I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.
To be fair, this is a much easier proposition when the enterprise in question is brewing tasty, tasty beer.
True, but the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in (redundantly) Siena, Italy is an operating bank that was established in 1472. Keeping an interest paying account in a bank will provide funds for operating the facility as long as the bank doesn't fail (and with no government to bail them out).
Of course perhaps a hybrid business model might work - a combined brewery and nuclear waste storage site. There might be problems with this proposal that I haven't noticed yet... (dang this Spaten Optimator is good!)
If you think Playboy is porn, you really need to get out of the basement. Playboy is to porn what Disneyworld is to authenticity.
I'm curious to hear what your definition of porn is. And with that where you live so I can get an idea of whether your standards are close to your communities standards. As there is no definitive statement as to what constitutes porn that could be applied globally.
I guess we should be thankful that Steven Jobs has not converted to a strict orthodox sect that believes the bodies of adult women should be completely covered in public. I don't need to specify a religion, all the major religions have such sects (the Amish/Salafi/Haredi/etc./etc.).
Seriously - Playboy is no more pornographic than the old and modern masters that school kids view in museums. Is the governing criterion whether the model has died of old age?
And we can all be absolutely certain that all future research contracts this group will get from Microsoft will also come with no strings attached and will be entirely unrelated to the results of the current contract. Yessir!
The BSA has a reputation as a extortion racket. What a great business model, sue your own customers! Only in tech.
Once again, an anti-anti-piracy screed misunderstands what a "customer" is. A "customer" buys something. The guy who sneaks into your bookstore with a portable scanner and makes a copy of a book and leaves without buying anything isn't a "customer."
Really? Meet Ernie Ball. He makes a pretty case of it being a racket.
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon
It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon.
Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.
First off - you do realize that Orion ships don't "burn" bulk natural uranium in a manner anything like a chemical rocket, right? That is, the uranium mined on the moon must be enriched to nearly pure U-235, and then fabricated into nuclear bombs. All of this infrastructure would have to be built on the moon to get that "weight savings" of shipping U-325 off of Earth.
Second, how much U-235 does an Orion ship require? According to the Wikipedia page a mid-size Orion craft weighing ~2000 tons (the Space Shuttle orbiter itself weighs only 78 tonnes so this is a huge ship by today's standards) needs 1080 bombs for a fuel load. Each bomb requires about 1 critical mass of U-235, weighing 15 kg or so. Thus the total weight savings in fueling up the Orion is 16 tonnes, less than 1% of the mass of the ship. The bombs themselves (since they require a lot of mass in addition to the fissile fuel to arrange the explosion and focus their energy) weigh something like 500 tonnes, so we are only saving 3% of the weight of the bombs. So the great expense of duplicating Earth-side uranium mining and enrichment save only a trivial fraction of the mass that must be lifted off Earth (how much do those Lunar factories weigh?)
Second - the cost of a gram of U-235 content in reactor fuel (before fabrication) is about $55 per gram. The cost of going to highly enriched uranium will raise this somewhat, but enrichment is only half the cost and most of the separative work to make highly enriched uranium is already done just to make low enriched fuel. Meanwhile the Russian Proton can lift payload into orbit for $4.30 per gram, so the added cost to sending HEU to the moon is a small fraction (~7% or so) of the cost of making it on Earth. Any production process on the Moon will be far more expensive.
You can make a simpler presentation of this concept by simply calling it a 10-fold expansion of the 1991 Border Patrol ($300 million budget for 3,000 agents: http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat6/147284.pdf) to 30,000 and $3 billion.
Part of the problem with this idea - which is generally feasible and affordable - is the ambivalence about locking down the border by people who actually live there. The "patrol" the entire border idea requires building a patrol road and infrastructure where there along the entire border much of which is currently wilderness. The border ended up where it is partly because of the nearly impassable terrain much of it runs through. Through many areas it will be impossible to patrol directly on the border and an interception line will have to be drawn in the interior where some-to-many U.S. citizens will need to traverse the line daily. The line will have to run through the property of numerous people, who generally will not like the idea.
The high-tech invisible border idea was an effort to do a technological end run around these problems.
I dunno, but in 1949 they were already... half a dozen at least that would fit into this characteristic.
The oldest coming into my mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
while mechanical and being a bit unreliable due to being handmade from scrap metal... still fits into the description.
Mark I and others also should be noted, in 1949 it was definitely not the first...
The development of computers that have all of the architectural features we consider standard took about 15 years and there were several steps in the process with each one having some sort of bragging rights. And deciding when the process was "done" and we had a fully modern architecture is something of a matter of judgment.
Back in the 1980s I researched exactly this question for a CS course project, and I examined the architectural details of every early computer to MANIAC and IAS or so. EDSAC was the computer I identified as being the first to have not only stored programs BUT ALSO "programs as data" - one that could rewrite their own instructions and thus (for example) load programs dynamically in the course of computation. Without this feature the concept of an "operating system" is essentially impossible. The EDSAC was my pick for the best claimant to the "first modern architecture" computer.
The only differecne with a Mars colony is that the Mars colony is less likley to be self sufficient in the near future, and therefore the Earth based founders will have to face the descision of at what point do the stop resupplying the colony. Do they keep the supplies going indefinately, or set a cutoff date? This not a lack of volinteers would prevent any sane coorporation from planning a private mars colony.
You are right that it is not a suicide mission being proposed - it is one-way settlement. But it is also important to realize that this is NOT like any settlement project ever carried out on Earth.
There is no possibility of a Mars colony with foreseeable technology in the next 50 years being self-sufficient. At best they can reduce the supplies that must be shipped to them regularly as long as they live by recycling/producing the most massive materials - water, air, and part of their food. Sending them there will entail a commitment of keeping up supplies until they die. The argument for it being cheaper to leave them there is that the cost of these robotic resupply missions would be less than the cost of the return system, and less risky.
It should be kept in mind that these colonists will be pretty busy simply keeping their systems in repair (see the ISS and Mir), if we also want them to do some useful science then maybe we should really cut-down on what we expect them to produce locally. The less subsistence work they must do the more science they can do. We can send them supplies, in return they do science for us - for the rest of their lives. Seems fair to support them indefinitely.
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably because it contains a magical monolith that tampers with DNA through magic? And in the end, Bowman is magically transformed into an impossible magical spacefaring magic embryo? The realistic parts don't cancel out the magical parts; the magical parts disqualify the whole film from realism.
So how is the Black Monolith more magical than the space travel device in Contact?
(I hit the wrong button when attempting to go back and edit.)
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably because it contains a magical monolith that tampers with DNA through magic? And in the end, Bowman is magically transformed into an impossible magical spacefaring magic embryo? The realistic parts don't cancel out the magical parts; the magical parts disqualify the whole film from realism.
So how is the Black Monolith less magical than the space travel device in Contact?
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yes, especially since they gave Contact a prominent placement.
I recently watched them both, and I must say that the alien Black Monolith is no more "unscientific" than the MacGuffin of the Contact alien specified space-travel device and its mysterious time-warping properties, if that is what is sticking in their craw.
No movie has ever succeeded at (or even attempted) to portray space travel, and astronauts, more realistically than 2001. They should have acknowledged that with a place on their list.
"I hear ya, but on the other hand your new 1155 mobo is likely to have 6 GB/sec SATA and USB 3.0 which your existing 1366 mobo most likely does not have."
It's not a feature of Sandy Bridge. Its a feature of newer motherboards - look at recent offerings on Newegg. Already 35 of the 271 Intel motherboards listed on Newegg already have these higher speed interfaces (some as cheap $110). The point is updating your motherboard likely adds additional performance independent of the processor socket.
I'm all for bigger and better but it's a pain to throw away a $500 motherboard every 18 months because Intel decided they want to change the socket.
I hear ya, but on the other hand your new 1155 mobo is likely to have 6 GB/sec SATA and USB 3.0 which your existing 1366 mobo most likely does not have. Changing out your mother board won't just get you a new socket.
No, you're editing the facts. The Portuguese had already taken over a fort in Hong Kong to defend colonies supporting their trade shortly after they arrived in 1513. All that is "fucking with China". The Opium War represents a peak of fuckery, not the beginning. The West didn't stop fucking with China when Japan invaded in the 1930s - leaving China twisting in the wind was a big part of the fuckery. And though the Western fuckery since the Communist government hasn't been forced, that's not all to fuckery: the pollution and labor exploitation of China and its people is largely Western fuckery, without which China's native masters wouldn't have the grist for the fuckery mill. There have been plenty of other fuckers of China other than Western, including thousands of years of Chinese aristocracy of one ideology or another. But that doesn't discount the half-millennium of Western fucking.
Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation - preposterous in fact. The Portuguese did indeed attempt to set up a trading colony by armed force in the early 16th century - but they got their asses handed to them in short order and then were gone. China was well able to defend itself - it was at the same technological and economic level as Europe until the industrial revolution (starting about 1780). China was a gigantic and powerful state, with twice the wealth of all of Europe (due to its size) and not some hothouse flower that was despoiled by mere contact with a colonial power wannabe in the 16th century.
China ruled its own territories and was in command of its own fate until the prelude to the Opium War when a Britain now armed with the fruits of the industrial revolution was able to start consistently defeating Chinese forces.
I note also you keep giving Asian imperialists - Japan - a free ride. The West (the U.S.) actually cut off exports to Japan to protest its treatment of China - a considerable national sacrifice during the Great Depression. From 1933 on you have to be deluded to blame China's problems on the West.
In your scenario China today - the world's biggest creditor, the third largest economy in the world (on its way to reclaiming its traditional position as largest in less than a decade) and the effective hegemon of East Asia - is not at fault for its own problems and choices. Sorry - they are big, big boys now and are responsible fo rehat happens to them. Blaming the West for everything is a childish ideological game.
... You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years...
Just to keep the facts straight: Westerners were engaged in fucking China for some 150 years - from 1781 to 1933, Easterners (Japan) started participating in 1894 and then did all the fucking from 1933 until 1945 (which was by far the worst that China got), so Japan gets credit for doing it for 50 years. From 1948 on (more than 60 years) China had been in command of its own policies - nobody has been forcing anything on them and any suffering and ruin has been with the approval of the Chinese government.
Re:Simple test for when a company is too big.
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 1
Put a $10 bill, or the local equivalent, in an envelope on the company bulletin board. On the outside, write, "I need change for $10 please" without any indication of who you are. Do this every six months or so. If you ever come back and find that the envelope is empty, your company is too big. You have hired a thief who does not care about his or her fellow employees.
How about the contractor (or landlord) supplied janitorial/maintenance crews?
Don't make me use a real browser to click all the way through your site, make me agree to a stupid set of conditions for using the software, and then provide my browser with a cookie that it can subsequently use to download your software; when my browser is on one continent and the machine that wants the software is on another continent...
Reminds me of the time I was going to spend a month vacation at a beach cottage. No broadband, no cable TV, no WiFi AP, but it did have a telephone. So I decided to sign up for a month with an ISP who had a POP that was a local call from the cottage. There was only one that I could find - EarthLink. Now obviously I couldn't sign up on-line for their service FROM THE COTTAGE since I would need an Internet connection for this. Additionally I did not suppose there was any reason that I would need to use the very computer I was going to have at the beach simply for the sign-up.
EarthLink thought differently. When I signed up it automatically downloaded software to the machine I was using (belonging to a relative I was staying with) that erased all of its Internet settings, making EarthLink the ISP on that machine, and replacing all of my relative's info (username, etc.) with the data I had entered on sign-up, all without warning me or giving me any options. I couldn't restore the settings myself since I didn't know them. Though not a disaster it was a real nuisance to undo all the "help" it deemed fit to give me.
The post office is going to lose money because unlike UPS, they can't raise rates. They have to visit everyone's house 6 days a week.
It's actually a very very efficient organization. It's the constraints put upon it that make it so that it loses money. Congress won't allow this cost saving, Congress won't allow to cut service. Congress won't allow it to raise rates.
...
Actually it has made profits fairly consistently in the past, it posted a profit of $910 million in 2006. Since then it has taken it on the chin with the economy, and - as you note - the refusal of Congress to allow cost reductions or raising rates to allow it to adapt.
Any number of service cut backs that a private company would make in a heartbeat can restore it to profitability, as can appropriate rate increases.
It is a highly efficient operation - you cannot find another postal system in the world that does better.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
- C.S. Lewis
Interesting quote. Here is another similar, but even more revealing, statement by Lewis: "The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent" (from Reflections on the Psalms, Chapter 3.).
We have seen over the last half century a revolution in American political philosophy - that of self-justifying wealth. Ayn Rand style Objectivism/Libertarianism holds that self-interest is the highest moral principle and altruism is evil; wealth is proof of moral rectitude, and poverty is proof of sloth and moral degeneracy. This philosophy has provided us with the perfection of the robber baron, now dominating American political life - cupidity that is never satiated, and extinguishing all moral doubt. Wealth is virtue; there can be nothing wrong with how the wealthy acquire or use their wealth; there is nothing to repent, and thus there is no possibility that the robber baron will change.
The pretentious quality of Jimbo's vanity shots rankles me every time I see them on Wikipedia since I am at best ambivalent about Wales himself, and some of the ways he uses Wikipedia. At least they are mixing it up now with images of other folks (all of them lacking that pretentious quality).
If Wikipedia had logins and subscriptions like Slashdot, that would make pictures of Jimmy Wales disappear forever I'd been in on that in a heartbeart.
Slashdot Mirror
I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.
To be fair, this is a much easier proposition when the enterprise in question is brewing tasty, tasty beer.
True, but the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in (redundantly) Siena, Italy is an operating bank that was established in 1472. Keeping an interest paying account in a bank will provide funds for operating the facility as long as the bank doesn't fail (and with no government to bail them out).
Of course perhaps a hybrid business model might work - a combined brewery and nuclear waste storage site. There might be problems with this proposal that I haven't noticed yet... (dang this Spaten Optimator is good!)
If you think Playboy is porn, you really need to get out of the basement. Playboy is to porn what Disneyworld is to authenticity.
I'm curious to hear what your definition of porn is. And with that where you live so I can get an idea of whether your standards are close to your communities standards. As there is no definitive statement as to what constitutes porn that could be applied globally.
I guess we should be thankful that Steven Jobs has not converted to a strict orthodox sect that believes the bodies of adult women should be completely covered in public. I don't need to specify a religion, all the major religions have such sects (the Amish/Salafi/Haredi/etc./etc.).
Seriously - Playboy is no more pornographic than the old and modern masters that school kids view in museums. Is the governing criterion whether the model has died of old age?
And we can all be absolutely certain that all future research contracts this group will get from Microsoft will also come with no strings attached and will be entirely unrelated to the results of the current contract. Yessir!
The BSA has a reputation as a extortion racket. What a great business model, sue your own customers! Only in tech. Once again, an anti-anti-piracy screed misunderstands what a "customer" is. A "customer" buys something. The guy who sneaks into your bookstore with a portable scanner and makes a copy of a book and leaves without buying anything isn't a "customer."
Really? Meet Ernie Ball. He makes a pretty case of it being a racket.
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon
It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon. Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.
First off - you do realize that Orion ships don't "burn" bulk natural uranium in a manner anything like a chemical rocket, right? That is, the uranium mined on the moon must be enriched to nearly pure U-235, and then fabricated into nuclear bombs. All of this infrastructure would have to be built on the moon to get that "weight savings" of shipping U-325 off of Earth.
Second, how much U-235 does an Orion ship require? According to the Wikipedia page a mid-size Orion craft weighing ~2000 tons (the Space Shuttle orbiter itself weighs only 78 tonnes so this is a huge ship by today's standards) needs 1080 bombs for a fuel load. Each bomb requires about 1 critical mass of U-235, weighing 15 kg or so. Thus the total weight savings in fueling up the Orion is 16 tonnes, less than 1% of the mass of the ship. The bombs themselves (since they require a lot of mass in addition to the fissile fuel to arrange the explosion and focus their energy) weigh something like 500 tonnes, so we are only saving 3% of the weight of the bombs. So the great expense of duplicating Earth-side uranium mining and enrichment save only a trivial fraction of the mass that must be lifted off Earth (how much do those Lunar factories weigh?)
Second - the cost of a gram of U-235 content in reactor fuel (before fabrication) is about $55 per gram. The cost of going to highly enriched uranium will raise this somewhat, but enrichment is only half the cost and most of the separative work to make highly enriched uranium is already done just to make low enriched fuel. Meanwhile the Russian Proton can lift payload into orbit for $4.30 per gram, so the added cost to sending HEU to the moon is a small fraction (~7% or so) of the cost of making it on Earth. Any production process on the Moon will be far more expensive.
So no, this is not a reasonable idea.
You can make a simpler presentation of this concept by simply calling it a 10-fold expansion of the 1991 Border Patrol ($300 million budget for 3,000 agents: http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat6/147284.pdf) to 30,000 and $3 billion.
Part of the problem with this idea - which is generally feasible and affordable - is the ambivalence about locking down the border by people who actually live there. The "patrol" the entire border idea requires building a patrol road and infrastructure where there along the entire border much of which is currently wilderness. The border ended up where it is partly because of the nearly impassable terrain much of it runs through. Through many areas it will be impossible to patrol directly on the border and an interception line will have to be drawn in the interior where some-to-many U.S. citizens will need to traverse the line daily. The line will have to run through the property of numerous people, who generally will not like the idea.
The high-tech invisible border idea was an effort to do a technological end run around these problems.
I dunno, but in 1949 they were already ... half a dozen at least that would fit into this characteristic.
The oldest coming into my mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer) while mechanical and being a bit unreliable due to being handmade from scrap metal... still fits into the description.
Mark I and others also should be noted, in 1949 it was definitely not the first...
The development of computers that have all of the architectural features we consider standard took about 15 years and there were several steps in the process with each one having some sort of bragging rights. And deciding when the process was "done" and we had a fully modern architecture is something of a matter of judgment.
Back in the 1980s I researched exactly this question for a CS course project, and I examined the architectural details of every early computer to MANIAC and IAS or so. EDSAC was the computer I identified as being the first to have not only stored programs BUT ALSO "programs as data" - one that could rewrite their own instructions and thus (for example) load programs dynamically in the course of computation. Without this feature the concept of an "operating system" is essentially impossible. The EDSAC was my pick for the best claimant to the "first modern architecture" computer.
Okay only discovered in 2007, but the latest batch of episodes were done after that time.
I imagine the Professor proposing to enter "Hanny's Voorwerp", which is treated as an off-color remark.
...
The only differecne with a Mars colony is that the Mars colony is less likley to be self sufficient in the near future, and therefore the Earth based founders will have to face the descision of at what point do the stop resupplying the colony. Do they keep the supplies going indefinately, or set a cutoff date? This not a lack of volinteers would prevent any sane coorporation from planning a private mars colony.
You are right that it is not a suicide mission being proposed - it is one-way settlement. But it is also important to realize that this is NOT like any settlement project ever carried out on Earth.
There is no possibility of a Mars colony with foreseeable technology in the next 50 years being self-sufficient. At best they can reduce the supplies that must be shipped to them regularly as long as they live by recycling/producing the most massive materials - water, air, and part of their food. Sending them there will entail a commitment of keeping up supplies until they die. The argument for it being cheaper to leave them there is that the cost of these robotic resupply missions would be less than the cost of the return system, and less risky.
It should be kept in mind that these colonists will be pretty busy simply keeping their systems in repair (see the ISS and Mir), if we also want them to do some useful science then maybe we should really cut-down on what we expect them to produce locally. The less subsistence work they must do the more science they can do. We can send them supplies, in return they do science for us - for the rest of their lives. Seems fair to support them indefinitely.
... by American's greatest writer ... and we can't let the kids read what he actually wrote.
If the can't handle "nigger" then they aren't ready to read the story.
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably because it contains a magical monolith that tampers with DNA through magic? And in the end, Bowman is magically transformed into an impossible magical spacefaring magic embryo? The realistic parts don't cancel out the magical parts; the magical parts disqualify the whole film from realism.
So how is the Black Monolith more magical than the space travel device in Contact?
(I hit the wrong button when attempting to go back and edit.)
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably because it contains a magical monolith that tampers with DNA through magic? And in the end, Bowman is magically transformed into an impossible magical spacefaring magic embryo? The realistic parts don't cancel out the magical parts; the magical parts disqualify the whole film from realism.
So how is the Black Monolith less magical than the space travel device in Contact?
I find it interesting that NASA showed no love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yes, especially since they gave Contact a prominent placement.
I recently watched them both, and I must say that the alien Black Monolith is no more "unscientific" than the MacGuffin of the Contact alien specified space-travel device and its mysterious time-warping properties, if that is what is sticking in their craw.
No movie has ever succeeded at (or even attempted) to portray space travel, and astronauts, more realistically than 2001. They should have acknowledged that with a place on their list.
"I hear ya, but on the other hand your new 1155 mobo is likely to have 6 GB/sec SATA and USB 3.0 which your existing 1366 mobo most likely does not have."
Likely? Source? Sandy Bridge doesn't guarantee USB 3.0, it's not even part of the chipset features
It's not a feature of Sandy Bridge. Its a feature of newer motherboards - look at recent offerings on Newegg. Already 35 of the 271 Intel motherboards listed on Newegg already have these higher speed interfaces (some as cheap $110). The point is updating your motherboard likely adds additional performance independent of the processor socket.
I'm all for bigger and better but it's a pain to throw away a $500 motherboard every 18 months because Intel decided they want to change the socket.
I hear ya, but on the other hand your new 1155 mobo is likely to have 6 GB/sec SATA and USB 3.0 which your existing 1366 mobo most likely does not have. Changing out your mother board won't just get you a new socket.
No, you're editing the facts. The Portuguese had already taken over a fort in Hong Kong to defend colonies supporting their trade shortly after they arrived in 1513. All that is "fucking with China". The Opium War represents a peak of fuckery, not the beginning. The West didn't stop fucking with China when Japan invaded in the 1930s - leaving China twisting in the wind was a big part of the fuckery. And though the Western fuckery since the Communist government hasn't been forced, that's not all to fuckery: the pollution and labor exploitation of China and its people is largely Western fuckery, without which China's native masters wouldn't have the grist for the fuckery mill. There have been plenty of other fuckers of China other than Western, including thousands of years of Chinese aristocracy of one ideology or another. But that doesn't discount the half-millennium of Western fucking.
Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation - preposterous in fact. The Portuguese did indeed attempt to set up a trading colony by armed force in the early 16th century - but they got their asses handed to them in short order and then were gone. China was well able to defend itself - it was at the same technological and economic level as Europe until the industrial revolution (starting about 1780). China was a gigantic and powerful state, with twice the wealth of all of Europe (due to its size) and not some hothouse flower that was despoiled by mere contact with a colonial power wannabe in the 16th century.
China ruled its own territories and was in command of its own fate until the prelude to the Opium War when a Britain now armed with the fruits of the industrial revolution was able to start consistently defeating Chinese forces.
I note also you keep giving Asian imperialists - Japan - a free ride. The West (the U.S.) actually cut off exports to Japan to protest its treatment of China - a considerable national sacrifice during the Great Depression. From 1933 on you have to be deluded to blame China's problems on the West.
In your scenario China today - the world's biggest creditor, the third largest economy in the world (on its way to reclaiming its traditional position as largest in less than a decade) and the effective hegemon of East Asia - is not at fault for its own problems and choices. Sorry - they are big, big boys now and are responsible fo rehat happens to them. Blaming the West for everything is a childish ideological game.
... You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years...
Just to keep the facts straight: Westerners were engaged in fucking China for some 150 years - from 1781 to 1933, Easterners (Japan) started participating in 1894 and then did all the fucking from 1933 until 1945 (which was by far the worst that China got), so Japan gets credit for doing it for 50 years. From 1948 on (more than 60 years) China had been in command of its own policies - nobody has been forcing anything on them and any suffering and ruin has been with the approval of the Chinese government.
Put a $10 bill, or the local equivalent, in an envelope on the company bulletin board. On the outside, write, "I need change for $10 please" without any indication of who you are. Do this every six months or so. If you ever come back and find that the envelope is empty, your company is too big. You have hired a thief who does not care about his or her fellow employees.
How about the contractor (or landlord) supplied janitorial/maintenance crews?
Don't make me use a real browser to click all the way through your site, make me agree to a stupid set of conditions for using the software, and then provide my browser with a cookie that it can subsequently use to download your software; when my browser is on one continent and the machine that wants the software is on another continent...
Reminds me of the time I was going to spend a month vacation at a beach cottage. No broadband, no cable TV, no WiFi AP, but it did have a telephone. So I decided to sign up for a month with an ISP who had a POP that was a local call from the cottage. There was only one that I could find - EarthLink. Now obviously I couldn't sign up on-line for their service FROM THE COTTAGE since I would need an Internet connection for this. Additionally I did not suppose there was any reason that I would need to use the very computer I was going to have at the beach simply for the sign-up.
EarthLink thought differently. When I signed up it automatically downloaded software to the machine I was using (belonging to a relative I was staying with) that erased all of its Internet settings, making EarthLink the ISP on that machine, and replacing all of my relative's info (username, etc.) with the data I had entered on sign-up, all without warning me or giving me any options. I couldn't restore the settings myself since I didn't know them. Though not a disaster it was a real nuisance to undo all the "help" it deemed fit to give me.
As DragonWriter points out the "Fairness Doctrine" was abolished in August 1987 - about what is termed "a generation ago" (23 years).
Mod this guy down and DragonWriter up as "Informative".
This should be emphasized....
And the government sends secret documents by the U.S. Postal Service.
The post office is going to lose money because unlike UPS, they can't raise rates. They have to visit everyone's house 6 days a week.
It's actually a very very efficient organization. It's the constraints put upon it that make it so that it loses money. Congress won't allow this cost saving, Congress won't allow to cut service. Congress won't allow it to raise rates.
...
Actually it has made profits fairly consistently in the past, it posted a profit of $910 million in 2006. Since then it has taken it on the chin with the economy, and - as you note - the refusal of Congress to allow cost reductions or raising rates to allow it to adapt.
Any number of service cut backs that a private company would make in a heartbeat can restore it to profitability, as can appropriate rate increases.
It is a highly efficient operation - you cannot find another postal system in the world that does better.
Any chance that such cooperation between companies meets the legal definition of collusion or trust?
I do not believe the current Supreme Court is inclined to recognize any "collusion" or "trust" regardless of the facts or the law.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis
Interesting quote. Here is another similar, but even more revealing, statement by Lewis: "The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent" (from Reflections on the Psalms, Chapter 3.).
We have seen over the last half century a revolution in American political philosophy - that of self-justifying wealth. Ayn Rand style Objectivism/Libertarianism holds that self-interest is the highest moral principle and altruism is evil; wealth is proof of moral rectitude, and poverty is proof of sloth and moral degeneracy. This philosophy has provided us with the perfection of the robber baron, now dominating American political life - cupidity that is never satiated, and extinguishing all moral doubt. Wealth is virtue; there can be nothing wrong with how the wealthy acquire or use their wealth; there is nothing to repent, and thus there is no possibility that the robber baron will change.
The pretentious quality of Jimbo's vanity shots rankles me every time I see them on Wikipedia since I am at best ambivalent about Wales himself, and some of the ways he uses Wikipedia. At least they are mixing it up now with images of other folks (all of them lacking that pretentious quality).
If Wikipedia had logins and subscriptions like Slashdot, that would make pictures of Jimmy Wales disappear forever I'd been in on that in a heartbeart.