all that useful in practice.
Well-implemented it seems like a fairly sensible separation. The real problem is that it's not well-implemented (or at least, not well adhered to).
If I had mod points I would give them all to this post.
This is exactly the problem almost every single "Mac-a-like" product endeavor suffers from. They rush to getting something that looks vaguely similar, by hacking together the base it runs on and produce something incredibly fragile and inconsistent.
In my experience users really don't care about the window dressing provided something works solidly, and has an intuitive and consistent interface.
Perhaps the single worst thing efforts like Gnome 3 and Unity represent is a solid move away from the Unix philosophy of combining a set of small tools that do one task very well in favor of being "Mac-a-like", rather then embracing that idea and presenting it in user-friendly way.
Needing FUSE would violate the "fast" part of the equation.
I've been listening to promises that FUSE was now fast-enough for years, but I'm yet to see more then 20mb/s performance from it. Which seems fast enough, right up until you need to actually do anything with it (there's also the observation that lightweight compression like LZO can easily beat that speed).
This has been true, but there are different levels of reasonable. Technically I can hack the kernel to fix things. But I'd really rather not.
Similarly, the Linux desktop should be a good deal higher in abstraction then that. Just because I can mess around with the way programs interact, doesn't mean I want to be doing so all the time. It means I'd like a set of sane defaults - or - a selection of default "flavors", presented to me in a way which makes sense.
Except for the issue that in that time it's highly probable whoever did it is outed, and their fiscal connections identified?
Punch cards are pretty much as bad as e-Voting. At the end of the day the vote counting is done by a machine, not by hand - so all you need to do is compromise the machine.
The Australian electoral system is 100% hand-counted, with machine verification. The problem with any automated system is that it magnifies the effect of any one bad actor.
Qantas has never had a fatal jet airliner accident. Their last plane crash was in 1951, from a propeller powered plane.