True, their virtual wealth will disappear or freeze up when the electrons stop flowing, but if they spend it smartly beforehand, they could continue to rule and lead luxurious lives.
Most of the ideas I've heard before that these wealthy monsters have for surviving "the event" have indeed been colossally stupid, but there were some genuinely smart ideas among this particular group of 0.001%ers in TFA - hiding out in the far-flung wilderness of Alaska rather than mostly warm and well-populated New Zealand (LOL) is a genuinely clever idea. The ideas of maintaining control over vital supplies (which can be purchased with money before it goes poof), and the neo-slavery-ish idea of fitting workers with Suicide Squad discipline/death collars to ensure service and compliance are also genuinely clever if horrifically immoral. The robot workforce idea is also a solid concept even if far from practicality right now.
Don't comfort yourself with the idea that all of their ideas are stupid and unworkable, because they aren't, and these people are indeed planning to leave us behind somehow - whether it's in terrafoam/trailer towers, control collar slavery, or robot-dug mass graves.
Seriously, people need to get their heads out of...er...whatever weird place they are in now. We are pushing our technological boundaries because that's what we do. It's not some grand conspiracy to fuck the world over, its just what makes sense to do right now. And with each breakthrough we make, "what makes sense" will change, and people will adapt to that.
Perhaps, but to an outside observer it is indistinguishable from a grand conspiracy to fuck the world over.
Laissez-faire capitalism is an environmental and societal suicide pact, and we must break it.
I agree, I'm not arguing against electrification at all, I'm saying that an inability to go completely ICE-free doesn't mean we're stuck with fossil fuels.
Because China is working to tighten their emissions and the US is working to loosen them, going as far as to intentionally try to bring back filthy coal power. China's emissions have fallen sharply in recent years. The US is already a much higher per-capita emitter.
Also I'd like to see what source made you think that the EU's emissions are rising.
Hydrogen is a nightmare fuel. It can escape through solids and embrittle steel on the way, and it has to be stored at high pressure to be practical in a vehicle.
Hydrogen powertrains are shitty compared to other options. Hydrogen ICEs are less powerful than those that run on fossil fuels or especially ethanol, and they're still ultra-complicated ICEs. Fuel cell powertrains are even more expensive than battery EV powertrains with their costly batteries.
Also, right now hydrogen is practically a fossil fuel. It's mostly produced as an oil extraction byproduct. It could be made through electrolysis, but nobody's doing that yet.
Furthermore, right now hydrogen is hellaciously expensive. Your wallet will wish your car ran on gasoline. So no cheap "fuel" after you've bought your ultra-expensive fuel cell vehicle, unlike a battery EV.
Oh, and places where you can purchase hydrogen are rare. There are just a small handful of hydrogen stations in the US, mostly in the coastal states, vs. gas at every gas station and electricity in almost every structure.
In short, hydrogen powered land/air/sea vehicles offer the best selection of the worst downsides. Using hydrogen for energy only makes sense for rockets and stationary power where there's an excess of hydrogen being produced by some other process.
This. The US is set to become the #1 polluter, environmental whipping boy, and international carbon-credit buyer if things continue on the current course (which luckily for them is very unlikely).
...if your political views involve things like blatant racism and overt calls for genocide. In most countries that sort of stuff is legally considered hate speech, but it seems to be a moderate-right position in the US these days.
Indeed it would be shocking if there aren't other "M-class" planets out there, and there's almost certainly other life in the universe or likely even our solar system. But quite possibly no other intelligent life.
Intelligent life is a rare fluke of nature, on Earth we have only a few that can build tools at all, and only one that can build complex tools, harness fire, and clearly has language capabilities. It's not normal for a species to evolve a stupidly enormous energy-guzzling brain.
Indeed, our current understanding of the laws of physics says it pretty much is. Pushing stuff from A to B is practically a nonstarter. A generation ship is perhaps a theoretical exception, but it will take a big chunk of Earth's resources and is unlikely to reach its destination given all the things that could go wrong with the equipment or crew on the way which could doom the ship. Generation ships might only make sense as emergency lifeboats for when nature, or more likely man, finally puts a hard expiry date on Earth's habitability.
The closest humanity might realistically come to "starfaring" is to have a few outposts throughout the solar system that only need minimal resupply from Earth. Then if our planet gets totally fucked up by an asteroid or conservative environmental policy, it can be used as a factory/mining outpost to resupply the others.
And it's Scientology. I dunno if they can help you with imaginary parasitic bugs, but they say they can help with imaginary parasitic volcano-nuked alien ghosts. They're kind of the same thing, right?
You're making UBSes out to be a lot more complicated and visible than they have to be. First of all the primary (as in easiest) UBS targets should be utilities, telecoms, and perhaps food and shelter (and selecting those targets should be done to the greatest extent possible via democratic processes rather than a bunch of bureaucrats). Two of those things are completely impossible for any 3rd party to identify (or even for the user to identify in any given amount), and the others are fairly easy to keep private.
UBS clothes are obviously an inherently more difficult idea. If they should be attempted, the best approach would be to offer them in such a wide variety of styles that the work of identifying them becomes so great as to be impractical. This would be made easier with advances in automated and additive manufacturing. New styles and "brands" for different items could even by generated on the fly by AI algorithms. Then you couldn't tell Universal Basic clothes apart from the cheapo no-name items that people who work for a living are increasingly reliant on.
The housing problems are no different than those under a UBI or even the status quo. Only the rich can afford to pay people to custom-build houses to meet special circumstances.
And if you offer variances upon application, you're employing an army of people to process the applications.
There's no need for much variance and we have computers now. Amazon doesn't have an army of people processing order forms.
Not to mention the fact that every applicant is probably going to have to sit in a waiting room for two hours and answer a bunch of demeaning questions. Read some stuff about the experience of being on welfare. Why would it not be exactly like that?
No they don't, just present ID, receive service/thing, like a UBI or voting.
Also, don't forget the incredible political pressure you'll be under to make the Universal Basic Products absolutely joyless, boring, and maybe just a little worse along every dimension than other products. You'll have one set of people pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be perceived as a luxury, and another set pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be offensive or "culturally insensitive". You'll have one group screaming that their pet item is a basic need, and another group screaming that anything they don't personally like is a wasteful luxury.
Problems for politicians, hardly different from today's or those that would exist under a UBI, people can vote on it.
The people who can afford it will buy alternatives... unless of course you also plan to outlaw the alternatives, in which case we are all living on mil-spec Universal Basic People Chow.
How much more "planned economy" can you get?
Nobody's proposed outlawing alternatives, so relax, it's not communism.
It's cool and all, but you shouldn't be so easily bowled over by a premium amusement park ride for rich bastards that's about as far from making humanity a spacefaring species as the first caveman to run down a hill holding a banana tree leaf over his head was to achieving supersonic flight.
Yuri Gagarin has been there, done that, and got the T-shirt, almost 60 years ago.
Universal basic services would probably be as expensive as UBI if not more so, because of the cost of the bureaucracy to administer them.
That's a pretty big assumption. There is more administrative overhead, but on the other hand, the budget no longer has to cover the profits of the corporations delivering basic services to people.
That same bureaucracy would make them slow and wasteful; the Soviets tried planned economies and it didn't work.
Government isn't necessarily slow and wasteful (See NASA for example). A UBS provider would be more like a state-owned corporation than a planned economy, and those have worked well for China, Russia and many OPEC nations just off the top of my head.
AND being seen to use UBS would carry a ton of stigma and make it harder for people who did want to work to be accepted to do so.
And how is this not better than the alternative of being poor (which also carries a ton of stigma) while not having access to those services at all?
A citizen's dividend is a UBI. It's just a way of funding a UBI.
They're similar and compatible but not identical concepts. A citizens' dividend is a regular payout from some kind of sovereign wealth fund. Immediately that sounds much like a UBI, and you could indeed fund a UBI from a sovereign wealth fund, but you could also have a UBI not funded by a sovereign wealth fund. A UBI also carries at least connotations of paying enough money for a person to live comfortably on while a citizens' dividend does not. If used in combination with universal basic services, the citizens' dividend payout wouldn't have to cover an unemployed person's living expenses.
Recently I've found different solutions with similar goals to be more promising and less problematic, such as universal basic services and/or a citizens' dividend.
The fact that you think Bitcoin isn't used for illegal things in spite of its lack of built-in anonymity features is a sure sign that you're being obtuse. Early darknet black markets primarily used Bitcoin. You don't need to provide a name or address to have a wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
True, their virtual wealth will disappear or freeze up when the electrons stop flowing, but if they spend it smartly beforehand, they could continue to rule and lead luxurious lives.
Most of the ideas I've heard before that these wealthy monsters have for surviving "the event" have indeed been colossally stupid, but there were some genuinely smart ideas among this particular group of 0.001%ers in TFA - hiding out in the far-flung wilderness of Alaska rather than mostly warm and well-populated New Zealand (LOL) is a genuinely clever idea. The ideas of maintaining control over vital supplies (which can be purchased with money before it goes poof), and the neo-slavery-ish idea of fitting workers with Suicide Squad discipline/death collars to ensure service and compliance are also genuinely clever if horrifically immoral. The robot workforce idea is also a solid concept even if far from practicality right now.
Don't comfort yourself with the idea that all of their ideas are stupid and unworkable, because they aren't, and these people are indeed planning to leave us behind somehow - whether it's in terrafoam/trailer towers, control collar slavery, or robot-dug mass graves.
Seriously, people need to get their heads out of...er...whatever weird place they are in now. We are pushing our technological boundaries because that's what we do. It's not some grand conspiracy to fuck the world over, its just what makes sense to do right now. And with each breakthrough we make, "what makes sense" will change, and people will adapt to that.
Perhaps, but to an outside observer it is indistinguishable from a grand conspiracy to fuck the world over.
Laissez-faire capitalism is an environmental and societal suicide pact, and we must break it.
65,000,000 pirates downrank Google in search preference.
I agree, I'm not arguing against electrification at all, I'm saying that an inability to go completely ICE-free doesn't mean we're stuck with fossil fuels.
Because China is working to tighten their emissions and the US is working to loosen them, going as far as to intentionally try to bring back filthy coal power. China's emissions have fallen sharply in recent years. The US is already a much higher per-capita emitter.
Also I'd like to see what source made you think that the EU's emissions are rising.
Why would I be joking?
https://www.nature.com/article...
Hydrogen is a nightmare fuel. It can escape through solids and embrittle steel on the way, and it has to be stored at high pressure to be practical in a vehicle.
Hydrogen powertrains are shitty compared to other options. Hydrogen ICEs are less powerful than those that run on fossil fuels or especially ethanol, and they're still ultra-complicated ICEs. Fuel cell powertrains are even more expensive than battery EV powertrains with their costly batteries.
Also, right now hydrogen is practically a fossil fuel. It's mostly produced as an oil extraction byproduct. It could be made through electrolysis, but nobody's doing that yet.
Furthermore, right now hydrogen is hellaciously expensive. Your wallet will wish your car ran on gasoline. So no cheap "fuel" after you've bought your ultra-expensive fuel cell vehicle, unlike a battery EV.
Oh, and places where you can purchase hydrogen are rare. There are just a small handful of hydrogen stations in the US, mostly in the coastal states, vs. gas at every gas station and electricity in almost every structure.
In short, hydrogen powered land/air/sea vehicles offer the best selection of the worst downsides. Using hydrogen for energy only makes sense for rockets and stationary power where there's an excess of hydrogen being produced by some other process.
We could also run the remaining ICEs on carbon-neutral bio/synth fuels.
This. The US is set to become the #1 polluter, environmental whipping boy, and international carbon-credit buyer if things continue on the current course (which luckily for them is very unlikely).
...if your political views involve things like blatant racism and overt calls for genocide. In most countries that sort of stuff is legally considered hate speech, but it seems to be a moderate-right position in the US these days.
Duct-tape an AR-15 onto it, spray on a camo paint job, and call it a SPACE FORCE unmanned recon ship. Funding guaranteed!
(Of course that could have dire consequences, but doesn't everything these days?)
Singlehanded huh? So he wrote every version of Linux, every fork, every application, and every improvement was his idea?
By CEO compensation logic, yeah, pretty much :-P
Indeed it would be shocking if there aren't other "M-class" planets out there, and there's almost certainly other life in the universe or likely even our solar system. But quite possibly no other intelligent life.
Intelligent life is a rare fluke of nature, on Earth we have only a few that can build tools at all, and only one that can build complex tools, harness fire, and clearly has language capabilities. It's not normal for a species to evolve a stupidly enormous energy-guzzling brain.
"starfaring" may be impossible in practice.
Indeed, our current understanding of the laws of physics says it pretty much is. Pushing stuff from A to B is practically a nonstarter. A generation ship is perhaps a theoretical exception, but it will take a big chunk of Earth's resources and is unlikely to reach its destination given all the things that could go wrong with the equipment or crew on the way which could doom the ship. Generation ships might only make sense as emergency lifeboats for when nature, or more likely man, finally puts a hard expiry date on Earth's habitability.
The closest humanity might realistically come to "starfaring" is to have a few outposts throughout the solar system that only need minimal resupply from Earth. Then if our planet gets totally fucked up by an asteroid or conservative environmental policy, it can be used as a factory/mining outpost to resupply the others.
And it's Scientology. I dunno if they can help you with imaginary parasitic bugs, but they say they can help with imaginary parasitic volcano-nuked alien ghosts. They're kind of the same thing, right?
You're making UBSes out to be a lot more complicated and visible than they have to be. First of all the primary (as in easiest) UBS targets should be utilities, telecoms, and perhaps food and shelter (and selecting those targets should be done to the greatest extent possible via democratic processes rather than a bunch of bureaucrats). Two of those things are completely impossible for any 3rd party to identify (or even for the user to identify in any given amount), and the others are fairly easy to keep private.
UBS clothes are obviously an inherently more difficult idea. If they should be attempted, the best approach would be to offer them in such a wide variety of styles that the work of identifying them becomes so great as to be impractical. This would be made easier with advances in automated and additive manufacturing. New styles and "brands" for different items could even by generated on the fly by AI algorithms. Then you couldn't tell Universal Basic clothes apart from the cheapo no-name items that people who work for a living are increasingly reliant on.
The housing problems are no different than those under a UBI or even the status quo. Only the rich can afford to pay people to custom-build houses to meet special circumstances.
And if you offer variances upon application, you're employing an army of people to process the applications.
There's no need for much variance and we have computers now. Amazon doesn't have an army of people processing order forms.
Not to mention the fact that every applicant is probably going to have to sit in a waiting room for two hours and answer a bunch of demeaning questions. Read some stuff about the experience of being on welfare. Why would it not be exactly like that?
No they don't, just present ID, receive service/thing, like a UBI or voting.
Also, don't forget the incredible political pressure you'll be under to make the Universal Basic Products absolutely joyless, boring, and maybe just a little worse along every dimension than other products. You'll have one set of people pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be perceived as a luxury, and another set pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be offensive or "culturally insensitive". You'll have one group screaming that their pet item is a basic need, and another group screaming that anything they don't personally like is a wasteful luxury.
Problems for politicians, hardly different from today's or those that would exist under a UBI, people can vote on it.
The people who can afford it will buy alternatives... unless of course you also plan to outlaw the alternatives, in which case we are all living on mil-spec Universal Basic People Chow.
How much more "planned economy" can you get?
Nobody's proposed outlawing alternatives, so relax, it's not communism.
I often say that small aircraft are the rich man's only natural predator...soon I may have to amend that to include spacecraft.
It's cool and all, but you shouldn't be so easily bowled over by a premium amusement park ride for rich bastards that's about as far from making humanity a spacefaring species as the first caveman to run down a hill holding a banana tree leaf over his head was to achieving supersonic flight.
Yuri Gagarin has been there, done that, and got the T-shirt, almost 60 years ago.
Universal basic services would probably be as expensive as UBI if not more so, because of the cost of the bureaucracy to administer them.
That's a pretty big assumption. There is more administrative overhead, but on the other hand, the budget no longer has to cover the profits of the corporations delivering basic services to people.
That same bureaucracy would make them slow and wasteful; the Soviets tried planned economies and it didn't work.
Government isn't necessarily slow and wasteful (See NASA for example). A UBS provider would be more like a state-owned corporation than a planned economy, and those have worked well for China, Russia and many OPEC nations just off the top of my head.
AND being seen to use UBS would carry a ton of stigma and make it harder for people who did want to work to be accepted to do so.
And how is this not better than the alternative of being poor (which also carries a ton of stigma) while not having access to those services at all?
A citizen's dividend is a UBI. It's just a way of funding a UBI.
They're similar and compatible but not identical concepts. A citizens' dividend is a regular payout from some kind of sovereign wealth fund. Immediately that sounds much like a UBI, and you could indeed fund a UBI from a sovereign wealth fund, but you could also have a UBI not funded by a sovereign wealth fund. A UBI also carries at least connotations of paying enough money for a person to live comfortably on while a citizens' dividend does not. If used in combination with universal basic services, the citizens' dividend payout wouldn't have to cover an unemployed person's living expenses.
Recently I've found different solutions with similar goals to be more promising and less problematic, such as universal basic services and/or a citizens' dividend.
Problems with UBI:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.co...
http://neweconomics.org/2018/0...
Some better solutions:
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
So close!
Lucasfilm's lawyers will not allow this.
I'm sure Trump will be quick to pardon fellow swindlers who were unfairly targeted by the justice system just because they were committing crimes.
The fact that you think Bitcoin isn't used for illegal things in spite of its lack of built-in anonymity features is a sure sign that you're being obtuse. Early darknet black markets primarily used Bitcoin. You don't need to provide a name or address to have a wallet.
If you think neutrality "at the media layer" is irrelevant to the issue of private platform censorship, give this a read.