which seeks to concentrate libertarian activism in a single state to effect major real changes in a localized area as a demonstration that Libertarianism can work.
Do you think a similar push by Greens would work, and would would you personally move to a place where green activists chose to concentrate their presence?
This is actually really, really, really dangerous, and here's why.
In theory:
The base case, System One, will use fingerprinting like TunePrint to check for copyright infringement. If it matches the database, pull it off the stream.
PROBLEM: suppose somebody released an important piece of free speech which government wanted to stifle... add it the the copyright database, it vanishes.
PROBLEM: suppose I encrypt my illegal music? Now it doesn't match the tuneprint database any more. Quickly the system becomes useless.
So now SYSTEM 2 is announced: in system two, tuneprint is used in the other mode - only things which are in the database as legitimate to copy are permitted. I.e. you can't record something and move it on othe network without registering the work first. And you need a frickin' license to publish.
Oh, and encrypted work can't be moved around, so you have no privacy.
PROBLEM: this would suit those Patriot Act Loving Bastards a little too well.
the civil liberties and free speech implications of these kinds of on-the-wire filtering schemes are horrendous. kill them before they take hold
the problem with the greens is this: to "Do The Right Thing" for everybody means that the government winds up with an enormous amount of intrusive power into people's lives. If somebody discoveres that Doing X is Bad For The World, the green approach is simply to ban it, and that requires making sure nobody does it, and...
It requires a centralized government with arbitrary powers - a government which can do whatever it thinks is best, period.
In that respect it's much like communism, concentrating power. I know the party likes to talk local control, but at the end of the day that local control doesn't amount to much on core issues.
However, I will say that a middle-of-the-road green state is probably possible, in the same way that middle of the road socialist democracies apparently function fine.
But the Greens don't have the politican answers I'm looking for because of the centralization of power issues.
Investor conflict of interest matters.
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
At the moment, however, because they are safe, investors encourage profitable risk taking.
That's fine, up to a point. But as we've seen with Enron, and WorldCom, and many other corporate disasters, and companies like Exxon who just keep breaking the law and paying the fines, shareholders still appoint board members who are willing to break the law to make a buck.
We've created a perverse incentive to shareholders to hire people who'll bend and break the rules, make a buck, and if they get caught, go to jail.
Why? Because the shareholders themselves are immune to prosecution for the actions they hire people to take.
Think about that: if I'm a shareholder, I can hire somebody as a director who then breaks the law - but they can't touch me. If that crime makes me a lot of money, that money is inviolate: share price rises, I cash out, the crime is discovered, and the director involved goes to jail.
But the agent behind the action, the individual investor, gets away scot free.
It's a broken system. It may have been necessary at an early stage of capitalism, but at this point it's like running a coal-fired steel mill in the heart of downtown.
Corporations are a relic of the industrial age. We should drop them.
Re:Culture of Empire vs. Culture of Exploration.
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In a nutshell: companies are taking too many risks in areas like biotech, handling of toxic chemicals, and consumer safely. They're using the unlimited protection afforded them by the government in ways which harm us all.
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
Now, does this sound familiar to you? It is modern America. Yes, we've got very used to the economic benefits of limited liability. However, the policital cost - individual voters losing control of the political process to big money is simply unacceptable.
It's time to rein in corporate power and put people back in the driver's seat.
Culture of Empire vs. Culture of Exploration.
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
NASA always had a culture of exploration: to see what is out there and find out what it means. Exploration and discovery go hand in hand.
Turning NASA from an Exploring agency to an empire-building agency is evil, pure and simple.
This was supposed to be a nation dedicated to freedom and increasingly we're becoming the most frightening and dangerous regime on earth. Our civil liberties have been strip mined, and we're saddled with a government we can't trust and may not be able to get rid of.
We started as Athens, and now we're rapidly heading towards Rome. What a lousy, bloody, stupid waste of the potential of a great nation this Bush has wrought.
I'm tired of the Democrats, and I'm tired of the Republicans. The libertarians show promise, but the Libertarians suck. The greens are a good idea, bu the Greens are fascists, and Nader is a basket case.
We need fundamental fixes: to admit that the Limited Liability Corporation was a grave error, or at least that the Constitution has proved inadquate in it's current for to keep such beasts under control, for starters**. We need to find a way of representing out views outside the follow-the-herd thinking of conventional political parties, so that intelligent debate, healthy scepticism and scientific fact get a fair hearing in the political arena.
NASA really once was our crown jewel: an essentially peaceful effort put the first human being on the surface of another world. Yes, there were nationalistic reasons for doing it, but we did it in peace, and we did it for everybody.
To see it militarized when there is no credible space-related threat to the safety or liberty of Americans is anathema.
I don't know what we can do to reverse this corruption of our ideals, but I hope somebody else does. How's about using this thread to think about that.
(**) The Bill of Rights would have contained a clause banning the formation of corporations, had not the states of the time had adaquate anti-corporate legislation themselves. In hindsight, this may have been the most critical error the Framers made.
I'm not suggesting the USA *singlehandedly* did anything, only that had they not participated, Hitler would have defeated Britain fairly quickly, and probably Russia would have fallen eventually.
US economic and later military intervention prevented that.
And the "policy of containment" prevented the USSR expanding into, say, all of Europe and keeping it's economy afloat by using the resources of Western europe to sustain it's empire. Read some of the policy papers around the time the policy of containment was though up and implimented - they knew exactly what would happen to Soviet Communism, they just thorught it would happen much, much earlier.
Hitler first: the USA kept Britain afloat, and defeated the Japanese. Had we not entered the war (even economically) until much later, or not at all, Britain would have fallen fairly rapidly, Hitler would have been free to focus on Russia, and probably defeated them.
Reasonable reading of history? I think so.
Now the USSR. They didn't just "fall apart" - if the USA had not participated in the arms race, had not contained them in Europe so they couldn't simply have rolled into Berlin at the end of WW2, say, or perhaps just driven through the rest of Europe any time it pleased them, they could have almost certainly survived economically and politically.
But the perpetual US pressure, the "Cold War", placed them in a position where they could not expand their territory to survive and where vital resources were being bled off into the miltary, eventually destroying their economy.
In both cases: no action from the USA, and a much, much worse world results.
Now, our relationship with China is a more subtle version of our relationship with the USSR, but fundamentally we're out to destroy them as a long-term threat to our welfare. This time, the tool of choice is capitalism and economic interdependence.
Odds are it'll work there too.
The USA has actually been the bulwark against which these tides crashed.
Twice in the past 50 years, the American people have defeated monsterous regimes: Hitler, and Stalin. Yes, the cold war never came to blows, but if we had not comitted to contain the USSR at any cost, they would have expanded out of all recogniction.
Staling murdered nearly three times as many people as Hitler, and Hitler murdered 22 million people, by the estimates of Rudy Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who's extensively studied mass murders in recent history. (search for Democide) on Google.
We didn't have the choice of "not playing" on either of those occasions, and the reason there are free people left is that we won those wars.
Don't knock it. American military strength is a good thing. It's just that our current leaders are imperialist assholes.
Where one side has a huge advantage, usually the war is swift, people surrender, and all's well. Put 'em in a camp, feed them, send them home.
The first Gulf War broke those rules, because we massacred 150 - 300, 000 retreating troops.
But, in general, I'd rather our soliders were well equipt, capable, and used wisely, rather than being poorly equpt, careless and used for imperialist aggression.
A strong American military is why Hitler and Stalin didn't wind up ruling the world, and don't forget it. Yes, and idiot like Bush is a big problem, but don't let bad leaders convince you that american military power is a bad thing. It's what kept the world free, and don't ever let anybody tell you different.
American military superiority is now so huge that nobody in their right minds is going to face us on an open battle field without air superiority, which basically ain't going to happen.
So at that point, people are adapting rapidly and finding ways to attack american political will and infrastructure: in Iraq, that's putting GIs in body bags and blowing up oil facilities.
It's not clear to anybody that an organized, hierarchical military force is capable of victory against guerillas, even in a desert environment. Nobody's going to come out and say that, but it's implicit in the work of John Boyd, a fighter pilot and philosopher who is widely hailed as the father of the F16 and it's entire school of fighter design, and the Air-Ground War doctrine which is the bedrock of military strategy for the USA.
Boyd basically suggests that hierarchies are inherently a bottleneck on the battlefield, and that the time it takes information to percolate to the level a decision can be made on is a critical point of attack for fast, light, independent forces.
So if you have cohesion and collective planning, you have slowness and are vulnerable. But if you have no central control, then you're not an army, you're a rabble.
That's why there's so much of a focus on netwar and similar concepts in current US military thought: we're trying to figure out how to beat sheep farmers with RPGs.
sorry, should have put this in the other post, but there's also ARTT - above real time training, where you run the sim 30% faster, people's reflexes speed up, and then in the real world they often have a 10% edge once they've reacclimatized to regular speed reality.
I really do worry about the simulator-shock aspect of this: both in terms of creating unrealistic expectations on the part of the soliders, but also in terms of people slipping into "gamespace" on the battle field.
ARRL (advanced robotics research limited) used to do a lot of VR work in Britain, and they wouldn't let people drive for about an hour or two after they'd been in the VR because people often drove in very odd ways, including being very agressive and taking foolish risks. They pinned it down to two things, if I remember correctly:
1> Simulator artefacts, as outlined in the other post. 2> The sense of "unreality" which pervaded the real world after having been inside for a while...
People didn't feel like the real world was real any more after even three hours in a VR system. Somehow the brain figures out "well, I can run into walls and I don't feel anything, I must be dreaming(?)" or something like that?
I don't know exactly, but stories like that give me a very, very bad feeling about extending the use of simulator based training even further. it might not be VR, but I won't be surprised if the problems are similar.
The psychological effects are so subtle, but potentially so important. I think we might do much, much better investing these resources in better real-world training for troops than sims.
Well, on one hand, this might be a really good idea: train people to think in new ways, provoke discussion and innovation, and generally have a place for people to make their dumb mistakes before they go out into the field.
On the other hand, let's not forget one of the big dangers of simulator training is that people often get very attuned to artefacts in the simulator, and then in the real world get their ass handed to them.
Great if it works. But if it turns out more over-enthusiastic rookies with unrealistic simulator expectations, people are going to get killed.
Intellectually unclean code is really just a trojan, right? If somebody (can't think who) really wanted to mount an attack on the integrity of open source software, one threat model is to hire people to insert stolen code into projects, let it get dug deep in, and then pull the plug by claiming IP violation and starting a court case.
Sound implausible? Well, perhaps....
But we write code to protect against much less plausible attacks all the time, and security isn't just about software.
So, ok, the SCO case might be beginning to crumble. Might take a little longer, and who knows, with M$ looking for any shot it can take, there might be more problems in future.
So what are we going to do about it? Are there any measures the open source community can take to prevent contaimination of the open code base with improperly cleared code? Can we look at this as a subset of the more general "malware CVS committs?" problem? Should we have coders sign contracts stating that they have all appropriate rights to what they are about to commit so that we can offload liability to them?
Open Source Programmer insurance couldn't be far behind that....
You should probably know that I live in rural Colorado, and am of profoundly mixed race.
"Other" is one of the largest growing racial categories: it covers the halves, quarters and sixteenths which are so common, particularly in urban areas. Here, where I live, a lot of mexicans and whites are forming relationships. In chicago where I once lived, I see a lot of black/white couples and children.
Demographically, these trends are probably unstoppable. It won't get to deeply traditional isolated areas for a long, long, long time, but anybody with access to an even slightly cosompolitan city could well take part in this blurring of traditional distinctions.
The flip side of that is the "flyovers." - with the declining amount of manpower required for farming, and the collapse of the supporting industries, a lot of those towns are just drying up. I recently took a detour in rural Nebraska in search of lunch, and wound up in a town which had once had a major tourist attraction and grain elevators.
The only life in near that town was the cluster of franchises near the highway. Everything else was a graveyard. The town was dead, empty, profoundly depressed and depressing.
There are a lot of places, and the demographics show it: people are still flocking to the cities, and rural populations continue to decline. One of my friends thinks large parts of the midwest will return to a "buffalo commons" within our lifetimes.
Now, you could claim economic coercion: people can't make a living because rural industry and collapsed, and so must move.
But I don't think that's the whole story. I have a lot of friends who grew up in rural Iowa and fled to the cities as soon as they could - not because they couldn't find jobs teaching or managing near their home towns, because that area of Iowa is still pretty healthy, but because they couldn't deal with the social and cultural starvation. They wanted out, to go explore in the big wide world and find their niche - a place which suited them better than their starting location chosen by accident of birth.
People aren't always born in the place in the world where they are happiest. In fact, I'd argue that very seldom are people most comfortable in their birth circumstances. Usually people want something different - rural people go urban, southerners wind up in Minnesota and so on.
The illusion of stability - this myth that people wind up where their parents put them - is largely (I think) a product of limited resources. And a lot of those resources are no longer limited, so people roam.
You can't stop that. And even if some proportion of the population wants to stay exactly where they are, the odds are that their children won't. Over generations, eventually very, very, very few houses will have the kind of intergenerational continuity which was so common in the past.
A very similar thing happened to marriage: when the external economic and social constraints were largely withdrawn, men and women found that they weren't able to maintain the old form any more. Now that marriage was no longer the only socially and economically viable option, a lot of people found the couldn't sustain it.
Similarly with race mixing. Now that it's OK, lots of people are doing it. Small, tightly knit racial groups (think: Jews) are freaking out because of the dilution of their race and culture.
And, at least from my perspective, these are "ratchets" - there's no going back, any more than hunter-gatherers who had taken up farming could go back to the old ways. Population increases, skills are lost, and you're trapped in the new world.
We can't stop it. Although groups like the religious right can react against it, eventually they either harden into fascist enclaves, or form small-but-sustainable cultural isolates like the Amish or the better communes or monastaries.
The general culture rolls down hill into the lowest energy state, and that's just the way history works.
look around you. if you open your eyes to what people are actually doing you'll see that these mega migrations are fact, not fiction. Ratial blending, cultual amalgamation, massive migrant populations (mexicans, south americans, russian jews, fleeing israelis - who else is on the move right now? - and that's in the USA).
some people will ground. more are wandering, and hypermobility is a fact, both among the very poor and the middle rich.
Enjoy the pastoral life. you might be one of a couple of hundred thousand people who give it a shot in the USA.
Don't forget: historically humans weren't farmers who stayed in one place and were buried a hundred yards from where they were born. Originally we were grazers, and then hunter-gatherers.
It's in the blood, and the narrow shackeles of agriculture are broken!
To follow up on my earlier response to your other post, oil is irrelevant. We will stop using oil long before the last wells run dry.
Evidence, please?
The industrialized first world might stop using oil in, say, thirty to fifty years, with the 50% point being in 20 years. Might.
But the rural chinese? They'll be running those diesel trucks until the engines wear out and they can't buy spares.
Let's take farming - yes, 3% feed 97%. But how long can we keep doing that? The farming methods used to produce those results are completely unsustainable - groundwater is running out across most of the country (within 20 years in some areas), plus pesticide resistance, soil degradation, groundwater buildup of fertilizers and so on. Our current modes of agriculture are not going to work in fifty years - and they might fail in large areas of america in as little as twenty.
I think what you're missing is that we're a "bloom" - a rampantly fast growing culture running on accumulated biological energy reserves - oil, the prarie ecosystem and so on. Almost all of our ultra technology has at it's root inputs from a limited biological resource pool, and that's a problem: the faster our tech goes, the faster that resource pool is depleted.
Go take a look at "Natural Capitalism" on google. It explains this better than I can.
You sound like you're gambling that we can switch over to some sort of nano-type tech revolution before some of these basic resources become prohibitively scarce. It's not a bad bet - yes, we could have nanofood plants before monoculture farming with oil-based pesticide/fertilizer inputs collapses due to either soil condition or water shortages. But I wouldn't be comfortable staking my civilization on it.
There are alternatives. Check out the Land Institute's work on sustainable farming methods for the prarie ecosystem. It's radical stuff.
That's what they said in the 1950s. Fifty years later, nuclear electricity is still honking expensive, and power in general is nowhere like as available as "experts" predicted then.
Your predictions will be no different, in all probability.
You're are talking about a fantasy world: the "in the future, things will be different." fantasy world. You're pinning hopes on genetic engineering, which is completely unproven on the scales you're talking about, and alleged increases in the capabilities of energy generating technologies and vehicle efficiencies.
You know what? Show me.
The most optimisitc predictions of how good hydrogen vehicles will be show a 5x improvement of passenger miles / unit energy.
So if the entire world had two car households, we'd still need roughly 20 times the energy input we currently have in the form of oil. 20 times more energy than the current total world oil consumption. And that's just the running costs, not the road construction, the manufacturing, the disposal, the whole nine yards.
And almost unimagineable amount of energy is going to come from where? Little purple faeries from outer space?
there are limits to consumption - pretending that there aren't is living in a fantasy world just as dangerous and corrupt as any religion.
I do believe in near-infinite future growth in some areas: computing power, scientific knowledge etc. However, while some areas of life run on exponential curves, others are at best logarythmic. You have to learn how to tell the difference.
Looking at the past helps: energy has always been an issue, from the age of firewood onwards. And no technology on the boards changes that, not even fusion reactors.
Roughly half the world make their livings by growing food in their back yards, only occasionally having enough to sell to cover other expenses. For most of these people, a chicken is a luxury item and eggs a delicacy.
Just a reality check. Unless you're assuming some kind of future nano-socialist post-scarcity science fiction state, these people are still going to be there, living much as they do now.
At that point, it's definitions. Some people have referred to what the USA did in south america as covert war, others might call it "political interference." Either way, it was almost all target at left wing regimes, and a lot of people died.
1> Thanks for an excellent line. "I'm The Enemy Of The American Home" - that'll give my friends a chuckle.
2> How many of the following list do you actually have, and how much of it exists in some imagination of yours?
* well-composted gardens * marks on the wall showing how their children have grown. * walkway stones laid by their own hands * fruit or nut trees planted in order to yield a harvest.
Not to mock, and all that, but what the hell is the bug up your ass? Bit of a gap between fantasy and reality? Or so attatched to some penny-ante heaven you've crafted that you want to stand outside of history and apart from the rest of the world?
Bottom line, bunky: your home is capital - and if you want to be able to control it, live in it, do what you want with it - well, what if I want the same rights over my money?
If I choose to keep my capital in the form of cold hard cash why the hell should you have the right to tell me what to do with it, and how I may enjoy it or attempt to increase it.
You're talking about putting your own selfish lifestyle interests over somebody elses, namely mine: you want my money to stay home and look after you, when it could be out in the world putting roofs over other people's head, and making a tidy profit into the bargain.
By god, as much as you have a right to make a home and live in it as you choose, I have the right to invest where I will on the face of the globe, to my own benefit and the benefit of others! Freedom for the goose is freedom for the gander.
BACK TO THE FARM WITH YOU, YOU PETTY MINDED NATIONALIST PASTORLIST PATERNALIST RETROGRADE FREAK
Ahh... that's better. I love the smell of fresh roasted moron in the morning. And, seriously, thanks: it's been a while since anybody's pissed me off so much while presenting such an easy target. Fuck off.
Yes, people need roots. But most people choose to break them to move because the work moves, or they don't like the climate, or a dozen other things.
The so-called American Home you're imagining is mostly a fantasy. Check out statistics on population mobility... it's already far, far, far too late. Something like 20% of the population moves house every year, and interstate moves account for something like a third to a half of those. Nobody has any roots anymore.
Yes, some people cling, or hold out, but I'm sorry, times have changed. You can make stability for yourself if you try hard enough, but the time you're talking about is gone. Farms are run by corporations, software is moving abroad, heavy industry is gutted, and your so-called American Way Of Life exists only in adverts.
Grow up. Wake up. You sound a lot like Keats - a fucking pastoralist.
Wrong millenium, mah friend, wrong millenium. Your children's children's children won't even know which continent you lived on, will probably have four or five ethnic identities, speak half a dozen languages and live in five countries before they're twenty five.
By all means, stay in your little nest boyo. See if I care.
Slashdot Mirror
which seeks to concentrate libertarian activism in a single state to effect major real changes in a localized area as a demonstration that Libertarianism can work.
Do you think a similar push by Greens would work, and would would you personally move to a place where green activists chose to concentrate their presence?
Stupidly large amounts of money for things which never actually work. Wasteful corporate welfare!
Etc. etc. etc.
check the Common Dreams link in my earlier post.
This is actually really, really, really dangerous, and here's why.
In theory:
The base case, System One, will use fingerprinting like TunePrint to check for copyright infringement. If it matches the database, pull it off the stream.
PROBLEM: suppose somebody released an important piece of free speech which government wanted to stifle... add it the the copyright database, it vanishes.
PROBLEM: suppose I encrypt my illegal music? Now it doesn't match the tuneprint database any more. Quickly the system becomes useless.
So now SYSTEM 2 is announced: in system two, tuneprint is used in the other mode - only things which are in the database as legitimate to copy are permitted. I.e. you can't record something and move it on othe network without registering the work first. And you need a frickin' license to publish.
Oh, and encrypted work can't be moved around, so you have no privacy.
PROBLEM: this would suit those Patriot Act Loving Bastards a little too well.
the civil liberties and free speech implications of these kinds of on-the-wire filtering schemes are horrendous. kill them before they take hold
the problem with the greens is this: to "Do The Right Thing" for everybody means that the government winds up with an enormous amount of intrusive power into people's lives. If somebody discoveres that Doing X is Bad For The World, the green approach is simply to ban it, and that requires making sure nobody does it, and...
It requires a centralized government with arbitrary powers - a government which can do whatever it thinks is best, period.
In that respect it's much like communism, concentrating power. I know the party likes to talk local control, but at the end of the day that local control doesn't amount to much on core issues.
However, I will say that a middle-of-the-road green state is probably possible, in the same way that middle of the road socialist democracies apparently function fine.
But the Greens don't have the politican answers I'm looking for because of the centralization of power issues.
At the moment, however, because they are safe, investors encourage profitable risk taking.
That's fine, up to a point. But as we've seen with Enron, and WorldCom, and many other corporate disasters, and companies like Exxon who just keep breaking the law and paying the fines, shareholders still appoint board members who are willing to break the law to make a buck.
We've created a perverse incentive to shareholders to hire people who'll bend and break the rules, make a buck, and if they get caught, go to jail.
Why? Because the shareholders themselves are immune to prosecution for the actions they hire people to take.
Think about that: if I'm a shareholder, I can hire somebody as a director who then breaks the law - but they can't touch me. If that crime makes me a lot of money, that money is inviolate: share price rises, I cash out, the crime is discovered, and the director involved goes to jail.
But the agent behind the action, the individual investor, gets away scot free.
It's a broken system. It may have been necessary at an early stage of capitalism, but at this point it's like running a coal-fired steel mill in the heart of downtown.
Corporations are a relic of the industrial age. We should drop them.
Further arguments on why abolishing limited liability is the Right Answer
In a nutshell: companies are taking too many risks in areas like biotech, handling of toxic chemicals, and consumer safely. They're using the unlimited protection afforded them by the government in ways which harm us all.
Abraham Lincoln on Corporations
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
Now, does this sound familiar to you? It is modern America. Yes, we've got very used to the economic benefits of limited liability. However, the policital cost - individual voters losing control of the political process to big money is simply unacceptable.
It's time to rein in corporate power and put people back in the driver's seat.
NASA always had a culture of exploration: to see what is out there and find out what it means. Exploration and discovery go hand in hand.
Turning NASA from an Exploring agency to an empire-building agency is evil, pure and simple.
This was supposed to be a nation dedicated to freedom and increasingly we're becoming the most frightening and dangerous regime on earth. Our civil liberties have been strip mined, and we're saddled with a government we can't trust and may not be able to get rid of.
We started as Athens, and now we're rapidly heading towards Rome. What a lousy, bloody, stupid waste of the potential of a great nation this Bush has wrought.
I'm tired of the Democrats, and I'm tired of the Republicans. The libertarians show promise, but the Libertarians suck. The greens are a good idea, bu the Greens are fascists, and Nader is a basket case.
We need fundamental fixes: to admit that the Limited Liability Corporation was a grave error, or at least that the Constitution has proved inadquate in it's current for to keep such beasts under control, for starters**. We need to find a way of representing out views outside the follow-the-herd thinking of conventional political parties, so that intelligent debate, healthy scepticism and scientific fact get a fair hearing in the political arena.
NASA really once was our crown jewel: an essentially peaceful effort put the first human being on the surface of another world. Yes, there were nationalistic reasons for doing it, but we did it in peace, and we did it for everybody.
To see it militarized when there is no credible space-related threat to the safety or liberty of Americans is anathema.
I don't know what we can do to reverse this corruption of our ideals, but I hope somebody else does. How's about using this thread to think about that.
(**) The Bill of Rights would have contained a clause banning the formation of corporations, had not the states of the time had adaquate anti-corporate legislation themselves. In hindsight, this may have been the most critical error the Framers made.
I'm not suggesting the USA *singlehandedly* did anything, only that had they not participated, Hitler would have defeated Britain fairly quickly, and probably Russia would have fallen eventually.
US economic and later military intervention prevented that.
And the "policy of containment" prevented the USSR expanding into, say, all of Europe and keeping it's economy afloat by using the resources of Western europe to sustain it's empire. Read some of the policy papers around the time the policy of containment was though up and implimented - they knew exactly what would happen to Soviet Communism, they just thorught it would happen much, much earlier.
Ok, let's flesh this out a bit.
Hitler first: the USA kept Britain afloat, and defeated the Japanese. Had we not entered the war (even economically) until much later, or not at all, Britain would have fallen fairly rapidly, Hitler would have been free to focus on Russia, and probably defeated them.
Reasonable reading of history? I think so.
Now the USSR. They didn't just "fall apart" - if the USA had not participated in the arms race, had not contained them in Europe so they couldn't simply have rolled into Berlin at the end of WW2, say, or perhaps just driven through the rest of Europe any time it pleased them, they could have almost certainly survived economically and politically.
But the perpetual US pressure, the "Cold War", placed them in a position where they could not expand their territory to survive and where vital resources were being bled off into the miltary, eventually destroying their economy.
In both cases: no action from the USA, and a much, much worse world results.
Now, our relationship with China is a more subtle version of our relationship with the USSR, but fundamentally we're out to destroy them as a long-term threat to our welfare. This time, the tool of choice is capitalism and economic interdependence.
Odds are it'll work there too.
The USA has actually been the bulwark against which these tides crashed.
You would rather concentrate it in China? Or North Korea?
Twice in the past 50 years, the American people have defeated monsterous regimes: Hitler, and Stalin. Yes, the cold war never came to blows, but if we had not comitted to contain the USSR at any cost, they would have expanded out of all recogniction.
Staling murdered nearly three times as many people as Hitler, and Hitler murdered 22 million people, by the estimates of Rudy Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who's extensively studied mass murders in recent history. (search for Democide) on Google.
We didn't have the choice of "not playing" on either of those occasions, and the reason there are free people left is that we won those wars.
Don't knock it. American military strength is a good thing. It's just that our current leaders are imperialist assholes.
Where one side has a huge advantage, usually the war is swift, people surrender, and all's well. Put 'em in a camp, feed them, send them home.
The first Gulf War broke those rules, because we massacred 150 - 300, 000 retreating troops.
But, in general, I'd rather our soliders were well equipt, capable, and used wisely, rather than being poorly equpt, careless and used for imperialist aggression.
A strong American military is why Hitler and Stalin didn't wind up ruling the world, and don't forget it. Yes, and idiot like Bush is a big problem, but don't let bad leaders convince you that american military power is a bad thing. It's what kept the world free, and don't ever let anybody tell you different.
American military superiority is now so huge that nobody in their right minds is going to face us on an open battle field without air superiority, which basically ain't going to happen.
So at that point, people are adapting rapidly and finding ways to attack american political will and infrastructure: in Iraq, that's putting GIs in body bags and blowing up oil facilities.
It's not clear to anybody that an organized, hierarchical military force is capable of victory against guerillas, even in a desert environment. Nobody's going to come out and say that, but it's implicit in the work of John Boyd, a fighter pilot and philosopher who is widely hailed as the father of the F16 and it's entire school of fighter design, and the Air-Ground War doctrine which is the bedrock of military strategy for the USA.
Boyd basically suggests that hierarchies are inherently a bottleneck on the battlefield, and that the time it takes information to percolate to the level a decision can be made on is a critical point of attack for fast, light, independent forces.
So if you have cohesion and collective planning, you have slowness and are vulnerable. But if you have no central control, then you're not an army, you're a rabble.
That's why there's so much of a focus on netwar and similar concepts in current US military thought: we're trying to figure out how to beat sheep farmers with RPGs.
You can read a lot of Boyd's though online: check out Google's pages Boyd's OODA loop for more info.
sorry, should have put this in the other post, but there's also ARTT - above real time training, where you run the sim 30% faster, people's reflexes speed up, and then in the real world they often have a 10% edge once they've reacclimatized to regular speed reality.
I really do worry about the simulator-shock aspect of this: both in terms of creating unrealistic expectations on the part of the soliders, but also in terms of people slipping into "gamespace" on the battle field.
ARRL (advanced robotics research limited) used to do a lot of VR work in Britain, and they wouldn't let people drive for about an hour or two after they'd been in the VR because people often drove in very odd ways, including being very agressive and taking foolish risks. They pinned it down to two things, if I remember correctly:
1> Simulator artefacts, as outlined in the other post.
2> The sense of "unreality" which pervaded the real world after having been inside for a while...
People didn't feel like the real world was real any more after even three hours in a VR system. Somehow the brain figures out "well, I can run into walls and I don't feel anything, I must be dreaming(?)" or something like that?
I don't know exactly, but stories like that give me a very, very bad feeling about extending the use of simulator based training even further. it might not be VR, but I won't be surprised if the problems are similar.
The psychological effects are so subtle, but potentially so important. I think we might do much, much better investing these resources in better real-world training for troops than sims.
Well, on one hand, this might be a really good idea: train people to think in new ways, provoke discussion and innovation, and generally have a place for people to make their dumb mistakes before they go out into the field.
On the other hand, let's not forget one of the big dangers of simulator training is that people often get very attuned to artefacts in the simulator, and then in the real world get their ass handed to them.
Great if it works. But if it turns out more over-enthusiastic rookies with unrealistic simulator expectations, people are going to get killed.
Intellectually unclean code is really just a trojan, right? If somebody (can't think who) really wanted to mount an attack on the integrity of open source software, one threat model is to hire people to insert stolen code into projects, let it get dug deep in, and then pull the plug by claiming IP violation and starting a court case.
Sound implausible? Well, perhaps....
But we write code to protect against much less plausible attacks all the time, and security isn't just about software.
So, ok, the SCO case might be beginning to crumble. Might take a little longer, and who knows, with M$ looking for any shot it can take, there might be more problems in future.
So what are we going to do about it? Are there any measures the open source community can take to prevent contaimination of the open code base with improperly cleared code? Can we look at this as a subset of the more general "malware CVS committs?" problem? Should we have coders sign contracts stating that they have all appropriate rights to what they are about to commit so that we can offload liability to them?
Open Source Programmer insurance couldn't be far behind that....
Anyway, your thoughs please!
You should probably know that I live in rural Colorado, and am of profoundly mixed race.
"Other" is one of the largest growing racial categories: it covers the halves, quarters and sixteenths which are so common, particularly in urban areas. Here, where I live, a lot of mexicans and whites are forming relationships. In chicago where I once lived, I see a lot of black/white couples and children.
Demographically, these trends are probably unstoppable. It won't get to deeply traditional isolated areas for a long, long, long time, but anybody with access to an even slightly cosompolitan city could well take part in this blurring of traditional distinctions.
The flip side of that is the "flyovers." - with the declining amount of manpower required for farming, and the collapse of the supporting industries, a lot of those towns are just drying up. I recently took a detour in rural Nebraska in search of lunch, and wound up in a town which had once had a major tourist attraction and grain elevators.
The only life in near that town was the cluster of franchises near the highway. Everything else was a graveyard. The town was dead, empty, profoundly depressed and depressing.
There are a lot of places, and the demographics show it: people are still flocking to the cities, and rural populations continue to decline. One of my friends thinks large parts of the midwest will return to a "buffalo commons" within our lifetimes.
Now, you could claim economic coercion: people can't make a living because rural industry and collapsed, and so must move.
But I don't think that's the whole story. I have a lot of friends who grew up in rural Iowa and fled to the cities as soon as they could - not because they couldn't find jobs teaching or managing near their home towns, because that area of Iowa is still pretty healthy, but because they couldn't deal with the social and cultural starvation. They wanted out, to go explore in the big wide world and find their niche - a place which suited them better than their starting location chosen by accident of birth.
People aren't always born in the place in the world where they are happiest. In fact, I'd argue that very seldom are people most comfortable in their birth circumstances. Usually people want something different - rural people go urban, southerners wind up in Minnesota and so on.
The illusion of stability - this myth that people wind up where their parents put them - is largely (I think) a product of limited resources. And a lot of those resources are no longer limited, so people roam.
You can't stop that. And even if some proportion of the population wants to stay exactly where they are, the odds are that their children won't. Over generations, eventually very, very, very few houses will have the kind of intergenerational continuity which was so common in the past.
A very similar thing happened to marriage: when the external economic and social constraints were largely withdrawn, men and women found that they weren't able to maintain the old form any more. Now that marriage was no longer the only socially and economically viable option, a lot of people found the couldn't sustain it.
Similarly with race mixing. Now that it's OK, lots of people are doing it. Small, tightly knit racial groups (think: Jews) are freaking out because of the dilution of their race and culture.
And, at least from my perspective, these are "ratchets" - there's no going back, any more than hunter-gatherers who had taken up farming could go back to the old ways. Population increases, skills are lost, and you're trapped in the new world.
We can't stop it. Although groups like the religious right can react against it, eventually they either harden into fascist enclaves, or form small-but-sustainable cultural isolates like the Amish or the better communes or monastaries.
The general culture rolls down hill into the lowest energy state, and that's just the way history works.
err... blah.
look around you. if you open your eyes to what people are actually doing you'll see that these mega migrations are fact, not fiction. Ratial blending, cultual amalgamation, massive migrant populations (mexicans, south americans, russian jews, fleeing israelis - who else is on the move right now? - and that's in the USA).
some people will ground. more are wandering, and hypermobility is a fact, both among the very poor and the middle rich.
Enjoy the pastoral life. you might be one of a couple of hundred thousand people who give it a shot in the USA.
Don't forget: historically humans weren't farmers who stayed in one place and were buried a hundred yards from where they were born. Originally we were grazers, and then hunter-gatherers.
It's in the blood, and the narrow shackeles of agriculture are broken!
To follow up on my earlier response to your other post, oil is irrelevant. We will stop using oil long before the last wells run dry.
Evidence, please?
The industrialized first world might stop using oil in, say, thirty to fifty years, with the 50% point being in 20 years. Might.
But the rural chinese? They'll be running those diesel trucks until the engines wear out and they can't buy spares.
Let's take farming - yes, 3% feed 97%. But how long can we keep doing that? The farming methods used to produce those results are completely unsustainable - groundwater is running out across most of the country (within 20 years in some areas), plus pesticide resistance, soil degradation, groundwater buildup of fertilizers and so on. Our current modes of agriculture are not going to work in fifty years - and they might fail in large areas of america in as little as twenty.
I think what you're missing is that we're a "bloom" - a rampantly fast growing culture running on accumulated biological energy reserves - oil, the prarie ecosystem and so on. Almost all of our ultra technology has at it's root inputs from a limited biological resource pool, and that's a problem: the faster our tech goes, the faster that resource pool is depleted.
Go take a look at "Natural Capitalism" on google. It explains this better than I can.
You sound like you're gambling that we can switch over to some sort of nano-type tech revolution before some of these basic resources become prohibitively scarce. It's not a bad bet - yes, we could have nanofood plants before monoculture farming with oil-based pesticide/fertilizer inputs collapses due to either soil condition or water shortages. But I wouldn't be comfortable staking my civilization on it.
There are alternatives. Check out the Land Institute's work on sustainable farming methods for the prarie ecosystem. It's radical stuff.
That's what they said in the 1950s. Fifty years later, nuclear electricity is still honking expensive, and power in general is nowhere like as available as "experts" predicted then.
Your predictions will be no different, in all probability.
You're are talking about a fantasy world: the "in the future, things will be different." fantasy world. You're pinning hopes on genetic engineering, which is completely unproven on the scales you're talking about, and alleged increases in the capabilities of energy generating technologies and vehicle efficiencies.
You know what? Show me.
The most optimisitc predictions of how good hydrogen vehicles will be show a 5x improvement of passenger miles / unit energy.
So if the entire world had two car households, we'd still need roughly 20 times the energy input we currently have in the form of oil. 20 times more energy than the current total world oil consumption. And that's just the running costs, not the road construction, the manufacturing, the disposal, the whole nine yards.
And almost unimagineable amount of energy is going to come from where? Little purple faeries from outer space?
there are limits to consumption - pretending that there aren't is living in a fantasy world just as dangerous and corrupt as any religion.
I do believe in near-infinite future growth in some areas: computing power, scientific knowledge etc. However, while some areas of life run on exponential curves, others are at best logarythmic. You have to learn how to tell the difference.
Looking at the past helps: energy has always been an issue, from the age of firewood onwards. And no technology on the boards changes that, not even fusion reactors.
Roughly half the world make their livings by growing food in their back yards, only occasionally having enough to sell to cover other expenses. For most of these people, a chicken is a luxury item and eggs a delicacy.
Just a reality check. Unless you're assuming some kind of future nano-socialist post-scarcity science fiction state, these people are still going to be there, living much as they do now.
At that point, it's definitions. Some people have referred to what the USA did in south america as covert war, others might call it "political interference." Either way, it was almost all target at left wing regimes, and a lot of people died.
And, two more points.
1> Thanks for an excellent line. "I'm The Enemy Of The American Home" - that'll give my friends a chuckle.
2> How many of the following list do you actually have, and how much of it exists in some imagination of yours?
* well-composted gardens
* marks on the wall showing how their children have grown.
* walkway stones laid by their own hands
* fruit or nut trees planted in order to yield a harvest.
Not to mock, and all that, but what the hell is the bug up your ass? Bit of a gap between fantasy and reality? Or so attatched to some penny-ante heaven you've crafted that you want to stand outside of history and apart from the rest of the world?
Bottom line, bunky: your home is capital - and if you want to be able to control it, live in it, do what you want with it - well, what if I want the same rights over my money?
If I choose to keep my capital in the form of cold hard cash why the hell should you have the right to tell me what to do with it, and how I may enjoy it or attempt to increase it.
You're talking about putting your own selfish lifestyle interests over somebody elses, namely mine: you want my money to stay home and look after you, when it could be out in the world putting roofs over other people's head, and making a tidy profit into the bargain.
By god, as much as you have a right to make a home and live in it as you choose, I have the right to invest where I will on the face of the globe, to my own benefit and the benefit of others! Freedom for the goose is freedom for the gander.
BACK TO THE FARM WITH YOU, YOU PETTY MINDED NATIONALIST PASTORLIST PATERNALIST RETROGRADE FREAK
Ahh... that's better. I love the smell of fresh roasted moron in the morning. And, seriously, thanks: it's been a while since anybody's pissed me off so much while presenting such an easy target. Fuck off.
Yes, people need roots. But most people choose to break them to move because the work moves, or they don't like the climate, or a dozen other things.
The so-called American Home you're imagining is mostly a fantasy. Check out statistics on population mobility... it's already far, far, far too late. Something like 20% of the population moves house every year, and interstate moves account for something like a third to a half of those. Nobody has any roots anymore.
Yes, some people cling, or hold out, but I'm sorry, times have changed. You can make stability for yourself if you try hard enough, but the time you're talking about is gone. Farms are run by corporations, software is moving abroad, heavy industry is gutted, and your so-called American Way Of Life exists only in adverts.
Grow up. Wake up. You sound a lot like Keats - a fucking pastoralist.
Wrong millenium, mah friend, wrong millenium. Your children's children's children won't even know which continent you lived on, will probably have four or five ethnic identities, speak half a dozen languages and live in five countries before they're twenty five.
By all means, stay in your little nest boyo. See if I care.