I don't consider myself an interventionist (I'm more of an isolationist), but to play devil's advocate the most recent memorable scenario was the Libyan revolution that was fighting their dictator. The international consensus was that they would be crushed without assistance.
Or, in the case of the Taliban we armed in the 1980's, it was cheap force leverage for us, especially if we had ensured the weapons could not potentially be turned against us some decades hence.
If only we could think of a way to make these deadly weapons safe.
No doubt you're attempting a wry statement. However, safety is always a goal in designing and deploying weapons. For example, at a fundamental level it simply doesn't do to ship rifles that inadvertently explode and kill the person operating them. Contrariwise, it also wouldn't be very safe to deploy a rifle that failed to fire when the trigger was pulled, presuming the operator is attempting to use it for self-defense.
It's also not very safe to hand over a weapon to someone who might turn it against you. And, in a more abstract sense, it's not very safe to have one's foreign policy undermined by an enemy, especially when judicious application of weapons could prevent that.
These safety goals can all be in tension—including certain parties receiving no weapons at all!—so the appropriate question is "safe for whom?"
You do realize he said "third parties" right? I have a little bit of experience developing weapon systems for export and degrading propellant would totally be inline with the kind of precautions I've heard about. The manufacturers would love it because it means a continuing revenue stream as the propellant would be replaced as part of the maintenance contract.
Exactly. The concept is that we would have real, unimpaired weapons for us and stable allies that won't divert them, and weapons with an expiration date for erstwhile "allies"/proxies.
This makes much more sense than some sort of DRM on the electronics, especially given our experience with diversion of ordnance to create IEDs. You don't need an advanced guidance system/PAL authorization in order to have the high explosive warhead triggered via a detonator you shoved in there yourself before burying it under the roadway or whatever.
Better to render the weapon chemically inert after a certain timeframe. If the third party is still friendly, swap the expired ordnance out for fresh. It's not like they were paying for the weapons we gave them in the first place. They'll take what we give them. If not, then fine... let then figure out how to fight their conflict on their own.
You seem to be unaware of history: major powers arm others for proxy warfare. Said arms tend to eventually be reused in ways the arming powers dislike.
The US armed the Taliban with advanced MANPADS in the 80's, and many of these missiles were unexpended against the Russians. They became a wildcard in the US conflict with the Taliban 20 years later. Had the propellant and/or explosives degraded in that timeframe due to intentionally engineered chemical instability these would no longer be an issue.
Finally, these third parties in question tend not to be buyers because they really are not states. They are ragtags bands of warlords or whatever. In fact, they are usually beggars when it comes to obtaining armaments, and we all know what they say about beggars: they can't be choosers.
Actually, the Iranian F-14 debacle contains the kernel of a workable approach. Fighters require scads of maintenance and parts to keep flying. Iran lost that channel. I would be surprised if they actually had a single airframe in combat ready status even only 10 years after the seizure.
I propose all arms going to third parties be given rounds with propellants / explosives that chemically degrade over time. Yes, this would be sensitive to storage conditions, but make them stable enough for, say, 18 months viability in the desert. At least that would keep us from having to worry about Stingers we gave away 3 decades ago.
If the third parties reverse engineer how to create/bind/mold a replacement propellant or explosive, then I believe they deserve to be able to shoot it at us... they earned it.
drivers' cellphones that get "hacked" can then "hack into" the Bluetooth interface on late model cars and totally "hack the brakes!!!" and make them refuse to operate.
The hidden threat in your pocket... hackers already stole your credit card info, but now they might cause you and your loved ones to die in a fiery wreck. More at 11!
Init was simple, but it left me pining for proper dependencies among daemons. I mean, more than simply trying to stipulate a runlevel loading order by numbering symlinks.
For example, I don't want samba to start unless iscsi is successfully up, etc, etc, and I don't want to code a bunch of one-off scripting in various daemon script files. There are many more instances just like this, and init doesn't handle the use case.
Services are one thing (dependencies, monitoring service status, etc) thar Windows got right. I didn't like the glue / bootstrap code and installation for services, but it's far closer to what I want than init. Solaris' approach also seemed nice, at least upon cursory examination.
Anyhow, systemd gives me what I have always wanted, at the cost of me having to learn a new approach. That's a fair trade.
I hate Gnome 3, Unity, Metro, the last 3 years of "improvements" to Google services UX, etc. Conversely, systemd honestly feels like an upgrade in practically every way.
Seriously, can someone tell me what horrors caused by systemd that I have overlooked?
As you said, "The problem [is] cops under investigation never being punished regardless of the severity of their actions". Unlike you, I don't advocate punishing those under investigation... just those found guilty.
Your suggestion punishes the innocent because even though they're still paid they can't use that income because of the shadow of a potential adverse finding.
That's not a real punishment under any sort of legal theory. I can imagine a variety of adverse scenarios and these are not considered "punishments". For example, I can imagine that I were wrongfully convicted and subsequently executed for a crime I didn't commit. Am I being punished right this moment by this threat? It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Do I deserve protection codified in the legal system to somehow preclude my fears?
For another example, I can conceive that the IRS could decide through a miscarriage of justice to have me convicted of tax fraud and thereby seize all my assets and garnish my income. Am I being punished right now, even though I'm innocent? I'm facing the potential prospect of wrongful conviction; according to you I am therefore logically unable to spend a cent of my income. I'm living in the shadow of a potential adverse finding, you know.
As I said, nothing is protecting you from the specter of miscarriage of justice. It's a fact of life, and you and everyone else just has to deal with that however you can because the alternative (accommodating everyone's fears) is absurd.
Wait. So, I'm the one thinking about this incorrectly when I propose punishing those found guilty, whereas you are proposing punishing those who are only under investigation?
And, yes, I'm fine with the scenario you proposed, insofar as the outcome is predicated upon a miscarriage of justice in the courts (which we should always strive to mitigate). What's protecting you, for example, from having all your assets seized if you are targeted by and subsequently lose a false civil lawsuit? Insurance? Nothing?
Welcome to life.
Better than rewarding malfeasant government agents with taxpayer dollars.
Precisely because they are under investigation - to not pay them means the investigators and the employers have taken a particular stance, and also it would be extremely easy to harm someone by making a false accusation against them.
Okay, fine. Presumption of innocence and all. However, if they are found guilty then I want to see a clawback of the pay.
For example, Nadal Hasan, the Ft. Hood terrorist^W"workplace violence perpetrator" drew over $300,000 in salary while awaiting trial. That's swell. What makes it better is that his victims' families were being jerked around and not receiving death benefits, etc, from the government while this was transpiring.
I mean, how'd you feel if Russia took over Mexico?
About the same way we'd feel when they tried to put nukes in Cuba?
But at least that one went well...
Right. In that case they were simply reacting to our aggressive positioning of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. We offered to remove those if they pulled back from Cuba. Balance of MAD restored.
The Eastern part of the Empire was where the revenue was generated. It could tolerate more overhead.
The early Principate had a lot of income from annexation and plunder. However that essentially had its last hurrah with Trajan, and Hadrian is most famous for being the first to set a limit on the expansion of the empire (the eponymous wall).
After that, well, the Roman civilization came with a lot of overhead. The Western part was a net revenue drain, while the East was revenue surplus. This was quite literal in some ways, as the annona (grain tax) fleet from Egypt fed Rome, and any delay of the tax fleet would cause unrest due to hungry mobs.
Closing the loop on my point: bureaucracy is additional complexity/overhead, and it grows even when the underlying society is unable to afford it. This adds additional stress to an already taxed system.
I suggest Tainter's treatise "The Collapse of Complex Societies" for additional conceptual background.
God damn browsers and Web 2.0. They have undone the stability gains we have gotten over *decades* simply to have yet another AJAX-y Web 2.0 site with a 4 MB homepage.
What am I talking about? All this push to inject hardware acceleration into the browser comes at a cost: the damn browser is now moving out of the safe userland and more into game territory where they are communicating with the low-level APIs.
Fucking browsers are the only application I use that can hard lock my machine. I only got relief from Chrome by disabling hardware acceleration. I can perceive how such acceleration may be necessary on phones and tablets, but why the fuck, on a quad-core Haswell with 16 GB of RAM, should hardware acceleration even be necessary (or have noticeable effect) for surfing the goddamn internet?!
It's like it's fucking 1996 all over again where I have to initiate a hardware reset on my machine because the browser completely crashed it. Thanks, guys.
That behavior does seem annoying. The implementation probably just wasn't ready for prime time.
Anyway, now with the beam carving on Mercedes/Volvo it's probably much less noticeable to the driver. Really, that's the best solution (at least in concept).
And I tell you now the FIRST thing you will do is turn the auto headlights off! I had an E class Mercedes that had the auto dim highbeam and it would get confused by street lights and reflections from signs. It is actually really really disconcerting.
Sorry your vehicle sucked. Any particular reason you were driving around with your highbeams on in the city?
I love the auto-dimming headlights on my Jeep Grand Cherokee; they are only engaged in highbeam mode. Between features like this and the radar-based adaptive cruise control, it feels like a semi-self driving vehicle. I can get on the interstate and cruise for hundreds of km only having to steer. No pedals. No flicking the highbeams.
Anyway, it seems like Mercedes is using beam carving adaptive headlights now as their high end option. Looks cool on paper.
Thanks, but I don't need education on the state of the art in personal lighting—I own plenty of digitally regulated LED flashlights already.
I will reiterate the main point of my previous post: "Perhaps that's less of a problem now, but I have other electronics that won't work with lithiums."
My anecdote was a specific example of why people need to understand that these Energizer disposable lithiums are not necessarily drop-in replacements that will work without a hitch. They need to be tested in gear before you simply throw it in a closet and expect it to work when you pull it out during an emergency.
These were standard AA maglites which (still, I believe) take two AA's. Our sample size was three of these flashlights, all had been used for years without incident. In fact, we were all commenting how with the lithiums the maglites weren't getting dim as quickly as they did on fresh alkalines. One lithium and one dead alkaline dropped the voltage and the bulbs shone at their normal, dimmer levels for hours without any bulb deaths.
Turns out, that additional power output we found remarkable pushed the bulbs past their tolerance. Probably not an issue with today's typical digitally-regulated LED flashlights, but then again there's that pulse ox of mine which is not exactly a low-tech, cheap gadget.
Don't get me wrong: I still use the lithiums. The shelf life, energy capacity, energy density, and lack of corrosive material to leak and kill gear, simply can't be beat. I just don't presume they will be compatible without testing, especially for gear that needs to work when it counts.
You're thinking of Lithium-Ion batteries which are nominally 3.6V.
Energizer Lithium batteries are 1.5V and are compatible with most electronics that take AA or AAA Alkaline batteries.
No. No, I'm not. I was backpacking at night with some friends in 2003 and we loaded Energizer lithium disposable AA's (they were branded as PhotoLithium at the time). Among us we experienced three bulb failures in under 20 minutes. We started wising up when the brand new replacement bulbs were getting killed too. Eventually we mated a lithium with a discharged alkaline in order to cut the power output. Our bulbs survived after that. If you've never had an incandescent maglite, suffice it to say that bulbs burning out was rare (on the order of years). It was the Energizer lithiums that were killing the bulbs.
In the past year I have found my pulse oximeter absolutely refuses to run on a fresh energizer disposable lithium AAA.
People should be aware that the disposable lithiums have a different discharge profile and initial voltage. Most electronics do well with them (albeit lithiums being expensive), but some don't tolerate these batteries.
It behooves people to test. And it behooves people not to jump to conclusions that other people's experiences are mere misunderstandings.
Depends on whether your flashlights are compatible with lithiums. For example, they will cook a maglight with incandescent bulbs. The bulbs burn out within 10 minutes. Perhaps that's less of a problem now, but I have other electronics that won't work with lithiums.
You're almost speaking as if the rulers having a check on their power was a bad thing.
That may have been how it seemed, but that's not what I was trying to communicate. The real solution was to return to the Republic, which was stable, had separation of powers, strong checks and balances, and so on.
When I was talking about constraints, I meant things like how eventually new Caesars had to pay the Praetorian Guard multiple years worth of salary upon taking power because previous Caesars had done so. As for the bureaucracy, the ratchet clicked (and the layers and expense grew) because the emperors wanted to strip power from regional governors and generals who were ready to usurp. The Caesars had their hand forced in these regards. Yes, it's a check on their absolute power, but not really in a positive sense: bribery, centralization of administration that had previously been decentralized, etc.
Of course, all these perverse incentives were a nonissue in the Republic.
If you are interested in the decline and fall of Rome from a more academic perspective than Gibbon's classical work, I suggest "How Rome Fell" by Goldsworthy. It's very well-written and full of citations. The book doesn't promote any "favored theory" for collapse, unlike many of the other works on the subject.
Totalitarianism was developed in the 20th century. Please don't conflate that with the autocracy of the emperors, and, for that matter, don't conflate bureaucracy and democracy.
That said, the real tragedy was the demise of the Roman Republic, which had separation of powers with strong checks and balances, designed specifically to prevent an autocracy. That's why Augustus' legal fictions that established the Principate were so deviously clever. In fact, that fiction was kept up until the fourth century (if memory serves) before any Caesar had the gall to claim a title that was monarchial.
However, to your point, the bureaucracy is a cancer because these are individuals who generally have no direct accountability to the public at large. In the republic, this power was decentralized and more local. This is somewhat like the principle of federalism the US was founded with but has been increasingly disavowing since the 19th century.
So, what I'm saying is that you proposed a false dichotomy. The choice should not be between autocracy and cancerous, centralized bureaucracy. It should have been whether or not to abolish the crazy emperors and return to the stable Republic that had brought Rome prosperity for centuries. No system is perfect, but centralizing power in a practically unaccountable bureaucracy is extremely deleterious.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't consider myself an interventionist (I'm more of an isolationist), but to play devil's advocate the most recent memorable scenario was the Libyan revolution that was fighting their dictator. The international consensus was that they would be crushed without assistance.
Or, in the case of the Taliban we armed in the 1980's, it was cheap force leverage for us, especially if we had ensured the weapons could not potentially be turned against us some decades hence.
If only we could think of a way to make these deadly weapons safe.
No doubt you're attempting a wry statement. However, safety is always a goal in designing and deploying weapons. For example, at a fundamental level it simply doesn't do to ship rifles that inadvertently explode and kill the person operating them. Contrariwise, it also wouldn't be very safe to deploy a rifle that failed to fire when the trigger was pulled, presuming the operator is attempting to use it for self-defense.
It's also not very safe to hand over a weapon to someone who might turn it against you. And, in a more abstract sense, it's not very safe to have one's foreign policy undermined by an enemy, especially when judicious application of weapons could prevent that.
These safety goals can all be in tension—including certain parties receiving no weapons at all!—so the appropriate question is "safe for whom?"
You do realize he said "third parties" right?
I have a little bit of experience developing weapon systems for export and degrading propellant would totally be inline with the kind of precautions I've heard about. The manufacturers would love it because it means a continuing revenue stream as the propellant would be replaced as part of the maintenance contract.
Exactly. The concept is that we would have real, unimpaired weapons for us and stable allies that won't divert them, and weapons with an expiration date for erstwhile "allies"/proxies.
This makes much more sense than some sort of DRM on the electronics, especially given our experience with diversion of ordnance to create IEDs. You don't need an advanced guidance system/PAL authorization in order to have the high explosive warhead triggered via a detonator you shoved in there yourself before burying it under the roadway or whatever.
Better to render the weapon chemically inert after a certain timeframe. If the third party is still friendly, swap the expired ordnance out for fresh. It's not like they were paying for the weapons we gave them in the first place. They'll take what we give them. If not, then fine... let then figure out how to fight their conflict on their own.
You seem to be unaware of history: major powers arm others for proxy warfare. Said arms tend to eventually be reused in ways the arming powers dislike.
The US armed the Taliban with advanced MANPADS in the 80's, and many of these missiles were unexpended against the Russians. They became a wildcard in the US conflict with the Taliban 20 years later. Had the propellant and/or explosives degraded in that timeframe due to intentionally engineered chemical instability these would no longer be an issue.
Finally, these third parties in question tend not to be buyers because they really are not states. They are ragtags bands of warlords or whatever. In fact, they are usually beggars when it comes to obtaining armaments, and we all know what they say about beggars: they can't be choosers.
Do try to keep up.
Actually, the Iranian F-14 debacle contains the kernel of a workable approach. Fighters require scads of maintenance and parts to keep flying. Iran lost that channel. I would be surprised if they actually had a single airframe in combat ready status even only 10 years after the seizure.
I propose all arms going to third parties be given rounds with propellants / explosives that chemically degrade over time. Yes, this would be sensitive to storage conditions, but make them stable enough for, say, 18 months viability in the desert. At least that would keep us from having to worry about Stingers we gave away 3 decades ago.
If the third parties reverse engineer how to create/bind/mold a replacement propellant or explosive, then I believe they deserve to be able to shoot it at us... they earned it.
drivers' cellphones that get "hacked" can then "hack into" the Bluetooth interface on late model cars and totally "hack the brakes!!!" and make them refuse to operate.
The hidden threat in your pocket... hackers already stole your credit card info, but now they might cause you and your loved ones to die in a fiery wreck. More at 11!
Init was simple, but it left me pining for proper dependencies among daemons. I mean, more than simply trying to stipulate a runlevel loading order by numbering symlinks.
For example, I don't want samba to start unless iscsi is successfully up, etc, etc, and I don't want to code a bunch of one-off scripting in various daemon script files. There are many more instances just like this, and init doesn't handle the use case.
Services are one thing (dependencies, monitoring service status, etc) thar Windows got right. I didn't like the glue / bootstrap code and installation for services, but it's far closer to what I want than init. Solaris' approach also seemed nice, at least upon cursory examination.
Anyhow, systemd gives me what I have always wanted, at the cost of me having to learn a new approach. That's a fair trade.
I hate Gnome 3, Unity, Metro, the last 3 years of "improvements" to Google services UX, etc. Conversely, systemd honestly feels like an upgrade in practically every way.
Seriously, can someone tell me what horrors caused by systemd that I have overlooked?
Huh? I think you have it backwards.
As you said, "The problem [is] cops under investigation never being punished regardless of the severity of their actions". Unlike you, I don't advocate punishing those under investigation... just those found guilty.
Your suggestion punishes the innocent because even though they're still paid they can't use that income because of the shadow of a potential adverse finding.
That's not a real punishment under any sort of legal theory. I can imagine a variety of adverse scenarios and these are not considered "punishments". For example, I can imagine that I were wrongfully convicted and subsequently executed for a crime I didn't commit. Am I being punished right this moment by this threat? It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Do I deserve protection codified in the legal system to somehow preclude my fears?
For another example, I can conceive that the IRS could decide through a miscarriage of justice to have me convicted of tax fraud and thereby seize all my assets and garnish my income. Am I being punished right now, even though I'm innocent? I'm facing the potential prospect of wrongful conviction; according to you I am therefore logically unable to spend a cent of my income. I'm living in the shadow of a potential adverse finding, you know.
As I said, nothing is protecting you from the specter of miscarriage of justice. It's a fact of life, and you and everyone else just has to deal with that however you can because the alternative (accommodating everyone's fears) is absurd.
Wait. So, I'm the one thinking about this incorrectly when I propose punishing those found guilty, whereas you are proposing punishing those who are only under investigation?
And, yes, I'm fine with the scenario you proposed, insofar as the outcome is predicated upon a miscarriage of justice in the courts (which we should always strive to mitigate). What's protecting you, for example, from having all your assets seized if you are targeted by and subsequently lose a false civil lawsuit? Insurance? Nothing?
Welcome to life.
Better than rewarding malfeasant government agents with taxpayer dollars.
Precisely because they are under investigation - to not pay them means the investigators and the employers have taken a particular stance, and also it would be extremely easy to harm someone by making a false accusation against them.
Okay, fine. Presumption of innocence and all. However, if they are found guilty then I want to see a clawback of the pay.
For example, Nadal Hasan, the Ft. Hood terrorist^W"workplace violence perpetrator" drew over $300,000 in salary while awaiting trial. That's swell. What makes it better is that his victims' families were being jerked around and not receiving death benefits, etc, from the government while this was transpiring.
Probably the most useful app I have installed is the Xposed installer.
This is Slashdot, so it's okay to be meta, right? Heh.
Ukraine is well within its rights to do so now that Russia has breached the agreement.
I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 2014, it's a little hard to come by.
I mean, how'd you feel if Russia took over Mexico?
About the same way we'd feel when they tried to put nukes in Cuba?
But at least that one went well...
Right. In that case they were simply reacting to our aggressive positioning of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. We offered to remove those if they pulled back from Cuba. Balance of MAD restored.
What's the quid pro quo play here?
The Eastern part of the Empire was where the revenue was generated. It could tolerate more overhead.
The early Principate had a lot of income from annexation and plunder. However that essentially had its last hurrah with Trajan, and Hadrian is most famous for being the first to set a limit on the expansion of the empire (the eponymous wall).
After that, well, the Roman civilization came with a lot of overhead. The Western part was a net revenue drain, while the East was revenue surplus. This was quite literal in some ways, as the annona (grain tax) fleet from Egypt fed Rome, and any delay of the tax fleet would cause unrest due to hungry mobs.
Closing the loop on my point: bureaucracy is additional complexity/overhead, and it grows even when the underlying society is unable to afford it. This adds additional stress to an already taxed system.
I suggest Tainter's treatise "The Collapse of Complex Societies" for additional conceptual background.
God damn browsers and Web 2.0. They have undone the stability gains we have gotten over *decades* simply to have yet another AJAX-y Web 2.0 site with a 4 MB homepage.
What am I talking about? All this push to inject hardware acceleration into the browser comes at a cost: the damn browser is now moving out of the safe userland and more into game territory where they are communicating with the low-level APIs.
Fucking browsers are the only application I use that can hard lock my machine. I only got relief from Chrome by disabling hardware acceleration. I can perceive how such acceleration may be necessary on phones and tablets, but why the fuck, on a quad-core Haswell with 16 GB of RAM, should hardware acceleration even be necessary (or have noticeable effect) for surfing the goddamn internet?!
It's like it's fucking 1996 all over again where I have to initiate a hardware reset on my machine because the browser completely crashed it. Thanks, guys.
That behavior does seem annoying. The implementation probably just wasn't ready for prime time.
Anyway, now with the beam carving on Mercedes/Volvo it's probably much less noticeable to the driver. Really, that's the best solution (at least in concept).
How is google going to stop you from posting lies on Slashdot?
Haven't you heard the whispers about the Google kick squad, armed with Reason(tm) hypervelocity rail guns?
That's how.
And I tell you now the FIRST thing you will do is turn the auto headlights off! I had an E class Mercedes that had the auto dim highbeam and it would get confused by street lights and reflections from signs. It is actually really really disconcerting.
Sorry your vehicle sucked. Any particular reason you were driving around with your highbeams on in the city?
I love the auto-dimming headlights on my Jeep Grand Cherokee; they are only engaged in highbeam mode. Between features like this and the radar-based adaptive cruise control, it feels like a semi-self driving vehicle. I can get on the interstate and cruise for hundreds of km only having to steer. No pedals. No flicking the highbeams.
Anyway, it seems like Mercedes is using beam carving adaptive headlights now as their high end option. Looks cool on paper.
The Scots should float their own currency. Backed by Whiskey
I see what you did there...
Why would you use lightbulbs in the 21st century?
Thanks, but I don't need education on the state of the art in personal lighting—I own plenty of digitally regulated LED flashlights already.
I will reiterate the main point of my previous post: "Perhaps that's less of a problem now, but I have other electronics that won't work with lithiums."
My anecdote was a specific example of why people need to understand that these Energizer disposable lithiums are not necessarily drop-in replacements that will work without a hitch. They need to be tested in gear before you simply throw it in a closet and expect it to work when you pull it out during an emergency.
These were standard AA maglites which (still, I believe) take two AA's. Our sample size was three of these flashlights, all had been used for years without incident. In fact, we were all commenting how with the lithiums the maglites weren't getting dim as quickly as they did on fresh alkalines. One lithium and one dead alkaline dropped the voltage and the bulbs shone at their normal, dimmer levels for hours without any bulb deaths.
Turns out, that additional power output we found remarkable pushed the bulbs past their tolerance. Probably not an issue with today's typical digitally-regulated LED flashlights, but then again there's that pulse ox of mine which is not exactly a low-tech, cheap gadget.
Don't get me wrong: I still use the lithiums. The shelf life, energy capacity, energy density, and lack of corrosive material to leak and kill gear, simply can't be beat. I just don't presume they will be compatible without testing, especially for gear that needs to work when it counts.
You're thinking of Lithium-Ion batteries which are nominally 3.6V.
Energizer Lithium batteries are 1.5V and are compatible with most electronics that take AA or AAA Alkaline batteries.
No. No, I'm not. I was backpacking at night with some friends in 2003 and we loaded Energizer lithium disposable AA's (they were branded as PhotoLithium at the time). Among us we experienced three bulb failures in under 20 minutes. We started wising up when the brand new replacement bulbs were getting killed too. Eventually we mated a lithium with a discharged alkaline in order to cut the power output. Our bulbs survived after that. If you've never had an incandescent maglite, suffice it to say that bulbs burning out was rare (on the order of years). It was the Energizer lithiums that were killing the bulbs.
In the past year I have found my pulse oximeter absolutely refuses to run on a fresh energizer disposable lithium AAA.
People should be aware that the disposable lithiums have a different discharge profile and initial voltage. Most electronics do well with them (albeit lithiums being expensive), but some don't tolerate these batteries.
It behooves people to test. And it behooves people not to jump to conclusions that other people's experiences are mere misunderstandings.
Depends on whether your flashlights are compatible with lithiums. For example, they will cook a maglight with incandescent bulbs. The bulbs burn out within 10 minutes. Perhaps that's less of a problem now, but I have other electronics that won't work with lithiums.
You're almost speaking as if the rulers having a check on their power was a bad thing.
That may have been how it seemed, but that's not what I was trying to communicate. The real solution was to return to the Republic, which was stable, had separation of powers, strong checks and balances, and so on.
When I was talking about constraints, I meant things like how eventually new Caesars had to pay the Praetorian Guard multiple years worth of salary upon taking power because previous Caesars had done so. As for the bureaucracy, the ratchet clicked (and the layers and expense grew) because the emperors wanted to strip power from regional governors and generals who were ready to usurp. The Caesars had their hand forced in these regards. Yes, it's a check on their absolute power, but not really in a positive sense: bribery, centralization of administration that had previously been decentralized, etc.
Of course, all these perverse incentives were a nonissue in the Republic.
If you are interested in the decline and fall of Rome from a more academic perspective than Gibbon's classical work, I suggest "How Rome Fell" by Goldsworthy. It's very well-written and full of citations. The book doesn't promote any "favored theory" for collapse, unlike many of the other works on the subject.
Totalitarianism was developed in the 20th century. Please don't conflate that with the autocracy of the emperors, and, for that matter, don't conflate bureaucracy and democracy.
That said, the real tragedy was the demise of the Roman Republic, which had separation of powers with strong checks and balances, designed specifically to prevent an autocracy. That's why Augustus' legal fictions that established the Principate were so deviously clever. In fact, that fiction was kept up until the fourth century (if memory serves) before any Caesar had the gall to claim a title that was monarchial.
However, to your point, the bureaucracy is a cancer because these are individuals who generally have no direct accountability to the public at large. In the republic, this power was decentralized and more local. This is somewhat like the principle of federalism the US was founded with but has been increasingly disavowing since the 19th century.
So, what I'm saying is that you proposed a false dichotomy. The choice should not be between autocracy and cancerous, centralized bureaucracy. It should have been whether or not to abolish the crazy emperors and return to the stable Republic that had brought Rome prosperity for centuries. No system is perfect, but centralizing power in a practically unaccountable bureaucracy is extremely deleterious.