It's easy to sell the electricity when you have an entire train+tunnel system running 24/7/365 running on said electricity. And if you have signed contracts where both sides share the costs (which would be a must in this case), you can cover a lot of your costs by electricity alone. This IS a Russian initiative after all. With some generous help from China most probably.
They've been planing this for a while now. (PDF link) Put two 10 gigawatt tidal plants to provide the power for the tunnel and the railroad up to the tunnel and connect everything over HDVC lines.
And you don't have to worry about the economics of natural gas - Russians will make it as cheap as they need it to be for their customers to become reliant on the gas that THEY are providing. After all, they can afford it. And Americans love their energy cheap. Think middle-eastern oil.
Add to that the fact that a series of service stations and storage facilities will have to be built along the railroad on both sides of the tunnel anyway. And while you're building warehouses for goods, why not build some tanks for the gas as well? Ship it later to your consumers at your discretion. Hey! It's cheaper and cleaner than getting your own. I'm quite sure that Russians would love to provide a line of credit to USA for that.
As for general financing... Chinese probably really like the idea. They ARE the ones with most to gain from a quick rail line to the USA. And interests on the money that USA owes them alone could probably cover the costs.
The entire plan works great if you think of the USA as the exploited side - which is the case this time. A trillion dollars of debt can make a "superpower" into an economic equivalent of a third-world banana republic. With an added bonus of built-in legalized political bribes through the lobbying system.
Everyone is always going just "Oil-oil-oil...". Whatever the political or economical issue may be everyone just jumps on the oil bandwagon as if that's the only possible answer.
How about food instead? ~312 mil people on one end of the line, holding top spots in world's production of corn and soy and in arable and permanent cropland. ~2.7 billion people on the other side of the line. Including world's largest producer of meat - China.
As for Russia... Selling oil is not their priority. They'd much rather corner the world market on natural gas. And naturally, as the article mentions - they plan to be selling electricity from renewable resources.
And there's no need to even start talking about all the stuff that gets imported into USA from China.
Rational basis for believing in God? Easy.
on
No Higgs Just Yet
·
· Score: 1
People are a superstitious and cowardly lot - so they imagine themselves an imaginary friend to protect them from all those other imaginary boogeymen.
Or did you by "rational basis for believing in God" actually mean "rational basis which would promote belief in God"? Cause with current, 21st century's, understanding of psychology, medicine, mental disorders, applied pharmacology, logic, philosophy etc., belief in gods is nothing more than an attempt to ignore the problems until they disappear on their own. Any rational basis promoting such behavior would not be very rational.
You know you've kicked over some idols and disrespected some sacred cows when your "F-U!" post goes up to +4, then down to +3, up to +5 again and then down to +1 Insightful. While your completely unrelated posts suffer some -1 splash damage.
Reminds me of that one time I talked badly of Apple, back in the under 500k UID days. Had negative karma for almost a year. Almost felt like a rebel. Hilarious.
You should have at least heard of Connie Willis - on account that she has been around for a while now.
And although Blackout and All Clear have won her a Nebula last year and a Hugo this year - I'd suggest avoiding them for now and reading her Doomsday Book instead. Which had also won her both a Hugo and a Nebula. It's in the same set of her time-travel books (even with some of the same characters) as Blackout and All Clear but more importantly - it is MUCH shorter and easier to "digest". I'm saying that cause, when I looked at reviews on Amazon, almost all 1- and 2-star reviews Blackout (512 pages) and All Clear (656 pages) got were on account of that "It's too long" or "Nothing gets resolved in the first book AND it's too long".
Also, audio books are your friends. And you can listen to them on your portable communication computer while you're doing other things that require high levels of visual attention but only low levels of mental attention - like walking, driving, jogging, shopping, playing various games etc.
Moderation on Slashdot is NOT implicitly objective through moderation by angelic omniscient moderators. Moderation on Slashdot is statistically objective through subjective moderation by a random sample of Slashdot members, taken from a subset of Slashdot members who statistically refrain from trolling and flaming.
Sure, you might have also meant to address a bunch of other brands too. But I'm sure you were actually referring to the company which presents such features as the color of the plastic that device is made of, locking devices to certain service providers through hardware modifications of SIM cards, enabling copy/paste years after it has become an obligatory option in the competing devices and dropping multitasking as "innovation".
No big deal. The only parts that are near land are right at the very ends; the majority of the loop is 80km up in the air. How are terrorists going to get to that? ll you need is a few ground defenses with AAA at the ends, and maybe some jets around that are ready to scramble.
LOL!
They don't need to get to the part that's 80 km up in the air. Anything from crashing a plane anywhere into the structure (and this time, we're talking a Cessna not a Boeing) to causing an overload in the powerplant supplying the structure will cause it to crash. Only when it crashes it will be like an A-Bomb, wiping out things for miles around.
Oh and... "ground defenses with AAA... and maybe some jets"? You remember perhaps how that plane crashed into Pentagon? You know... One of the biggest military installations in the world. They didn't have that kind of support. "Some jets" cost a LOT to fly and maintain. Bonus points for such toys being under military control AND command. It takes a shitload of authorizations to just take those planes up in the air, let alone to have them fire off a round.
Near an installation particularly susceptible to gunfire, might I add.
And should it be built so that it float in the ocean, there's a whole series of other safety issues not solvable by "some jets" - like storms and hurricanes. Heck... just the fact that it would be a biggest electromagnet in the world and a biggest LIGHTNING-ROD in the world would be a fun thing to observe, come first clouds.
Also, most of the structure being "up in the air", we are not talking about protecting a ground area, but of a 3D area extending for kilometers up and out around the structure's anchor points. And those go along the entire length of the structure. The whole 2000 kilometers of it.
There are not enough "some jets" in the world to guard something like that 24/7/365.
So what? You're acting like a nuclear bomb is world-shattering or something.
So NIMBY. Not in ANY yard, ANY where. Good luck building that. Particularly with THAT attitude.
The idea of the thing, as I understand it, is that it's a giant energy-storage device.
Try "energy sink" instead. It takes HUGE amounts of power to get it even operational, once you've got it built despite it being literally THE most dangerous structure in the world (imagine an atomic bomb with a pressure-switch balanced on a pedestal made out of toothpicks), and then it uses up energy continuously just to stay afloat. Add more if you want something launched from it.
energy needed for each launch is very small, compared to what you'd need to launch a rocket
Except you can STORE the energy that will be used by the rocket until you need it. You can't store electricity you don't plan to (or that you can't) spend at the moment. Not without significant waste. And significant safety issues.
Basically, you'd have to go nuclear with that thing IF you want to absolutely, positively keep it up in the air. So now, when it goes boom - it is also radioactive. With an added bonus that you could have a meltdown first and THEN "the boom".
80km long cables are nothing special; there's undersea cables that are much... The anchor cables for the launch loop probably don't need anywhere near that much strength, and can be made from conventional materials.
Undersea cables are LAID OUT on the ocean floor. PLUS, they are not holding anything in place.
These babies would have to go straight up in the air, in order to anchor the 2000 kilometer long structure to the ground.
That's the same unobtainium used in the production of the space elevator.
A running loop would have an extremely large amount of energy in the form of linear momentum. While the magnetic suspension system would be highly redundant, with failures of small sections having essentially no effect at all, if a major failure did occur the energy in the loop (1.5Ã--1015 joules or 1.5 petajoules) would be approaching the same total energy release as a nuclear bomb explosion (350 kilotons of TNT equivalent), although not emitting nuclear radiation.
While this is a large amount of energy, it is unlikely that this would destroy very much of the structure due to its very large size, and because most of the energy would be deliberately dumped at preselected places when the failure is detected. Steps might need to be taken to lower the cable down from 80 km altitude with minimal damage, such as parachutes.
Therefore for safety and astrodynamic reasons, launch loops are intended to be installed over an ocean near the equator, well away from habitation.
The published design of a launch loop requires electronic control of the magnetic levitation to minimise power dissipation and to stabilise the otherwise under-damped cable.
The two main points of instability are the turnaround sections and the cable.
The turnaround sections are potentially unstable, since movement of the rotor away from the magnets gives reduced magnetic attraction, whereas movements closer gives increased attraction. In either case, instability occurs.[3] This problem is routinely solved with existing servo control systems that vary the strength of the magnets. Although servo reliability is a potential issue, at the high speed of the rotor, very many consecutive sections would need to fail for the rotor containment to be lost.[3]
The cable sections also share this potential issue, although the forces are much lower.[3] However, an additional instability is present in that the cable/sheath/rotor may undergo meandering modes (similar to a Lariat chain) that grow in amplitude without limit. Lofstrom believes that this instability also can be controlled in real time by servo mechanisms, although this has never been attempted. [edit] Competing and similar designs
In works by Alexander Bolonkin [7][8][9] it is suggested that Lofstrom's project has many non-solved problems and that it is very far from a current technology. For example, the Lofstrom project has expansion joints between 1.5 meter iron plates. Their speeds (under gravitation, friction) can be different and Bolonkin claims that they could wedge in the tube;[citation needed] and the force and friction in the ground 28 km diameter turnaround sections are gigantic. In 2008[10], Bolonkin proposed a simple rotated close-loop cable to launch the space apparatus in a way suitable for current technology.
Another project, the space cable, is a smaller design by John Knapman that is intended for launch assist for conventional rockets and suborbital tourism. The space cable design uses electrodynamic levitation rather than electromagnetic levitation and discrete bolts rather than a continuous rotor, as with the launch loop architecture. John Knapman has also mathematically shown that the meander instability can be tamed.[11]
For extra credit:
- Come up with necessary security measures for a 2000 kilometers long and 80 kilometers high structure which doubles as a rail-gun and which acts just like an atomic bomb if something goes wrong. - Practice saying "But there would be no radiation even if it DID explode" in front of a mirror. - Come up with a reason why is it somehow NOT impossible to build 80 kilometers long anchor cables, but stacking those cables as sections of a much longer cable IS. - Invent a perpetual motion machine which would both power the 2000 kilometer long structure keeping it "aloft" AND provide additional energy needed to launch the payload.
And here I thought that a community of individuals interested in a particular human endeavor, pooled their resources to keep that endeavor functioning AFTER it lost all support it had from any possible governing party - political, economical, educational etc.
Communism has nothing to do with states - just like capitalism. It's just that certain states try to use it as a tool - just like capitalism. Neither is necessarily oppressive, but both can be used by an oppressive government.
Problem is, there never was and there never will be a single tool that will fit (and fix) every problem or task. Particularly when the so called "free world" chooses allies such as Nazis and dictatorship juntas just so it could sabotage that particular tool at every step. Mad dictators with no understanding of the tool beyond "Got me out of the gutter and into power" don't help either.
Also, you can't just take uneducated feudal farmers, drill the "community spirit" (or whatever you choose to call the ideology) into them and then try to let them run a country. Countries are too big and at the same time too small for something like that.
A family, a tribe, a small town can "run on communism" just fine. Or an entire planet. Anything in between has excellent chances in failing, even without outside help - because greed is a much simpler tool than empathy. And while seeds of both communism (empathy) and capitalism (greed) are inherent to all humans (perfectly normal human psychological concepts, beneficial in moderation, detrimental in excess), it is much simpler to get people onto capitalism than onto communism. "Whatever I can grab is mine and you can go fuck yourself" is a very inviting philosophy. Particularly for those who are already holding something in their hand. "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" on the other hand is much harder to grasp - particularly whenever one is not among the "many".
On the other hand, it would be simply idiotic to use capitalist approach on a human community the size of a family or a tribe. Town, city, state WILL "run on capitalism" though - until all capital starts to accumulate in the hands of the "few". Usually, that is about the time when shit starts hitting the fan. "Many" are then either sent to fight a war somewhere in order to get more capital into the community and possibly create an even lower class who will do all the work for (basically) nothing (thus making "many" economically obsolete), OR "many" decide that it is time for their needs to outweigh the needs of the few - and revolt.
Due to large groups of people running at speeds of the lowest common denominator - that is rarely a good thing. Although, it would be a really fun thing to observe. Particularly if it happened in a large capitalist country, where it was programed into generations of people that socialism and communism are synonymous with satanism and cannibalism. If for no other reason, than just to laugh at the schizophrenic renaming of such ideas.
20th and 21st century warfare turns into trench warfare as soon as both sides are equally matched. Mostly in situations with no air support and unavailability of armor. Digging in and holding position is far more appealing than trying to capture a fortified position. At the same time, it binds enemy forces to that area cause there is now an opposing force right outside their zone of influence.
I'm saying emotions are information which is necessarily logical to understand.
That (part of the) sentence does not make much sense.
Are you trying to say that logic is necessary to understand information? Or that it is logical that the understanding of something like emotions is necessary? Or that all emotion is JUST information, and all information being logical it can be understood logically... something-something...
1 - Humans are not perfectly logical automatons. In fact, if we have learned anything from all those math classes it's that most people can't wrap their heads around any logic above the very basic "1+1=2" level.
2 - Other person's subjective point is generally inferior to our own subjective point, us being able to sense our own body and think our own thoughts and not theirs. Unless...
3 -...We are confusing his/her/its subjective point with our own. Which would be empathy. We are not logically empathic any more than we are logically hateful, loving or afraid. We simply can't always tell if it is us or the humans we are observing that is experiencing sensations and emotions.
You can't be rationally emotional, no more than you can solve mathematical problems with love alone. Sure, you can use logic to figure out empathy, but you can't impose rules or form laws of empathic actions-reactions on the base of rational logic. Cause emotions are simply not logical.
Apparently, someone heard about a movie where only a handful of humans remain on Earth trying to figure out what wiped out the rest of humanity. Movie being called "Twelve Monkeys" they assumed it was one of the "Planet of the Apes" movies and a part of that canon.
Not that they've actually seen any of those movies. They just kinda make movies, they don't watch them.
All them people donating a small amount of money so that one project (potentially beneficial to the whole humanity) could continue... Feels a lot like *GASP!* [whisper] communism.[/whisper]
Slashdot Mirror
And here I thought the problem is that it's a samzenpus summary and as such trollific and inaccurate by definition.
It's easy to sell the electricity when you have an entire train+tunnel system running 24/7/365 running on said electricity.
And if you have signed contracts where both sides share the costs (which would be a must in this case), you can cover a lot of your costs by electricity alone.
This IS a Russian initiative after all. With some generous help from China most probably.
They've been planing this for a while now. (PDF link)
Put two 10 gigawatt tidal plants to provide the power for the tunnel and the railroad up to the tunnel and connect everything over HDVC lines.
And you don't have to worry about the economics of natural gas - Russians will make it as cheap as they need it to be for their customers to become reliant on the gas that THEY are providing.
After all, they can afford it. And Americans love their energy cheap. Think middle-eastern oil.
Add to that the fact that a series of service stations and storage facilities will have to be built along the railroad on both sides of the tunnel anyway.
And while you're building warehouses for goods, why not build some tanks for the gas as well? Ship it later to your consumers at your discretion.
Hey! It's cheaper and cleaner than getting your own.
I'm quite sure that Russians would love to provide a line of credit to USA for that.
As for general financing... Chinese probably really like the idea. They ARE the ones with most to gain from a quick rail line to the USA.
And interests on the money that USA owes them alone could probably cover the costs.
The entire plan works great if you think of the USA as the exploited side - which is the case this time.
A trillion dollars of debt can make a "superpower" into an economic equivalent of a third-world banana republic.
With an added bonus of built-in legalized political bribes through the lobbying system.
Everyone is always going just "Oil-oil-oil...". Whatever the political or economical issue may be everyone just jumps on the oil bandwagon as if that's the only possible answer.
How about food instead?
~312 mil people on one end of the line, holding top spots in world's production of corn and soy and in arable and permanent cropland.
~2.7 billion people on the other side of the line. Including world's largest producer of meat - China.
As for Russia... Selling oil is not their priority.
They'd much rather corner the world market on natural gas.
And naturally, as the article mentions - they plan to be selling electricity from renewable resources.
And there's no need to even start talking about all the stuff that gets imported into USA from China.
...I was clearly trolling in the post above.
They give mod points to anyone these days.
People are a superstitious and cowardly lot - so they imagine themselves an imaginary friend to protect them from all those other imaginary boogeymen.
Or did you by "rational basis for believing in God" actually mean "rational basis which would promote belief in God"?
Cause with current, 21st century's, understanding of psychology, medicine, mental disorders, applied pharmacology, logic, philosophy etc., belief in gods is nothing more than an attempt to ignore the problems until they disappear on their own.
Any rational basis promoting such behavior would not be very rational.
You know you've kicked over some idols and disrespected some sacred cows when your "F-U!" post goes up to +4, then down to +3, up to +5 again and then down to +1 Insightful.
While your completely unrelated posts suffer some -1 splash damage.
Reminds me of that one time I talked badly of Apple, back in the under 500k UID days.
Had negative karma for almost a year.
Almost felt like a rebel.
Hilarious.
And to think I spent my mod-points on trolls...
On Slashdot, not only can you be his friend - you can be his FOE.
AND we have "I hate" buttons too.
They come in flavors of "Offtopic", "Flamebait", "Troll", "Redundant" and "Overrated".
You should have at least heard of Connie Willis - on account that she has been around for a while now.
And although Blackout and All Clear have won her a Nebula last year and a Hugo this year - I'd suggest avoiding them for now and reading her Doomsday Book instead.
Which had also won her both a Hugo and a Nebula.
It's in the same set of her time-travel books (even with some of the same characters) as Blackout and All Clear but more importantly - it is MUCH shorter and easier to "digest".
I'm saying that cause, when I looked at reviews on Amazon, almost all 1- and 2-star reviews Blackout (512 pages) and All Clear (656 pages) got were on account of that "It's too long" or "Nothing gets resolved in the first book AND it's too long".
Also, audio books are your friends.
And you can listen to them on your portable communication computer while you're doing other things that require high levels of visual attention but only low levels of mental attention - like walking, driving, jogging, shopping, playing various games etc.
... but then I saw your multimillionaire UID.
Moderation on Slashdot is NOT implicitly objective through moderation by angelic omniscient moderators.
Moderation on Slashdot is statistically objective through subjective moderation by a random sample of Slashdot members, taken from a subset of Slashdot members who statistically refrain from trolling and flaming.
nifty pink polka dot set
Clownwear is the new camo? Someone should alert the authorities.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll start randomly shooting clowns.
Finally something good to come out of all this security theater.
...a pre-crisis or post-crisis Superman?
You misspelled Apple.
Sure, you might have also meant to address a bunch of other brands too.
But I'm sure you were actually referring to the company which presents such features as the color of the plastic that device is made of, locking devices to certain service providers through hardware modifications of SIM cards, enabling copy/paste years after it has become an obligatory option in the competing devices and dropping multitasking as "innovation".
Fuck you.
And your pluses.
No big deal. The only parts that are near land are right at the very ends; the majority of the loop is 80km up in the air. How are terrorists going to get to that? ll you need is a few ground defenses with AAA at the ends, and maybe some jets around that are ready to scramble.
LOL!
They don't need to get to the part that's 80 km up in the air.
Anything from crashing a plane anywhere into the structure (and this time, we're talking a Cessna not a Boeing) to causing an overload in the powerplant supplying the structure will cause it to crash.
Only when it crashes it will be like an A-Bomb, wiping out things for miles around.
Oh and... "ground defenses with AAA... and maybe some jets"? You remember perhaps how that plane crashed into Pentagon?
You know... One of the biggest military installations in the world. They didn't have that kind of support.
"Some jets" cost a LOT to fly and maintain. Bonus points for such toys being under military control AND command.
It takes a shitload of authorizations to just take those planes up in the air, let alone to have them fire off a round.
Near an installation particularly susceptible to gunfire, might I add.
And should it be built so that it float in the ocean, there's a whole series of other safety issues not solvable by "some jets" - like storms and hurricanes.
Heck... just the fact that it would be a biggest electromagnet in the world and a biggest LIGHTNING-ROD in the world would be a fun thing to observe, come first clouds.
Also, most of the structure being "up in the air", we are not talking about protecting a ground area, but of a 3D area extending for kilometers up and out around the structure's anchor points.
And those go along the entire length of the structure. The whole 2000 kilometers of it.
There are not enough "some jets" in the world to guard something like that 24/7/365.
So what? You're acting like a nuclear bomb is world-shattering or something.
So NIMBY.
Not in ANY yard, ANY where. Good luck building that. Particularly with THAT attitude.
The idea of the thing, as I understand it, is that it's a giant energy-storage device.
Try "energy sink" instead.
It takes HUGE amounts of power to get it even operational, once you've got it built despite it being literally THE most dangerous structure in the world (imagine an atomic bomb with a pressure-switch balanced on a pedestal made out of toothpicks), and then it uses up energy continuously just to stay afloat.
Add more if you want something launched from it.
energy needed for each launch is very small, compared to what you'd need to launch a rocket
Except you can STORE the energy that will be used by the rocket until you need it.
You can't store electricity you don't plan to (or that you can't) spend at the moment. Not without significant waste.
And significant safety issues.
Basically, you'd have to go nuclear with that thing IF you want to absolutely, positively keep it up in the air.
So now, when it goes boom - it is also radioactive.
With an added bonus that you could have a meltdown first and THEN "the boom".
80km long cables are nothing special; there's undersea cables that are much...
The anchor cables for the launch loop probably don't need anywhere near that much strength, and can be made from conventional materials.
Undersea cables are LAID OUT on the ocean floor.
PLUS, they are not holding anything in place.
These babies would have to go straight up in the air, in order to anchor the 2000 kilometer long structure to the ground.
That's the same unobtainium used in the production of the space elevator.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Launch_loop#Difficulties_of_launch_loops
Difficulties of launch loops
A running loop would have an extremely large amount of energy in the form of linear momentum. While the magnetic suspension system would be highly redundant, with failures of small sections having essentially no effect at all, if a major failure did occur the energy in the loop (1.5Ã--1015 joules or 1.5 petajoules) would be approaching the same total energy release as a nuclear bomb explosion (350 kilotons of TNT equivalent), although not emitting nuclear radiation.
While this is a large amount of energy, it is unlikely that this would destroy very much of the structure due to its very large size, and because most of the energy would be deliberately dumped at preselected places when the failure is detected. Steps might need to be taken to lower the cable down from 80 km altitude with minimal damage, such as parachutes.
Therefore for safety and astrodynamic reasons, launch loops are intended to be installed over an ocean near the equator, well away from habitation.
The published design of a launch loop requires electronic control of the magnetic levitation to minimise power dissipation and to stabilise the otherwise under-damped cable.
The two main points of instability are the turnaround sections and the cable.
The turnaround sections are potentially unstable, since movement of the rotor away from the magnets gives reduced magnetic attraction, whereas movements closer gives increased attraction. In either case, instability occurs.[3] This problem is routinely solved with existing servo control systems that vary the strength of the magnets. Although servo reliability is a potential issue, at the high speed of the rotor, very many consecutive sections would need to fail for the rotor containment to be lost.[3]
The cable sections also share this potential issue, although the forces are much lower.[3] However, an additional instability is present in that the cable/sheath/rotor may undergo meandering modes (similar to a Lariat chain) that grow in amplitude without limit. Lofstrom believes that this instability also can be controlled in real time by servo mechanisms, although this has never been attempted.
[edit] Competing and similar designs
In works by Alexander Bolonkin [7][8][9] it is suggested that Lofstrom's project has many non-solved problems and that it is very far from a current technology. For example, the Lofstrom project has expansion joints between 1.5 meter iron plates. Their speeds (under gravitation, friction) can be different and Bolonkin claims that they could wedge in the tube;[citation needed] and the force and friction in the ground 28 km diameter turnaround sections are gigantic. In 2008[10], Bolonkin proposed a simple rotated close-loop cable to launch the space apparatus in a way suitable for current technology.
Another project, the space cable, is a smaller design by John Knapman that is intended for launch assist for conventional rockets and suborbital tourism. The space cable design uses electrodynamic levitation rather than electromagnetic levitation and discrete bolts rather than a continuous rotor, as with the launch loop architecture. John Knapman has also mathematically shown that the meander instability can be tamed.[11]
For extra credit:
- Come up with necessary security measures for a 2000 kilometers long and 80 kilometers high structure which doubles as a rail-gun and which acts just like an atomic bomb if something goes wrong.
- Practice saying "But there would be no radiation even if it DID explode" in front of a mirror.
- Come up with a reason why is it somehow NOT impossible to build 80 kilometers long anchor cables, but stacking those cables as sections of a much longer cable IS.
- Invent a perpetual motion machine which would both power the 2000 kilometer long structure keeping it "aloft" AND provide additional energy needed to launch the payload.
I just heard what you said there.
And the optic-hearing apparently works long distance as well. What a glorious day for science this is.
Well, light might go into yours
That his orifice captures light?
Like a... black hole?
And here I thought that a community of individuals interested in a particular human endeavor, pooled their resources to keep that endeavor functioning AFTER it lost all support it had from any possible governing party - political, economical, educational etc.
Communism has nothing to do with states - just like capitalism.
It's just that certain states try to use it as a tool - just like capitalism.
Neither is necessarily oppressive, but both can be used by an oppressive government.
Problem is, there never was and there never will be a single tool that will fit (and fix) every problem or task.
Particularly when the so called "free world" chooses allies such as Nazis and dictatorship juntas just so it could sabotage that particular tool at every step.
Mad dictators with no understanding of the tool beyond "Got me out of the gutter and into power" don't help either.
Also, you can't just take uneducated feudal farmers, drill the "community spirit" (or whatever you choose to call the ideology) into them and then try to let them run a country.
Countries are too big and at the same time too small for something like that.
A family, a tribe, a small town can "run on communism" just fine. Or an entire planet.
Anything in between has excellent chances in failing, even without outside help - because greed is a much simpler tool than empathy.
And while seeds of both communism (empathy) and capitalism (greed) are inherent to all humans (perfectly normal human psychological concepts, beneficial in moderation, detrimental in excess), it is much simpler to get people onto capitalism than onto communism.
"Whatever I can grab is mine and you can go fuck yourself" is a very inviting philosophy.
Particularly for those who are already holding something in their hand.
"Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" on the other hand is much harder to grasp - particularly whenever one is not among the "many".
On the other hand, it would be simply idiotic to use capitalist approach on a human community the size of a family or a tribe.
Town, city, state WILL "run on capitalism" though - until all capital starts to accumulate in the hands of the "few".
Usually, that is about the time when shit starts hitting the fan.
"Many" are then either sent to fight a war somewhere in order to get more capital into the community and possibly create an even lower class who will do all the work for (basically) nothing (thus making "many" economically obsolete), OR "many" decide that it is time for their needs to outweigh the needs of the few - and revolt.
Due to large groups of people running at speeds of the lowest common denominator - that is rarely a good thing.
Although, it would be a really fun thing to observe.
Particularly if it happened in a large capitalist country, where it was programed into generations of people that socialism and communism are synonymous with satanism and cannibalism.
If for no other reason, than just to laugh at the schizophrenic renaming of such ideas.
Weapons and equipment are of no relevance.
20th and 21st century warfare turns into trench warfare as soon as both sides are equally matched.
Mostly in situations with no air support and unavailability of armor.
Digging in and holding position is far more appealing than trying to capture a fortified position.
At the same time, it binds enemy forces to that area cause there is now an opposing force right outside their zone of influence.
I'm saying emotions are information which is necessarily logical to understand.
That (part of the) sentence does not make much sense.
Are you trying to say that logic is necessary to understand information?
Or that it is logical that the understanding of something like emotions is necessary?
Or that all emotion is JUST information, and all information being logical it can be understood logically... something-something...
If you're pushing for realism, how do you explain the 2 sides building their bases 40 feet away from each other?
World War I-like trench warfare?
1 - Humans are not perfectly logical automatons.
In fact, if we have learned anything from all those math classes it's that most people can't wrap their heads around any logic above the very basic "1+1=2" level.
2 - Other person's subjective point is generally inferior to our own subjective point, us being able to sense our own body and think our own thoughts and not theirs. Unless...
3 - ...We are confusing his/her/its subjective point with our own. Which would be empathy.
We are not logically empathic any more than we are logically hateful, loving or afraid.
We simply can't always tell if it is us or the humans we are observing that is experiencing sensations and emotions.
You can't be rationally emotional, no more than you can solve mathematical problems with love alone.
Sure, you can use logic to figure out empathy, but you can't impose rules or form laws of empathic actions-reactions on the base of rational logic.
Cause emotions are simply not logical.
Apparently, someone heard about a movie where only a handful of humans remain on Earth trying to figure out what wiped out the rest of humanity.
Movie being called "Twelve Monkeys" they assumed it was one of the "Planet of the Apes" movies and a part of that canon.
Not that they've actually seen any of those movies. They just kinda make movies, they don't watch them.
All them people donating a small amount of money so that one project (potentially beneficial to the whole humanity) could continue...
Feels a lot like *GASP!* [whisper] communism.[/whisper]