Sure, it's pretty easy to agree that ISIS are a bunch of nasty fuckers, even by terrorist standards; but I am utterly sick of people hyperventilating and pretending that they are some kind of bold, unprecedented, super-threat that thererfore totally negates all historical arguments in favor of free political speech.
By western body count, they are still lagging Al Qaeda, though their media arm appears to be better; and in terms of killing random foreigners we don't much care about they lag behind Boko Haram, a wide variety of respectable nation states quite possibly including us; and they are no closer to magic-super-brainwashing-propaganda than anyone else is.
The 'argument' in favor of keeping the scary ISIS social media away from the kiddies to prevent their little minds being poisoned could just as easily have been applied to 'communist propaganda'(and, unlike ISIS, Team Communism actually had enough thermonuclear ICBMs to burn us into a smoking crater); basically any pacifist group during one of our wars, assorted unpopular sects, and all kinds of other things.
They are mediagenic, and they aren't nice guys; but They. Are. Not. That. Novel. Any nonsense about their being some bold, new, existential threat is simply false. It's just the same old bad arguments for censorship, with a new boogieman. Plus, even if you ignore any principled objections; are you really going to win a war of ideas by looking like an utter coward? "Ohh, jihad is so attractive that we can't let kids hear about it or they'll adopt it for sure and go out and start attacking our decadent immoral civilization!" That's not fighting 'the terrorists', that's agreeing with them. Get your head out of your ass and do what it takes to have a culture where contempt for the opposition's message is all it takes. No, you won't win everyone, some people really do love the most sociopathic flavors of abrahamic blood god they can find, which is what actual police operations are for; but cowering at the power of the opposition's message is both pathetic and strategically dubious.
Aside from my usual distaste for antiliberal 'national security' bullshit; the sheer cowardice of this really rubs me the wrong way. If you actually think that your own cultural offering is so weak that you need to live in terror of somebody's jihad-blog making it through the great firewall; surely you should be working on solving the real problem? Again, can't win em all; but if you can't compete with 'join in our glorious sandbox hellhole where the war is constant and everything fun is forbidden' message; you have issues.
It doesn't fully or directly solve the problem; but the way in which is partially mitigates it seems pretty obvious:
The usual objection(going right back to Smith on specialization of labor, though much more heavily emphasized by Marx) to improvements in the means of production is not that productivity is bad; but that ownership of the means of production becomes a mechanism to accrue wealth at the expense of labor(since they can't compete with your efficiency using hand tools; but if they depend on your machines they are just a commodity, with an equilibrium price equal to their cost of production, just like any other commodity). If 'AI' can actually be made to work, it is the ultimate expression of this development: a hypothetical means-of-production that is more efficient than humans and has no need of their labor.
If such a thing is possible, perfectly orthodox capitalist economics suggests that whoever owns it wins; and everyone else is either screwed or(as in the case of capitalist welfare-states, is social-safety-netted to keep the peace; but equally unemployable). If this 'AI' is instead developed on a philanthropic basis, and made widely available, that doesn't stop Killbotdyne Pacification Solutions LLC. from building killbots; but it does prevent a monopolization of this radically advanced means of production.
The big 'if',(aside from whether AI is in fact doable) is how much hardware vs. how much software an AI will involve: Given how computationally expensive modeling even small biological neural networks is(on the order of 'entire supercomputer to emulate part of a mouse') it probably will require some nontrivial hardware; but it isn't clear whether it will be basically software that you can FOSS away as usual, just with fairly high system requirements; or whether it'll be a much-harder-to-distribute "Well, we took a billion dollars worth of FPGAs and ran a zillion iterations of some genetic algorithms, we have no idea how it works or why only some attempts to build another one succeed..."
Barring FTL travel being blindingly obvious to our AI overlords, we will be competitors. There is only so much stuff within reasonable distance.
Whether we are the 'fuzzy coexisting' sort of competitors or the 'thrown, still alive, into the matter decompilers to make more computronium' type makes a bit of a difference.
For the fretting writers at the Harvard Business Review; I'd propose the obvious response: "If you accept the possibility of a strong AI, do you want to share a planet with one that feels an imperative to show growth every quarter forever?"
Why do you suggest that 'post scarcity' means that everyone gets plenty?
There are some philanthropic exceptions; but there are currently loads of people who are wealthy well beyond the ability of additional money to buy additional happiness, yet still uninterested in solving even the most urgent and blameless scarcity cases.
I'm not sure why some additional wealth provided by the robotic means of production would make them feel any more charitable; nor would I be optimistic about the availability of improved killbots making it easier to post-scarcity over their objections.
Why, exactly, would it be a good thing to use some sort of janky hack to allow people to use encryption that we strongly suspect of being dangerously broken, or close to it?
Yes, it's unfortunate that there are people stuck on hardware or software that can't handle updated algorithms; but their ability to use encrypted communication is compromised by the fact that SHA1 is tottering, not by the fact that some servers might stop negotating connections using it. Is there some benefit I'm not understanding here to bodging something together so that antique browsers can enjoy a false sense of security?
Is the notion that SHA1 isn't "all that broken", and is good enough to keep uninteresting traffic safe? Or does Zuckerberg just not want to lose that comforting little 'lock' symbol for his 40 million poorest facebook chattels?
It probably depends on the desired shape, as well. The cuts designed to take advantage of diamond's extraordinary refractive index and get that 'brilliance' that other gems can't match involve cutting a whole lot of facets into a stone, and figuring out what the largest possible stone of the desired shape is that can be fit within the raw diamond(and avoid any defects, inclusions, etc.) That takes skill.
If you are just banging out thermal spreaders/substrates for the semiconductor industry, you'd basically just need a bunch of rectangles. Probably a pain because diamonds are hard enough to be murder on basically any cutting and grinding tools, no matter what you make them out of; but baby's first CNC project in terms of geometric complexity.
If memory serves, we got really lucky on chemical weapons in WWII. Pesticide research had just started to stumble onto the potential of organophosphate nerve agents when things heated up. Luckily the allies were not yet fully aware of the potential of their research; and the axis, based on published patents and research papers, thought that the allies were further along than they in fact were, and feared retaliation. V-2s full of Sarin would not have improved the situation.
I'm not a starry-eyed optimist of Civics 101; but unless you are positing a substantially earlier invention of fascism than is commonly accepted; there was more or less necessarily a period when the situation was something other than fascist. Quite possibly also not what we mythologize it as; but fascism is fairly modern.
Probably only because electronic medical record interoperability is such a clusterfuck that the attackers won't be able to make sense of the data they've dumped, rather than because it will remain secure.
It just seems like such a terrible fit for guns. Not because OMG, guns are scary; but because everyone I know with an interest in guns is either some sort of hunter type who would be interested in a gun, assorted accessories, possibly chatting with compatriots or knowledgeable salespeople about local conditions, etc. which seems much better served by either retail or online shopping; or a hardcore spec-nut who wouldn't dream of just buying the one gun that the guy on the TV is hyping; because comparison shopping, arguing about the virtues and vices of various manufacturers and dealers, customizing and accessorizing, and that sort of thing is half the fun. They seem better served by catalogs, if old school, or the internet, if not.
TV shopping is like a store that slowly passes one product at a time in front of you; which seems like a terrible fit for anything except impulse purchases almost assured of producing buyer's remorse.
That is definitely true. The 'franchise agreements' need a very, very, serious kick in the ass(even if they weren't invidious in principle; it is [i]pitiful[/i] how cheaply municipalities have been bought off: "Ooh, CableCorp LLC said that they'll provide each school with a 'free' lowest-tier-of-'business class' internet connection in exchange for exclusive rights to suck our citizens dry. Amazing deal!"). I am extraordinarily pleased that Google has been working to scare the incumbents, at least in some markets, and to demonstrate how much of the high cost and low quality is purely a matter of lack of competitive pressure(even when they can't actually match gigabit service, because they are working with legacy coax, it's...interesting...how much cheaper and faster the competitor's offerings are in markets where Google is active, or sniffing around, than in markets where they aren't. You'd think that somebody would ask Comcast and friends about how that strange dissimilarity comes to be...
My point was purely that, given the logistics of a network build-out, a society with theoretical adherence to private property rights is trickier than one where you can just steamroller whoever you like. This seems like a good reason to stop pretending that ISPs actually operate in under meaningfully 'free market' conditions; and either aggressively step up efforts to change this, or keep a closer eye on them as oligopolies; but it is the case.
You arguably have it backwards: given the amount of private property you need to obtain outright, or secure 'easements' to cross, in order to set up a wired network of municipal scale, building one in the context of property rights does involve asking nicely, convincing people of the benefits of allowing you the access you need, and so on.
If you can just declare the People's Patriotic Fiber Plan and move in, then you don't have to do any of that.
(That said, given the widespread existence of utility easements going back as far as water and sewer, and the abject awfulness of low-competition internet service markets, I'd be very, very, disappointed in any municipal or community organizations that don't do what they can to allow another entrant to share the various conduits and poles and such that are already in place for running utilities. Yes, the logistics are a pain; but being bled year after year by an incumbent monopolist is worse.)
On the minus side, you have to sell the million-dollar diamond all at once, if you can find a buyer, while you can dispose of the gold in much more conveniently sized transactions. If you are in an environment where rule of law is fully operational and you are operating within it, various financial instruments offer higher value density than just about any physically valuable object; and if rule of law is unavailable, or you are skirting it, disposing of a single unusual and very valuable piece is going to be a lot trickier than selling easily divisible bits, both in terms of finding buyers and in not attracting excessive attention. Diamonds are unlikely to be as bad as art in terms of liquidity; but ones of any significant worth will be of interest to a pretty select audience, while metal trinkets scale comparatively neatly from low end pawnshop transactions to the iconic 400oz bricks.
If the improvements in fuel economy of civilian airliners are anything to go by, we could probably build a somewhat better B-52 today(either longer range, larger payload, or some combination of the two); but it would be a sufficiently modest and incremental improvement that the cost and uncertainty of a new development project would be a really hard sell compared to incrementally worse performance; but markedly lower project management risk, through repairs and incremental upgrades of the aircraft we already have.
It doesn't have to be, and probably isn't, the best possible implementation; but it is a good enough implementation that the airframes are really going to have to be falling apart before "Yeah, basically a B-52 but with more carbon fiber" is something you'd be willing to risk development hell on. Even with the substantially larger production numbers of airliners, the current generation improved fuel efficiency models had some serious teething issues; and similar problems would really blow up the unit cost of a smaller production run.
Have we really failed to progress so much that TV Shopping is still a viable thing? No browseability, no price comparisons, not enough resolution for detailed tables, options lists, specs, etc? Are there people just sitting on their couches, credit card in hand, waiting for some guy on the TV to wave a gun and tell them what number to call to Order Now, Supplies are Limited!
Between Ye Olde in-person purchases, catalogs, and the internet; who is buying from what is basically a stream of infomercials? Especially modestly expensive gear like guns; surely you do a little looking around, rather than just impulse-buying whatever happens to be in front of you?
I'd imagine that synthesizing diamond would be uncompetitive for industrial abrasives(unless there happens to be some cheap method that is considered a dead-end because it only produces tiny crystals); and might well also be hard pressed to match basic, small, natural diamonds; but for applications that require a thin film deposited on something, or big chunks of low-defect material, the naturally occurring options are much rarer. If you wanted to use diamonds for something like packaging semiconductors, to take advantage of their superb conductivity, you'd just be cutting slices; but you'd need large stones to start with; and (unlike metals) a bunch of small diamonds can't be turned into a large diamond very easily.
It certainly doesn't improve the cost per pound of explosives delivered; but B-52s have been adapted for launching cruise missiles if the situation is deemed too scary for closer approach. A lot more expensive than dropping bombs(even guided ones); but presumably cheaper than having each missile capable of B-52 level range.
There is also the issue that radar absorbing materials tend to be a pretty touchy arrangement of conductive and dielectric materials precisely arrayed to effectively absorb and not re-emit the appropriate RF. When such materials get wet, their properties inevitably change.
An impressive percentage of the things John Browning had his fingerprints on would appear to qualify. The M-2's 100th anniversary is coming up and it is still in active use, with some of his other designs no longer in US military service but ridiculously common.
Aside from the "because military contractors" excuse, I suspect that the very dumb, durable, reliability of the B-52 may actually contribute to a dysfunctional replacement-selection process:
Since the B-52, while old enough that it could almost certainly be done better with newer engines, more lightweight composites, and whatnot, does what it does fairly well; which means that any bid of the form "Well, build basically the same aircraft; but with contemporary technology where applicable" will immediately be compared with proposals to just do more maintenance and some incremental system upgrades to the planes we already have.
Any bids of the "zOMG, radical new bomber with sexy low-radar-signature geometry and stuff!" flavor, by contrast, aren't as vulnerable to "Or we could just upgrade the engines at markedly lower cost and within a much shorter and more reliable timeframe..." objections.
In fairness to the "zOMG radical new bomber!" proposals, one of the reasons that the B-52 has remained in service so long is that it can be used to air-launch cruise missiles against targets that might actually have AA capabilities; and many of our wars largely involve pounding on hapless opponents who simply lack the means to shoot down anything other than low-flying helicopters, so its probably-dismal survivability against remotely competent air defenses hasn't been a serious issue. This probably also complicates the bidding for a replacement: If you decided to admit that "Yeah, this thing isn't supposed to go near actual air defenses, it's either a missile boat or for beating down soft targets", you could probably have the B-52++ sketched out relatively quickly. If you want similar payload; but in an aircraft that can actually survive hostile environments, it's much less clear exactly how you can do that. B-1s and B-2s are totally sci-fi; but I'd hate to imagine what building an aircraft like that on a scale large enough to match a B-52 would cost.
There's also the fairly obvious (though unlikely to be heard on your local talking heads cable show) problem that adopting a variety of blatantly illiberal 'security' measures that trample all over the alleged virtues of 'the west' and 'the free world' is a really, really good way to help convince anyone who thinks that we are decadent, corrupt, hypocritical, and more hype than substance that they are absolutely right.
Even if we were doing a 100% perfect job of upholding our noblest values, we can't expect to win them all; some people actively dislike the best aspects of our civilization; so they will be a tough crowd. For the people who agree that we've got a noble theory; but can only laugh bitterly at the 'liberty and justice for all' part because...price and participation may vary...the further we go into overtly illiberal tactics, the more reasonable their conviction that we are long on talk and short on substance.
Even if we were willing to sacrifice our own freedoms for the alleged benefits, which we shouldn't be; it's not clear how 'liberal democracy' wins the war of ideas by turning to fascism as soon as it starts to get nervous.
The natural ones are just so much more romantic. Why sully your finger with some soulless rock synthesized with care, skill, and years of materials science research when you could get one extracted from a giant hole in the ground by the backbreaking labor of mining peons? Even those, though, show a lack of true commitment. Conflict diamonds are where it's at.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's pretty easy to agree that ISIS are a bunch of nasty fuckers, even by terrorist standards; but I am utterly sick of people hyperventilating and pretending that they are some kind of bold, unprecedented, super-threat that thererfore totally negates all historical arguments in favor of free political speech.
By western body count, they are still lagging Al Qaeda, though their media arm appears to be better; and in terms of killing random foreigners we don't much care about they lag behind Boko Haram, a wide variety of respectable nation states quite possibly including us; and they are no closer to magic-super-brainwashing-propaganda than anyone else is.
The 'argument' in favor of keeping the scary ISIS social media away from the kiddies to prevent their little minds being poisoned could just as easily have been applied to 'communist propaganda'(and, unlike ISIS, Team Communism actually had enough thermonuclear ICBMs to burn us into a smoking crater); basically any pacifist group during one of our wars, assorted unpopular sects, and all kinds of other things.
They are mediagenic, and they aren't nice guys; but They. Are. Not. That. Novel. Any nonsense about their being some bold, new, existential threat is simply false. It's just the same old bad arguments for censorship, with a new boogieman. Plus, even if you ignore any principled objections; are you really going to win a war of ideas by looking like an utter coward? "Ohh, jihad is so attractive that we can't let kids hear about it or they'll adopt it for sure and go out and start attacking our decadent immoral civilization!" That's not fighting 'the terrorists', that's agreeing with them. Get your head out of your ass and do what it takes to have a culture where contempt for the opposition's message is all it takes. No, you won't win everyone, some people really do love the most sociopathic flavors of abrahamic blood god they can find, which is what actual police operations are for; but cowering at the power of the opposition's message is both pathetic and strategically dubious.
Aside from my usual distaste for antiliberal 'national security' bullshit; the sheer cowardice of this really rubs me the wrong way. If you actually think that your own cultural offering is so weak that you need to live in terror of somebody's jihad-blog making it through the great firewall; surely you should be working on solving the real problem? Again, can't win em all; but if you can't compete with 'join in our glorious sandbox hellhole where the war is constant and everything fun is forbidden' message; you have issues.
It doesn't fully or directly solve the problem; but the way in which is partially mitigates it seems pretty obvious:
The usual objection(going right back to Smith on specialization of labor, though much more heavily emphasized by Marx) to improvements in the means of production is not that productivity is bad; but that ownership of the means of production becomes a mechanism to accrue wealth at the expense of labor(since they can't compete with your efficiency using hand tools; but if they depend on your machines they are just a commodity, with an equilibrium price equal to their cost of production, just like any other commodity). If 'AI' can actually be made to work, it is the ultimate expression of this development: a hypothetical means-of-production that is more efficient than humans and has no need of their labor.
If such a thing is possible, perfectly orthodox capitalist economics suggests that whoever owns it wins; and everyone else is either screwed or(as in the case of capitalist welfare-states, is social-safety-netted to keep the peace; but equally unemployable). If this 'AI' is instead developed on a philanthropic basis, and made widely available, that doesn't stop Killbotdyne Pacification Solutions LLC. from building killbots; but it does prevent a monopolization of this radically advanced means of production.
The big 'if',(aside from whether AI is in fact doable) is how much hardware vs. how much software an AI will involve: Given how computationally expensive modeling even small biological neural networks is(on the order of 'entire supercomputer to emulate part of a mouse') it probably will require some nontrivial hardware; but it isn't clear whether it will be basically software that you can FOSS away as usual, just with fairly high system requirements; or whether it'll be a much-harder-to-distribute "Well, we took a billion dollars worth of FPGAs and ran a zillion iterations of some genetic algorithms, we have no idea how it works or why only some attempts to build another one succeed..."
Barring FTL travel being blindingly obvious to our AI overlords, we will be competitors. There is only so much stuff within reasonable distance.
Whether we are the 'fuzzy coexisting' sort of competitors or the 'thrown, still alive, into the matter decompilers to make more computronium' type makes a bit of a difference.
For the fretting writers at the Harvard Business Review; I'd propose the obvious response: "If you accept the possibility of a strong AI, do you want to share a planet with one that feels an imperative to show growth every quarter forever?"
Why do you suggest that 'post scarcity' means that everyone gets plenty?
There are some philanthropic exceptions; but there are currently loads of people who are wealthy well beyond the ability of additional money to buy additional happiness, yet still uninterested in solving even the most urgent and blameless scarcity cases.
I'm not sure why some additional wealth provided by the robotic means of production would make them feel any more charitable; nor would I be optimistic about the availability of improved killbots making it easier to post-scarcity over their objections.
At least you can barter with these natives in USD; and actual attacks on the green zones are comparatively rare and low-level.
A black box with a known-lousy history of misusing the power they have available; which isn't exactly more encouraging.
Why, exactly, would it be a good thing to use some sort of janky hack to allow people to use encryption that we strongly suspect of being dangerously broken, or close to it?
Yes, it's unfortunate that there are people stuck on hardware or software that can't handle updated algorithms; but their ability to use encrypted communication is compromised by the fact that SHA1 is tottering, not by the fact that some servers might stop negotating connections using it. Is there some benefit I'm not understanding here to bodging something together so that antique browsers can enjoy a false sense of security?
Is the notion that SHA1 isn't "all that broken", and is good enough to keep uninteresting traffic safe? Or does Zuckerberg just not want to lose that comforting little 'lock' symbol for his 40 million poorest facebook chattels?
Interesting. Did not know that. Thanks for the heads-up.
It probably depends on the desired shape, as well. The cuts designed to take advantage of diamond's extraordinary refractive index and get that 'brilliance' that other gems can't match involve cutting a whole lot of facets into a stone, and figuring out what the largest possible stone of the desired shape is that can be fit within the raw diamond(and avoid any defects, inclusions, etc.) That takes skill.
If you are just banging out thermal spreaders/substrates for the semiconductor industry, you'd basically just need a bunch of rectangles. Probably a pain because diamonds are hard enough to be murder on basically any cutting and grinding tools, no matter what you make them out of; but baby's first CNC project in terms of geometric complexity.
If memory serves, we got really lucky on chemical weapons in WWII. Pesticide research had just started to stumble onto the potential of organophosphate nerve agents when things heated up. Luckily the allies were not yet fully aware of the potential of their research; and the axis, based on published patents and research papers, thought that the allies were further along than they in fact were, and feared retaliation. V-2s full of Sarin would not have improved the situation.
I'm not a starry-eyed optimist of Civics 101; but unless you are positing a substantially earlier invention of fascism than is commonly accepted; there was more or less necessarily a period when the situation was something other than fascist. Quite possibly also not what we mythologize it as; but fascism is fairly modern.
Probably only because electronic medical record interoperability is such a clusterfuck that the attackers won't be able to make sense of the data they've dumped, rather than because it will remain secure.
It just seems like such a terrible fit for guns. Not because OMG, guns are scary; but because everyone I know with an interest in guns is either some sort of hunter type who would be interested in a gun, assorted accessories, possibly chatting with compatriots or knowledgeable salespeople about local conditions, etc. which seems much better served by either retail or online shopping; or a hardcore spec-nut who wouldn't dream of just buying the one gun that the guy on the TV is hyping; because comparison shopping, arguing about the virtues and vices of various manufacturers and dealers, customizing and accessorizing, and that sort of thing is half the fun. They seem better served by catalogs, if old school, or the internet, if not.
TV shopping is like a store that slowly passes one product at a time in front of you; which seems like a terrible fit for anything except impulse purchases almost assured of producing buyer's remorse.
That is definitely true. The 'franchise agreements' need a very, very, serious kick in the ass(even if they weren't invidious in principle; it is [i]pitiful[/i] how cheaply municipalities have been bought off: "Ooh, CableCorp LLC said that they'll provide each school with a 'free' lowest-tier-of-'business class' internet connection in exchange for exclusive rights to suck our citizens dry. Amazing deal!"). I am extraordinarily pleased that Google has been working to scare the incumbents, at least in some markets, and to demonstrate how much of the high cost and low quality is purely a matter of lack of competitive pressure(even when they can't actually match gigabit service, because they are working with legacy coax, it's...interesting...how much cheaper and faster the competitor's offerings are in markets where Google is active, or sniffing around, than in markets where they aren't. You'd think that somebody would ask Comcast and friends about how that strange dissimilarity comes to be...
My point was purely that, given the logistics of a network build-out, a society with theoretical adherence to private property rights is trickier than one where you can just steamroller whoever you like. This seems like a good reason to stop pretending that ISPs actually operate in under meaningfully 'free market' conditions; and either aggressively step up efforts to change this, or keep a closer eye on them as oligopolies; but it is the case.
You arguably have it backwards: given the amount of private property you need to obtain outright, or secure 'easements' to cross, in order to set up a wired network of municipal scale, building one in the context of property rights does involve asking nicely, convincing people of the benefits of allowing you the access you need, and so on.
If you can just declare the People's Patriotic Fiber Plan and move in, then you don't have to do any of that.
(That said, given the widespread existence of utility easements going back as far as water and sewer, and the abject awfulness of low-competition internet service markets, I'd be very, very, disappointed in any municipal or community organizations that don't do what they can to allow another entrant to share the various conduits and poles and such that are already in place for running utilities. Yes, the logistics are a pain; but being bled year after year by an incumbent monopolist is worse.)
On the minus side, you have to sell the million-dollar diamond all at once, if you can find a buyer, while you can dispose of the gold in much more conveniently sized transactions. If you are in an environment where rule of law is fully operational and you are operating within it, various financial instruments offer higher value density than just about any physically valuable object; and if rule of law is unavailable, or you are skirting it, disposing of a single unusual and very valuable piece is going to be a lot trickier than selling easily divisible bits, both in terms of finding buyers and in not attracting excessive attention. Diamonds are unlikely to be as bad as art in terms of liquidity; but ones of any significant worth will be of interest to a pretty select audience, while metal trinkets scale comparatively neatly from low end pawnshop transactions to the iconic 400oz bricks.
If the improvements in fuel economy of civilian airliners are anything to go by, we could probably build a somewhat better B-52 today(either longer range, larger payload, or some combination of the two); but it would be a sufficiently modest and incremental improvement that the cost and uncertainty of a new development project would be a really hard sell compared to incrementally worse performance; but markedly lower project management risk, through repairs and incremental upgrades of the aircraft we already have.
It doesn't have to be, and probably isn't, the best possible implementation; but it is a good enough implementation that the airframes are really going to have to be falling apart before "Yeah, basically a B-52 but with more carbon fiber" is something you'd be willing to risk development hell on. Even with the substantially larger production numbers of airliners, the current generation improved fuel efficiency models had some serious teething issues; and similar problems would really blow up the unit cost of a smaller production run.
Have we really failed to progress so much that TV Shopping is still a viable thing? No browseability, no price comparisons, not enough resolution for detailed tables, options lists, specs, etc? Are there people just sitting on their couches, credit card in hand, waiting for some guy on the TV to wave a gun and tell them what number to call to Order Now, Supplies are Limited!
Between Ye Olde in-person purchases, catalogs, and the internet; who is buying from what is basically a stream of infomercials? Especially modestly expensive gear like guns; surely you do a little looking around, rather than just impulse-buying whatever happens to be in front of you?
I'd imagine that synthesizing diamond would be uncompetitive for industrial abrasives(unless there happens to be some cheap method that is considered a dead-end because it only produces tiny crystals); and might well also be hard pressed to match basic, small, natural diamonds; but for applications that require a thin film deposited on something, or big chunks of low-defect material, the naturally occurring options are much rarer. If you wanted to use diamonds for something like packaging semiconductors, to take advantage of their superb conductivity, you'd just be cutting slices; but you'd need large stones to start with; and (unlike metals) a bunch of small diamonds can't be turned into a large diamond very easily.
It certainly doesn't improve the cost per pound of explosives delivered; but B-52s have been adapted for launching cruise missiles if the situation is deemed too scary for closer approach. A lot more expensive than dropping bombs(even guided ones); but presumably cheaper than having each missile capable of B-52 level range.
There is also the issue that radar absorbing materials tend to be a pretty touchy arrangement of conductive and dielectric materials precisely arrayed to effectively absorb and not re-emit the appropriate RF. When such materials get wet, their properties inevitably change.
An impressive percentage of the things John Browning had his fingerprints on would appear to qualify. The M-2's 100th anniversary is coming up and it is still in active use, with some of his other designs no longer in US military service but ridiculously common.
Aside from the "because military contractors" excuse, I suspect that the very dumb, durable, reliability of the B-52 may actually contribute to a dysfunctional replacement-selection process:
Since the B-52, while old enough that it could almost certainly be done better with newer engines, more lightweight composites, and whatnot, does what it does fairly well; which means that any bid of the form "Well, build basically the same aircraft; but with contemporary technology where applicable" will immediately be compared with proposals to just do more maintenance and some incremental system upgrades to the planes we already have.
Any bids of the "zOMG, radical new bomber with sexy low-radar-signature geometry and stuff!" flavor, by contrast, aren't as vulnerable to "Or we could just upgrade the engines at markedly lower cost and within a much shorter and more reliable timeframe..." objections.
In fairness to the "zOMG radical new bomber!" proposals, one of the reasons that the B-52 has remained in service so long is that it can be used to air-launch cruise missiles against targets that might actually have AA capabilities; and many of our wars largely involve pounding on hapless opponents who simply lack the means to shoot down anything other than low-flying helicopters, so its probably-dismal survivability against remotely competent air defenses hasn't been a serious issue. This probably also complicates the bidding for a replacement: If you decided to admit that "Yeah, this thing isn't supposed to go near actual air defenses, it's either a missile boat or for beating down soft targets", you could probably have the B-52++ sketched out relatively quickly. If you want similar payload; but in an aircraft that can actually survive hostile environments, it's much less clear exactly how you can do that. B-1s and B-2s are totally sci-fi; but I'd hate to imagine what building an aircraft like that on a scale large enough to match a B-52 would cost.
There's also the fairly obvious (though unlikely to be heard on your local talking heads cable show) problem that adopting a variety of blatantly illiberal 'security' measures that trample all over the alleged virtues of 'the west' and 'the free world' is a really, really good way to help convince anyone who thinks that we are decadent, corrupt, hypocritical, and more hype than substance that they are absolutely right.
Even if we were doing a 100% perfect job of upholding our noblest values, we can't expect to win them all; some people actively dislike the best aspects of our civilization; so they will be a tough crowd. For the people who agree that we've got a noble theory; but can only laugh bitterly at the 'liberty and justice for all' part because...price and participation may vary...the further we go into overtly illiberal tactics, the more reasonable their conviction that we are long on talk and short on substance.
Even if we were willing to sacrifice our own freedoms for the alleged benefits, which we shouldn't be; it's not clear how 'liberal democracy' wins the war of ideas by turning to fascism as soon as it starts to get nervous.
The natural ones are just so much more romantic. Why sully your finger with some soulless rock synthesized with care, skill, and years of materials science research when you could get one extracted from a giant hole in the ground by the backbreaking labor of mining peons? Even those, though, show a lack of true commitment. Conflict diamonds are where it's at.