"You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. "
So, a perfectly replicated microcosm of academic knowledge production, then.
"No parts are common to all robots...They all have the general idea that something electronic controls something mechanical. Beyond that vague idea, what they all have in common is... Umm... yeah, nothing at all, thats it.
Sure, that's how it is right now... but why is that state of affairs something that can't be improved?
Remember, before TCP/IP, we had a plethora of incompatible timesharing and packet-routing networks, and the thought of getting them to intercommunicate was also considered stupid for exactly the same reason.
Before the IBM PC (or the Altair/S-100 bus before it) we had incompatible machine architectures. If the IBM S/360 hadn't been so proprietary and if IBM hadn't practically abandoned the microprocessor market, it might have taken root there too.
Before Unix, we had multiple incompatible operating systems. Unix is pretty crap, but at least it gets you interfacing with hardware.
Without standardisation, progress is slow because people do reinvent the wheel each time. But that's no argument for not standardising what you can.
"this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square)."
"I'll say this though: most libertarian economists warn about the dangers of governments using policy to direct economic matters."
But that's a political point of view right there. It's akin to saying that Sector X of the economy (where X in this case == banking) should be above the law. Why? Well... just because we say so! It's our axiom that GOVERNMENT == BAD and FINANCE == GOOD!
Both government and finance are means of social control - and neither come from Mars but both execute with the consent of the people, and as the means of implementing the people's will. It's also valid to say that finance should not control people's lives any more than government should.
Do libertarian economists warn against the dangers of financial speculation wasting resources and causing gross mismanagement? But they should, if they're going to be honest. Economists should be both apolitical and afinancial.
However, "libertarians" often seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to money. They seem to think that money is a self-justifying power base which can do no wrong, unlike those evil Gubmint bureaucrats. But greed and power is greed and power no matter what the label on the suit.
"I'd agree with anything but 'quit trying to innovate' ? Why would anyone consider that?"
Because "innovate" is usually spelled "break compatibility, make all your contacts and historical data unreadable, experiment wildly at the user's expense with a risky protocol which does all sorts of things wrong, and lock you into one company's system".
Why would anyone want that?
Foundational services should NOT "innovate". They should continue being boring, predictable, dependable and secure. Innovate until you get it right, sure - but once you do get it right, don't ever change.
This of course is making the very old-school obsolete pre-post-modernist assumption that there exists a "right" way to do things - you know, how engineering used to be before the Internet era, when we actually made a virtue of NOT being buggy, insecure, and exploding in flames every five seconds.
"I don't know if there will be anything bigger than Twitter or Facebook, or how long they'll last but they will undoubtedly go down in history next to Email and IRC as far as breakthrough Internet communication methods."
"So you are saying that dumping water from one ocean to another would potentially lead to the development of new technologies? "
"Potentially" is an important word in that sentence.
What's happened to the space technologies that have ALREADY been paid for? Do we have any idea? NASA and USAF sure seem to have invested a whole lot of money doing.... stufff... which they don't seem to want to talk about and which never quite gets 'finished'.
"Investing in space tourism is investing in cheap access to space."
Yes, and?
Space is, by definition, a vacuum. A large empty hole filled with a whole lot of nothing.
What, precisely, do we gain by getting cheap access to cubic giga-miles of nothing?
Low gravity for manufacturing? Okay. What exactly are we going to manufacture that will justify the cost required to ship it up and down the well?
Solar radiation unfiltered by atmosphere? Okay. And after transferring to microwaves and building ground stations... why not just build solar cells on Earth?
Communications satellites? Sure, but we've got those already and filled up most of the GEO slots. Why do we need people there?
Excitement and fun for the obscenely rich? Okay. But how many multi-millionaires are there and what happens once they've all gone into orbit once?
Rocks and ores? Yes, but getting rocks down the well would either require expensive heavy-lift capacity or would be indistinguishable from orbital bombing, so creates a whole new category of weapon of mass destruction. And the ores we're likely to run out of soon on Earth are finnicky things like copper and cadmium and uranium. Are huge asteroids of boring nickel-iron actually *useful* except as a way of wiping continents off the map?
We'll use the space ore to build stuff in space, you say? Great. Why are we going to need space habitats to house? The miners? Excellent, then. A self-justifying economy with no return on investment. By the way, where are we going to get water and soil for those habitats from? Ice comets? Okay, but how are we getting out there? The Moon and Mars don't have much water, and what little they might have will be seized on by scientists looking for life before you can use it.
We'll fund it all with upfront investment and work it out later? Great, you just created the solar system's biggest speculative bubble and crash - or, if you then turn around to demand payment from your space colonists, you've just created a whole new generation of indentured space labour. Makes for a good Space Communist technothriller, but not good business sense.
We'll find weird space microbes on the Jovian moons then! And make medicines from them! Yes, well maybe we will and maybe we won't. There's no guarantee there's any life out there except ours. But gene-piracy seems like it might work - except, only if existing patent laws continue. What if gene patents go open-source in a few years?
Helium-3! We'll mine the Moon for it and later scoop Jupiter! Okay... but you need functioning fusion before Helium-3 is useful. We might get warp drive first. And even then, it might not pay for itself.
Warp drive! That's the ticket! Then we can find Earthlike biospheres and ransack them for new bioforms! Yes, that might work. Got a warp drive in your pocket anywhere? Or any theory that even suggests one is possible? Oh and then you'll have to deal with new diseases, but at least you'll have something resembling a Star Trek future. No warp drive... no space future, really.
But.... SPACE IS BIG you say! There so much stuff out there! There must be something! But Einstein says we can't get to much of any of it within a human lifetime. Big, empty, and slow. Or try your luck at kicking Einstein over. Major props if you can do that - many physicists have died trying.
Doing anything in space is orders of magnitude harder, riskier, slower, and more expensive and less fun than on Earth. Where's the orders of magnitude return? Heck, where's *any* return except for what we've got already: unmanned probes, satellites, and missiles?
"One day people will get it into their heads that money spent on the space program is spent pretty much exclusively on Earth where jobs are created, new technologies are developed, and countless other economic and social spin-offs are generated."
Are they, though?
I mean, yes of course that money is spent "on Earth" strictly speaking... but what it is spent *doing*? It's spent paying very specialised engineers to create very specialised one-off hardware which is tossed into space and thrown away. In the case of Apollo, even much of that Earth-based knowledge component *was* literally thrown away when the Shuttle became the new hotness. And now that Ares is the new hotness... and don't forget the X-30 National Aerospace Plane which Ronald Reagan said would be a "new Orient Express" and sat there burning a hole in the black budget for a couple decades.... is this knowledge building on anything? Is it going anywhere? *Why* is it important to be able to build rockets, other than to learn how to build better rockets?
It's often *claimed* that space research has spinoffs - but is that in fact true, and if true, is it relevant? Are the spinoffs in any reasonable proportion to the money spent? It's directly false in the case of Tang and it's also not the case for Teflon. These products were invented outside the space program and became associated with it - but they weren't spinoffs. Any high-tech endeavour would have created them. Why space?
If we employed a bunch of very smart people here on Earth to build a castle made out of cheese, we'd also promote a lot of rapid development in dairy-related construction techniques, and that money would recirculate back into local economies - etc, etc, etc. But we generally expect a bit more from a big project than just "people got paid and it doesn't matter what they got paid to do".
"Foisting class warfare stereotypes on sheeple who know no better is how leftists got into office"
No, I think you'll find it's having a hard-right President and Congress commit war crimes by launching an illegal war while crashing the economy which is what elects leftists into office.
In 2000, I was pretty much indifferent to the whole Gore vs Bush gridlock. "They're both the same," I said. "Republicans, Democrats, left and right... they all have the same policies." After all, could anyone be more meh than Clinton? Took him til 1999 to release the crypto export provisions. Invaded Yugoslavia. Slept around like a Frenchman. This Bush guy was talking about "humble" foreign policy. Okay, I thought. They're America, they might be screwing Russia over, and not removing their nukes fast enough, and still trying to control the world... but at least they're not outright stupid.
And then I watched in horror how much, much worse it could get - what happens when you have a Republican rather than Democratic president who "responds" in a lather of panic and pride to a fairly small terrorist incident. Kabloom! United Nations? What United Nations? We'll baldly lie outright to the world if we want! We're Mericka, eff yeah! Bombs away!
A few years later your party of choice picks about the scariest pair of gun-crazy candidates you could imagine to replace Bush, and the world goes "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. comma. Uniform. Sierra. Alpha? Hotel Tango Hotel? Over? Hello? Anyone in there, Major Tom?"
And then a miracle occurs.
And that's how come you have a quiet, intelligent, soft-spoken mixed-race Democrat representing you to the world. And the world breathed a sigh of relief and muttered "wow, and here we thought you Yanks really were a bunch of fascist jerks... guess we were wrong. When you've exhausted all other options, sometimes you do make the right choice. C'mon over here and give us a big, manly trade and arms reduction deal. We know we'll hate ourselves for it in the morning... but you're just so sexy right now!"
Yeah we know Obama's just JFK and Clinton reborn. We know he's stepped down Iraq just to ramp up Afghanistan. We know he's a master of the velvet glove of American imperialism instead of the naked iron fist. (Bush naked. Either of them. Brrrrrrrrr. Bad brain.)
But, well, he's half-black. And he got elected! That's, whuh, we still can't quite stop pinching ourselves. If you guys don't realise what a massive foreign policy boost you guys get just from having him there...wow.
And domestically, so he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet. But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP? We here in NZ look at American-style healthcare as a Very Very Bad Idea which we flirted with in the 1980s-90s, and thank goodness we didn't completely go that route. It looks like hell, and we're so glad we don't have the mess you now have to fix.
"WTF? Yes, all rich people hate community... When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell. "
Yep, that's pretty much word for word what Margaret Thatcher said in 1987:
"VMWare and Citrix are excellent applications, but there ought not be a great need for them. Much of the need comes from defects elsewhere."
Heck yeah!
Our concepts of "operating system" are so weird and clunky that it's a miracle our systems run at all. The older I get in IT the grumpier I get at how fundamentally broken things are - and worse, how we just accept the industry-wide state of brokenness as "normal" and hail as breakthroughs every hacky non-solution like OS virtualisation. Whatever happened to the early vision of objects, where we'd have fully mobile code, sensible clean interfaces, simple trustworthy primitives, and recursively composable systems all the way down to the instruction set?
"Well green groups are notoriously bad for simply not caring. They just hate on all solutions. "
No, it's more that like Richard Stallman they keep rudely pointing out whenever someone proposes a 'solution' that is in fact a bigger problem because it violates the laws of physics.
The free market doesn't like to hear that! The free market knows you can just keep drilling for oil forever! The free market knows cabbages grow just fine on oil-based herbicides and pesticides and hormones! The free market knows fresh water comes for free everywhere! The free market knows exponential growth can continue forever!
Until it doesnt, then the free market will abruptly come to the same conclusion those naysaying greens did 50 years ago: that infinite growth is in fact unsstainable. So yes, in the 'long run', as Keynes said, the market is self-correcting. It's just that there might be smarter ways of managing that correction than just let it all jump on us at once.
"If they want more people to take them seriously they need to grow up. They can't just point out problems, they have to start coming up with solutions."
They do. It's just that the solutions proposed - deindustrialisation, organics, fair trade - are considered unacceptable by the market.
And of course, the market always knows best. Until it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
"You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. "
So, a perfectly replicated microcosm of academic knowledge production, then.
"Would you want to publish to the world what software you are running on your machines? "
Kernel build 1776 amendment 27, uptime 233 years. Last critical system event 1865.
"and are part of KPMG's/Smartronix value-added business techniques"
Funny, as a consumer I usually find "value-added" means "value-subtracted".
Trust us, we're accountants. And we totally called the cras..., er, look a monkey!
"No parts are common to all robots. ..They all have the general idea that something electronic controls something mechanical. Beyond that vague idea, what they all have in common is... Umm ... yeah, nothing at all, thats it.
Sure, that's how it is right now... but why is that state of affairs something that can't be improved?
Remember, before TCP/IP, we had a plethora of incompatible timesharing and packet-routing networks, and the thought of getting them to intercommunicate was also considered stupid for exactly the same reason.
Before the IBM PC (or the Altair/S-100 bus before it) we had incompatible machine architectures. If the IBM S/360 hadn't been so proprietary and if IBM hadn't practically abandoned the microprocessor market, it might have taken root there too.
Before Unix, we had multiple incompatible operating systems. Unix is pretty crap, but at least it gets you interfacing with hardware.
Without standardisation, progress is slow because people do reinvent the wheel each time. But that's no argument for not standardising what you can.
"Birds are annoying enough without the ability to publish celebrity gossip tabloids."
I blame Twitter.
"this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square)."
I wonder what would happen if we did.
Criticality event? Or just a dull fizzle?
"because, as I understand it, anything that comes out of secured areas is labeled "nuclear waste" and disposed of.'
Well, yeah - because it's radioactive. That's why it's waste.
"So used radiation suits and other such _harmless_ things are part of the total."
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
... make me feel old.
I remember the VIC-20, darnit.
22 columns of fuzzy text! AND WE LOVED IT.
Actually, no, we hated it.
"I'll say this though: most libertarian economists warn about the dangers of governments using policy to direct economic matters."
But that's a political point of view right there. It's akin to saying that Sector X of the economy (where X in this case == banking) should be above the law. Why? Well... just because we say so! It's our axiom that GOVERNMENT == BAD and FINANCE == GOOD!
Both government and finance are means of social control - and neither come from Mars but both execute with the consent of the people, and as the means of implementing the people's will. It's also valid to say that finance should not control people's lives any more than government should.
Do libertarian economists warn against the dangers of financial speculation wasting resources and causing gross mismanagement? But they should, if they're going to be honest. Economists should be both apolitical and afinancial.
However, "libertarians" often seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to money. They seem to think that money is a self-justifying power base which can do no wrong, unlike those evil Gubmint bureaucrats. But greed and power is greed and power no matter what the label on the suit.
"I'd agree with anything but 'quit trying to innovate' ? Why would anyone consider that?"
Because "innovate" is usually spelled "break compatibility, make all your contacts and historical data unreadable, experiment wildly at the user's expense with a risky protocol which does all sorts of things wrong, and lock you into one company's system".
Why would anyone want that?
Foundational services should NOT "innovate". They should continue being boring, predictable, dependable and secure. Innovate until you get it right, sure - but once you do get it right, don't ever change.
This of course is making the very old-school obsolete pre-post-modernist assumption that there exists a "right" way to do things - you know, how engineering used to be before the Internet era, when we actually made a virtue of NOT being buggy, insecure, and exploding in flames every five seconds.
Those old days were pretty stupid, huh?
"I don't know if there will be anything bigger than Twitter or Facebook, or how long they'll last but they will undoubtedly go down in history next to Email and IRC as far as breakthrough Internet communication methods."
How about Google Wave?
"If we can't go cheaply into space, how can we terraform moon or mine asteroid belt? "
CAN we terraform the moon, is the question we should ask before we ask "how".
"So you are saying that dumping water from one ocean to another would potentially lead to the development of new technologies? "
"Potentially" is an important word in that sentence.
What's happened to the space technologies that have ALREADY been paid for? Do we have any idea? NASA and USAF sure seem to have invested a whole lot of money doing.... stufff... which they don't seem to want to talk about and which never quite gets 'finished'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-30
http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/nasp.htm
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/waverider/examples.shtml
But I'm sure it's all in the public interest.
"What happens if it becomes just as cheap to get into space as it does to fly a cargo jet around the country?"
Very little? Because you can grow, eg, corn and soy and cotton and cattle on Earth but you can't grow much in hard vacuum?
"where megalo-corps grow tons of excess corn and then let it rot."
Call it "ferment" and it's BIOETHANOL! One for me, one for you!
"Investing in space tourism is investing in cheap access to space."
Yes, and?
Space is, by definition, a vacuum. A large empty hole filled with a whole lot of nothing.
What, precisely, do we gain by getting cheap access to cubic giga-miles of nothing?
Low gravity for manufacturing? Okay. What exactly are we going to manufacture that will justify the cost required to ship it up and down the well?
Solar radiation unfiltered by atmosphere? Okay. And after transferring to microwaves and building ground stations... why not just build solar cells on Earth?
Communications satellites? Sure, but we've got those already and filled up most of the GEO slots. Why do we need people there?
Excitement and fun for the obscenely rich? Okay. But how many multi-millionaires are there and what happens once they've all gone into orbit once?
Rocks and ores? Yes, but getting rocks down the well would either require expensive heavy-lift capacity or would be indistinguishable from orbital bombing, so creates a whole new category of weapon of mass destruction. And the ores we're likely to run out of soon on Earth are finnicky things like copper and cadmium and uranium. Are huge asteroids of boring nickel-iron actually *useful* except as a way of wiping continents off the map?
We'll use the space ore to build stuff in space, you say? Great. Why are we going to need space habitats to house? The miners? Excellent, then. A self-justifying economy with no return on investment. By the way, where are we going to get water and soil for those habitats from? Ice comets? Okay, but how are we getting out there? The Moon and Mars don't have much water, and what little they might have will be seized on by scientists looking for life before you can use it.
We'll fund it all with upfront investment and work it out later? Great, you just created the solar system's biggest speculative bubble and crash - or, if you then turn around to demand payment from your space colonists, you've just created a whole new generation of indentured space labour. Makes for a good Space Communist technothriller, but not good business sense.
We'll find weird space microbes on the Jovian moons then! And make medicines from them! Yes, well maybe we will and maybe we won't. There's no guarantee there's any life out there except ours. But gene-piracy seems like it might work - except, only if existing patent laws continue. What if gene patents go open-source in a few years?
Helium-3! We'll mine the Moon for it and later scoop Jupiter! Okay... but you need functioning fusion before Helium-3 is useful. We might get warp drive first. And even then, it might not pay for itself.
Warp drive! That's the ticket! Then we can find Earthlike biospheres and ransack them for new bioforms! Yes, that might work. Got a warp drive in your pocket anywhere? Or any theory that even suggests one is possible? Oh and then you'll have to deal with new diseases, but at least you'll have something resembling a Star Trek future. No warp drive... no space future, really.
But.... SPACE IS BIG you say! There so much stuff out there! There must be something! But Einstein says we can't get to much of any of it within a human lifetime. Big, empty, and slow. Or try your luck at kicking Einstein over. Major props if you can do that - many physicists have died trying.
Doing anything in space is orders of magnitude harder, riskier, slower, and more expensive and less fun than on Earth. Where's the orders of magnitude return? Heck, where's *any* return except for what we've got already: unmanned probes, satellites, and missiles?
"One day people will get it into their heads that money spent on the space program is spent pretty much exclusively on Earth where jobs are created, new technologies are developed, and countless other economic and social spin-offs are generated."
Are they, though?
I mean, yes of course that money is spent "on Earth" strictly speaking... but what it is spent *doing*? It's spent paying very specialised engineers to create very specialised one-off hardware which is tossed into space and thrown away. In the case of Apollo, even much of that Earth-based knowledge component *was* literally thrown away when the Shuttle became the new hotness. And now that Ares is the new hotness... and don't forget the X-30 National Aerospace Plane which Ronald Reagan said would be a "new Orient Express" and sat there burning a hole in the black budget for a couple decades.... is this knowledge building on anything? Is it going anywhere? *Why* is it important to be able to build rockets, other than to learn how to build better rockets?
It's often *claimed* that space research has spinoffs - but is that in fact true, and if true, is it relevant? Are the spinoffs in any reasonable proportion to the money spent? It's directly false in the case of Tang and it's also not the case for Teflon. These products were invented outside the space program and became associated with it - but they weren't spinoffs. Any high-tech endeavour would have created them. Why space?
If we employed a bunch of very smart people here on Earth to build a castle made out of cheese, we'd also promote a lot of rapid development in dairy-related construction techniques, and that money would recirculate back into local economies - etc, etc, etc. But we generally expect a bit more from a big project than just "people got paid and it doesn't matter what they got paid to do".
"Foisting class warfare stereotypes on sheeple who know no better is how leftists got into office"
No, I think you'll find it's having a hard-right President and Congress commit war crimes by launching an illegal war while crashing the economy which is what elects leftists into office.
In 2000, I was pretty much indifferent to the whole Gore vs Bush gridlock. "They're both the same," I said. "Republicans, Democrats, left and right... they all have the same policies." After all, could anyone be more meh than Clinton? Took him til 1999 to release the crypto export provisions. Invaded Yugoslavia. Slept around like a Frenchman. This Bush guy was talking about "humble" foreign policy. Okay, I thought. They're America, they might be screwing Russia over, and not removing their nukes fast enough, and still trying to control the world... but at least they're not outright stupid.
And then I watched in horror how much, much worse it could get - what happens when you have a Republican rather than Democratic president who "responds" in a lather of panic and pride to a fairly small terrorist incident. Kabloom! United Nations? What United Nations? We'll baldly lie outright to the world if we want! We're Mericka, eff yeah! Bombs away!
A few years later your party of choice picks about the scariest pair of gun-crazy candidates you could imagine to replace Bush, and the world goes "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. comma. Uniform. Sierra. Alpha? Hotel Tango Hotel? Over? Hello? Anyone in there, Major Tom?"
And then a miracle occurs.
And that's how come you have a quiet, intelligent, soft-spoken mixed-race Democrat representing you to the world. And the world breathed a sigh of relief and muttered "wow, and here we thought you Yanks really were a bunch of fascist jerks... guess we were wrong. When you've exhausted all other options, sometimes you do make the right choice. C'mon over here and give us a big, manly trade and arms reduction deal. We know we'll hate ourselves for it in the morning... but you're just so sexy right now!"
Yeah we know Obama's just JFK and Clinton reborn. We know he's stepped down Iraq just to ramp up Afghanistan. We know he's a master of the velvet glove of American imperialism instead of the naked iron fist. (Bush naked. Either of them. Brrrrrrrrr. Bad brain.)
But, well, he's half-black. And he got elected! That's, whuh, we still can't quite stop pinching ourselves. If you guys don't realise what a massive foreign policy boost you guys get just from having him there...wow.
And domestically, so he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet. But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP? We here in NZ look at American-style healthcare as a Very Very Bad Idea which we flirted with in the 1980s-90s, and thank goodness we didn't completely go that route. It looks like hell, and we're so glad we don't have the mess you now have to fix.
You're welcome.
"And I thought everyone had realised by now that Rand was full of shit, but clearly not."
Objectivism: It's all fun and games until someone cuts open a sea cucumber.
Oh no! Mr Bubbles!
"You are aware that we just elected a professional class and race warrior as president, right?"
Classy *and* racy!
"WTF? Yes, all rich people hate community... When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell. "
Yep, that's pretty much word for word what Margaret Thatcher said in 1987:
"And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."
Set the soup kitchens on fire? Hardly, dahling. Far too much effort. So much cheaper to just de-fund them.
It's their own fault they're poor, you know.
"I really thought we had moved beyond this class warfare nonsense a long time ago."
Not until the rich stop making war on the poor, no, we haven't "moved beyond" the class war.
"Who in their right mind would make a commercial aircraft if they weren't shielded from liability?"
Someone who doesn't care if they sell products that kill lots of people?
"VMWare and Citrix are excellent applications, but there ought not be a great need for them. Much of the need comes from defects elsewhere."
Heck yeah!
Our concepts of "operating system" are so weird and clunky that it's a miracle our systems run at all. The older I get in IT the grumpier I get at how fundamentally broken things are - and worse, how we just accept the industry-wide state of brokenness as "normal" and hail as breakthroughs every hacky non-solution like OS virtualisation. Whatever happened to the early vision of objects, where we'd have fully mobile code, sensible clean interfaces, simple trustworthy primitives, and recursively composable systems all the way down to the instruction set?
"This should be modded -1, Racist. It's not a culture thing. "
Race, however, is not culture.
"Endocrinating young children into fairy tales"
"... and suddenly Cinderella's coach turned back into a hypothalamus!"
"Well green groups are notoriously bad for simply not caring. They just hate on all solutions. "
No, it's more that like Richard Stallman they keep rudely pointing out whenever someone proposes a 'solution' that is in fact a bigger problem because it violates the laws of physics.
The free market doesn't like to hear that! The free market knows you can just keep drilling for oil forever! The free market knows cabbages grow just fine on oil-based herbicides and pesticides and hormones! The free market knows fresh water comes for free everywhere! The free market knows exponential growth can continue forever!
Until it doesnt, then the free market will abruptly come to the same conclusion those naysaying greens did 50 years ago: that infinite growth is in fact unsstainable. So yes, in the 'long run', as Keynes said, the market is self-correcting. It's just that there might be smarter ways of managing that correction than just let it all jump on us at once.
"If they want more people to take them seriously they need to grow up. They can't just point out problems, they have to start coming up with solutions."
They do. It's just that the solutions proposed - deindustrialisation, organics, fair trade - are considered unacceptable by the market.
And of course, the market always knows best. Until it doesn't.