Sounds like a neat farm. I don't mean to personally bug you.
There are massive subsidies at all points of the system of cars. Mining the minerals oil and metals is subsidised heavily. The most obvious source being that these are public goods sold to private interests for a song. Even after that it is well known how often Mining requires intervention in order to continue.
The auto manufacturing industry is heavily subsidised as the recent crisis makes clear. They have been bailed out many times before though not often as dramatically. Additionally, military funding (public) is often a major part of the equation. Historically, during both WW1 and WW2 the auto industry made tanks (and other arms) for the public. This public infrastructure later became the base capital that fueled the industry. If you look at the adoption of private automobiles the more dramatic shifts in adoption happened immediately after the wars and were based on this public event.
Of course neither of us individually opted to pay for roads, disposal, pollution clean up etc. But we all still pay for that no matter how "off the grid" we like to imagine ourselves to be.
On a sidenote a major pet peeve of mine is the term "off the grid" which usually means someone lives outside of urban areas and might have well water and or some kind of private electrical source. Often these places have paved and painted roads leading right to this "off the grid" location! The biggest grid is the road network and there is almost nowhere it doesn't go and it is all public (the exceptions are so rare they are negligable - even most "private" toll roads are more accurately described as a private contract to maintain a toll booth on a private road and maybe also a contract to do road maintenance for the public on a small section of the road)
Also, if one is to consider the meaning of "grid" ie a sort of oppressive network that traps you... A grid of water and electricity aren't very trapping - certainly not compared to a road network designed for cars that leaves other uses at the margins (very literally). The worst is people who get bottled water delivered and say they are off the grid - yet of course are using trucks that take from the public, don't give back, and do it super ineffectively. All the while drinking plastic.
Hitler loved to imagine a world full of cars. This is (part of) why he admired Ford so much. And this is why he started the Autobahn network that was later copied in the US interstate system. He wanted a world full of "atomic supermen" and indeed we now got it. So many deluded individuals live thinking that they have achieved some sort of independence on the "open road" while being totally interdependent on a huge corporate/state system of oil/cars/military. Rebel in a car = Rebel without a clue.
Are 3 of those cars tractors? Why would you possibly need 3 extra cars? I can imagine 1 extra postentially if all 5 were normally in use (highly unlikely)
Also, car ownership is heavily subsidised and it is a lie that you can take individual responsibility for it. We all pay for the manufacture, subsitence, pollution and disposal of cars.
People who own cars are the ones forcing their poor financial choices on the rest of us that are smart enough not to own one. We all pay for that system. And I'm not even counting the biggest public expense -roads- without which cars are useless.
Cars are also the most advertised product overall - so, it is natural that people think absurd things like: their car is only theirs and that they are independent individuals using a transport machine that isn't a burden to others. Complete fiction but like the Bible it is unquestionable.
Actually, 100 years ago most places in North America had worse density but better public transit. (Streetcars were everywhere!) Density is certainly a big issue. But political will is a bigger issue. If you can collectively afford to pay for many paved roads and disposable private automobiles you have more than enough to pay for some train tracks and long term light rail trains. The automobile system is more expensive overall and only has a wider reach given certain assumed subsidised costs (roads everywhere).
Sweaty maybe but not exhausted. And it depends where you are going. I would be much less prepared for my job (physically/mentally) if I had to drive there.
For me a car would take 3-4x more time to get where I need than biking and roughly the same amount of time compared to public transit. The choices of where you live make a big difference. I'm sure I could pay hundreds of dollars less per month in rent if I lived way out in the suburbs. But the time and energy to commute and probably need to own a car would be thousands more per month so this way I save lots of money and can afford to work part time.
This is not true in Europe and places where public transit is taken seriously. For instace Slovakia is a fairly poor country but has excellent affordable rail service. This includes single car trains that resemble busses and go into very small towns.
Land use and ownership patterns in North America make such sensible cheap solutions difficult. Change could happen here if we had the political will. However, the huge river of public funding to the private automobile (easily our largest material expenditure, traditionally tied into military-industrial) would have to be diverted. Private discretionary spending would also need to change, the $8000/yr private car cost (very conservative figure) would have to be redirected at least partially.
The good news is that public transit DOES save money overall. A lot. A simple analogy would be train vs. car: Cost of one efficient train engine pulling many cars is a lot less than -- Many cars each with their own small (impossible to be very efficient) engine often colliding with each other.
To turn the slashdot convention on it's head ---lets have a computer analogy for the car system! Imagine the inefficiency if each user on the internet had to individually do all the work of all the web,mail servers, switches, DNS, spam filtering etc. etc. Instead of now where fairly well designed data centres (with VMs etc) do a lot of the heavy lifting and can afford to concentrate expertise there.
(I'm sure someone will think of a better computer-car analogy below)
Any car costs a lot more than the alternative in ownership, except perhaps owning a boat or plane. Old cars have very high maintenance costs that do add up. If you do the work yourself that cost is hidden but still huge (time, energy, space)
The cost of parking a car you own is huge and usually underestimated especially because often public parking is given away free at a hidden cost to all taxpayers. (non-car owners pay more than their fair share)
Public costs for roads are incomparable but I assume we are ignoring those. The whole ideology of the motor car system is to hide public costs in order to make the individual perceived cost seem affordable. Advertising deludes us into thinking we are independant when we have a car when in fact you are just as much tied to the tracks as a train.
Using a bicycle in combination with public transit can be particularly cost effective alternative, sometimes even in areas with inadequate public transit infrastructure.
However, we can all agree that public transit isn't an option where it doesn't exist (far too many paved places)
Not that I would prefer a US government to our own, but most of your examples simply come down to the US being a lot bigger with more people so there is higher incidence of the things you are describing.
I also don't really see what is so mystical and hard to understand about examining the basic economic structure. It isn't just political opinion to state that there is a difference in for-profit vs something else. A lot of people nowadays don't understand the basic definition of profit. Profit is not getting paid for the work you do. It is getting paid for MORE than the work you do plus all other expenses including debt repayment. Profit isn't immoral because of some abstract or subjective circumstance, it is immoral because you are making an unfair exchange where you get back more than you put in (labour and all included)
I'm not going to say Marx was a true scientist but at least there was a certain sanity to his definitions that we now lack in our Private-Profit-is-my-Birthright era.
The high altitude makes pollution worse. I was in Bogota Columbia and the pollution there in combination with the altitude made the air very unhealthy. Like Mexico City they are implementing ways to get cars off the streets where only odd numbered licence plates can drive on odd days etc.
I'm quite certain the pollution and altitude mix makes things worse there. The question is the disease still leathal in other environments. The Google map had a death in Baja Mexico as well... I think we'll see the results in the next few days. If the disease is widely leathal outside of Mexico City and peripheral (as opposed to just contageous) then that would debunk our theory somewhat.
On the other hand as these scares spread so do -I would think- the incidence of exaggeration and mis-reported deaths (only suspected to be swine flue because of the notion being so present) so the information isn't going to be objective.
The best case scenario is that the pollution is the cause of the real leathality and then in the aftermath we but more serious efforts into improving air quality and maybe reducing dependance on plague breeding factory farms (However, that never really happened with the bird flu scare so it's probably too optimistic)
I'm just guessing but I think the famously abysmal air quality in Mexico City probably has something to do with the deadliness of this flu there. Isn't it a respiratory problem ultimately?
The high mortality in other cities has yet to materialise.
I'm hoping that in the long run we will maybe start taking air quality seriously as a result of this. Maybe even decide to stop relying on cars because we don't really need them in cities. (Unlike computer analogies)
On the other hand maybe we should all watch a tall stack of apocalyptic movies (The latest ones I saw were: the Happening, Blindness, The Day the Earth Stood Still, none were good - Blindness the only one worth considering) and freak ourselves out and get paranoid about our neighbours and immigrants. I'm sure that would be helpful.
Wouldn't it be simpler to assume the soldier population was in ill-health? Lots of injuries, trenchfoot, psychological damage, tired, etc?
I think the revealing fact would be to compare gender since (I'm assuming) most of the soldiers were male. If this death rate bump was among males but not females that would point to it being a soldier related phenomenon. On the other hand if it was both genders then one would consider the theories about it attacking "healthy" immune systems as more plausible.
Either way, this is a scary bit of news. Fear is dangerous.
That's only the most basic level of what a classroom provides. As much as we like to show it off - our technology still can't achieve most of the subtle and important interactions that being there in person provides. Things like Twitter and Facebook just start to provide some of that functionality and look how hot they are. Neither is particularly technologically advanced - the hard part is replicating the the ultra complex functionality of human interactions.
I had bad experiences with online courses too. So much time is wasted figuring out the badly designed system (how to login, how to post, how to keep up) and the topic of the course is obscured. It allowed me to procrastinate and do a lot less work which helped me a little then because I was super busy at the time but overall I learned a lot less and it was easy to be lazy because I could always navigate the web quicker than the others and do a half-assed job that looked decent because I had the tech part figured out quicker.
This kind of idiot is ruining our schools everwhere and us geeks are not calling the shucksters like this out enough so they keep getting away with it!
My ART school (Emily Carr, Vancouver) has a president (and CEO) who is constantly on about this kind of "digital" nonsense. Meanwhile he does an interview for the National Business newspaper with him sitting there with a dual monitor WindowsXP (in 2006) saying he is avante-garde technologist artist hot shit. (Not trying to slag Windoze here, just saying that a dual monitor rig with default OS isn't cutting edge digital anything)
The school doesn't even KNOW what open source means. The school is totally NOT high tech but rather sold up the river buying the typical software suites that are NOT innovative, shunning spending on real art materials.
Basically the whole point is very bad old school, save money, make more profits. How did we let private profiteers run higher education? My ART school was a depressing place. The hands-on studios were empty due to being de-emphasized and underfunded. (too costly too upkeep in the new regieme, things might get messy and require knowledgable staff to maintain) The computer labs were also basically under-used because - hey, why not just work at home anyway if all you can use is a lame default networked XP or OSX with only officially vetted software.
Was there any combining of cool traditional arts with cool digital hacking a la the MAKE magazine type of culture? Not unless you did it on your own time and dime. The school would make a fuss if you did. Sometimes they would claim credit but never integrate the type of sharing culture required to cultivate this at the school. The whole school is reduced to this cliched argument of digital vs. traditional, modern technology vs old masters from the 1970s. Instead of being a place of hybrid innovation (as the school's literature desperately proclaims at every breath) it becomes a backwater where people get depressed about the whole for-profit-mostly BS situation and don't have the energy to even follow the exciting digital/analog/creative art and sharing that our culture of free internet sharing has brought us.
I suppose I'm almost supporting the techno-whiz-bang fellows argument that schools are becoming obsolete and unable to handle technology. But he isn't saying that it is his false utopian promises that are the basis for the whole cynical changes to the system.
Obviously there are signifigant technologically based changes that can and will be happening. However the edutainment model is backwards, anti-tech and needs to be called out. A bunch of passive consumers to whom technology might as well be a magic box is about as antithetical to higher learning as you can get.
-End of rant. (I sure wish there was more of a geek community at my school when I went there)
Actually the article is asserting that Caribbean piracy was never as significant as fiction makes it out to be in comparison to that of British poaching of Persian/Indian trade.
You want to tell me once more that the USA is exceptional and use us perspectives to back that up (Only in the USA does the NYT count as an "outsider" perspective of "liberalism", and while you are at it you should look up the term liberalism because it doesn't mean what US media voices use it to mean). I don't see how that is particularly relevant.
The article is not referenced and isn't meant to be academic (unlike your very worldly NYT scholarship). It's an opinion piece that asks us to question our mythologies. Just like cowboys, the historical pirate isn't very much like what we see in moving pictures (though they do but a lot of effort into the costumes). The social impact of these phenomenon is not what Hollywood storytelling usually portrays (but Hollywood storytelling is a long tail of that impact)
The author is pointing out that nation building and piracy are very similar acts, especially when done on a large scale.
The "piracy" that Potvin is alluding to in the USA is not nautical but rather the theft of land (NDN) and theft of people (slavery) that founded the Empire's colonies in the New World. And yes, at that time the English speaking empire was also involved in the Indian Ocean.
You're correct in citing British Piracy against the New World colonies as a source of national unity in the US. And thereby you are confirming Kevin's assertion that piracy is akin to nation building. In this case you might say piracy inverted, however, had the tides of history been different and France not sided with the rebellious colonies then probably the British Piracy would have been the foundation for a different kind of nation as it had been intended (but obviously backfired on them)
And actually, when the pirates seized a ship full of armaments, I would say that one could make a pretty convincing argument that that was a righteous act with theoretically wide reaching positive consequences.
But of course not, America is exceptional. Everything else is terrorism or piracy or some other lawlessness that America is morally justified in punishing - especially if that punishment is torture or some other lawlessness. All the better to show the world how exceptional America really is.
Thanks for reading the article BTW, I enjoy defending it and most people don't bother reading because the subject is too arcane and the author a true blue hack. (I've met him, he use to run a great bookstore)
adequacy.org seems interesting. Never seen that before.
Actually The Republic: they're more like devil's advocates here, it's a local paper but pretty often writes about grandiose ideas. He'll write contradictory articles in the hopes of getting people talking and thinking.
Blame America first is like Blame yourself (myself) first. It's a wisdom and humbleness that should be more universal.
Actually the pirates are doing the real work of nation building just as pirates usually are. It just happens that they are on the other side and not ours otherwise we would call them the navy or entrepaneurs.
Another criminal activity in Somalia is the use of their waters/ports/military supply routes by rich trading nations who pay nothing back for what they are using and only get away with it because Somalia is a failed state. However, now that they are getting more organised (less failed) we call them pirates because we (USA) isn't in favour of stability, democracy or anything like that unless it profits us.
You do it first and we'll all watch. If it really is a great idea I'm sure you'll be rewarded for your innovation.
(In reality nuclear isn't economic at all - it relies on more cost of subsidy than the benefit it produces... And all the nonsense you hear about it being safe now that we are in the future is just successful marketing)
What we lack is not resources or money but imagination. Money is just a number on human social value. If we decide that we value something all of a sudden it can go from having no value to having huge value.
It's actually not simpler to use fossil fuels than it is to use the wind around you... or at least from the perspective of someone thinking in longer range terms.
My great grandfather was a sailing ship captain. Of the last European commercial sailing vessels. They would get towed out from London all the way to the spot where the Ocean wind was steady and left from there. Across the Atlantic to South America. They went all around the world that way and carried heavy cargo like tin and coal. I'm not a real buff on the history but my impression was that the sailing ships were used for the cheaper materials (low density per dollar) were sent by said whereas only the higher value cargo would be on fuel transport --- this was because fuel was so much more costly than sail.
With all of our technological advances it isn't hard to imagine a more efficient huge sailboat. But we are creatures of habit and change is adobted slowly even if it is superior technology. We could do sailing, the question is do we want to?
But then you're going to have the problem solved instead of opening up a new can of worms with lots of jobs and neverending problems to solve. Intelligence is bad for the economy.
this reminds me of an article printed in Harpers some years back discussing the then current war movie Jarhead and the idea if it was ever possible to create a truly anti-war film that didn't in the end glorify war. The main argument being that the film Apocalypse Now - probably the most famous "Anti-"War film is referenced in the film Jarhead - and apparently this is a true story - the Death from Above Scene where they play Wagner and destroy the unarmed village from helicopter is used psyche up the soldier and get them ready for combat in Iraq War 1991.
I know a lot of computer geeks like to take the free speech line of reasoning that says we can't blame the messenger and that censorship is evil. However, (and I am not arguing in favour of censorship) it really is a shame that we have such a black and white morality where you either have horrible censorship or you have media which promotes barbarism. The stories we tell are what define us and are what we refer to when we imagine solutions to how we need to act in the real world. There is a definate relationship between violent individualistic storytelling and the type of morally abhorrent behaviors (normalisation of government torture etc) that we now live with.
What I would prefer to outright censorship would by a populist system of moral values where violence was considered uncool (or some other way of being socially unacceptable but not banned)... However, usually social systems like that are religious or otherwise have major flaws.
Well, I'm just guessing but it may be more user friendly. Last time I tried BSD I didn't complete the install because: A) the text based install gave me lots of options I didn't understand and I couldn't Google the answer because the network wasn't installed yet B) I've already got a fine working linux install and I wasn't motivated to do much work to really install it - i just wanted to test/play. However, my avoidance of getting really into the details would be quite parallel to a newbie who really wants to adopt but is foiled by getting in over his head.
It's vital for seeing how the OS recognises hardware. Sometimes even different versions of the same distribution will have major differences and the new one just doesn't work with a piece of hardware! Even if it only requires minor tweaking knowing that some important hardware (like a wifi card, or a RAID card!) is not going to work out of the box is pretty vital to doing a successful install.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a neat farm. I don't mean to personally bug you.
There are massive subsidies at all points of the system of cars. Mining the minerals oil and metals is subsidised heavily. The most obvious source being that these are public goods sold to private interests for a song. Even after that it is well known how often Mining requires intervention in order to continue.
The auto manufacturing industry is heavily subsidised as the recent crisis makes clear. They have been bailed out many times before though not often as dramatically. Additionally, military funding (public) is often a major part of the equation. Historically, during both WW1 and WW2 the auto industry made tanks (and other arms) for the public. This public infrastructure later became the base capital that fueled the industry. If you look at the adoption of private automobiles the more dramatic shifts in adoption happened immediately after the wars and were based on this public event.
Of course neither of us individually opted to pay for roads, disposal, pollution clean up etc. But we all still pay for that no matter how "off the grid" we like to imagine ourselves to be.
On a sidenote a major pet peeve of mine is the term "off the grid" which usually means someone lives outside of urban areas and might have well water and or some kind of private electrical source. Often these places have paved and painted roads leading right to this "off the grid" location! The biggest grid is the road network and there is almost nowhere it doesn't go and it is all public (the exceptions are so rare they are negligable - even most "private" toll roads are more accurately described as a private contract to maintain a toll booth on a private road and maybe also a contract to do road maintenance for the public on a small section of the road)
Also, if one is to consider the meaning of "grid" ie a sort of oppressive network that traps you... A grid of water and electricity aren't very trapping - certainly not compared to a road network designed for cars that leaves other uses at the margins (very literally). The worst is people who get bottled water delivered and say they are off the grid - yet of course are using trucks that take from the public, don't give back, and do it super ineffectively. All the while drinking plastic.
Hitler loved to imagine a world full of cars. This is (part of) why he admired Ford so much. And this is why he started the Autobahn network that was later copied in the US interstate system. He wanted a world full of "atomic supermen" and indeed we now got it. So many deluded individuals live thinking that they have achieved some sort of independence on the "open road" while being totally interdependent on a huge corporate/state system of oil/cars/military. Rebel in a car = Rebel without a clue.
Are 3 of those cars tractors? Why would you possibly need 3 extra cars? I can imagine 1 extra postentially if all 5 were normally in use (highly unlikely)
Also, car ownership is heavily subsidised and it is a lie that you can take individual responsibility for it. We all pay for the manufacture, subsitence, pollution and disposal of cars.
People who own cars are the ones forcing their poor financial choices on the rest of us that are smart enough not to own one. We all pay for that system. And I'm not even counting the biggest public expense -roads- without which cars are useless.
Cars are also the most advertised product overall - so, it is natural that people think absurd things like: their car is only theirs and that they are independent individuals using a transport machine that isn't a burden to others. Complete fiction but like the Bible it is unquestionable.
Actually, 100 years ago most places in North America had worse density but better public transit. (Streetcars were everywhere!) Density is certainly a big issue. But political will is a bigger issue. If you can collectively afford to pay for many paved roads and disposable private automobiles you have more than enough to pay for some train tracks and long term light rail trains. The automobile system is more expensive overall and only has a wider reach given certain assumed subsidised costs (roads everywhere).
Sweaty maybe but not exhausted. And it depends where you are going. I would be much less prepared for my job (physically/mentally) if I had to drive there.
For me a car would take 3-4x more time to get where I need than biking and roughly the same amount of time compared to public transit. The choices of where you live make a big difference. I'm sure I could pay hundreds of dollars less per month in rent if I lived way out in the suburbs. But the time and energy to commute and probably need to own a car would be thousands more per month so this way I save lots of money and can afford to work part time.
This is not true in Europe and places where public transit is taken seriously. For instace Slovakia is a fairly poor country but has excellent affordable rail service. This includes single car trains that resemble busses and go into very small towns.
Land use and ownership patterns in North America make such sensible cheap solutions difficult. Change could happen here if we had the political will. However, the huge river of public funding to the private automobile (easily our largest material expenditure, traditionally tied into military-industrial) would have to be diverted. Private discretionary spending would also need to change, the $8000/yr private car cost (very conservative figure) would have to be redirected at least partially.
The good news is that public transit DOES save money overall. A lot. A simple analogy would be train vs. car: Cost of one efficient train engine pulling many cars is a lot less than -- Many cars each with their own small (impossible to be very efficient) engine often colliding with each other.
To turn the slashdot convention on it's head ---lets have a computer analogy for the car system! Imagine the inefficiency if each user on the internet had to individually do all the work of all the web,mail servers, switches, DNS, spam filtering etc. etc. Instead of now where fairly well designed data centres (with VMs etc) do a lot of the heavy lifting and can afford to concentrate expertise there.
(I'm sure someone will think of a better computer-car analogy below)
Any car costs a lot more than the alternative in ownership, except perhaps owning a boat or plane. Old cars have very high maintenance costs that do add up. If you do the work yourself that cost is hidden but still huge (time, energy, space)
The cost of parking a car you own is huge and usually underestimated especially because often public parking is given away free at a hidden cost to all taxpayers. (non-car owners pay more than their fair share)
Public costs for roads are incomparable but I assume we are ignoring those. The whole ideology of the motor car system is to hide public costs in order to make the individual perceived cost seem affordable. Advertising deludes us into thinking we are independant when we have a car when in fact you are just as much tied to the tracks as a train.
Using a bicycle in combination with public transit can be particularly cost effective alternative, sometimes even in areas with inadequate public transit infrastructure.
However, we can all agree that public transit isn't an option where it doesn't exist (far too many paved places)
Not that I would prefer a US government to our own, but most of your examples simply come down to the US being a lot bigger with more people so there is higher incidence of the things you are describing.
I also don't really see what is so mystical and hard to understand about examining the basic economic structure. It isn't just political opinion to state that there is a difference in for-profit vs something else. A lot of people nowadays don't understand the basic definition of profit. Profit is not getting paid for the work you do. It is getting paid for MORE than the work you do plus all other expenses including debt repayment. Profit isn't immoral because of some abstract or subjective circumstance, it is immoral because you are making an unfair exchange where you get back more than you put in (labour and all included)
I'm not going to say Marx was a true scientist but at least there was a certain sanity to his definitions that we now lack in our Private-Profit-is-my-Birthright era.
The high altitude makes pollution worse. I was in Bogota Columbia and the pollution there in combination with the altitude made the air very unhealthy. Like Mexico City they are implementing ways to get cars off the streets where only odd numbered licence plates can drive on odd days etc.
I'm quite certain the pollution and altitude mix makes things worse there. The question is the disease still leathal in other environments. The Google map had a death in Baja Mexico as well... I think we'll see the results in the next few days. If the disease is widely leathal outside of Mexico City and peripheral (as opposed to just contageous) then that would debunk our theory somewhat.
On the other hand as these scares spread so do -I would think- the incidence of exaggeration and mis-reported deaths (only suspected to be swine flue because of the notion being so present) so the information isn't going to be objective.
The best case scenario is that the pollution is the cause of the real leathality and then in the aftermath we but more serious efforts into improving air quality and maybe reducing dependance on plague breeding factory farms (However, that never really happened with the bird flu scare so it's probably too optimistic)
I'm just guessing but I think the famously abysmal air quality in Mexico City probably has something to do with the deadliness of this flu there. Isn't it a respiratory problem ultimately?
The high mortality in other cities has yet to materialise.
I'm hoping that in the long run we will maybe start taking air quality seriously as a result of this. Maybe even decide to stop relying on cars because we don't really need them in cities. (Unlike computer analogies)
On the other hand maybe we should all watch a tall stack of apocalyptic movies (The latest ones I saw were: the Happening, Blindness, The Day the Earth Stood Still, none were good - Blindness the only one worth considering) and freak ourselves out and get paranoid about our neighbours and immigrants. I'm sure that would be helpful.
Wouldn't it be simpler to assume the soldier population was in ill-health? Lots of injuries, trenchfoot, psychological damage, tired, etc?
I think the revealing fact would be to compare gender since (I'm assuming) most of the soldiers were male. If this death rate bump was among males but not females that would point to it being a soldier related phenomenon. On the other hand if it was both genders then one would consider the theories about it attacking "healthy" immune systems as more plausible.
Either way, this is a scary bit of news. Fear is dangerous.
That's only the most basic level of what a classroom provides. As much as we like to show it off - our technology still can't achieve most of the subtle and important interactions that being there in person provides. Things like Twitter and Facebook just start to provide some of that functionality and look how hot they are. Neither is particularly technologically advanced - the hard part is replicating the the ultra complex functionality of human interactions.
I had bad experiences with online courses too. So much time is wasted figuring out the badly designed system (how to login, how to post, how to keep up) and the topic of the course is obscured. It allowed me to procrastinate and do a lot less work which helped me a little then because I was super busy at the time but overall I learned a lot less and it was easy to be lazy because I could always navigate the web quicker than the others and do a half-assed job that looked decent because I had the tech part figured out quicker.
This kind of idiot is ruining our schools everwhere and us geeks are not calling the shucksters like this out enough so they keep getting away with it!
My ART school (Emily Carr, Vancouver) has a president (and CEO) who is constantly on about this kind of "digital" nonsense. Meanwhile he does an interview for the National Business newspaper with him sitting there with a dual monitor WindowsXP (in 2006) saying he is avante-garde technologist artist hot shit. (Not trying to slag Windoze here, just saying that a dual monitor rig with default OS isn't cutting edge digital anything)
The school doesn't even KNOW what open source means. The school is totally NOT high tech but rather sold up the river buying the typical software suites that are NOT innovative, shunning spending on real art materials.
Basically the whole point is very bad old school, save money, make more profits. How did we let private profiteers run higher education? My ART school was a depressing place. The hands-on studios were empty due to being de-emphasized and underfunded. (too costly too upkeep in the new regieme, things might get messy and require knowledgable staff to maintain) The computer labs were also basically under-used because - hey, why not just work at home anyway if all you can use is a lame default networked XP or OSX with only officially vetted software.
Was there any combining of cool traditional arts with cool digital hacking a la the MAKE magazine type of culture? Not unless you did it on your own time and dime. The school would make a fuss if you did. Sometimes they would claim credit but never integrate the type of sharing culture required to cultivate this at the school. The whole school is reduced to this cliched argument of digital vs. traditional, modern technology vs old masters from the 1970s. Instead of being a place of hybrid innovation (as the school's literature desperately proclaims at every breath) it becomes a backwater where people get depressed about the whole for-profit-mostly BS situation and don't have the energy to even follow the exciting digital/analog/creative art and sharing that our culture of free internet sharing has brought us.
I suppose I'm almost supporting the techno-whiz-bang fellows argument that schools are becoming obsolete and unable to handle technology. But he isn't saying that it is his false utopian promises that are the basis for the whole cynical changes to the system.
Obviously there are signifigant technologically based changes that can and will be happening. However the edutainment model is backwards, anti-tech and needs to be called out. A bunch of passive consumers to whom technology might as well be a magic box is about as antithetical to higher learning as you can get.
-End of rant.
(I sure wish there was more of a geek community at my school when I went there)
Actually the article is asserting that Caribbean piracy was never as significant as fiction makes it out to be in comparison to that of British poaching of Persian/Indian trade.
You want to tell me once more that the USA is exceptional and use us perspectives to back that up (Only in the USA does the NYT count as an "outsider" perspective of "liberalism", and while you are at it you should look up the term liberalism because it doesn't mean what US media voices use it to mean). I don't see how that is particularly relevant.
The article is not referenced and isn't meant to be academic (unlike your very worldly NYT scholarship). It's an opinion piece that asks us to question our mythologies. Just like cowboys, the historical pirate isn't very much like what we see in moving pictures (though they do but a lot of effort into the costumes). The social impact of these phenomenon is not what Hollywood storytelling usually portrays (but Hollywood storytelling is a long tail of that impact)
The author is pointing out that nation building and piracy are very similar acts, especially when done on a large scale.
The "piracy" that Potvin is alluding to in the USA is not nautical but rather the theft of land (NDN) and theft of people (slavery) that founded the Empire's colonies in the New World. And yes, at that time the English speaking empire was also involved in the Indian Ocean.
You're correct in citing British Piracy against the New World colonies as a source of national unity in the US. And thereby you are confirming Kevin's assertion that piracy is akin to nation building. In this case you might say piracy inverted, however, had the tides of history been different and France not sided with the rebellious colonies then probably the British Piracy would have been the foundation for a different kind of nation as it had been intended (but obviously backfired on them)
And actually, when the pirates seized a ship full of armaments, I would say that one could make a pretty convincing argument that that was a righteous act with theoretically wide reaching positive consequences.
But of course not, America is exceptional. Everything else is terrorism or piracy or some other lawlessness that America is morally justified in punishing - especially if that punishment is torture or some other lawlessness. All the better to show the world how exceptional America really is.
Thanks for reading the article BTW, I enjoy defending it and most people don't bother reading because the subject is too arcane and the author a true blue hack. (I've met him, he use to run a great bookstore)
adequacy.org seems interesting. Never seen that before.
Actually The Republic: they're more like devil's advocates here, it's a local paper but pretty often writes about grandiose ideas. He'll write contradictory articles in the hopes of getting people talking and thinking.
Blame America first is like Blame yourself (myself) first. It's a wisdom and humbleness that should be more universal.
The author got in most trouble for writing this one article: http://republic-news.org/archive/52-repub/repub_52_potvin_conf.html
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070413/Kevin_Potvin_070413/20070413?hub=Politics
Well, someone has to cleanup the oil spills and I actually did mention using the ports and shipping arms illegally through this lawless land.
Your response would be more witty if it was in reference to what I did write.
Actually the pirates are doing the real work of nation building just as pirates usually are. It just happens that they are on the other side and not ours otherwise we would call them the navy or entrepaneurs.
Another criminal activity in Somalia is the use of their waters/ports/military supply routes by rich trading nations who pay nothing back for what they are using and only get away with it because Somalia is a failed state. However, now that they are getting more organised (less failed) we call them pirates because we (USA) isn't in favour of stability, democracy or anything like that unless it profits us.
http://www.republic-news.org/archive/208-repub/208_potvin_pirates.html
You do it first and we'll all watch. If it really is a great idea I'm sure you'll be rewarded for your innovation.
(In reality nuclear isn't economic at all - it relies on more cost of subsidy than the benefit it produces... And all the nonsense you hear about it being safe now that we are in the future is just successful marketing)
What we lack is not resources or money but imagination. Money is just a number on human social value. If we decide that we value something all of a sudden it can go from having no value to having huge value.
It's actually not simpler to use fossil fuels than it is to use the wind around you... or at least from the perspective of someone thinking in longer range terms.
My great grandfather was a sailing ship captain. Of the last European commercial sailing vessels. They would get towed out from London all the way to the spot where the Ocean wind was steady and left from there. Across the Atlantic to South America. They went all around the world that way and carried heavy cargo like tin and coal. I'm not a real buff on the history but my impression was that the sailing ships were used for the cheaper materials (low density per dollar) were sent by said whereas only the higher value cargo would be on fuel transport --- this was because fuel was so much more costly than sail.
With all of our technological advances it isn't hard to imagine a more efficient huge sailboat. But we are creatures of habit and change is adobted slowly even if it is superior technology. We could do sailing, the question is do we want to?
But then you're going to have the problem solved instead of opening up a new can of worms with lots of jobs and neverending problems to solve. Intelligence is bad for the economy.
this reminds me of an article printed in Harpers some years back discussing the then current war movie Jarhead and the idea if it was ever possible to create a truly anti-war film that didn't in the end glorify war. The main argument being that the film Apocalypse Now - probably the most famous "Anti-"War film is referenced in the film Jarhead - and apparently this is a true story - the Death from Above Scene where they play Wagner and destroy the unarmed village from helicopter is used psyche up the soldier and get them ready for combat in Iraq War 1991.
I know a lot of computer geeks like to take the free speech line of reasoning that says we can't blame the messenger and that censorship is evil. However, (and I am not arguing in favour of censorship) it really is a shame that we have such a black and white morality where you either have horrible censorship or you have media which promotes barbarism. The stories we tell are what define us and are what we refer to when we imagine solutions to how we need to act in the real world. There is a definate relationship between violent individualistic storytelling and the type of morally abhorrent behaviors (normalisation of government torture etc) that we now live with.
What I would prefer to outright censorship would by a populist system of moral values where violence was considered uncool (or some other way of being socially unacceptable but not banned)... However, usually social systems like that are religious or otherwise have major flaws.
Well, I'm just guessing but it may be more user friendly. Last time I tried BSD I didn't complete the install because:
A) the text based install gave me lots of options I didn't understand and I couldn't Google the answer because the network wasn't installed yet
B) I've already got a fine working linux install and I wasn't motivated to do much work to really install it - i just wanted to test/play. However, my avoidance of getting really into the details would be quite parallel to a newbie who really wants to adopt but is foiled by getting in over his head.
It's vital for seeing how the OS recognises hardware. Sometimes even different versions of the same distribution will have major differences and the new one just doesn't work with a piece of hardware! Even if it only requires minor tweaking knowing that some important hardware (like a wifi card, or a RAID card!) is not going to work out of the box is pretty vital to doing a successful install.
This should have been posted yesterday morning.