I don't know the specific machine - but it may be something similar to a problem I ran into back circa 2003 or so.
At the time I was lead dev on an educational distribution called OpenLab - mostly used by projects that put computer labs into poor schools in Africa. Our biggest client had put computers running OpenLab into 95% of the schools in Namibia. About halfway through that project they got a new batch in - and something weird happened, the machines would consistently reboot halfway through the bootup process in the installer. It was impossible to install on them.
So I had them send me one and spent ages tracking down the problem. It wasn't easy because there was no way to boot the damn thing up and look for the error. I took a guess, considering it ONLY happened on this model that it was a driver missbehaving somehow - so I started disabling the drivers one by one in the kernel, rebuilding the install ISO each time and testing until it booted and I had identified the bad driver. Turns out it was the driver for intel watchdog cards... now why the hell was that even being loaded ?
Because the cheap-ass Taiwanese made board had a built-in soundcard of their own design and hadn't bothered to register a new PCI-ID for it, they just used one randomly chosen from a list of server hardware people probably wouldn't install in their desktop boards... in this case the Intel Watchdog card. So during bootup, that PCI-ID caused the plug and play system to load the intel watchdog card driver, which would sit and wait for a hardware ping from a card that wasn't actually there and send a reboot signal when no ping arrived for 60 seconds. We solved the problem by shipping them an updated install disk with the watchdog driver removed.
Cheap hardware with corner-cutting can have seriously weird down-stream results. Problems like that are, luckily, very rare - but you can hardly blame Linux for the fact that the pointy haired bosses at some fly-by-night motherboard factory were cutting corners and doing so incompetently.
Having used both extensively I promise you it's easier on Linux than OSX.
Much easier. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw a device that required ANYTHING AT ALL on Linux. You plug it in, and you use it. No other steps are required.
The steam controller is brand new, and it had full Linux support on day one. Granted the driver was proprietory but it came with steam anyway.
And on day 2 (literally just 24 hours later) there was an open-source driver available that you could use instead of steam https://github.com/ynsta/steam...
I don't play racing games (I last played a need for speed from several years ago, and never finished it) so I have never cared about wheels. So unlike you - I won't make claims about hardware with which I have no experience.
I will tell you that every single time I have had to, for any reason, put windows temporarily on one of my machines (rarely) it was a nightmare to get the hardware going. It always meant ages hunting for drivers - and if I didn't have multiple computers and were dualbooting even while doing so it would be impossible since one of the things that no windows I've ever used had a driver for was my network cards - so no internet to get drivers for the network card. Had to reboot into linux every time, download it there, copy it to the mounted windows drive and boot back into there to get it going. Every device is a nightmare unless you happen to have the original disk that came with it. I never do because as a Linux user I haven't needed a driver disk in 15 years and I never consider the vague possibility than in 5 years time I may want to run windows again for a week (my record longest period I ever had it installed before being finishing coming up with a way to do the same thing on Linux or run the same software under wine). And the major use of my home computers is photography and gaming, so I have pretty high end hardware.
The fact is that almost never does something not have the drivers included. In the rare cases where it happens - a good desktop distro will find and install those drivers for you automagically and without hassles. I can't remember the last time I saw a device that didn't just work out of the box on Linux.
But I won't claim my experience is universal like you do. I'm sure there are still the odd device out there that is so rare that it's utterly unsupported. But this is genuinely the exception and not the rule.
Apples and oranges. 1) Linux doesn't fight you when you want to customize, it actively assists you (now if only Leonard Poettering would figure out that this is not only a good thing but the single most ESSENTIAL feature of the entire platform and stop trying to take that away...). 2) Linux customization is almost always done by choice, not by need - for most desktop users a system like Mint works perfectly - out of the box, exactly the way they want to - and without spending nearly as much time installing applications since almost every application you need is already included, as is just about every hardware driver that exists so no fighting to get drivers for devices you long lost the CD's for in an OS that makes getting the device IDs seriously complicated. 3) None of that customization is to stop the OS from being downright evil and spying on you. Nor has anybody yet shipped an OEM Linux CD packed to the brim with spyware. 4) You didn't *pay* for Linux, so you don't get to demand consumer protections. You DID pay for Windows so you bloody well DO get to demand consumer rights.
Because you can't cure a disease if you don't cure the cause. You could treat symptoms, but it won't be a cure. Thinking outside the box is all well and good - IF you have the understanding to know which of the infinite variety of ideas outside the box are sane and which are not. In this case - you are so ignorant you don't even know where the box IS. Carbon reduction is not "inside the box" - it's the cause of the disease, out-of-the-box thinking means coming up with ways of reducing carbon you have not actually considered before. There are LOTS of people doing that. Some of them are still crazy, some are workable but not really practical, some are good ideas and are developing well. If you want to argue that "outside the box" means "suggest ways to treat the symptoms while the disease rages on" then you're on a road that leads nowhere. Especially as we keep making the disease worse - which means even if you find a way to treat the symptoms you'll at best buy time - because the symptoms will keep coming back *worse*.
I was simplifying for the sake of internet discussion. I'm well aware that the atoms are not the same weight, that burning is not perfect and thus that those numbers are not entirely accurate. That's one reason I worked in tons - I upped the scale to reduce the impact of the rounding.
Fermi calculations may not be how you do science, but they ARE useful for understanding a problem space, which is literally all I was attempting to achieve.
Carbon is the problem. There are no solutions that do not involve cutting it. Not even outside the box. You however should please remain firmly inside the box. Out of the box is for smart people. When dumb people try it they end up crazy people.
Tectonic drift was first proven on a computer simulation, we didn't have the technology to confirm it with first-hand observation until it had been consennsus for almost 3 decades. That was done on an early predecessor of the PDP-10. The thing was archaic.
We have much better simulation systems now, much better hardware to run them on - and far better statistical analysis teams to set the parameters and figure out what the results mean.
I've never yet encountered and anti-simulationist who had a sane argument against using simulations to study things. Simulations have been the means by which we did experiments that were otherwise impossible for many decades. They are a key part of every field of science. If you reject them, you are literally putting us back to 1930 in every single field of human endeavour. That's pretty fucking crazy. Einstein praised "Gedanken experiments" (thought experiments) as a critical part of the scientific method - before committing lots of time and money into testing an idea - first run a test in your own mind and at least try to figure out if it *should* work. Sometimes an actual experiments isn't even possible or nobody has figured out a way to do one (yet) so this is a key feature of science. Einstein used one to test the idea of gravitational lensing, we didn't have a way to prove it with a physical experiment until nearly 10 years later - and we only started having any ways of testing such things without waiting for rare events like Jupiterian eclipses in the last few years (and have recently used some of that advanced technology to test and confirm another of his predictions - gravitational waves). Simulations have been key in recent refinements to and improvements to evolutionary theory as well.
Simulations are thought experiments taken to the next level. They don't run on quite so powerful a computer, true, but on the other hand they can be scrutinized - they can be adjusted and improved and re-run with those improvements - which makes them, over all, a great improvement. Thought experiments have the problem that you can unconsciously alter the parameters of the experiment (like, say, the exact force of gravity) to show what you're expecting, a computer simulation places those parameters under peer-reviewable scrutiny.
It's true that even the best simulation is still not as good as a physical experiment, but where physical experiments are not actually possible they are a critical next-best-thing. We can't do a physical experiment to test the big bang theory (or compare two slightly different versions of it), because nobody has yet figured out how to build a control universe. But we can take all the knowledge we have, plug them into a simulation and see whether the results match predictions. We can't do an experiment to figure out how complex systems like eyes evolve because nobody has a control-earth to compare against, but we can create a simulation in which a simulated organism is put under selection pressure, with a simple light-sensitive cell and allowed random mutations with the most sensitive ones surviving to breed... and confirm that within a hundred generations they have recognizable eyes - complete with reshapable focussing lenses like ours.
So why is simulations critical and accepted in every field of science (including ones like evolution which are infinitely more chaotic and difficult to predict than climate)... but not in climate ?
I've said for a long time that the greatest loss of life from climate change will be people killed by other people. Resource wars have a tendency to be exceptionally brutal, especially when the resources in question are essentials like food and water.
You seem to have a real issue with Carter... odd for the man who is probably the most productive ex-president in American history. The man only went and eradicated and entire disease from humanity since he left office, and he is a few months from eradicating a SECOND one.
But yeah... a president who actively avoided wars and were more focussed on saving lives than taking them and has the sense to employ highly skilled scientists to tell him how to solve problems rather than lobbyists (and continued to do so after leaving office - which is how he achieved the eradication of one disease and is on the verge of doing it again)... can't have that !
Well, if the definition of "friend" is "those who know you best" then google may yet qualify again. If you add "and has your best interests at heart" though, it becomes more accurate to say "Google is your stalker".
There is more to it than that (though you are right with what you said). A wall is a relatively flat thing vertically. So all the weight is pushing straight down. The higher and taller it gets, the more weight it is - the stronger the base needs to be. There's an upper limit to what height and length a wall of a given material can be. Buildings are easier - they are essentially hollow structures, so there's a bit less weight, and even there we are basically at the limits of what our current building materials can do. Sure you could try building out of something stronger - but that will get *very* expensive.
A mountain is easier. Mountains start wide and get thinner going up, so the weight is more evenly distributed over a larger carrying base. Closer to a pyramid than to a wall (and at least part of the reason those ancient tombs were pyramids is because it was the only way to get buildings that high to stay up when you build them by basically stacking rocks on each other).
So what if you were to build a wall shaped with a wide base that got progressively thinner ? Well at that stage you're basically building a mountain out of concrete, and frankly dirt is cheaper.
Add all those up, assuming none of them decide self driving would actually meet their needs more, and you still have driving being a niche skill acquired by the tiny proportion of people who still have a need/interest in it. Much like horse-riding is now.
To be fair, that's a relatively minor one compared to the changes that CARS made. The Model-T offered relative privacy and comfort outside the house to the masses for the first time in human history - and a VERY large portion of the next generation were conceived on it's back seats.
You haven't really learned python until you've implemented Conway's game-of-life with no if statements or forks in the code at all.
Yes. It can be done. There are several ways actually. The easiest one is to build each condition handler as a function, and set up a dictionary with the test values as keys and the functions as values. Then it's a simple case of: some_dict[test_value]()
I'm aware of that, and have read some other pieces on the topic. At least 70% of all chocolate is picked by child slaves for example. That's exactly what I meant by "corporations continue it to this day". The last government to sanction it stopped doing so more than a century-and-a-half ago, and fought a civil war to achieve that. It's not legal anywhere in the world.
But it still happens... wherever they have "small government". Because it turns out one of the things that "small government" is too small to do is to actually fight slavers.
Slavery was legally ended in the US in the 1850's but it didn't actually end in PRACTISE until 1939. When finally government was big enough to crack down on it properly. No president before FDR had the ability to take down slavers once and for all. The system between the civil war and 1939 was frighteningly ingenius. Cops would walk around the streets looking for able-looking black men, then arrest them on the flimsiest excuse. The black man would be brought before a corrupt judge and fined a fee he could never afford. Then some wealthy white "benefactor" would offer to pay the fine, and let the black guy work it off. Of course food, and shelter would be added to the debt, and the "payment" was always less than those. Voila - lifelong forced labour backed by the local police. This form of slavery mined all the raw materials for the American rail network. Alabama's coal mines were operated this way as well. Just another little dirty heritage of fossil fuels. It took the republican's favorite example of the ultimate expander of government to end it. Which was no coincidence, the government had to first be big enough.
Why do we have continuing slavery in the DRC ? India ? The Amazon ? And on such a massive scale too (the slaves in the world today outnumber the population of Washington state). Why is slave industries responsible for more CO2 emissions than all legitimate industries combined ? It's really simple: those countries have governments that are too small for the conditions over which they govern. The DRC government lacks the power to end slavery in the rural areas - they aren't powerful enough to fight the warlords that rule there and so cannot end the slave labour that operates there. The Indian police force is far too small, it can barely maintain civil order in the urban areas - there are no men to spare to fight slavers in the rural rock mines (almost every headstone in every graveyard in the world was mined by slaves). The Brazilian government has never yet been able to to muster a military powerful enough to stop the clear-cutters, how would they muster one powerful enough to stop those clearcutters from using the very natives they displace as they clearcut as slaves afterwards ?
Hell - in Brazil it's not unusual to come across an army base in the amazon with nothing but corpses. The clearcutters actually murder all the soldiers in the area with impunity to keep them from interfering with their "business".
I actually agree with you. The size of the government is utterly unimportant. Even the taxrate is mostly unimportant.
What does matter is whether the government does a good job, wheher you get decent value for your taxes. As long as whatever your taxes buy would have cost you more in the private sector, or be worse quality, or both (as in the case of healthcare), it's better to buy it with more taxes because even though your taxrate is higher - you spend less money - it also has the advantage that you can provide these services to people who would not be able to access them in the private sector.
That really IS an advantage for everybody. Take healthcare again: making healthcare universally available means your odds of being infected with some virulent plague is greatly reduced because it can't spread like wildfire among an untreated homeless population who can't afford to be treated for it (and thus slip through the radar of quarantine systems and the like). Same goes with things like water supply. Making sure everybody has access to clean, fresh water protects the entire population from diseases like cholera.
You are by no means describing an absense of regulation. Just a different form of regulation. It nay or may not be better but it is decidedly not what you advertised it as.
In other words: exactly what you should not shrink. And if you think corporations are less powerful than governments you are seriously naive. Governments cant avoid every law that constrains them by doing whatever they want to do in another country
and corporations do not need to worry about reelection. When corps poison the drinking water - they get a slap on the wrist. But I promise you the governor of michigan will not get elected again. We have power over government. Corps have power over us. Governments ended slavery. Corps continue it to this day.
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I don't know the specific machine - but it may be something similar to a problem I ran into back circa 2003 or so.
At the time I was lead dev on an educational distribution called OpenLab - mostly used by projects that put computer labs into poor schools in Africa. Our biggest client had put computers running OpenLab into 95% of the schools in Namibia. About halfway through that project they got a new batch in - and something weird happened, the machines would consistently reboot halfway through the bootup process in the installer. It was impossible to install on them.
So I had them send me one and spent ages tracking down the problem. It wasn't easy because there was no way to boot the damn thing up and look for the error. I took a guess, considering it ONLY happened on this model that it was a driver missbehaving somehow - so I started disabling the drivers one by one in the kernel, rebuilding the install ISO each time and testing until it booted and I had identified the bad driver. Turns out it was the driver for intel watchdog cards... now why the hell was that even being loaded ?
Because the cheap-ass Taiwanese made board had a built-in soundcard of their own design and hadn't bothered to register a new PCI-ID for it, they just used one randomly chosen from a list of server hardware people probably wouldn't install in their desktop boards... in this case the Intel Watchdog card. So during bootup, that PCI-ID caused the plug and play system to load the intel watchdog card driver, which would sit and wait for a hardware ping from a card that wasn't actually there and send a reboot signal when no ping arrived for 60 seconds. We solved the problem by shipping them an updated install disk with the watchdog driver removed.
Cheap hardware with corner-cutting can have seriously weird down-stream results. Problems like that are, luckily, very rare - but you can hardly blame Linux for the fact that the pointy haired bosses at some fly-by-night motherboard factory were cutting corners and doing so incompetently.
So... you are saying that windows 10 has finally gotten to the point where Linux was in 2008 ?
Having used both extensively I promise you it's easier on Linux than OSX.
Much easier. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw a device that required ANYTHING AT ALL on Linux. You plug it in, and you use it. No other steps are required.
The steam controller is brand new, and it had full Linux support on day one. Granted the driver was proprietory but it came with steam anyway.
And on day 2 (literally just 24 hours later) there was an open-source driver available that you could use instead of steam https://github.com/ynsta/steam...
I don't play racing games (I last played a need for speed from several years ago, and never finished it) so I have never cared about wheels. So unlike you - I won't make claims about hardware with which I have no experience.
I will tell you that every single time I have had to, for any reason, put windows temporarily on one of my machines (rarely) it was a nightmare to get the hardware going. It always meant ages hunting for drivers - and if I didn't have multiple computers and were dualbooting even while doing so it would be impossible since one of the things that no windows I've ever used had a driver for was my network cards - so no internet to get drivers for the network card. Had to reboot into linux every time, download it there, copy it to the mounted windows drive and boot back into there to get it going.
Every device is a nightmare unless you happen to have the original disk that came with it. I never do because as a Linux user I haven't needed a driver disk in 15 years and I never consider the vague possibility than in 5 years time I may want to run windows again for a week (my record longest period I ever had it installed before being finishing coming up with a way to do the same thing on Linux or run the same software under wine). And the major use of my home computers is photography and gaming, so I have pretty high end hardware.
The fact is that almost never does something not have the drivers included. In the rare cases where it happens - a good desktop distro will find and install those drivers for you automagically and without hassles. I can't remember the last time I saw a device that didn't just work out of the box on Linux.
But I won't claim my experience is universal like you do. I'm sure there are still the odd device out there that is so rare that it's utterly unsupported. But this is genuinely the exception and not the rule.
Considering the first car is microsoft... would "Monster-sized lube-resistent buttplug where the seat should be" not be a more accurate analogy ?
Apples and oranges.
1) Linux doesn't fight you when you want to customize, it actively assists you (now if only Leonard Poettering would figure out that this is not only a good thing but the single most ESSENTIAL feature of the entire platform and stop trying to take that away...).
2) Linux customization is almost always done by choice, not by need - for most desktop users a system like Mint works perfectly - out of the box, exactly the way they want to - and without spending nearly as much time installing applications since almost every application you need is already included, as is just about every hardware driver that exists so no fighting to get drivers for devices you long lost the CD's for in an OS that makes getting the device IDs seriously complicated.
3) None of that customization is to stop the OS from being downright evil and spying on you. Nor has anybody yet shipped an OEM Linux CD packed to the brim with spyware.
4) You didn't *pay* for Linux, so you don't get to demand consumer protections. You DID pay for Windows so you bloody well DO get to demand consumer rights.
>How do you know this?
Because you can't cure a disease if you don't cure the cause. You could treat symptoms, but it won't be a cure. Thinking outside the box is all well and good - IF you have the understanding to know which of the infinite variety of ideas outside the box are sane and which are not. In this case - you are so ignorant you don't even know where the box IS.
Carbon reduction is not "inside the box" - it's the cause of the disease, out-of-the-box thinking means coming up with ways of reducing carbon you have not actually considered before. There are LOTS of people doing that. Some of them are still crazy, some are workable but not really practical, some are good ideas and are developing well.
If you want to argue that "outside the box" means "suggest ways to treat the symptoms while the disease rages on" then you're on a road that leads nowhere. Especially as we keep making the disease worse - which means even if you find a way to treat the symptoms you'll at best buy time - because the symptoms will keep coming back *worse*.
I was simplifying for the sake of internet discussion. I'm well aware that the atoms are not the same weight, that burning is not perfect and thus that those numbers are not entirely accurate. That's one reason I worked in tons - I upped the scale to reduce the impact of the rounding.
Fermi calculations may not be how you do science, but they ARE useful for understanding a problem space, which is literally all I was attempting to achieve.
Quite a lot are being turned into CO2. Remember every tonne of carbon burned removes 2 tonnes of oxygen from the atmosphere and adds 3 tonnes of CO2.
Carbon is the problem. There are no solutions that do not involve cutting it. Not even outside the box.
You however should please remain firmly inside the box. Out of the box is for smart people. When dumb people try it they end up crazy people.
Tectonic drift was first proven on a computer simulation, we didn't have the technology to confirm it with first-hand observation until it had been consennsus for almost 3 decades.
That was done on an early predecessor of the PDP-10. The thing was archaic.
We have much better simulation systems now, much better hardware to run them on - and far better statistical analysis teams to set the parameters and figure out what the results mean.
I've never yet encountered and anti-simulationist who had a sane argument against using simulations to study things. Simulations have been the means by which we did experiments that were otherwise impossible for many decades. They are a key part of every field of science. If you reject them, you are literally putting us back to 1930 in every single field of human endeavour. That's pretty fucking crazy.
Einstein praised "Gedanken experiments" (thought experiments) as a critical part of the scientific method - before committing lots of time and money into testing an idea - first run a test in your own mind and at least try to figure out if it *should* work. Sometimes an actual experiments isn't even possible or nobody has figured out a way to do one (yet) so this is a key feature of science. Einstein used one to test the idea of gravitational lensing, we didn't have a way to prove it with a physical experiment until nearly 10 years later - and we only started having any ways of testing such things without waiting for rare events like Jupiterian eclipses in the last few years (and have recently used some of that advanced technology to test and confirm another of his predictions - gravitational waves).
Simulations have been key in recent refinements to and improvements to evolutionary theory as well.
Simulations are thought experiments taken to the next level. They don't run on quite so powerful a computer, true, but on the other hand they can be scrutinized - they can be adjusted and improved and re-run with those improvements - which makes them, over all, a great improvement.
Thought experiments have the problem that you can unconsciously alter the parameters of the experiment (like, say, the exact force of gravity) to show what you're expecting, a computer simulation places those parameters under peer-reviewable scrutiny.
It's true that even the best simulation is still not as good as a physical experiment, but where physical experiments are not actually possible they are a critical next-best-thing. We can't do a physical experiment to test the big bang theory (or compare two slightly different versions of it), because nobody has yet figured out how to build a control universe. But we can take all the knowledge we have, plug them into a simulation and see whether the results match predictions. We can't do an experiment to figure out how complex systems like eyes evolve because nobody has a control-earth to compare against, but we can create a simulation in which a simulated organism is put under selection pressure, with a simple light-sensitive cell and allowed random mutations with the most sensitive ones surviving to breed ... and confirm that within a hundred generations they have recognizable eyes - complete with reshapable focussing lenses like ours.
So why is simulations critical and accepted in every field of science (including ones like evolution which are infinitely more chaotic and difficult to predict than climate)... but not in climate ?
I've said for a long time that the greatest loss of life from climate change will be people killed by other people. Resource wars have a tendency to be exceptionally brutal, especially when the resources in question are essentials like food and water.
You seem to have a real issue with Carter... odd for the man who is probably the most productive ex-president in American history. The man only went and eradicated and entire disease from humanity since he left office, and he is a few months from eradicating a SECOND one.
But yeah... a president who actively avoided wars and were more focussed on saving lives than taking them and has the sense to employ highly skilled scientists to tell him how to solve problems rather than lobbyists (and continued to do so after leaving office - which is how he achieved the eradication of one disease and is on the verge of doing it again) ... can't have that !
That would be more appropriate if he wanted to experience being fucked in the ass without feeling gay.
Well, if the definition of "friend" is "those who know you best" then google may yet qualify again. If you add "and has your best interests at heart" though, it becomes more accurate to say "Google is your stalker".
There is more to it than that (though you are right with what you said). A wall is a relatively flat thing vertically. So all the weight is pushing straight down. The higher and taller it gets, the more weight it is - the stronger the base needs to be. There's an upper limit to what height and length a wall of a given material can be. Buildings are easier - they are essentially hollow structures, so there's a bit less weight, and even there we are basically at the limits of what our current building materials can do. Sure you could try building out of something stronger - but that will get *very* expensive.
A mountain is easier. Mountains start wide and get thinner going up, so the weight is more evenly distributed over a larger carrying base. Closer to a pyramid than to a wall (and at least part of the reason those ancient tombs were pyramids is because it was the only way to get buildings that high to stay up when you build them by basically stacking rocks on each other).
So what if you were to build a wall shaped with a wide base that got progressively thinner ? Well at that stage you're basically building a mountain out of concrete, and frankly dirt is cheaper.
Add all those up, assuming none of them decide self driving would actually meet their needs more, and you still have driving being a niche skill acquired by the tiny proportion of people who still have a need/interest in it. Much like horse-riding is now.
To be fair, that's a relatively minor one compared to the changes that CARS made. The Model-T offered relative privacy and comfort outside the house to the masses for the first time in human history - and a VERY large portion of the next generation were conceived on it's back seats.
You haven't really learned python until you've implemented Conway's game-of-life with no if statements or forks in the code at all.
Yes. It can be done. There are several ways actually. The easiest one is to build each condition handler as a function, and set up a dictionary with the test values as keys and the functions as values. Then it's a simple case of: some_dict[test_value]()
I live in Cape Town. A city where, especially in Winter, it is common for there to be weeks of continuous rain. We are USED to rain.
Yet, apparently, in a city of some millions, there are about 7 who know how to drive in rain.
I'm aware of that, and have read some other pieces on the topic. At least 70% of all chocolate is picked by child slaves for example. That's exactly what I meant by "corporations continue it to this day". The last government to sanction it stopped doing so more than a century-and-a-half ago, and fought a civil war to achieve that. It's not legal anywhere in the world.
But it still happens... wherever they have "small government". Because it turns out one of the things that "small government" is too small to do is to actually fight slavers.
Slavery was legally ended in the US in the 1850's but it didn't actually end in PRACTISE until 1939. When finally government was big enough to crack down on it properly. No president before FDR had the ability to take down slavers once and for all. The system between the civil war and 1939 was frighteningly ingenius. Cops would walk around the streets looking for able-looking black men, then arrest them on the flimsiest excuse. The black man would be brought before a corrupt judge and fined a fee he could never afford. Then some wealthy white "benefactor" would offer to pay the fine, and let the black guy work it off. Of course food, and shelter would be added to the debt, and the "payment" was always less than those. Voila - lifelong forced labour backed by the local police. This form of slavery mined all the raw materials for the American rail network. Alabama's coal mines were operated this way as well. Just another little dirty heritage of fossil fuels.
It took the republican's favorite example of the ultimate expander of government to end it. Which was no coincidence, the government had to first be big enough.
Why do we have continuing slavery in the DRC ? India ? The Amazon ? And on such a massive scale too (the slaves in the world today outnumber the population of Washington state). Why is slave industries responsible for more CO2 emissions than all legitimate industries combined ? It's really simple: those countries have governments that are too small for the conditions over which they govern. The DRC government lacks the power to end slavery in the rural areas - they aren't powerful enough to fight the warlords that rule there and so cannot end the slave labour that operates there. The Indian police force is far too small, it can barely maintain civil order in the urban areas - there are no men to spare to fight slavers in the rural rock mines (almost every headstone in every graveyard in the world was mined by slaves). The Brazilian government has never yet been able to to muster a military powerful enough to stop the clear-cutters, how would they muster one powerful enough to stop those clearcutters from using the very natives they displace as they clearcut as slaves afterwards ?
Hell - in Brazil it's not unusual to come across an army base in the amazon with nothing but corpses. The clearcutters actually murder all the soldiers in the area with impunity to keep them from interfering with their "business".
I actually agree with you. The size of the government is utterly unimportant. Even the taxrate is mostly unimportant.
What does matter is whether the government does a good job, wheher you get decent value for your taxes. As long as whatever your taxes buy would have cost you more in the private sector, or be worse quality, or both (as in the case of healthcare), it's better to buy it with more taxes because even though your taxrate is higher - you spend less money - it also has the advantage that you can provide these services to people who would not be able to access them in the private sector.
That really IS an advantage for everybody. Take healthcare again: making healthcare universally available means your odds of being infected with some virulent plague is greatly reduced because it can't spread like wildfire among an untreated homeless population who can't afford to be treated for it (and thus slip through the radar of quarantine systems and the like).
Same goes with things like water supply. Making sure everybody has access to clean, fresh water protects the entire population from diseases like cholera.
You are by no means describing an absense of regulation. Just a different form of regulation. It nay or may not be better but it is decidedly not what you advertised it as.
In other words: exactly what you should not shrink. And if you think corporations are less powerful than governments you are seriously naive. Governments cant avoid every law that constrains them by doing whatever they want to do in another country
and corporations do not need to worry about reelection.
When corps poison the drinking water - they get a slap on the wrist. But I promise you the governor of michigan will not get elected again. We have power over government. Corps have power over us. Governments ended slavery. Corps continue it to this day.
Direct democracy is a synonym for anarchism