Honestly, who in their right mind wants to live _on_ a planet?
The environment is totally unpredictable and you are utterly at the mercy of forces vastly beyond your control. You have to share a single fickle and tiresomely fragile environment with everyone and everything there, including heavy industry. And the parameters of that single environment (air pressure and content, temperature, etc) can be modified locally only with great effort; some things like gravity are basically out of the question entirely. Compounding all this is the fact that you are living at the bottom of a fairly steep gravity well, which makes getting anywhere else a difficult proposition at best. The geometry of the place is largely 2-dimensional and is encumbered with all the inefficiencies thereof.
Agreed. My comment on it to a friend was, "I have no problem with religion in my science fiction. It's been a powerful force in human history from day one, I don't see it changing anytime soon. But faith drives _people_, not plot. If you actually make a script which has God... oh _I'm_ sorry, he doesn't like to be called that... just reaching in and conjuring songs, characters, ships, species, whole fucking planets out of thin air, then you might as well just quit and start writing the next Left Behind novel."
Even a Quaker farming community is space-age wizardry compared to humans circa 150k BC. It was farmers who conquered the earth from hunter gatherers.
So which is it. Did they keep their farming? Then what were they doing for the next 140,000 years? Did they _not_ keep their farming? I'd sooner believe they all stood in a big circle and slit each other's throats.
The wheel. The horse collar. The plow. Knowledge of calendars and seasons. Breeding crops and animal husbandry. Alphabetic language. Pottery you don't need high-temperature kilns for. None of these require hyper-advanced infrastructure, but they changed human society and the very face of the planet when they were invented. None of the colonials are going to forget things _this_ simple, nor fail to pass them on to their descendants.
You mean shut down everything I was doing, which as a developer can get into quite a lot of apps and documents and windows and sessions? In other words, in order to install software I must undertake an activity essentially indistinguishable from power cycling? What a brilliont idea!
The first copyright system in the US was for 14 years, renewable for up to 28. Today it has a theoretical maximum of nearly two centuries, with absolutely no guarantee that it won't be retroactively increased to "infinity minus a day", as the senator from Disney so revealingly put it.
Somehow I think the disparity there is more relevant to the discussion than any amount of greed on the part of the artists. Copyrights have been extended so far backwards that my grandparents weren't born yet when the last public domain-ed work was created and so far forwards that my own great-grandchildren (I'm 29 with no kids) will still see active copyrights on works created today.
> If by "not too far" you mean "we've started to bang the rocks together"...
Not at all. Getting to space at all is by far the hardest part of any interstellar journey. For instance, it takes as much delta-v to get to orbit as it takes to get form earth orbit to Mars. And unlike the Martian Express, it all has to be applied pretty quickly. It's _insanely_ difficult.
Actually getting from one star to another is nowhere near as hard to research as this first step. We have any number of propulsion systems with the fuel efficiency to get up to speed, and we _have_ demonstrated the ability to create artificial ecologies that are sustainable in the long-term. Certainly there are still problems to be overcome (high LEO launch costs chief among them), but we're not exactly at the stone age of development along these lines.
Imagine the worst-case scenario. The army has taken on the role of occupying its own country. Martial law, tanks in the streets, firing squads for anyone who complains, the works. Those tanks and planes are powerful, yes. But they don't run themselves. All those guys in uniform go home eventually. That's a big stretch of time in which they are not armed and armored, sitting safely behind security checkpoints. In Iraq and Vietnam we were foreign occupiers. Our soldiers were in a secure base or they were combat-ready. The supply line only terminated in a war zone. And still the costs were too high to bear for long. Imagine if the entire supply line, from start to finish, was inside 'enemy territory'. Imagine if troops (and even their families) were constantly coming under fire, even on their supposed R&R. The weapons factories, the trucking system, the entire M/I complex is hideously vulnerable if it has to operate while surrounded by armed foes.
Same thing goes for run-of-the-mill cops and judges, bureaucrats and politicians. It's easy to get away with being a cruel public official if the population has no choice but to take it. It's quite another if many of them are armed, and you risk getting capped by some victims's spouse or parent or loved one every time you step outside.
Personally, I find the idea of a domestic insurgency carrying out campaigns of planned assassination or of diligently working to disrupt national transportation and communications systems to be distasteful in the extreme. That volunteering to serve one's country would open one's family up to risk of grave violence is beyond repugnant. The number of people killed annually in crimes or accidents involving firearms is truly appalling. But if the 20th century has shown us anything, it's that those casualties are _nothing_ compared to those that can be inflicted by a government that becomes the enemy of its own people.
I've been saying for years that our landfills will eventually become the best places for mining raw materials. We'll need some whiz-bang tech for cheaply separating out the various elements from the myriad compounds they ended up in. But those landfills are probably a richer source of metals than any natural mine.
Did you just use the costs of getting something up off the ground to claim that dropping something down to the ground would be too expensive? Semms to me that launch costs would be needed upfront to establish space-based industry, true. But once done, launch costs would have to little to do with the per ton cost of extracting and returning rare and valuable metals.
It's like saying that because it costs a fortune upfront to dig a diamond mine, the diamonds will be too expensive, irregardless of how many there are or how cheap it is to get them back to the world. Quite wrong, because those other two things really do affect the bottom line.
Umm, actually, the Indiana law doesn't go into effect until July, so the problems which we are predicting simply can't have taken place _yet_. In Missouri, which passed a similar law, they've been having lots of troubles with exactly the people we all said they would: legitimate voters who simply lack a photo ID. Hundreds of thousands of them.
Next time, try to have some passing knowledge of a topic before speaking on it, yah?
Out of curiosity, what sorts of iron ores would you find in asteroids? Nothing oxidized, obviously...
Hmmm. Yeah, figured the cement would be the sticking point. Gravel and sand are easy enough to get, and clay and gypsum you might even find out there. But limestone doesn't strike me as being particularly commonplace out amongst the inky void, what with it being a biological product and all.
Anyway, I suspect that if LEO launch costs were cheap enough, we'd see exactly that kind of demand for sturdy habitats and raw materials. If all else fails, just bore into a suitable asteroid and plug the hole with an airlock.
It's like the Internet. Just a toy for university and government geeks to play with. Add inexpensive access, stir gently, and *wham*, less than 20 years and look what it's become.
Of course robots are cheaper. They aren't able to do 1/100th of what a single human being could manage. Even something as simple as, "flip over that rock and see what's on the bottom" is beyond it.
> Spacecraft hulls are made of aluminum, titanium, and composite materials. There is very little iron.
That's because spacecraft hulls currently have to be hauled out of a steep gravity well, and mass costs money. So they use flimsy, lightweight materials. If the stuff is already up there and need only be refined, then you could use whatever you wanted. For structural components, I'd take steel over aluminum any day of the week, thank you very much.
But yes, definitely need a comet with light elements as well.
What I'm wondering is, what all's it take to make concrete? The construction techniques for dome homes could be used to make spherical space habitats as well. Nothing like having 12" of concrete between you and the vacuum and radiation to improve your mood.
Nothing, but then he didn't say there was. He said, "in a Microsoft Universe", which I take to mean one in which a company can systematically strip useful features from an app in favor of turning it into buggy bloatware incapable of doing its stated job without losing all your data, and make a mint for doing so.
say someone broke into your network and stole valuable information... you'd be blaming the victim for not using what you considered the best protection
Only if they had been _gratuitously_ stupid. If a company's database gets broken into because they were a few weeks behind on their software patches (perfectly reasonable, it can take that long to test them to make sure they won't hose your business), they have my sympathy and let's go get the guys who did it. But if their database gets broken into because they were running it on MS Access, or a master password file was kept on someones laptop which they then lost, or their CEO gave up root access in exchange for a candy bar... then you are correct, I will not be feeling particularly charitable towards them.
Jury selection should be strictly random. No cherry picking should be allowed.
Well, we really do want to have it both ways. We want to have a system that can let attorneys strke out truly horrendous jurors but is still largely beyond their control.
I'd argue that the current voi dire system is fine, it is simply excessive and thus works in the wrong direction. It lets attorneys choose who will be on the jury rather than who won't. And this is simply because each side can strike too many potential jurors.
How about, each side can arbitrarily strike one and only one juror, and they may each make a formal appeal to the judge citing reasons why they would like a second juror removed from consideration. This would keep the random factor in place but still let the attorneys remove, for instance, the Klan member from a trial involving minorities.
The grandparent here was right. I have never been called for jury duty, and I'd absolutely love to serve. But it saddens me to think that I'd be told to go home due to being intelligent, university educated, and a CS professional.
It wasn't genocide, but as recently as WW2 we did round up people of an unpopular ethnicity, force them to sell their belongings, and herd them into concentration camps where the mortality rate was signifcantly higher than was normal. Still a while back, but frankly I don't see any great epiphany on the part of the American public not to ever do that again.
IIRC, the sonic boom is more a function of the aerodynamics than the engine design. Recent developments (i.e., post-Concorde) in super-sonic aircraft forms have cut down the sonic boom factor immensely.
The point is that the H2 generation can be as green as you feel like making it. Hydrocarbon fuels are inherently dirty, can't be synthesized in any kind of quantity, and have precisely one natural source. H2 as a power system is like electrical batteries; it's a common medium that can be generated from any number of sources of varying cleanliness and efficiency.
Now, it just so happens that the cheapest and most efficient means of making H2 _today_ involves fossil fuels. But that will change in the future, as oil and natural gas get more expensive and electrolysis and biological derivations get cheaper. But since it's all the same H2, it won't require any change in H2-burning engines.
No, space travel is fairly easy. You apply thrust in one direction, your ship heads off in the opposite direction. Building spaceships is easy, really far easier than submarines, since containing internal pressure is much easier than withstanding external. Orbital dynamics are very well worked out, so navigation is no problem. Raw materials are no problem, there's a universe of stuff out there just waiting to be used.
The part that is difficult is getting out to space in the first place. It takes as much delta-v to get to orbit as it does getting from Earth to Mars, and it all has to be applied in the space of a few minutes. That's why all our space-going efforts have been flimsy, rickety, barely functioning laughingstocks. It costs it weight in gold to ship something to LEO on the Shuttle, and stands a fair chance of never making it at all.
I'm all for private industry in space, and in fact it's the only way anything worthwhile will happen there. Depending on a command economy to start mining asteroids and harvesting comets and setting up habitats and factories is a joke. But the entry costs to the space industry are so high that it precludes all but the wealthiest and most risk-loving non-national entities from taking part. That's why NASA is such a joke; rather than try to open up space for the rest of us, they got it just far enough that they can get there and left it with that. The probes, the station, even the Apollo missions, they were all Very Cool ventures, but in the end they didn't help the rost of us do anything. All NASA needed to do, all they've ever needed to do, was bring LEO launch costs down to the point where all the entrepreneurs stuck at the bottom of this gravity well can get a chance at space. Instead, they've actually regressed. The Shuttle is less capable, more expensive, and has lower payload capacity than the 40-year old technology that put us on the moon.
Not necessarily. Look at BushCo's antics. They lie like other people breathe. The entire Bush administration lies about damn near everything. They lie about things both trivial and earth-shattering. I can't find the specifics just now, but IIRC Bush was caught telling some stupid lie about a kind of food he likes. It's a totally reflexive, instinctive reaction for them. They lie when it's painfully obvious that they're lying and stupid to try, but they do it anyway.
Similarly, the instinctive reaction for an authoritarian dictatorship is to make problematic people disappear. Doesn't matter that it makes them look bad, and is stupid in demographic terms (Russia is suffering a population crunch due in great part to vast swaths of its own people being done away with by the Soviet government) or intellectual disadvantage (Soviet dogma dismissed Darwinian evolution, thus crippling any sort of progress in biological fields, to say nothing of the fact that their most intelligent citizens were always the ones most likely to get disappeared). It was Stalin who said, "No people, no problem".
In a way, though, this is a good thing. It means the sort of permanent national necrosis you see in 1984 or other dystopias probably can't ever develop. The guys in charge will never be willing to apply the exact amount of oppression needed to keep it going; there will always be the temptation to go overboard on cruelty, generating positive feedback cycles in rebellion and excessive government responses. Imagine Nazi Germany given two or three more generations to work their nasty; is there a single demographic they wouldn't have eviscerated, either numerically or intellectually? Blue-eyed blonde-haired germans sure weren't immune from the Gestapo.
If nothing else, they end of falling behind their neighbors and get reduced to irrelevancy. North Korea, for instance, would have the same international clout as Bangladesh if they weren't lucky enough to be in artillery range of Seoul.
Of course, an _illegal_ rally, where the illegality is determined by none other than George Bush. How convenient! I'm sure someone with that kind of authority would never, ever abuse it to their own political advantage, nossir.
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> To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch
There's always a lithobraking orbit. :)
Honestly, who in their right mind wants to live _on_ a planet?
The environment is totally unpredictable and you are utterly at the mercy of forces vastly beyond your control. You have to share a single fickle and tiresomely fragile environment with everyone and everything there, including heavy industry. And the parameters of that single environment (air pressure and content, temperature, etc) can be modified locally only with great effort; some things like gravity are basically out of the question entirely. Compounding all this is the fact that you are living at the bottom of a fairly steep gravity well, which makes getting anywhere else a difficult proposition at best. The geometry of the place is largely 2-dimensional and is encumbered with all the inefficiencies thereof.
Nuts to that. Give me a habitat in space any day.
Agreed. My comment on it to a friend was, "I have no problem with religion in my science fiction. It's been a powerful force in human history from day one, I don't see it changing anytime soon. But faith drives _people_, not plot. If you actually make a script which has God... oh _I'm_ sorry, he doesn't like to be called that... just reaching in and conjuring songs, characters, ships, species, whole fucking planets out of thin air, then you might as well just quit and start writing the next Left Behind novel."
Even a Quaker farming community is space-age wizardry compared to humans circa 150k BC. It was farmers who conquered the earth from hunter gatherers.
So which is it. Did they keep their farming? Then what were they doing for the next 140,000 years? Did they _not_ keep their farming? I'd sooner believe they all stood in a big circle and slit each other's throats.
The wheel. The horse collar. The plow. Knowledge of calendars and seasons. Breeding crops and animal husbandry. Alphabetic language. Pottery you don't need high-temperature kilns for. None of these require hyper-advanced infrastructure, but they changed human society and the very face of the planet when they were invented. None of the colonials are going to forget things _this_ simple, nor fail to pass them on to their descendants.
You mean shut down everything I was doing, which as a developer can get into quite a lot of apps and documents and windows and sessions? In other words, in order to install software I must undertake an activity essentially indistinguishable from power cycling? What a brilliont idea!
The first copyright system in the US was for 14 years, renewable for up to 28. Today it has a theoretical maximum of nearly two centuries, with absolutely no guarantee that it won't be retroactively increased to "infinity minus a day", as the senator from Disney so revealingly put it.
Somehow I think the disparity there is more relevant to the discussion than any amount of greed on the part of the artists. Copyrights have been extended so far backwards that my grandparents weren't born yet when the last public domain-ed work was created and so far forwards that my own great-grandchildren (I'm 29 with no kids) will still see active copyrights on works created today.
> If by "not too far" you mean "we've started to bang the rocks together" ...
Not at all. Getting to space at all is by far the hardest part of any interstellar journey. For instance, it takes as much delta-v to get to orbit as it takes to get form earth orbit to Mars. And unlike the Martian Express, it all has to be applied pretty quickly. It's _insanely_ difficult.
Actually getting from one star to another is nowhere near as hard to research as this first step. We have any number of propulsion systems with the fuel efficiency to get up to speed, and we _have_ demonstrated the ability to create artificial ecologies that are sustainable in the long-term. Certainly there are still problems to be overcome (high LEO launch costs chief among them), but we're not exactly at the stone age of development along these lines.
Imagine the worst-case scenario. The army has taken on the role of occupying its own country. Martial law, tanks in the streets, firing squads for anyone who complains, the works. Those tanks and planes are powerful, yes. But they don't run themselves. All those guys in uniform go home eventually. That's a big stretch of time in which they are not armed and armored, sitting safely behind security checkpoints. In Iraq and Vietnam we were foreign occupiers. Our soldiers were in a secure base or they were combat-ready. The supply line only terminated in a war zone. And still the costs were too high to bear for long. Imagine if the entire supply line, from start to finish, was inside 'enemy territory'. Imagine if troops (and even their families) were constantly coming under fire, even on their supposed R&R. The weapons factories, the trucking system, the entire M/I complex is hideously vulnerable if it has to operate while surrounded by armed foes.
Same thing goes for run-of-the-mill cops and judges, bureaucrats and politicians. It's easy to get away with being a cruel public official if the population has no choice but to take it. It's quite another if many of them are armed, and you risk getting capped by some victims's spouse or parent or loved one every time you step outside.
Personally, I find the idea of a domestic insurgency carrying out campaigns of planned assassination or of diligently working to disrupt national transportation and communications systems to be distasteful in the extreme. That volunteering to serve one's country would open one's family up to risk of grave violence is beyond repugnant. The number of people killed annually in crimes or accidents involving firearms is truly appalling. But if the 20th century has shown us anything, it's that those casualties are _nothing_ compared to those that can be inflicted by a government that becomes the enemy of its own people.
I've been saying for years that our landfills will eventually become the best places for mining raw materials. We'll need some whiz-bang tech for cheaply separating out the various elements from the myriad compounds they ended up in. But those landfills are probably a richer source of metals than any natural mine.
Did you just use the costs of getting something up off the ground to claim that dropping something down to the ground would be too expensive? Semms to me that launch costs would be needed upfront to establish space-based industry, true. But once done, launch costs would have to little to do with the per ton cost of extracting and returning rare and valuable metals.
It's like saying that because it costs a fortune upfront to dig a diamond mine, the diamonds will be too expensive, irregardless of how many there are or how cheap it is to get them back to the world. Quite wrong, because those other two things really do affect the bottom line.
Umm, actually, the Indiana law doesn't go into effect until July, so the problems which we are predicting simply can't have taken place _yet_. In Missouri, which passed a similar law, they've been having lots of troubles with exactly the people we all said they would: legitimate voters who simply lack a photo ID. Hundreds of thousands of them.
Next time, try to have some passing knowledge of a topic before speaking on it, yah?
Out of curiosity, what sorts of iron ores would you find in asteroids? Nothing oxidized, obviously...
Hmmm. Yeah, figured the cement would be the sticking point. Gravel and sand are easy enough to get, and clay and gypsum you might even find out there. But limestone doesn't strike me as being particularly commonplace out amongst the inky void, what with it being a biological product and all.
Anyway, I suspect that if LEO launch costs were cheap enough, we'd see exactly that kind of demand for sturdy habitats and raw materials. If all else fails, just bore into a suitable asteroid and plug the hole with an airlock.
It's like the Internet. Just a toy for university and government geeks to play with. Add inexpensive access, stir gently, and *wham*, less than 20 years and look what it's become.
Of course robots are cheaper. They aren't able to do 1/100th of what a single human being could manage. Even something as simple as, "flip over that rock and see what's on the bottom" is beyond it.
> Spacecraft hulls are made of aluminum, titanium, and composite materials. There is very little iron.
That's because spacecraft hulls currently have to be hauled out of a steep gravity well, and mass costs money. So they use flimsy, lightweight materials. If the stuff is already up there and need only be refined, then you could use whatever you wanted. For structural components, I'd take steel over aluminum any day of the week, thank you very much.
But yes, definitely need a comet with light elements as well.
What I'm wondering is, what all's it take to make concrete? The construction techniques for dome homes could be used to make spherical space habitats as well. Nothing like having 12" of concrete between you and the vacuum and radiation to improve your mood.
Nothing, but then he didn't say there was. He said, "in a Microsoft Universe", which I take to mean one in which a company can systematically strip useful features from an app in favor of turning it into buggy bloatware incapable of doing its stated job without losing all your data, and make a mint for doing so.
say someone broke into your network and stole valuable information... you'd be blaming the victim for not using what you considered the best protection
Only if they had been _gratuitously_ stupid. If a company's database gets broken into because they were a few weeks behind on their software patches (perfectly reasonable, it can take that long to test them to make sure they won't hose your business), they have my sympathy and let's go get the guys who did it. But if their database gets broken into because they were running it on MS Access, or a master password file was kept on someones laptop which they then lost, or their CEO gave up root access in exchange for a candy bar... then you are correct, I will not be feeling particularly charitable towards them.
Jury selection should be strictly random. No cherry picking should be allowed.
Well, we really do want to have it both ways. We want to have a system that can let attorneys strke out truly horrendous jurors but is still largely beyond their control.
I'd argue that the current voi dire system is fine, it is simply excessive and thus works in the wrong direction. It lets attorneys choose who will be on the jury rather than who won't. And this is simply because each side can strike too many potential jurors.
How about, each side can arbitrarily strike one and only one juror, and they may each make a formal appeal to the judge citing reasons why they would like a second juror removed from consideration. This would keep the random factor in place but still let the attorneys remove, for instance, the Klan member from a trial involving minorities.
The grandparent here was right. I have never been called for jury duty, and I'd absolutely love to serve. But it saddens me to think that I'd be told to go home due to being intelligent, university educated, and a CS professional.
It wasn't genocide, but as recently as WW2 we did round up people of an unpopular ethnicity, force them to sell their belongings, and herd them into concentration camps where the mortality rate was signifcantly higher than was normal. Still a while back, but frankly I don't see any great epiphany on the part of the American public not to ever do that again.
IIRC, the sonic boom is more a function of the aerodynamics than the engine design. Recent developments (i.e., post-Concorde) in super-sonic aircraft forms have cut down the sonic boom factor immensely.
The point is that the H2 generation can be as green as you feel like making it. Hydrocarbon fuels are inherently dirty, can't be synthesized in any kind of quantity, and have precisely one natural source. H2 as a power system is like electrical batteries; it's a common medium that can be generated from any number of sources of varying cleanliness and efficiency.
Now, it just so happens that the cheapest and most efficient means of making H2 _today_ involves fossil fuels. But that will change in the future, as oil and natural gas get more expensive and electrolysis and biological derivations get cheaper. But since it's all the same H2, it won't require any change in H2-burning engines.
No, space travel is fairly easy. You apply thrust in one direction, your ship heads off in the opposite direction. Building spaceships is easy, really far easier than submarines, since containing internal pressure is much easier than withstanding external. Orbital dynamics are very well worked out, so navigation is no problem. Raw materials are no problem, there's a universe of stuff out there just waiting to be used.
The part that is difficult is getting out to space in the first place. It takes as much delta-v to get to orbit as it does getting from Earth to Mars, and it all has to be applied in the space of a few minutes. That's why all our space-going efforts have been flimsy, rickety, barely functioning laughingstocks. It costs it weight in gold to ship something to LEO on the Shuttle, and stands a fair chance of never making it at all.
I'm all for private industry in space, and in fact it's the only way anything worthwhile will happen there. Depending on a command economy to start mining asteroids and harvesting comets and setting up habitats and factories is a joke. But the entry costs to the space industry are so high that it precludes all but the wealthiest and most risk-loving non-national entities from taking part. That's why NASA is such a joke; rather than try to open up space for the rest of us, they got it just far enough that they can get there and left it with that. The probes, the station, even the Apollo missions, they were all Very Cool ventures, but in the end they didn't help the rost of us do anything. All NASA needed to do, all they've ever needed to do, was bring LEO launch costs down to the point where all the entrepreneurs stuck at the bottom of this gravity well can get a chance at space. Instead, they've actually regressed. The Shuttle is less capable, more expensive, and has lower payload capacity than the 40-year old technology that put us on the moon.
Not necessarily. Look at BushCo's antics. They lie like other people breathe. The entire Bush administration lies about damn near everything. They lie about things both trivial and earth-shattering. I can't find the specifics just now, but IIRC Bush was caught telling some stupid lie about a kind of food he likes. It's a totally reflexive, instinctive reaction for them. They lie when it's painfully obvious that they're lying and stupid to try, but they do it anyway.
Similarly, the instinctive reaction for an authoritarian dictatorship is to make problematic people disappear. Doesn't matter that it makes them look bad, and is stupid in demographic terms (Russia is suffering a population crunch due in great part to vast swaths of its own people being done away with by the Soviet government) or intellectual disadvantage (Soviet dogma dismissed Darwinian evolution, thus crippling any sort of progress in biological fields, to say nothing of the fact that their most intelligent citizens were always the ones most likely to get disappeared). It was Stalin who said, "No people, no problem".
In a way, though, this is a good thing. It means the sort of permanent national necrosis you see in 1984 or other dystopias probably can't ever develop. The guys in charge will never be willing to apply the exact amount of oppression needed to keep it going; there will always be the temptation to go overboard on cruelty, generating positive feedback cycles in rebellion and excessive government responses. Imagine Nazi Germany given two or three more generations to work their nasty; is there a single demographic they wouldn't have eviscerated, either numerically or intellectually? Blue-eyed blonde-haired germans sure weren't immune from the Gestapo.
If nothing else, they end of falling behind their neighbors and get reduced to irrelevancy. North Korea, for instance, would have the same international clout as Bangladesh if they weren't lucky enough to be in artillery range of Seoul.
Of course, an _illegal_ rally, where the illegality is determined by none other than George Bush. How convenient! I'm sure someone with that kind of authority would never, ever abuse it to their own political advantage, nossir.
Is there any way we can get a leader who hasn't spent their entire career moving up the ranks of a political organization?
Sure. Hereditary monarchy.