Obama was the one who chose to fund and arm "rebels" in Syria to try and oust Assad, paving way to the rise of ISIS, a group that is now being used as a justification to continue NSA spying.
The Libertarian philosophy is the most self-consistent of all available.
Quite possibly. I would prefer a reality consistent philosophy, especially since Libertarianism makes extravagant claims about economics which is very much an empirical activity.
It requires the fewest "common-sense" exceptions to be practical.
reality-denying assumptions.
Oh my, no. Libertarianism and its Hayekist pseudo-economics twin are quite aggressive about denying the importance of basing beliefs of reality. Can you say "Praxeology"?
LIbertarians and Hayekists hold that their axiomatic principles are the true basis of perfect morality, the best of all possible moral codes, and that social, political and economic doctrines can, indeed must, be derived directly from them without contaminating the matter with social or economic data.
If you dispute with a Libertarian about the feasibility, and desirability of their proposals, you will shortly find them trying to derail the discussion from practical effects to an effort to educate you about the perfection of their axioms.
...I have no clue what it would be like to actually go through life without it. Maybe it's not as "required" as I think it is, so maybe it's not that irresponsible either.
I can help here. Look out the window. Close one eye.
Wow! Didn't everything look totally different and you suddenly had no idea how far away anything was?
No?
I think no. I think things looked almost exactly the same, and still knew how far away cars, and signs, and people, and houses were.
Binocular depth perception is only one many cues your brain uses to interpret the environment's layout.
Yes indeed. This seems to be making mountain out of a molehill. Here is the operative phrase I think: "wasn't mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks". This may well be the case - are every know structure commonly included in anatomy textbooks? They aren't, you know, atlases or encyclopedias of neuroanatomy that might be expected to contain everything.
As AC shows, the bit about "absent from the literature" seems to have been hype.
Take a look at "most important" (highest ranking) deceased author from the 1980s. It is science fiction/fantasy writer Tom Godwin. Number two is Stanton A. Coblentz . Also in the top 20 (in order): Lin Carter, Robert A. Heinlein, Mack Reynolds, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Clifford D. Simak. Forty percent of the top 20 are SF&F authors. Meanwhile we have Tuchman at 101, Sartre at 112, Borges at 254, Tennessee Williams at 439, Toynbee at 526, and so.
Looking at the 1990s, the top loading by SF&F are equally extreme with Marion Zimmer Bradley No. 1, and William S. Burroughs at 748.
Now I feel that SF&F authors are under-appreciated by critics and "the academy" in the English-speaking world, dismissing brilliantly inventive writing in English, when they would praise it as "magic realism" if written in Spanish or Portuguese, but this is just nerd/geek fannishness run amok.
Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.
Citation please.
This seems an absurd assertion. The Chernobyl clean-up employed about 250,000 people for two years, mostly with low tech equipment, while the Soviet military had about 5 million men under arms, a lot of it very costly high tech gear.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
...
Your instincts about the defense spending in the USSR are dead-on. They never ran out of money for defense. They ran short on supplies for everything else, and the civilian economy suffered terribly for it, but defense was always flush with resources.
The USSR had, by the end of the 1960s, a fully militarized economy - the military was first in line for everything, taking so much that by the mid-1970s it stalled economic growth (this before Reagan, or even Carter, was in office). The notion that the Reagan military build-up caused the USSR to fall is not supported by studies of what actually happened, such as Ellman and Kontorvich's "The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System".
The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.
The Guardian is on the extremely moderate UK left: at the last general election it came out in favour of voting for the LibDems (who are now in coalition with the Tories, and have reneged on essentially all their manifesto pledges).
To consider it as extreme left wing, you would need to be some sort of neo Nazi...
No, you simply need to be a mainstream U.S Republican today. Conservative policies of the recent past are now denounced as "Marxist" without dissent in current day Republican-land.
That more reflects his background - street level activist and local politics, where that's how things are done. That's not really appropriate at the national level, where he had very little experience before becoming President. The result is that he views Congress as damage to be routed around (not that he's entirely wrong about that, and I say that as a conservative who's greatly dismayed at the sway the nutjob fringe holds on the Right) and tries to handle that in much the same manner he did back then... which doesn't really work as personal influence and the Party Machine hold much less sway at the national level.
As you say, the nutjob fringe does hold sway over the Right. On an objective basis, there has not been a Congress this obstructionist for more than eight decades. Although the Republicans seem fine with grid-locking government, regardless of the cost the nation, as long as Obama sits in office -- he understandably knows someone needs to actually govern.
Conservative political psycho-babble fantasies about what 'community activists' think need to be set aside. The fact is he is President and needs to deal with issues facing the nation, even if Congressional Republicans do not.
If Obama is actually, in any way, violating the principles of governance in the U.S. you can be sure that a lawsuit would be in the courts, passed up the chain to the Supreme Court, where the right-wing majority there would slap him down.
Well, given that Obama is a centre-rightist I can't see that you have demonstrated any problem with the premise at all.
The problem with the premise is that it's based on the tried-and-true No True Scotsman logical fallacy, as in "no true leftie would bomb brown people." Obama may indeed be a center-rightist, but only someone preoccupied with ideological purity would reach that conclusion merely by observing his predilection for bombing brown people.
There is plenty of other evidence supporting this conclusion - it is hardly just his "bombing" policies
The way Obama spearheaded the national implementation of Heritage/Romneycare. His Conservative, but deeply misguided policy of austerity - shrinking the Federal government during a lingering depression for another. And these are the most important two policies of his entire 8-year term in office. That defines the character of his Presidency.
... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%?...
There is a field of mathematics that has this problem firmly under control. It is called "statistics". Constructing a procedure for making this determination would be a reasonable homework assignment in a statistics class, it is no more difficult than that.
Eratosthenes pre-dated Columbus by some time...he was not wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but the size of the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus was wrong about both. Despite having the correct size of the Earth computed very closely by Eratosthenes (we do not know how closely though since the exact size of this "stadia" is unknown), Columbus still accepted a grossly incorrect figure due to his own (flawed) interpretations of ancient geographers.
This much older modern human has the same fraction of Neanderthal DNA as modern humans today.
Think about it.
We haven't seen any ancient Modern Humans that have a different degree of Neanderthal ancestry.
When Modern Humans first bred with Neanderthals the offspring were 50/50. If these F1s bred with each other predominantly from then on you would end up with a new breeding population that was roughly 50/50 in heritage. If the F1s predominantly bred with Modern Humans, then the Neanderthan portion would be cut to 25% in the F2, and if the process repeats it is 12.5% in the F3, etc.
This process stops when there are effectively no more pure blood Modern Humans, that the Neanderthal genome has diffused evenly across the entire population. But subsequent re-encounters would inject new Neanderthal DNA and restart the process.
We haven't yet seen any evidence of this history yet. Even 45,000 years ago it was "ancient history" and epoch that passed many, many generations earlier.
Neanderthals are the same. The whole notion of "Neanderthals" being a separate thing is just a miscategorization of traits that modern humans have. Maybe they are rare, and have become less attractive over the millenia, but not any different than any other trait.
The traits we collectively call "Neanderthal" are a distinction without a difference.
If you were complaining about the "Cro Magnon" concept you would be on solid ground. That turned out to be an imaginary construct. Neanderthals and Denisovans though definitely form a genetically defined group much more divergent from modern human populations than are found between the most divergent populations among modern humans (defined roughly by the San on one hand and everyone who is not African on the other). That said there is only 0.3% variation across the entire Neanderthal-Denisovan-Modern Human super-group. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were real separate breeding populations for hundreds of thousands of years, but still clearly part of one human species.
... It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing....
Just addressing the example given - the "Cro-Magnon" concept and term has been entirely abandoned by science. The problem was that there was never a definition of what a "Cro-Magnon" supposedly was. No distinguishing set of physical characteristics, no distinctive physical culture, and now with our powerful genetic analysis tools - no distinctive genetic pattern. Their range of variation is within that of modern humans, and supposing they were a subspecies would be as well founded as declaring "Samoans" a subspecies since they are, like the "Cro Magnon" physically more robust on average than modern Europeans.
I haven't used it recently, but years ago I found the Matlab language and programming environment to be terrible - very primitive (which is why I haven't used it since). Sure, it has great libraries - it should considering the cost.
Mathematica is a wonderful programming environment, with equally powerful libraries (in many areas, far more powerful), and they have brought the cost of entry way down.
...though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you mentioned seawater extraction. If we did that for uranium then we would have a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. If we increase nuclear power 20-fold, to 250% of world electricity production today, it is still 500 years. If we implement breeding (I suspect we could get the bugs worked out by then) we are back up to a 50,000 year supply.
...How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce...
Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.
No conspiracy of hippies is keeping U.S. nuclear power off the table. Commercial ventures can get licenses if they want (and have). The issue is straight-up capitalism and profit-making business decisions -- the capital cost of a nuclear plant is very high so it is an unattractive investment as long as coal or natural gas are available.
Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.
"Viable" roughly means "practical", the first step for something to be practical is to be able to do it. Did you read page you linked to? It admits that "Humanity hasn't figured out how to harness it yet." Actually that is a half-truth. We haven't learned how to harness convention tritum+deuterium fusion yet. But we at least can demonstrate it in a laboratory. With aneutronic thermonuclear fusion can't do it at all under any circumstances!
This isn't in a class with fairies, unicorns and pixie dust since it is based on physical principles, but it is in the same class as those elevators that take us to the Moon.
We are better off restricting energy plans to technologies that we know can be implemented this century.
... As I recall even thorium will only provide several centuries at 100%, though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you brought up seawater extraction technology. Using that we have enough uranium, even just using once-through burning, for something like a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. Increase nuclear power ten-fold (125% of current world electricity consumption) and it is still 1,000 years. If we implement breeding (we could get the bugs worked out in a few centuries I imagine) then we are back up 100,000 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but where did I advocate for terminating all Sunnis? I advocating for terminating ISIS. There is a difference you know.
Obligatory Godwin time: Not all Germans were members of the SS.
And we executed all the Germans who were?
Words fail me, as well.
Obama was the one who chose to fund and arm "rebels" in Syria to try and oust Assad, paving way to the rise of ISIS, a group that is now being used as a justification to continue NSA spying.
So, uh, yeah-- thanks Obama!
Wait - I thought the story-line was that Obama did not do ENOUGH arming of the rebels, which created space for Islamist radicals to create ISIS. Shill on, AC.
The Libertarian philosophy is the most self-consistent of all available.
Quite possibly. I would prefer a reality consistent philosophy, especially since Libertarianism makes extravagant claims about economics which is very much an empirical activity.
It requires the fewest "common-sense" exceptions to be practical.
reality-denying assumptions.
Oh my, no. Libertarianism and its Hayekist pseudo-economics twin are quite aggressive about denying the importance of basing beliefs of reality. Can you say "Praxeology"?
LIbertarians and Hayekists hold that their axiomatic principles are the true basis of perfect morality, the best of all possible moral codes, and that social, political and economic doctrines can, indeed must, be derived directly from them without contaminating the matter with social or economic data.
If you dispute with a Libertarian about the feasibility, and desirability of their proposals, you will shortly find them trying to derail the discussion from practical effects to an effort to educate you about the perfection of their axioms.
...I have no clue what it would be like to actually go through life without it. Maybe it's not as "required" as I think it is, so maybe it's not that irresponsible either.
I can help here. Look out the window. Close one eye.
Wow! Didn't everything look totally different and you suddenly had no idea how far away anything was?
No?
I think no. I think things looked almost exactly the same, and still knew how far away cars, and signs, and people, and houses were.
Binocular depth perception is only one many cues your brain uses to interpret the environment's layout.
Mod parent up!
Yes indeed. This seems to be making mountain out of a molehill. Here is the operative phrase I think: "wasn't mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks". This may well be the case - are every know structure commonly included in anatomy textbooks? They aren't, you know, atlases or encyclopedias of neuroanatomy that might be expected to contain everything.
As AC shows, the bit about "absent from the literature" seems to have been hype.
Take a look at "most important" (highest ranking) deceased author from the 1980s. It is science fiction/fantasy writer Tom Godwin. Number two is Stanton A. Coblentz . Also in the top 20 (in order): Lin Carter, Robert A. Heinlein, Mack Reynolds, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Clifford D. Simak. Forty percent of the top 20 are SF&F authors. Meanwhile we have Tuchman at 101, Sartre at 112, Borges at 254, Tennessee Williams at 439, Toynbee at 526, and so.
Looking at the 1990s, the top loading by SF&F are equally extreme with Marion Zimmer Bradley No. 1, and William S. Burroughs at 748.
Now I feel that SF&F authors are under-appreciated by critics and "the academy" in the English-speaking world, dismissing brilliantly inventive writing in English, when they would praise it as "magic realism" if written in Spanish or Portuguese, but this is just nerd/geek fannishness run amok.
GIGO forever.
Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.
Citation please.
This seems an absurd assertion. The Chernobyl clean-up employed about 250,000 people for two years, mostly with low tech equipment, while the Soviet military had about 5 million men under arms, a lot of it very costly high tech gear.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
...
Your instincts about the defense spending in the USSR are dead-on. They never ran out of money for defense. They ran short on supplies for everything else, and the civilian economy suffered terribly for it, but defense was always flush with resources.
The USSR had, by the end of the 1960s, a fully militarized economy - the military was first in line for everything, taking so much that by the mid-1970s it stalled economic growth (this before Reagan, or even Carter, was in office). The notion that the Reagan military build-up caused the USSR to fall is not supported by studies of what actually happened, such as Ellman and Kontorvich's "The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System".
The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.
The Guardian is on the extremely moderate UK left: at the last general election it came out in favour of voting for the LibDems (who are now in coalition with the Tories, and have reneged on essentially all their manifesto pledges).
To consider it as extreme left wing, you would need to be some sort of neo Nazi...
No, you simply need to be a mainstream U.S Republican today. Conservative policies of the recent past are now denounced as "Marxist" without dissent in current day Republican-land.
...
That more reflects his background - street level activist and local politics, where that's how things are done. That's not really appropriate at the national level, where he had very little experience before becoming President. The result is that he views Congress as damage to be routed around (not that he's entirely wrong about that, and I say that as a conservative who's greatly dismayed at the sway the nutjob fringe holds on the Right) and tries to handle that in much the same manner he did back then... which doesn't really work as personal influence and the Party Machine hold much less sway at the national level.
As you say, the nutjob fringe does hold sway over the Right. On an objective basis, there has not been a Congress this obstructionist for more than eight decades. Although the Republicans seem fine with grid-locking government, regardless of the cost the nation, as long as Obama sits in office -- he understandably knows someone needs to actually govern.
Conservative political psycho-babble fantasies about what 'community activists' think need to be set aside. The fact is he is President and needs to deal with issues facing the nation, even if Congressional Republicans do not.
If Obama is actually, in any way, violating the principles of governance in the U.S. you can be sure that a lawsuit would be in the courts, passed up the chain to the Supreme Court, where the right-wing majority there would slap him down.
"Your O.S. Trip" - RedGum/Michael Atkinson (1981)
Yes, lets base public policy decisions on essays written by cheap sci-fi authors.
You mean based on essays written by a Professor of Biochemistry, and leading popular science educator, who also wrote some fiction?
(The "cheap" shot was way to obvious shilling. Your paymasters should dock you for something so amateur.)
Well, given that Obama is a centre-rightist I can't see that you have demonstrated any problem with the premise at all.
The problem with the premise is that it's based on the tried-and-true No True Scotsman logical fallacy, as in "no true leftie would bomb brown people." Obama may indeed be a center-rightist, but only someone preoccupied with ideological purity would reach that conclusion merely by observing his predilection for bombing brown people.
There is plenty of other evidence supporting this conclusion - it is hardly just his "bombing" policies
The way Obama spearheaded the national implementation of Heritage/Romneycare. His Conservative, but deeply misguided policy of austerity - shrinking the Federal government during a lingering depression for another. And these are the most important two policies of his entire 8-year term in office. That defines the character of his Presidency.
... inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.
This is the problem with Congress. How the hell do you make a law saying you need to identify 90% of something we can't validate at all? Who's going to say when you reach 90%?...
There is a field of mathematics that has this problem firmly under control. It is called "statistics". Constructing a procedure for making this determination would be a reasonable homework assignment in a statistics class, it is no more difficult than that.
Eratosthenes pre-dated Columbus by some time...he was not wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but the size of the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus was wrong about both. Despite having the correct size of the Earth computed very closely by Eratosthenes (we do not know how closely though since the exact size of this "stadia" is unknown), Columbus still accepted a grossly incorrect figure due to his own (flawed) interpretations of ancient geographers.
This much older modern human has the same fraction of Neanderthal DNA as modern humans today.
Think about it.
We haven't seen any ancient Modern Humans that have a different degree of Neanderthal ancestry.
When Modern Humans first bred with Neanderthals the offspring were 50/50. If these F1s bred with each other predominantly from then on you would end up with a new breeding population that was roughly 50/50 in heritage. If the F1s predominantly bred with Modern Humans, then the Neanderthan portion would be cut to 25% in the F2, and if the process repeats it is 12.5% in the F3, etc.
This process stops when there are effectively no more pure blood Modern Humans, that the Neanderthal genome has diffused evenly across the entire population. But subsequent re-encounters would inject new Neanderthal DNA and restart the process.
We haven't yet seen any evidence of this history yet. Even 45,000 years ago it was "ancient history" and epoch that passed many, many generations earlier.
Neanderthals are the same. The whole notion of "Neanderthals" being a separate thing is just a miscategorization of traits that modern humans have. Maybe they are rare, and have become less attractive over the millenia, but not any different than any other trait.
Look at Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev
The traits we collectively call "Neanderthal" are a distinction without a difference.
If you were complaining about the "Cro Magnon" concept you would be on solid ground. That turned out to be an imaginary construct. Neanderthals and Denisovans though definitely form a genetically defined group much more divergent from modern human populations than are found between the most divergent populations among modern humans (defined roughly by the San on one hand and everyone who is not African on the other). That said there is only 0.3% variation across the entire Neanderthal-Denisovan-Modern Human super-group. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were real separate breeding populations for hundreds of thousands of years, but still clearly part of one human species.
...
Just addressing the example given - the "Cro-Magnon" concept and term has been entirely abandoned by science. The problem was that there was never a definition of what a "Cro-Magnon" supposedly was. No distinguishing set of physical characteristics, no distinctive physical culture, and now with our powerful genetic analysis tools - no distinctive genetic pattern. Their range of variation is within that of modern humans, and supposing they were a subspecies would be as well founded as declaring "Samoans" a subspecies since they are, like the "Cro Magnon" physically more robust on average than modern Europeans.
Mod parent up!
I haven't used it recently, but years ago I found the Matlab language and programming environment to be terrible - very primitive (which is why I haven't used it since). Sure, it has great libraries - it should considering the cost.
Mathematica is a wonderful programming environment, with equally powerful libraries (in many areas, far more powerful), and they have brought the cost of entry way down.
...though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you mentioned seawater extraction. If we did that for uranium then we would have a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. If we increase nuclear power 20-fold, to 250% of world electricity production today, it is still 500 years. If we implement breeding (I suspect we could get the bugs worked out by then) we are back up to a 50,000 year supply.
Where is the necessity of thorium?
...How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce...
Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.
You can with a fusion reactor.
How? They don't exist.
Mod this guy up!
You have hit the nail on the head.
No conspiracy of hippies is keeping U.S. nuclear power off the table. Commercial ventures can get licenses if they want (and have). The issue is straight-up capitalism and profit-making business decisions -- the capital cost of a nuclear plant is very high so it is an unattractive investment as long as coal or natural gas are available.
Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.
"Viable" roughly means "practical", the first step for something to be practical is to be able to do it. Did you read page you linked to? It admits that "Humanity hasn't figured out how to harness it yet." Actually that is a half-truth. We haven't learned how to harness convention tritum+deuterium fusion yet. But we at least can demonstrate it in a laboratory. With aneutronic thermonuclear fusion can't do it at all under any circumstances!
This isn't in a class with fairies, unicorns and pixie dust since it is based on physical principles, but it is in the same class as those elevators that take us to the Moon.
We are better off restricting energy plans to technologies that we know can be implemented this century.
... As I recall even thorium will only provide several centuries at 100%, though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you brought up seawater extraction technology. Using that we have enough uranium, even just using once-through burning, for something like a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. Increase nuclear power ten-fold (125% of current world electricity consumption) and it is still 1,000 years. If we implement breeding (we could get the bugs worked out in a few centuries I imagine) then we are back up 100,000 years or so.
Why does thorium need to enter the picture?
It appears that word does not mean what I think it means.
Say the guy slapping the name "welfare" on every social expenditure the government makes (including earned retirement by the military).
Maybe you should to extra distance and call it "Marxism". "Satanism" is also available.