That's somewhat pedantic... When I said animals "maintain" their population, I didn't mean to imply that it was somehow voluntary. I guess I should have said "Animals maximum population is determined by the available food supply."
If you read the very next sentence in my comment you would have noticed that I said exactly that. We waste half the food that is produced.
That's an interesting point about Kodiak bears, though I suspect that since they've been doing that for a LONG time, they are participating in a (relatively) short-cycle "food web", and that the bits of fish they they don't eat are quickly taken care of by other organisms, and since their population is relatively stable, they're not going to overfish like humans have done.
A lot of human food-waste is not reintroduced to the biosphere in a short-cycle process, but putrefies in landfills along with tons of toxic crap. I'm sure there are some happy micro-organisms in there, but isolated pockets of rotting crap doesn't do much for the ecosystem as a whole.
If most food waste was composted and used to feed the soil, it would be a useful resource, rather than an energy sink, and there has been some progress on that front.
Voluntary limiting of reproduction is odd and fascinating indeed, and will be our saving grace if universally adopted, as the models predict.
My point, which I guess I didn't really state, was that a much smaller population of humans would probably be an asset rather than a liability in the grand scheme of things, and it's hard to imagine a scenario where humans "accidentally" go extinct because they don't want to reproduce!
You're correct, in that I was only referring to food production. You're also right that our "Modern" "post-industrial" society is not only unsustainable, taken as a whole, it's self-destructive and self-defeating.
However, food production techniques have not remained static. We're not going to be stuck in late 20th-cenutry production-mode forever, in fact we can't be. You may or may not be aware, but there has been a *HUGE* shift in food production over the last decade or so, away from giant-agribusiness-controlled methods and practices to (more) sustainable practices. Here's a statistic I recently heard at an organic farming conference:
70% of the current world food supply is now produced by small and medium sized farms. This is a 180 from just 20 years ago.
That 70% slice of production uses only 30% of the total energy input into creating food.
The remaining 30% (mostly agribusiness-produced factory food) uses 70% of all energy inputs for food production.
Think about that for a minute.
That's the trend. It's not happening (primarily) due to activisim and smarter consumer choice (though it's that in part) but because the way we had been been producing food was not just unsustainable, but STUPID! Giant energy-inefficient petrochemical farming practices are TOO EXPENSIVE in every sense. They deplete the soil, they produce less-healthy food, use chemical feedstocks that would be better suited to other purposes. The list goes on. These hugely wasteful practices are fading from use, simply because the alternative (small and mid-scale more-or-less "organic" farming) is BETTER IN EVERY WAY -- it's still not "sustainable" in every sense, but we've made HUGE progress in a short time-frame. There is a sea-change to REGENERATIVE agriculture underway, where instead of depleting topsoil, farming (with good stewardship) is beginning to actually create fertile topsoil, as natural grassland and forest do. Use of cover cropping, no-till, mycorrhizal and nutritive soil amendments (rather than "fertilizer"), companion planting, smart rotation, and many other practices, taken from antiquity and based on current science are turning the tide.
As I said, there are a lot of BIG IFs and we have many challenges ahead of us, but the trend, at least in the area of food production is looking up.
Animals generally maintain their population to a level that consumes the available food supply.
Current food-production levels can support roughly 12 billion humans (We waste about half of the food that is currently produced. We're definitely different from other animals in this respect)
While it's true that most late-stage industrial societies are currently running birth rates that are below replacement level, and that the most likely "peak-population" scenario is probably 9-14 billion people, sometime around 2050. Speculation as to what happens after that is exactly that: speculation.
That said, any population level that is below max possible food production level should be sustainable nearly indefinitely, be it 14 billion or 14 million, we'll do just fine, provided we make it through the peak transition without any sharp dropoff: war, famine, disease or severe global environmental catastrophe. If the transition is reasonably smooth (which I agree is a big IF with things as they are).
Humans are incredibly adaptable, and provided we use our technology well (which again is a pretty big IF given our track record). I don't see any problem maintaining an advanced technological society with population levels at pre-industrial levels. The headline and article would seem to be pure sensationalism.
Most plants also (quite literally) feed the soil microbiome by producing sugars and other nutrients that bacteria and fungi absorb. The microorganisms return the favor by fixing nitrogen, for plants that don't do that themselves, as well as defending the roots from non-friendly microorganisms, and probably a whole host of other things that we don't even know about yet: perhaps even participating in the communication network that plants use to help identify clones vs. same-species neighbors vs. other plants.
Becky Chambers: Record of a Spaceborn Few Emma Newman: Before Mars Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Moon John C Wright: The Golden Age Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi Nnedi Okorafor: Binti - The Night Masquerade John Scalzi: Head On An Novel of the Near Future Scott Meyer; Fight & Flight Aliette de Bodard: The Tea Master and the Detective Nathan Lowell: Suicide Run
Not quite... since the water and valves could (I think) only find a "local minimum" or naive solution, not a near-optimal (global minimum) one, like the amoeba does. The lighted areas on the chip don't *prevent* the ameoba from going there, and in fact to find an approximate global minimum solution, the ameoba *has* to sometimes go where it doesn't want to, in order to maximize it's nutrient intake. In other words the water can't "decide" to go through a closed valve, but the ameoba can choose to extend into a lit cell, in order to maximize survival advantage.
Yeah, that was my first though too, since the summary makes it sound that way, but the article explains in depth:
The challenge for the plasmodium to find the shortest tour is that its branches should not enter the frequently illuminated lanes and should elongate into the optimal combination of the least frequently illuminated lanes. However, the optimal combination cannot be found as long as the branches always obey the control principle; if always the branches shrank when illuminated and expanded when not illuminated, the plasmodium would not avoid falling into a local minimum. To better explore the potential energy landscape and locate the global minimum (the shortest tour), the plasmodium needs to misallocate the resource to its branches and the branches must violate the control principle with a certain small probability, because the lengths of the tours can be compared only when the branches operate contrary to their photoavoidance response
so the computer is only really defining where the "bounds" of the problem are. The ameoba really is doing the computational work (going *against* the computer's control) to find a nearly-optimal solution.
The only thing that having a lot of money should get you is, well, a lot of money, ya know, to buy stuff with. It shouldn't give you more political power, or "get out of jail free" cards, or the ability to write your own laws, or break them with impunity. The fact that it more-or-less already *does* give you those things, is pretty much the primary problem our civilization currently faces; e.g. money == speech.
We have quite a few laws that don't make any sense, and shouldn't exist, though that's a separate issue. Even the stupid laws need to be applied equally to everyone, or the law ceases to have any meaning, or more specifically: people stop respecting it.
If people want to amass huge sums of money, that's their prerogative, though that right need not impinge on the rights of the rest of us to have equal protection under the law. That way lies madness. The madness of the world we currently live in, specifically.
That's true, unless the code uses the (LONG deprecated) mysql_* functions. Though even that is actually trivial to fix, since PHP7 supports built-in function overloading, and since good code will abstract database calls anyway, even switching to one of the newer DB methods should be pretty straightforward.
I maintain code that was actually written for PHP3/4. Migrating to PHP5 was frustrating, mostly because some of the the breaking changes involved REALLY basic stuff (they broke array indexing!), and weren't rolled out with the first version of PHP5, but came out in dribs and drabs in the point releases. Migrating to PHP7 is really not that bad by comparison, and PHP7 fixes most of the really bad warts in the language.
Granted this code was originally written almost exclusively by me, and I was/am a Perl/C programmer so the code looks more like C-style Perl than most PHP code.
PHP3 was *nasty* and I went into the project kicking and screaming, but I was part of a team that outvoted me. I wanted to write the thing in Perl. Almost 20 years later, the code still works, is maintainable/customizable, and the language itself is much less nasty than it was then.
No, NOW he's as free as all of us will eventually be. Being a suicidal jerk doesn't make one free, it makes one a suicidal jerk.
If you're going to kill yourself, at least have the decency to minimize the impact your death will leave on those you leave behind, rather than (potentially) maximizing it.
That's only partly true. The last "red tide" of this scale happened from 2004 to 2006. However, the number of dead animals on the beaches seems to be unprecedented this time, probably because the "red tide" is accompanied by a blue-green algae bloom, which is caused by a different organism, although has the same proximate cause: too much for the algae/bacteria to eat. The governor has declared a state of emergency, so even he's taking it seriously (now). Probably at least partly because of the potential billions in lost tourism dollars, though that's really closing the barn door after the horses are out.
The link to agricultural runoff is not something that is being made up by hippy-dippy environmentalists. It's a very real, well-documented phenomenon, and has happened virtually everywhere that large-scale agricultural pollution is allowed to run unhindered into the sea.
I spent a lot of time as a kid (in the 70s & 80s) in Lee county, and "red tide" during that period usually just meant that you couldn't (safely) eat the local seafood, not that it was washing up dead on the beach.
Having said all that, Florida (at least where the people are) is one of the most heavily-modified environments in the world. There would be hardly any buildable land through most of coastal Florida if it were not for the ubiquitous drainage ditches, tunnels, canals and other ground works to keep the water out of buildings and off of roads. And even with all that you can't build a basement. The whole state is basically a sandbar, with the water table at or just barely under ground level. Why anyone wants to live there at all is beyond me.
100% agree. As a card-carrying Nerd, I would like to be able to *enjoy* geeking out about sports (it's funny how many sports fans don't necessarily see it that way) but I find most professional sports rather distasteful, for the same reasons you mention: they've taken all the fun out of them with big money, forcing kids into a militaristic training regime from age 3, and to a lesser extent: the "fans", which is short for fanatics, which pretty much sums up what some of them seem like to me. If I could, I think I'd enjoy being a sport-enthusiast, but never a fanatic.
I guess for some sports, I am exactly that, and it's even on-topic. I love curling! They're courteous (sportsmanlike!) to their opponents and the players seem to actually enjoy playing the game, and while they do take it seriously at the highest levels of competition, it's only "game serious" not "cancer serious" like many other pro sports. I hope the popularity of the sport doesn't change it's character.
There's at least one private company [as a contractor for the state(s)] working on doing something like this in the United States. There's already a pilot program in at least one state.
While the "National-Socialist German Workers' Party" was very cagey about "not being left or right at all" modern scholarship plants them firmly in the "far-right" of the political spectrum.
It's self-evident if you study them at all, that their primary ideology was nationalistic, not socialistic.
They *claimed* that their ultimate goal was "socialism for just us aryans, and no one else, once we get rid of all these sub-human dregs that aren't 'True Germans'" but that was probably never going to happen, even if they conquered Europe. Nazis were fascist, not socialist. The actual distinctions can get fuzzy, and this stuff is not ever cut and dry, and the political spectrum itself has warped over many decades, but to say that the Nazis were "left-wing" in any meaningful sense is disingenuous, at best -- neither were they mainstream "right-wing" either, but if you put Fascism and Nazism into the language of the 19th century, they would have indeed been called "far right": Totalitarian, xenophobic and nationalistic.
To make matters more complex, within the party there were "conservatives" that wanted to hang with mainstream reactionaries and other capitalists, and "radicals" that saw capitalism as a "Jewish threat" (hey, their words, not mine). So the party was basically schizophrenic (surprise surprise). At it's inception the party made all kinds of social promises to the proletariat, but none of that ever materialized (they lost the war after all), and with a few exceptions (those corporations that weren't nazi enough), Hitler let private capital thrive quite nicely.
To say that the mainstream left in Nazi Germany was anti-Semitic is also disingenuous, since *virtually everyone* in Germany at the time was to some degree, regardless of where they fell on the political spectrum. If anything, it was the left and the far-left that led the fight (such of it that there was) against antisemitism in pre-war and wartime Germany.
Truth is we can't demonize the "right" or the "left" since virtually all ideologies have at one time or another been used to justify atrocities.
Such a great writer, and a Great Lady. She will be missed by multitudes, and loved for centuries to come. She is among the greatest of both fantasy and sci-fi writers.
I am crushed that the worlds she created are now finite.
“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.” Ursula K. Le Guin
I'm no expert, but It seems to me that access to specific spectrum by cell providers is not the issue with mobile connectivity. It's not like you can't manufacture a radio that can't transmit on more than one band. It's that the various players have never had an incentive to share/pool or at least wholesale resources to each other. This is clearly in the "Regulate-able" zone, since this is *our* spectrum we're talking about. A resource that we can all benefit from, and that we literally *have* to share it in order to use it effectively.
I live in a rural area, there is a cell tower 1/2 mile from my house, but I don't have signal, because the tower doesn't talk to my "brand" of phone. I don't even know what the specifics are, and I could switch providers, but this particular provider has no signal in other areas where I often go, whereas the one that doesn't work at my house works most other places that I go.
If there had been a regulation 20 years ago that said "Hey, let's find a common industry solution so that all phones can talk to all towers, and then let the owners of those towers worry about billing each other" we wouldn't have the mess we have now with competing standards and antagonistic competitive business. I sometimes even end up places where I have *signal* but the tower tells me (essentially) that while I can talk to you, I won't let you use me, since your provider doesn't have a billing arrangement with me in this area. I realize these things are complicated, and I'm perhaps oversimplifying, but they've been made more complicated than they need to be.
It's like "Hey! you can't drive on this road! You have a Ford! Only Chevys can drive on this road!" That's insane, right? But we put up with it with mobile communications, because... why, exactly? I realize this isn't an issue in metro areas (they have issues too, just different ones) but if the system were managed and engineered properly we wouldn't have this type of issue at all.
Letting the incumbent competing players have even MORE power and control is probably not going to solve this problem. This is one of those issues that's going to have to play out over a long time now, since the window for regulating a unified system probably closed long ago.
I just made my first Von Neumann probe launch.. I'm ready to give up now actually, since it doesn't seem to really be doing anything anymore. It's been a few hours and I'm still at "0.000000000000% of universe explored"...:/
Though I run a *tiny* business, so am not really in the same boat exactly, I understand what you mean, however there is a *very* simple solution: set a high tax rate on *actual individual income* above $500,000 or so -- since there's literally no one that needs more than that to live on, and it's above that level where the obscene levels of wealth concentration are happening. Then give the (actual) small businesses a break.
If a business grosses 5M, but the owner(s) only pay themselves $250k after payroll, expenses, etc, they should not be taxed as "rich" since, for all intent and purposes, they're not. By the same token, if a business grosses 5M and the owners pull 4M, or even 2M out of it, then they *should* be taxed as rich.
I'd also say that "income" earned by a business that is to go immediately back out again as employee paychecks and front-line expenses shouldn't count as business income at all, especially for partnerships and sole-proprietorships. It should come right off the top. Things get complex with corporations, since the very large ones already can play pretty fast and loose with that kind of thing as it is.
Ya know, have, like, a *sensible* tax policy... I know, dream on, right?
The other bit would be to raise the capital gains tax %, when proceeds exceed a certain level, say, $10,000 -- in fact I'd suggest NO tax on capital gains below that level, with a progressive sliding scale as it goes up -- along with some exceptions for the sale of a business or tangible property -- to encourage the small investor, but for people "earning" a quarter million or more simply by being rich and having investments, a large chunk of that needs to get fed back into the economy, rather than just making the already rich even richer. How exactly that would get done is, admittedly, rather complex, and I don't have any answers.
Slashdot Mirror
That's somewhat pedantic... When I said animals "maintain" their population, I didn't mean to imply that it was somehow voluntary. I guess I should have said "Animals maximum population is determined by the available food supply."
If you read the very next sentence in my comment you would have noticed that I said exactly that. We waste half the food that is produced.
That's an interesting point about Kodiak bears, though I suspect that since they've been doing that for a LONG time, they are participating in a (relatively) short-cycle "food web", and that the bits of fish they they don't eat are quickly taken care of by other organisms, and since their population is relatively stable, they're not going to overfish like humans have done.
A lot of human food-waste is not reintroduced to the biosphere in a short-cycle process, but putrefies in landfills along with tons of toxic crap. I'm sure there are some happy micro-organisms in there, but isolated pockets of rotting crap doesn't do much for the ecosystem as a whole.
If most food waste was composted and used to feed the soil, it would be a useful resource, rather than an energy sink, and there has been some progress on that front.
Voluntary limiting of reproduction is odd and fascinating indeed, and will be our saving grace if universally adopted, as the models predict.
My point, which I guess I didn't really state, was that a much smaller population of humans would probably be an asset rather than a liability in the grand scheme of things, and it's hard to imagine a scenario where humans "accidentally" go extinct because they don't want to reproduce!
You're correct, in that I was only referring to food production. You're also right that our "Modern" "post-industrial" society is not only unsustainable, taken as a whole, it's self-destructive and self-defeating.
However, food production techniques have not remained static. We're not going to be stuck in late 20th-cenutry production-mode forever, in fact we can't be. You may or may not be aware, but there has been a *HUGE* shift in food production over the last decade or so, away from giant-agribusiness-controlled methods and practices to (more) sustainable practices. Here's a statistic I recently heard at an organic farming conference:
70% of the current world food supply is now produced by small and medium sized farms. This is a 180 from just 20 years ago.
That 70% slice of production uses only 30% of the total energy input into creating food.
The remaining 30% (mostly agribusiness-produced factory food) uses 70% of all energy inputs for food production.
Think about that for a minute.
That's the trend. It's not happening (primarily) due to activisim and smarter consumer choice (though it's that in part) but because the way we had been been producing food was not just unsustainable, but STUPID! Giant energy-inefficient petrochemical farming practices are TOO EXPENSIVE in every sense. They deplete the soil, they produce less-healthy food, use chemical feedstocks that would be better suited to other purposes. The list goes on. These hugely wasteful practices are fading from use, simply because the alternative (small and mid-scale more-or-less "organic" farming) is BETTER IN EVERY WAY -- it's still not "sustainable" in every sense, but we've made HUGE progress in a short time-frame. There is a sea-change to REGENERATIVE agriculture underway, where instead of depleting topsoil, farming (with good stewardship) is beginning to actually create fertile topsoil, as natural grassland and forest do. Use of cover cropping, no-till, mycorrhizal and nutritive soil amendments (rather than "fertilizer"), companion planting, smart rotation, and many other practices, taken from antiquity and based on current science are turning the tide.
As I said, there are a lot of BIG IFs and we have many challenges ahead of us, but the trend, at least in the area of food production is looking up.
Animals generally maintain their population to a level that consumes the available food supply.
Current food-production levels can support roughly 12 billion humans (We waste about half of the food that is currently produced. We're definitely different from other animals in this respect)
While it's true that most late-stage industrial societies are currently running birth rates that are below replacement level, and that the most likely "peak-population" scenario is probably 9-14 billion people, sometime around 2050. Speculation as to what happens after that is exactly that: speculation.
That said, any population level that is below max possible food production level should be sustainable nearly indefinitely, be it 14 billion or 14 million, we'll do just fine, provided we make it through the peak transition without any sharp dropoff: war, famine, disease or severe global environmental catastrophe. If the transition is reasonably smooth (which I agree is a big IF with things as they are).
Humans are incredibly adaptable, and provided we use our technology well (which again is a pretty big IF given our track record). I don't see any problem maintaining an advanced technological society with population levels at pre-industrial levels. The headline and article would seem to be pure sensationalism.
Most plants also (quite literally) feed the soil microbiome by producing sugars and other nutrients that bacteria and fungi absorb. The microorganisms return the favor by fixing nitrogen, for plants that don't do that themselves, as well as defending the roots from non-friendly microorganisms, and probably a whole host of other things that we don't even know about yet: perhaps even participating in the communication network that plants use to help identify clones vs. same-species neighbors vs. other plants.
If interested, check out Symphony of the Soil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Becky Chambers: Record of a Spaceborn Few
Emma Newman: Before Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Moon
John C Wright: The Golden Age
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi
Nnedi Okorafor: Binti - The Night Masquerade
John Scalzi: Head On An Novel of the Near Future
Scott Meyer; Fight & Flight
Aliette de Bodard: The Tea Master and the Detective
Nathan Lowell: Suicide Run
Not quite... since the water and valves could (I think) only find a "local minimum" or naive solution, not a near-optimal (global minimum) one, like the amoeba does. The lighted areas on the chip don't *prevent* the ameoba from going there, and in fact to find an approximate global minimum solution, the ameoba *has* to sometimes go where it doesn't want to, in order to maximize it's nutrient intake. In other words the water can't "decide" to go through a closed valve, but the ameoba can choose to extend into a lit cell, in order to maximize survival advantage.
Yeah, that was my first though too, since the summary makes it sound that way, but the article explains in depth:
The challenge for the plasmodium to find the shortest tour is that its branches should not enter the frequently illuminated lanes and should elongate into the optimal combination of the least frequently illuminated lanes. However, the optimal combination cannot be found as long as the branches always obey the control principle; if always the branches shrank when illuminated and expanded when not illuminated, the plasmodium would not avoid falling into a local minimum. To better explore the potential energy landscape and locate the global minimum (the shortest tour), the plasmodium needs to misallocate the resource to its branches and the branches must violate the control principle with a certain small probability, because the lengths of the tours can be compared only when the branches operate contrary to their photoavoidance response
so the computer is only really defining where the "bounds" of the problem are. The ameoba really is doing the computational work (going *against* the computer's control) to find a nearly-optimal solution.
Hard to tell if you're trolling, but I'll bite.
The only thing that having a lot of money should get you is, well, a lot of money, ya know, to buy stuff with. It shouldn't give you more political power, or "get out of jail free" cards, or the ability to write your own laws, or break them with impunity. The fact that it more-or-less already *does* give you those things, is pretty much the primary problem our civilization currently faces; e.g. money == speech.
We have quite a few laws that don't make any sense, and shouldn't exist, though that's a separate issue. Even the stupid laws need to be applied equally to everyone, or the law ceases to have any meaning, or more specifically: people stop respecting it.
If people want to amass huge sums of money, that's their prerogative, though that right need not impinge on the rights of the rest of us to have equal protection under the law. That way lies madness. The madness of the world we currently live in, specifically.
Or talk from the '80s...
...no light of any kind would get through.
So almost like Peril Sensitive Sunglasses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
!!!
That's true, unless the code uses the (LONG deprecated) mysql_* functions. Though even that is actually trivial to fix, since PHP7 supports built-in function overloading, and since good code will abstract database calls anyway, even switching to one of the newer DB methods should be pretty straightforward.
I maintain code that was actually written for PHP3/4. Migrating to PHP5 was frustrating, mostly because some of the the breaking changes involved REALLY basic stuff (they broke array indexing!), and weren't rolled out with the first version of PHP5, but came out in dribs and drabs in the point releases. Migrating to PHP7 is really not that bad by comparison, and PHP7 fixes most of the really bad warts in the language.
Granted this code was originally written almost exclusively by me, and I was/am a Perl/C programmer so the code looks more like C-style Perl than most PHP code.
PHP3 was *nasty* and I went into the project kicking and screaming, but I was part of a team that outvoted me. I wanted to write the thing in Perl. Almost 20 years later, the code still works, is maintainable/customizable, and the language itself is much less nasty than it was then.
No, NOW he's as free as all of us will eventually be. Being a suicidal jerk doesn't make one free, it makes one a suicidal jerk.
If you're going to kill yourself, at least have the decency to minimize the impact your death will leave on those you leave behind, rather than (potentially) maximizing it.
That's only partly true. The last "red tide" of this scale happened from 2004 to 2006. However, the number of dead animals on the beaches seems to be unprecedented this time, probably because the "red tide" is accompanied by a blue-green algae bloom, which is caused by a different organism, although has the same proximate cause: too much for the algae/bacteria to eat. The governor has declared a state of emergency, so even he's taking it seriously (now). Probably at least partly because of the potential billions in lost tourism dollars, though that's really closing the barn door after the horses are out.
The link to agricultural runoff is not something that is being made up by hippy-dippy environmentalists. It's a very real, well-documented phenomenon, and has happened virtually everywhere that large-scale agricultural pollution is allowed to run unhindered into the sea.
I spent a lot of time as a kid (in the 70s & 80s) in Lee county, and "red tide" during that period usually just meant that you couldn't (safely) eat the local seafood, not that it was washing up dead on the beach.
Having said all that, Florida (at least where the people are) is one of the most heavily-modified environments in the world. There would be hardly any buildable land through most of coastal Florida if it were not for the ubiquitous drainage ditches, tunnels, canals and other ground works to keep the water out of buildings and off of roads. And even with all that you can't build a basement. The whole state is basically a sandbar, with the water table at or just barely under ground level. Why anyone wants to live there at all is beyond me.
100% agree. As a card-carrying Nerd, I would like to be able to *enjoy* geeking out about sports (it's funny how many sports fans don't necessarily see it that way) but I find most professional sports rather distasteful, for the same reasons you mention: they've taken all the fun out of them with big money, forcing kids into a militaristic training regime from age 3, and to a lesser extent: the "fans", which is short for fanatics, which pretty much sums up what some of them seem like to me. If I could, I think I'd enjoy being a sport-enthusiast, but never a fanatic.
I guess for some sports, I am exactly that, and it's even on-topic. I love curling! They're courteous (sportsmanlike!) to their opponents and the players seem to actually enjoy playing the game, and while they do take it seriously at the highest levels of competition, it's only "game serious" not "cancer serious" like many other pro sports. I hope the popularity of the sport doesn't change it's character.
Uh, isn't Oxford in the UK?
There's at least one private company [as a contractor for the state(s)] working on doing something like this in the United States. There's already a pilot program in at least one state.
Not this again.
While the "National-Socialist German Workers' Party" was very cagey about "not being left or right at all" modern scholarship plants them firmly in the "far-right" of the political spectrum.
It's self-evident if you study them at all, that their primary ideology was nationalistic, not socialistic.
They *claimed* that their ultimate goal was "socialism for just us aryans, and no one else, once we get rid of all these sub-human dregs that aren't 'True Germans'" but that was probably never going to happen, even if they conquered Europe. Nazis were fascist, not socialist. The actual distinctions can get fuzzy, and this stuff is not ever cut and dry, and the political spectrum itself has warped over many decades, but to say that the Nazis were "left-wing" in any meaningful sense is disingenuous, at best -- neither were they mainstream "right-wing" either, but if you put Fascism and Nazism into the language of the 19th century, they would have indeed been called "far right": Totalitarian, xenophobic and nationalistic.
To make matters more complex, within the party there were "conservatives" that wanted to hang with mainstream reactionaries and other capitalists, and "radicals" that saw capitalism as a "Jewish threat" (hey, their words, not mine). So the party was basically schizophrenic (surprise surprise). At it's inception the party made all kinds of social promises to the proletariat, but none of that ever materialized (they lost the war after all), and with a few exceptions (those corporations that weren't nazi enough), Hitler let private capital thrive quite nicely.
To say that the mainstream left in Nazi Germany was anti-Semitic is also disingenuous, since *virtually everyone* in Germany at the time was to some degree, regardless of where they fell on the political spectrum. If anything, it was the left and the far-left that led the fight (such of it that there was) against antisemitism in pre-war and wartime Germany.
Truth is we can't demonize the "right" or the "left" since virtually all ideologies have at one time or another been used to justify atrocities.
Such a great writer, and a Great Lady. She will be missed by multitudes, and loved for centuries to come. She is among the greatest of both fantasy and sci-fi writers.
I am crushed that the worlds she created are now finite.
“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
Yes, is definitely a thing:
http://makeanddo4d.com/spreads... :)
I'm no expert, but It seems to me that access to specific spectrum by cell providers is not the issue with mobile connectivity. It's not like you can't manufacture a radio that can't transmit on more than one band. It's that the various players have never had an incentive to share/pool or at least wholesale resources to each other. This is clearly in the "Regulate-able" zone, since this is *our* spectrum we're talking about. A resource that we can all benefit from, and that we literally *have* to share it in order to use it effectively.
I live in a rural area, there is a cell tower 1/2 mile from my house, but I don't have signal, because the tower doesn't talk to my "brand" of phone. I don't even know what the specifics are, and I could switch providers, but this particular provider has no signal in other areas where I often go, whereas the one that doesn't work at my house works most other places that I go.
If there had been a regulation 20 years ago that said "Hey, let's find a common industry solution so that all phones can talk to all towers, and then let the owners of those towers worry about billing each other" we wouldn't have the mess we have now with competing standards and antagonistic competitive business. I sometimes even end up places where I have *signal* but the tower tells me (essentially) that while I can talk to you, I won't let you use me, since your provider doesn't have a billing arrangement with me in this area. I realize these things are complicated, and I'm perhaps oversimplifying, but they've been made more complicated than they need to be.
It's like "Hey! you can't drive on this road! You have a Ford! Only Chevys can drive on this road!" That's insane, right? But we put up with it with mobile communications, because... why, exactly? I realize this isn't an issue in metro areas (they have issues too, just different ones) but if the system were managed and engineered properly we wouldn't have this type of issue at all.
Letting the incumbent competing players have even MORE power and control is probably not going to solve this problem. This is one of those issues that's going to have to play out over a long time now, since the window for regulating a unified system probably closed long ago.
FRONKinsteen!
I just made my first Von Neumann probe launch.. I'm ready to give up now actually, since it doesn't seem to really be doing anything anymore. It's been a few hours and I'm still at "0.000000000000% of universe explored"... :/
It's everyone playing this new paperclip game:
http://www.decisionproblem.com...
And crashing the internet...
( :) )
Though I run a *tiny* business, so am not really in the same boat exactly, I understand what you mean, however there is a *very* simple solution: set a high tax rate on *actual individual income* above $500,000 or so -- since there's literally no one that needs more than that to live on, and it's above that level where the obscene levels of wealth concentration are happening. Then give the (actual) small businesses a break.
If a business grosses 5M, but the owner(s) only pay themselves $250k after payroll, expenses, etc, they should not be taxed as "rich" since, for all intent and purposes, they're not. By the same token, if a business grosses 5M and the owners pull 4M, or even 2M out of it, then they *should* be taxed as rich.
I'd also say that "income" earned by a business that is to go immediately back out again as employee paychecks and front-line expenses shouldn't count as business income at all, especially for partnerships and sole-proprietorships. It should come right off the top. Things get complex with corporations, since the very large ones already can play pretty fast and loose with that kind of thing as it is.
Ya know, have, like, a *sensible* tax policy... I know, dream on, right?
The other bit would be to raise the capital gains tax %, when proceeds exceed a certain level, say, $10,000 -- in fact I'd suggest NO tax on capital gains below that level, with a progressive sliding scale as it goes up -- along with some exceptions for the sale of a business or tangible property -- to encourage the small investor, but for people "earning" a quarter million or more simply by being rich and having investments, a large chunk of that needs to get fed back into the economy, rather than just making the already rich even richer. How exactly that would get done is, admittedly, rather complex, and I don't have any answers.