"... Niven's interest in the paranormal, peculiar for a writer usually lauded for the believable science of his stories."
Not that peculiar, since there is in fact a large body of believable science supporting the existence of paranormal effects, which you may well be unaware of if you've only ever read CSICOP or James Randi material. See, for instance:
"IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size."
Except that in the standard IPv6 addressing scheme, we immediately throw away 64 of those bits and use them as host identifier. Then we divide the rest heirarchically up into networks, each division of which can leak addresses. We probably won't be seeing a lot of 2-bit subnets for point-to-point links, as we have now in 32-bit CIDR; they'll grab 8 bits instead 'just in case'.
Since every network operator will think 'it's okay, I can be sloppy because 64 bits is enough for everybody', I'm sure it will be perfectly possible to get address space exhaustion in IPv6.
"Richard Stallman has done more damage to the open source movement than anyone else. He is pompous, arrogant, rude, inflexible, and intolerant of diversity of opinion."
But he's also *right*. History has proved this, time and again. He seems like a hardass because reality is unforgiving. Too bad. He's still right.
What does 'tolerance of diversity of opinion' have to do with anything? Maths doesn't tolerate 1+1 not equalling 2. There are some places you *can't* tolerate wrong answers. Computer science and law are two of them.
You can disagree with his conclusions as much as you like, but that doesn't invalidate them.
"The kind of freedom I am into is freedom for the individual. You are free to do whatever you want as long as it does no unwanted harm to others."
I respect that.
The complication is that when you take into account all the social impact of one's decisions, it is actually impossible to do *anything* without it having an effect, negative or positive, on someone. There's no such thing as a company which does *no* harm to anyone; it's just a matter of mitigated harms, offset costs, and calculated risks.
Breathe out, or light a fire, and you're increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. You can ignore this for one person; it gets harder to ignore if it's one person owning a factory, or a herd of cattle, and suddenly it starts to become non-trivial.
The libertarian answer to this dilemma of freedom vs responsibility seems to be lots of individual contracts. But individual contracts are extremely frictional: very time-consuming to manage and enforce. Not to mention that most individuals are not in any good position, time- and training- wise, to negotiate effectively with the owners of large resource pools.
The standard answer to the problem of economic friction is to pool resources, create collective organisations with collective contracts. That's how unions and companies were created.
And that's what a government is: just a collective contract. We take all those individual contracts and collapse then down into a single unified relationship called 'citizenship' which starts at birth or the filing of suitable papers and is bounded by the geographical reach of the contract's delegated enforcement authorities.
It's more efficient for everyone and it accomplishes the same end. Increasing efficiency and reduced overheads are what libertarians claim to support, right? So how can you have any philosophical objections to the *idea* of a government, as opposed to perhaps certain specific implementations? It seems to me that you'd have to reject the idea of both contracts and associations themselves, and even the most extreme libertarian or anarcho-capitalist (heck, even the left-anarchists) don't do that.
Now: I do think that in order for a government to count as a valid collective contract, you need a way of leaving if you decide you don't want to abide by the 'terms of service' - just like, say, an internet service agreement. Obviously if you decide you don't want to continue to use a society's resources, you need to stop doing so, so you'll need to leave their physical realm. Ie, emigrate. So I'm not in favour of governments which restrict emigration.
But even beyond this, I believe that a contract - any contract - ought to provide some way for the parties to *renegotiate* their agreement while still inside it. In societies, we accomplish this by various forms of democracy - voting - balanced with forms of currency, because we believe neither votes nor dollars are perfect 'scoring' systems in themselves.
One problem I believe we have with our society at *all* levels is that many of our institutions - both companies and public departments - are not internally democratic, out of a misguided belief that it's 'more efficient' to have a tiny cadre of 'managers' who make top-down, military-style command decisions based on what information filters up through the ranks to them. And the bigger these nondemocratic institutions get compared to the democratic ones, the more entrenched that military-style command governance gets into our society. That means a lot of information and creative freedom is getting lost.
To the extent that we can devolve power to small, self-organising groups, I believe we should. But I think those groups should not have an ethos of 'we can do anything we want because we're FREE' but more 'we have freedom in order to serve the best interests of the wider community'.
There is a delicate balance between 'private enterprise' which is internally undemocratic and potentially exploitative, but has a laser-like focus on 'increasing wealt
"And you hate and despise us Libertarians why? All we want is FREEDOM."... to kill the environment and abuse your employees, load down nations with debts they can never pay back, and gain exclusive monopoly control over land, air and water - and then watch those die who can't pay. Or shoot them with your own hand if they try to 'steal' 'your' 'hard-earned' resources.
At least that's the kind of 'freedom' most anarcho-capitalists I've seen dream about. And unrestricted, unregulated, corporate iron fist and death to the teeming masses.
The absolute freedom to take everything you want and give nothing back.
If you're not into that kind of 'freedom', we have something in common.
*Someone* has to do the hard and creative work of running organisations. Some people are really gifted at this and do it well. Those who do, contribute hugely to science and society.
"Moreover, the Standard Model deals with elementary particles, while this "particle" is actually a resonance, a shortly lived, bound state of several elementary particles."
I don't get this thing about bound particles.
If we have the ability to arbitrary say 'that thing there that looks like a particle actually isn't', then what's to say that *all* the particles we currently consider 'elementary' aren't just resonance modes? Seems like it would be a simpler model.
I'm pretty sure that nature- at least in the macroscopic domain - doesn't make much of a distinction between what it considers 'objects' and what it considers 'aggregations' or resonances or waveforms or whatever. It's all just interlinked stuff that we happen to detect in one mode or another.
To the extent that current quantum maths maintains this arbitrary-seeming idea of certain particle-events being 'elementary', it suggests that it's broken.
"Also, if you get too detailed into pricing you start getting into competitive information, and companies don't like it when you release that information (it might even be unlawful to release it). "
Then the law needs to be changed. The use of public money must NOT be a secret. If the commercial partners can't cope with sunlight, they can cope with not getting our tax money, and someone else can take their place. Fair's fair.
Yes, it happens everywhere right now. Secret trade treaties, secret outsourcing deals, public/private partnerships with 'commercially sensitive' contracts. That doesn't make it right.
Actually - and for context, I'm not an American, and not at all a supporter of Bush, and economically I'm a lot further to the left than Obama - my biggest disappointment so far with the Obama administration is just how many unreconstructed, unrepentant banking types and Bush appointees he's keeping/bringing into his administration.
There's 'experience' and there's 'corruption', and there's 'naivety' and there's 'corruption. It's hard to tell them apart. The charitable interpretation is that Obama is just being very, very conservative and far too trusting in who he appoints.
I fear he may go down in history not as Roosevelt, but as Hoover. Of course, FDR was fairly conservative when he tried to fix the economy too, and Obama at least is *trying* to put some money into infrastructure (ie, real things) even as he's flushing huge sums down the bankster drain.
And yes, when the guy he hires as CIO has to step down because of corruption in his home team, we should notice and complain. Bush's administration was filled with corruption scandals. I see no reason why Obama should get a free pass when the same thing happens on his watch. I don't care about party labels - I care about politics that 1) doesn't commit war crimes, and 2) isn't domestically corrupt. Doing less of 1) doesn't entitle you to more (or even the same amount) of 2).
I use Ubuntu, I went cold turkey from Windows eleven years ago with Red Hat 5... and I'm *still* just deeply frustrated at how many silly little things aren't on anyone's priority list to get fixed.
Not only that, most of the big projects (KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice) seem to have a definite philosophy of 'that's NOT broken and we WON'T fix it!' for things which quite patently ARE broken.
Let's pass over with all decent haste the absolutely insane affair of 'spatial windows' in Nautilus (wtf? Windows 95 Explorer had a 'spatial' mode, it was just smart enough to *also* offer a tree browsing view for people who wanted to do serious file management) and give thanks that the Ubuntu people at least had the insight to override the GNOME people and turn *that* craziness off.
Let's ignore for now the equally insane rush to *remove* copy-pastable file path text fields from dialog boxes and replace them with un-automatable candy-bar strips of buttons. Because, um, nobody uses keyboards anymore? I guess that's a step 'forward'. (Oh, yes, there's a magic hidden alt-key to bring up the real text field... but you'll never know what it is, because we don't talk about that.)
Let's also be thankful that *finally* some 'fully packaged' applications *now* start putting in menu entries.
No, let's talk about the more serious issues: how there are about five separate, incompatible 'official' object systems (GObject, CORBA/Bonobo, D-BUS, KParts, Firefox's XPCom, OpenOffice's UNO) before we even think about.NET/Mono or Java integration.
How there's still no sensible shared configuration system - after a zillion false starts, we still have gconf (two versions of) for GNOME, and the horde of weird formats in/etc for everyone else. Different/etc layout for each distribution, of course, despite what FHS tried to do.
How although we have X, which is fully networkable, if your X Server crashes - by definition a component which could be *on another machine entirely* - then ALL YOUR RUNNING X APPLICATIONS have to be restarted! The best feature of X, completely subverted just by bad 'standard' configuration.
And yes, how every 'desktop environment' insists on reinventing the API wheel and building 'virtual filesystems' ON TOP OF its own API rather than making them available to the Posix level with something like FUSE.
And then there's the pain of device management, like webcams. If it autodetects at startup, it'll probably work. If not.... good luck.
I love Linux, but... we seem to be settling for far less than we had in the 80s, even. At least then we had dreams of what a desktop *could* be.
"The Darwin effect could be a bit slow, so it seems reasonable to allow them to carry guns as well. As the prop is at the back, a forward shooting machine gun should be easy to set up. If they are allowed to carry their lawyers with them as well (vive le constitution) then we could get a double bonus with every shoot-down."
"Instead, they went the other way, and encouraged Fannie and Freddie to give mortgages to people who had no business getting one. Well, once the two biggest lenders in the country start doing this, what do you expect everyone else to do? This is what caused the wholesale inflation of the housing market, and the bursting of this bubble has caused this economic downturn."
That's a bizarre viewpoint. I'm pretty sure that Fannie and Freddie were not the primary cause of the international housing bubble, nor was the housing bubble the cause of the widespread delinking of the financial sector from reality, which was enabled by Reagan and Thatcher's wave of deregulation in the 1980s.
The problem was derivatives, not morgages. For some perspective, read a book like Traders, Guns & Money.
I'm sure it's comforting to be able to find a way to blame poor people for the massive fraud and corruption perpetrated by the ultra-rich banking elite... but I find myself unable to perform the required mental gymnastics.
"Uh, it -sounds- like you're saying that the economic policies of the 80's did NOT produce the prosperity of the 90's and 00's, but that -can't- be, because we know that's what did it."
We do?
I thought the 80s were marked by a massive increase in deregulation of trade and finance and a massive increase in military funding, leading to massive indebtedness, combined with reduction of costs by outsourcing to regimes with worse labour and ecological conditions.
In other words, we made more widgets by cutting down more forests, skimping on wages, and when that didn't work, putting it all on the credit card and offsetting the interest payments with increasingly wild gambles.
Oh, and we also saved money by stopping investing in infrastructure of 'old media' things like the power grid and the New Orleans levees.
And then a lot of the production of widgets was caused because the *lifespan* of the widgets was reduced: the average consumer electronics device now burns out in around three years. But I'm still using the clothes washer my parents bought in the 1970s. I wonder which device is more objectively valuable: one which does something flashy for three years and dies, or one which does something non-glamourous but important for forty years?
And the forests are running out, as is the cheap oil for shipping the widgets from China to us. What is the worth of our manufacturing pipeline when the raw materials are gone?
We did some good things in the 90s. We laid cable for the Internet which might last us a few years yet. We made a lot of cheap fast i386 boxes and got Linux and Wikipedia built, and that might give us a bare-minimum communications and education infrastructure for the upcoming transition years.
We're going to need it, because the bill for the rest is coming due right about... now.
Negative prosperity... we built that city on rock'n'roll in the 80s.
"You're mixing apples and bananas here. The regulations around the rocket motors required me, the user, to have a Low Explosive User Permit, to keep records of each motor I purchased and what I did with it, and to allow the BATFE to visit me whenever they wanted and to inspect my records for compliance with the record keeping regulations."
Ever stop to think that might be because, oh, I dunno, you might be able to kill quite a lot of people with a rocket? I mean historically that's what they were originally built for, in wars and stuff. You might well know what you're doing, but what exactly is it that you *are* doing? And we know this for sure how?
Oh, we have your *word* that you don't plan to hurt anybody with your near-military-level ordnance. That's great, sir. Hope your Rocket Club goes well. We'll get back to watching jaywalkers.
"The solution to criminals with guns is citizens with guns."
And the solution to citizens with guns who accidentally leave their gun cupboard unlocked, or have a domestic dispute escalate beyond fisticuffs, or lose their job and realise that a firearm gives them more negotiating power, or just snap one day and go on a rampage -
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe even more than one challenge. One at puberty. One at 16. One at 18. Something like that. For different parts of acceptance."
You mean like high school exams and the driving test?
"... Niven's interest in the paranormal, peculiar for a writer usually lauded for the believable science of his stories."
Not that peculiar, since there is in fact a large body of believable science supporting the existence of paranormal effects, which you may well be unaware of if you've only ever read CSICOP or James Randi material. See, for instance:
http://www.parapsychologyandtheskeptics.com/
http://www.deanradin.com/NewWeb/EMindex.html
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553803352
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922
No boom today. Boom tomorrow.
There's always a boom tomorrow.
"IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size."
Except that in the standard IPv6 addressing scheme, we immediately throw away 64 of those bits and use them as host identifier. Then we divide the rest heirarchically up into networks, each division of which can leak addresses. We probably won't be seeing a lot of 2-bit subnets for point-to-point links, as we have now in 32-bit CIDR; they'll grab 8 bits instead 'just in case'.
Since every network operator will think 'it's okay, I can be sloppy because 64 bits is enough for everybody', I'm sure it will be perfectly possible to get address space exhaustion in IPv6.
"Richard Stallman has done more damage to the open source movement than anyone else. He is pompous, arrogant, rude, inflexible, and intolerant of diversity of opinion."
But he's also *right*. History has proved this, time and again. He seems like a hardass because reality is unforgiving. Too bad. He's still right.
What does 'tolerance of diversity of opinion' have to do with anything? Maths doesn't tolerate 1+1 not equalling 2. There are some places you *can't* tolerate wrong answers. Computer science and law are two of them.
You can disagree with his conclusions as much as you like, but that doesn't invalidate them.
"... vegans are rabbit food people."
Fixed that for you.
"The kind of freedom I am into is freedom for the individual. You are free to do whatever you want as long as it does no unwanted harm to others."
I respect that.
The complication is that when you take into account all the social impact of one's decisions, it is actually impossible to do *anything* without it having an effect, negative or positive, on someone. There's no such thing as a company which does *no* harm to anyone; it's just a matter of mitigated harms, offset costs, and calculated risks.
Breathe out, or light a fire, and you're increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. You can ignore this for one person; it gets harder to ignore if it's one person owning a factory, or a herd of cattle, and suddenly it starts to become non-trivial.
The libertarian answer to this dilemma of freedom vs responsibility seems to be lots of individual contracts. But individual contracts are extremely frictional: very time-consuming to manage and enforce. Not to mention that most individuals are not in any good position, time- and training- wise, to negotiate effectively with the owners of large resource pools.
The standard answer to the problem of economic friction is to pool resources, create collective organisations with collective contracts. That's how unions and companies were created.
And that's what a government is: just a collective contract. We take all those individual contracts and collapse then down into a single unified relationship called 'citizenship' which starts at birth or the filing of suitable papers and is bounded by the geographical reach of the contract's delegated enforcement authorities.
It's more efficient for everyone and it accomplishes the same end. Increasing efficiency and reduced overheads are what libertarians claim to support, right? So how can you have any philosophical objections to the *idea* of a government, as opposed to perhaps certain specific implementations? It seems to me that you'd have to reject the idea of both contracts and associations themselves, and even the most extreme libertarian or anarcho-capitalist (heck, even the left-anarchists) don't do that.
Now: I do think that in order for a government to count as a valid collective contract, you need a way of leaving if you decide you don't want to abide by the 'terms of service' - just like, say, an internet service agreement. Obviously if you decide you don't want to continue to use a society's resources, you need to stop doing so, so you'll need to leave their physical realm. Ie, emigrate. So I'm not in favour of governments which restrict emigration.
But even beyond this, I believe that a contract - any contract - ought to provide some way for the parties to *renegotiate* their agreement while still inside it. In societies, we accomplish this by various forms of democracy - voting - balanced with forms of currency, because we believe neither votes nor dollars are perfect 'scoring' systems in themselves.
One problem I believe we have with our society at *all* levels is that many of our institutions - both companies and public departments - are not internally democratic, out of a misguided belief that it's 'more efficient' to have a tiny cadre of 'managers' who make top-down, military-style command decisions based on what information filters up through the ranks to them. And the bigger these nondemocratic institutions get compared to the democratic ones, the more entrenched that military-style command governance gets into our society. That means a lot of information and creative freedom is getting lost.
To the extent that we can devolve power to small, self-organising groups, I believe we should. But I think those groups should not have an ethos of 'we can do anything we want because we're FREE' but more 'we have freedom in order to serve the best interests of the wider community'.
There is a delicate balance between 'private enterprise' which is internally undemocratic and potentially exploitative, but has a laser-like focus on 'increasing wealt
"And you hate and despise us Libertarians why? All we want is FREEDOM." ... to kill the environment and abuse your employees, load down nations with debts they can never pay back, and gain exclusive monopoly control over land, air and water - and then watch those die who can't pay. Or shoot them with your own hand if they try to 'steal' 'your' 'hard-earned' resources.
At least that's the kind of 'freedom' most anarcho-capitalists I've seen dream about. And unrestricted, unregulated, corporate iron fist and death to the teeming masses.
The absolute freedom to take everything you want and give nothing back.
If you're not into that kind of 'freedom', we have something in common.
"I do not hack....... Wine."
Network infrastructure of choice: 10base5 Thicknet.
Sorry.
"Still a bureaucrat. Doesn't deserve it."
In what way is "bureaucrat" a swear word to you?
*Someone* has to do the hard and creative work of running organisations. Some people are really gifted at this and do it well. Those who do, contribute hugely to science and society.
"Moreover, the Standard Model deals with elementary particles, while this "particle" is actually a resonance, a shortly lived, bound state of several elementary particles."
I don't get this thing about bound particles.
If we have the ability to arbitrary say 'that thing there that looks like a particle actually isn't', then what's to say that *all* the particles we currently consider 'elementary' aren't just resonance modes? Seems like it would be a simpler model.
I'm pretty sure that nature- at least in the macroscopic domain - doesn't make much of a distinction between what it considers 'objects' and what it considers 'aggregations' or resonances or waveforms or whatever. It's all just interlinked stuff that we happen to detect in one mode or another.
To the extent that current quantum maths maintains this arbitrary-seeming idea of certain particle-events being 'elementary', it suggests that it's broken.
"robot fish to hunt down politician".
Reality is disappointingly less surreal.
"Also, if you get too detailed into pricing you start getting into competitive information, and companies don't like it when you release that information (it might even be unlawful to release it). "
Then the law needs to be changed. The use of public money must NOT be a secret. If the commercial partners can't cope with sunlight, they can cope with not getting our tax money, and someone else can take their place. Fair's fair.
Yes, it happens everywhere right now. Secret trade treaties, secret outsourcing deals, public/private partnerships with 'commercially sensitive' contracts. That doesn't make it right.
It has to stop.
Actually - and for context, I'm not an American, and not at all a supporter of Bush, and economically I'm a lot further to the left than Obama - my biggest disappointment so far with the Obama administration is just how many unreconstructed, unrepentant banking types and Bush appointees he's keeping/bringing into his administration.
There's 'experience' and there's 'corruption', and there's 'naivety' and there's 'corruption. It's hard to tell them apart. The charitable interpretation is that Obama is just being very, very conservative and far too trusting in who he appoints.
I fear he may go down in history not as Roosevelt, but as Hoover. Of course, FDR was fairly conservative when he tried to fix the economy too, and Obama at least is *trying* to put some money into infrastructure (ie, real things) even as he's flushing huge sums down the bankster drain.
And yes, when the guy he hires as CIO has to step down because of corruption in his home team, we should notice and complain. Bush's administration was filled with corruption scandals. I see no reason why Obama should get a free pass when the same thing happens on his watch. I don't care about party labels - I care about politics that 1) doesn't commit war crimes, and 2) isn't domestically corrupt. Doing less of 1) doesn't entitle you to more (or even the same amount) of 2).
Its love? What does money love?
Yes, exactly!
I use Ubuntu, I went cold turkey from Windows eleven years ago with Red Hat 5... and I'm *still* just deeply frustrated at how many silly little things aren't on anyone's priority list to get fixed.
Not only that, most of the big projects (KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice) seem to have a definite philosophy of 'that's NOT broken and we WON'T fix it!' for things which quite patently ARE broken.
Let's pass over with all decent haste the absolutely insane affair of 'spatial windows' in Nautilus (wtf? Windows 95 Explorer had a 'spatial' mode, it was just smart enough to *also* offer a tree browsing view for people who wanted to do serious file management) and give thanks that the Ubuntu people at least had the insight to override the GNOME people and turn *that* craziness off.
Let's ignore for now the equally insane rush to *remove* copy-pastable file path text fields from dialog boxes and replace them with un-automatable candy-bar strips of buttons. Because, um, nobody uses keyboards anymore? I guess that's a step 'forward'. (Oh, yes, there's a magic hidden alt-key to bring up the real text field... but you'll never know what it is, because we don't talk about that.)
Let's also be thankful that *finally* some 'fully packaged' applications *now* start putting in menu entries.
No, let's talk about the more serious issues: how there are about five separate, incompatible 'official' object systems (GObject, CORBA/Bonobo, D-BUS, KParts, Firefox's XPCom, OpenOffice's UNO) before we even think about .NET/Mono or Java integration.
How there's still no sensible shared configuration system - after a zillion false starts, we still have gconf (two versions of) for GNOME, and the horde of weird formats in /etc for everyone else. Different /etc layout for each distribution, of course, despite what FHS tried to do.
How although we have X, which is fully networkable, if your X Server crashes - by definition a component which could be *on another machine entirely* - then ALL YOUR RUNNING X APPLICATIONS have to be restarted! The best feature of X, completely subverted just by bad 'standard' configuration.
And yes, how every 'desktop environment' insists on reinventing the API wheel and building 'virtual filesystems' ON TOP OF its own API rather than making them available to the Posix level with something like FUSE.
And then there's the pain of device management, like webcams. If it autodetects at startup, it'll probably work. If not.... good luck.
I love Linux, but... we seem to be settling for far less than we had in the 80s, even. At least then we had dreams of what a desktop *could* be.
"The Darwin effect could be a bit slow, so it seems reasonable to allow them to carry guns as well. As the prop is at the back, a forward shooting machine gun should be easy to set up. If they are allowed to carry their lawyers with them as well (vive le constitution) then we could get a double bonus with every shoot-down."
Hunter S Thompson, is that you?
Tzhat five tizms faszt.
Thzank you I will bee hee-yah all nizght.
Try the ravioli it is dee-lizc-i-ous.
"Instead, they went the other way, and encouraged Fannie and Freddie to give mortgages to people who had no business getting one. Well, once the two biggest lenders in the country start doing this, what do you expect everyone else to do? This is what caused the wholesale inflation of the housing market, and the bursting of this bubble has caused this economic downturn."
That's a bizarre viewpoint. I'm pretty sure that Fannie and Freddie were not the primary cause of the international housing bubble, nor was the housing bubble the cause of the widespread delinking of the financial sector from reality, which was enabled by Reagan and Thatcher's wave of deregulation in the 1980s.
The problem was derivatives, not morgages. For some perspective, read a book like Traders, Guns & Money.
I'm sure it's comforting to be able to find a way to blame poor people for the massive fraud and corruption perpetrated by the ultra-rich banking elite... but I find myself unable to perform the required mental gymnastics.
"Uh, it -sounds- like you're saying that the economic policies of the 80's did NOT produce the prosperity of the 90's and 00's, but that -can't- be, because we know that's what did it."
We do?
I thought the 80s were marked by a massive increase in deregulation of trade and finance and a massive increase in military funding, leading to massive indebtedness, combined with reduction of costs by outsourcing to regimes with worse labour and ecological conditions.
In other words, we made more widgets by cutting down more forests, skimping on wages, and when that didn't work, putting it all on the credit card and offsetting the interest payments with increasingly wild gambles.
Oh, and we also saved money by stopping investing in infrastructure of 'old media' things like the power grid and the New Orleans levees.
And then a lot of the production of widgets was caused because the *lifespan* of the widgets was reduced: the average consumer electronics device now burns out in around three years. But I'm still using the clothes washer my parents bought in the 1970s. I wonder which device is more objectively valuable: one which does something flashy for three years and dies, or one which does something non-glamourous but important for forty years?
And the forests are running out, as is the cheap oil for shipping the widgets from China to us. What is the worth of our manufacturing pipeline when the raw materials are gone?
We did some good things in the 90s. We laid cable for the Internet which might last us a few years yet. We made a lot of cheap fast i386 boxes and got Linux and Wikipedia built, and that might give us a bare-minimum communications and education infrastructure for the upcoming transition years.
We're going to need it, because the bill for the rest is coming due right about... now.
Negative prosperity... we built that city on rock'n'roll in the 80s.
Cyberpunk is like any other genre, it's either a benefit or a hazard.
If it's a benefit, it's not my problem.
"The FBI covers the B, the F and the E. The FDA covers the A and the T. What's left?"
A world where alcohol, tobacco, firearms AND explosives are sold at a drive-thru so that a man can use them all before he gets home.
Heck, all in one mixed drink if he likes.
"You're mixing apples and bananas here. The regulations around the rocket motors required me, the user, to have a Low Explosive User Permit, to keep records of each motor I purchased and what I did with it, and to allow the BATFE to visit me whenever they wanted and to inspect my records for compliance with the record keeping regulations."
Ever stop to think that might be because, oh, I dunno, you might be able to kill quite a lot of people with a rocket? I mean historically that's what they were originally built for, in wars and stuff. You might well know what you're doing, but what exactly is it that you *are* doing? And we know this for sure how?
Oh, we have your *word* that you don't plan to hurt anybody with your near-military-level ordnance. That's great, sir. Hope your Rocket Club goes well. We'll get back to watching jaywalkers.
"Because something is potentially dangerous it needs to be regulated?"
Er, yes? Is that a trick question?
Restricting dangerous things is what regulation *is*.
"The solution to criminals with guns is citizens with guns."
And the solution to citizens with guns who accidentally leave their gun cupboard unlocked, or have a domestic dispute escalate beyond fisticuffs, or lose their job and realise that a firearm gives them more negotiating power, or just snap one day and go on a rampage -
- is MORE citizens with guns.
It's a perfect self-correcting system.