A) You're probably right. If we had a global population growth of 3-4% the politicians supporting space exploration as a potential method to fix the problem would probably agree that it was unlikely to work. But if there's a 10% chance of it working then they can probably convince voters to go along with it. Overpopulation would be a real problem for those voters, more importantly it would be a real problem for their kids, so getting access to space would be worth $100 or $200 per capita to them.
More importantly if we had that kind of population growth we'd probably have money to throw around. When your population is in decline that means that it's disproportionately old people who have retired. If you're at six workers per retiree and dropping you've got find a way of getting more money from each worker every year or Grandma's retirement gets gutted.
Which leads neatly to C):
Since reality is that our poiltics HAVE to be devoted to how much we ascrew working age people vs. how much we screw grandma nobody is thinking in terms of the "space dividend," or the non-economic uses of space tech, or even the military implications of having a practical device that can transfer thousands of tons of equipment off-planet. Or, in fact, any of the numerous justifications you could give for spending 1% of GDP in space.
There's a reason Japan has not actually done anything interesting since their population started aging. In the US this is manifesting itself as a myopic obsession with budget deficits, probably because the ruling elite is beggining to have OCD freak-outs about how we pay for seniors when our 30-somethings aren't willing/able to pay for kids. Most of them don;t even understand the problem is us 30-somethings can;t afford kids, and since the ones who do can't see a governmental solution that doesn't involve spending money (which would require a) tax hikes, or b) cuts to the numerous programs we have for seniors), we get fucked.
As for B): frankly it's irrelevant what the numbers are. Voters don't change their votes based on mathematical proofs. They change their votes based on a weird combination of life experience, enthusiasm, and how well each candidate's positions fit in with their own preconceptions. If we were growing at Uganda's rate, I could make spending a bitchload of money on space fit into voters expectations. Since it isn't I can't.
And as a result we don't really have a space program. We don;t spend enough to get a real return on our investment. We spend enough to avoid firing the people who work at NASA, and sometimes they can turn our tiny budget into cool pictures.
Apparently I've been unclear. I have been quite careful to not say anything about whether space exploration is a good idea in this thread. i personally like it, but that doesn't mean that a) I'm convinced I can convince everyone else to pay for it, or b) the difficulty of achieving a) doesn't show that the Fermi Paradox is not much of a Paradox.
You aren't exactly a champion of clarity either. You have a half-paragraph mentioning "other good reasons to go into space," but you don't actually mention any. You actually contradict your claimed position that space exploration is a good thing by pooh-poohing the only reason anyone on this thread has given for going into space (population growth). I haven't said that it's objectively the best reason to go into space, what I've said is that it's the reason most likely to convince everyone else we should go into space. Partly this is because it would be a justification for spending huge sums of money, and partly it's because when your population is shrinking you don't have huge sums of free money to spend. When you have six workers per retiree you have a lot more money to play with then when you have five. OTOH if you have 10 workers per retiree, and it's going up to 11, you can jack up Social Security 5% and still have some cash left over for investing in the future. There's a reason japan hasn;t done anything interesting since the mid-90s, and the US has spent the past 4 years or so mired in suicidal games ofr chicken over what to do with miniscule portions of the budget.
Moreover you're conflating a bunch of things that are only vaguely related. The Fermi paradox assumes a significant proportion of intelligent life is Starfleet. We'd have seen Starfleet. If the Klingon space race is Klingon state A beating Klingon state B to Qu'Nos III and then everyone goes home because they're all focused on balancing the budget with a shrinking work-force then of course we don't see Warbirds parked around Jupiter. If the US races Russia to Mars, but nobody builds a base on Mars, and everybody stops when somebody wins; that's not Starfleet.
On a note completely unrelated to the paradox: If you have an argument that will convince working class voters, many of whom have trouble paying for staples (especially gas, but an awful lot of people get food stamps), that we should increase the NASA budget to Starfleet levels I'm all ears. If they had a bunch of kids who needed work (ie: population growth), it would be pretty easy to convince them to do so. Since they don't, and they're gonna assume the money comes from their personal budgets, you got a tough order.
Why are you assuming that every technical program the government embarks upon will succeed in solving a major proportion of the problem it was intended to solve? I'm not arguing dealing with population growth via space would be efficient, I'm arguing that nobody is going to bother finding out (by spending lots of money) unless population growth is a major problem. If global population were growing at 3-5% a year, then spending $50 Billion a year on a project that could conceivably house all those people is a no-brainer. It probably wouldn't work, for the same reason the overwhelming majority of Europe's attempts to colonize foreign shores failed miserably, but it would be worth a try.
Moreover you're over-estimating the magnitude of the current problem. Uganda and Niger lead the pack in population growth terms, and they're under 4%. The world as a whole is a bit above 1%. Given that population growth plummets as countries develop economically, and most of the top 10 in population growth have rapidly developing economies, that global increase goes down every year. At our current rate of spending on space, I doubt we'll have put any actual humans on any planets/asteroids/etc. before the "growth" becomes "decline."
If we're only growing by a fraction of a percent a year, or we're in decline, colonizing space goes from "reasonable, yet risky, bet intended to solve a major problem," to "something really cool that we wish some other country would do because half our paycheck goes to maintaining grandma's retirement income."
Where do you live? I'd love to live in a place where population growth was driven solely by birth rate. In the real world we also have a little thing called a "death rate," which is higher then the birth rate in every industrialized country in the world. The actual number of people being added every year is a about half your number.
And even if your number was right, you're intentionally misinterpreting my point. I didn't say that we'd actually solve the population growth problem by going to space (indeed, I was very careful to not call population growth a problem). I said we have no incentive to actually spend money on space unless we had a population growth problem, and we could a) use some of our excess working age adults creating a space program, and b) find work for some of those adults permanently by moving them to Mars.
Since in reality we're almost certainly going to have the opposite problem, there's no reason for us to start an interplanetary empire, much less the intersteller empire assumed by the Fermi paradox.
It's only a fallacious argument if you assume no other technology besides rockets will actually work in getting people off-planet. If $10 billion a year into anti-grav research for five years creates something like the Grav Plates of Honor Harrington then going to space will basically be free. Same with a Space Elevator, the amount of power provided by a Dilithium equivalent, etc. Hell a $$150 Billion a year rocket program would probably find a bunch of economies of scale that we don't have now to reduce the cost of going to Venus or Mars significantly.
And if that assumption is correct then the Paradox is resolved anyway. Assuming 1-3 million tickets to a planet in our solar system a year would be cost prohibitive no matter how much we spend on space, a trip to any star besides Sol (something on the order of 100,000 times the distance to Venus or Mars) is something we could not ever do; which answers the question pretty neatly: they're not here because they can't afford it.
I think people really underestimate how unusual it is to spend lots of money exploring places. They also severely over-estimate the resource needs of a space-capable culture.
Almost any state on the Eurasian landmass could have funded Chris Columbus. But only the Spanish did, because nobody else actually wanted to know what was in the middle of the ocean between Europe and Asia. The Spanish only went for it because they thought Columbus'd get to Asia, and they could get rich trading European luxury goods for Asian luxury goods.
So let's say you're a space-going culture. You've got a beautiful planet which is the perfect temperature for your people because you evolved there. It has the resources to support your population. Why would you spend a significant amount of money sending colonists to other planets in your system? They'll take forever to terraform. Pretty much the only reason to spend money on your equivalent of NASA is if your population is growing at an exponential rate, so you actually need the space. Your smartest strategy in almost any other case is to use your technology to manage your resources on-planet, rather then risk throwing an asteroid into the only planet you;ve got when you're trying to wrangle the thing into orbit.
But why would your population be growing that quickly? Human children are a pain in the ass, so us humans prefer not to have them unless there's massive cultural pressure to do so (population is declining in every rich country that doesn't allow lots of poor immigrants from places where such pressure is pretty strong). Why would our hypothetical race be any different?
As it is the US is spending a truly trivial amount (roughly $60 per person) on space exploration. It's basically just enough for our President to be able to claim he's got the leading program in the world. Other countries spend just enough to claim they're important too. Everybody talks big. Nobody is actually serious about exploration. No domestic constituency is so serious about space exploration that it would prefer a big NASA funded by a new tax, or even a big NASA funded by halving it's sixth favorite domestic program, to the current NASA.
In other words Fermi's Paradox is only a paradox if you grew up in the 50s. At any other time the answer is simple: we haven't met them because virtually no intelligent race is gonna get it's head out of it's ass long enough to develop a starship, much less build enough of them that we should expect to see them.
I fail to answer the question because it's a stupid question. I came here in the late 90s because I liked technology. I stay around partly because trolling trolls is fun, and partly because sometimes the trolls actually aren't trolls and have a point. So far you've failed to make a real point, because you seem to be incapable of admitting that, by the common definition of Industrial Espionage, there is no evidence the US engages in a significant amount of it. Given the way the US Security establishment leaks, it's very hard to believe this would be the case unless we did very little industrial espionage.
Hell, let's turn this on it's head: You have admitted that you did not read any of the sources you link to to back up your assertions. I, who actually read your sources, pointed out they say the exact opposite of what you claim.
By your own logic you are intentionally misleading the geek community, in an effort to prove the US Government is corrupt. How much is Putin paying you?
So now, not only are you setting up straw men, your entire argument is ad hominem.
And, as usual, you;re ignoring the actual meat of the argument: that if Putin simply had his people ignore some paperwork he could let Snowden go on his way for free.
I'd call you a hack, but I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Nobody could be this dumb on purpose.
At my tax bracket a Roth would be overkill. A non-retirement account would be fine. I'm not gonna be paying any taxes on it when I withdraw from it when I'm retired (unless my economic situation completely changes), because my main income will be Social Security. Since that is typically $10k-15k, and it's only taxable if your total income is $25k, I'd have to be withdrawing $10k a year to pay any taxes on it. Investment income under $10k would be wiped out by the standard deduction and my exemption. Since I'm likely to live until 85, any tax planning is silly unless I end up with a total of $200k in the account ($10k times 20 years), which would probably require me to put at least $2-3k away a year (I only have 30 or so years left). I made $14k last year. At this income level all the conventional wisdom is pretty much BS for rich people.
As for the bullying, who said we're bullying the countries directly? Hell, simply require that any transaction involving a US-based corporation gets reported to the IRS if the country itself doesn't have an equivalent transaction tax. Then you levy the transaction tax on the company. Since that's a huge pain in the ass, most countries would simply pass the tax themselves.
Remember the international outcry when we required so much paperwork for foreign banks with US-account-holders? It mostly resulted in said banks refusing to have US account holders. This would be the same thing, except instead of screwing with our own people, in every country we're allied with, it would only screw with the ones who genuinely prefer not to have a transaction tax.
Yeah, but a language barrier means that many times the computer shows it's a computer the person communicating it will chalk that up to language problems.
Moreover it's not just language and age, it's foreignness. A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation with a Swede on this very site, about the powers of thee Swedish government. It took me actually using the phrase "Lost in Translation" before he realized I was asking him to talk to me like I was six. Because in terms of knowing how Swedes have chosen to set up their government, I am actually about six.
The age just compounds everything. I'd expect a 13-year-old with a certain attitude to respond to something he didn't know at all by completely changing the subject for no reason at all. Since this kid is Ukrainian, and I'm English (the test happened in England); and his English is not great; let's say the bot blew up a couple times during our five-minute conversation and reset itself. It would just look like a 13-year-old refusing to admit he didn't know about foreign, old people things in England. So this isn't actually a test of their technology, it'/s a test of their ability to hack the test with rules-lawyering BS.
And even with that little advantage, these guys still didn't manage to officially pass the Turing test because to pass you need 50% (ie: better then chance). They got 33%. The dude who ran the test apparently picked his 30% number after the test so they could claim somebody passed it.
European leaders generally have one very sexy, cool-looking, military toy they can point to and say "we are a force to be reckoned with". They don't buy non-sexy things that are actually needed to fight a war.
For example, you mention Germany's tank battalions. Let's say that Chancellor Merkel had decided to deploy them to Ukraine to stop further Russian encroachment. Could she have done the job on short notice? Hell no, her entire Air Force has exactly one Strategic Transport, which means they can only send in the tanks two at a time.
You also mention helicopter carriers. Why have a helicopter carrier? Seriously. Why, in God's name, would you ever buy such a thing? If your opponent has an air force the choppers are sitting ducks. Which means the carrier is already sunk. If he doesn't have an air force it's cheaper to send in special forces to set up/seize an airbase. Of course, for the air base to actually be useful you need some strategic transports. The only reason to buy a helicopter carrier is that you're too cheap to buy the real thing, and your people are too dumb to know it's useless.
There's a reason that Obama's "Leading from behind" campaign in Libya required the USAF to fight alone for a couple days despite strong support from two large countries that actually have military capabilities: France and the UK. They are more capable then the Germans, but they simply don't spend enough on defense to afford the boring but useful shit you need if you're gonna support a rebel movement in a country that can afford anti-aircraft defenses.
As for the point of the other things that money can be used for, you do realize that Canada's budget is not set by God? If $300 a person in planes, and $300 a person in textbooks, are both logical things for Canada to spend money the country can raise taxes.
But then I read them. And none of them provided any support for the assertion that 'the NSA engaged in industrial espionage on Indonesian Clove Cigarette companies.' It wasn't even close. By definition every single word in that sentence was actually wrong. The NSA was not accused of spying on anyone directly, rather the Aussies were and the NSA simply received the info. What they were doing was not industrial espionage, because it had nothing to do with finding out secrets to protect domestic industry. They were trying to win a case at the WTO, not find out the business secrets of some non-governmental for-profit corporation so they could give them to another non-governmental for-profit corporation. And they weren't spying on any companies. WTO disputes are between governments, which means they were spying on the lawyers for the Republic of Indonesia.
In other words I;m not really calling you a "liar," I'm more calling you an amateur who doesn't understand the meanings of any of the words he's trying to use. You read the paper, absorb the general message ("US NSA Nasty to Indonesia in Business Dispute") and fail to comprehend that there are numerous ways to be nasty in a business dispute that are not technically Industrial Espionage.
Apparently you didn't read any of those articles. Industrial espionage is, by definition, spying on foreign businesses to help domestic businesses. In this case the US banned Clove Cigarettes, because they're cigarettes which makes them dangerous; but did not ban other cigarettes (especially Menthols) despite the fact those are dangerous. The Indonesian government (not a private company) sued and won in the WTO. The Australians (not the NSA) spied upon the lawyers Indonesia used, and then turned the info over to the NSA. So if your argument is "The NSA engaged in industrial espionage regarding Indonesian Kretak Cigarette companies," you're wrong on literally every point. It wasn't the NSA directly, it wasn't industrial espionage (because it was not intended to booster domestic industries), and the target was the Indoensian government (not the Clove Cigarette companies).
If you want to show the US routinely engages in industrial espionage you;re probably gonna have to actually a) understand the definition of industrial espionage s extremely limited, and b) actually read your own sources.
Of course we already knew your reading comprehension sucked. The Dirigesme link was the one that proved other states support their domestic industry a lot more then us. Given that spying is something all states do to one extent or another any state that supports it's industry strongly is gonna engage in some industrial espionage. It's not gonna be open, because it's espionage, but it will happen.
You want links to any of my assertions I'll be happy to provide them. It's fairly trivial to find most of the info. A simple google of "National Champions" leads directly to the policy of dirigesme. It's not quite as bad as it was during the 30 glorious years, but it's still impossible to conceive of the French coming across something important to AirBus and them not telling it directly to AirBus. The whole point of the system is they're too small to win if they don't have everything (including their spy agencies) working together.
An equally simple google turns up numerous PoliSci works indicating transparency leads to peace, if everyone knows what everyone else actually wants it's much easier to get to an agreement. Here's one book. That actually goes to a page stating that if Germany had known how the Brits would actually react to their invasion of Belgium, then it's likely WW1 would have been completely avoided. It does not say how this information was to be obtained.
Your problem seems to be you read the papers, and take them at face value. You don't understand that if we actually cheated half as much as people say we do in papers, the Germans would not prefer us to Putin. So they don't read those articles carefully. Then they half-remember said articles, and repeat them on the internet.
As for my being in the government's can, re-read some of my posts on this thread. I have explicitly stated that Snowden will never be kidnapped from Russia because he's white. If you'd think about what I'm saying for 10 seconds, instead of mindlessly repeating drivel you clearly don't remember (otherwise you could link to it) you'd note that I just called the government racist.
The summary doesn't tell you who started the suit, that iFone predates the iPhone, or anything of that nature. It's not unknown for local entrepreneurs in developing countries to register a trademark they know a big American company is going to need, and then make a nuisance of themselves in local Courts until the Americans pay them to go away.
To find out that iFone are actually a decent company you have to either read the article (and we know that's not happening), or read this guy's summary.
Siri probably would have kicked it's ass, if she hadn't been released to the general public years ago so that a statistically significant proportion of users would recognize her. I believe Google has something, that could also probably kick it's ass.
So the problem isn't that the technology is the same as way back then, it's that the small, low-budget, University teams that enter this kind of competition don't have the staff/budget to do anything more complex. Silicon computers simply suck at replicating the thought processes of carbon-based human brains. Given time, expertise, and processing power you can overcome a lot of the issues; but you really need all three.
It convinced 33% of judges it's a 13-year-old Ukrainian. Since the test wasn't run in Ukrainian, you can't really say it proved that it had human-level language skills. Poor syntax, grammar, not understanding the question, etc. would be excused by the Judges as the "kid" doesn't know English well.
Since the program claimed to be 13, it also did not actually have to understand most of the things there are to talk about. Or anything, really. As an Englishman you wouldn't expect a Ukrainian teen to know anything about your life in England, and in turn the computer could make up all kinds of things about it's life in Ukraine and you'd have no clue.
So this isn't really AI, it's a take on the Eliza program of the late 80s/early 90s that hides the computer better.
Now if the test had been in Ukrainian, and happened in Odessa or Kiev; or even in Russian and in Moscow; tricking 33% into thinking your computer is a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy would be really fucking hard. It would be an amazing accomplishment.
I honestly thought it was the latter. I thought it was Pastis himself. When he started he had virtually no art skills at all, so the characters are not much more advanced then stick figures. Since the strip's established he doesn't want to mess with the style. But after years of practice he'd gotten much better and wanted to show off, so he drew it in the style of Bill Watterson.
Doing three or four panels "In the style of" isn't nearly as hard as doing an entire strip. Pastis seems to have actually drawn one of the Watterson-style panels himself -- the first panel of the June 5th strip is the same style as Watterson's second panel. Given that people mimic the styles of great masters in fine art routinely -- even to the point of convincing experts that their fakes are genuine and making seven figures at auction -- it didn't seem that far-fetched that Pastis could do Watterson for four panels.
And you still don't quote a statute, because you don't actually have a statute.
It's not illegal to share classified information with anyone with the proper security clearance. It's that simple. If I have a Top Secret clearance as a DoD analyst, and my wife has a Top Secret clearance from her work in the CIA, it's perfectly legal for me to give her anything I am allowed to see. Lots of Congressman have that clearance because they are on the committees that oversee classified crap, which means they have to be allowed to read it.
As for the rest of Congress, again oversight of intelligence agencies is their entire fucking job. A law that said you can;t snitch on said agencies to a Congressman would be obviously unconstitutional. Which is why you can;t name the statute that says Snowden could be legally sanctioned for snitching to Congress.
Are you gonna come up with a statute, or are you just gonna puff out your chest and scream BS again?
His art sucks. I mean "Libby" drawing in a style reminiscent of "Bill Watterson?" It couldn't actually be that loser Pastis. It had to be the real Bill Watterston.
And I must have known it was Watterson the whole time, because i just said so on the internet.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market. "Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
A retirement account. That sounds like something I thought I'd have back in the days when I still had hope.
I work retail. The last time I spent a day a week looking for non-retail gigs on the internet my landlord/father vetoed it because I was "just wasting my time." He was right. They're turning away 22-year-olds. Nobody's gonna give a 34-year-old with no experience in a full-time job that requires a degree an entry-level position that requires a degree.
If the unions get their $15 an hour minimum wage I may re-enter the market with a 401k. Until then a savings account makes way more sense, because sometimes a bill NEEDS to be paid, and retirement money don't pay bills.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
And where would finance shift to if it didn't have Wall Street? We're not an aging military power that hasn't had real economic clout since Napoleon I pissed it all away on a futile European Empire project.
We are a huge chunk of the global economy. All the big rich countries are our allies. The little rich countries are easily bullied into complying with US Tax law. The non-Allied states either have very primitive finance systems (Brazil, India, etc.) or they have governments that insist on shooting/jailing a successful financier every few years to keep the rest in line.
If we pass a tax, and include a credible reason why it's a good idea, as well as sanctions on any state foolish enough to take a significant part of our financial business we'll be fine. NATO and the Asian allies will sign on, and the finance system would rather pay the damn tax then trust Kirchner's Argentina not to confiscate their assets.
So the SEC are infallible gods, whose decisions cannot be appealed and never change their minds? They're a Federal Agency.
The President, VP, any 50 Senators, and any 218 Congressman could overturn any regulation tomorrow. And if the banks issued a press release saying "we want this looked at", at least 40 Senators and 200 Congressman would sign on. None of them would have any clue what they were signing onto, but they'd so it because it was the bank's idea. Then Elizabeth Warren would announce "it'll probably help," and that would get it over the hump.
Either the banks know it won't work, or they're benefiting from front-loading. Either way they're betting Republicans continue to dominate the House, and protect them from the transactions tax.
I've heard people claim Petrobras as an example before, but a) Petrobras is a state-owned entity so it's a perfectly valid target for the NSA, and b) nobody's willing to link to the actual evidence that we used our info on them to help a private us corporation.
What I've seen so far is exactly what I'd expect to see if a major, controversial, country was not spying on other people's corporations for the benefit of it's own corporations: lots of people saying "this clearly happens all the time," lots of other people who generally support the major country's opponents asserting "it happened in this case, but I refuse to post evidence because you can google it" despite the fact google shows no such info, and almost no hard evidence that any private US Corporation ever received anything from the NSA.
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My responses to your argument:
A) You're probably right. If we had a global population growth of 3-4% the politicians supporting space exploration as a potential method to fix the problem would probably agree that it was unlikely to work. But if there's a 10% chance of it working then they can probably convince voters to go along with it. Overpopulation would be a real problem for those voters, more importantly it would be a real problem for their kids, so getting access to space would be worth $100 or $200 per capita to them.
More importantly if we had that kind of population growth we'd probably have money to throw around. When your population is in decline that means that it's disproportionately old people who have retired. If you're at six workers per retiree and dropping you've got find a way of getting more money from each worker every year or Grandma's retirement gets gutted.
Which leads neatly to C):
Since reality is that our poiltics HAVE to be devoted to how much we ascrew working age people vs. how much we screw grandma nobody is thinking in terms of the "space dividend," or the non-economic uses of space tech, or even the military implications of having a practical device that can transfer thousands of tons of equipment off-planet. Or, in fact, any of the numerous justifications you could give for spending 1% of GDP in space.
There's a reason Japan has not actually done anything interesting since their population started aging. In the US this is manifesting itself as a myopic obsession with budget deficits, probably because the ruling elite is beggining to have OCD freak-outs about how we pay for seniors when our 30-somethings aren't willing/able to pay for kids. Most of them don;t even understand the problem is us 30-somethings can;t afford kids, and since the ones who do can't see a governmental solution that doesn't involve spending money (which would require a) tax hikes, or b) cuts to the numerous programs we have for seniors), we get fucked.
As for B): frankly it's irrelevant what the numbers are. Voters don't change their votes based on mathematical proofs. They change their votes based on a weird combination of life experience, enthusiasm, and how well each candidate's positions fit in with their own preconceptions. If we were growing at Uganda's rate, I could make spending a bitchload of money on space fit into voters expectations. Since it isn't I can't.
And as a result we don't really have a space program. We don;t spend enough to get a real return on our investment. We spend enough to avoid firing the people who work at NASA, and sometimes they can turn our tiny budget into cool pictures.
Apparently I've been unclear. I have been quite careful to not say anything about whether space exploration is a good idea in this thread. i personally like it, but that doesn't mean that a) I'm convinced I can convince everyone else to pay for it, or b) the difficulty of achieving a) doesn't show that the Fermi Paradox is not much of a Paradox.
You aren't exactly a champion of clarity either. You have a half-paragraph mentioning "other good reasons to go into space," but you don't actually mention any. You actually contradict your claimed position that space exploration is a good thing by pooh-poohing the only reason anyone on this thread has given for going into space (population growth). I haven't said that it's objectively the best reason to go into space, what I've said is that it's the reason most likely to convince everyone else we should go into space. Partly this is because it would be a justification for spending huge sums of money, and partly it's because when your population is shrinking you don't have huge sums of free money to spend. When you have six workers per retiree you have a lot more money to play with then when you have five. OTOH if you have 10 workers per retiree, and it's going up to 11, you can jack up Social Security 5% and still have some cash left over for investing in the future. There's a reason japan hasn;t done anything interesting since the mid-90s, and the US has spent the past 4 years or so mired in suicidal games ofr chicken over what to do with miniscule portions of the budget.
Moreover you're conflating a bunch of things that are only vaguely related. The Fermi paradox assumes a significant proportion of intelligent life is Starfleet. We'd have seen Starfleet. If the Klingon space race is Klingon state A beating Klingon state B to Qu'Nos III and then everyone goes home because they're all focused on balancing the budget with a shrinking work-force then of course we don't see Warbirds parked around Jupiter. If the US races Russia to Mars, but nobody builds a base on Mars, and everybody stops when somebody wins; that's not Starfleet.
On a note completely unrelated to the paradox:
If you have an argument that will convince working class voters, many of whom have trouble paying for staples (especially gas, but an awful lot of people get food stamps), that we should increase the NASA budget to Starfleet levels I'm all ears. If they had a bunch of kids who needed work (ie: population growth), it would be pretty easy to convince them to do so. Since they don't, and they're gonna assume the money comes from their personal budgets, you got a tough order.
Why are you assuming that every technical program the government embarks upon will succeed in solving a major proportion of the problem it was intended to solve? I'm not arguing dealing with population growth via space would be efficient, I'm arguing that nobody is going to bother finding out (by spending lots of money) unless population growth is a major problem. If global population were growing at 3-5% a year, then spending $50 Billion a year on a project that could conceivably house all those people is a no-brainer. It probably wouldn't work, for the same reason the overwhelming majority of Europe's attempts to colonize foreign shores failed miserably, but it would be worth a try.
Moreover you're over-estimating the magnitude of the current problem. Uganda and Niger lead the pack in population growth terms, and they're under 4%. The world as a whole is a bit above 1%. Given that population growth plummets as countries develop economically, and most of the top 10 in population growth have rapidly developing economies, that global increase goes down every year. At our current rate of spending on space, I doubt we'll have put any actual humans on any planets/asteroids/etc. before the "growth" becomes "decline."
If we're only growing by a fraction of a percent a year, or we're in decline, colonizing space goes from "reasonable, yet risky, bet intended to solve a major problem," to "something really cool that we wish some other country would do because half our paycheck goes to maintaining grandma's retirement income."
Where do you live? I'd love to live in a place where population growth was driven solely by birth rate. In the real world we also have a little thing called a "death rate," which is higher then the birth rate in every industrialized country in the world. The actual number of people being added every year is a about half your number.
And even if your number was right, you're intentionally misinterpreting my point. I didn't say that we'd actually solve the population growth problem by going to space (indeed, I was very careful to not call population growth a problem). I said we have no incentive to actually spend money on space unless we had a population growth problem, and we could a) use some of our excess working age adults creating a space program, and b) find work for some of those adults permanently by moving them to Mars.
Since in reality we're almost certainly going to have the opposite problem, there's no reason for us to start an interplanetary empire, much less the intersteller empire assumed by the Fermi paradox.
It's only a fallacious argument if you assume no other technology besides rockets will actually work in getting people off-planet. If $10 billion a year into anti-grav research for five years creates something like the Grav Plates of Honor Harrington then going to space will basically be free. Same with a Space Elevator, the amount of power provided by a Dilithium equivalent, etc. Hell a $$150 Billion a year rocket program would probably find a bunch of economies of scale that we don't have now to reduce the cost of going to Venus or Mars significantly.
And if that assumption is correct then the Paradox is resolved anyway. Assuming 1-3 million tickets to a planet in our solar system a year would be cost prohibitive no matter how much we spend on space, a trip to any star besides Sol (something on the order of 100,000 times the distance to Venus or Mars) is something we could not ever do; which answers the question pretty neatly: they're not here because they can't afford it.
I think people really underestimate how unusual it is to spend lots of money exploring places. They also severely over-estimate the resource needs of a space-capable culture.
Almost any state on the Eurasian landmass could have funded Chris Columbus. But only the Spanish did, because nobody else actually wanted to know what was in the middle of the ocean between Europe and Asia. The Spanish only went for it because they thought Columbus'd get to Asia, and they could get rich trading European luxury goods for Asian luxury goods.
So let's say you're a space-going culture. You've got a beautiful planet which is the perfect temperature for your people because you evolved there. It has the resources to support your population. Why would you spend a significant amount of money sending colonists to other planets in your system? They'll take forever to terraform. Pretty much the only reason to spend money on your equivalent of NASA is if your population is growing at an exponential rate, so you actually need the space. Your smartest strategy in almost any other case is to use your technology to manage your resources on-planet, rather then risk throwing an asteroid into the only planet you;ve got when you're trying to wrangle the thing into orbit.
But why would your population be growing that quickly? Human children are a pain in the ass, so us humans prefer not to have them unless there's massive cultural pressure to do so (population is declining in every rich country that doesn't allow lots of poor immigrants from places where such pressure is pretty strong). Why would our hypothetical race be any different?
As it is the US is spending a truly trivial amount (roughly $60 per person) on space exploration. It's basically just enough for our President to be able to claim he's got the leading program in the world. Other countries spend just enough to claim they're important too. Everybody talks big. Nobody is actually serious about exploration. No domestic constituency is so serious about space exploration that it would prefer a big NASA funded by a new tax, or even a big NASA funded by halving it's sixth favorite domestic program, to the current NASA.
In other words Fermi's Paradox is only a paradox if you grew up in the 50s. At any other time the answer is simple: we haven't met them because virtually no intelligent race is gonna get it's head out of it's ass long enough to develop a starship, much less build enough of them that we should expect to see them.
I fail to answer the question because it's a stupid question. I came here in the late 90s because I liked technology. I stay around partly because trolling trolls is fun, and partly because sometimes the trolls actually aren't trolls and have a point. So far you've failed to make a real point, because you seem to be incapable of admitting that, by the common definition of Industrial Espionage, there is no evidence the US engages in a significant amount of it. Given the way the US Security establishment leaks, it's very hard to believe this would be the case unless we did very little industrial espionage.
Hell, let's turn this on it's head:
You have admitted that you did not read any of the sources you link to to back up your assertions. I, who actually read your sources, pointed out they say the exact opposite of what you claim.
By your own logic you are intentionally misleading the geek community, in an effort to prove the US Government is corrupt. How much is Putin paying you?
So now, not only are you setting up straw men, your entire argument is ad hominem.
And, as usual, you;re ignoring the actual meat of the argument: that if Putin simply had his people ignore some paperwork he could let Snowden go on his way for free.
I'd call you a hack, but I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Nobody could be this dumb on purpose.
At my tax bracket a Roth would be overkill. A non-retirement account would be fine. I'm not gonna be paying any taxes on it when I withdraw from it when I'm retired (unless my economic situation completely changes), because my main income will be Social Security. Since that is typically $10k-15k, and it's only taxable if your total income is $25k, I'd have to be withdrawing $10k a year to pay any taxes on it. Investment income under $10k would be wiped out by the standard deduction and my exemption. Since I'm likely to live until 85, any tax planning is silly unless I end up with a total of $200k in the account ($10k times 20 years), which would probably require me to put at least $2-3k away a year (I only have 30 or so years left). I made $14k last year. At this income level all the conventional wisdom is pretty much BS for rich people.
As for the bullying, who said we're bullying the countries directly? Hell, simply require that any transaction involving a US-based corporation gets reported to the IRS if the country itself doesn't have an equivalent transaction tax. Then you levy the transaction tax on the company. Since that's a huge pain in the ass, most countries would simply pass the tax themselves.
Remember the international outcry when we required so much paperwork for foreign banks with US-account-holders? It mostly resulted in said banks refusing to have US account holders. This would be the same thing, except instead of screwing with our own people, in every country we're allied with, it would only screw with the ones who genuinely prefer not to have a transaction tax.
Yeah, but a language barrier means that many times the computer shows it's a computer the person communicating it will chalk that up to language problems.
Moreover it's not just language and age, it's foreignness. A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation with a Swede on this very site, about the powers of thee Swedish government. It took me actually using the phrase "Lost in Translation" before he realized I was asking him to talk to me like I was six. Because in terms of knowing how Swedes have chosen to set up their government, I am actually about six.
The age just compounds everything. I'd expect a 13-year-old with a certain attitude to respond to something he didn't know at all by completely changing the subject for no reason at all. Since this kid is Ukrainian, and I'm English (the test happened in England); and his English is not great; let's say the bot blew up a couple times during our five-minute conversation and reset itself. It would just look like a 13-year-old refusing to admit he didn't know about foreign, old people things in England. So this isn't actually a test of their technology, it'/s a test of their ability to hack the test with rules-lawyering BS.
And even with that little advantage, these guys still didn't manage to officially pass the Turing test because to pass you need 50% (ie: better then chance). They got 33%. The dude who ran the test apparently picked his 30% number after the test so they could claim somebody passed it.
This post sums up the problem.
European leaders generally have one very sexy, cool-looking, military toy they can point to and say "we are a force to be reckoned with". They don't buy non-sexy things that are actually needed to fight a war.
For example, you mention Germany's tank battalions. Let's say that Chancellor Merkel had decided to deploy them to Ukraine to stop further Russian encroachment. Could she have done the job on short notice? Hell no, her entire Air Force has exactly one Strategic Transport, which means they can only send in the tanks two at a time.
You also mention helicopter carriers. Why have a helicopter carrier? Seriously. Why, in God's name, would you ever buy such a thing? If your opponent has an air force the choppers are sitting ducks. Which means the carrier is already sunk. If he doesn't have an air force it's cheaper to send in special forces to set up/seize an airbase. Of course, for the air base to actually be useful you need some strategic transports. The only reason to buy a helicopter carrier is that you're too cheap to buy the real thing, and your people are too dumb to know it's useless.
There's a reason that Obama's "Leading from behind" campaign in Libya required the USAF to fight alone for a couple days despite strong support from two large countries that actually have military capabilities: France and the UK. They are more capable then the Germans, but they simply don't spend enough on defense to afford the boring but useful shit you need if you're gonna support a rebel movement in a country that can afford anti-aircraft defenses.
As for the point of the other things that money can be used for, you do realize that Canada's budget is not set by God? If $300 a person in planes, and $300 a person in textbooks, are both logical things for Canada to spend money the country can raise taxes.
I did google it.
I did the exact google you suggested.
But then I read them. And none of them provided any support for the assertion that 'the NSA engaged in industrial espionage on Indonesian Clove Cigarette companies.' It wasn't even close. By definition every single word in that sentence was actually wrong. The NSA was not accused of spying on anyone directly, rather the Aussies were and the NSA simply received the info. What they were doing was not industrial espionage, because it had nothing to do with finding out secrets to protect domestic industry. They were trying to win a case at the WTO, not find out the business secrets of some non-governmental for-profit corporation so they could give them to another non-governmental for-profit corporation. And they weren't spying on any companies. WTO disputes are between governments, which means they were spying on the lawyers for the Republic of Indonesia.
In other words I;m not really calling you a "liar," I'm more calling you an amateur who doesn't understand the meanings of any of the words he's trying to use. You read the paper, absorb the general message ("US NSA Nasty to Indonesia in Business Dispute") and fail to comprehend that there are numerous ways to be nasty in a business dispute that are not technically Industrial Espionage.
Apparently you didn't read any of those articles. Industrial espionage is, by definition, spying on foreign businesses to help domestic businesses. In this case the US banned Clove Cigarettes, because they're cigarettes which makes them dangerous; but did not ban other cigarettes (especially Menthols) despite the fact those are dangerous. The Indonesian government (not a private company) sued and won in the WTO. The Australians (not the NSA) spied upon the lawyers Indonesia used, and then turned the info over to the NSA. So if your argument is "The NSA engaged in industrial espionage regarding Indonesian Kretak Cigarette companies," you're wrong on literally every point. It wasn't the NSA directly, it wasn't industrial espionage (because it was not intended to booster domestic industries), and the target was the Indoensian government (not the Clove Cigarette companies).
If you want to show the US routinely engages in industrial espionage you;re probably gonna have to actually a) understand the definition of industrial espionage s extremely limited, and b) actually read your own sources.
Of course we already knew your reading comprehension sucked. The Dirigesme link was the one that proved other states support their domestic industry a lot more then us. Given that spying is something all states do to one extent or another any state that supports it's industry strongly is gonna engage in some industrial espionage. It's not gonna be open, because it's espionage, but it will happen.
Damnit, dirigisme was supposed to be a link to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
I hate HTML links. My typing skills suck, and I always forget to hit preview to confirm that the >s and s match up.
You want links to any of my assertions I'll be happy to provide them. It's fairly trivial to find most of the info. A simple google of "National Champions" leads directly to the policy of dirigesme. It's not quite as bad as it was during the 30 glorious years, but it's still impossible to conceive of the French coming across something important to AirBus and them not telling it directly to AirBus. The whole point of the system is they're too small to win if they don't have everything (including their spy agencies) working together.
An equally simple google turns up numerous PoliSci works indicating transparency leads to peace, if everyone knows what everyone else actually wants it's much easier to get to an agreement. Here's one book. That actually goes to a page stating that if Germany had known how the Brits would actually react to their invasion of Belgium, then it's likely WW1 would have been completely avoided. It does not say how this information was to be obtained.
Your problem seems to be you read the papers, and take them at face value. You don't understand that if we actually cheated half as much as people say we do in papers, the Germans would not prefer us to Putin. So they don't read those articles carefully. Then they half-remember said articles, and repeat them on the internet.
As for my being in the government's can, re-read some of my posts on this thread. I have explicitly stated that Snowden will never be kidnapped from Russia because he's white. If you'd think about what I'm saying for 10 seconds, instead of mindlessly repeating drivel you clearly don't remember (otherwise you could link to it) you'd note that I just called the government racist.
Still waiting for a link from you.
Kinda.
The summary doesn't tell you who started the suit, that iFone predates the iPhone, or anything of that nature. It's not unknown for local entrepreneurs in developing countries to register a trademark they know a big American company is going to need, and then make a nuisance of themselves in local Courts until the Americans pay them to go away.
To find out that iFone are actually a decent company you have to either read the article (and we know that's not happening), or read this guy's summary.
So basically Apple was dumb and sued when they were clearly wrong. Oh well.
They can afford the cash, and the solution for Mexican Cell companies is trivial: advertise you sell "Apple Phones," or "iOS phones."
Siri probably would have kicked it's ass, if she hadn't been released to the general public years ago so that a statistically significant proportion of users would recognize her. I believe Google has something, that could also probably kick it's ass.
So the problem isn't that the technology is the same as way back then, it's that the small, low-budget, University teams that enter this kind of competition don't have the staff/budget to do anything more complex. Silicon computers simply suck at replicating the thought processes of carbon-based human brains. Given time, expertise, and processing power you can overcome a lot of the issues; but you really need all three.
It convinced 33% of judges it's a 13-year-old Ukrainian. Since the test wasn't run in Ukrainian, you can't really say it proved that it had human-level language skills. Poor syntax, grammar, not understanding the question, etc. would be excused by the Judges as the "kid" doesn't know English well.
Since the program claimed to be 13, it also did not actually have to understand most of the things there are to talk about. Or anything, really. As an Englishman you wouldn't expect a Ukrainian teen to know anything about your life in England, and in turn the computer could make up all kinds of things about it's life in Ukraine and you'd have no clue.
So this isn't really AI, it's a take on the Eliza program of the late 80s/early 90s that hides the computer better.
Now if the test had been in Ukrainian, and happened in Odessa or Kiev; or even in Russian and in Moscow; tricking 33% into thinking your computer is a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy would be really fucking hard. It would be an amazing accomplishment.
I honestly thought it was the latter. I thought it was Pastis himself. When he started he had virtually no art skills at all, so the characters are not much more advanced then stick figures. Since the strip's established he doesn't want to mess with the style. But after years of practice he'd gotten much better and wanted to show off, so he drew it in the style of Bill Watterson.
Doing three or four panels "In the style of" isn't nearly as hard as doing an entire strip. Pastis seems to have actually drawn one of the Watterson-style panels himself -- the first panel of the June 5th strip is the same style as Watterson's second panel. Given that people mimic the styles of great masters in fine art routinely -- even to the point of convincing experts that their fakes are genuine and making seven figures at auction -- it didn't seem that far-fetched that Pastis could do Watterson for four panels.
But apparently it was.
And you still don't quote a statute, because you don't actually have a statute.
It's not illegal to share classified information with anyone with the proper security clearance. It's that simple. If I have a Top Secret clearance as a DoD analyst, and my wife has a Top Secret clearance from her work in the CIA, it's perfectly legal for me to give her anything I am allowed to see. Lots of Congressman have that clearance because they are on the committees that oversee classified crap, which means they have to be allowed to read it.
As for the rest of Congress, again oversight of intelligence agencies is their entire fucking job. A law that said you can;t snitch on said agencies to a Congressman would be obviously unconstitutional. Which is why you can;t name the statute that says Snowden could be legally sanctioned for snitching to Congress.
Are you gonna come up with a statute, or are you just gonna puff out your chest and scream BS again?
His art sucks. I mean "Libby" drawing in a style reminiscent of "Bill Watterson?" It couldn't actually be that loser Pastis. It had to be the real Bill Watterston.
And I must have known it was Watterson the whole time, because i just said so on the internet.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market.
"Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
A retirement account. That sounds like something I thought I'd have back in the days when I still had hope.
I work retail. The last time I spent a day a week looking for non-retail gigs on the internet my landlord/father vetoed it because I was "just wasting my time." He was right. They're turning away 22-year-olds. Nobody's gonna give a 34-year-old with no experience in a full-time job that requires a degree an entry-level position that requires a degree.
If the unions get their $15 an hour minimum wage I may re-enter the market with a 401k. Until then a savings account makes way more sense, because sometimes a bill NEEDS to be paid, and retirement money don't pay bills.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
And where would finance shift to if it didn't have Wall Street? We're not an aging military power that hasn't had real economic clout since Napoleon I pissed it all away on a futile European Empire project.
We are a huge chunk of the global economy. All the big rich countries are our allies. The little rich countries are easily bullied into complying with US Tax law. The non-Allied states either have very primitive finance systems (Brazil, India, etc.) or they have governments that insist on shooting/jailing a successful financier every few years to keep the rest in line.
If we pass a tax, and include a credible reason why it's a good idea, as well as sanctions on any state foolish enough to take a significant part of our financial business we'll be fine. NATO and the Asian allies will sign on, and the finance system would rather pay the damn tax then trust Kirchner's Argentina not to confiscate their assets.
So the SEC are infallible gods, whose decisions cannot be appealed and never change their minds? They're a Federal Agency.
The President, VP, any 50 Senators, and any 218 Congressman could overturn any regulation tomorrow. And if the banks issued a press release saying "we want this looked at", at least 40 Senators and 200 Congressman would sign on. None of them would have any clue what they were signing onto, but they'd so it because it was the bank's idea. Then Elizabeth Warren would announce "it'll probably help," and that would get it over the hump.
Either the banks know it won't work, or they're benefiting from front-loading. Either way they're betting Republicans continue to dominate the House, and protect them from the transactions tax.
That just won't work in the long-term.
Are you going to link to some of these things?
I've heard people claim Petrobras as an example before, but a) Petrobras is a state-owned entity so it's a perfectly valid target for the NSA, and b) nobody's willing to link to the actual evidence that we used our info on them to help a private us corporation.
What I've seen so far is exactly what I'd expect to see if a major, controversial, country was not spying on other people's corporations for the benefit of it's own corporations: lots of people saying "this clearly happens all the time," lots of other people who generally support the major country's opponents asserting "it happened in this case, but I refuse to post evidence because you can google it" despite the fact google shows no such info, and almost no hard evidence that any private US Corporation ever received anything from the NSA.