I installed Xubuntu, and then tried to get Compiz running on top of it. I ended up with an unholy mess (maybe my fault, I dunno). Things deteriorated from there, the UI was a weird mishmash of various things. Now I've wiped the machine, and I'm using live CDs (and DVDs) to try out other distros to move everything too.
In fairness, this is tantamount to someone coming into your house and swapping your leathere couch out for a white plastic affair, or something. We 'live' in our desktop metaphors, and we don't like the furniture being rearranged unless we are the ones doing it. For myself, the arrangement and workings of my computer's desktop, from the focus-follows-mouse to the always-transparent Desktop Cube are as important to my work productivity as the organization of the stuff on my desk, the stool under the desk where I put my feet, and my cordless keyboard in my lap - and a chair with head support so I can lean back properly. Messing with this stuff disrupts our work, reduces productivity, and may even make us lose 1/2 day trying to figure out how to get it back something like the way we want it.
Or, using a car analogy, if my radio has knobs, I don't want the service guy switching it out for one with buttons when all I need is an oil change.
I haven't had to hack files to get video, wireless (wifi), wireless (cellular) or modems (do they still make those?) working since 2007, except I did have to download the proprietary NVidia driver to run OpenGL for Compiz. In 2007 my new laptop's ATI video card did need a bleeding edge open source driver, that was the last time.
Just for perspective, Erickson's telephone switches that ran Erlang regularly ran for years without reboots, including periodic code updates (the Erlang language was effectively the kernel). It of course also ran thousands of processes in parallel on as many processors as needed. AFAIK no other machines have had uptimes comparable to those phone switches. I keep planning to learn Erlang. I've done a few toy programs but nothing past the level of the Erlang book.
This would be fine if it were like buying a car - a 1980 Hooptiemobile drives on the freeway pretty much the same as a 2013 Whatchamotor, and the headlight switch, the horn and the gas pedal don't get moved every time I take it in for six month service.
After 20 years or so it does get a bit harder to find parts, and after 30 or 40 years it's definitely a hobby car. But that's still a lot better than having to go through hoops every two years having to either preserve the desktop UI that you are used to while the infrastructure (KDE, Gnome, etc.) gets completely redesigned according to the latest fad; or spend way too much valuable time trying to maintain a particular system while everything you run on it _has_ to be updated for security or compatibility reasons.
My personal productivity depends a lot on everything working the same. I run dual monitors. I put my mail client on one face of the Desktop Cube. I put other 'housekeeping' (IM, timesheet, Pithos,...) functions on the same face. I put my editing windows and some web windows for previewing on the next face. If I have multiple projects open I have two more face available for that, or for miscellaneous short things like quick peeks at Slashdot or the news.
Between KDE, Gnome and now Unity (ugh), that requirement for a consistent stable working environment has been broken one too many times. I'm now looking to revert to a simpler window manager that isn't likely to do that any time soon. So far of the ones I've tried, Bodhi (Enlightenment) is the front runner but it's early days yet.
I don't mind the prospect of redoing my UI every five or ten years, but this constant shifting of the sands beneath my feet sucks. It's a fundamental problem of these big all-in-one desktop GUI environments. In short, I want to keep my Desktop Cube, and some other things. It's my metaphor and I like it. I don't want some other idiot's brainstorm of how the metaphor should be. So one way or another, I'm going back to a simple window manager, and I'll run other stuff on top as I see fit. And I can evolve the environment as and when I want. Maybe some bucket seats, a new stereo, exhaust headers,...
I just installed Bodhi on my home desktop. I'm testing that, and Chakra, and Kubuntu. After running Live CDs of each I did the install of Bodhi. I wanted to try the KDE 4 distros because I'm a long time user of the Desktop Cube using Compiz, and I'm hoping that I can retain that. However at my first look at both Chakra and Kubuntu, it's just too MSWindows-esque.
I will probably set the machine up as multiple-boot and give the others a real solid try, see if I can configure things the way I like it. A completely transparent Desktop Cube, rotating against an animated SkyDome - I like being able to see the back of the windows on my alternate desktops, and rotate the whole mess around. In fact if I could I would eliminate icons from the Desktop and only have access to them on a widget or something, or via the File Manager - I 'mostly' do that now. As an ADD-er and visual thinker, I 'need' to see everything this way to know where things are. Instant switching between desktops requires too much of a context switch for my taste.
Interestingly, like entangled particles, those nearly always occur in pairs. However they seem to have the ability to generate entanglements that involve the attraction of other masses characterized by a different pole-arity.
IMHO, from the perspective of the solar system, we are 'life'. There's no evidence of life anywhere else in the solar system. If so, then where we go, we bring 'life' with us. We are the carriers of that seed. So in that sense, we are the fruiting body of the biological entity called 'Terran Life'. It has taken a billion years to develop its fruit, with the capability to carry itself to other soils.
I think the analogy stands. Consider the tardigrade, an animal composed of 40,000 or so cells (every adult has the exact same number of cells). They have been shown to survive freezing to near 0K, heating to over 130C, and the radiation and vacuum of space outside the ISS (or was it the Shuttle?).
The point is that for a given potential infestation, the bugs only have to succeed once. Sterilization measures have to be 100% successful every time. And they aren't, can't be and won't be. Even if we never actually put humans into space again, every vehicle will contribute it's little pile of DNA. Each halving of the number of impurities left on a surface increases the cost, difficulty and effort by an order of magnitude. (hmm - this is much like the 90% rule of software!)
IANA physical biologist, but I did look into this question a bit from a systems point of view a few years ago. The key thing would be the minimizing of the energy required to sustain the structure while at the same time allowing maximal adaptability. Or, more abstractly, the 'fitness' of each amino acid pairing for the general task.
There is certainly a large element of chance, but it's probable that the four amino acids that ended up being used are pretty close to the optimal set. This derives from a general evolutionary model, where various things happened by chance, and the ones that worked best for the situation (I could have said 'survived' but that carries too much baggage) would tend to be the ones that were incorporated.
Otherwise, one is arguing that a single chance pairing of amino acids just happened to work, and no others were (in an analogous sense) 'tried' in the right conditions. To my mind, it's more likely that many combinations came together, and one was more successful. It might even be that there was a sequence of such cases - maybe (hypothetical example) when the G and C bases bond together, they float better in a solution with a pH of 7.2 or some such thing.
I prefer to think that certain bases were more available, or just happened to work better under the conditions, and so they got used while others that were 'almost as good' didn't, or didn't for very long. In this case (again with little biological background), things like requiring just enough energy to be split apart, or fitting just right together with the splitting mechanism, or any of several other criteria including environmental ones such as 'in this temperature and pH range') would all be factors. I suspect some very interesting analysis and experiments could be done on this.
(Oblig.) And in Turing's day, they put paper tape in the machine and it went back and forth reading and punching, reading and punching, and they LIKED it.:) And constructed an entire theory of automata.
I think those fast-shifting trannies were developed for racing. They absolutely can shift faster than a NASCAR driver, and since the shift paddles are right behind the steering wheel, the driver doesn't have to move his/her hands. They also manage the engine RPMs better for the shifting, preventing a missed shift or gear grind, which can cost time or break things.
Interesting that the hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings that we call mice would direct us to use their traditional enemies, rats, as preliminary test subjects for the future wiring of all of humanity into one hyper-super-duper-parallel-mind-games-puper-computer to come up with the question much sooner than we would otherwise.
From flight training a long time ago, engine failures tend to happen on takeoff. At that moment a two-engine plane that suddenly loses one engine is probably in more trouble than a single-engine plane with no engine working. The single has a reasonable chance of gliding somewhere and making a dead-stick landing. Unless the pilot does exactly the right things, very quickly (two-three seconds), the plane is likely to flip sidewise and drop out of the sky, with not enough altitude to correct the situation. I already cited this article once, here 'tis again. And the numbers are there, probably on the net somewhere (I haven't looked at this stuff for a couple of decades) - NTSB flight accident stats tend to be very explicit.
It's been a couple of decades since I took flying lessons, but here goes: Engines tend to die at the worst possible moments, when they are under the most stress. This is during the takeoff phase, when you are still relatively close to the ground. In a twin-engine plane, when one of the engines dies, it has two effects - one is that the plane suddenly has both a terrific off-center thrust and an increase of drag from the stopped propeller, causing yaw (rotation on the vertical axis), and the other is that the loss of the balancing effect of counter-rotating engines and the yaw-induced loss of lift on the slower wing drastically increases the tendency to roll (rotation on the line-of-flight axis). All in all, the loss of performance is much more than just the loss of thrust.
So when one engine dies, the pilot has a couple of seconds to do the right thing, or else the plane suddenly flips and dives sidewise (like those videos of fighter planes peeling off for a run at the enemy ship) the 300-1000 feet to the ground - too enough altitude to recover. The 'right thing' is pretty complicated according to this. Some of it is counter-intuitive (so should be practiced during training). If you're fast, and lucky, you'll be able to go around and land.
Maybe this is time for another class action monopoly suit, arguing that Microsoft's approach to this effectively puts in place a monopoly control on PC operating systems.
Actually two feet might be safer than a larger distance. It's hard to alter velocity very much relative to the other vehicle in two feet. In fact it's probably better to have a physical connection such as a magnetic latch between them during 'long' passages (for some definition of long) - I can see 'trains' of cars, latched together, moving in unison down the road. Occasionally one or more will disengage and move out of the train, and the train will reform. The key point is that the control paradigm is quite different. With human drivers the typical reaction time varies from 1/2 to a full second before the driver even knows there's something happening; and another 1/2 second before his/her hits the brake or turns the wheel. If all the cars 'know' the same thing at the same instant, the computers in all of them can respond essentially immediately. Compared to a four car line, this gives the last car four seconds advance capability. These four cars could *simultaneously* move out of the way, for example.
Of course there are complications - ice, loss of a wheel, things like that - but look up the 'Big Dog' robot and watch it handle ice. Or the recent quadrocopters video, balancing a stick and tossing it between quadrocopters. I think it's safe to say that we are close to a situation where the computers could handle almost any emergency faster and better than any human driver. Caveat: "once the programming gets there" - but it's there for 99% of cases, today. Ideally the software for handling this would be open source or at least open sourced between automotive makers, so everyone is on the same page and we have continuous incremental improvements. In fact that might be the single way for the makers to avoid crippling legal liability - make the collision handling software a standardized system, provided by a single government or non-profit institute that all makers must use. Include a well-defined indemnity plan so that when an error occurs, all the victims are properly taken care of and fixes put in place - all cars automatically updated with new software.
There were successful experiments done in the 1990s in the San Diego area, where (IIRC) six Buicks followed each other down a specially prepared section of highway, two feet apart. Of course that's not the same as typical real life emergencies etc. but it was done during a variety of traffic conditions. Each car had a 'driver' just in case, but IIRC only the front driver actually did anything during the tests. Then there are the Google self-driving cars, which have already been approved in CA or NV (I don't recall which). And Red Whittaker's work at CMU's Field Robotics Center, and Stanford, and a couple of European institutions.
:D There is something magical about speeding along (probably only 6 knots, but it feels like more!), transported by nothing but wind and water. Instead of pushing our way through the world, we are sensibly using what's available to sliver our way along the desired path. Between wind and water we have a duality of countervailing forces, and can take (almost) any direction.
Unfortunately for Marx and his adherents, the math just doesn't work out. Without going into the gory details and math, here is an analogy. Imagine a society with complete 'equality' - everyone has the same resources. This is equivalent to a wheat field - every stalk is the same height, everyone is equally productive, everyone has the same demands for resources. A nice grass lawn is another example.
But if you look at this from a systems point of view, this is a very artificial system. It requires a lot of work to maintain this against the natural effects of its environment. It has to be plowed, seeded, mowed in the case of a lawn. It has to be treated with chemicals to prevent various pests and weeds (nature) from destroying that nice pretty evenness, and fertilizer to correct the nutritional deficiencies that will develop over time. And this expenditure of energy and resources has to be maintained increasingly over time.
And what happens if this artificial enforcement of the desired plan is stopped? Nature comes back. Messy, uncoordinated, glorious Nature will return and a real ecosystem will be regenerated. An ecosystem that has biological entities at all scales (not all the same size and shape), competing freely with one another for the available resources, at the same time cooperating with each other to retain the existing resources within the system, and to optimize the utilization of available energy. And the natural system that results will also be optimally capable of surviving, adapting to and prospering with changes in the environment.
This is analogous to free enterprise and to democracy - the same math applies as to ecosystems. Note that monopolies, manipulation of government, and dictatorship all have the same problem as the wheat field, but I have blathered long enough! See the book "The Edge of Chaos".
It was also much more true back in the days when 'yachts' were custom-made wood boats. I've been told that a wood boat takes 2 hours per week for every 10 feet of length to maintain. I think that number goes up a lot above 15 or 20 feet (4-6 meters). So back in the day, a boat of significant length required a full time crew just to keep it afloat. Fiberglass, to a lesser extent steel and aluminum, and relatively 'mass' production methods have rewritten the boat ownership equation.
Actually the parent is correct. The vast majority of boats really are owned by Joe and Sam the carpenters down the street. Go to most boatyards or marinas, and you'll be able to meet them. Some marinas are definitely gold-plated, but in most cases it's a Bud Light crowd.
Interestingly, in most cases also, the folks in boats don't care how much you make - I've had many a beer sitting around a fire with a guy who owns a $1million + catamaran on one side and a guy who cleans houses for a living with a 25 foot fishing boat on the other. They've known each other for years, and they're both welcome any time on the other's boat. And they both dislike the 'boat snobs' who think the size of their tool makes them important;) Boat people mostly respect each other because of their common interest - even with the mostly-friendly dichotomy between 'rag-boaters' (sailors) and 'stinkpotters' (power boaters).
There's a Creedence Clearwater song about "people on the river". It's mostly true.
Slashdot Mirror
I installed Xubuntu, and then tried to get Compiz running on top of it. I ended up with an unholy mess (maybe my fault, I dunno). Things deteriorated from there, the UI was a weird mishmash of various things. Now I've wiped the machine, and I'm using live CDs (and DVDs) to try out other distros to move everything too.
In fairness, this is tantamount to someone coming into your house and swapping your leathere couch out for a white plastic affair, or something. We 'live' in our desktop metaphors, and we don't like the furniture being rearranged unless we are the ones doing it. For myself, the arrangement and workings of my computer's desktop, from the focus-follows-mouse to the always-transparent Desktop Cube are as important to my work productivity as the organization of the stuff on my desk, the stool under the desk where I put my feet, and my cordless keyboard in my lap - and a chair with head support so I can lean back properly. Messing with this stuff disrupts our work, reduces productivity, and may even make us lose 1/2 day trying to figure out how to get it back something like the way we want it.
Or, using a car analogy, if my radio has knobs, I don't want the service guy switching it out for one with buttons when all I need is an oil change.
I haven't had to hack files to get video, wireless (wifi), wireless (cellular) or modems (do they still make those?) working since 2007, except I did have to download the proprietary NVidia driver to run OpenGL for Compiz. In 2007 my new laptop's ATI video card did need a bleeding edge open source driver, that was the last time.
Just for perspective, Erickson's telephone switches that ran Erlang regularly ran for years without reboots, including periodic code updates (the Erlang language was effectively the kernel). It of course also ran thousands of processes in parallel on as many processors as needed. AFAIK no other machines have had uptimes comparable to those phone switches. I keep planning to learn Erlang. I've done a few toy programs but nothing past the level of the Erlang book.
This would be fine if it were like buying a car - a 1980 Hooptiemobile drives on the freeway pretty much the same as a 2013 Whatchamotor, and the headlight switch, the horn and the gas pedal don't get moved every time I take it in for six month service.
After 20 years or so it does get a bit harder to find parts, and after 30 or 40 years it's definitely a hobby car. But that's still a lot better than having to go through hoops every two years having to either preserve the desktop UI that you are used to while the infrastructure (KDE, Gnome, etc.) gets completely redesigned according to the latest fad; or spend way too much valuable time trying to maintain a particular system while everything you run on it _has_ to be updated for security or compatibility reasons.
My personal productivity depends a lot on everything working the same. I run dual monitors. I put my mail client on one face of the Desktop Cube. I put other 'housekeeping' (IM, timesheet, Pithos, ...) functions on the same face. I put my editing windows and some web windows for previewing on the next face. If I have multiple projects open I have two more face available for that, or for miscellaneous short things like quick peeks at Slashdot or the news.
Between KDE, Gnome and now Unity (ugh), that requirement for a consistent stable working environment has been broken one too many times. I'm now looking to revert to a simpler window manager that isn't likely to do that any time soon. So far of the ones I've tried, Bodhi (Enlightenment) is the front runner but it's early days yet.
I don't mind the prospect of redoing my UI every five or ten years, but this constant shifting of the sands beneath my feet sucks. It's a fundamental problem of these big all-in-one desktop GUI environments. In short, I want to keep my Desktop Cube, and some other things. It's my metaphor and I like it. I don't want some other idiot's brainstorm of how the metaphor should be. So one way or another, I'm going back to a simple window manager, and I'll run other stuff on top as I see fit. And I can evolve the environment as and when I want. Maybe some bucket seats, a new stereo, exhaust headers, ...
So you're saying it's not any more of a mess than the typical Linux desktop? Damning with faint praise, that. :)
I just installed Bodhi on my home desktop. I'm testing that, and Chakra, and Kubuntu. After running Live CDs of each I did the install of Bodhi. I wanted to try the KDE 4 distros because I'm a long time user of the Desktop Cube using Compiz, and I'm hoping that I can retain that. However at my first look at both Chakra and Kubuntu, it's just too MSWindows-esque.
I will probably set the machine up as multiple-boot and give the others a real solid try, see if I can configure things the way I like it. A completely transparent Desktop Cube, rotating against an animated SkyDome - I like being able to see the back of the windows on my alternate desktops, and rotate the whole mess around. In fact if I could I would eliminate icons from the Desktop and only have access to them on a widget or something, or via the File Manager - I 'mostly' do that now. As an ADD-er and visual thinker, I 'need' to see everything this way to know where things are. Instant switching between desktops requires too much of a context switch for my taste.
Interestingly, like entangled particles, those nearly always occur in pairs. However they seem to have the ability to generate entanglements that involve the attraction of other masses characterized by a different pole-arity.
kz67uip95zqtn.com
Dang, now I'm going to have to find a new name for my website! :P
IMHO, from the perspective of the solar system, we are 'life'. There's no evidence of life anywhere else in the solar system. If so, then where we go, we bring 'life' with us. We are the carriers of that seed. So in that sense, we are the fruiting body of the biological entity called 'Terran Life'. It has taken a billion years to develop its fruit, with the capability to carry itself to other soils.
I think the analogy stands. Consider the tardigrade, an animal composed of 40,000 or so cells (every adult has the exact same number of cells). They have been shown to survive freezing to near 0K, heating to over 130C, and the radiation and vacuum of space outside the ISS (or was it the Shuttle?).
The point is that for a given potential infestation, the bugs only have to succeed once. Sterilization measures have to be 100% successful every time. And they aren't, can't be and won't be. Even if we never actually put humans into space again, every vehicle will contribute it's little pile of DNA. Each halving of the number of impurities left on a surface increases the cost, difficulty and effort by an order of magnitude. (hmm - this is much like the 90% rule of software!)
IANA physical biologist, but I did look into this question a bit from a systems point of view a few years ago. The key thing would be the minimizing of the energy required to sustain the structure while at the same time allowing maximal adaptability. Or, more abstractly, the 'fitness' of each amino acid pairing for the general task.
There is certainly a large element of chance, but it's probable that the four amino acids that ended up being used are pretty close to the optimal set. This derives from a general evolutionary model, where various things happened by chance, and the ones that worked best for the situation (I could have said 'survived' but that carries too much baggage) would tend to be the ones that were incorporated.
Otherwise, one is arguing that a single chance pairing of amino acids just happened to work, and no others were (in an analogous sense) 'tried' in the right conditions. To my mind, it's more likely that many combinations came together, and one was more successful. It might even be that there was a sequence of such cases - maybe (hypothetical example) when the G and C bases bond together, they float better in a solution with a pH of 7.2 or some such thing.
I prefer to think that certain bases were more available, or just happened to work better under the conditions, and so they got used while others that were 'almost as good' didn't, or didn't for very long. In this case (again with little biological background), things like requiring just enough energy to be split apart, or fitting just right together with the splitting mechanism, or any of several other criteria including environmental ones such as 'in this temperature and pH range') would all be factors. I suspect some very interesting analysis and experiments could be done on this.
(Oblig.) And in Turing's day, they put paper tape in the machine and it went back and forth reading and punching, reading and punching, and they LIKED it. :) And constructed an entire theory of automata.
In MY day, we stacked cards in the card reader, and took cards out of the card puncher and put them back into the reader, and we LIKED it.
I think those fast-shifting trannies were developed for racing. They absolutely can shift faster than a NASCAR driver, and since the shift paddles are right behind the steering wheel, the driver doesn't have to move his/her hands. They also manage the engine RPMs better for the shifting, preventing a missed shift or gear grind, which can cost time or break things.
Interesting that the hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings that we call mice would direct us to use their traditional enemies, rats, as preliminary test subjects for the future wiring of all of humanity into one hyper-super-duper-parallel-mind-games-puper-computer to come up with the question much sooner than we would otherwise.
From flight training a long time ago, engine failures tend to happen on takeoff. At that moment a two-engine plane that suddenly loses one engine is probably in more trouble than a single-engine plane with no engine working. The single has a reasonable chance of gliding somewhere and making a dead-stick landing. Unless the pilot does exactly the right things, very quickly (two-three seconds), the plane is likely to flip sidewise and drop out of the sky, with not enough altitude to correct the situation. I already cited this article once, here 'tis again. And the numbers are there, probably on the net somewhere (I haven't looked at this stuff for a couple of decades) - NTSB flight accident stats tend to be very explicit.
It's been a couple of decades since I took flying lessons, but here goes: Engines tend to die at the worst possible moments, when they are under the most stress. This is during the takeoff phase, when you are still relatively close to the ground. In a twin-engine plane, when one of the engines dies, it has two effects - one is that the plane suddenly has both a terrific off-center thrust and an increase of drag from the stopped propeller, causing yaw (rotation on the vertical axis), and the other is that the loss of the balancing effect of counter-rotating engines and the yaw-induced loss of lift on the slower wing drastically increases the tendency to roll (rotation on the line-of-flight axis). All in all, the loss of performance is much more than just the loss of thrust.
So when one engine dies, the pilot has a couple of seconds to do the right thing, or else the plane suddenly flips and dives sidewise (like those videos of fighter planes peeling off for a run at the enemy ship) the 300-1000 feet to the ground - too enough altitude to recover. The 'right thing' is pretty complicated according to this. Some of it is counter-intuitive (so should be practiced during training). If you're fast, and lucky, you'll be able to go around and land.
Maybe this is time for another class action monopoly suit, arguing that Microsoft's approach to this effectively puts in place a monopoly control on PC operating systems.
Actually two feet might be safer than a larger distance. It's hard to alter velocity very much relative to the other vehicle in two feet. In fact it's probably better to have a physical connection such as a magnetic latch between them during 'long' passages (for some definition of long) - I can see 'trains' of cars, latched together, moving in unison down the road. Occasionally one or more will disengage and move out of the train, and the train will reform. The key point is that the control paradigm is quite different. With human drivers the typical reaction time varies from 1/2 to a full second before the driver even knows there's something happening; and another 1/2 second before his/her hits the brake or turns the wheel. If all the cars 'know' the same thing at the same instant, the computers in all of them can respond essentially immediately. Compared to a four car line, this gives the last car four seconds advance capability. These four cars could *simultaneously* move out of the way, for example.
Of course there are complications - ice, loss of a wheel, things like that - but look up the 'Big Dog' robot and watch it handle ice. Or the recent quadrocopters video, balancing a stick and tossing it between quadrocopters. I think it's safe to say that we are close to a situation where the computers could handle almost any emergency faster and better than any human driver. Caveat: "once the programming gets there" - but it's there for 99% of cases, today. Ideally the software for handling this would be open source or at least open sourced between automotive makers, so everyone is on the same page and we have continuous incremental improvements. In fact that might be the single way for the makers to avoid crippling legal liability - make the collision handling software a standardized system, provided by a single government or non-profit institute that all makers must use. Include a well-defined indemnity plan so that when an error occurs, all the victims are properly taken care of and fixes put in place - all cars automatically updated with new software.
There were successful experiments done in the 1990s in the San Diego area, where (IIRC) six Buicks followed each other down a specially prepared section of highway, two feet apart. Of course that's not the same as typical real life emergencies etc. but it was done during a variety of traffic conditions. Each car had a 'driver' just in case, but IIRC only the front driver actually did anything during the tests. Then there are the Google self-driving cars, which have already been approved in CA or NV (I don't recall which). And Red Whittaker's work at CMU's Field Robotics Center, and Stanford, and a couple of European institutions.
:D
There is something magical about speeding along (probably only 6 knots, but it feels like more!), transported by nothing but wind and water. Instead of pushing our way through the world, we are sensibly using what's available to sliver our way along the desired path. Between wind and water we have a duality of countervailing forces, and can take (almost) any direction.
Somebody once said, "The three most dangerous words in the world are 'Go ahead, shoot.'"
Unfortunately for Marx and his adherents, the math just doesn't work out. Without going into the gory details and math, here is an analogy. Imagine a society with complete 'equality' - everyone has the same resources. This is equivalent to a wheat field - every stalk is the same height, everyone is equally productive, everyone has the same demands for resources. A nice grass lawn is another example.
But if you look at this from a systems point of view, this is a very artificial system. It requires a lot of work to maintain this against the natural effects of its environment. It has to be plowed, seeded, mowed in the case of a lawn. It has to be treated with chemicals to prevent various pests and weeds (nature) from destroying that nice pretty evenness, and fertilizer to correct the nutritional deficiencies that will develop over time. And this expenditure of energy and resources has to be maintained increasingly over time.
And what happens if this artificial enforcement of the desired plan is stopped? Nature comes back. Messy, uncoordinated, glorious Nature will return and a real ecosystem will be regenerated. An ecosystem that has biological entities at all scales (not all the same size and shape), competing freely with one another for the available resources, at the same time cooperating with each other to retain the existing resources within the system, and to optimize the utilization of available energy. And the natural system that results will also be optimally capable of surviving, adapting to and prospering with changes in the environment.
This is analogous to free enterprise and to democracy - the same math applies as to ecosystems. Note that monopolies, manipulation of government, and dictatorship all have the same problem as the wheat field, but I have blathered long enough! See the book "The Edge of Chaos".
It was also much more true back in the days when 'yachts' were custom-made wood boats. I've been told that a wood boat takes 2 hours per week for every 10 feet of length to maintain. I think that number goes up a lot above 15 or 20 feet (4-6 meters). So back in the day, a boat of significant length required a full time crew just to keep it afloat. Fiberglass, to a lesser extent steel and aluminum, and relatively 'mass' production methods have rewritten the boat ownership equation.
Actually the parent is correct. The vast majority of boats really are owned by Joe and Sam the carpenters down the street. Go to most boatyards or marinas, and you'll be able to meet them. Some marinas are definitely gold-plated, but in most cases it's a Bud Light crowd.
Interestingly, in most cases also, the folks in boats don't care how much you make - I've had many a beer sitting around a fire with a guy who owns a $1million + catamaran on one side and a guy who cleans houses for a living with a 25 foot fishing boat on the other. They've known each other for years, and they're both welcome any time on the other's boat. And they both dislike the 'boat snobs' who think the size of their tool makes them important ;) Boat people mostly respect each other because of their common interest - even with the mostly-friendly dichotomy between 'rag-boaters' (sailors) and 'stinkpotters' (power boaters).
There's a Creedence Clearwater song about "people on the river". It's mostly true.