I do have a little sole proprietorship, so this is vaguely credible. But in 2010 and in 2009 and in 2008 it had no revenue. I suppose I could go further back,but who knows and who cares. And this box goes on my home system. Openbsd 4.8 -current and handles some routing, although I ended up also using it as the desktop, which this is composed on.
I am basically retired and rally doing pro-bono web site stuff for non-profits. Ah, sometimes something makes a little revenue but never a profit. I think in six years the revenue is $1000 and that is pretty much for out-of-pocket stuff like buying domain names.
Do you really want to say this is a commercial machine?
And I will guess you might know something about "commercial", but I do not see that from the osha regs I read and I did not even see that "commercial" distinction there. The distinction I saw was custom and for a specific customer. That does sound to me like a corner white-box store. And they do sell a lot of definitely home machines and if you are claiming these machines are "illegal", then, well, you *are* an AC. And I noticed you did not cite to osha regs.
I did not see the earlier hobby claim either. I am a ham and can legally make high-end dangerous in many ways electronics, including a lot of digital silicon. Gosh, let me count the ways I can fry myself. And I can sell that stuff, oh, not "commercially" which does mean something in my license, but the osha emphasis is on "for sale". And, yah, pretty much it is going to be to another ham, but still.
Since you gave a cite, but I knew that in the late 20th and early 21th century in the US, you were really out of step with my reality, I googled around at the regs. I just looked at the Lqbor department stuff.
You have the problem of never having eaten chinese food, if you get the old programming reference.
I figure your employer is a little like this:
He builds pretty much standardized boxes and sells them wherever.
So I might have bought some little odd toy computer for my kid and later laptops and netbooks like that. But my first personal computer was a cpm machine and except for the exceptions cited, I never ever bought a computer of the sort manufactured by your company. So you basically say all my toys are illegal, including the openbsd box I am typing this message upon.
So I go to nearby computer stores of what I called the white-box variety. These are mom and pop sort of places. I claim these people are manufacturing my computer. I specify the components. Hmm, the last tower I bought, I specified 8 nic ports. I specified the memory. I specified the hard disk size. I specified the cpu manufacturer and the number of cores. I specified that the video card have a HDDI out. This machine was thus a custom machine. It was build for a particular customer. So, if you are any good, you now have a clue. But I expect you are so very sure of yourself, so I will spell it out:
If you manufacture custom electrical equipment for an individual customer, your requirement is apparently not really more than keeping some records. Of what...oh, the "tests" you do.
(3) With respect to custom-made equipment or related installations that are designed, fabricated for, and intended for use by a particular customer, if it is determined to be safe for its intended use by its manufacturer on the basis of test data which the employer keeps and makes available for inspection to the Assistant Secretary and his authorized representatives.
On the FCC side I did not bother to check, but I have been very close, sort of on the inside, hah, literally, with a white-box place. I recall hearing that if the case was FCC approved and the electrical components FCC approved, then it was all clean.
Your phrasing leads to difficulties. Since you speak of animals, I have a fairly high IQ on standard tests and a friend have a fairly low IQ on standard tests. So I realistically can suppose I am twice as "smart" as my buddy. So maybe he should have half my rights? And then I might reasonably be willing to say this guy is twice as successful as me, Maybe he should have twice my rights? We are both animals, and of the same species and culture, so these questions should be both easy and realistic. And then we are often speaking here of rights and I am not quite sure what those are. Certainly, for humans, the answers vary a great deal looking over space and time.
I have what is a probably a pretty good ethics book sitting around here and I really really need to read it, but you need to be sufficiently careful in what you say as to not open yourself to as simple a response as mine.
Directly on the topic, perhaps a equal claim on life to myself? We do not approve of national military forces killing groups of unarmed civilians in cold blood. Generally, we think genocide should be opposed. Lethal scientific experiments on people are considered inappropriate. These views are not universal, but the first, with some exceptions, is against well-established international law. Perhaps we should ask about dolphins and fish nets in a similar way. Just asking.
Given your handle, I bet you are a kinesthic causality model type. Most everyone is. But when pushed real hard by something interesting, you sometimes see physics people looking at dynamic models. There is an issue therein about what is relevant. I hear there a couple hundred causality models.
On the summary slug, my immediate thought was a criticism of current instrumentation on these sort of inquiries. This is a pretty standard thought about the purpose to which we build machines. I thought of a couple examples I thought were relevant here, googled, and this is the top hit.
More simply, most everyone does some sort of physical/spiritual dualalty, so it is hard for me to understand why the story author thinks that a physical demonstration of non-existence would be relevant to his social situation. I might think he hopes his relatives would have to actually think about what they are saying around ghosts, but somehow I think this is a very difficult goal.
This is to me an interesting and novel idea. Maybe a new function of the Army Corp of Engineers?
As far as navy nuclear reactors, as far as we know, they have a 50+ year perfect safety record?
Or try this if you do not favor simple military solutions. Have a paramilitary civilian operator corp and the trick is that they must have all their families living on site.:>-) And also maybe the nuke regulatory people and their politicians and their families, and maybe.. all the congress critters.:>-) Oh, akll all the construction people up to include the board of directors of the construction firm.
I see nothing to object to in most of your assertions. And I figure most any metaphor is fair dealing, especially if everyone knows it is a metaphor. But... avoid nuclear war at all costs...
Somewhere I made the assertion that we are in the terminal phase of a mathusian process. Part of the way we have gotten here is through the concept of avoiding a nuclear war at all costs. Now it is really quite reasonable to say that we are getting health/sanitation, violence, and starvation right now from this sort of malthusian causation. And you do not have to look overseas for this.
As I said somewhere, I am an old guy and I remember the cuban missile crisis. There was an interesting psych op part of that... for instance, I remember walking out my house on a clear hot day and musing that a big sub-orbital blast would simply fry me on the sidewalk, along with everyone else in a 1000 mile radius, with no warning for anyone.
Okay, avoid at all cost... should JFK have rolled on the missiles?
Now it may be true that it is correct at this time to avoid actual species extinction at all cost. But if I may be permitted to do a little analogy, is it true you are going to personally avoid dying at all cost?
And if you are going to avoid our species extinction at all cost, I think it likely that you would have to claim to have a very good grasp of future events and their causality. Otherwise, you would try really hard to avoid accepting lesser evil choices in the present.
The nuclear winter concept is such that you might think there is an ideological motivation involved in its popularization. But there was an experiment done, sort of an experiment.
I happen to know about this concept because some idiot on slashdot was looking at the BP oil spill and talking about it as a possible human extinction event with a vague reference to collapsing volcanos. So I poked around.
None of this says a nuclear spasm would not ruin everyone's day... hmm.. maybe for 3k years, but it is quite possible that a transitory nuclear winter does not imply a human extinction event...near, but that is a different concept.
Most of the humans dying from radiation sickness? I figure that is sort of a nutso concept and is passed around because "radiation" is yet another created boogie man. I do not know of any studies pro or con on this, but I am a little bit old and had some involvement with civil defense in the early 60's?. I live in a part of the country that in that time, given expected targeting and wind patterns, would not get a lot of radiation. Well, if you did not die from more mundane causes, then maybe eventually you would die of "radiation", but this would end up as sort of a "chronic" illness for a lot of people.
I have noticed that a lot of what people think, including me, is garbage, so I am not sure that "always heard" is a very reliable approach to stuff. Maybe in a different society...
As best I can tell, given the 99% kill everything figure, you are assuming a nuclear war would extinct homo sap sap? I think not. I figure there are some astronomical stuff that can do us, but doing ourselves? Not quite yet.
End of the world stuff is popular with some now and I think the rhetoric should be avoided.. But for most people, say a 2 billion to 6 billion die off (over the next couple centuries) will *look* like the end of the world. But this is more a lack of tech then too much tech, or some sort of nuclear spasm. Hah, people say that when you are dying, it looks like the end of the world.:-) I suppose "saving the world" from the great unwashed dictatorships or whatever is sort of a popular idea, but I am not sure that "the world" is the sort of thing that you "save". But I could buy off on saving Western Civilization.:-)
A basic reason nuke plants put out a lot of radioactive waste is the the rational solution of reprocessing the waste is very actively discouraged. Even the development of the tech has been discouraged. And the reason is fear of nuclear proliferation because most of the current fuel cycles produce plutonium. Hmm, this issue is also why we do not have a lot of breeder reactors and people complain there is not enough fuel to support nuclear energy. It happens that now a lot of countries existentially need nuclear energy and countries like India are actively developing "novel" fuel cycles, some of which provide new avenues to do nuke weapons.
A bit of history is relevant. When I was a kid, the national policy was to have in the US over a thousand nuclear power plants... by what is now yesterday. This is say a trillion watts output. I would wish we had the trillion watts... yesterday. Instead, the world is in a big time malthusian terminal crisis unnecessarily and as a result of policy decision like not building nuclear power plants. Now if you are a sovereign nation and as all would agree have the sovereign right under established international law to build nuclear power plants and domestic fuel capabilities, do you really *want* to forgo a domestic fuel capability? This is over and beyond the general defects of not developing in-nation tech capability on *any* tech. Colonial American was not supposed to have any tech either. Do you really *want* to say nations cannot develop tech? I cannot think of a tech that is *legally* prohibited. You might say "biological warfare" or "poison gas weapons" in addition to "nuclear weapons", but you are really not paying attention to the details.
I hear we again have debtor's prison in the USA. I hear that in some places, if you owe money, the creditor goes to court and when you fail to show gets a default judgment. Somewhere in there the judge puts you in jail and levies a fine...that is exactly what you owe. So you end up paying.... and the fine is turned over to the creditor. Maybe this needs a cite.
and it reference a newspaper article which is in turn referenced by many articles, but the *original* is simply not showing up in google. However, playing through the links, we get this,
and this seems to directly quote the article and is in direct support of the larouche cite.
Sort of peculiar how the original article is not there and almost all the references to the article do not mention the turning over of the fines to the creditor. I think what is happening here is that the original is getting updated, has a new update date, and has dropped the really nasty parts of the original.
when you look for the slime aspects of capitalism, the first thing to look at is the speculators, but the second thing is the resource extractors. And the third thing is forcing nations into a agriculture only cash crop posture. So digging up diamonds is inferior to actually building stuff. Note that the slime behavior here I really falsely attribute to "capitalism", but I figure the parent poster has around this sort of stuff only reflexes, so why confuse him.
Note that I do not claim that resource extractions is not to be done, but the way it gets done ends up often as simply a kind of looting. And speculators always == looting, rather than actual useful production.
hahha, maybe *that* was what they mean to offer when I call next year.:-) But these are the good guys, been putting fibre to the home for quite a while, hmm, five years? Talking to brain-dead third party support people who want to know about my internet connection and I tell them fibre and they immediately want to claim I have some brand-name thingy like FIOS? from a big operator, maybe franchised through the local ISP, and it cannot be the locals.
I imagine I am dual stack at home. RTSOL? So I am not quite sure what goes out ipv4 vs ipv6. But it seemed to work well enough. So I asked my ISP for a/16:-) Ended up a bit upstream from the actual ISP and they told me to check back at the start of 2011. That is real close in time now and I am interested in what they will be saying to me next month. But my ISP is fully tricked out for ipv6 but they do not spend time doing the testing they would need to do if a lot of people were depending on ipv6.
say in Washington state, you get the J.D. and you pass the bar, then you can practice as a lawyer. You have to join the bar association. The bar association, by law, defines the rules for you. If you need to be slapped up by the side of the head, the bar does it. If you do not like it, hey, you can get the state supreme court to review things. So if you are not in the bar association, you cannot practice. law. In places like texas, I believe lots of the usual legal self-help stuff is simply in some meaniful sense illegal because making it available is seen as practicing.
Another way to look at it: a lawyer is an officer of the court. So he is always under the court's jurisdiction in a certain way. And judges can do about whatever they want to you, at first cut, and not particularly because you are some sort of criminal. So what they do is reviewable by higher courts, but it is not impossible to sit in jail for, what, 20 years, as happened to one lawyer in the US who got hit with a contempt of court thing and would not deal on it. I know someone who got his ticket pulled for a bit because he dropped the dime on a judge who was taking bribes. Hey, I was before the the judge once too (IANAL). Now realize the my friend did not get nailed exactly for outing the judge. It was just that the way he got the information, it was, by the lawyer rules in Washington, improper to reveal the information, even to the judge discipline apparatus.
Oh, judges are not lawyers. Sure, they were lawyers, and they might be lawyers again in the future, but in Washington State, they do not have to stay in the bar association. Their rule set is again different than a lawyer's rule set.
Anyway, I do not assume this lawyer's situation is simple and of course no one walking into a court room can figure he will surely prevail, no matter the merits of the case.
Coyotes eat lots of stuff. So maybe not many chickens in the loop, but how about pet cats? I guess they probably already need to be indoor cats I suppose.
Usually the usa feds keep lots of stuff off the budget. This does not at first glance say much about whether your remarks are true or not. But, hmm, July 2009, reported by some special investigator to Congress in about Nov 2009, Bernaeke had commited hmm 23.4 trillion USD to bailouts. (starting in 2007, if you are some Republican partisan) This is never going to show on a standard document. If you want to call bailing out speculators a "social service", then okay. On the other hand, looking at today's headlines around Ireland and the US and elsewhere, you also might be inclined to do some sort of Goodwin violation. People usually think of that as some form of capitalism, though that sort of position tends to be a little unsubtle.
Everyone sane has obama and the US's number and is giving him and us the cold shoulder. But India was willing to play with Obama. Now India has big big deals going on with Russia and even China and the implications are disasterous for anglo-american geopolitics. So we all know the front end of anglo-american geopolitics is going down big time, but the underlying policy is chaos and war, and I suspect they will get that one way or another. But this announcement is just part of the fallout from the willingness of India to play.,
So why did India play? It is easy to say the difference between China and US is that China is not run by idiots. The Brits are pretty easy to understand, if you willing to think about nasty stuff. But India is a puzzle for me. After all, they really really have to have nuke power big time. So you would figure that they would be skittish about playing with the anglo-americans. Ah well. Probably some new formulation of BRIC, mophing from the last failed version. It is not exactly being idiots, but big time blinders.
So cheap power is the deal. I bet this is from the last century FDR TVA project centered not so far away.
People like to complain about US economy whatever, but the difference between China and the US is that China is not run by idiots. And for figuring out where all the idiots are, you need to look a bit further than your favorite love-to-hate politician.
I have started a little project to see if I can eliminate problems with drive-by binary drops and about anything dependent on binary code. It actually looks straightforward, but only useful for someone who actually is concerned. It looks pretty doable for any of us to put together from a fpga a low end armish thing with a randomized opcode set. At the moment, I am just trying for a standard armish thing, with no randomization. As far as I can tell, this segment is just system administration skills. A little code to randomize the opcodes in the verilog and rerinse. Then a little programming to get the tool chain. Then some sort of magic bootstrapping and spend a couple weeks compiling what you need. If the opcode set is unique, then security through obscurity might be workable. So you might end up with a pretty secure appliance at least. Wait ten years and the fpga performance might come up. Note that the last time I dealt with hardware, transistors were all discrete devices. Thus it would seem if I could do the first segment I referenced, pretty much anyone could if they wanted to. Does not really cost much. A few hundred USD and some time.
If you could actually bootstrap the tool chain very transparently and deal with physical security, then you might manage to have a trusted computer, at least for a bit. That is a bigger problem of course.
Hmm, if you like math game theory, obama's assertion should be seen as correct, even to the point of mathematically correct. The typical economics type will cite this result as both one of the actually interesting truths to come out economics and as a justification for globalization and against protectionism. Here is a overview on game theory.
This stuff can be criticized, but the right way to do it is to cast doubt on contemporary math and physics, as say in Gauss's attacks on Euler. I suppose from a decent economics point of view, the best way is to observe the utility function is measured in "money", but realize that "money" does not have intrinsic value, and so the utility function is haywire from the start. None of these approaches are going to get much traction on slashdot, but let us not make silly buy-ins that are conceptually the generators of the problem you are complaining about,.
Perhaps like hot-linking. But I think the real thread is as to a motivation that also generates such concepts as "electricity as a luxury items" and opposition to its general availability. This is historical, say pre- 1960's and not some more recent greenie thing. Hmm, well I could make the relationship, but the concepts are more subtle. At least in my area of the US, the defense of scarcity for electricity got really pretty nasty, up the point that the Bonneville Power Administration was online and the creepy-crawlers had lost that particular battle.
But the simple idea of scarcity goes back to "the hatred of goods". The usual cite is to how merchants who had inventory, scarce and sold dearly, hated it when new stock came in on the sailing ships of the day.
Hmm, looking around for my source (probably Smith or Ricardo or someone like that), and having pushed back all the way to B.C., I came across this:
The nature of basic research is such that the return is hard to predict, and often hard to quantify after the fact. But the Chinese guy who is in charge of their lunar stuff and seems to expect to get approval to go for a manned landing soon, thinks apollo had a 14 to 1 payback. The reasons private companies do not go for basic research is multiple. On one hand, there is a risk of not getting anywhere. Then if it does have a payback, the individual firm may not benefit from it. (Horrors, the whole society may benefit and in a way that cannot be monertized.) And of course, a sure but distance benefit is meaniless because compound interest at market rates makes the present value of the return essentially zero. And of course, management is pretty much required to look only a quarter ahead anyway. Oh well. Since the cultural destruction from the Peloponesian war, a lot of people have had the idea that money has an intrinsic worth. So you get funny things like Office of Management and Budget making NASA R&D decisions.
But I nominate corn. In 5k years it spread all over the world into lots of niches and became extremely populous. So, I like the first more than the second, but the second sounds like something a bean counter would approve of even more.
Sovereign governments get to emit credit. If they cannot, in these days, what you have is a financier dictatorship. The usual phrase is a bankers dictatorship.
You are right on the approval process. You want to build a nuke,then you take out a loan. If it takes ten years to start getting revenue, then you are screwed. However, approval,and forced design changes, are a politiical thing, not a property of nukes. Indeed, other countries have been able to build quickly. And now we ar getting barge-based factory-built reactors and I suppose there is a sense in which construction time would be zero.
Now all this is interesting and important, but there is a conceptual issue. If you build something, and it is going to be economically valuable for a real long time, when you are doing the financial feasabilty study, as a private corporation, the long time part does not count. The present value of a return 200 years out is zero from an accounting point of view. So what happens is a government builds the project somehow or other. And if you re going to get the right economic returns to the society as a whole, then emitting credit is not inflationary.
At one point, the banks were in to us for, hmm, 23.4 trillion, hmm, 2009 government report to Congress. This includes loan guarantees and is not part of the usual budget numbers anyway. Of course, keeping speculators happy is exactly the soul of negative economic return, so we are on the edge of hyperinflation, while the fake speculative assets are deflating. Getting rid of the fake assets is about what you can identify as good about a big depression. Hyper inflation can be part of this. Weimar got to a trillion percent inflation in about half a year.
Can we put a number on the fake assets? World-wide, I hear 1.4 quadrillion usd.
I liked your take on the gap to the stars. The usual argument goes more along the lines if we get to the next star system and colonize, then make some reasonable assumptions on how easy is would be to recurse and maybe we own the galaxy in 10meg years.
As far as space vs planet, your point has virtue for those who are silly, but you know darn well that we will do both. Who leaves habitat unused? Even the Sahara, which is really sort of an example of the failure so far of whatever,life oriented deity you like, gets some life and includes humans. To me, it seems quite reasonable to "terraform" local deserts, so why not local planets?
Here is a sort of terraforming project that has been kicking around since the middle of last century. No interesting tech requirements, just no willpower So. as part of it, you need some new science work, but not new hardware tech. Like most things, getting the concepts right is the hard part.
Slashdot Mirror
well, maybe
I do have a little sole proprietorship, so this is vaguely credible. But in 2010 and in 2009 and in 2008 it had no revenue. I suppose I could go further back,but who knows and who cares. And this box goes on my home system. Openbsd 4.8 -current and handles some routing, although I ended up also using it as the desktop, which this is composed on.
I am basically retired and rally doing pro-bono web site stuff for non-profits. Ah, sometimes something makes a little revenue but never a profit. I think in six years the revenue is $1000 and that is pretty much for out-of-pocket stuff like buying domain names.
Do you really want to say this is a commercial machine?
And I will guess you might know something about "commercial", but I do not see that from the osha regs I read and I did not even see that "commercial" distinction there. The distinction I saw was custom and for a specific customer. That does sound to me like a corner white-box store. And they do sell a lot of definitely home machines and if you are claiming these machines are "illegal", then, well, you *are* an AC. And I noticed you did not cite to osha regs.
I did not see the earlier hobby claim either. I am a ham and can legally make high-end dangerous in many ways electronics, including a lot of digital silicon. Gosh, let me count the ways I can fry myself. And I can sell that stuff, oh, not "commercially" which does mean something in my license, but the osha emphasis is on "for sale". And, yah, pretty much it is going to be to another ham, but still.
Since you gave a cite, but I knew that in the late 20th and early 21th century in the US, you were really out of step with my reality, I googled around at the regs. I just looked at the Lqbor department stuff.
You have the problem of never having eaten chinese food, if you get the old programming reference.
I figure your employer is a little like this:
He builds pretty much standardized boxes and sells them wherever.
So I might have bought some little odd toy computer for my kid and later laptops and netbooks like that. But my first personal computer was a cpm machine and except for the exceptions cited, I never ever bought a computer of the sort manufactured by your company. So you basically say all my toys are illegal, including the openbsd box I am typing this message upon.
So I go to nearby computer stores of what I called the white-box variety. These are mom and pop sort of places. I claim these people are manufacturing my computer. I specify the components. Hmm, the last tower I bought, I specified 8 nic ports. I specified the memory. I specified the hard disk size. I specified the cpu manufacturer and the number of cores. I specified that the video card have a HDDI out. This machine was thus a custom machine. It was build for a particular customer. So, if you are any good, you now have a clue. But I expect you are so very sure of yourself, so I will spell it out:
If you manufacture custom electrical equipment for an individual customer, your requirement is apparently not really more than keeping some records. Of what...oh, the "tests" you do.
(3) With respect to custom-made equipment or related installations that are designed, fabricated for, and intended for use by a particular customer, if it is determined to be safe for its intended use by its manufacturer on the basis of test data which the employer keeps and makes available for inspection to the Assistant Secretary and his authorized representatives.
On the FCC side I did not bother to check, but I have been very close, sort of on the inside, hah, literally, with a white-box place. I recall hearing that if the case was FCC approved and the electrical components FCC approved, then it was all clean.
Your phrasing leads to difficulties. Since you speak of animals, I have a fairly high IQ on standard tests and a friend have a fairly low IQ on standard tests. So I realistically can suppose I am twice as "smart" as my buddy. So maybe he should have half my rights? And then I might reasonably be willing to say this guy is twice as successful as me, Maybe he should have twice my rights? We are both animals, and of the same species and culture, so these questions should be both easy and realistic. And then we are often speaking here of rights and I am not quite sure what those are. Certainly, for humans, the answers vary a great deal looking over space and time.
I have what is a probably a pretty good ethics book sitting around here and I really really need to read it, but you need to be sufficiently careful in what you say as to not open yourself to as simple a response as mine.
Directly on the topic, perhaps a equal claim on life to myself? We do not approve of national military forces killing groups of unarmed civilians in cold blood. Generally, we think genocide should be opposed. Lethal scientific experiments on people are considered inappropriate. These views are not universal, but the first, with some exceptions, is against well-established international law. Perhaps we should ask about dolphins and fish nets in a similar way. Just asking.
Hey, you are fun.
Given your handle, I bet you are a kinesthic causality model type. Most everyone is. But when pushed real hard by something interesting, you sometimes see physics people looking at dynamic models. There is an issue therein about what is relevant. I hear there a couple hundred causality models.
On the summary slug, my immediate thought was a criticism of current instrumentation on these sort of inquiries. This is a pretty standard thought about the purpose to which we build machines. I thought of a couple examples I thought were relevant here, googled, and this is the top hit.
http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF12/1257.html
More simply, most everyone does some sort of physical/spiritual dualalty, so it is hard for me to understand why the story author thinks that a physical demonstration of non-existence would be relevant to his social situation. I might think he hopes his relatives would have to actually think about what they are saying around ghosts, but somehow I think this is a very difficult goal.
This is to me an interesting and novel idea. Maybe a new function of the Army Corp of Engineers?
As far as navy nuclear reactors, as far as we know, they have a 50+ year perfect safety record?
Or try this if you do not favor simple military solutions. Have a paramilitary civilian operator corp and the trick is that they must have all their families living on site. :>-) And also maybe the nuke regulatory people and their politicians and their families, and maybe.. all the congress critters. :>-) Oh, akll all the construction people up to include the board of directors of the construction firm.
I see nothing to object to in most of your assertions. And I figure most any metaphor is fair dealing, especially if everyone knows it is a metaphor. But ... avoid nuclear war at all costs ...
Somewhere I made the assertion that we are in the terminal phase of a mathusian process. Part of the way we have gotten here is through the concept of avoiding a nuclear war at all costs. Now it is really quite reasonable to say that we are getting health/sanitation, violence, and starvation right now from this sort of malthusian causation. And you do not have to look overseas for this.
As I said somewhere, I am an old guy and I remember the cuban missile crisis. There was an interesting psych op part of that... for instance, I remember walking out my house on a clear hot day and musing that a big sub-orbital blast would simply fry me on the sidewalk, along with everyone else in a 1000 mile radius, with no warning for anyone.
Okay, avoid at all cost... should JFK have rolled on the missiles?
Now it may be true that it is correct at this time to avoid actual species extinction at all cost. But if I may be permitted to do a little analogy, is it true you are going to personally avoid dying at all cost?
And if you are going to avoid our species extinction at all cost, I think it likely that you would have to claim to have a very good grasp of future events and their causality. Otherwise, you would try really hard to avoid accepting lesser evil choices in the present.
Fun playing with you.
The nuclear winter concept is such that you might think there is an ideological motivation involved in its popularization. But there was an experiment done, sort of an experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
I happen to know about this concept because some idiot on slashdot was looking at the BP oil spill and talking about it as a possible human extinction event with a vague reference to collapsing volcanos. So I poked around.
None of this says a nuclear spasm would not ruin everyone's day... hmm .. maybe for 3k years, but it is quite possible that a transitory nuclear winter does not imply a human extinction event...near, but that is a different concept.
Most of the humans dying from radiation sickness? I figure that is sort of a nutso concept and is passed around because "radiation" is yet another created boogie man. I do not know of any studies pro or con on this, but I am a little bit old and had some involvement with civil defense in the early 60's?. I live in a part of the country that in that time, given expected targeting and wind patterns, would not get a lot of radiation. Well, if you did not die from more mundane causes, then maybe eventually you would die of "radiation", but this would end up as sort of a "chronic" illness for a lot of people.
I have noticed that a lot of what people think, including me, is garbage, so I am not sure that "always heard" is a very reliable approach to stuff. Maybe in a different society ...
As best I can tell, given the 99% kill everything figure, you are assuming a nuclear war would extinct homo sap sap? I think not. I figure there are some astronomical stuff that can do us, but doing ourselves? Not quite yet.
End of the world stuff is popular with some now and I think the rhetoric should be avoided.. But for most people, say a 2 billion to 6 billion die off (over the next couple centuries) will *look* like the end of the world. But this is more a lack of tech then too much tech, or some sort of nuclear spasm. Hah, people say that when you are dying, it looks like the end of the world. :-) I suppose "saving the world" from the great unwashed dictatorships or whatever is sort of a popular idea, but I am not sure that "the world" is the sort of thing that you "save". But I could buy off on saving Western Civilization. :-)
A basic reason nuke plants put out a lot of radioactive waste is the the rational solution of reprocessing the waste is very actively discouraged. Even the development of the tech has been discouraged. And the reason is fear of nuclear proliferation because most of the current fuel cycles produce plutonium. Hmm, this issue is also why we do not have a lot of breeder reactors and people complain there is not enough fuel to support nuclear energy. It happens that now a lot of countries existentially need nuclear energy and countries like India are actively developing "novel" fuel cycles, some of which provide new avenues to do nuke weapons.
A bit of history is relevant. When I was a kid, the national policy was to have in the US over a thousand nuclear power plants ... by what is now yesterday. This is say a trillion watts output. I would wish we had the trillion watts... yesterday. Instead, the world is in a big time malthusian terminal crisis unnecessarily and as a result of policy decision like not building nuclear power plants. Now if you are a sovereign nation and as all would agree have the sovereign right under established international law to build nuclear power plants and domestic fuel capabilities, do you really *want* to forgo a domestic fuel capability? This is over and beyond the general defects of not developing in-nation tech capability on *any* tech. Colonial American was not supposed to have any tech either. Do you really *want* to say nations cannot develop tech? I cannot think of a tech that is *legally* prohibited. You might say "biological warfare" or "poison gas weapons" in addition to "nuclear weapons", but you are really not paying attention to the details.
I hear we again have debtor's prison in the USA. I hear that in some places, if you owe money, the creditor goes to court and when you fail to show gets a default judgment. Somewhere in there the judge puts you in jail and levies a fine...that is exactly what you owe. So you end up paying.... and the fine is turned over to the creditor. Maybe this needs a cite.
http://www.schr.org/poor
http://mostlywater.org/us_debtors_prisons
ah, here it is: http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15243
and it reference a newspaper article which is in turn referenced by many articles, but the *original* is simply not showing up in google. However, playing through the links, we get this,
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/07/15/americas-new-debtor-prison-jail-time-being-given-to-those-who/
and this seems to directly quote the article and is in direct support of the larouche cite.
Sort of peculiar how the original article is not there and almost all the references to the article do not mention the turning over of the fines to the creditor. I think what is happening here is that the original is getting updated, has a new update date, and has dropped the really nasty parts of the original.
when you look for the slime aspects of capitalism, the first thing to look at is the speculators, but the second thing is the resource extractors. And the third thing is forcing nations into a agriculture only cash crop posture. So digging up diamonds is inferior to actually building stuff. Note that the slime behavior here I really falsely attribute to "capitalism", but I figure the parent poster has around this sort of stuff only reflexes, so why confuse him.
Note that I do not claim that resource extractions is not to be done, but the way it gets done ends up often as simply a kind of looting. And speculators always == looting, rather than actual useful production.
hahha, maybe *that* was what they mean to offer when I call next year. :-) But these are the good guys, been putting fibre to the home for quite a while, hmm, five years? Talking to brain-dead third party support people who want to know about my internet connection and I tell them fibre and they immediately want to claim I have some brand-name thingy like FIOS? from a big operator, maybe franchised through the local ISP, and it cannot be the locals.
I imagine I am dual stack at home. RTSOL? So I am not quite sure what goes out ipv4 vs ipv6. But it seemed to work well enough. So I asked my ISP for a /16:-) Ended up a bit upstream from the actual ISP and they told me to check back at the start of 2011. That is real close in time now and I am interested in what they will be saying to me next month. But my ISP is fully tricked out for ipv6 but they do not spend time doing the testing they would need to do if a lot of people were depending on ipv6.
say in Washington state, you get the J.D. and you pass the bar, then you can practice as a lawyer. You have to join the bar association. The bar association, by law, defines the rules for you. If you need to be slapped up by the side of the head, the bar does it. If you do not like it, hey, you can get the state supreme court to review things. So if you are not in the bar association, you cannot practice. law. In places like texas, I believe lots of the usual legal self-help stuff is simply in some meaniful sense illegal because making it available is seen as practicing.
Another way to look at it: a lawyer is an officer of the court. So he is always under the court's jurisdiction in a certain way. And judges can do about whatever they want to you, at first cut, and not particularly because you are some sort of criminal. So what they do is reviewable by higher courts, but it is not impossible to sit in jail for, what, 20 years, as happened to one lawyer in the US who got hit with a contempt of court thing and would not deal on it. I know someone who got his ticket pulled for a bit because he dropped the dime on a judge who was taking bribes. Hey, I was before the the judge once too (IANAL). Now realize the my friend did not get nailed exactly for outing the judge. It was just that the way he got the information, it was, by the lawyer rules in Washington, improper to reveal the information, even to the judge discipline apparatus.
Oh, judges are not lawyers. Sure, they were lawyers, and they might be lawyers again in the future, but in Washington State, they do not have to stay in the bar association. Their rule set is again different than a lawyer's rule set.
Anyway, I do not assume this lawyer's situation is simple and of course no one walking into a court room can figure he will surely prevail, no matter the merits of the case.
Coyotes eat lots of stuff. So maybe not many chickens in the loop, but how about pet cats? I guess they probably already need to be indoor cats I suppose.
Usually the usa feds keep lots of stuff off the budget. This does not at first glance say much about whether your remarks are true or not. But, hmm, July 2009, reported by some special investigator to Congress in about Nov 2009, Bernaeke had commited hmm 23.4 trillion USD to bailouts. (starting in 2007, if you are some Republican partisan) This is never going to show on a standard document. If you want to call bailing out speculators a "social service", then okay. On the other hand, looking at today's headlines around Ireland and the US and elsewhere, you also might be inclined to do some sort of Goodwin violation. People usually think of that as some form of capitalism, though that sort of position tends to be a little unsubtle.
when I see stuff like this..
I thinj,,,
Everyone sane has obama and the US's number and is giving him and us the cold shoulder. But India was willing to play with Obama. Now India has big big deals going on with Russia and even China and the implications are disasterous for anglo-american geopolitics. So we all know the front end of anglo-american geopolitics is going down big time, but the underlying policy is chaos and war, and I suspect they will get that one way or another. But this announcement is just part of the fallout from the willingness of India to play.,
So why did India play? It is easy to say the difference between China and US is that China is not run by idiots. The Brits are pretty easy to understand, if you willing to think about nasty stuff. But India is a puzzle for me. After all, they really really have to have nuke power big time. So you would figure that they would be skittish about playing with the anglo-americans. Ah well. Probably some new formulation of BRIC, mophing from the last failed version. It is not exactly being idiots, but big time blinders.
So cheap power is the deal. I bet this is from the last century FDR TVA project centered not so far away.
People like to complain about US economy whatever, but the difference between China and the US is that China is not run by idiots. And for figuring out where all the idiots are, you need to look a bit further than your favorite love-to-hate politician.
I have started a little project to see if I can eliminate problems with drive-by binary drops and about anything dependent on binary code. It actually looks straightforward, but only useful for someone who actually is concerned. It looks pretty doable for any of us to put together from a fpga a low end armish thing with a randomized opcode set. At the moment, I am just trying for a standard armish thing, with no randomization. As far as I can tell, this segment is just system administration skills. A little code to randomize the opcodes in the verilog and rerinse. Then a little programming to get the tool chain. Then some sort of magic bootstrapping and spend a couple weeks compiling what you need. If the opcode set is unique, then security through obscurity might be workable. So you might end up with a pretty secure appliance at least. Wait ten years and the fpga performance might come up. Note that the last time I dealt with hardware, transistors were all discrete devices. Thus it would seem if I could do the first segment I referenced, pretty much anyone could if they wanted to. Does not really cost much. A few hundred USD and some time.
If you could actually bootstrap the tool chain very transparently and deal with physical security, then you might manage to have a trusted computer, at least for a bit. That is a bigger problem of course.
Hmm, if you like math game theory, obama's assertion should be seen as correct, even to the point of mathematically correct. The typical economics type will cite this result as both one of the actually interesting truths to come out economics and as a justification for globalization and against protectionism. Here is a overview on game theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
The key guy is I believe Nash.
This stuff can be criticized, but the right way to do it is to cast doubt on contemporary math and physics, as say in Gauss's attacks on Euler. I suppose from a decent economics point of view, the best way is to observe the utility function is measured in "money", but realize that "money" does not have intrinsic value, and so the utility function is haywire from the start. None of these approaches are going to get much traction on slashdot, but let us not make silly buy-ins that are conceptually the generators of the problem you are complaining about,.
Perhaps like hot-linking. But I think the real thread is as to a motivation that also generates such concepts as "electricity as a luxury items" and opposition to its general availability. This is historical, say pre- 1960's and not some more recent greenie thing. Hmm, well I could make the relationship, but the concepts are more subtle. At least in my area of the US, the defense of scarcity for electricity got really pretty nasty, up the point that the Bonneville Power Administration was online and the creepy-crawlers had lost that particular battle.
But the simple idea of scarcity goes back to "the hatred of goods". The usual cite is to how merchants who had inventory, scarce and sold dearly, hated it when new stock came in on the sailing ships of the day.
Hmm, looking around for my source (probably Smith or Ricardo or someone like that), and having pushed back all the way to B.C., I came across this:
http://samvak.tripod.com/scarcity.html
which was not too bad.
I was particularly amused to find that I had heard of him with respect to his psych publications.
The nature of basic research is such that the return is hard to predict, and often hard to quantify after the fact. But the Chinese guy who is in charge of their lunar stuff and seems to expect to get approval to go for a manned landing soon, thinks apollo had a 14 to 1 payback. The reasons private companies do not go for basic research is multiple. On one hand, there is a risk of not getting anywhere. Then if it does have a payback, the individual firm may not benefit from it. (Horrors, the whole society may benefit and in a way that cannot be monertized.) And of course, a sure but distance benefit is meaniless because compound interest at market rates makes the present value of the return essentially zero. And of course, management is pretty much required to look only a quarter ahead anyway. Oh well. Since the cultural destruction from the Peloponesian war, a lot of people have had the idea that money has an intrinsic worth. So you get funny things like Office of Management and Budget making NASA R&D decisions.
I figure you mean there is no "apex"?
But I nominate corn. In 5k years it spread all over the world into lots of niches and became extremely populous. So, I like the first more than the second, but the second sounds like something a bean counter would approve of even more.
Sovereign governments get to emit credit. If they cannot, in these days, what you have is a financier dictatorship. The usual phrase is a bankers dictatorship.
You are right on the approval process. You want to build a nuke,then you take out a loan. If it takes ten years to start getting revenue, then you are screwed. However, approval,and forced design changes, are a politiical thing, not a property of nukes. Indeed, other countries have been able to build quickly. And now we ar getting barge-based factory-built reactors and I suppose there is a sense in which construction time would be zero.
Now all this is interesting and important, but there is a conceptual issue. If you build something, and it is going to be economically valuable for a real long time, when you are doing the financial feasabilty study, as a private corporation, the long time part does not count. The present value of a return 200 years out is zero from an accounting point of view. So what happens is a government builds the project somehow or other. And if you re going to get the right economic returns to the society as a whole, then emitting credit is not inflationary.
At one point, the banks were in to us for, hmm, 23.4 trillion, hmm, 2009 government report to Congress. This includes loan guarantees and is not part of the usual budget numbers anyway. Of course, keeping speculators happy is exactly the soul of negative economic return, so we are on the edge of hyperinflation, while the fake speculative assets are deflating. Getting rid of the fake assets is about what you can identify as good about a big depression. Hyper inflation can be part of this. Weimar got to a trillion percent inflation in about half a year.
Can we put a number on the fake assets? World-wide, I hear 1.4 quadrillion usd.
I liked your take on the gap to the stars. The usual argument goes more along the lines if we get to the next star system and colonize, then make some reasonable assumptions on how easy is would be to recurse and maybe we own the galaxy in 10meg years.
As far as space vs planet, your point has virtue for those who are silly, but you know darn well that we will do both. Who leaves habitat unused? Even the Sahara, which is really sort of an example of the failure so far of whatever ,life oriented deity you like, gets some life and includes humans. To me, it seems quite reasonable to "terraform" local deserts, so why not local planets?
Here is a sort of terraforming project that has been kicking around since the middle of last century. No interesting tech requirements, just no willpower So. as part of it, you need some new science work, but not new hardware tech. Like most things, getting the concepts right is the hard part.
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15992