>>Just because you think some tax is "extortionistic" doesn't mean it is, and if you don't like the taxes you pay, then convince enough of your fellow citizens to elect a different government.
>Done.
You think THAT's what you did? You elected a guy who will have to increase your taxes hugely - unless you're already one of the richest 1% - they get massive discounts. Guess who gets to foot the bill ? Trump will almost certainly keep his promisses to fuck up the lives of every group whose lives he promised to fuck up... EXCEPT the elites. Because he is one of them. But what you're about to find out is - he's not going to stop with the people whose lives he promised to fuck up - he's going to fuck up YOUR life too, and all your neighbours and friends.
Hell even most of the middle class in London do. Americans tend to assume everybody else has their terrible public transport and odd fetish for smog machines.
The rest of us sees a car not as a status symbol, not as a toy, not even as a luxury - it's a device of purely practical worth used to get from A to B and suitable to buy ONLY if it's pragmatically the BEST way of getting from A to B on a regular basis.
If you sell something promising certain attributes of the product which the product does not comply with - then that product is defective under the standard legal definition (throughout most of the world actually off) 'fitness for purpose'.
That there are actually laws that the car failed to comply with AGGRAVATES the defect - it does not limit it as you suggest. It makes the fraud on customers more severe since they were buying, in good faith, a car that they were told complied with the law when it didn't.
The fact that the car violated laws actually makes it even LESS fit for purpose.
And damn straight clients should not be held accountable for this. They had no reasonable way of learning about the deception until governments discovered it. The company that committed the fraud should be held accountable - and the CEO belongs in jail... if we start actually jailing the CEOs and executives of every company that commits large-scale fraud then large scale fraud would become a great deal less common - and things like the 2008 crash won't happen. Nobody would defraud millions of investors and even entire governments if they think they'll actually go to jail for it.
That's the one change in regulations the world really needs to keep capitalism mostly working. If a business commits a crime, the board and executive officers should face the same punishments that you or I would face if we did the same thing. They dump toxic waste in a river -they get the same punishment you would get for poisoning a town's well: death penalties for mass murder. They lie to customers or investors about what they are selling - they get the same punishment that con-artists get: ten to twenty in prison for fraud. The problem is we only punish individuals when they don't have strong corporate shields. We put Madoff in jail - but the CEO of Goldman-Sachs walks free. So far no country has proposed criminal charges against the executives at VW for this massive fraud. Lots of fines - a few got fired, but no jail-time. Considering the size of the fraud here, they should get consecutive ten year sentences for each offense... basically they should die of old age in prison.
Oh, and that 'three come along at once' pattern gets even BIGGER when you factor in ELE's across multiple types. For example - volcanic superplumes and impacts have historically happened together far more often than not - that particular correlation is SO STRONG actually that many geologists believe impacts can actually CAUSE superplumes.
No. That's not how it works. I explained how it works - and you come give me a bunch of maths that all assume the statistics are not, in fact, devoid of memory. Your fallacy is, in fact, the same one that leads people to think that lottery numbers which haven't come up much for a while are more likely to come up in the near future.
But, just like the global scattering or potentially harmful things in the universe, a lottery machine has no memory in it's outcomes. The result 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 is exactly as likely as ANY other set of numbers. It SEEMS unlikely, we intuitively feel that the odds of that number ever happening must be incredibly low - in fact if it did there would be probably be all sorts of audits and accusations since people would refuse to believe it could possibly be real.
But those people are wrong. All sets lottery numbers have the exact same likelihood of happening - and what happened before has ZERO impact on that outcome. The same goes for asteroids - for the same reason. It's physics in a chaotic system. There is only one, tiny, difference that affects the odds. Once we're hit by an asteroid the odds of being hit by the SAME asteroid again usually goes down to zero. But there are more than enough asteroids and coments just in our solar system for that to have no measurable impact on the odds.
The odds of being hit by a killer asteroid two days after being hit by a killer asteroid is no less than it is 10 million years after one. Indeed, there have been quite a few times in Earth's history already where significant impacts happened extremely close together creating much larger extinctions than either could have done by itself. The actual history of earth suggests that extinction level events are like busses. You can wait all day and not see any, and then three come along at once.
Your very first paragraph contains a fatal mistake. See the branch of statistics involved here has a curious trait: it has no memory. The average time between world killing asteroids is 20 million years... but it is ALWAYS 20 million years. It was 20 million years on average to the next one 30 seconds before the last one hit and it was 20 million years on average 30 seconds after it hit and its 20 million years right now. The thing is - because this branch of statistics has no memory it tells you how often it has happened but allows no prediction of any kind for when the next event will occur. The odds are always identical. Your claim that its low had no basis in reality: its mathematically impossible to make that claim, in fact the odds right now is identical to the odds on the day before the K/T event. The odds are constant. Always the same - and always unknowable.
The same goes for all the cosmic disasters I mentioned. If we see something incoming we can calculate better odds but then we are no longer using statistics - then it becomes physics and the new calculations apply only to that one we are looking at. It does not even rule out being hit by another one while looking at it - the odds of that is still the same as it always was
Right... because an english dictionary is a useful tool for this purpose... no wait, it's not.
If you actually want to dig in - then you need to look up the original hebrew word - and assume the translators of any given edition just chose the word in English they thought best conveyed the meaning. Theologians are in pretty much universal agreement that the word in those texts would, today, be best translated as 'immigrant' or 'alien'. Indeed most modern translations use one of those words.
That King James had used 'sojourner', but then the KJV is also among theologians universally considered one of the worst translations ever done in English. It was created by a monarch who prized securing his position over accuracy of translation, switched ad hoc between literal and equivalent translation methodologies (and lived before more advanced methods were invented - like the ones modern translators are trained in - I speak as somebody who actually IS a licensed translator, a consequence of taking a translation course in university though I never practiced professionally).
I clarified the meaning on purpose. In another post in this thread somebody else also tried to claim what you did - and another commenter provided the text for those versus from a dozen other translations and showed how they all chose 'immigrant' or 'alien' - because that's a much better translation for the phrase found in the original hebrew.
Seriously - I don't even believe in God and I understand the methods of theology better than you do. If this is how christians read the bible, and how American pastors teach it - then it's no wonder that 1) They still cling to the KJV as if it's a good version and 2) American Christians are so utterly ignorant about what their religion actually says.
In most of the world you still have to do 3rd year in at least 4 ancient languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek) to become a minister or a pastor - you're not supposed to teach the bible if you can't read it in the original language and your primary job is to teach people the things that were lost in translation.
You can debate what counts as the first submarine, there were underwater oared boats built in the 1500's already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the US had a scew-powered one-man sub known as the turtle in the late 1700s but what Verne describes in 20-thousand leagues most closely resembles a modern submarine - not anything that existed at the time or would exist until the 20th century. It had a periscope, could dive to great depths, was oceanborn, use balasts with pumps, electrically powered interiors, and - the shape he describes is identical to what modern submarines converged on. A shape which first starts showing up in designs of actual boats in the 1870's - AFTER the book was published.
So yes, Verne took inspiration from existing technologies - and made a pretty damn impressive prediction about what would come in the future. That's exactly what futurists do.
It's a very good book. Set in a distant future where humanity has, in an odd way, achieved immortality. You get to live 7 times, with your body regenerated if you die, but after the 7th death your mind is uploaded to the net and you live on as code in a type of fantasy world. But now the world is facing imminent destruction as the sun is about to go red giant.
Without giving too much away - the people in this virtual paradise have no idea what to do about their imminent demise but their ancestors who built the world they now luxuriate in had reached a peak of technology. So now their only hope is that the old people had left them something to deal with the end of the sun, and a long winding tale develops as a young boy and his ant (yes, ant) set out to find it.
So what about Neil Stephenson - the internet he predicted in the early 1980s is remarkably similar to the one we actually got (the only significant error was his assumption that there would be a need for a central authority and architecture - something we found we didn't need, and perhaps did better by not having). His descriptions of VR were decades ahead of the actual technology (though some other cyberpunk authors had similar ideas) - but remarkably close to what is actually being built now, and his version was closer to AR than anything else until AR was a thing.
How about Arthur C. Clarke ? He predicted the geostationary satelite decades before we even put a rocket into space. Jules Verne predicted the submarine almost 100 years before we ever built one - and he got almost all the core technologies it would require right. The way it worked is very much like the real things do - including ballasts, he was so influential in the building of the first real submarine that it was NAMED after the one in his book: the nautilus.
Verne also predicted a moon landing. He again got several things right, and only one thing really wrong. He predicted that America would be the first to do it, and he predicted that the launch site would be in Florida. Just as it happened for real more than a century later. His launcher was a capsule fired from a giant gun, which would actually work (if you don't mind laminating your astronauts to the back of the capsule) - but it was the only major thing he got wrong, we would soon enough realise that if you make the gun part of the bullet and fire it slowly over a longer time then it works well (we usually call those 'rockets'). Florida was no accident. The US chose it because it's the most Sourthernly state in their Northern Hemisphere country - and that's important. The closer to the equator your launch site - the cheaper the launch becomes. That's why the ESA launches from Korou (which is practically ON the equator). Florida is the closest to the equator you can get while still in the continental USA (some of the other territories could work but shipping rocket parts there over water and foreign lands would cost a fortune). Verne did the same maths and realised that your best way to get to the moon was to launch from near the equator - and came to the same conclusion as Nasa about where to do it- a hundred years in advance.
And these are just the well known versions. The BEST example is Verne's novel "Paris 1930" - but that was never published, it was only discovered after his death. It described a city where electrical power was so abundant that they used to light the streetlamps, where cars drove on the city streets in such numbers that traffic jams happened. Next to the manuscript was a letter from Verne's publisher: "I can't publish this, it's just too farfetched that Paris could possibly change that much in just a few decades". Paris 1930 was, in fact, just about spot on.
So - yeah, some futurists are extremely good. The trouble is that it's very hard, perhaps even impossible, to tell the good ones and the bad ones apart. At the time of writing -some of them are incredibly right, and some are woefully wrong about everything - and we can't be certain which is which until enough time passes that we can see what came true, and what nobody saw coming.
>I'll make one prediction based on human nature: That future generations will judge us as dithering, selfish kleptoparasites that did nothing when we could of and just partied on the available resources leaving them with the consequences.
So... the exact OPPOSITE of the end of 'Feersum Enjin'... sounds about right yeah.
The preppers are more likely to CAUSE extinction, war or societal collapse than they are to actually survive it.
It is logically impossible to plan for the unpredictable, ergo their plans WILL be wrong and WILL not help them - at all. It's impossible for any of them to get it right except by pure chance. Logically the people most likely to survive (if it's something survivable - so not a nuclear holocaust, volcanic superplume or gamma ray burster for example) will be the ones best capable of ingenuity, who can create the means of survival out of whatever they can find. Not the ones who did planning or preparation - the ones who don't NEED planning or preparation.
Simply put - McGuyver would be make it, the A-team would be toast.
And you are magically going to get EVERYBODY not to do something stupid ? You didn't do so well a few days ago...
Not to mention - there is nothing you as an individual can do about the things that represent real risks to our survival. You have the tech to detect an asteroid early enough that it can be deflected and to send something to deflect it ? You think you (or indeed humanity) has any tech that would let us survive a volcanic superplume ? What is your genius individualist plan for a gamma ray burster ? Remember - those things travel at the speed of light, it's impossible to detect them before they are already frying us. We get hit by one of those, everything on the surface is dead instantly, a few things deep underground may survive (perhaps some miners)... but they'll almost certainly be sterilised.
A gamma ray burster isn't just the end of humanity but of life on earth if one hits us.
And that could happen before I finish this sentence. Aren't you glad it didn't ? But it could happen anytime and we'll have no warning.
Literally the only chance we have of surviving if one hits earth - is to have a sufficient number of humans living on not-earth.
You're conflating foreigner with immigrant - not the same thing. Leviticus 19 and Exodus 21 both describes immigrants with the phrase "the stranger who sojourns in your land" or "sojourners" - in other words, they were not subject to the same rules as other foreigners, if they adopted the Jewish religion they would be allowed in the temple as well.
I paraphrased. Here's the original quote: Levitcus 19:33 “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. 34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. In fact my paraphrasing is extremely close to the original text - and could very easily be the text in a contemporary translation without altering the meaning in any way.
Also worth noting that this message is repeated in several other texts - for example: Exodus 21: “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
Sojourner would just be an older word meaning 'immigrant'.
There is no doubt in my mind that America's current immigration laws violate the principles of those verses which make them incompatible with Christianity - literally the only reason the bible gives where breaking the law is biblical okay - when the law prevents you from acting as the bible commands, and those texts make no claim of a difference between 'legal' or 'illegal' immigration. It tells you how to treat immigrants, it doesn't say you get to change that treatment because an immigrant hasn't complied with a burocratic process that itself violates those principles and numerous others (like the obligation to care for the poor and destitute and to offer shelter to those fearing for their lives).
Trust the atheist to, as usual, know the bible better than the biblethumpers do.
And that's without me even pointing out that if you oppose offering shelter to refugees fleeing YOUR enemies who want to kill them - then you have become nothing less than a murderer. You fear that one or two Syrian refugees may want to kill Americans ? So you are happy to let hundreds of thousands of them die ? You're a mass murderer if you think that way. Nothing less.
Oh no, if you have ANY part of your heritage left, if you even remember what you country your ancestors came from - then you haven't 'assimilated'... you have to be like a white American and ONLY like a white American to count. You can't also have a Japanese heritage you keep alive, or an Indian one or an Indonesian one.
Oddly, when recent European immigrants (especially Western European ones) keep THEIR herritage alive - that gets celebrated, and in fact, Americans adopt parts of their culture INTO the melting pot. Weird how when the Irish brought St. Patricks Day and Halloween America as a whole adopted those.
The melting pot used to be a two-way exchange, but now apparently it's meant to be a one-way white supremacist domination.
>That's not racism or "white nationalism", it's the whole fucking point of having a country and has been for 3000 years.
Appeal to tradition fallacy - not to mention a rather disingenious argument because, if that's really true, then why the fuck BOTHER to have countries anymore ? Cultures can exist without them - and many cultures exist in several countries or none. So clearly they aren't actually useful for the job - and all the resources we waste on having countries could instead be spent on actually protecting cultures, which raises the question of whether we ought to be doing THAT ? And if so - why we shouldn't focus most of our energy on cultures that are far more endangered than American culture - particularly those which American culture displaced in the first place ?
I assume of course you are consistent in your views and if the Cherokee people (for example) demanded their ancestral land back to build a new Cherokee country governed by and for the protection of their culture - you would defend their claim ? Why should they allow a bunch of a European immigrants to keep displacing them and literally rule their country ?
Slashdot Mirror
>>Just because you think some tax is "extortionistic" doesn't mean it is, and if you don't like the taxes you pay, then convince enough of your fellow citizens to elect a different government.
>Done.
You think THAT's what you did? You elected a guy who will have to increase your taxes hugely - unless you're already one of the richest 1% - they get massive discounts. Guess who gets to foot the bill ?
Trump will almost certainly keep his promisses to fuck up the lives of every group whose lives he promised to fuck up... EXCEPT the elites. Because he is one of them.
But what you're about to find out is - he's not going to stop with the people whose lives he promised to fuck up - he's going to fuck up YOUR life too, and all your neighbours and friends.
Money made from defrauding people does not count as money 'earned'.
So spending VW's money in this case - does not even meet your (typical crazy 'all tax is theft' batshit-insane) criteria for 'bad'.
It depends how many you stole. That's what "three times" means. You steal a goat - you have to give back three goats.
You steel 2 goats you have to give back 6 goats.
I would actually advise stealing 2, male and female, it would make it easier to get the other 4 goats so you can pay back the fine.
Hell even most of the middle class in London do. Americans tend to assume everybody else has their terrible public transport and odd fetish for smog machines.
The rest of us sees a car not as a status symbol, not as a toy, not even as a luxury - it's a device of purely practical worth used to get from A to B and suitable to buy ONLY if it's pragmatically the BEST way of getting from A to B on a regular basis.
>Yeah, like that pesky satellite data showing no warming. Gotta 'massage' those pesky facts into the proper agenda-backing curve, don't ya know!
No such satellite data exists, you've been lied to.
Yay... now look up the definition of 'fraud'.
If you sell something promising certain attributes of the product which the product does not comply with - then that product is defective under the standard legal definition (throughout most of the world actually off) 'fitness for purpose'.
That there are actually laws that the car failed to comply with AGGRAVATES the defect - it does not limit it as you suggest. It makes the fraud on customers more severe since they were buying, in good faith, a car that they were told complied with the law when it didn't.
The fact that the car violated laws actually makes it even LESS fit for purpose.
And damn straight clients should not be held accountable for this. They had no reasonable way of learning about the deception until governments discovered it. The company that committed the fraud should be held accountable - and the CEO belongs in jail... if we start actually jailing the CEOs and executives of every company that commits large-scale fraud then large scale fraud would become a great deal less common - and things like the 2008 crash won't happen. Nobody would defraud millions of investors and even entire governments if they think they'll actually go to jail for it.
That's the one change in regulations the world really needs to keep capitalism mostly working. If a business commits a crime, the board and executive officers should face the same punishments that you or I would face if we did the same thing. They dump toxic waste in a river -they get the same punishment you would get for poisoning a town's well: death penalties for mass murder. They lie to customers or investors about what they are selling - they get the same punishment that con-artists get: ten to twenty in prison for fraud.
The problem is we only punish individuals when they don't have strong corporate shields. We put Madoff in jail - but the CEO of Goldman-Sachs walks free. So far no country has proposed criminal charges against the executives at VW for this massive fraud. Lots of fines - a few got fired, but no jail-time.
Considering the size of the fraud here, they should get consecutive ten year sentences for each offense... basically they should die of old age in prison.
Oh, and that 'three come along at once' pattern gets even BIGGER when you factor in ELE's across multiple types. For example - volcanic superplumes and impacts have historically happened together far more often than not - that particular correlation is SO STRONG actually that many geologists believe impacts can actually CAUSE superplumes.
No. That's not how it works. I explained how it works - and you come give me a bunch of maths that all assume the statistics are not, in fact, devoid of memory. Your fallacy is, in fact, the same one that leads people to think that lottery numbers which haven't come up much for a while are more likely to come up in the near future.
But, just like the global scattering or potentially harmful things in the universe, a lottery machine has no memory in it's outcomes. The result 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 is exactly as likely as ANY other set of numbers. It SEEMS unlikely, we intuitively feel that the odds of that number ever happening must be incredibly low - in fact if it did there would be probably be all sorts of audits and accusations since people would refuse to believe it could possibly be real.
But those people are wrong. All sets lottery numbers have the exact same likelihood of happening - and what happened before has ZERO impact on that outcome. The same goes for asteroids - for the same reason. It's physics in a chaotic system. There is only one, tiny, difference that affects the odds. Once we're hit by an asteroid the odds of being hit by the SAME asteroid again usually goes down to zero.
But there are more than enough asteroids and coments just in our solar system for that to have no measurable impact on the odds.
The odds of being hit by a killer asteroid two days after being hit by a killer asteroid is no less than it is 10 million years after one. Indeed, there have been quite a few times in Earth's history already where significant impacts happened extremely close together creating much larger extinctions than either could have done by itself.
The actual history of earth suggests that extinction level events are like busses. You can wait all day and not see any, and then three come along at once.
Your very first paragraph contains a fatal mistake. See the branch of statistics involved here has a curious trait: it has no memory. The average time between world killing asteroids is 20 million years... but it is ALWAYS 20 million years. It was 20 million years on average to the next one 30 seconds before the last one hit and it was 20 million years on average 30 seconds after it hit and its 20 million years right now.
The thing is - because this branch of statistics has no memory it tells you how often it has happened but allows no prediction of any kind for when the next event will occur. The odds are always identical. Your claim that its low had no basis in reality: its mathematically impossible to make that claim, in fact the odds right now is identical to the odds on the day before the K/T event. The odds are constant. Always the same - and always unknowable.
The same goes for all the cosmic disasters I mentioned. If we see something incoming we can calculate better odds but then we are no longer using statistics - then it becomes physics and the new calculations apply only to that one we are looking at. It does not even rule out being hit by another one while looking at it - the odds of that is still the same as it always was
Right... because an english dictionary is a useful tool for this purpose... no wait, it's not.
If you actually want to dig in - then you need to look up the original hebrew word - and assume the translators of any given edition just chose the word in English they thought best conveyed the meaning. Theologians are in pretty much universal agreement that the word in those texts would, today, be best translated as 'immigrant' or 'alien'. Indeed most modern translations use one of those words.
That King James had used 'sojourner', but then the KJV is also among theologians universally considered one of the worst translations ever done in English. It was created by a monarch who prized securing his position over accuracy of translation, switched ad hoc between literal and equivalent translation methodologies (and lived before more advanced methods were invented - like the ones modern translators are trained in - I speak as somebody who actually IS a licensed translator, a consequence of taking a translation course in university though I never practiced professionally).
I clarified the meaning on purpose. In another post in this thread somebody else also tried to claim what you did - and another commenter provided the text for those versus from a dozen other translations and showed how they all chose 'immigrant' or 'alien' - because that's a much better translation for the phrase found in the original hebrew.
Seriously - I don't even believe in God and I understand the methods of theology better than you do. If this is how christians read the bible, and how American pastors teach it - then it's no wonder that
1) They still cling to the KJV as if it's a good version and
2) American Christians are so utterly ignorant about what their religion actually says.
In most of the world you still have to do 3rd year in at least 4 ancient languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek) to become a minister or a pastor - you're not supposed to teach the bible if you can't read it in the original language and your primary job is to teach people the things that were lost in translation.
Where did you hear that ?
The first submarine to ever have a name was the HMS Nautilus - in 1914.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can debate what counts as the first submarine, there were underwater oared boats built in the 1500's already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the US had a scew-powered one-man sub known as the turtle in the late 1700s but what Verne describes in 20-thousand leagues most closely resembles a modern submarine - not anything that existed at the time or would exist until the 20th century. It had a periscope, could dive to great depths, was oceanborn, use balasts with pumps, electrically powered interiors, and - the shape he describes is identical to what modern submarines converged on. A shape which first starts showing up in designs of actual boats in the 1870's - AFTER the book was published.
So yes, Verne took inspiration from existing technologies - and made a pretty damn impressive prediction about what would come in the future. That's exactly what futurists do.
It's a very good book. Set in a distant future where humanity has, in an odd way, achieved immortality. You get to live 7 times, with your body regenerated if you die, but after the 7th death your mind is uploaded to the net and you live on as code in a type of fantasy world. But now the world is facing imminent destruction as the sun is about to go red giant.
Without giving too much away - the people in this virtual paradise have no idea what to do about their imminent demise but their ancestors who built the world they now luxuriate in had reached a peak of technology. So now their only hope is that the old people had left them something to deal with the end of the sun, and a long winding tale develops as a young boy and his ant (yes, ant) set out to find it.
You know, I bet you just wrote the real code on slashdot... after all, it had to be something Bush Jr. could remember !
So what about Neil Stephenson - the internet he predicted in the early 1980s is remarkably similar to the one we actually got (the only significant error was his assumption that there would be a need for a central authority and architecture - something we found we didn't need, and perhaps did better by not having). His descriptions of VR were decades ahead of the actual technology (though some other cyberpunk authors had similar ideas) - but remarkably close to what is actually being built now, and his version was closer to AR than anything else until AR was a thing.
How about Arthur C. Clarke ? He predicted the geostationary satelite decades before we even put a rocket into space. Jules Verne predicted the submarine almost 100 years before we ever built one - and he got almost all the core technologies it would require right. The way it worked is very much like the real things do - including ballasts, he was so influential in the building of the first real submarine that it was NAMED after the one in his book: the nautilus.
Verne also predicted a moon landing. He again got several things right, and only one thing really wrong. He predicted that America would be the first to do it, and he predicted that the launch site would be in Florida. Just as it happened for real more than a century later. His launcher was a capsule fired from a giant gun, which would actually work (if you don't mind laminating your astronauts to the back of the capsule) - but it was the only major thing he got wrong, we would soon enough realise that if you make the gun part of the bullet and fire it slowly over a longer time then it works well (we usually call those 'rockets'). Florida was no accident. The US chose it because it's the most Sourthernly state in their Northern Hemisphere country - and that's important. The closer to the equator your launch site - the cheaper the launch becomes. That's why the ESA launches from Korou (which is practically ON the equator). Florida is the closest to the equator you can get while still in the continental USA (some of the other territories could work but shipping rocket parts there over water and foreign lands would cost a fortune). Verne did the same maths and realised that your best way to get to the moon was to launch from near the equator - and came to the same conclusion as Nasa about where to do it- a hundred years in advance.
And these are just the well known versions. The BEST example is Verne's novel "Paris 1930" - but that was never published, it was only discovered after his death. It described a city where electrical power was so abundant that they used to light the streetlamps, where cars drove on the city streets in such numbers that traffic jams happened. Next to the manuscript was a letter from Verne's publisher: "I can't publish this, it's just too farfetched that Paris could possibly change that much in just a few decades".
Paris 1930 was, in fact, just about spot on.
So - yeah, some futurists are extremely good. The trouble is that it's very hard, perhaps even impossible, to tell the good ones and the bad ones apart. At the time of writing -some of them are incredibly right, and some are woefully wrong about everything - and we can't be certain which is which until enough time passes that we can see what came true, and what nobody saw coming.
>I'll make one prediction based on human nature: That future generations will judge us as dithering, selfish kleptoparasites that did nothing when we could of and just partied on the available resources leaving them with the consequences.
So... the exact OPPOSITE of the end of 'Feersum Enjin' ... sounds about right yeah.
Because physics isn't sociollogy and the universe doesn't give a fuck about us?
Three words: gamma ray burster.
Look it up.
I'm pretty sure that Hawking has no functional orifices to speak out off at all. That's why he speaks with the robovoicer.
Slashdot crowd should be fairly safe from a nuclear war.
Basements could make halfway decent bomb shelters...
The preppers are more likely to CAUSE extinction, war or societal collapse than they are to actually survive it.
It is logically impossible to plan for the unpredictable, ergo their plans WILL be wrong and WILL not help them - at all. It's impossible for any of them to get it right except by pure chance.
Logically the people most likely to survive (if it's something survivable - so not a nuclear holocaust, volcanic superplume or gamma ray burster for example) will be the ones best capable of ingenuity, who can create the means of survival out of whatever they can find. Not the ones who did planning or preparation - the ones who don't NEED planning or preparation.
Simply put - McGuyver would be make it, the A-team would be toast.
And you are magically going to get EVERYBODY not to do something stupid ? You didn't do so well a few days ago...
Not to mention - there is nothing you as an individual can do about the things that represent real risks to our survival. You have the tech to detect an asteroid early enough that it can be deflected and to send something to deflect it ? You think you (or indeed humanity) has any tech that would let us survive a volcanic superplume ?
What is your genius individualist plan for a gamma ray burster ? Remember - those things travel at the speed of light, it's impossible to detect them before they are already frying us. We get hit by one of those, everything on the surface is dead instantly, a few things deep underground may survive (perhaps some miners)... but they'll almost certainly be sterilised.
A gamma ray burster isn't just the end of humanity but of life on earth if one hits us.
And that could happen before I finish this sentence. Aren't you glad it didn't ? But it could happen anytime and we'll have no warning.
Literally the only chance we have of surviving if one hits earth - is to have a sufficient number of humans living on not-earth.
You're conflating foreigner with immigrant - not the same thing. Leviticus 19 and Exodus 21 both describes immigrants with the phrase "the stranger who sojourns in your land" or "sojourners" - in other words, they were not subject to the same rules as other foreigners, if they adopted the Jewish religion they would be allowed in the temple as well.
That's the best you can do - prove that you either didn't read or didn't understand 1984 ?
I paraphrased.
Here's the original quote:
Levitcus 19:33 “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. 34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. In fact my paraphrasing is extremely close to the original text - and could very easily be the text in a contemporary translation without altering the meaning in any way.
Also worth noting that this message is repeated in several other texts - for example:
Exodus 21: “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
Sojourner would just be an older word meaning 'immigrant'.
There is no doubt in my mind that America's current immigration laws violate the principles of those verses which make them incompatible with Christianity - literally the only reason the bible gives where breaking the law is biblical okay - when the law prevents you from acting as the bible commands, and those texts make no claim of a difference between 'legal' or 'illegal' immigration. It tells you how to treat immigrants, it doesn't say you get to change that treatment because an immigrant hasn't complied with a burocratic process that itself violates those principles and numerous others (like the obligation to care for the poor and destitute and to offer shelter to those fearing for their lives).
Trust the atheist to, as usual, know the bible better than the biblethumpers do.
And that's without me even pointing out that if you oppose offering shelter to refugees fleeing YOUR enemies who want to kill them - then you have become nothing less than a murderer. You fear that one or two Syrian refugees may want to kill Americans ? So you are happy to let hundreds of thousands of them die ? You're a mass murderer if you think that way. Nothing less.
Oh no, if you have ANY part of your heritage left, if you even remember what you country your ancestors came from - then you haven't 'assimilated'... you have to be like a white American and ONLY like a white American to count. You can't also have a Japanese heritage you keep alive, or an Indian one or an Indonesian one.
Oddly, when recent European immigrants (especially Western European ones) keep THEIR herritage alive - that gets celebrated, and in fact, Americans adopt parts of their culture INTO the melting pot.
Weird how when the Irish brought St. Patricks Day and Halloween America as a whole adopted those.
The melting pot used to be a two-way exchange, but now apparently it's meant to be a one-way white supremacist domination.
>That's not racism or "white nationalism", it's the whole fucking point of having a country and has been for 3000 years.
Appeal to tradition fallacy - not to mention a rather disingenious argument because, if that's really true, then why the fuck BOTHER to have countries anymore ? Cultures can exist without them - and many cultures exist in several countries or none. So clearly they aren't actually useful for the job - and all the resources we waste on having countries could instead be spent on actually protecting cultures, which raises the question of whether we ought to be doing THAT ? And if so - why we shouldn't focus most of our energy on cultures that are far more endangered than American culture - particularly those which American culture displaced in the first place ?
I assume of course you are consistent in your views and if the Cherokee people (for example) demanded their ancestral land back to build a new Cherokee country governed by and for the protection of their culture - you would defend their claim ?
Why should they allow a bunch of a European immigrants to keep displacing them and literally rule their country ?