I would, but I'm not a US resident, so I probably wouldn't show up on their radar.
I don't know what the 7th grader wrote, but that tweet could certainly count as a death threat. These were two isolated incidents. Like I said before, wake me when the Teabaggers calling Obama the Ante-Christ are being arrested in droves...
Oh please, there's no such thing as a 'slippery slope'. Not since the Constitution of the US. and the Declaration of Independence established your right to rebel should your government lose track of its objectives. The slope continues as long as you let it continue. Besides, at least 50% of GP's examples are rightfully illegal: would you like to take your chances with poisoned Tylenol you ordered from a Korean online pharmacy?
You know the main difference between Freedom of Speech and Totalitarian Censorship? If you put up blog post saying "I hate Obama, I wish he was dead!", you get nothing in the US. If you put up a blog post saying "I'm fed up with communism, let's move to something else! Oh yeah, and the Politburo should just up and die!", men in a black Volga will visit you sooner than you can say "Who's that knocking on the door so late at night?".
3. More nuke plants for power. Shut down coal plants and replace with with nukes. No more "green energy"; it doesn't work. Solar would require the space of a planet to power the planet, and wind kills hundreds of thousands of birds a year, including lots of endangered varieties. We've learned a lot from TMI, Chernobyl, and even Fukushima, and we could get some pointers from the French, too.
Basically the only thing I agree with. Nukes can produce the output of a hundred coal/oil-fired plants, at a fraction of the pollution. Green energy is useful as a supplement, but can not carry the energy density required to power our civilization on its own.
Communism is a complete and total failure - economically, socially, politically. The lies of the production rates of the factories was a symptom, not a cause.
Communism makes everyone equally poor, so the poor in a capitalist society are richer than all but the the ruling class in the communist countries.
And where did I say it was a success? The over-reporting was both a symptom, and a cause, if you wish. A symptom of the inflexibility of the system, and the cause for its eventual exhaustion and collapse.
1) Landfill space isn't an issue, at all. (Unless you're living on a small desert island.)
I never said it's a space issue. The issue is the wealth of recyclable materials in there, that aren't recycled, but replaced, exhausting the resource base of the planet.
2) It's cheaper to make a new plastic bottle than to recycle it. 3) The parts of the oil spectrum that go into new plastic bottles might not be used otherwise, IIRC. 4) If it does becomes more expensive to make new, then the freeish markish will start recycling.
Irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
5) This is the reason why most scarcity doomsaying never pans out, because the freeish market can usually find workarounds for scarcity at a higher price point.
... Up to a certain point, where there will be no more resources to exploit and prices rise sky-high. And you might be in the group that benefits from this, but most likely, you'll be in the one that becomes impoverished paupers. Because if you could profit from that, you wouldn't be posting here, but enjoying the sun in the Caribbeans...
Well FINALLY, someone who isn't having a knee-jerk Joe McCarthy-reaction! Thank you! Although I'm not sure if it would be worth it to have individual currencies any more after this. The way I see it, since the backing system is the same, as well as the accounting system, individual currencies would most likely be exchangeable at a 1:1 ratio with no room for political maneuvering in the valuation, so it would be just calling a rose by any other name. We might as well go ahead, take a cue from sci-fi, and call them credits...
As for political will, yes, it probably never will be there, since this would eliminate or severely restrict the ability of one country to economically dominate another. And guess which countries are the dominating most everyone else...? This is made even worse by the fact that the system has to be rolled out at once, otherwise global commerce falls apart as I can see no real way to convert the current, arbitrarily valued currencies into energy credits.
I, on the other hand, who has seen what a communist society is like, suspect that the failure was more due to the economy being planned five years in advance with no way to account for changes on-the-fly, and the plans having to be kept, even if it meant reporting three-four times the production that was actually occurring. And naturally, as the plans were based on the reported amounts, the economy was seen to be booming, which led to overspending. Do I really need to spell this out for you, or can you reach the deductions on your own? Also, there was no concept of resource conservation, and there still isn't a lot. Take a look at landfills: the consumer society is burning through raw materials faster than ever, even if we have the technology to recover much of these (plastics can be melted down and recast, metal frameworks or foils the same way, glass can be reused by melting it into new glass mixtures as filler, etc.). If recycling was mandated to the fullest possible extent, and I'm talking physically possible, not willingly possible, the world could get close to breaking even in terms of resource utilization, requiring comparatively little to be introduced every year (as compared to the turnover currently).
Energy accounting is in no way a communist system, not any more than the internet a "series of tubes", to bring an example you're likely to understand: you could say it is, and a dilettante might agree, but you're still horribly, horribly wrong and oversimplifying.
First off, and for the third time today, this is not communism, and never was. Read up on its definition, and compare it to what I wrote, they're fundamentally different.
Second, R&D and intellect.
While it may work for the manufacturing of basic goods, anything that requires intellect to produce, wont fit in the system.
Thing is, nothing requires intellect to produce. Create, yes. Develop, yes. Mass produce, no. After the initial design is created, it's all just raw materials and energy to produce something. Development, however, may be included in the cost as the energy consumed by the computer the designer is working on, the utility costs incurred by having them test the graphics card, the materials and energy required to fab the prototypes for testing, etc. I'm not an economist myself, but I think one could come up with a way to integrate these factors into an energy accounting system. And after the dev cycle is complete, production no longer requires intellect. However, those that invest more in R&D and come up with a more efficient way to make a product, will be awarded by lower prices and lower costs.
Except Communism was doomed to fail because it still relied on a currency accounting, and was scarcity-based, meaning that the citizens still consumed all resources at the old rate. Besides, like I said, this switch has to occur simultaneously, otherwise the first nation to adopt this will be left high and dry as they are unable to trade with the rest of the world using currencies. Also, this is only an economic model, not a socio-economic one. Society may still layer itself as it sees fit, and the modes of production are owned by the companies, not by the masses. There's no need for communal ownership, any more than there is a need to abolish social classes: what you buy with the energy credits you are allotted is yours, no questions asked. The political model needs no changing either (purely because of this, otherwise it does, but that's a different story).
However, if you still live in the 1950s, listening to Joe McCarthy, I can understand your opposition. The energy accounting system could theoretically work after a capitalist fashion, where one is awarded credits based on the work they do, but that has its own problems, including calculating how much one contributed to the nation's production with their job, if at all (hint: services do not produce anything, so the western world's majority would be in a bit of a bind). Really, it's just less hassle and fewer chances to screw up if it is implemented as what you call communism, which it really isn't.
I, for one, am partial to energy accounting. Given that we can recycle much or most of the components in today's products, the only resource we consume irreversibly is power. By measuring an item's price in terms of power needed to produce a set quantity, we can have true, effective competition, unskewed by 'creative accounting', bailouts, and other practices. Then, by dividing a country's productive capacity among its population, we can prevent overspending by any one institution or individual: end of debts, and banking (since you can't put an interest on energy).
The problem with this is that it can't be rolled out incrementally. This is a change that needs to occur globally and simultaneously, preceded by years or decades of planning (calculation and certification of global energy costs for every item produced at the time, mandating proper recycling tech so that the basic premise (energy is the only non-renewable resource consumed) is valid, setting up whole new exchange systems to facilitate trade, etc.), so that when the switch occurs, everything falls into place on the first go, because if it doesn't, all hell breaks loose.
Done right, this could move humanity into a pseudo-post-scarcity world, given that everyone will have more energy credits to spend in, say, a year, than they could conceivably do so. It wouldn't be true post-scarcity, since some of the materials are still being consumed, however slowly, and will continue to be limited, but this limitation will be severely lessened through proper recycling and trade possibilities unrestricted by national debts, balances, and exchange rates. Done wrong, it will send the global economic system into a crisis that will dwarf the Great Depression, 2008 Subprime Mortgage, and Sovereign Debt crises combined. Note to world leaders: Don't screw up!
If I ever fly to the US, I'll be sure to buy a big block of modelling clay and an Arduino with an LCD before hand. I want to see the TSA guys' faces when they open my backpack, and see the message "BOOM HEADSHOT" on the LCD. That should show them a "real attack scenario". I wonder if they could do anything to me, as an EU citizen, who committed no actual crime...
No, they're not stupid. They won't release bioweapons because bioweapons are uncontrollable, by their very nature. Once you deploy them, they will kill without discrimination, and there's nothing you can do to limit their effects to the enemy. Make it successful enough, and you're killing yourself along with your target.
Why on Earth would they try to blow up the plane if they have to go through such tight security? It's a lot easier to target the lines.
Excerpts from the last thoughts of Abdul Hassan Gamal ibn al Azad*: "I wait in line, my backpack concealing three kilograms of C4, surrounded by a layer of scrap metal and nails dipped in anti-coagulant rat poison. I wait for the line to get as long as possible to include the greatest number of people in the blast. I don't care if I die, 40 (or 42?) virgins will be my reward for fighting the Holy War in the name of the one god Allah. I trigger the detonator..." Maybe less casualties than downing an Airbus, possibly more if the line is long and packed, and no need to risk going through security. The fact that the bomber dies first doesn't seem to be a problem when they're happy to die, and you can afford to use them like money ante poker chips, knowing you can always recruit five more for every one that's caught or killed. The checkpoints merely shifted the most vulnerable point from the air onto the ground, where the terrorists can do even more damage.
* Any semblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Except if they're programmed to. Thing is, they also can't be persuaded that you're right. And if they're bringing out the human Scanners, I fear for my thoughts and everything else...
No you didn't. I was going by the original syntax: "In America, there's plenty of light beer, and you can always find a party. In Russia, Party always finds you..." And if you want to start something, watch the original commercial first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbP1DVeJCT0
If the two were created in equal amounts, why is the universe we see mostly positive matter? There was possibly some effect or interaction in the first few picoseconds to skew the balance in favor of the stuff we're made up of, otherwise the universe would have been reduced to a hot photon soup pretty fast by runaway annihilation.
The problem is that apparently, a single one is enough to bring back their whole race, through cloning or finding a repository of ancient Dalek data that reconstructs into five brand new ones. You can say Deus Ex Machina, but it doesn't change the fact they just refuse to stay down.:)
I could also bring up the terrorism-example: the Daleks win if they get past the Doctor once, for the Doctor to win, he has to stop them every time. Different definitions of defeat and victory.
Slashdot Mirror
I would, but I'm not a US resident, so I probably wouldn't show up on their radar.
I don't know what the 7th grader wrote, but that tweet could certainly count as a death threat. These were two isolated incidents. Like I said before, wake me when the Teabaggers calling Obama the Ante-Christ are being arrested in droves...
Oh please, there's no such thing as a 'slippery slope'. Not since the Constitution of the US. and the Declaration of Independence established your right to rebel should your government lose track of its objectives. The slope continues as long as you let it continue.
Besides, at least 50% of GP's examples are rightfully illegal: would you like to take your chances with poisoned Tylenol you ordered from a Korean online pharmacy?
Then why aren't the Teabaggers from Facebook being arrested in droves?
You know the main difference between Freedom of Speech and Totalitarian Censorship? If you put up blog post saying "I hate Obama, I wish he was dead!", you get nothing in the US. If you put up a blog post saying "I'm fed up with communism, let's move to something else! Oh yeah, and the Politburo should just up and die!", men in a black Volga will visit you sooner than you can say "Who's that knocking on the door so late at night?".
Fuck, redundant instead of insightful. There goes my modding for this article...
Why doesn't Slashdot have an "Undo Moderation" button?
3. More nuke plants for power. Shut down coal plants and replace with with nukes. No more "green energy"; it doesn't work. Solar would require the space of a planet to power the planet, and wind kills hundreds of thousands of birds a year, including lots of endangered varieties. We've learned a lot from TMI, Chernobyl, and even Fukushima, and we could get some pointers from the French, too.
Basically the only thing I agree with. Nukes can produce the output of a hundred coal/oil-fired plants, at a fraction of the pollution. Green energy is useful as a supplement, but can not carry the energy density required to power our civilization on its own.
No.
Communism is a complete and total failure - economically, socially, politically. The lies of the production rates of the factories was a symptom, not a cause.
Communism makes everyone equally poor, so the poor in a capitalist society are richer than all but the the ruling class in the communist countries.
And where did I say it was a success? The over-reporting was both a symptom, and a cause, if you wish. A symptom of the inflexibility of the system, and the cause for its eventual exhaustion and collapse.
1) Landfill space isn't an issue, at all. (Unless you're living on a small desert island.)
I never said it's a space issue. The issue is the wealth of recyclable materials in there, that aren't recycled, but replaced, exhausting the resource base of the planet.
2) It's cheaper to make a new plastic bottle than to recycle it.
3) The parts of the oil spectrum that go into new plastic bottles might not be used otherwise, IIRC.
4) If it does becomes more expensive to make new, then the freeish markish will start recycling.
Irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
5) This is the reason why most scarcity doomsaying never pans out, because the freeish market can usually find workarounds for scarcity at a higher price point.
... Up to a certain point, where there will be no more resources to exploit and prices rise sky-high. And you might be in the group that benefits from this, but most likely, you'll be in the one that becomes impoverished paupers. Because if you could profit from that, you wouldn't be posting here, but enjoying the sun in the Caribbeans...
Well FINALLY, someone who isn't having a knee-jerk Joe McCarthy-reaction! Thank you!
Although I'm not sure if it would be worth it to have individual currencies any more after this. The way I see it, since the backing system is the same, as well as the accounting system, individual currencies would most likely be exchangeable at a 1:1 ratio with no room for political maneuvering in the valuation, so it would be just calling a rose by any other name. We might as well go ahead, take a cue from sci-fi, and call them credits...
As for political will, yes, it probably never will be there, since this would eliminate or severely restrict the ability of one country to economically dominate another. And guess which countries are the dominating most everyone else...?
This is made even worse by the fact that the system has to be rolled out at once, otherwise global commerce falls apart as I can see no real way to convert the current, arbitrarily valued currencies into energy credits.
I, on the other hand, who has seen what a communist society is like, suspect that the failure was more due to the economy being planned five years in advance with no way to account for changes on-the-fly, and the plans having to be kept, even if it meant reporting three-four times the production that was actually occurring. And naturally, as the plans were based on the reported amounts, the economy was seen to be booming, which led to overspending. Do I really need to spell this out for you, or can you reach the deductions on your own?
Also, there was no concept of resource conservation, and there still isn't a lot. Take a look at landfills: the consumer society is burning through raw materials faster than ever, even if we have the technology to recover much of these (plastics can be melted down and recast, metal frameworks or foils the same way, glass can be reused by melting it into new glass mixtures as filler, etc.). If recycling was mandated to the fullest possible extent, and I'm talking physically possible, not willingly possible, the world could get close to breaking even in terms of resource utilization, requiring comparatively little to be introduced every year (as compared to the turnover currently).
Energy accounting is in no way a communist system, not any more than the internet a "series of tubes", to bring an example you're likely to understand: you could say it is, and a dilettante might agree, but you're still horribly, horribly wrong and oversimplifying.
Synonym.
First off, and for the third time today, this is not communism, and never was. Read up on its definition, and compare it to what I wrote, they're fundamentally different.
Second, R&D and intellect.
While it may work for the manufacturing of basic goods, anything that requires intellect to produce, wont fit in the system.
Thing is, nothing requires intellect to produce. Create, yes. Develop, yes. Mass produce, no. After the initial design is created, it's all just raw materials and energy to produce something. Development, however, may be included in the cost as the energy consumed by the computer the designer is working on, the utility costs incurred by having them test the graphics card, the materials and energy required to fab the prototypes for testing, etc. I'm not an economist myself, but I think one could come up with a way to integrate these factors into an energy accounting system. And after the dev cycle is complete, production no longer requires intellect. However, those that invest more in R&D and come up with a more efficient way to make a product, will be awarded by lower prices and lower costs.
For a start, that it's not planned. Tell me, where do I introduce the concept of a planned economy in my post?
Except Communism was doomed to fail because it still relied on a currency accounting, and was scarcity-based, meaning that the citizens still consumed all resources at the old rate. Besides, like I said, this switch has to occur simultaneously, otherwise the first nation to adopt this will be left high and dry as they are unable to trade with the rest of the world using currencies.
Also, this is only an economic model, not a socio-economic one. Society may still layer itself as it sees fit, and the modes of production are owned by the companies, not by the masses. There's no need for communal ownership, any more than there is a need to abolish social classes: what you buy with the energy credits you are allotted is yours, no questions asked. The political model needs no changing either (purely because of this, otherwise it does, but that's a different story).
However, if you still live in the 1950s, listening to Joe McCarthy, I can understand your opposition. The energy accounting system could theoretically work after a capitalist fashion, where one is awarded credits based on the work they do, but that has its own problems, including calculating how much one contributed to the nation's production with their job, if at all (hint: services do not produce anything, so the western world's majority would be in a bit of a bind). Really, it's just less hassle and fewer chances to screw up if it is implemented as what you call communism, which it really isn't.
I, for one, am partial to energy accounting. Given that we can recycle much or most of the components in today's products, the only resource we consume irreversibly is power. By measuring an item's price in terms of power needed to produce a set quantity, we can have true, effective competition, unskewed by 'creative accounting', bailouts, and other practices. Then, by dividing a country's productive capacity among its population, we can prevent overspending by any one institution or individual: end of debts, and banking (since you can't put an interest on energy).
The problem with this is that it can't be rolled out incrementally. This is a change that needs to occur globally and simultaneously, preceded by years or decades of planning (calculation and certification of global energy costs for every item produced at the time, mandating proper recycling tech so that the basic premise (energy is the only non-renewable resource consumed) is valid, setting up whole new exchange systems to facilitate trade, etc.), so that when the switch occurs, everything falls into place on the first go, because if it doesn't, all hell breaks loose.
Done right, this could move humanity into a pseudo-post-scarcity world, given that everyone will have more energy credits to spend in, say, a year, than they could conceivably do so. It wouldn't be true post-scarcity, since some of the materials are still being consumed, however slowly, and will continue to be limited, but this limitation will be severely lessened through proper recycling and trade possibilities unrestricted by national debts, balances, and exchange rates.
Done wrong, it will send the global economic system into a crisis that will dwarf the Great Depression, 2008 Subprime Mortgage, and Sovereign Debt crises combined.
Note to world leaders: Don't screw up!
If I ever fly to the US, I'll be sure to buy a big block of modelling clay and an Arduino with an LCD before hand. I want to see the TSA guys' faces when they open my backpack, and see the message "BOOM HEADSHOT" on the LCD. That should show them a "real attack scenario".
I wonder if they could do anything to me, as an EU citizen, who committed no actual crime...
No, they're not stupid. They won't release bioweapons because bioweapons are uncontrollable, by their very nature. Once you deploy them, they will kill without discrimination, and there's nothing you can do to limit their effects to the enemy. Make it successful enough, and you're killing yourself along with your target.
I request asylum under the Shadow Proclamation!
Why on Earth would they try to blow up the plane if they have to go through such tight security? It's a lot easier to target the lines.
Excerpts from the last thoughts of Abdul Hassan Gamal ibn al Azad*: "I wait in line, my backpack concealing three kilograms of C4, surrounded by a layer of scrap metal and nails dipped in anti-coagulant rat poison. I wait for the line to get as long as possible to include the greatest number of people in the blast. I don't care if I die, 40 (or 42?) virgins will be my reward for fighting the Holy War in the name of the one god Allah. I trigger the detonator..."
Maybe less casualties than downing an Airbus, possibly more if the line is long and packed, and no need to risk going through security. The fact that the bomber dies first doesn't seem to be a problem when they're happy to die, and you can afford to use them like money ante poker chips, knowing you can always recruit five more for every one that's caught or killed. The checkpoints merely shifted the most vulnerable point from the air onto the ground, where the terrorists can do even more damage.
* Any semblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Except if they're programmed to. Thing is, they also can't be persuaded that you're right.
And if they're bringing out the human Scanners, I fear for my thoughts and everything else...
Up, mostly. I'd aim for Mars or Alpha Centauri, or whatever place has an oxygen atmosphere and liquid water...
No you didn't. I was going by the original syntax: "In America, there's plenty of light beer, and you can always find a party. In Russia, Party always finds you..."
And if you want to start something, watch the original commercial first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbP1DVeJCT0
A 'Soviet Russia' joke that's not disparaging of Russia: "In Russia, you reform copyright law. In America, copyright law reforms you..."
Boltzmann brains? If that were true, I wonder why my imagination created all the bastards this world has... :)
If the two were created in equal amounts, why is the universe we see mostly positive matter? There was possibly some effect or interaction in the first few picoseconds to skew the balance in favor of the stuff we're made up of, otherwise the universe would have been reduced to a hot photon soup pretty fast by runaway annihilation.
The problem is that apparently, a single one is enough to bring back their whole race, through cloning or finding a repository of ancient Dalek data that reconstructs into five brand new ones. You can say Deus Ex Machina, but it doesn't change the fact they just refuse to stay down. :)
I could also bring up the terrorism-example: the Daleks win if they get past the Doctor once, for the Doctor to win, he has to stop them every time. Different definitions of defeat and victory.