The US needs to accept that you need a healthy balance between the state and the individual
"Balance" is the wrong word, but yes.
and that this balance can NEVER be achieved, you always will end up with a pendulum swinging back and forth.
Absolutely positively wrong. It is completely possible to achieve balance. With the right set of rules and by moving to a workable set of initial conditions, it is entirely possible to eliminate force from the system. It requires a lot of changes, but it is entirely achievable. Unfortunately, we are not moving in the direction of balance or of dampening the pendulum. To move in that direction would be to move closer to the initial founding principles of this country. Instead, we are speeding the pendulum up.
Things only go wrong if the pendulum is either hanging still or doesn't swing back.
No, no, no. "Hanging still" is the ideal state. I used to believe that it was not achievable. In the decade that I have spent watching the pendulum swing, and considering this problem, it has become clear to me that it is in fact achievable. Difficult, perhaps impossibly so, but theoretically possible.
There is one ideology. It is not the "middle path" or anything resembling a mish-mash of competing ideologies. It is a third way.
The likes of Goldman are neither clueless nor evil, merely self-interested. From what I understand, Goldman is one of the smaller firms on Wall Street, and they seem to have been one of the few to profit (legitimately, without bailouts) from the housing collapse. And it's important to realize that they did so by doing the right thing before any of the others, by divesting themselves of many mortgage backed securities and by hedging against the collapse of the market. If any of them are clueless, it's the larger banks (Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo) that rode the real estate market right off the cliff. If any of them are evil, it's the government-sponsored mortgage backers who encouraged (with stolen tax dollars) such a ridiculous mis-allocation of resources to begin with.
Furthermore, profiting by "betting" against mal-investment is in no way evil. Here's an analogy. Let's say you know someone who discovers a coal mine in his backyard. And he says that he'd rather not go to the trouble of developing the mine and selling the coal to produce electricity or heat houses or whatever. He'd rather just ignite it to burn off underground.
You clearly recognize that this is an economic waste, a mis-allocation of resources, an increase of entropy with no discernible benefit to anyone. So you tie him up and rob him of his coal instead. You have saved an entire mine full of coal, and provided that benefit to the market and the economy, by preventing him from destroying this natural resource. This example is much more extreme than merely betting against some endeavour, it's actually physically preventing it. But is what you did evil? You prevented someone from destroying a valuable resource. If it required no physical force, would performing the same action using paper instruments or "betting" be evil?
What did he do exactly that makes people believe that he in any way represented the view that "government doesn't work."
He campaigned on exactly that premise, in a party that supposedly represented that ideal. And people voted for him because of it. And it turns out he completely lied out his ass.
Zombies in no way personify a fear of science and technology. They personify a fear of the elderly. Every American I have ever known to be preoccupied with zombies is a young person. The monsters of elderly Americans' generations were King Kong (Blacks) and, before that, Dracula (Jews).
Zombies are catatonic, un-dead creatures that forcibly feast on the brains of the living in the same way that elderly Americans forcibly rob younger generations of progress, instead co-opting the best and brightest to work to extend their lives indefinitely, turning them into zombies as well in an unsustainable, exponentially-growing process.
Sorry, I didn't read your entire post before responding. You're assuming they have some need to convert to floating point, which sounds completely retarded to me (not to mention a missile intercept system with a 0.1 second resolution). At this point, the utter incompetence of 90% of the US and it's military, educational system and most of it's industry is absolutely no surprise to me. Of course that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
Second, since 0.1 seconds are the baseline resolution of the system, the system should have been using floating point numbers where '1' corresponds to a decisecond rather than a second.
As far as I can tell, science and engineering are just as much "world destruction" careers as any other, insofar as they exist and work almost completely in support of the US military.
"The market" doesn't exist. It's a shell game of FED money printing designed to concentrate capital in the hands of the large banks and corporations that pay the most taxes and provide the most convenient levers for political control by the governing party.
the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering
I'd hate to interrupt your rant, but you should probably read the summary and realize that it doesn't actually contradict your anecdotal evidence.
But, hey, I dropped out of college so what do I know.
But for my money I would still rather have ten new scientists or technologists trying and failing than another sociologist telling me that it isn't worth trying.
a government willing to throw off the chains of industry and innovation that stifle equality of opportunity in the name of equality of outcome.
Productivity is enhanced by making the best use of scarce resources. Education (especially good education) is a limited resource. College is expensive in the US. Paying for ten new scientists to try and fail has a measurable cost to society, as well as to the scientists.
Teaching and working in industrial engineering are popular sideways career moves for IT people. There is still a market in the US for large-scale industrial engineering (heavy machinery, chemical processing, construction). It is typically a similar environment, lots of technical savvy required, not too much customer interaction, but with reasonable hours and less stress than the typical IT position. Teaching is an obvious move, since it is government subsidized, benefits from the recession, has a history of rising prices, and there are still lots of people out there willing to go into debt for the opportunity to learn about the magic of computing. Also, less stressful and typically lower paying than IT.
*encourage the creation of a market for the trade of CO2 as a resource for use in materials synthesis and biofuel production. This creates an economic incentive to capture CO2 and use it as a resource just like ancient microbes used the former cell toxin Oxygen as an electron acceptor.
Unless you are proposing transmutating CO2 into iron, there is absolutely no economical way to make this work. CO2 has been free for the taking (in large quantities) for several decades now, and the only economic use yet to be found involves massive greenhouses.
*set aside military funding for research into military applications of alternative fuels and waste reduction. The synthesis of aviation fuel from CO2 on board nuclear aircraft carriers as an example. The tech significantly reduces the nuclear aircraft carrier's vulnerability to attack on supply ships since it would produce its own aviation fuel.
Any scheme involving atmospheric CO2 would be several orders of magnitude less effective than synthesizing aviation fuel from a small, onboard supply of coal instead. In fact, I would be almost willing to bet that it would be more efficient to capture CO2 on land, sequester the carbon, put that on aircraft carriers and reverse the process than to try to capture CO2 at sea.
It's too popular to just throw money at a problem
Believe me, anything involving the US military will absolutely consist of just throwing money at the problem. Well, money and dead bodies, actually.
Quite insightful. There is no such a thing as a "circle" of life. Life is not a circle. It is a process of decay. Of course it's nuclear decay, actually, so the more cyclical aspects tend to dominate on human timescales.
It's lower than I assumed, but not insignificant. 13.8% of the land's "theoretical" (according to the article) energy production, for modern corn farming at least, is provided by fossil fuels. For the sake of simplicity, I guess we can say the rest is photosynthesis.
A corn-fed (or corn-fed-chicken-fed) dog would then require 15.7 gigajoules of fossil fuels, compared with the SUV's 55.1 gigajoules.
Of course, the SUV could be powered by renewable biofuels instead of fossil fuels.
Sorry, I'm not one to nitpick about copyleft. But in this case RMS's argument does in fact appear to hinge on an "extremely narrow" definition of free. MySQL is released under the GPLv2. GNU considers GPLv2 to be free. RMS should have no problem with this, regardless of who the owner is, right?
Wrong. RMS does have a problem with it. He makes a point to mention both GPLv2 and GPLv3. Why? Because everyone knows that the GPLv2 does not include the "freedom-enhancing" restrictions on usage that the GPLv3 does, and that these restrictions are especially pertinent to web software such as MySQL. Had the developers of MySQL chosen to distribute MySQL under GPLv3 instead of GPLv2, this may well have increased competition.
But, they didn't. So I fail to see how making a pitch for (realistically) a completely unrelated license to a regulatory agency could possibly convince them to intervene. It's like writing a letter to the FTC opposing Microsoft's acquisition of some [small_competitor] because, well if only [small_competitor] had released it's code as free software, there would have been more competition. Like I said, it is simply a bad argument regardless of your views of copyleft. His concerns are legitimate. There are certainly valid arguments to be made. This simply isn't one of them.
You are conflating a "usage" license with a "distribution" license. I agree that the former is completely inane. But the latter is a necessary extension of the concept of copyright, and the basis of the GPLv2.
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The US needs to accept that you need a healthy balance between the state and the individual
"Balance" is the wrong word, but yes.
and that this balance can NEVER be achieved, you always will end up with a pendulum swinging back and forth.
Absolutely positively wrong. It is completely possible to achieve balance. With the right set of rules and by moving to a workable set of initial conditions, it is entirely possible to eliminate force from the system. It requires a lot of changes, but it is entirely achievable. Unfortunately, we are not moving in the direction of balance or of dampening the pendulum. To move in that direction would be to move closer to the initial founding principles of this country. Instead, we are speeding the pendulum up.
Things only go wrong if the pendulum is either hanging still or doesn't swing back.
No, no, no. "Hanging still" is the ideal state. I used to believe that it was not achievable. In the decade that I have spent watching the pendulum swing, and considering this problem, it has become clear to me that it is in fact achievable. Difficult, perhaps impossibly so, but theoretically possible.
There is one ideology. It is not the "middle path" or anything resembling a mish-mash of competing ideologies. It is a third way.
The likes of Goldman are neither clueless nor evil, merely self-interested. From what I understand, Goldman is one of the smaller firms on Wall Street, and they seem to have been one of the few to profit (legitimately, without bailouts) from the housing collapse. And it's important to realize that they did so by doing the right thing before any of the others, by divesting themselves of many mortgage backed securities and by hedging against the collapse of the market. If any of them are clueless, it's the larger banks (Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo) that rode the real estate market right off the cliff. If any of them are evil, it's the government-sponsored mortgage backers who encouraged (with stolen tax dollars) such a ridiculous mis-allocation of resources to begin with.
Furthermore, profiting by "betting" against mal-investment is in no way evil. Here's an analogy. Let's say you know someone who discovers a coal mine in his backyard. And he says that he'd rather not go to the trouble of developing the mine and selling the coal to produce electricity or heat houses or whatever. He'd rather just ignite it to burn off underground.
You clearly recognize that this is an economic waste, a mis-allocation of resources, an increase of entropy with no discernible benefit to anyone. So you tie him up and rob him of his coal instead. You have saved an entire mine full of coal, and provided that benefit to the market and the economy, by preventing him from destroying this natural resource. This example is much more extreme than merely betting against some endeavour, it's actually physically preventing it. But is what you did evil? You prevented someone from destroying a valuable resource. If it required no physical force, would performing the same action using paper instruments or "betting" be evil?
What did he do exactly that makes people believe that he in any way represented the view that "government doesn't work."
He campaigned on exactly that premise, in a party that supposedly represented that ideal. And people voted for him because of it. And it turns out he completely lied out his ass.
Google search: Godzilla personify
http://www.popmatters.com/features/godzilla/1ward.shtml
Godzilla personifies Japan's nuclear-age anxiety and stems directly from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II
Sounds reasonable.
Zombies in no way personify a fear of science and technology. They personify a fear of the elderly. Every American I have ever known to be preoccupied with zombies is a young person. The monsters of elderly Americans' generations were King Kong (Blacks) and, before that, Dracula (Jews).
Zombies are catatonic, un-dead creatures that forcibly feast on the brains of the living in the same way that elderly Americans forcibly rob younger generations of progress, instead co-opting the best and brightest to work to extend their lives indefinitely, turning them into zombies as well in an unsustainable, exponentially-growing process.
"You'll eat your young." --some American
Sorry, I didn't read your entire post before responding. You're assuming they have some need to convert to floating point, which sounds completely retarded to me (not to mention a missile intercept system with a 0.1 second resolution). At this point, the utter incompetence of 90% of the US and it's military, educational system and most of it's industry is absolutely no surprise to me. Of course that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
And thats much diffrent then now, how exactly?
You see, with the government funding them to complain about how the government "isn't doing enough", they'll still be here in three years.
Second, since 0.1 seconds are the baseline resolution of the system, the system should have been using floating point numbers where '1' corresponds to a decisecond rather than a second.
Integer you mean?
banking and other world destruction careers
As far as I can tell, science and engineering are just as much "world destruction" careers as any other, insofar as they exist and work almost completely in support of the US military.
"The market" doesn't exist. It's a shell game of FED money printing designed to concentrate capital in the hands of the large banks and corporations that pay the most taxes and provide the most convenient levers for political control by the governing party.
the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering
I'd hate to interrupt your rant, but you should probably read the summary and realize that it doesn't actually contradict your anecdotal evidence.
But, hey, I dropped out of college so what do I know.
Or raising interest rates on student loans?
But for my money I would still rather have ten new scientists or technologists trying and failing than another sociologist telling me that it isn't worth trying.
a government willing to throw off the chains of industry and innovation that stifle equality of opportunity in the name of equality of outcome.
Productivity is enhanced by making the best use of scarce resources. Education (especially good education) is a limited resource. College is expensive in the US. Paying for ten new scientists to try and fail has a measurable cost to society, as well as to the scientists.
But what if science doesn't pay the bills?
Beg for government bailout.
Teaching and working in industrial engineering are popular sideways career moves for IT people. There is still a market in the US for large-scale industrial engineering (heavy machinery, chemical processing, construction). It is typically a similar environment, lots of technical savvy required, not too much customer interaction, but with reasonable hours and less stress than the typical IT position. Teaching is an obvious move, since it is government subsidized, benefits from the recession, has a history of rising prices, and there are still lots of people out there willing to go into debt for the opportunity to learn about the magic of computing. Also, less stressful and typically lower paying than IT.
*encourage the creation of a market for the trade of CO2 as a resource for use in materials synthesis and biofuel production. This creates an economic incentive to capture CO2 and use it as a resource just like ancient microbes used the former cell toxin Oxygen as an electron acceptor.
Unless you are proposing transmutating CO2 into iron, there is absolutely no economical way to make this work. CO2 has been free for the taking (in large quantities) for several decades now, and the only economic use yet to be found involves massive greenhouses.
*set aside military funding for research into military applications of alternative fuels and waste reduction. The synthesis of aviation fuel from CO2 on board nuclear aircraft carriers as an example. The tech significantly reduces the nuclear aircraft carrier's vulnerability to attack on supply ships since it would produce its own aviation fuel.
Any scheme involving atmospheric CO2 would be several orders of magnitude less effective than synthesizing aviation fuel from a small, onboard supply of coal instead. In fact, I would be almost willing to bet that it would be more efficient to capture CO2 on land, sequester the carbon, put that on aircraft carriers and reverse the process than to try to capture CO2 at sea.
It's too popular to just throw money at a problem
Believe me, anything involving the US military will absolutely consist of just throwing money at the problem. Well, money and dead bodies, actually.
You're right. The article isn't really talking about "environmental impact". That was the wrong phrase to use. Just energy usage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWOoqmrOCH8
Your post reminds me of this guy.
My first reaction was that I'll believe this article when I see bands of stray SUV's roaming the neighborhood.
Of course that may not be as far off as we think.
Quite insightful. There is no such a thing as a "circle" of life. Life is not a circle. It is a process of decay. Of course it's nuclear decay, actually, so the more cyclical aspects tend to dominate on human timescales.
The environmental impact of all the workers who built the car (and their dogs) is included in the price.
It's lower than I assumed, but not insignificant. 13.8% of the land's "theoretical" (according to the article) energy production, for modern corn farming at least, is provided by fossil fuels. For the sake of simplicity, I guess we can say the rest is photosynthesis.
A corn-fed (or corn-fed-chicken-fed) dog would then require 15.7 gigajoules of fossil fuels, compared with the SUV's 55.1 gigajoules.
Of course, the SUV could be powered by renewable biofuels instead of fossil fuels.
The grains fed to farm animals and dogs are most certainly fertilized with fossil fuels.
Grass-fed beef and organic chicken are far too expensive for pet food.
Sorry, I'm not one to nitpick about copyleft. But in this case RMS's argument does in fact appear to hinge on an "extremely narrow" definition of free. MySQL is released under the GPLv2. GNU considers GPLv2 to be free. RMS should have no problem with this, regardless of who the owner is, right?
Wrong. RMS does have a problem with it. He makes a point to mention both GPLv2 and GPLv3. Why? Because everyone knows that the GPLv2 does not include the "freedom-enhancing" restrictions on usage that the GPLv3 does, and that these restrictions are especially pertinent to web software such as MySQL. Had the developers of MySQL chosen to distribute MySQL under GPLv3 instead of GPLv2, this may well have increased competition.
But, they didn't. So I fail to see how making a pitch for (realistically) a completely unrelated license to a regulatory agency could possibly convince them to intervene. It's like writing a letter to the FTC opposing Microsoft's acquisition of some [small_competitor] because, well if only [small_competitor] had released it's code as free software, there would have been more competition. Like I said, it is simply a bad argument regardless of your views of copyleft. His concerns are legitimate. There are certainly valid arguments to be made. This simply isn't one of them.
You are conflating a "usage" license with a "distribution" license. I agree that the former is completely inane. But the latter is a necessary extension of the concept of copyright, and the basis of the GPLv2.