Then again, maybe we'd look back and see the period about 1800-2000 as one of those blips in the data set, an anomoly of time and place not seen before or since.
I've wasted most of my so-called reading on ancient Rome from about the rise of Marius to the fall of Rome so I don't have a very good grasp of the "high" period of the Roman Republic but even by 100 BC Rome strikes me as extremely undemocratic and more like a kleptocratic plutocracy with just enough distribution of power that no one family can gain the kind of power utlimately obtained by the Judeo-Claudian dynasty a century later. It's hard to believe that a century or more before the rise of Marius that Rome was significantly more democratic or inclusive or even if they were that it was far enough along in its development as a civilization to matter.
But even assuming Rome up to Augustus WAS largely democratic, what came after? You really don't see anything like individual liberty and democratic institutions until the 18th century.
Sure, we've had a good run for a couple hundred years but the current trends aren't encouraging, especially vis-a-vis our own increasingly corrupt plutocracy, mass surveillance, a hyper-active law enforcement apparatus and a growing rejection of liberal democratic thought in non-western culture.
to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life's work
Personally, I think it's great that there are people dumb/crazy/brave enough to try to accomplish this outside of whatever the ossified system is. I'm sure Linus was told by plenty of people "You can't develop a better operating system like this! We've been sitting in cubicles at Bell Labs for 20 years, slaving over punch cards and 9 track mag tapes toiling in anonymity and you think a bunch of Internet hackers are going to create a viable operating system that can do real work?"
Maybe this is what bothers all those people, that despite their trying and relative anonymity someone else NOT diligently working in anonymity and utilizing other skills or methods will succeed where they haven't, and this bugs them. Should there be a manned mission to Mars it should be THEIR mission because of their ceaseless faith and devotion to the true methods and ideals of space travel.
It almost reads like a religous argument from the 16th century -- why should a group of barely literate peasants be allowed to read and interpret the word of God and achieve salvation through their own heretical ideals and methods? It can only be achieved through the devotion to and leadership of the one true church and its singular vision as revealed through its chosen leaders.
Now, I don't know much about Mars One and it probably is a bullshit deal designed to fleece the naive and they can't get to Disney's "Mission to Mars" let alone fly a mission to Mars. So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.
What I find interesting is the recurring appeal of not conforming.
It seems like nearly every iteration of non-conformity, from jazz-loving hipsters, to hippies, to the punks/alternatives, to the generally current crop of bearded hipsters ultimately becomes popular.
Some of this can be explained by people who adopt the facile elements of these trends merely to appear popular, but many of these flavors of non-conformity end up having fairly enduring influence over larger culture which seems to be outsize relative to the number of people consciously glomming on just for popularity.
Why do people seem so drawn to fringe, non-conformist cultures?
I think your idea has some merit, but the downside would be extremely high prices.
I can remember in the late 1970s calling about a dozen long-distance "time and temperature" phone numbers and my parents got a bill for like $150. Even post-breakup, long distance remained pretty expensive -- I dated a girl who lived in Chicago and a couple of hours a week on the phone ended up being hundreds of dollars.
Does anyone ever even think about area codes anymore, especially when calling with a cell phone? I know people that relocated to Florida that still have 612 area codes on the cell phones and the only problems they run into are old farts who think they're not "local" because they have a non-local area code.
I think your idea makes more sense in the context of cellular phones -- make the towers and radio spectrum "owned" by a single, highly-regulated monopoly (think electricity) who then wholesales minutes to retail cell phone companies, aka carriers. Suddenly, we have 4x the spectrum! Devices are default portable to other "carriers" because the carriers aren't tied to physical spectrum. Pricing is now much more closely tied to actual usage. Setting up a new "carrier" is trivial and you could possible see new, no-frills carriers specializing in data only, low-bandwidth device data, etc. MVNOs come close but they inherit all the stupidity of our cell infrastructure which duplicates resources needlessly.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?
FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly because it seems to fit and no other explanation has really been offered.
The Civil War argument I've heard before but you really don't see significant changes in personal liberty as a result. The Whiskey Rebellion seems more dubious as I think you can make a strong argument for the tax and the response by Washington (and this case, quite literally George Washington) plus there doesn't seem to be any single enduring legacy of loss of personal liberty stemming from it.
Sadly, liberty and democracy have been on the losing end throughout history. We could say it died with the failure of the reforms of the Gracchi, Sulla's march on Rome and dictatorship, or the decline of the Senate at the rise of the Empire.
You could argue that the last time the US was "free" was prior to about 1910.
Before the 1911 passage of the 16th Ammendment the government's power to collect income taxes was extremely limited. A good chunk of the loss of financial freedom could be attributed to the income tax and all the various laws that grew up around enforcing it, such as limits on cash transactions, financial reporting, etc.
1909 saw the passage of the "Smoking Opium Exclusion Act" which barred the importation of opium, the first time a substance was banned for consumption. Followed up with the Harrsion Act in 1914 which got tougher on opioids and restricted them to medical uses. This leads to the next step, alcohol prohibition in 1920. Although it was overturned, it was the first big attempt at wholesale regulation of previously free behavior. The entire thing grew into the war on drugs and all the loss of freedom we now associate with it, including contributing to controls on cash transactions, a total erosion of search and seizure and mass incarceration.
Lots of other firsts from that era -- the Red Scare, the rise of Federal law enforcement, etc.
You can say we were "more free" in the 1970s or 60s or whatever, but it seems like we really started to lose it around 1910 when the Federal Government began to assert itself as a central law enforcement and control authority.
I think the prostitution angle is probably on the money.
The state can block licenses to girls with a prostitution history (thus encouraging them to avoid prostitution) and can probably yank the club's license if they hire unlicensed girls.
It probably helps the girls, too, in that the licensing reqirement probably limits the supply of dancers thus eliminating competition, making wages higher and working conditions better.
25 years ago I worked at a major State University. They had a huge, campus-wide network for AppleTalk. You could go into the Chooser and select laser printers or file servers all over the campus.
We were always coming up with conspiracies as to what to do with access to every LaserWriter on campus. Mostly we were curious how many times we'd have to print a porno image before we read about "Random Porno Images Printed Campus Wide" in the student paper.
There was zero security on any of this and I would imagine the network technology of the era probably would have made tracing it tough. Many offices, including ours, were connected behind Ethertalk bridges, which I think had an effect similar to NAT in terms of tracking traffic -- entire departments (ours was 25 people) could have been seen as a single source.
I can't imagine how they do college campus networks these days, you'd almost think they'd firewall departments off.
You're right For some reason I remember him targeting corporate executives but only the last two fatalities were corporate execs and most of his targets were University professors.
The thread starter's comment is kind of intriguing, because I can't think of any ideology that's specifically anti-corporate without being part of some other, broader anti-capitalist or anti-technological ideology or philosophy.
Maybe it will become some kind of emerging ideology, ultimately recycling anti-royalist ideas from the pre-20th century era.
Well, Ted Kaczynski led something of an anti-corporate campagin. Groups like EarthFirst have done a fair amount of direct action against environmental exploitation.
And workplace shootings aren't unheard of, although they tend to be driven more by personal rather than sociopolitical motivations. Although maybe you could make the argument that many of their grievenaces ultimately derive from soulless busines policies.
But generally, there is little targeted violence against corporations or CEOs. About the only examples I can think of are historical -- the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst, and the Red Army faction killed the head of Dresdner bank in a botched kidnapping, but there was something more politically motivated about these groups in a kind of Marxist-Lennist way than specific anti-corporate anger.
Solar batteries. You don't convert those photons into electricity and store that, you just store the light and then you can shine it on the solar cells when you need the power.
I'm absolutely sure it doesn't work like this but it's an interesting science fiction concept.
These would be more interesting if they had more clever features. Uploading and downloading files doesn't seem interesting enough on its own.
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
It would take a critical mass of users for something like this to be useful, but it seems like it would be a great way to anonymously connect people/information.
Joe Biden's son gets punished *because* he's Joe Biden's son and he serves as a proxy for punishing Joe Biden and Joe Biden is too high profile to fix it without a scandal.
If Joe Biden was John Brown instead and some kind of law partner instead of a national politician, the son would skate with minimal punishment.
I voted for him and the Grassroots candidates in the other races where they ran. Otherwise I voted Independence party as I heard they needed to get 5% in some races to stay major party status.
The Democratic governor Mark Dayton is a dry drunk, so he has major cognitive dissonance and guilt when it comes to anything involving intoxicants and was in debt to police labor votes.
So instead of a groovy, California style medical marijuana we got some lame experimental thing involving cannabis oils or something.
But then again,. we can't buy booze in grocery stores or on Sundays, so maybe its a byproduct of our stern, Scandahoovian upbringing.
It all makes sense. I need a big minimum wage so I can buy good pot and pay for my girlfriend's abortion (if the pot wasn't so good, she'd remember her free pills!).
I might go out on a limb and guess Rand Paul and some backbenchers in the House, but how many of them are "pro-market" that doesn't just stop at government regulation but acknowledges the anti-consumer/anti-competitive aspects of big business?
Usually any attempt to reign in big business results in "pro-market" responses about as complex as "Because Business."
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, maybe we'd look back and see the period about 1800-2000 as one of those blips in the data set, an anomoly of time and place not seen before or since.
I've wasted most of my so-called reading on ancient Rome from about the rise of Marius to the fall of Rome so I don't have a very good grasp of the "high" period of the Roman Republic but even by 100 BC Rome strikes me as extremely undemocratic and more like a kleptocratic plutocracy with just enough distribution of power that no one family can gain the kind of power utlimately obtained by the Judeo-Claudian dynasty a century later. It's hard to believe that a century or more before the rise of Marius that Rome was significantly more democratic or inclusive or even if they were that it was far enough along in its development as a civilization to matter.
But even assuming Rome up to Augustus WAS largely democratic, what came after? You really don't see anything like individual liberty and democratic institutions until the 18th century.
Sure, we've had a good run for a couple hundred years but the current trends aren't encouraging, especially vis-a-vis our own increasingly corrupt plutocracy, mass surveillance, a hyper-active law enforcement apparatus and a growing rejection of liberal democratic thought in non-western culture.
to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life's work
Personally, I think it's great that there are people dumb/crazy/brave enough to try to accomplish this outside of whatever the ossified system is. I'm sure Linus was told by plenty of people "You can't develop a better operating system like this! We've been sitting in cubicles at Bell Labs for 20 years, slaving over punch cards and 9 track mag tapes toiling in anonymity and you think a bunch of Internet hackers are going to create a viable operating system that can do real work?"
Maybe this is what bothers all those people, that despite their trying and relative anonymity someone else NOT diligently working in anonymity and utilizing other skills or methods will succeed where they haven't, and this bugs them. Should there be a manned mission to Mars it should be THEIR mission because of their ceaseless faith and devotion to the true methods and ideals of space travel.
It almost reads like a religous argument from the 16th century -- why should a group of barely literate peasants be allowed to read and interpret the word of God and achieve salvation through their own heretical ideals and methods? It can only be achieved through the devotion to and leadership of the one true church and its singular vision as revealed through its chosen leaders.
Now, I don't know much about Mars One and it probably is a bullshit deal designed to fleece the naive and they can't get to Disney's "Mission to Mars" let alone fly a mission to Mars. So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.
What I find interesting is the recurring appeal of not conforming.
It seems like nearly every iteration of non-conformity, from jazz-loving hipsters, to hippies, to the punks/alternatives, to the generally current crop of bearded hipsters ultimately becomes popular.
Some of this can be explained by people who adopt the facile elements of these trends merely to appear popular, but many of these flavors of non-conformity end up having fairly enduring influence over larger culture which seems to be outsize relative to the number of people consciously glomming on just for popularity.
Why do people seem so drawn to fringe, non-conformist cultures?
I think your idea has some merit, but the downside would be extremely high prices.
I can remember in the late 1970s calling about a dozen long-distance "time and temperature" phone numbers and my parents got a bill for like $150. Even post-breakup, long distance remained pretty expensive -- I dated a girl who lived in Chicago and a couple of hours a week on the phone ended up being hundreds of dollars.
Does anyone ever even think about area codes anymore, especially when calling with a cell phone? I know people that relocated to Florida that still have 612 area codes on the cell phones and the only problems they run into are old farts who think they're not "local" because they have a non-local area code.
I think your idea makes more sense in the context of cellular phones -- make the towers and radio spectrum "owned" by a single, highly-regulated monopoly (think electricity) who then wholesales minutes to retail cell phone companies, aka carriers. Suddenly, we have 4x the spectrum! Devices are default portable to other "carriers" because the carriers aren't tied to physical spectrum. Pricing is now much more closely tied to actual usage. Setting up a new "carrier" is trivial and you could possible see new, no-frills carriers specializing in data only, low-bandwidth device data, etc. MVNOs come close but they inherit all the stupidity of our cell infrastructure which duplicates resources needlessly.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?
FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly because it seems to fit and no other explanation has really been offered.
The Civil War argument I've heard before but you really don't see significant changes in personal liberty as a result. The Whiskey Rebellion seems more dubious as I think you can make a strong argument for the tax and the response by Washington (and this case, quite literally George Washington) plus there doesn't seem to be any single enduring legacy of loss of personal liberty stemming from it.
Sadly, liberty and democracy have been on the losing end throughout history. We could say it died with the failure of the reforms of the Gracchi, Sulla's march on Rome and dictatorship, or the decline of the Senate at the rise of the Empire.
You could argue that the last time the US was "free" was prior to about 1910.
Before the 1911 passage of the 16th Ammendment the government's power to collect income taxes was extremely limited. A good chunk of the loss of financial freedom could be attributed to the income tax and all the various laws that grew up around enforcing it, such as limits on cash transactions, financial reporting, etc.
1909 saw the passage of the "Smoking Opium Exclusion Act" which barred the importation of opium, the first time a substance was banned for consumption. Followed up with the Harrsion Act in 1914 which got tougher on opioids and restricted them to medical uses. This leads to the next step, alcohol prohibition in 1920. Although it was overturned, it was the first big attempt at wholesale regulation of previously free behavior. The entire thing grew into the war on drugs and all the loss of freedom we now associate with it, including contributing to controls on cash transactions, a total erosion of search and seizure and mass incarceration.
Lots of other firsts from that era -- the Red Scare, the rise of Federal law enforcement, etc.
You can say we were "more free" in the 1970s or 60s or whatever, but it seems like we really started to lose it around 1910 when the Federal Government began to assert itself as a central law enforcement and control authority.
I think the prostitution angle is probably on the money.
The state can block licenses to girls with a prostitution history (thus encouraging them to avoid prostitution) and can probably yank the club's license if they hire unlicensed girls.
It probably helps the girls, too, in that the licensing reqirement probably limits the supply of dancers thus eliminating competition, making wages higher and working conditions better.
25 years ago I worked at a major State University. They had a huge, campus-wide network for AppleTalk. You could go into the Chooser and select laser printers or file servers all over the campus.
We were always coming up with conspiracies as to what to do with access to every LaserWriter on campus. Mostly we were curious how many times we'd have to print a porno image before we read about "Random Porno Images Printed Campus Wide" in the student paper.
There was zero security on any of this and I would imagine the network technology of the era probably would have made tracing it tough. Many offices, including ours, were connected behind Ethertalk bridges, which I think had an effect similar to NAT in terms of tracking traffic -- entire departments (ours was 25 people) could have been seen as a single source.
I can't imagine how they do college campus networks these days, you'd almost think they'd firewall departments off.
You're right For some reason I remember him targeting corporate executives but only the last two fatalities were corporate execs and most of his targets were University professors.
The thread starter's comment is kind of intriguing, because I can't think of any ideology that's specifically anti-corporate without being part of some other, broader anti-capitalist or anti-technological ideology or philosophy.
Maybe it will become some kind of emerging ideology, ultimately recycling anti-royalist ideas from the pre-20th century era.
Well, Ted Kaczynski led something of an anti-corporate campagin. Groups like EarthFirst have done a fair amount of direct action against environmental exploitation.
And workplace shootings aren't unheard of, although they tend to be driven more by personal rather than sociopolitical motivations. Although maybe you could make the argument that many of their grievenaces ultimately derive from soulless busines policies.
But generally, there is little targeted violence against corporations or CEOs. About the only examples I can think of are historical -- the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst, and the Red Army faction killed the head of Dresdner bank in a botched kidnapping, but there was something more politically motivated about these groups in a kind of Marxist-Lennist way than specific anti-corporate anger.
The CIA will be a vendor and customer..
Solar batteries. You don't convert those photons into electricity and store that, you just store the light and then you can shine it on the solar cells when you need the power.
I'm absolutely sure it doesn't work like this but it's an interesting science fiction concept.
These would be more interesting if they had more clever features. Uploading and downloading files doesn't seem interesting enough on its own.
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
It would take a critical mass of users for something like this to be useful, but it seems like it would be a great way to anonymously connect people/information.
Joe Biden's son gets punished *because* he's Joe Biden's son and he serves as a proxy for punishing Joe Biden and Joe Biden is too high profile to fix it without a scandal.
If Joe Biden was John Brown instead and some kind of law partner instead of a national politician, the son would skate with minimal punishment.
Oratory skills? Dayton? He's a mumbler! How can anyone as inarticulate as Dayton get elected to anything?
Oh yeah, the Dayton family fortune.
At the end of the day, he's the last of the Minnesota merchant aristocrats dallying in we-know-what's-good-for-you, paternalistic DFL politics.
I voted for him and the Grassroots candidates in the other races where they ran. Otherwise I voted Independence party as I heard they needed to get 5% in some races to stay major party status.
The Democratic governor Mark Dayton is a dry drunk, so he has major cognitive dissonance and guilt when it comes to anything involving intoxicants and was in debt to police labor votes.
So instead of a groovy, California style medical marijuana we got some lame experimental thing involving cannabis oils or something.
But then again,. we can't buy booze in grocery stores or on Sundays, so maybe its a byproduct of our stern, Scandahoovian upbringing.
I'm sure the cocaine consumption will keep snacking at a minimum.
It all makes sense. I need a big minimum wage so I can buy good pot and pay for my girlfriend's abortion (if the pot wasn't so good, she'd remember her free pills!).
And after all that I need a vacation!
I would imagine Oregon and Alaska are recreational, but DC, too?
Let's hope the pace quickens over the next few years -- at 3 states every two years it'l take too long to legalize it everywhere.l
Google has servers for this. You're supposed to be letting them index/scan/use your info, not storing it privately on flash.
Duh, it's a network device, everyone has unlimited network access everywhere don't they?
Just really yucky to mine and process, which is why the last US mine got spun down in favor of letting the Chinese eat the pollution.
If they haven't stolen it already and then use their brute force and political power to chase other vendors out of their own market.
I might go out on a limb and guess Rand Paul and some backbenchers in the House, but how many of them are "pro-market" that doesn't just stop at government regulation but acknowledges the anti-consumer/anti-competitive aspects of big business?
Usually any attempt to reign in big business results in "pro-market" responses about as complex as "Because Business."