The pace of technological advance has been accelerating for some time, and "Moore's law" was not the driving force by any means, because the phenomenon started long before the invention of the transistor or integrated circuit.
Let's compare 0 AD and 1000AD. Sure, there are some advances and changes, but by and large not too different. Jumping from one time to the next, technology is going to be the least of your concerns as far as difference. Now let's go from 1000AD to 1500AD. Changes are a little more apparent, from gunpowder to better ships, but still not that much farther forward. 1500 to 1750AD - Still pretty similar, but things are visibly more advanced. 1750 to 1850AD - Railroads, early industrialization. Noticeably more advanced. 1850AD to 1900AD... and the further ahead we go, the more changes and advances we see in a shorter and shorter time period. At the moment, things are changing so rapidly that the difference between today and 25 years ago looks more like the difference between 1500AD and 1750AD, if not moreso.
Part of the reason that people kept heirlooms for generations and generations is not only that they were built to last, but they were expected to have designs that lasted, because things didn't change in design or function for hundreds of years at a time.
You would need someone with some connection to you, just one that would not be readily apparent such as family. Some sort of amount of trust, both in wanting the money, and in the fact that either one of you can spoil the whole thing for the other, but also based on a third factor. A mistress you're planning to run away with, that nobody knows about, would probably be the most ideal, as they're romantically attached to you, and this helps them get what they want, which is to tie you to them. It's certainly not foolproof, but better than soliciting some random person.
Needless to say, of course, this is all highly illegal, and would constitute criminal conspiracy in addition to whatever other laws are broken, so I'm not suggesting anyone do this - merely red teaming the scenario.
I'm not sure what it looks like from where you're sitting, but there were some pretty obvious shenanigans at play with the whole Comcast/etc vs Netflix deal. Traffic to/from a particular site doesn't suddenly degrade in quality only on a particular ISP, and only when an argument about getting paid extra starts, only to magically vanish the moment that site agrees to pay up, all on its own. And that's after all the lawsuits that were launched to overturn previous, far less extensive regulatory attempts.
Unregulated? Without any act of Congress? You do know that "Title II" refers specifically to a law, passed by Congress, as updated to cover modern telecommunications, right? And you do know that they tried doing stuff before, and the Courts told them "you have to use Title II classification to do this," right?
I'm not even going to start on the fact that you think sending data is somehow not "telecommunications."
A) Definite it clearly enough to include one and exclude the other B) Make it sufficiently in the interest of all countries to want to do so.
It's B that's really going to be the hard part. Weapons generally don't get banned because they're morally horrifying or repugnant, they get banned because countries come to the conclusion that using them really just isn't worth it, and that we'd be better off agreeing to not do so, EVEN IF SOMEONE ELSE DECIDES TO VIOLATE THAT.
Consider Chemical Weapons, something that despite their widespread proliferation, generally was never employed in warfare with the exception of WWI and the Iran-Iraq war. In both of the wars CW were employed in, they were generally indecisive in the outcome of the war. They're also rather prone to affecting your own troops, and one can employ countermeasures without employing the weapons yourself. In short, they're not worth the trouble, expense, and time to maintain them.
Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are clearly quite potent, and useful as a tool of state preservation (or at least perceived to be). Despite how horrible these weapons are, and how incomprehensibly awful it would/will be if they ever get used again, the best we've managed to do is reduce the number of them (because again, they're expensive, and we can spend less while still maintaining the same effect).
Now consider another weapon - Land Mines. These are banned by the Ottawa Treaty, which has an impressive number of signatories... but notably lacks the participation of the USA, China, or Russia, or of certain countries with significantly hostile borders such as India/Pakistan and North and South Korea. Basically, anyone who still thinks they might need these weapons.
So where does that leave highly autonomous combat systems? Well, my take is that war has long been a factor of three things - population, technology, and production capacity. We're talking about something that takes one of those almost entirely out of the equation. Does that seem like a potentially powerful thing, or something that no one would have any interest in ever using?
This is a key point. No military in the world is going to want a weapon system that they have zero control over. Limited control, maybe - but we've had that for decades in the form of long range guided cruise/ballistic missiles, and even then there's a human "in the loop" (in the decision to launch/fire). Some of those may also have a self-destruct/abort, but the early ones certainly didn't.
Furthermore, trying to draw an artificial line between a present-day cruise missile that gets launched from a ship, flies to its target and blows up, and something like the X-47 drone that launches from a carrier, flies to its target, drops a bomb that blows up, then flies back to the carrier... I'm not really seeing the difference, nor the a reason why countries are going to want to ban one and not the other, or at least why every advanced country would want to ban one, and not the other.
You know what, maybe there's even something bad in there - but by now, I'm so fatigued by hearing the incessant parade of outrage and supposed scandal that it's like the boy who cried wolf. I'm just not listening anymore.
It's not just with the Clintons, either. Obama has been subjected to the same stream of crap, trying to put together some sort of scandal or conspiracy, or even flat out making things up ("Obama is coming for your guns!") when they've got nothing better to go on. During the 2008 primaries, I even thought at one point "Better Obama win than Clinton, because he doesn't have that baggage, and it's better if we don't have to relive that whole deluge of minor non-scandals and animosity." It was such a ridiculously naive thought, because it had nothing to do with the Clintons personally, and everything to do with there being a Democrat in the White House.
I generally support Nuclear power, but in reference to old plants shutting down? Good. Old reactor designs need to be retired, because quite frankly they're not safe enough compared to what's available now.
No, the problem isn't that older plants which have seen significant wear and tear face too many regulatory hurdles to continue operating - it's that NEW plants, using more advanced, safer technology, are facing too many legal hurdles in most cases to get built. We're talking about Passively Safe fourth-gen reactors, the sort that would be able to survive even something like Fukushima without a meltdown. We can't get these old plants replaced with new ones, so the old ones keep running with increasingly creaky equipment? That strikes me as downright crazy.
In other news, Microsoft announced that they needed the government to increase the number of H-1B visa workers allowed into the country, because the American educational system just wasn't producing enough skilled workers to meet the needs of high tech companies.
This is not meant to defend, but rather to explain. Pretty much two things have happened:
The first is that everything is standard now, because everyone's running the same stuff. To spy on the Nazis, the Polish and British had to break the "Enigma" devices that the Germans were using. Nobody in Britain was using these, let alone anywhere but Germany and its allies. Same for Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, etc. The US breaking the Japanese codes to gain advance knowledge of the attack on Midway couldn't have had any implication against anyone in the USA, because even if we were going to rely on something for privacy, we wouldn't be using classified Japanese military encryption. Today however, not only is encryption in widespread use, but we're all pretty much using the same kinds of encryption and other systems to handle and safeguard our data. Want to break into a computer used by the North Korean/Chinese/Syrian/Iranian/American/British/etc military? They're all going to be running some version of Windows, MacOS, or *NIX, just like pretty much everyone else in the world. The same goes with communications channels. While there are some exceptions, like in China or Russia, most people in the world use the same services and sites (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc) that people in the USA and the rest of the West do.
Now, all of that would probably be reasonably solvable with some strong oversight and precautions to make sure that any domestic stuff that got pulled in by accident was swiftly and ruthlessly purged, if it weren't for the second factor, which is...
Terrorism and Drugs, aka "The War on." These two combined have had an incredibly corrosive effect on civil liberties. The War on Drugs pretty much has been the single biggest factor in setting law enforcement agencies against the general public, because when large swathes of your populace don't obey (because the laws are stupidly draconian and unrealistic among other things), well, we basically ended up with an attitude that the average person is probably a (drug) criminal. It's worse on the part of some (DEA, looking at you here) than others, and that's before all the incentives like civil asset forfeiture come into play.
What the War on Terrorism did was scare enough people that they tore down what walls there were between law enforcement and intelligence. Remember that bit after 9/11 about how the CIA and FBI didn't compare notes enough? That applies to the DEA, too. It also made a whole new swath of Americans into potential suspects, as well as increasing support among the general public for doing "whatever it takes." Remember, the various agencies (DEA/FBI) were trying to push similar stuff in the past, they just never got as far with it until after 9/11.
Back when you primarily got internet access via the phone lines, say, in the late 90s to early 2000s, how was the market for internet service? Maybe this is just me, but I remember a ton of different providers, all trying to offer better service/better prices/etc. Why was that? Well, by that point, phone service was mandated to be unbundled by the FCC, meaning that you could get phone service from anyone, and in turn, could use that to get internet service from a large number of people.
Now, what was the regulatory regime that was under? I think it was called... Title II?
The ideal is to have the infrastructure be publicly owned (or so heavily regulated that it might as well be), and then let anyone offer services over that infrastructure. It works great with roads, and so many other things. Don't let a monopoly in infrastructure distort competition in other markets.
The most expansion of services and speed in the internet was during the time it was being offered primarily over the phone lines, which were a Title II regulated infrastructure over which (by that point) anyone could offer service. Costs went down, service went up, and everyone was competing for customers. It only hit a wall when those telephone lines were no longer able to handle the advancing speeds that most customers wanted.
I certainly understand the potential problems and inefficiencies inherent in tax-funded services. However, at a micro-level, these things can work, simply because they're close enough to the people using and paying for them to be very responsive, even moreso than an independently owned company. This isn't true in a city of 400,000; but it's certainly true in a small town of say, 100 people. If I live in such a place, and we vote for it - heck, maybe even say we need a 2/3rds majority - and we are generally fine with the taxes we pay and the services we receive, I don't see the problem. If service gets bad, or the people hired to run it need replacing, it's a lot easier to get a group of people in a small town to fix that.
Again, this does not hold true for any large group or area, but when we're talking about small, rural towns that probably aren't getting much corporate interest to begin with, this can be a very reasonable solution for them.
And according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12333, that part of it dates back to Reagan.
Really, I don't think you're going to find any president in recent history whose hands are clean on any of this. They're all responsible for adding another layer or two. The only time I can think of anything getting rolled back was the Church Committee and such in response to Watergate, but even that didn't go nearly far enough, I suspect.
What should also be mentioned is the change in demographics. There were about 40,000 native Hawaiians at the time (1890ish).
Was it crappy that white people took over the islands? Yes. It was also completely normal for the time period. By 1900 there were more Japanese alone on the islands than natives. It's certainly not unfeasible to think that if the USA hadn't, that either Japan or some European power would have established at least a protectorate.
Look, history is a long story of people doing crappy things to other people. That doesn't mean we should wash our hands of it completely, or forget about it all, but there need to be reasonable goals. Those goals should be trying to get everyone to a reasonable footing today - things like making sure children can get an education, people can get opportunities for jobs, to build wealth, etc. We shouldn't just say "oh, well, you have the poor historical luck to be poor and live in a poor area now, so your schools will suck, etc, tough luck" for instance. If anything, that's at the heart of today's problems - the systematic past destruction of and transfer of wealth.
But at the same time, we're not going to be able to just turn back the clock. It would be insane to just think we should do something like give Manhattan back to the Lenape tribe (nevermind the rest of New Jersey, Delaware, etc), because you'd be evicting over a million people on behalf of 10,000 or so.
Also, the "Native" population only comprises about 5.9% as of the 2010 Census. There are more Filipino (14.6%) and Japanese (13.6%) alone. Various "white/caucasian" ethnic groups are about 25%. Even if you add in "Other Pacific Islander" to the Native column, it's still only 10% of the population.
Also crappy as that may be and have been, it should probably also be mentioned that the alternative was not "Hawaii lives happy and free and everything is perfect." It would have been being turned into a Protectorate or Possession of some other power - probably Japan. In the early 1920s the population of Hawaii was over 40% Japanese, and only 25% "Native."
Furthermore, Hawaii, unlike every single other exterior territory (excepting Alaska, which is very different from the rest) the USA has acquired, is now a state with full voting rights. Contrast this to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Marianas, American Samoa, etc... And let's not even get started on how much worse the native tribes in the various interior regions of the USA were treated.
While I do have some sympathy for the fact that the USA steamrollered the fuck out of lots of indigenous native populations, nevermind those it displaced to form in the first place, there do need to be limits.
Yes - it really comes down to how thorough the programming is, and how much imagination and foresight the programming team has. To really do it right, you would need to bring in lots of subject matter experts (i.e. veteran pilots), and exhaustively cover every situation that's happened in history, as well as anything they can think of that might go wrong. You'd also then need to rigorously subject it to a Q&A process to make sure the program is handling all of those cases correctly. Even then that might not be enough, but that would be the right way to do it.
Now, how expensive do you think all of that is, and how confident are you that a given software company will get it right, without bugs - because in this case a "crash" is going to become a rather deadly double entendre. At most it would have to be given serious oversight by the FAA before it was cleared to operate.
Finally... do you really think passengers are going to want to fly on one, even then?
On the other hand, cargo flights are a prime candidate for "drone-ification" like this, and I won't be surprised at all when that happens. I just think too many people are too afraid (and probably with good reason) to fly on a pilotless passenger aircraft.
The problem is that a lot of people buy the whole "I have nothing to hide" line of crap. "Oh, I don't care if they read my email, I have nothing to hide." You're not going to nearly as much traction by convincing them of the principle that it shouldn't matter, that the government could abuse this someday, as you will by pointing out that, yes, they DO have something they want to keep private, even from the government, and provoking a visceral reaction on those grounds.
Bottom line, it's not just a way to get them to understand, it's a way to get them to care about it because it impacts their otherwise blissfully ignorant lives.
Oh, definitely an 8.5 or better. After all, if I can't dump California west of the San Andreas into the sea, who's going to be interested in my new beachfont development properties of Luthorville, Luthortown, Port Luthor, Otisberg, or... wait, Otisberg?
Not to mention the bad publicity they've been getting from some high profile incidents involving their drivers (allegedly) robbing or raping passengers.
It is. Providing occupations is a side benefit, as is allowing people to earn enough to make a living. They've all gone together for so long that a lot of people take it for granted. There was a time, too, when economic activity was pretty much entirely comprised of human labor, plus a bit of work from the draft animals we had. That's not true anymore, and while you still need human involvement, it's a much smaller fraction than it used to be.
Moreover, we've gone from "making people more efficient in what they do", such as having a worker drive a horse-drawn cart, or later a truck, rather than hauling goods on their back to not even needing the worker at all, and instead having one or two people in an office directing all the various trucks their company runs remotely (the same people who provide instructions to the existing drivers, doing so for the robots instead). We're eliminating the jobs entirely, not just making them able to do more with less workers.
The question then becomes, what do we as a society do with those people? How are they going to earn a living, as society expects them to do? Some will be able to retrain into higher skilled occupations, but those people are the exception and not the rule. Minimum wage work isn't enough to survive on without significant government assistance, and even those jobs are going to become increasingly scarce.
My thinking is that we're eventually going to have to divorce economic survival from employment. Put in a guaranteed basic income, such that everyone gets enough to get by, and any wages earned go on top of that. It can take the place of pretty much all the current benefits (SS, WIC, Food Stamps, etc). You can get rid of the minimum wage, because no one needs to worry about earning enough to live on - all they're earning is for luxuries (however small), so markets can freely set the value of labor (because people would be free to quit without worrying about unemployment threatening their survival). Now, you'd probably also have to radically alter the tax base, and tax the output of capital (namely, robots and other highly automated or independent machinery) - partly since that's where more and more of the money will be. There's some precedent for this, as at the time the Constitution was signed, tariffs and excise taxes were the primary funding source for the government. Income tax didn't come until much later.
Unfortunately it's the way things are going to go, sooner or later. It's going to put a lot of people out of work, because driving is a key occupation for a lot of people, not just Taxis. It's also not just college students that deliver pizza, but all the delivery drivers, long-haul truck drivers, and it's these we should be worried about, because there's a lot more of them.
Even just going by the 2012 numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (data.bls.gov), there's something around 1.25 local/regional delivery drivers, and 1.7 million heavy and tractor trailer drivers, plus about 250k taxi drivers/chauffeurs. Roughly speaking, we're talking about something like 1% of the population here that will likely be replaced almost entirely by robots in the next 20 to 30 years, if not sooner. The number of jobs that take their place will be minimal.
Now, this will make the economy vastly more efficient in any number of ways. Robots don't doze off at the wheel because they tried to drive too long in a day, they try to attack their taxi customers, and they can work far, far longer than any human can. At the same time, these are not high skill jobs that are being eliminated, and many of these people will not be able to easily transition to other work, if at all. What are we going to do with that? Sure, eventually people will stop having the expectation that they can simply go into truck/taxi driving as a career... but I also don't think many were directly planning on that when in school, to begin with.
Instead, we're facing a situation where the amount of viable work for no or low skill workers is becoming smaller and smaller, and we're going to have to figure out what to do about that as a society where increasing amounts of people are simply unable to earn a reasonable living no matter how hard they're willing to work.
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The pace of technological advance has been accelerating for some time, and "Moore's law" was not the driving force by any means, because the phenomenon started long before the invention of the transistor or integrated circuit.
Let's compare 0 AD and 1000AD. Sure, there are some advances and changes, but by and large not too different. Jumping from one time to the next, technology is going to be the least of your concerns as far as difference.
Now let's go from 1000AD to 1500AD. Changes are a little more apparent, from gunpowder to better ships, but still not that much farther forward.
1500 to 1750AD - Still pretty similar, but things are visibly more advanced.
1750 to 1850AD - Railroads, early industrialization. Noticeably more advanced.
1850AD to 1900AD... and the further ahead we go, the more changes and advances we see in a shorter and shorter time period. At the moment, things are changing so rapidly that the difference between today and 25 years ago looks more like the difference between 1500AD and 1750AD, if not moreso.
Part of the reason that people kept heirlooms for generations and generations is not only that they were built to last, but they were expected to have designs that lasted, because things didn't change in design or function for hundreds of years at a time.
You would need someone with some connection to you, just one that would not be readily apparent such as family. Some sort of amount of trust, both in wanting the money, and in the fact that either one of you can spoil the whole thing for the other, but also based on a third factor. A mistress you're planning to run away with, that nobody knows about, would probably be the most ideal, as they're romantically attached to you, and this helps them get what they want, which is to tie you to them. It's certainly not foolproof, but better than soliciting some random person.
Needless to say, of course, this is all highly illegal, and would constitute criminal conspiracy in addition to whatever other laws are broken, so I'm not suggesting anyone do this - merely red teaming the scenario.
I'm not sure what it looks like from where you're sitting, but there were some pretty obvious shenanigans at play with the whole Comcast/etc vs Netflix deal. Traffic to/from a particular site doesn't suddenly degrade in quality only on a particular ISP, and only when an argument about getting paid extra starts, only to magically vanish the moment that site agrees to pay up, all on its own. And that's after all the lawsuits that were launched to overturn previous, far less extensive regulatory attempts.
Unregulated? Without any act of Congress? You do know that "Title II" refers specifically to a law, passed by Congress, as updated to cover modern telecommunications, right? And you do know that they tried doing stuff before, and the Courts told them "you have to use Title II classification to do this," right?
I'm not even going to start on the fact that you think sending data is somehow not "telecommunications."
No, the problem is in how you:
A) Definite it clearly enough to include one and exclude the other
B) Make it sufficiently in the interest of all countries to want to do so.
It's B that's really going to be the hard part. Weapons generally don't get banned because they're morally horrifying or repugnant, they get banned because countries come to the conclusion that using them really just isn't worth it, and that we'd be better off agreeing to not do so, EVEN IF SOMEONE ELSE DECIDES TO VIOLATE THAT.
Consider Chemical Weapons, something that despite their widespread proliferation, generally was never employed in warfare with the exception of WWI and the Iran-Iraq war. In both of the wars CW were employed in, they were generally indecisive in the outcome of the war. They're also rather prone to affecting your own troops, and one can employ countermeasures without employing the weapons yourself. In short, they're not worth the trouble, expense, and time to maintain them.
Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are clearly quite potent, and useful as a tool of state preservation (or at least perceived to be). Despite how horrible these weapons are, and how incomprehensibly awful it would/will be if they ever get used again, the best we've managed to do is reduce the number of them (because again, they're expensive, and we can spend less while still maintaining the same effect).
Now consider another weapon - Land Mines. These are banned by the Ottawa Treaty, which has an impressive number of signatories... but notably lacks the participation of the USA, China, or Russia, or of certain countries with significantly hostile borders such as India/Pakistan and North and South Korea. Basically, anyone who still thinks they might need these weapons.
So where does that leave highly autonomous combat systems? Well, my take is that war has long been a factor of three things - population, technology, and production capacity. We're talking about something that takes one of those almost entirely out of the equation. Does that seem like a potentially powerful thing, or something that no one would have any interest in ever using?
There are no Mars Climate Model deniers, because we haven't found oil/gas there.
Yet.
The solution to that was proposed years ago.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/481/
This is a key point. No military in the world is going to want a weapon system that they have zero control over. Limited control, maybe - but we've had that for decades in the form of long range guided cruise/ballistic missiles, and even then there's a human "in the loop" (in the decision to launch/fire). Some of those may also have a self-destruct/abort, but the early ones certainly didn't.
Furthermore, trying to draw an artificial line between a present-day cruise missile that gets launched from a ship, flies to its target and blows up, and something like the X-47 drone that launches from a carrier, flies to its target, drops a bomb that blows up, then flies back to the carrier... I'm not really seeing the difference, nor the a reason why countries are going to want to ban one and not the other, or at least why every advanced country would want to ban one, and not the other.
You know what, maybe there's even something bad in there - but by now, I'm so fatigued by hearing the incessant parade of outrage and supposed scandal that it's like the boy who cried wolf. I'm just not listening anymore.
It's not just with the Clintons, either. Obama has been subjected to the same stream of crap, trying to put together some sort of scandal or conspiracy, or even flat out making things up ("Obama is coming for your guns!") when they've got nothing better to go on. During the 2008 primaries, I even thought at one point "Better Obama win than Clinton, because he doesn't have that baggage, and it's better if we don't have to relive that whole deluge of minor non-scandals and animosity." It was such a ridiculously naive thought, because it had nothing to do with the Clintons personally, and everything to do with there being a Democrat in the White House.
I generally support Nuclear power, but in reference to old plants shutting down? Good. Old reactor designs need to be retired, because quite frankly they're not safe enough compared to what's available now.
No, the problem isn't that older plants which have seen significant wear and tear face too many regulatory hurdles to continue operating - it's that NEW plants, using more advanced, safer technology, are facing too many legal hurdles in most cases to get built. We're talking about Passively Safe fourth-gen reactors, the sort that would be able to survive even something like Fukushima without a meltdown. We can't get these old plants replaced with new ones, so the old ones keep running with increasingly creaky equipment? That strikes me as downright crazy.
Cthulhu's alarm clock going off, maybe?
In other news, Microsoft announced that they needed the government to increase the number of H-1B visa workers allowed into the country, because the American educational system just wasn't producing enough skilled workers to meet the needs of high tech companies.
This is not meant to defend, but rather to explain. Pretty much two things have happened:
The first is that everything is standard now, because everyone's running the same stuff. To spy on the Nazis, the Polish and British had to break the "Enigma" devices that the Germans were using. Nobody in Britain was using these, let alone anywhere but Germany and its allies. Same for Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, etc. The US breaking the Japanese codes to gain advance knowledge of the attack on Midway couldn't have had any implication against anyone in the USA, because even if we were going to rely on something for privacy, we wouldn't be using classified Japanese military encryption. Today however, not only is encryption in widespread use, but we're all pretty much using the same kinds of encryption and other systems to handle and safeguard our data. Want to break into a computer used by the North Korean/Chinese/Syrian/Iranian/American/British/etc military? They're all going to be running some version of Windows, MacOS, or *NIX, just like pretty much everyone else in the world. The same goes with communications channels. While there are some exceptions, like in China or Russia, most people in the world use the same services and sites (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc) that people in the USA and the rest of the West do.
Now, all of that would probably be reasonably solvable with some strong oversight and precautions to make sure that any domestic stuff that got pulled in by accident was swiftly and ruthlessly purged, if it weren't for the second factor, which is...
Terrorism and Drugs, aka "The War on." These two combined have had an incredibly corrosive effect on civil liberties. The War on Drugs pretty much has been the single biggest factor in setting law enforcement agencies against the general public, because when large swathes of your populace don't obey (because the laws are stupidly draconian and unrealistic among other things), well, we basically ended up with an attitude that the average person is probably a (drug) criminal. It's worse on the part of some (DEA, looking at you here) than others, and that's before all the incentives like civil asset forfeiture come into play.
What the War on Terrorism did was scare enough people that they tore down what walls there were between law enforcement and intelligence. Remember that bit after 9/11 about how the CIA and FBI didn't compare notes enough? That applies to the DEA, too. It also made a whole new swath of Americans into potential suspects, as well as increasing support among the general public for doing "whatever it takes." Remember, the various agencies (DEA/FBI) were trying to push similar stuff in the past, they just never got as far with it until after 9/11.
Back when you primarily got internet access via the phone lines, say, in the late 90s to early 2000s, how was the market for internet service? Maybe this is just me, but I remember a ton of different providers, all trying to offer better service/better prices/etc. Why was that? Well, by that point, phone service was mandated to be unbundled by the FCC, meaning that you could get phone service from anyone, and in turn, could use that to get internet service from a large number of people.
Now, what was the regulatory regime that was under? I think it was called... Title II?
The ideal is to have the infrastructure be publicly owned (or so heavily regulated that it might as well be), and then let anyone offer services over that infrastructure. It works great with roads, and so many other things. Don't let a monopoly in infrastructure distort competition in other markets.
The most expansion of services and speed in the internet was during the time it was being offered primarily over the phone lines, which were a Title II regulated infrastructure over which (by that point) anyone could offer service. Costs went down, service went up, and everyone was competing for customers. It only hit a wall when those telephone lines were no longer able to handle the advancing speeds that most customers wanted.
I certainly understand the potential problems and inefficiencies inherent in tax-funded services. However, at a micro-level, these things can work, simply because they're close enough to the people using and paying for them to be very responsive, even moreso than an independently owned company. This isn't true in a city of 400,000; but it's certainly true in a small town of say, 100 people. If I live in such a place, and we vote for it - heck, maybe even say we need a 2/3rds majority - and we are generally fine with the taxes we pay and the services we receive, I don't see the problem. If service gets bad, or the people hired to run it need replacing, it's a lot easier to get a group of people in a small town to fix that.
Again, this does not hold true for any large group or area, but when we're talking about small, rural towns that probably aren't getting much corporate interest to begin with, this can be a very reasonable solution for them.
And according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12333, that part of it dates back to Reagan.
Really, I don't think you're going to find any president in recent history whose hands are clean on any of this. They're all responsible for adding another layer or two. The only time I can think of anything getting rolled back was the Church Committee and such in response to Watergate, but even that didn't go nearly far enough, I suspect.
But where does Natalie Portmann fit in?
What should also be mentioned is the change in demographics. There were about 40,000 native Hawaiians at the time (1890ish).
Was it crappy that white people took over the islands? Yes. It was also completely normal for the time period. By 1900 there were more Japanese alone on the islands than natives. It's certainly not unfeasible to think that if the USA hadn't, that either Japan or some European power would have established at least a protectorate.
Look, history is a long story of people doing crappy things to other people. That doesn't mean we should wash our hands of it completely, or forget about it all, but there need to be reasonable goals. Those goals should be trying to get everyone to a reasonable footing today - things like making sure children can get an education, people can get opportunities for jobs, to build wealth, etc. We shouldn't just say "oh, well, you have the poor historical luck to be poor and live in a poor area now, so your schools will suck, etc, tough luck" for instance. If anything, that's at the heart of today's problems - the systematic past destruction of and transfer of wealth.
But at the same time, we're not going to be able to just turn back the clock. It would be insane to just think we should do something like give Manhattan back to the Lenape tribe (nevermind the rest of New Jersey, Delaware, etc), because you'd be evicting over a million people on behalf of 10,000 or so.
Also, the "Native" population only comprises about 5.9% as of the 2010 Census. There are more Filipino (14.6%) and Japanese (13.6%) alone. Various "white/caucasian" ethnic groups are about 25%. Even if you add in "Other Pacific Islander" to the Native column, it's still only 10% of the population.
Also crappy as that may be and have been, it should probably also be mentioned that the alternative was not "Hawaii lives happy and free and everything is perfect." It would have been being turned into a Protectorate or Possession of some other power - probably Japan. In the early 1920s the population of Hawaii was over 40% Japanese, and only 25% "Native."
Furthermore, Hawaii, unlike every single other exterior territory (excepting Alaska, which is very different from the rest) the USA has acquired, is now a state with full voting rights. Contrast this to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Marianas, American Samoa, etc... And let's not even get started on how much worse the native tribes in the various interior regions of the USA were treated.
While I do have some sympathy for the fact that the USA steamrollered the fuck out of lots of indigenous native populations, nevermind those it displaced to form in the first place, there do need to be limits.
Yes - it really comes down to how thorough the programming is, and how much imagination and foresight the programming team has. To really do it right, you would need to bring in lots of subject matter experts (i.e. veteran pilots), and exhaustively cover every situation that's happened in history, as well as anything they can think of that might go wrong. You'd also then need to rigorously subject it to a Q&A process to make sure the program is handling all of those cases correctly. Even then that might not be enough, but that would be the right way to do it.
Now, how expensive do you think all of that is, and how confident are you that a given software company will get it right, without bugs - because in this case a "crash" is going to become a rather deadly double entendre. At most it would have to be given serious oversight by the FAA before it was cleared to operate.
Finally... do you really think passengers are going to want to fly on one, even then?
On the other hand, cargo flights are a prime candidate for "drone-ification" like this, and I won't be surprised at all when that happens. I just think too many people are too afraid (and probably with good reason) to fly on a pilotless passenger aircraft.
The problem is that a lot of people buy the whole "I have nothing to hide" line of crap. "Oh, I don't care if they read my email, I have nothing to hide." You're not going to nearly as much traction by convincing them of the principle that it shouldn't matter, that the government could abuse this someday, as you will by pointing out that, yes, they DO have something they want to keep private, even from the government, and provoking a visceral reaction on those grounds.
Bottom line, it's not just a way to get them to understand, it's a way to get them to care about it because it impacts their otherwise blissfully ignorant lives.
Oh, definitely an 8.5 or better. After all, if I can't dump California west of the San Andreas into the sea, who's going to be interested in my new beachfont development properties of Luthorville, Luthortown, Port Luthor, Otisberg, or... wait, Otisberg?
OTIS!
Not to mention the bad publicity they've been getting from some high profile incidents involving their drivers (allegedly) robbing or raping passengers.
It is. Providing occupations is a side benefit, as is allowing people to earn enough to make a living. They've all gone together for so long that a lot of people take it for granted. There was a time, too, when economic activity was pretty much entirely comprised of human labor, plus a bit of work from the draft animals we had. That's not true anymore, and while you still need human involvement, it's a much smaller fraction than it used to be.
Moreover, we've gone from "making people more efficient in what they do", such as having a worker drive a horse-drawn cart, or later a truck, rather than hauling goods on their back to not even needing the worker at all, and instead having one or two people in an office directing all the various trucks their company runs remotely (the same people who provide instructions to the existing drivers, doing so for the robots instead). We're eliminating the jobs entirely, not just making them able to do more with less workers.
The question then becomes, what do we as a society do with those people? How are they going to earn a living, as society expects them to do? Some will be able to retrain into higher skilled occupations, but those people are the exception and not the rule. Minimum wage work isn't enough to survive on without significant government assistance, and even those jobs are going to become increasingly scarce.
My thinking is that we're eventually going to have to divorce economic survival from employment. Put in a guaranteed basic income, such that everyone gets enough to get by, and any wages earned go on top of that. It can take the place of pretty much all the current benefits (SS, WIC, Food Stamps, etc). You can get rid of the minimum wage, because no one needs to worry about earning enough to live on - all they're earning is for luxuries (however small), so markets can freely set the value of labor (because people would be free to quit without worrying about unemployment threatening their survival). Now, you'd probably also have to radically alter the tax base, and tax the output of capital (namely, robots and other highly automated or independent machinery) - partly since that's where more and more of the money will be. There's some precedent for this, as at the time the Constitution was signed, tariffs and excise taxes were the primary funding source for the government. Income tax didn't come until much later.
Unfortunately it's the way things are going to go, sooner or later. It's going to put a lot of people out of work, because driving is a key occupation for a lot of people, not just Taxis. It's also not just college students that deliver pizza, but all the delivery drivers, long-haul truck drivers, and it's these we should be worried about, because there's a lot more of them.
Even just going by the 2012 numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (data.bls.gov), there's something around 1.25 local/regional delivery drivers, and 1.7 million heavy and tractor trailer drivers, plus about 250k taxi drivers/chauffeurs. Roughly speaking, we're talking about something like 1% of the population here that will likely be replaced almost entirely by robots in the next 20 to 30 years, if not sooner. The number of jobs that take their place will be minimal.
Now, this will make the economy vastly more efficient in any number of ways. Robots don't doze off at the wheel because they tried to drive too long in a day, they try to attack their taxi customers, and they can work far, far longer than any human can. At the same time, these are not high skill jobs that are being eliminated, and many of these people will not be able to easily transition to other work, if at all. What are we going to do with that? Sure, eventually people will stop having the expectation that they can simply go into truck/taxi driving as a career... but I also don't think many were directly planning on that when in school, to begin with.
Instead, we're facing a situation where the amount of viable work for no or low skill workers is becoming smaller and smaller, and we're going to have to figure out what to do about that as a society where increasing amounts of people are simply unable to earn a reasonable living no matter how hard they're willing to work.