It would be literally *impossible* for them to rely more heavily on industry sources of information than the current house. It really is that bad. And if you think the bills you mention are how laws should be written, we have a major point of disagreement.
To my way of thinking nobody should be expected to obey a law that they can't understand. I'll grant that since some people can't understand much, this means that they shouldn't be expected to obey many laws. So the more important a law is, the simpler it's expression needs to be.
I understand that my belief has certain technical problems. E.g., people tend to lie when it's to their advantage, so they can be expected to claim to not understand laws. This means that most laws that impose requirements must also grant benefits. As it is more traditionally put, with liberty comes responsibility. But this needs to be built into the structure of the legal system rather than being a pious pronouncement with vague but obviously meaningful weight. If you can't measure it, it's not something that can, or should, be regulated. If you think it should be regulated, find a way to measure it.
Currently we not only have too many laws, but the laws we have are too complex. This is the result of having a legislature that sees it's job as passing laws, and of companies that benefit from having specific laws passed. Often they will literally write the laws, and the congressional sponsors will never read them. (Well, perhaps not often, but much too often.)
I have a belief that most people put in job will try to do the job as well as they can (plus a bunch of sluffing off). And I have a belief that if they weren't corrupted, they would try to do the right thing. (We might well disagree about what's right. But I often disagree about that.)
If you don't think that that's enough, require that each bill pass by a 2/3 vote. Or allow representatives to filibuster. But I think that's putting too many road-blocks in the way when some legislation does need to be passed.
Additional options: 1) Every bill automatically expires after 20 years. If it's important enough, it should be worth passing again every 20 years. 2) There is a special house of congress created whose only job is do remove legislation that's already been enacted. 3) No bill can be more than 5000 words long, and each bill must be understood to mean the same thing by 3 randomly chosen classes of high school seniors. 4) There is a limit on the number of bills that can be passed. Say 5000. ( Consider using this in conjunction with 3, above. If you don't like the numbers chosen [they're pretty arbitrary] what numbers would be appropriate?)
The main point is that the legal information needs to be intelligible. When four different intelligent people come to four different opinions about what the legal implications are of some one particular action, then the system is broken. There should never be more than three reasonable opinions which I can characterize as 1) it's covered by these particular law; 2) it's not covered by any law; 3) I need more information. If different intelligent and well-informed people disagree about whether it's covered, or which laws cover it, then the law is bad.
Sorry, I've gotten well off the point, so I'll close now.
No matter how you select a dictator, it isn't a good long term answer, and I wasn't proposing any such method. I'm more relying on statistics. If you select 535 people at random, you have a pretty good chance that when they vote they won't make crazy choices that don't accomplish what they want. (Not accomplishing what they want is quite likely if they don't want something reasonable.) This was about the size of an Athenian jury, and those worked out pretty well, though not perfectly. And the jury wasn't selected at random, so even that's not a fair comparison, but it's reasonably close.
So instead of electing members of the House of Representatives, choose them at random from within their district. Declining not allowed. You've got 6 months to put your affairs in order, after that you are financially independent of all private organizations (meaning that you can't accept bribes either now or in the future). You have a secure retirement and a better than average salary. And your expenses while on the job are paid (but anything you acquire is owned by the office, not by you...like the crown jewels, except that it's not a job for life, but only for two years).
Analogously for the Senate, but I think the number of senators is too small for reasonable statistical certainty, so it's 3 senators per state rather than two. And the term is, as now, 6 years.
Note that the only way to get chosen a second time is to be chosen by the lottery twice. This would be *very* rare.
This way one ends up paying for lots of retired legislators, but much smaller selection costs. And you don't get candidates that have been "pre-corrupted". You may get many stupid ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some malicious ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some...
Unfortunately, this approach wouldn't work for selecting a president. But I think the presidential powers need to be scaled way back anyway. Perhaps the president's office should be divided in half, with one office doing nothing be either vetoing bills or not, and the other being totally separate from legislation. Centralizations of power need to be broken up. Centralized power becomes largely immune to the consequences of it's actions.
P.S.: It's not power that corrupts, it's immunity to consequences. But power is used to acquire immunity to consequences. (Even those who aren't yet corrupt don't want to suffer the consequences of making a mistake. That desire, however, is one of the first steps toward corruption. And EVERYONE has it.)
Thank you for your more precise resolution. For my grip of history "30 years before" counts as about the same time as. (Unless, of course, it's something since WWII. And it gets worse the farther back you go, and gets more precise as you get closer to now, but at about 1865 30 years +|- counts as "about the same time" unless I'm discussing something that's anchored to something I know more precisely.)
So you're probably right. But I didn't disagree with you, I just have larger error bars.
This is but one of several pre-event trasmission of informations that was ignored. There wasn't just one, there were many, including one from an FBI supervisor.
You can believe that they were all ignored because of information overload, and that's possible. But I don't consider it the most likely reason. Especially given the immediate submission of legislation to congress that was passed in a hurry for abridging civil liberties. And the constant cries that we should be more paranoid being raised for most of the next 3 years.
I guess I did become more paranoid, but not about external assailants. And there are reasonable grounds for believing that if the government didn't do the assault on twin-towers, it at least had advance knowledge, and decided to let it go through. (I'm not really convinced that it *didn't* perform the act through agents that were working for it. But I don't believe that the evidence is sufficient to prove that that was the case. It does indicate it, however, and it's well to remember that a government is not an entity. It is a collection of agents that each have their own idea about what is going on. So at the department head level it might well have only had advance knowledge, while at the operative level it could be acting to make the event more spectacular. But again, this is not proven. Merely plausible. Even the "advance knowledge" is only most plausible, and was probably kept from the public faces, so that they would react more realisticly. The "cell system" isn't only used by the underground, an informal version of it is living in every large bureaucracy.)
It's a feedback system, set up around the time of the civil war. The companies pay the politicians, and the politicians pay the companies. They just use different kinds of coin. (Before then "lobbying" was illegal.)
Expect that where-ever, whenever, you have centralized control by humans, you will have corruption. Expect it, and design your systems to account for it. One reason that elections are a bad means of selecting representatives is that they encourage corruption. A simple lottery would be better. (Simple. It is to laugh. You still need means to prevent corruption, even if almost everyone selected would start out not-yet corrupted. This means enforced penalties. Not only on those who are the corrupters, but also on those who become corrupt. And it means denying rewards in the future, not just while they hold office.)
But in a feedback system, you can't say one link is more important than the other. They are all important. If any one breaks, the mode of operation of the system changes.
What I propose is that if someone is selected to state or regional office, they be given a salary of 3/2 the median income in the country, an ample pension, and forbidden from accepting any gifts or favors from anyone. Expenses of office would need to be covered (which can get a bit tricky...but being a bit lavish here isn't *too* damaging to the country).
And I also propose that they be selected at random (lottery) from among all adult citizens in an area. It would probably be best to increase the number of Senators, as we don't want a state to be represented by a delegation that's half looney. But 1/3 would be ok.
If you don't like this, Condorcet voting or Instant Runoff is far better than the current system, as it makes it much more difficult for all contenders to be purchased before the election. But you also need to do something to eliminate the advantage that the well-funded have over the poorly funded, or even so the improvement is likely to be minimal.
OTOH, don't expect the Supreme Court to allow anything to be done that will impede the ability of the well-funded to rule things. They have recently and historically shown a distressing tendency to side with the wealthy, and let justice and equity go hang.
If the Constitution was actually honored, I'd be much less likely to propose such an alteration, which is clearly unconstitutional (unless amended). However, since the constitution is ignored except when it's convenient by the powerful and wealthy, I have no qualms in such a proposal. (Besides, I know it won't be adopted, so I'll never be proven foolish.)
Well, if you want to get technical they were originally used in Numenor for communication among the great houses. We have no idea how many originally existed, but only nine were brought by ship when the continent? Large Island? sank. These were originally used by the lords of the survivors for communication, and only later were they lodged in towers (after many had been lost). At the time of the "Lord of the Rings" only 3 were known to be surviving. And only one of those was usable by the end of the book. Even that one would bend itself to look only at Orthanc unless the mind had great fixity of purpose. (It was stated that this was because it had been used to look in that direction so often, so I don't think the fall of Sauron would have changed things. It was more wear grooves than compulsion by that time, though originally it was entrapment by Sauron.)
FWIW, I suspect that Google has lots of non-public data.
But they have a better track record for being helpful to people in general than the government has of recent decades. And they aren't allowed to directly use force. Both leave me feeling less suspicious of Google.
This is a bit unfair to the government. The job that they should be doing does require that they occasionally act in unpleasant manners using force as an argument. I just don't feel that they have been attending to their proper job, and that they have instead been using their force and rule making capability to advantage one proportion of their constituency over another. This, in a government, is malfeasance. They are also guilty of misfeasance, i.e., not properly performing their jobs. (Failure to resolve the budget problem is an example of misfeasance rather than malfeasance.)
I should be clear that when I describe the actions of the government in terms of criminal acts, the criminal acts are not necessarily something that the judicial system would recognize as criminal. They are things that *I*, personally, consider criminal. And though I use the term government, I actually mean the people holding office in the government. E.g., at the recent civil disobedience in Davis, CA I feel that the officer that sprayed the demonstrators with pepper spray should be charged with assault, and that the other police who just stood around should be arraigned as accessories before the fact. The judicial system does not appear to be of the same opinion. (You will note that I do not call it the justice system.)
That's because it's allowed. Even the laws that exist against such things as bait-and-switch aren't enforced. This hasn't always been true, but it does seem to be true at most times.
Actually, wireless does. I'm not sure, however, that electromagnetic does. Ultrasonic can work pretty well for short distances (which is what you want). Infrasonic is even better (being less directional), but tends to require larger transmitters and receivers.
I've been very surprised at the way low cost infra-red lasers have suppressed ultrasonic controllers. I suppose, however, that the key point is "low cost". But ultra-sonics have lots of advantages when you don't want the signals to travel very far.
Their OfficeJet like, however, is also bad. A recent one will only print of paper that's the right **COLOR** for gods sake. And if I want to print on green paper, or card stock, I need to switch into draft mode. (Admittedly, the quality of the draft mode isn't that bad.)
This is an unacceptable piece of garbage, and a good reason to not buy HP again.
And if they think that by this kind of trick they're going to get me to pay more money for a more expensive product, they can think again. I take it as a quality statement about their entire line of printers. ALL of them. (By the time I buy my next printer, all the model numbers will have changed anyway, so I can't just particular models. Only companies.)
Not if it's a real photonic circuit. Of course, we don't have many of those right now. A few telescopes, but not the ones with photon amplifiers. A few microscopes, but not many of them, either. Mainly the only current "photonic circuits" are experimental. (To be photonic rather than just optical you need to have light intentionally modifying the signal that other light carries. Usually this only happens by accident, and degrades the signal.)
Most of the things that we have that approach photonics are actually electronic/optic hybrids.
(I may be overstating the current presence of photonic circuits. I'm giving interpretation that favor that to some things I read that could be interpreted either way.)
Linux (and the Mac?) have relatively little malware, and most of that trojans.
"Malware" is possible on any platform, and *is* driven by market share. Trojans are the catch here, and vetting software (via a repository) is the only known solution. This appears to be a weakness in the Android system. Viruses, a much more specific category, is driven by system vulnerabilities, as worms are driven by network vulnerabilities. Generally I only install software from the Debian repository, though occasionally I'll install a source package that appears to be safe. (I don't study the source, so I can't claim that I know that it's safe, but I don't think I've been bitten yet.)
I am annoyed, however, at usability decisions made by Linux that compromise safety. And several have been made, but my pet peeve is that tar can extract files with the execute permission set. Yes, it makes things much more convenient. It's also an inherent weakness. Privilege escalations are less important to me because I'm the sole user of this machine, and I keep everything that I care about in my home directory. So it doesn't require a privilege escalation the trash everything I care about. (And I decline to, e.g., engage in electronic banking, so that kind of information is just not present. My concern isn't secrecy, but not losing information. [Well, I'd be annoyed at having my privacy violated, but not injured. Because I don't have much of anything on my computer that would be compromising...intentionally. The most I'd lose would be things like my/. password.])
Is MSWind7 safe? At this point nobody knows. Which means that it probably is, for now, except, perhaps, for trojans included by MS. Would I use it? Quite unlikely. I haven't read the EULA, but given their past EULAs it seems quite unlikely that I'd agree to it. (Apple generally has much milder EULAs, and I won't agree to theirs.) More to the point, if I know I'm likely to be sold something that I won't be able to use (for not agreeing to the EULA) and can't return, I'm quite unlikely to fork over ANY cash. I've been bitten unpleasantly that way before, and ended up with a computer I could only use off the net. I'm not about to be put in that situation again. If it has an EULA, I want to know the terms BEFORE I fork over the cash. And this means the actual terms, not a bait-and-switch kind of deal like Apple pulled. (If you actually read the terms that adhere to the security patches, you may be quite surprised...though that was nearly a decade ago by now, and they may have improved. [Ha. Ha. It is to laugh.])
At the time that was written person damn well did NOT mean corporation. Many of the signers didn't even believe that corporations should be legal. Seeing what's been happening recently, I'd say they had a good point.
And *I* sure don't consider corporations to be people. When was the last time one went to jail for killing someone? I trust you aren't going to claim that they never do, because that's blatantly false. They have been documented doing it with prior intent. (Usually it's of the form "when we do this we can expect so many people to die" rather than "I want that person dead", but it's still killing people by intent. And the other form has also been documented occasionally. No corporation has ever been sent to jail for the crime of either murder or homicide. They often aren't even fined.)
Currently the galactic clusters are still gravitationally bound. Unless Dark Energy gets a lot stronger, they will stay visible. If it does, the remaining intelligences will have other problems.
OTOH, IIUC, by the time Dark Energy gets strong enough to break up the galactic clusters, at it's maximal current rate of strengthening, the Milky Way will have merged with Andromeda, and there effectively won't BE any local galactic cluster. Just a much larger galaxy of MUCH older stars. (Andromeda is already so much larger than the Mikly Way that I said we merge with them.)
By that time, though, the only currently active stars that will still be "active" will be the red and white dwarf stars.
OTOH, I am not an astronomer or cosmologist. You may want to check this with a more reliable source. But I believe it to be correct to the best of current knowledge.
Black hole? Something's wrong with your physics model.
OTOH, as stars emit gas, and so do galaxies, you'd expect to detect a lot of matter-antimatter annihilation going on. This is a particular energy range of gamma radiation that we just aren't seeing, so we believe that there's no sizable amount of antimatter in the universe. This isn't entirely certain, as glaxy clusters are much more separated than individual galaxies, but if there is a significant amount of antimatter it's at the galactic cluster range of size, and it's really hard to explain why it would chunk in that way. (OTOH, I'm not a cosmologist. I could be wrong. But in this case I'd make a reasonable bet that I wasn't.)
Bamboo's not that great. It's too high in cellulose. Which is great if you're making chairs, but a pain to process. And algae...well, there's lots of different kinds, but I'm skeptical about the algae->diesel oil plan. It's possible, but the rate of conversion seems too slow to be practical.
Be clear on your purpose, though. If your purpose is to remove carbon from the atmosphere, that cellulose isn't a bad thing, But you want it to be something that will endure, like acid-free paper. Or furniture, but there is only a limited demand for bamboo chairs, etc.
Perhaps a better idea would be perennial versions of food crops. I understand that it's being worked on, but nobody's predicting when they will have success. This would result in a plant that stored a bunch of carbon in it's root system, and didn't need anywhere near as much water or fertilizer. It might also be more resistant to insects, but I think that's a separate problem.
A plant with an oily seed does seem like a reasonable approach, but perhaps one should start with something different. Soy beans, perhaps. Or some perennial that still produces a large number of sizable seeds. Again, though, this is probably too minor a source to replace fuel needs. For that I think electric in some form is the only option. (I don't like hydrogen, but most hydrogen is either a processed form of natural gas, or a disguised form of electricity.)
That's oversimplifying. We're definitely past some tipping points, but there are some that we haven't passed yet. It's not like there was just one.
E.g., coral could still survive. We aren't definitively past the point at which the species become extinct. But the Great Barrier Reef has probably had it. That's two minor tipping points right there.
The problem is that 30 hours is already too long to equitably distribute the work that needs doing. Even though as the work week declines, the amount of work for the Personnel department increases.
Also, the work week needs to divide evenly into the time that the business is open. 40 hours interpreted as 8 hours/day is a 5-day single shift work week. 30 hours is 6/day for 5 days or 5/day for 6 days. The second doesn't work for many jobs, though open for 10 hours with 3 5 hour shifts could work if the business were open for 10 hours / day. (With double coverage during the central, presumably busiest, period.)
But people aren't usually conscious of the expense of hiring a new person. It's not insignificant. So all businesses can be depended upon to fight shorter work weeks even at the same hourly rate. It means you need to manage more people. This is not only expensive, it's more difficult, even if you can find the ones you want.
Another problem is that many people have skills only in certain areas. Cutting the hours of such a person means you need to provide coverage from someone equally skilled. And even that won't suffice. Project specific knowledge needs to be continually transferred between the people working on the project. If you're writing a piece of code, how easy is it to explain to someone what you're planning as the next step of the development? You basically can't. (OTOH, it's not at all clear that reducing the hours that programmers are at work would even slow down development. Much development comes during the time you aren't actually coding, but merely ruminating over how to handle things in the back of your mind.)
So I'm not particularly advocating either for or against a shorter work week. But I *am* aware of it as a real problem, that society appears to be intending to ignore as long as it can.
N.B.: Automation is continually increasing, even without increasing use of computers, which is also happening. Sometimes it's just redesigning jobs to be done more efficiently. This often means that it gets turned into something that could be handled by current automation. (E.g., consider the function of the cashier at a fast food restaurant. Their obvious job could be handled by a user operated menu combined with a cash accepting machine. So what is their secondary job? Can that also be similarly automated?)
My estimate now is that half of the work done at paid jobs is not socially productive except in that it keeps people employed. And even so there's a very large number of people who AREN'T employed. Note that in the 1950's women generally didn't work, and we had a level of social happiness and wealth that averaged higher than today's. This DID discriminate against many women, but is it really that much better if we discriminate against people who are, basically, unlucky? (Being born with poor parents qualifies as unlucky in my book, as does being raised in an environment that discourages learning.)
OTOH, can you really justify college in today's world? It's not at all clear. Most students acquire a crushing level of debt, and then are thrown into a job market that won't pay off that investment. And you can expect that any particular skill set you acquire will be obsolete within five years, and it's quite possible that the entire field will be automated away (or at least closed to new entrants). P.S.: have you heard about the automated paralegals? They do citation searches for precedent cases that paralegals used to do. Several major legal firms have already cut way back on the hiring of paralegals and new lawyers. That's not upcoming, that's here. They are already saving the firms money, even though they are currently quite limited. And this is just the first generation, so rapid improvement and generalization can be expected. (I think the current version is limited to patent law, but I'm not sure as I've only "heard about" it.)
But the major point is that there aren't any secure options. Except, perhaps, top manageme
My Representative usually votes in a way I deem at least defensible. I can't say that about either Senator. One of them occasionally votes in a reasonable manner, but not on copyright or patent law. The other... you could generally pick the correct way to vote by watching their vote and choosing the alternative.
FWIW, I've tried campaigning at the local level. The candidate won. I was immediately sold to another candidate in a deal to shift the district boundaries. The appalling thing is, that candidate is still one of the better council members. The one that is now my representative is a slimy wheeler-dealer who ignores any comment I make. And is president of the council.
(My wife continues to make excuses for the boundary shifting deal. Maybe there is something to them, but *I* was sold out, and I don't forgive that quickly. The "wheeler-dealer" is in a safe district, as with boundary adjustments he is essentially guaranteed re-election.)
Regulatory capture doesn't require that the companies be even comparable in size or power to the government. All requires is loose ethics laws, and that the companies be wealthy in comparison to the individual people doing the regulating.
Regulators should be forbidden from accepting ANY favors or recompense either while they are regulating the companies OR AFTERWARD. That requirement should be extended to all members of their immediate family. This would, if strictly enforced, make regulatory capture 90% more difficult. And penalties for breaking this rule should apply not only to the individual regulators, but also the the companies AND TO THE EXECUTIVES OF THE COMPANIES. (If they are corporations, make that "and members of the boards of directors".)
The problem is that responsibilities are not enforced commensurate with powers granted. (A difficult problem, admittedly. E.g., would it be proper to award district attorneys a percentage of the penalties for enforcing this proposed regulation? Why and why not?)
libertarianism (note the lowercase initial letter) is quite reasonable. The Libertarian party isn't. And isn't libertarian.
I'm not certain that libertarianism is an acceptable political choice, but it is reasonable and defensible. This is not true of Libertarianism.
The government is too large and too intrusive in the lives of citizens is the message of libertarianism. This isn't at all the same as "The government shouldn't interfere with whatever I want to do." But it's headed towards that, even though all sensible people would stop before it got that far.
N.B.: communism (note, again, the lowercase initial letter) is also quite reasonably defensible. And not totally inconsistent with libertarianism...though there are obvious points of conflict. But traditional communism didn't scale. Even a village was larger than it's optimal size.
Question: What is a reasonable social system for a civilization where only 20% of the populace need to work to produce the goods used by the rest of the civilization? Does this change if the number declines to 15%? 10%? 5%? 1%? Nobody?
This is the current problem. If we can solve energy requirements, the percentage of the populace that will need to hold jobs is going to be declining. It has already declined tremendously, even though this is being masked by various societal mechanisms.
Question: What are the implications of the military increasingly deploying robot soldiers?
Slashdot Mirror
It would be literally *impossible* for them to rely more heavily on industry sources of information than the current house. It really is that bad. And if you think the bills you mention are how laws should be written, we have a major point of disagreement.
To my way of thinking nobody should be expected to obey a law that they can't understand. I'll grant that since some people can't understand much, this means that they shouldn't be expected to obey many laws. So the more important a law is, the simpler it's expression needs to be.
I understand that my belief has certain technical problems. E.g., people tend to lie when it's to their advantage, so they can be expected to claim to not understand laws. This means that most laws that impose requirements must also grant benefits. As it is more traditionally put, with liberty comes responsibility. But this needs to be built into the structure of the legal system rather than being a pious pronouncement with vague but obviously meaningful weight. If you can't measure it, it's not something that can, or should, be regulated. If you think it should be regulated, find a way to measure it.
Currently we not only have too many laws, but the laws we have are too complex. This is the result of having a legislature that sees it's job as passing laws, and of companies that benefit from having specific laws passed. Often they will literally write the laws, and the congressional sponsors will never read them. (Well, perhaps not often, but much too often.)
I have a belief that most people put in job will try to do the job as well as they can (plus a bunch of sluffing off). And I have a belief that if they weren't corrupted, they would try to do the right thing. (We might well disagree about what's right. But I often disagree about that.)
If you don't think that that's enough, require that each bill pass by a 2/3 vote. Or allow representatives to filibuster. But I think that's putting too many road-blocks in the way when some legislation does need to be passed.
Additional options:
1) Every bill automatically expires after 20 years. If it's important enough, it should be worth passing again every 20 years.
2) There is a special house of congress created whose only job is do remove legislation that's already been enacted.
3) No bill can be more than 5000 words long, and each bill must be understood to mean the same thing by 3 randomly chosen classes of high school seniors.
4) There is a limit on the number of bills that can be passed. Say 5000. ( Consider using this in conjunction with 3, above. If you don't like the numbers chosen [they're pretty arbitrary] what numbers would be appropriate?)
The main point is that the legal information needs to be intelligible. When four different intelligent people come to four different opinions about what the legal implications are of some one particular action, then the system is broken. There should never be more than three reasonable opinions which I can characterize as 1) it's covered by these particular law; 2) it's not covered by any law; 3) I need more information. If different intelligent and well-informed people disagree about whether it's covered, or which laws cover it, then the law is bad.
Sorry, I've gotten well off the point, so I'll close now.
No matter how you select a dictator, it isn't a good long term answer, and I wasn't proposing any such method. I'm more relying on statistics. If you select 535 people at random, you have a pretty good chance that when they vote they won't make crazy choices that don't accomplish what they want. (Not accomplishing what they want is quite likely if they don't want something reasonable.) This was about the size of an Athenian jury, and those worked out pretty well, though not perfectly. And the jury wasn't selected at random, so even that's not a fair comparison, but it's reasonably close.
So instead of electing members of the House of Representatives, choose them at random from within their district. Declining not allowed. You've got 6 months to put your affairs in order, after that you are financially independent of all private organizations (meaning that you can't accept bribes either now or in the future). You have a secure retirement and a better than average salary. And your expenses while on the job are paid (but anything you acquire is owned by the office, not by you...like the crown jewels, except that it's not a job for life, but only for two years).
Analogously for the Senate, but I think the number of senators is too small for reasonable statistical certainty, so it's 3 senators per state rather than two. And the term is, as now, 6 years.
Note that the only way to get chosen a second time is to be chosen by the lottery twice. This would be *very* rare.
This way one ends up paying for lots of retired legislators, but much smaller selection costs. And you don't get candidates that have been "pre-corrupted". You may get many stupid ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some malicious ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some...
Unfortunately, this approach wouldn't work for selecting a president. But I think the presidential powers need to be scaled way back anyway. Perhaps the president's office should be divided in half, with one office doing nothing be either vetoing bills or not, and the other being totally separate from legislation. Centralizations of power need to be broken up. Centralized power becomes largely immune to the consequences of it's actions.
P.S.: It's not power that corrupts, it's immunity to consequences. But power is used to acquire immunity to consequences. (Even those who aren't yet corrupt don't want to suffer the consequences of making a mistake. That desire, however, is one of the first steps toward corruption. And EVERYONE has it.)
Thank you for your more precise resolution. For my grip of history "30 years before" counts as about the same time as. (Unless, of course, it's something since WWII. And it gets worse the farther back you go, and gets more precise as you get closer to now, but at about 1865 30 years +|- counts as "about the same time" unless I'm discussing something that's anchored to something I know more precisely.)
So you're probably right. But I didn't disagree with you, I just have larger error bars.
This is but one of several pre-event trasmission of informations that was ignored. There wasn't just one, there were many, including one from an FBI supervisor.
You can believe that they were all ignored because of information overload, and that's possible. But I don't consider it the most likely reason. Especially given the immediate submission of legislation to congress that was passed in a hurry for abridging civil liberties. And the constant cries that we should be more paranoid being raised for most of the next 3 years.
I guess I did become more paranoid, but not about external assailants. And there are reasonable grounds for believing that if the government didn't do the assault on twin-towers, it at least had advance knowledge, and decided to let it go through. (I'm not really convinced that it *didn't* perform the act through agents that were working for it. But I don't believe that the evidence is sufficient to prove that that was the case. It does indicate it, however, and it's well to remember that a government is not an entity. It is a collection of agents that each have their own idea about what is going on. So at the department head level it might well have only had advance knowledge, while at the operative level it could be acting to make the event more spectacular. But again, this is not proven. Merely plausible. Even the "advance knowledge" is only most plausible, and was probably kept from the public faces, so that they would react more realisticly. The "cell system" isn't only used by the underground, an informal version of it is living in every large bureaucracy.)
It's a feedback system, set up around the time of the civil war. The companies pay the politicians, and the politicians pay the companies. They just use different kinds of coin. (Before then "lobbying" was illegal.)
Expect that where-ever, whenever, you have centralized control by humans, you will have corruption. Expect it, and design your systems to account for it. One reason that elections are a bad means of selecting representatives is that they encourage corruption. A simple lottery would be better. (Simple. It is to laugh. You still need means to prevent corruption, even if almost everyone selected would start out not-yet corrupted. This means enforced penalties. Not only on those who are the corrupters, but also on those who become corrupt. And it means denying rewards in the future, not just while they hold office.)
But in a feedback system, you can't say one link is more important than the other. They are all important. If any one breaks, the mode of operation of the system changes.
What I propose is that if someone is selected to state or regional office, they be given a salary of 3/2 the median income in the country, an ample pension, and forbidden from accepting any gifts or favors from anyone. Expenses of office would need to be covered (which can get a bit tricky...but being a bit lavish here isn't *too* damaging to the country).
And I also propose that they be selected at random (lottery) from among all adult citizens in an area. It would probably be best to increase the number of Senators, as we don't want a state to be represented by a delegation that's half looney. But 1/3 would be ok.
If you don't like this, Condorcet voting or Instant Runoff is far better than the current system, as it makes it much more difficult for all contenders to be purchased before the election. But you also need to do something to eliminate the advantage that the well-funded have over the poorly funded, or even so the improvement is likely to be minimal.
OTOH, don't expect the Supreme Court to allow anything to be done that will impede the ability of the well-funded to rule things. They have recently and historically shown a distressing tendency to side with the wealthy, and let justice and equity go hang.
If the Constitution was actually honored, I'd be much less likely to propose such an alteration, which is clearly unconstitutional (unless amended). However, since the constitution is ignored except when it's convenient by the powerful and wealthy, I have no qualms in such a proposal. (Besides, I know it won't be adopted, so I'll never be proven foolish.)
Well, if you want to get technical they were originally used in Numenor for communication among the great houses. We have no idea how many originally existed, but only nine were brought by ship when the continent? Large Island? sank. These were originally used by the lords of the survivors for communication, and only later were they lodged in towers (after many had been lost). At the time of the "Lord of the Rings" only 3 were known to be surviving. And only one of those was usable by the end of the book. Even that one would bend itself to look only at Orthanc unless the mind had great fixity of purpose. (It was stated that this was because it had been used to look in that direction so often, so I don't think the fall of Sauron would have changed things. It was more wear grooves than compulsion by that time, though originally it was entrapment by Sauron.)
FWIW, I suspect that Google has lots of non-public data.
But they have a better track record for being helpful to people in general than the government has of recent decades. And they aren't allowed to directly use force. Both leave me feeling less suspicious of Google.
This is a bit unfair to the government. The job that they should be doing does require that they occasionally act in unpleasant manners using force as an argument. I just don't feel that they have been attending to their proper job, and that they have instead been using their force and rule making capability to advantage one proportion of their constituency over another. This, in a government, is malfeasance. They are also guilty of misfeasance, i.e., not properly performing their jobs. (Failure to resolve the budget problem is an example of misfeasance rather than malfeasance.)
I should be clear that when I describe the actions of the government in terms of criminal acts, the criminal acts are not necessarily something that the judicial system would recognize as criminal. They are things that *I*, personally, consider criminal. And though I use the term government, I actually mean the people holding office in the government. E.g., at the recent civil disobedience in Davis, CA I feel that the officer that sprayed the demonstrators with pepper spray should be charged with assault, and that the other police who just stood around should be arraigned as accessories before the fact. The judicial system does not appear to be of the same opinion. (You will note that I do not call it the justice system.)
That's because it's allowed. Even the laws that exist against such things as bait-and-switch aren't enforced. This hasn't always been true, but it does seem to be true at most times.
The last agreement I read said "up to ?? Mbps". Which may have been truthful. (It would have been very hard to disprove.)
But do I really want a promise that they'll never deliver a connection faster that I asked for?
Actually, wireless does. I'm not sure, however, that electromagnetic does. Ultrasonic can work pretty well for short distances (which is what you want). Infrasonic is even better (being less directional), but tends to require larger transmitters and receivers.
I've been very surprised at the way low cost infra-red lasers have suppressed ultrasonic controllers. I suppose, however, that the key point is "low cost". But ultra-sonics have lots of advantages when you don't want the signals to travel very far.
Their OfficeJet like, however, is also bad. A recent one will only print of paper that's the right **COLOR** for gods sake. And if I want to print on green paper, or card stock, I need to switch into draft mode. (Admittedly, the quality of the draft mode isn't that bad.)
This is an unacceptable piece of garbage, and a good reason to not buy HP again.
And if they think that by this kind of trick they're going to get me to pay more money for a more expensive product, they can think again. I take it as a quality statement about their entire line of printers. ALL of them. (By the time I buy my next printer, all the model numbers will have changed anyway, so I can't just particular models. Only companies.)
Not if it's a real photonic circuit. Of course, we don't have many of those right now. A few telescopes, but not the ones with photon amplifiers. A few microscopes, but not many of them, either. Mainly the only current "photonic circuits" are experimental. (To be photonic rather than just optical you need to have light intentionally modifying the signal that other light carries. Usually this only happens by accident, and degrades the signal.)
Most of the things that we have that approach photonics are actually electronic/optic hybrids.
(I may be overstating the current presence of photonic circuits. I'm giving interpretation that favor that to some things I read that could be interpreted either way.)
Linux (and the Mac?) have relatively little malware, and most of that trojans.
"Malware" is possible on any platform, and *is* driven by market share. Trojans are the catch here, and vetting software (via a repository) is the only known solution. This appears to be a weakness in the Android system. Viruses, a much more specific category, is driven by system vulnerabilities, as worms are driven by network vulnerabilities. Generally I only install software from the Debian repository, though occasionally I'll install a source package that appears to be safe. (I don't study the source, so I can't claim that I know that it's safe, but I don't think I've been bitten yet.)
I am annoyed, however, at usability decisions made by Linux that compromise safety. And several have been made, but my pet peeve is that tar can extract files with the execute permission set. Yes, it makes things much more convenient. It's also an inherent weakness. Privilege escalations are less important to me because I'm the sole user of this machine, and I keep everything that I care about in my home directory. So it doesn't require a privilege escalation the trash everything I care about. (And I decline to, e.g., engage in electronic banking, so that kind of information is just not present. My concern isn't secrecy, but not losing information. [Well, I'd be annoyed at having my privacy violated, but not injured. Because I don't have much of anything on my computer that would be compromising...intentionally. The most I'd lose would be things like my /. password.])
Is MSWind7 safe? At this point nobody knows. Which means that it probably is, for now, except, perhaps, for trojans included by MS. Would I use it? Quite unlikely. I haven't read the EULA, but given their past EULAs it seems quite unlikely that I'd agree to it. (Apple generally has much milder EULAs, and I won't agree to theirs.) More to the point, if I know I'm likely to be sold something that I won't be able to use (for not agreeing to the EULA) and can't return, I'm quite unlikely to fork over ANY cash. I've been bitten unpleasantly that way before, and ended up with a computer I could only use off the net. I'm not about to be put in that situation again. If it has an EULA, I want to know the terms BEFORE I fork over the cash. And this means the actual terms, not a bait-and-switch kind of deal like Apple pulled. (If you actually read the terms that adhere to the security patches, you may be quite surprised...though that was nearly a decade ago by now, and they may have improved. [Ha. Ha. It is to laugh.])
At the time that was written person damn well did NOT mean corporation. Many of the signers didn't even believe that corporations should be legal. Seeing what's been happening recently, I'd say they had a good point.
And *I* sure don't consider corporations to be people. When was the last time one went to jail for killing someone? I trust you aren't going to claim that they never do, because that's blatantly false. They have been documented doing it with prior intent. (Usually it's of the form "when we do this we can expect so many people to die" rather than "I want that person dead", but it's still killing people by intent. And the other form has also been documented occasionally. No corporation has ever been sent to jail for the crime of either murder or homicide. They often aren't even fined.)
in 10 years the usa will be disconnected from the internet.. at least; the free internet the rest of the world will enjoy.
The problem is that the majority of the Internet infrastructure is inside the US.
That was once true. I don't believe that it's been true for over a decade
I'll encourage outright piracy when you show that it actually hurts the RIAA, the MPAA, or their member companies.
As it is I think of it as free advertizing for despicable entities. Not actually immoral, but dangerous and stupid.
Currently the galactic clusters are still gravitationally bound. Unless Dark Energy gets a lot stronger, they will stay visible. If it does, the remaining intelligences will have other problems.
OTOH, IIUC, by the time Dark Energy gets strong enough to break up the galactic clusters, at it's maximal current rate of strengthening, the Milky Way will have merged with Andromeda, and there effectively won't BE any local galactic cluster. Just a much larger galaxy of MUCH older stars. (Andromeda is already so much larger than the Mikly Way that I said we merge with them.)
By that time, though, the only currently active stars that will still be "active" will be the red and white dwarf stars.
OTOH, I am not an astronomer or cosmologist. You may want to check this with a more reliable source. But I believe it to be correct to the best of current knowledge.
Black hole? Something's wrong with your physics model.
OTOH, as stars emit gas, and so do galaxies, you'd expect to detect a lot of matter-antimatter annihilation going on. This is a particular energy range of gamma radiation that we just aren't seeing, so we believe that there's no sizable amount of antimatter in the universe. This isn't entirely certain, as glaxy clusters are much more separated than individual galaxies, but if there is a significant amount of antimatter it's at the galactic cluster range of size, and it's really hard to explain why it would chunk in that way. (OTOH, I'm not a cosmologist. I could be wrong. But in this case I'd make a reasonable bet that I wasn't.)
Bamboo's not that great. It's too high in cellulose. Which is great if you're making chairs, but a pain to process. And algae...well, there's lots of different kinds, but I'm skeptical about the algae->diesel oil plan. It's possible, but the rate of conversion seems too slow to be practical.
Be clear on your purpose, though. If your purpose is to remove carbon from the atmosphere, that cellulose isn't a bad thing, But you want it to be something that will endure, like acid-free paper. Or furniture, but there is only a limited demand for bamboo chairs, etc.
Perhaps a better idea would be perennial versions of food crops. I understand that it's being worked on, but nobody's predicting when they will have success. This would result in a plant that stored a bunch of carbon in it's root system, and didn't need anywhere near as much water or fertilizer. It might also be more resistant to insects, but I think that's a separate problem.
A plant with an oily seed does seem like a reasonable approach, but perhaps one should start with something different. Soy beans, perhaps. Or some perennial that still produces a large number of sizable seeds. Again, though, this is probably too minor a source to replace fuel needs. For that I think electric in some form is the only option. (I don't like hydrogen, but most hydrogen is either a processed form of natural gas, or a disguised form of electricity.)
That's oversimplifying. We're definitely past some tipping points, but there are some that we haven't passed yet. It's not like there was just one.
E.g., coral could still survive. We aren't definitively past the point at which the species become extinct. But the Great Barrier Reef has probably had it. That's two minor tipping points right there.
The problem is that 30 hours is already too long to equitably distribute the work that needs doing. Even though as the work week declines, the amount of work for the Personnel department increases.
Also, the work week needs to divide evenly into the time that the business is open. 40 hours interpreted as 8 hours/day is a 5-day single shift work week. 30 hours is 6/day for 5 days or 5/day for 6 days. The second doesn't work for many jobs, though open for 10 hours with 3 5 hour shifts could work if the business were open for 10 hours / day. (With double coverage during the central, presumably busiest, period.)
But people aren't usually conscious of the expense of hiring a new person. It's not insignificant. So all businesses can be depended upon to fight shorter work weeks even at the same hourly rate. It means you need to manage more people. This is not only expensive, it's more difficult, even if you can find the ones you want.
Another problem is that many people have skills only in certain areas. Cutting the hours of such a person means you need to provide coverage from someone equally skilled. And even that won't suffice. Project specific knowledge needs to be continually transferred between the people working on the project. If you're writing a piece of code, how easy is it to explain to someone what you're planning as the next step of the development? You basically can't. (OTOH, it's not at all clear that reducing the hours that programmers are at work would even slow down development. Much development comes during the time you aren't actually coding, but merely ruminating over how to handle things in the back of your mind.)
So I'm not particularly advocating either for or against a shorter work week. But I *am* aware of it as a real problem, that society appears to be intending to ignore as long as it can.
N.B.: Automation is continually increasing, even without increasing use of computers, which is also happening. Sometimes it's just redesigning jobs to be done more efficiently. This often means that it gets turned into something that could be handled by current automation. (E.g., consider the function of the cashier at a fast food restaurant. Their obvious job could be handled by a user operated menu combined with a cash accepting machine. So what is their secondary job? Can that also be similarly automated?)
My estimate now is that half of the work done at paid jobs is not socially productive except in that it keeps people employed. And even so there's a very large number of people who AREN'T employed. Note that in the 1950's women generally didn't work, and we had a level of social happiness and wealth that averaged higher than today's. This DID discriminate against many women, but is it really that much better if we discriminate against people who are, basically, unlucky? (Being born with poor parents qualifies as unlucky in my book, as does being raised in an environment that discourages learning.)
OTOH, can you really justify college in today's world? It's not at all clear. Most students acquire a crushing level of debt, and then are thrown into a job market that won't pay off that investment. And you can expect that any particular skill set you acquire will be obsolete within five years, and it's quite possible that the entire field will be automated away (or at least closed to new entrants).
P.S.: have you heard about the automated paralegals? They do citation searches for precedent cases that paralegals used to do. Several major legal firms have already cut way back on the hiring of paralegals and new lawyers. That's not upcoming, that's here. They are already saving the firms money, even though they are currently quite limited. And this is just the first generation, so rapid improvement and generalization can be expected. (I think the current version is limited to patent law, but I'm not sure as I've only "heard about" it.)
But the major point is that there aren't any secure options. Except, perhaps, top manageme
My Representative usually votes in a way I deem at least defensible. I can't say that about either Senator. One of them occasionally votes in a reasonable manner, but not on copyright or patent law. The other ... you could generally pick the correct way to vote by watching their vote and choosing the alternative.
What are you suggesting they do? Be specific.
FWIW, I've tried campaigning at the local level. The candidate won. I was immediately sold to another candidate in a deal to shift the district boundaries. The appalling thing is, that candidate is still one of the better council members. The one that is now my representative is a slimy wheeler-dealer who ignores any comment I make. And is president of the council.
(My wife continues to make excuses for the boundary shifting deal. Maybe there is something to them, but *I* was sold out, and I don't forgive that quickly. The "wheeler-dealer" is in a safe district, as with boundary adjustments he is essentially guaranteed re-election.)
Regulatory capture doesn't require that the companies be even comparable in size or power to the government. All requires is loose ethics laws, and that the companies be wealthy in comparison to the individual people doing the regulating.
Regulators should be forbidden from accepting ANY favors or recompense either while they are regulating the companies OR AFTERWARD. That requirement should be extended to all members of their immediate family. This would, if strictly enforced, make regulatory capture 90% more difficult. And penalties for breaking this rule should apply not only to the individual regulators, but also the the companies AND TO THE EXECUTIVES OF THE COMPANIES. (If they are corporations, make that "and members of the boards of directors".)
The problem is that responsibilities are not enforced commensurate with powers granted. (A difficult problem, admittedly. E.g., would it be proper to award district attorneys a percentage of the penalties for enforcing this proposed regulation? Why and why not?)
libertarianism (note the lowercase initial letter) is quite reasonable. The Libertarian party isn't. And isn't libertarian.
I'm not certain that libertarianism is an acceptable political choice, but it is reasonable and defensible. This is not true of Libertarianism.
The government is too large and too intrusive in the lives of citizens is the message of libertarianism. This isn't at all the same as "The government shouldn't interfere with whatever I want to do." But it's headed towards that, even though all sensible people would stop before it got that far.
N.B.: communism (note, again, the lowercase initial letter) is also quite reasonably defensible. And not totally inconsistent with libertarianism...though there are obvious points of conflict. But traditional communism didn't scale. Even a village was larger than it's optimal size.
Question: What is a reasonable social system for a civilization where only 20% of the populace need to work to produce the goods used by the rest of the civilization? Does this change if the number declines to 15%? 10%? 5%? 1%? Nobody?
This is the current problem. If we can solve energy requirements, the percentage of the populace that will need to hold jobs is going to be declining. It has already declined tremendously, even though this is being masked by various societal mechanisms.
Question: What are the implications of the military increasingly deploying robot soldiers?