"Libertarians of all stripes... from Rand's Objectivists to the Austrian School people... place property rights as the most precious of liberties."
And that's where I part ways with libertarianism as a philosophy, because 'property' is often defined as 'the right to control OTHER people's use of their time and labour, as long as something I supposedly 'own' was involved.'.
This is the definition of 'property' which is, strictly speaking, theft. Because it's not about me using my stuff and living my life - it's about you using stuff which I say is 'mine' (even though I may well be an absentee landlord) and therefore me scooping up and controlling the fruits of your labour without doing anything to earn it.
It's a subtle distinction between the two types of 'property' but one which has far-reaching implications.
"copyright is legal protection for the result of intellectual labor. "
Not quite. It's actually legal protection for *extracting money from other people's intellectual labour derived from your own*. This rent-seeking, however, doesn't logically follow from the act intellectual labour in the first place.
The result of intellectual labour is just information. Information can't be destroyed by incorporation into another person's intellectual work. It's valuable in its own right and is its own reward.
The only thing which can be so 'taken' or 'pirated' is the original labourer's supposed 'right' to extract rent from their 'property'. But this is not a natural 'right' - it's a social bonus, over and on top of the value of creating the information in the first place (which is never taken away), which is only meaningful within certain very narrow views of trade and exchange (since information can't actually be exchanged, only copied), and which can only be granted by restricting other people's intellectual freedom.
It's a very dangerous 'right' to try to absolutise, because the absolute 'right' to other people's use of information leads to absolute mental tyranny.
"Big, bloated, inefficient government leads to big, bloated, inefficient corps"
Or vice-versa. There's nothing especially privileged about "government" vs "corporation" - both are large human organisations with the associated problems - except that a corporation's duty is to make money for its shareholders while a government's duty is to do whatever all its citizens agree on.
If you have a minority who want to abuse a majority, they may well find it easier to do so by taking control of a corporation which doesn't even need to pay lipservice to democracy, than by taking control of a government.
But if they do want to take control of a government, the easiest sector to dominate will be the military, which already is based around top-down command/control and secrecy. And if you have a military which does secret, large-dollar deals with equally secret corporations - then that's a hotbed of corruption and abuse right there.
To the extent that libertarians/conservatives notice this huge democracy and freedom gap in both the military and corporate sectors (and some of them, like the Antiwar.com folks, do - others like the Heritage Foundation, not so much, it's a huge blind spot) then I'm in agreement.
"Libertarians argue that free markets and robust civil society are good for the poor precisely because they are bottom-up, participatory structures that give every individual the opportunity to make the most of their own lives."
And despite being a critic of capitalism, I'd agree with this - to the extent to which it is true.
Free markets, when all the participants are small-scale, *are* bottom-up, participatory structures.
The problem is that they don't often stay that way for long. Completely free markets also have a systemic tendency toward rewarding predatory behaviour, and full-fledged 'capitalism' - that is, secondary rent-seeking and profiting from others' work via the consolidation and ownership of productive capital in private hands - makes it even worse. Such 'markets' tend to quickly consolidate into oligarchies or cartels, because competition is unstable and rewards winning - where 'winning' means 'removing the competition'.
Look at history and see this happening. Look at microcomputing circa 1980, or the Web circa 1995. A new market opens up: a whole bunch of small-time, hobbyist Mom-n-Pop players jump in. It's great! It's exciting. It's open. Anyone can stake a claim. Anyone does. There's a boom. Then overshoot. Then a crunch. Then the big boys wade in, buy up the survivors, consolidate, start 'vertical integration', and we're down to two or three major players. Then two. Then, maybe, one. And people who have fond memories of the original free, open marketplace vibe get called 'socialists' and 'freedom-haters' because they see all their freedom being siphoned up into big capital ventures and not given back.
There is a systemic problem with the idea of *capital* - that money should agglomerate and concentrate and that those with more money deserve to 'make' exponentially more money (where 'make' isn't the right word since that money actually gets taken from all the small players and redistributed upward). This 'capital' syndrome actively works *against* the free, open dynamics of the marketplace. It's a concentrative rather than distributive force. This is why 'socialists' often call for 'redistribution of wealth' downard in order to rebalance the equation. Granted, once in power many socialist governments do the exact opposite - but that doesn't make the problem go away.
We can have open, marketplace-like structures, I think, without the competitive, winner-take-all aspect of the current capitalist model, and especially without the rent-seeking behaviour of using money to make money, which actively destroys the openness of a market. But we have to be clear that we need these, and work out ways for them to arise. And doing so will actively rub the wrong way those few people who make billions out of leveraging capital's power to dominate.
"Money is the only tool we have to express value in something. "
And that in itself might be a problem if money does not in fact accurately reflect the actual value of things.
"If everything has the same value, then it is worthless."
Not necessarily. It might just be not able to be valued. Subtle distinction until you lose, say, drinkable water from the biosphere and realise that it was actually worth a very large sum of money, just that it happened to not be accounted for in any transactions.
Some things, money is not a good measure of. The evil comes in when we start aggressively optimising our lifestyle to increase an inaccurate measure of worth.
tl;dr: Money's fine as long as you realise it's as useful an indicator of true worth as high school popularity.
"If it's more convenient to shoehorn every activity into a single monolithic application than "switch between applications," then your desktop environment is built wrong."
And yes, it is.
The problem is that we have an emphasis on "applications" instead of on data. This assumes that data divides cleanly into task silos, doesn't ever share between tasks, and is only ever accessed with a rigidly defined set of operations.
And that's increasingly not true. What we need is a desktop environment that understands that data is something to be shared aggressively between tasks and views, where every window can be an aggregator of sorts.
Something like Étoilé, perhaps, as a start. If Raindrop is a step towards that then cool.
"In other words, he wants to take any program installed on his real machine and say "run this in a virtual environment cloned from my existing real environment"."
It seems to me this is exactly the sort of capability that should be a basic fundamental thing that an OS does. Instead of being a big ball of soup that lets pretty much any program write anywhere, and then tries to impose security reactively over the top. It should start out with '1. Every process can be a full machine or system/network equivalent, 2. Processes can be arbitrarily small or arbitrarily large, 3. No process can overwrite any other process without permission' and see where we get from there.
Of course that would give us an architecture very unlike Unix - maybe a little like Plan 9 - so a lot of redesign is in order, but I think the prevalence of virtual machines as an ad-hoc, coarse-grained solution should be telling us that our foundations are a little crooked.
"The bottom line is that the paint was paid for each time it was applies. The building was paid for each time it was built, maintained, or expanded. If you build ten buildings, you will have to pay for ten buildings. If you paint it ten times, you will have to pay ten times."
Right, but paint wears out. So it's entirely natural to charge each time it gets repainted. Music - as idea or information - doesn't. So is it natural to try to pretend that it's a physical thing and impose an artificial scarcity on it, as if every time someone hears a song, a music pixie dies and must be replaced?
This is the fundamental problem: information replicates at zero cost, matter doesn't. Matter, it makes sense to swap for another piece of matter. Information.... doesn't. You can't 'swap' information, you can only copy it, and now you have two ideas where before you had one. But our economic system is built on swapping matter and therefore assumes that information must be a 'good' whose sale must be strictly regulated so that the music pixies don't burn out.
But there are no music pixes and never were. There is a need to fund the creation of NEW information - but there's no need to keep funding the replication old information. It does that part by itself. So make that work FOR us, not against us.
"Songwriters are the ones who get compensated for this, and rightfully so: people are using the fruits of their labor (music) to help sell merchandise."
Er, but why is this "rightful"? The "fruit of your labour" was intellectual - the music you created, which is an idea that you gave to the whole universe. You and the whole universe still have that, and will eternally. It was produced once, it can't be destroyed. Ideas are not consumable goods.
What you're saying you're entitled to is the fruits of SOMEONE ELSE's labour - their use of your music to sell their merchandise. Why are you entitled to this?
Or by 'fruits' do you mean 'everything done or created by anyone, anywhere, that was influenced in any way by my music, eternally until the end of time?'
Because that's a heck of a lot of other people's labour you're claiming as your personal 'fruit' - and if you look the other way, your music was equally influenced by a heck of a lot of people. Did you use a blues riff? You morally owe every blues singer you quoted. Did you use the Well-Tempered Clavier scale? You owe Bach. Do you really want to be running those numbers?
"Governments eliminating, at its discretion, groups that influence it, or are merely perceived to, hasn't worked out too well historically."
s/government/any human group
There's nothing intrinsically special or horrible about 'government'. There's a natural monopoly on dominance; any group which has a competitive relationship with some other group (or even idea) become a 'governing' power. And often, this happens because it's the most efficient solution to a coordination problem. Chaos and duplication make life hard, so there are systemic pressures for someone, anyone, to make a decision. Corporations, movements, causes, parties, churches, gangs - everything starts out as an association of individuals around a common cause, then moves into competition with causes which it feels opposed to. And different groups will have different governing structures.
This gets really tricky, because the natural reaction to a regime or power bloc that you hate is to immediately set up your own counter-movement to overthrow it. Which is logical, but what often happens is that because regimes are emergent things, arising from the logic of conflict and control, and just wanting something doesn't automatically get you there unless you work for it, any movement born in conflict is likely to model itself on the same power structures it opposes. To take down the State you need to build a revolutionary militia; the militia to be efficient and survive needs centralised command and secrecy; pretty soon you've created a microcosm of the state you're opposing.
Because the visible government isn't actually what you're wanting to oppose: it's the *idea* of a government which is a much more nebulous thing. Take down one State (or class, or race, or religion) and the next biggest power group - a religion, a crime gang, a corporation, just anything that's organised - will step into the gap.
And the other side of the equation is that a lot of the functions of government, beside the exercise of dominance, are just the normal human actions of networking, information and resource sharing, and coordination. These are beneficial and have to get done somehow, and when you disrupt one government you often smash all that positive stuff as well as the negative. They're often so intertwined that it's really hard to tell where (eg) building hospitals and training medical workers ends, and (eg) deciding to euthanise the mentally ill and criminals 'for their own good' begins. Especially when you move into a wartime situation where there's a perceived existential threat to the race, the class, the movement, or the individuals.
The problem of violence is really hard to solve because it's so endemic to the human condition and goes right down to the individual level. It's not just something that emerges from group behaviour - it's there as our shadow at our very core, and most of our philosophy is based on the idea of judgement, choice, success vs failure - and right there you have all the legitimisation any amount of violence needs. It just needs to be seen as 'necessary for my/our survival' and any atrocity can be committed by any group.
As in, 'I say, what is that GNU/aweful noise? Do you have a licence for that iTune? Wolfram False? Well then, it's off to the Google Justoplex for you! Huzzah!!'
"People will then ask "what is WINE" and we can smugly say...
WINE Is Not an Emulator"
Q: So, what's this Wine thing? A: WINE Is Not An Emulator Q: Okay. What is it? A: It's not an emulator! Q: Right. So what is it then? A: WINE stands for WINE Is Not An Emulator. That's what it is. Q: Okay.... so I know what it isn't. What is it? A: Well it isn't an emulator. Whatever stories you've heard about emulation, they're all lies. Because Wine isn't an emulator. Q: It's not? A: No it most certainly is not. No emulation is occurring in any way, form or fashion. Nil, zip, nada. Emulation: not happening. Q: If it's not emulating... what is it doing? A: Something else, that's what. Something QUITE different from emulating, thank you very much. Q: Is it a simulator? A: Nope, it's not a simulator either. Q: A port then? A: Well. not a port as such, no. It's not just a recompile. Q:Not a drop-in replacement? A: No, it's a little different from.... what it's not emulating... so no, not quite a drop-in replacement. Q: An environment? An interface layer? A compatibility box? A: Yes, something like that. Not an emulator, but a layer... yes, perhaps a layer... Q: But it's a substitute, yes? An ersatz? A fake? A replica? A knockoff? A Clayton's beverage? A cheap facsimile of an expensive, unobtainable item? A: It's not an emulator! Q: Whats it not emulating? A: Well it's certainly not emulating Windows, that's for sure. Q: It's a Windows emulator, isn't it. A: Oh just go run Snow Leopard.
What is it with you Americans and your toxic aversion to sensible healthcare?
It's like you're *proud* of letting your poor rot, or something. Like you think money is intrinsically moral and only very bad people are poor. Hasn't the crash showed that idea to be false?
I wouldn't mind so much except that your models tend to get exported to the rest of the world. We in NZ went through the 'privatise all healthcare' wave in the 1990s when we swung hard right. It was not pretty and it hurt us badly.
It would be nice to think that America finally started caring for its weakest. Want moral influence in the world? That's one way.
"Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years."
Indeed. It's actually rather strange when you step back and look at it.
Newton gave us calculus, mechanics and kick-started the industrial revolution.
Maxwell in the 1860s produced a rich field of practical applications that we're still mining today.
Radioactivity and atomic theory in the late 1800s produced, well, very large bombs and power reactors which don't *always* kill people nastily. And a whole bunch of paradoxical complications which were 'solved' one by one in an ad-hoc manner leading to quantum mechanics.
Special relativity linked Maxwell and Newton and is used in a lot of engineering.
General relativity made gravitational maths vastly harder, predicted Mercury's precession and gravitational lensing (after a bit of fudging of the data), created cosmology which has no practical applications, led to Unified Field theory which... didn't work at all... and.... um. We'll get back to you in a billion years! Because that's the timescales it operates on! But it's useful, honest!
Quantum electrodynamics sorta-kinda linked SR and quantum mechanics, made the behaviour of light darn near impossible to think intuitively about, but seems to have led to useful results in microelectronics.
Quantum chromodynamics.... explains the results of collider experiments.... and.... well, because quarks don't exist unbound, there aren't any practical applications of that knowledge at all. But we need to build bigger colliders to generate more data to hand-tune our theory which explains the results of collider experiments. So we can tune our theory more. It's all useful, honest!
String theory... produces string theory, which produces string theory, which produces books complaining about string theory. It's useful, honest!
Even fun stuff like Bose-Einstein condensates are all using maths which dates back to the 1930s.
Post-1970s *engineering* has done amazing things applying and confirming existing theoretical models. But post-1970s theory doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. Isn't that odd? We had this huge Cambrian explosion in the 1800s to 1930s... then the tap just sort of dried up.
What's disturbing is not that post-1970 theory hasn't seemed to lead us anywhere, but that theoretical consensus has converged more and more on a deep pessimism about seeing any revolutionary changes. In the 1930s, the general air in physics seemed to be 'is your idea crazy enough to be true?' So we got science fiction. Now, it's 'ennh, there's a good reason why for any interesting X, we'll never be able to do that - Einstein/Feynman/Bohr deny it. Gravity control or cold fusion are only for crackpots. But give us billions for a new collider/tokamak anyway, just to prove that we can't do it. And stop bugging us for your jetpack, you'll never understand the maths anyway. Oh, and it's all useful, honest!'
Our best technology showpieces are still 1930s theory with 2000s engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
"Libertarians of all stripes... from Rand's Objectivists to the Austrian School people... place property rights as the most precious of liberties."
And that's where I part ways with libertarianism as a philosophy, because 'property' is often defined as 'the right to control OTHER people's use of their time and labour, as long as something I supposedly 'own' was involved.'.
This is the definition of 'property' which is, strictly speaking, theft. Because it's not about me using my stuff and living my life - it's about you using stuff which I say is 'mine' (even though I may well be an absentee landlord) and therefore me scooping up and controlling the fruits of your labour without doing anything to earn it.
It's a subtle distinction between the two types of 'property' but one which has far-reaching implications.
"copyright is legal protection for the result of intellectual labor. "
Not quite. It's actually legal protection for *extracting money from other people's intellectual labour derived from your own*. This rent-seeking, however, doesn't logically follow from the act intellectual labour in the first place.
The result of intellectual labour is just information. Information can't be destroyed by incorporation into another person's intellectual work. It's valuable in its own right and is its own reward.
The only thing which can be so 'taken' or 'pirated' is the original labourer's supposed 'right' to extract rent from their 'property'. But this is not a natural 'right' - it's a social bonus, over and on top of the value of creating the information in the first place (which is never taken away), which is only meaningful within certain very narrow views of trade and exchange (since information can't actually be exchanged, only copied), and which can only be granted by restricting other people's intellectual freedom.
It's a very dangerous 'right' to try to absolutise, because the absolute 'right' to other people's use of information leads to absolute mental tyranny.
"Big, bloated, inefficient government leads to big, bloated, inefficient corps"
Or vice-versa. There's nothing especially privileged about "government" vs "corporation" - both are large human organisations with the associated problems - except that a corporation's duty is to make money for its shareholders while a government's duty is to do whatever all its citizens agree on.
If you have a minority who want to abuse a majority, they may well find it easier to do so by taking control of a corporation which doesn't even need to pay lipservice to democracy, than by taking control of a government.
But if they do want to take control of a government, the easiest sector to dominate will be the military, which already is based around top-down command/control and secrecy. And if you have a military which does secret, large-dollar deals with equally secret corporations - then that's a hotbed of corruption and abuse right there.
To the extent that libertarians/conservatives notice this huge democracy and freedom gap in both the military and corporate sectors (and some of them, like the Antiwar.com folks, do - others like the Heritage Foundation, not so much, it's a huge blind spot) then I'm in agreement.
"Libertarians argue that free markets and robust civil society are good for the poor precisely because they are bottom-up, participatory structures that give every individual the opportunity to make the most of their own lives."
And despite being a critic of capitalism, I'd agree with this - to the extent to which it is true.
Free markets, when all the participants are small-scale, *are* bottom-up, participatory structures.
The problem is that they don't often stay that way for long. Completely free markets also have a systemic tendency toward rewarding predatory behaviour, and full-fledged 'capitalism' - that is, secondary rent-seeking and profiting from others' work via the consolidation and ownership of productive capital in private hands - makes it even worse. Such 'markets' tend to quickly consolidate into oligarchies or cartels, because competition is unstable and rewards winning - where 'winning' means 'removing the competition'.
Look at history and see this happening. Look at microcomputing circa 1980, or the Web circa 1995. A new market opens up: a whole bunch of small-time, hobbyist Mom-n-Pop players jump in. It's great! It's exciting. It's open. Anyone can stake a claim. Anyone does. There's a boom. Then overshoot. Then a crunch. Then the big boys wade in, buy up the survivors, consolidate, start 'vertical integration', and we're down to two or three major players. Then two. Then, maybe, one. And people who have fond memories of the original free, open marketplace vibe get called 'socialists' and 'freedom-haters' because they see all their freedom being siphoned up into big capital ventures and not given back.
There is a systemic problem with the idea of *capital* - that money should agglomerate and concentrate and that those with more money deserve to 'make' exponentially more money (where 'make' isn't the right word since that money actually gets taken from all the small players and redistributed upward). This 'capital' syndrome actively works *against* the free, open dynamics of the marketplace. It's a concentrative rather than distributive force. This is why 'socialists' often call for 'redistribution of wealth' downard in order to rebalance the equation. Granted, once in power many socialist governments do the exact opposite - but that doesn't make the problem go away.
We can have open, marketplace-like structures, I think, without the competitive, winner-take-all aspect of the current capitalist model, and especially without the rent-seeking behaviour of using money to make money, which actively destroys the openness of a market. But we have to be clear that we need these, and work out ways for them to arise. And doing so will actively rub the wrong way those few people who make billions out of leveraging capital's power to dominate.
It's the Layer 9 issues you really have to watch out for...
"Money is the only tool we have to express value in something. "
And that in itself might be a problem if money does not in fact accurately reflect the actual value of things.
"If everything has the same value, then it is worthless."
Not necessarily. It might just be not able to be valued. Subtle distinction until you lose, say, drinkable water from the biosphere and realise that it was actually worth a very large sum of money, just that it happened to not be accounted for in any transactions.
Some things, money is not a good measure of. The evil comes in when we start aggressively optimising our lifestyle to increase an inaccurate measure of worth.
tl;dr: Money's fine as long as you realise it's as useful an indicator of true worth as high school popularity.
"If it's more convenient to shoehorn every activity into a single monolithic application than "switch between applications," then your desktop environment is built wrong."
And yes, it is.
The problem is that we have an emphasis on "applications" instead of on data. This assumes that data divides cleanly into task silos, doesn't ever share between tasks, and is only ever accessed with a rigidly defined set of operations.
And that's increasingly not true. What we need is a desktop environment that understands that data is something to be shared aggressively between tasks and views, where every window can be an aggregator of sorts.
Something like Étoilé, perhaps, as a start. If Raindrop is a step towards that then cool.
"The left environmental movement seems to be using environmental concerns as a means to bash Capitalism"
You say that like it's a bad thing. :)
Last I checked, Capitalism (tm) seemed to be doing its best to bash the rest of the world.
mmm, bailout bonuses. Yum yum.
"Trusting in Jesus has nothing to do with irresponsibility - in fact, good land / environmental stewardship is a main point in Christian teaching"
++. E. F. Schumacher, one of the fathers of Green economics, would agree with you strongly.
I don't understand why in the USA Christianity has become such a fan of right-wing economics. Doesn't have much to do with Jesus' actual teaching IMO.
"The environment is not king of everything, people. "
Er, yes, it kind of is. By definition. No more environment, no more everything.
People's *understandings of* and *beliefs about* the environment, not so much.
"panels of researchers and industry experts with years of experience"
Industry expert being someone whose paycheck depends on there not being a problem with what their industry is doing, right?
Not surprisingly those "experts" tend to report that there isn't any problem with what their industry is doing.
Doc Brown called, he wants his DeLorean back. Forward. Returned to its original timeline.
"In other words, he wants to take any program installed on his real machine and say "run this in a virtual environment cloned from my existing real environment"."
It seems to me this is exactly the sort of capability that should be a basic fundamental thing that an OS does. Instead of being a big ball of soup that lets pretty much any program write anywhere, and then tries to impose security reactively over the top. It should start out with '1. Every process can be a full machine or system/network equivalent, 2. Processes can be arbitrarily small or arbitrarily large, 3. No process can overwrite any other process without permission' and see where we get from there.
Of course that would give us an architecture very unlike Unix - maybe a little like Plan 9 - so a lot of redesign is in order, but I think the prevalence of virtual machines as an ad-hoc, coarse-grained solution should be telling us that our foundations are a little crooked.
We had yore?
That must've been before I joined.
The Ubuntu Church does mass weddings now? That's better than some old CDs!
Oh, UNIFICATION Church. Wrong cult. Never mind then.
"I'm just trying to figure out the fascination."
2012 is the Millennium for kids who were too young to celebrate Y2K.
Shall we do it again in 2024? Seems like we need a good Doomsday every decade.
"The most commonly used correlation of the Gregorian Calendar and the Maya Calendar is the GMT correlation, after Goodwin, Martinez, Thompson"
So all this time, when I've set my computer to GMT... it's actually been setting it to Mayan Long Count time?
That explains all the Daylight Saving hassles I've been having.
"The bottom line is that the paint was paid for each time it was applies. The building was paid for each time it was built, maintained, or expanded. If you build ten buildings, you will have to pay for ten buildings. If you paint it ten times, you will have to pay ten times."
Right, but paint wears out. So it's entirely natural to charge each time it gets repainted. Music - as idea or information - doesn't. So is it natural to try to pretend that it's a physical thing and impose an artificial scarcity on it, as if every time someone hears a song, a music pixie dies and must be replaced?
This is the fundamental problem: information replicates at zero cost, matter doesn't. Matter, it makes sense to swap for another piece of matter. Information.... doesn't. You can't 'swap' information, you can only copy it, and now you have two ideas where before you had one. But our economic system is built on swapping matter and therefore assumes that information must be a 'good' whose sale must be strictly regulated so that the music pixies don't burn out.
But there are no music pixes and never were. There is a need to fund the creation of NEW information - but there's no need to keep funding the replication old information. It does that part by itself. So make that work FOR us, not against us.
"Songwriters are the ones who get compensated for this, and rightfully so: people are using the fruits of their labor (music) to help sell merchandise."
Er, but why is this "rightful"? The "fruit of your labour" was intellectual - the music you created, which is an idea that you gave to the whole universe. You and the whole universe still have that, and will eternally. It was produced once, it can't be destroyed. Ideas are not consumable goods.
What you're saying you're entitled to is the fruits of SOMEONE ELSE's labour - their use of your music to sell their merchandise. Why are you entitled to this?
Or by 'fruits' do you mean 'everything done or created by anyone, anywhere, that was influenced in any way by my music, eternally until the end of time?'
Because that's a heck of a lot of other people's labour you're claiming as your personal 'fruit' - and if you look the other way, your music was equally influenced by a heck of a lot of people. Did you use a blues riff? You morally owe every blues singer you quoted. Did you use the Well-Tempered Clavier scale? You owe Bach. Do you really want to be running those numbers?
"Governments eliminating, at its discretion, groups that influence it, or are merely perceived to, hasn't worked out too well historically."
s/government/any human group
There's nothing intrinsically special or horrible about 'government'. There's a natural monopoly on dominance; any group which has a competitive relationship with some other group (or even idea) become a 'governing' power. And often, this happens because it's the most efficient solution to a coordination problem. Chaos and duplication make life hard, so there are systemic pressures for someone, anyone, to make a decision. Corporations, movements, causes, parties, churches, gangs - everything starts out as an association of individuals around a common cause, then moves into competition with causes which it feels opposed to. And different groups will have different governing structures.
This gets really tricky, because the natural reaction to a regime or power bloc that you hate is to immediately set up your own counter-movement to overthrow it. Which is logical, but what often happens is that because regimes are emergent things, arising from the logic of conflict and control, and just wanting something doesn't automatically get you there unless you work for it, any movement born in conflict is likely to model itself on the same power structures it opposes. To take down the State you need to build a revolutionary militia; the militia to be efficient and survive needs centralised command and secrecy; pretty soon you've created a microcosm of the state you're opposing.
Because the visible government isn't actually what you're wanting to oppose: it's the *idea* of a government which is a much more nebulous thing. Take down one State (or class, or race, or religion) and the next biggest power group - a religion, a crime gang, a corporation, just anything that's organised - will step into the gap.
And the other side of the equation is that a lot of the functions of government, beside the exercise of dominance, are just the normal human actions of networking, information and resource sharing, and coordination. These are beneficial and have to get done somehow, and when you disrupt one government you often smash all that positive stuff as well as the negative. They're often so intertwined that it's really hard to tell where (eg) building hospitals and training medical workers ends, and (eg) deciding to euthanise the mentally ill and criminals 'for their own good' begins. Especially when you move into a wartime situation where there's a perceived existential threat to the race, the class, the movement, or the individuals.
The problem of violence is really hard to solve because it's so endemic to the human condition and goes right down to the individual level. It's not just something that emerges from group behaviour - it's there as our shadow at our very core, and most of our philosophy is based on the idea of judgement, choice, success vs failure - and right there you have all the legitimisation any amount of violence needs. It just needs to be seen as 'necessary for my/our survival' and any atrocity can be committed by any group.
As in, 'I say, what is that GNU/aweful noise? Do you have a licence for that iTune? Wolfram False? Well then, it's off to the Google Justoplex for you! Huzzah!!'
"People will then ask "what is WINE" and we can smugly say ...
WINE Is Not an Emulator"
Q: So, what's this Wine thing?
A: WINE Is Not An Emulator
Q: Okay. What is it?
A: It's not an emulator!
Q: Right. So what is it then?
A: WINE stands for WINE Is Not An Emulator. That's what it is.
Q: Okay.... so I know what it isn't. What is it?
A: Well it isn't an emulator. Whatever stories you've heard about emulation, they're all lies. Because Wine isn't an emulator.
Q: It's not?
A: No it most certainly is not. No emulation is occurring in any way, form or fashion. Nil, zip, nada. Emulation: not happening.
Q: If it's not emulating... what is it doing?
A: Something else, that's what. Something QUITE different from emulating, thank you very much.
Q: Is it a simulator?
A: Nope, it's not a simulator either.
Q: A port then?
A: Well. not a port as such, no. It's not just a recompile.
Q:Not a drop-in replacement?
A: No, it's a little different from.... what it's not emulating... so no, not quite a drop-in replacement.
Q: An environment? An interface layer? A compatibility box?
A: Yes, something like that. Not an emulator, but a layer... yes, perhaps a layer...
Q: But it's a substitute, yes? An ersatz? A fake? A replica? A knockoff? A Clayton's beverage? A cheap facsimile of an expensive, unobtainable item?
A: It's not an emulator!
Q: Whats it not emulating?
A: Well it's certainly not emulating Windows, that's for sure.
Q: It's a Windows emulator, isn't it.
A: Oh just go run Snow Leopard.
What is it with you Americans and your toxic aversion to sensible healthcare?
It's like you're *proud* of letting your poor rot, or something. Like you think money is intrinsically moral and only very bad people are poor. Hasn't the crash showed that idea to be false?
I wouldn't mind so much except that your models tend to get exported to the rest of the world. We in NZ went through the 'privatise all healthcare' wave in the 1990s when we swung hard right. It was not pretty and it hurt us badly.
It would be nice to think that America finally started caring for its weakest. Want moral influence in the world? That's one way.
"Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years."
Indeed. It's actually rather strange when you step back and look at it.
Newton gave us calculus, mechanics and kick-started the industrial revolution.
Maxwell in the 1860s produced a rich field of practical applications that we're still mining today.
Radioactivity and atomic theory in the late 1800s produced, well, very large bombs and power reactors which don't *always* kill people nastily. And a whole bunch of paradoxical complications which were 'solved' one by one in an ad-hoc manner leading to quantum mechanics.
Special relativity linked Maxwell and Newton and is used in a lot of engineering.
General relativity made gravitational maths vastly harder, predicted Mercury's precession and gravitational lensing (after a bit of fudging of the data), created cosmology which has no practical applications, led to Unified Field theory which... didn't work at all... and.... um. We'll get back to you in a billion years! Because that's the timescales it operates on! But it's useful, honest!
Quantum electrodynamics sorta-kinda linked SR and quantum mechanics, made the behaviour of light darn near impossible to think intuitively about, but seems to have led to useful results in microelectronics.
Quantum chromodynamics.... explains the results of collider experiments.... and.... well, because quarks don't exist unbound, there aren't any practical applications of that knowledge at all. But we need to build bigger colliders to generate more data to hand-tune our theory which explains the results of collider experiments. So we can tune our theory more. It's all useful, honest!
String theory... produces string theory, which produces string theory, which produces books complaining about string theory. It's useful, honest!
Even fun stuff like Bose-Einstein condensates are all using maths which dates back to the 1930s.
Post-1970s *engineering* has done amazing things applying and confirming existing theoretical models. But post-1970s theory doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. Isn't that odd? We had this huge Cambrian explosion in the 1800s to 1930s... then the tap just sort of dried up.
What's disturbing is not that post-1970 theory hasn't seemed to lead us anywhere, but that theoretical consensus has converged more and more on a deep pessimism about seeing any revolutionary changes. In the 1930s, the general air in physics seemed to be 'is your idea crazy enough to be true?' So we got science fiction. Now, it's 'ennh, there's a good reason why for any interesting X, we'll never be able to do that - Einstein/Feynman/Bohr deny it. Gravity control or cold fusion are only for crackpots. But give us billions for a new collider/tokamak anyway, just to prove that we can't do it. And stop bugging us for your jetpack, you'll never understand the maths anyway. Oh, and it's all useful, honest!'
Our best technology showpieces are still 1930s theory with 2000s engineering.
Something is wrong with this picture.
"Lots of theoretical results, you just can't see them. Hello, they're theoretical!"
If there are theoretical results we can't see, I think the word you're looking for is "classified".