Besides that, if you have enough people willing to die to win a revolution, you probably have enough support to win an election.
Actually, the numbers don't work out quite so intuitively. At the start of the American Secession, only about 17% of the population was strongly in favor of separating from the Crown. A similar percentage was strongly in favor of remaining subjects. The rest just tended to go along with the status quo, pretty much the same as today.
He might not have started it, but he has the power to stop it
That's quite an assumption. Why, because the Constitution says so? We're dealing with very bad people who don't care about the Constitution or the Rule of Law.
Oh, right, Kennedy had the power to re-establish the silver standard.
And as you know, it's those who win the wars who write the history books. I don't think that had much to do with the journalists he jailed.
The North didn't win easily. If there had been significant public opposition during the last two years, there might not have been enough resources (including troops) to defeat the South. Having the newspapers as propaganda pieces during that period certainly had a benefit for the continuing war effort.
It's, of course, very hard to say what might have been.
If photovoltaics or fusion ever really get huge, we'll be stuck with it. Useless except as chemical feedstock.
Exactly right. We're paying a war premium now and we won't have a long-term benefit from holding back. It's lose-lose. Except for the oil corporations who contribute heavily to the politicians.
Simply pushing hard on the economy won't work. Globalization means companies will keep moving to the lowest-wage, lowest-regulation, most-corrupt countries.
You can't call that economic maximization, but your point is well taken. Getting rid of corporations would be a great step towards healing the world society.
Second of all... have you done the math on how long it will take the human population to decrease as a result of the declining birth rate?
This is a well-studied problem. Check out this TED Talk.
And compare that to how quickly the carbon footprint of the middle class is rising? Do the math... then talk.
Oh, we have the technology to address that now. The Argone integral fast reactor ran perfectly for years, and then the project was killed by Clinton/Gore/Kerry (with a complicit O'Leary). By 2013 we should have been running thousands of them, cleaning up all the existing nuclear waste (which is a separate disaster). There is enough extant waste to power all of the world's electric needs for the rest of this century.
Branson has been trying to get permits from the Obama administration to do just that - Virgin Electric, cleaning up the world's nuclear waste and providing clean energy. He *can't even get a meeting* with them, after years of trying. And by default it's not permitted.
This is entirely a political problem, retarding the natural march of technology. Unfortunately, those in power seem to want to push more humans back into a lower standard of living than to see the world blossom with a world-wide 'upper' class.
Many of the "rules of war" are intended to create lots of wounded, creating lots of costs for the enemy.
I just find it funny/sad that the question about this topic seems to be "which group of psychopaths should ultimately wind up with the deadly weapons in this particular geographic area?"
If you have new scholarship that presents a different ancestral homeland of the Jews, then by all means let's hear it.
The Jews, the Hebrews, or the Israelites? Those are all different groups; it's important not to confer the expectations of rights on them equally.
That aside, how long are rights good for? The Dutch settlers bought temporary 'additional use' rights for the island of Manhattan (for about $1000 in current value), possibly even from a nomadic tribe that just happened to be transiting Lenape land, yet their descendants have since claimed absolute jurisdiction to the land. Should that land be returned to the Lenape at this point?
and all the small oil producing countries aligning themselves with whoever replaces the US.
How much does the US's most hated adversary pay per barrel of oil?
Some day we may not be dependent on the middle east oil, and may that day come soon, but it is not here yet.
Shell has the technology to gassify natural gas into diesel and gasoline for $30/barrel. They are doing it in the middle east already. The US is now known as the "Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas" and the government won't permit new gassification plants to be built.
You tell me where the real strings of power are being pulled.
He did, arguably and depending on your perspective, as much harm as the original "crimes" he revealed.
No, the State has admitted that his disclosures did not lead to any deaths.
You don't just share 10,000 secret documents without at least reading them first.
Manning left that job up to journalists. He first tried to leak directly to the NYT, as Ellsberg had done and they rebuffed him. He then went to Wikileaks, which arranged a consortium of newspapers (El PaÃs, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, The Guardian and The New York Times) to analyze, redact, and publish the information responsibly.
Snowden, perhaps reflecting his age and experience, is doing exactly that.
Why is Snowden more qualified to determine what's right and wrong to publish than a group of experienced journalists?
So while I feel strongly that any crimes revealed by Manning should be prosecuted, I also feel that he needs to go away for a while.
But that's not how it works. If Manning revealed crimes, then he is to be afforded, by law, whistleblower protection. In fact, he did reveal crimes, has been denied those protections, and those who committed the highest crimes are walking around with huge pensions and stock options for doing so.
Absolute bullshit. It's been done before, and it's never worked.
Lincoln was pretty successful with locking up hundreds of editors of newspapers who published against his war of domination against the Confederate States of America. Heck, so much so that schools still teach that he was a hero for causing the murders of nearly a million Americans. Even FDR couldn't wreak that much mayhem.
So you think all the government files should be public? Somehow I'm thinking the lists of double agents and the nuclear weapons codes might be things we don't want to post.
Perhaps the problem then is having nuclear weapons and double agents, not government accountability.
But go ahead and escalate in a positive feedback loop until the whole thing collapses instead...
I happened to be at a bank yesterday, inquiring about a bank transfer. Turns out it was cheaper for me to get a bank check and overnight it than it would be to do a bank transfer, and the bank transfer wasn't even guaranteed to be complete within 24 hours.
The young teller thought the system was as odd as I did ("hey, I just work here") and was more interested in asking me about nuclear transmutation in star formation than banking (my strange little world...) but I have to assume that when the banks are 20 years behind Western Union and Walmart that their systems are too. I wouldn't expect 20 year old systems to be robust against attack and it would surprise me if they put much effort into otherwise defending them.
Nothing short of humanity committing mass suicide will ever make them happy.
But that's already predicted to happen, at least on a grand scale.
As education and technology improves the birth rate decreases. Worldwide population is expected to spike to over 10 billion, due to increasing age, before declining to below current levels.
If... actually this is ironic... the only way this could go awry is if humans decide to decrease their level of technology on purpose. Which is basically what the carbon taxes are about. So basically these people are asking to get the opposite of what they want because they think they're sooo smart but don't consider second, third and beyond -level effects.
What we actually need to do is to push as hard as possible on the economy, creating excess wealth, some of which will fund additional science (the more the better IMO) and rapidly get to the point of having sustainable non-fossil fuels (safe nuclear (eventually fusion), static towers, convection chimneys, perhaps solar, etc.). This stuff is only going to happen organically, not by some industrial model of the population where a few self-appointed "smart people" tell everybody else what to do.
Stalling out the economy will produce exactly the opposite effect of what these people claim to want. Which makes me question what they really want.
It's not, though - that's basically the crux of the current arguments. The sensitivity of the various variables in the model are unclear because many of the underlying mechanisms and confounding variables (e.g. cloud formation) are poorly understood. Many of the theories are built on models which are built on theories - the assumptions become self-embedding, not built from first-principles.
We'd have a model that makes great predictions if we understood all that stuff. Imagine if a bunch of physicists got together and proposed a grand unification theory that they were confident about, thought we should make policy decisions based on (because, "or else") but they were still unable to use their model to make useful predictions.
Heck, I was showing my grandparents, who lived near the ocean, some simulator models that were published in the late 90's. By those models, the oceans were going to be lapping at their front steps by a year and a half from now. If the ocean level has risen at all, it's in the range of millimeters. They looked at it and told me to be careful to not believe everything somebody who has an agenda says.
I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
The trouble is that most people overestimate themselves - for instance in matters of spelling and capitalization. They often don't even notice the errors they're making. Yet they want us to believe they are the best navigators of two tons of steel traveling at high velocities.
Personally, I'm still kicking myself for a fender bender with a guard rail on an icy curve twenty-two years ago, but it's the other drivers I worry about most of the time. Yes, those fine young lads who want to pay attention to everything but the road and still think they're in control of their vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides that, if you have enough people willing to die to win a revolution, you probably have enough support to win an election.
Actually, the numbers don't work out quite so intuitively. At the start of the American Secession, only about 17% of the population was strongly in favor of separating from the Crown. A similar percentage was strongly in favor of remaining subjects. The rest just tended to go along with the status quo, pretty much the same as today.
He might not have started it, but he has the power to stop it
That's quite an assumption. Why, because the Constitution says so? We're dealing with very bad people who don't care about the Constitution or the Rule of Law.
Oh, right, Kennedy had the power to re-establish the silver standard.
Surprisingly, Ground Zero not the saddest place on Earth -- that's reserved for Wall Street.
Unlikely, given that the only thing that Wall Street likes more than money is cocaine.
Stuck in bed for a month or two due to a car accident? This is for you.
Also para- or quadriplegics, who often wind up with consequences of not being able to stay in shape.
And as you know, it's those who win the wars who write the history books. I don't think that had much to do with the journalists he jailed.
The North didn't win easily. If there had been significant public opposition during the last two years, there might not have been enough resources (including troops) to defeat the South. Having the newspapers as propaganda pieces during that period certainly had a benefit for the continuing war effort.
It's, of course, very hard to say what might have been.
If photovoltaics or fusion ever really get huge, we'll be stuck with it. Useless except as chemical feedstock.
Exactly right. We're paying a war premium now and we won't have a long-term benefit from holding back. It's lose-lose. Except for the oil corporations who contribute heavily to the politicians.
Simply pushing hard on the economy won't work.
Globalization means companies will keep moving to the lowest-wage, lowest-regulation, most-corrupt countries.
You can't call that economic maximization, but your point is well taken. Getting rid of corporations would be a great step towards healing the world society.
Second of all... have you done the math on how long it will take the human population to decrease as a result of the declining birth rate?
This is a well-studied problem. Check out this TED Talk.
And compare that to how quickly the carbon footprint of the middle class is rising? Do the math... then talk.
Oh, we have the technology to address that now. The Argone integral fast reactor ran perfectly for years, and then the project was killed by Clinton/Gore/Kerry (with a complicit O'Leary). By 2013 we should have been running thousands of them, cleaning up all the existing nuclear waste (which is a separate disaster). There is enough extant waste to power all of the world's electric needs for the rest of this century.
Branson has been trying to get permits from the Obama administration to do just that - Virgin Electric, cleaning up the world's nuclear waste and providing clean energy. He *can't even get a meeting* with them, after years of trying. And by default it's not permitted.
This is entirely a political problem, retarding the natural march of technology. Unfortunately, those in power seem to want to push more humans back into a lower standard of living than to see the world blossom with a world-wide 'upper' class.
Cool tip, thanks. Not relevant in this case, but we do have a few national banks in the area and it might come up again.
Many of the "rules of war" are intended to create lots of wounded, creating lots of costs for the enemy.
I just find it funny/sad that the question about this topic seems to be "which group of psychopaths should ultimately wind up with the deadly weapons in this particular geographic area?"
If you have new scholarship that presents a different ancestral homeland of the Jews, then by all means let's hear it.
The Jews, the Hebrews, or the Israelites? Those are all different groups; it's important not to confer the expectations of rights on them equally.
That aside, how long are rights good for? The Dutch settlers bought temporary
'additional use' rights for the island of Manhattan (for about $1000 in current value), possibly even from a nomadic tribe that just happened to be transiting Lenape land, yet their descendants have since claimed absolute jurisdiction to the land. Should that land be returned to the Lenape at this point?
the Arabs basically didn't care much for that area originally
other than the ones living there - amirite?
and all the small oil producing countries aligning themselves with whoever replaces the US.
How much does the US's most hated adversary pay per barrel of oil?
Some day we may not be dependent on the middle east oil, and may that day come soon, but it is not here yet.
Shell has the technology to gassify natural gas into diesel and gasoline for $30/barrel. They are doing it in the middle east already. The US is now known as the "Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas" and the government won't permit new gassification plants to be built.
You tell me where the real strings of power are being pulled.
He did, arguably and depending on your perspective, as much harm as the original "crimes" he revealed.
No, the State has admitted that his disclosures did not lead to any deaths.
You don't just share 10,000 secret documents without at least reading them first.
Manning left that job up to journalists. He first tried to leak directly to the NYT, as Ellsberg had done and they rebuffed him. He then went to Wikileaks, which arranged a consortium of newspapers (El PaÃs, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, The Guardian and The New York Times) to analyze, redact, and publish the information responsibly.
Snowden, perhaps reflecting his age and experience, is doing exactly that.
Why is Snowden more qualified to determine what's right and wrong to publish than a group of experienced journalists?
So while I feel strongly that any crimes revealed by Manning should be prosecuted, I also feel that he needs to go away for a while.
But that's not how it works. If Manning revealed crimes, then he is to be afforded, by law, whistleblower protection. In fact, he did reveal crimes, has been denied those protections, and those who committed the highest crimes are walking around with huge pensions and stock options for doing so.
Absolute bullshit. It's been done before, and it's never worked.
Lincoln was pretty successful with locking up hundreds of editors of newspapers who published against his war of domination against the Confederate States of America. Heck, so much so that schools still teach that he was a hero for causing the murders of nearly a million Americans. Even FDR couldn't wreak that much mayhem.
So you think all the government files should be public? Somehow I'm thinking the lists of double agents and the nuclear weapons codes might be things we don't want to post.
Perhaps the problem then is having nuclear weapons and double agents, not government accountability.
But go ahead and escalate in a positive feedback loop until the whole thing collapses instead...
NH, 2006, because that's we roll. Floridians should be ashamed of their Peeping Tom government.
I worked for Unisys and one of its predecessors for 24 years
Ah, you can settle a question for me then ... my daughter is always wondering if a flying horned horse is a Pegacorn or a Unisys.
Was this ever a part of the Unisys name?
I happened to be at a bank yesterday, inquiring about a bank transfer. Turns out it was cheaper for me to get a bank check and overnight it than it would be to do a bank transfer, and the bank transfer wasn't even guaranteed to be complete within 24 hours.
The young teller thought the system was as odd as I did ("hey, I just work here") and was more interested in asking me about nuclear transmutation in star formation than banking (my strange little world...) but I have to assume that when the banks are 20 years behind Western Union and Walmart that their systems are too. I wouldn't expect 20 year old systems to be robust against attack and it would surprise me if they put much effort into otherwise defending them.
Marriage makes you fat
You know what they say, the #1 food that makes people obese is wedding cake.
Nothing short of humanity committing mass suicide will ever make them happy.
But that's already predicted to happen, at least on a grand scale.
As education and technology improves the birth rate decreases. Worldwide population is expected to spike to over 10 billion, due to increasing age, before declining to below current levels.
If ... actually this is ironic ... the only way this could go awry is if humans decide to decrease their level of technology on purpose. Which is basically what the carbon taxes are about. So basically these people are asking to get the opposite of what they want because they think they're sooo smart but don't consider second, third and beyond -level effects.
What we actually need to do is to push as hard as possible on the economy, creating excess wealth, some of which will fund additional science (the more the better IMO) and rapidly get to the point of having sustainable non-fossil fuels (safe nuclear (eventually fusion), static towers, convection chimneys, perhaps solar, etc.). This stuff is only going to happen organically, not by some industrial model of the population where a few self-appointed "smart people" tell everybody else what to do.
Stalling out the economy will produce exactly the opposite effect of what these people claim to want. Which makes me question what they really want.
The greenhouse effect is well understood.
It's not, though - that's basically the crux of the current arguments. The sensitivity of the various variables in the model are unclear because many of the underlying mechanisms and confounding variables (e.g. cloud formation) are poorly understood. Many of the theories are built on models which are built on theories - the assumptions become self-embedding, not built from first-principles.
We'd have a model that makes great predictions if we understood all that stuff. Imagine if a bunch of physicists got together and proposed a grand unification theory that they were confident about, thought we should make policy decisions based on (because, "or else") but they were still unable to use their model to make useful predictions.
Heck, I was showing my grandparents, who lived near the ocean, some simulator models that were published in the late 90's. By those models, the oceans were going to be lapping at their front steps by a year and a half from now. If the ocean level has risen at all, it's in the range of millimeters. They looked at it and told me to be careful to not believe everything somebody who has an agenda says.
also denigrating the character of System Administrators as a class, that they would betray their country over a job
Quite the opposite - they appear more likely than typical to betray their job for their country.
... 100% of potential leakers are now 90% sure that they're going to lose their job anyway.
Carry on, NSA.
I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
The trouble is that most people overestimate themselves - for instance in matters of spelling and capitalization. They often don't even notice the errors they're making. Yet they want us to believe they are the best navigators of two tons of steel traveling at high velocities.
Personally, I'm still kicking myself for a fender bender with a guard rail on an icy curve twenty-two years ago, but it's the other drivers I worry about most of the time. Yes, those fine young lads who want to pay attention to everything but the road and still think they're in control of their vehicles.