You have not provided any positive definition of the word "republic," only asserted it as a simple antonym of monarchy. As I understand the "republic, not democracy" meme, those who buy into it (and I am rather sympathetic myself) are bemoaning the fact that the central government is controlled by a specific, entrenched political class who determine the choices set in front of the electorate. This situation is just as dangerous as an unfettered monarch, albeit in different ways. Simple assertions that the system is supposed to be a democracy do not address the division of labor which creates specalists in manipulating the levers of centralized power.
UNDERsteer, in a rear-engine car? I think you have a bit of confusion in terms there. Oversteer is what occurs when the rear of a vehicle loses traction due to weight imbalance. Additionally, Ralph Nader's criticism of the similarly rear-engined Corvair (and its contemporary Volkswagens) in "Unsafe at Any Speed" had a lot to do with that vehicle's use of a swing-axle transaxle, in which the rear axle's suspension only has one, vertical, degree of freedom and thus has a tendency to bounce upwards during oversteer incidents and risk overturning the whole car. 1969 and later Beetles had independent rear suspension, which does not exhibit this behavior. The Corvair was killed before it could be evolved in this direction.
Additionally, Porsche fanatics will tell you that the 911's rear engine placement is actually an advantage in terms of traction during corner exit, so long as you are not foolish enough to lift the throttle in mid-turn.
Yes, and now you have a thoroughly subsidized monocultural food production system which breeds antibiotic-resistant bacteria and outputs decidely non-nutritious food at its most affordable levels; and the abusive working conditions you decry have simply been moved offshore, leaving the corporations who contract for such cheap labor to enforce our enlightened norms, if they feel like it. The moneyed interests which benefit from these arrangements have much more influence over the people in power than do you, the single voter. So while these problems may, eventually, be addressed by the government, it will not happen until they are almost catastrophes. This is the downside to such a heavily centralized republic.
What if the tech is used on a character who's supposed to look slightly inhuman? I'm thinking chiefly of Data from Star Trek, whom Brent Spiner has said he will never play again since an immortal android doesn't age. But if you could reset his looks to 1987, while also setting the character further apart from the normal humans surrounding him, I think that would be an enhancement rather than a drawback.
I don't think that's quite a fair assertion to make. Local elected officials' hands are generally tied by policies set at the national and state levels. California is a strong example of this. Someone up above mentioned the extreme imbalance of tax payments made to the federal government vs. returns received. And I have experienced firsthand the enforced impotence of well-meaning school district officials in repairing severely outdated school plants due to positively Byzantine and constantly shifting state funding rules (which are typically rigged to benefit huge districts like Los Angeles). These are but two examples. The social engineering policies that define our society are set at the highest levels, and the power brokers at those levels do indeed come from an elite background or are validated by the elites who control the political and financial machinery. Populists and guys next door can make it to national office, usually in the House of Representatives, but they quickly learn to toe their party's line or be marginalized.
The American republic may have a system vaguely resembling democracy, but it is hardly participatory, and that is where the populist rage you decry comes from. It is especially intensified by the ease of individual interconnectivity that modern information technology enables. As these interconnected individuals come to feel more disempowered, their rhetoric becomes more intense. The same thing happened with liberals under Bush.
Part of it is that Next Generation ran longer and thus had a better opportunity to develop all the characters, making it more disappointing when the movies degenerated into Picard/Data stories. Insurrection and Nemesis were Rick Berman's incompetent attempts to balance the desires of both Star Trek fans and general audiences, something that JJ Abrams seems to have done quite deftly.
In a way, the wormhole aliens were simply a logical extension of the ideas they began exploring with the character of Q. Q chose to present himself as easily relatable, essentially a human with boundless control over space and time. However, it was easy for Picard to dismiss Q as a god due to his human appearance, which included such flaws as hubris and a willingness to pass judgment. The Prophets, on the other hand, had a completely different non-linear perspective that was not friendly to human comprehension (or easy writing). Thus Sisko and co. had a much harder time dismissing them.
The theme of relating to superhuman intelligences is found throughout Star Trek. It's just too bad that later attempts at exploring it failed so miserably, such as the Q episodes of Voyager.
Please elaborate on your metrics of efficiency. I would also like to hear about specific social improvements that are a direct result of the school system.
The front companies provide the illusion of choice, but the American Medical Association holds a monopoly on licensing for conventional care, the drug companies are focused mainly on securing patent monopolies above anything else, and the insurance companies themselves have an army of lobbyists to keep them in their places of privilege.
Note also that neither Clinton nor Obama seriously advocated for a single-payer system during the recent election. Both proposed federal subsidies for existing insurance companies, touting it as the more politically realistic choice. I don't support state-monopolized medicine myself, but I can't see such a proposal as anything other than crackpot realism, which is the first refuge of scoundrels.
Why bother involving yourself with the existing parties or trying to seize a seat in Congress? There are far too many compromises down that road. Get involved in transforming your local politics away from a pathetic sideshow, and build sustainable institutions on the local level. Disregard what the national government is trying to do. It will collapse in upon itself.
Counterproductive, unsustainable, divisive policies like this one might appear to be the roots of dystopia to most people, but it really amounts to the last desperate thrashings of a dinosaur as it drowns in a tar pit.
A whole lot of people are having their daily lives derailed or impinged upon right now, thanks to the government's poor economic policy. In addition, the spigot of foreign lending that kept consumer spending growing over the past decade is being cut off, meaning that the politicians in Washington won't have an easy time papering their way out of this. Change that affects the daily lives of everyone in the country is occurring, right now.
You're the one who reduced the argument to absurdity. The grandparent poster was arguing against a specific legal construct instituted by governments to enable capitalist production and exchange, and you skip straight to the tired old statist argument of warlordism in response.
How is state-granted limited liability and corporate personhood a necessity for an effective legal system, or even the institution of private property? Your argument does not follow. It seems like you're just trying to head off legitimate criticisms of government before they become inconvenient for you to argue against.
The only aspect of your post that might hold any water as a response to the GP is your assertion that modern economies would not arise without the corporate form. This is true on its face, since corporations dominate modern trade. But why should I believe that the modern global economy is the endpoint of human evolution, just because we've managed to put producers on the opposite side of the globe from their consumers? In fact, it certainly isn't, if we're going to be bumping up against resource shortages as the article at the top of the page suggests.
The most effective argument against existing governments is not that they do not provide an effective legal system, or that they impede trade or production. The most effective argument is that they provide a single point of failure for all of the society they encompass, and lend inertia to unsustainable economic arrangements.
Opt-in would be an important component, yes. I can see something like this as a caching service run on nodes of a wireless mesh network, occasionally exchanging checksums or updating RSS feeds with the upstream servers of their most popular content. And anybody in the area with storage space and/or processing power to burn could volunteer as an alternate caching server, so you don't have to jerry-rig a giant hard drive to a WRT54G or something.
Widespread implementation of a concept like this would probably have the side-effect of forcing dynamic Web applications to decentralize. We're seeing the first wave of this with stuff like XULRunner and Apple pushing "Save as Web App..." with the next version of Safari.
It would have the probable effect that people would simply ignore the government and get on with their own business. I find this preferable to the idolatrous, slightly more intellectual version of celebrity culture we have now.
In reading through these posts, it seems to me that your particular brand of nutjobbery involves making broad generalizations about human nature and then backing them up with either contrived scenarios, such as the point here where you guarantee what will occur in 15 minutes of daycare, or further generalizations about history or culture. Since you concentrate on the abstract, imploring your opponent to use his imagination to bring out the details of the reality around him, it is a style of argument very befitting a filmmaker. And the fact that so much effort has gone into such a voluminous Slashdot postcount perhaps implies why that movie in your sig seems to be perpetually in production.
These two qualities are cornerstones of capitalism as we know it. All I'm looking for is an admission that the market system would evolve into something radically different without such distortions, an idea not put forward by most writers I see who split hairs between mercantilism and capitalism. If you're not one of these writers, I apologize.
Of course something twenty years (or even ten years) newer is going to offer superior crash safety. Materials and manufacturing technologies will have seen to that. However, every modern minivan I've experienced offers inferior handling and traction (partly thanks to that extended wheelbase), meaning you have less of an opportunity to avoid a crash in the first place. This also leads to increased maneuvering difficulty when parking. For these reasons, I'll gladly take taller and shorter any day. Volkswagen's engineers chose this layout even though the Vanagon/T3 was to be a clean-sheet design, which could've easily taken advantage of the front-engine chassis and drivetrains they were abandoning the Beetle for. It would be a decade before economies of scale would win out over space-efficiency considerations.
And if modern minivans do offer more leg room, it comes mainly at the expense of cargo space, requiring you to dispose of passenger seating in order to carry anything bigger than a couple of suitcases or a few gym bags. You might not find this compromise as ridiculous as I do, but as more and more people take up car-pooling, many of them will probably come around to my point of view. It's just too bad that the last developer of rear-engine vehicles in the Western world is Porsche, who have been focused on sports cars and ludicrously high profits for decades. Crash-engineering a cab-over design to modern standards would yield a substantial commercial advantage.
There's another way to look at this that makes a lot more sense: intellectual property law subsidizes monolithic methods of information distribution. The music, publishing, software, and movie industries are all deeply distorted by this intervention, and widespread information technology is eating into their subsidies. These markets have been so distorted for so long (since 1787, as a matter of fact!) that the massive enterprises which control them have no incentive to come up with new distribution mechanisms that compensate and still guarantee some form of income. They're so big and well-entrenched that they can simply exercise influence with the central government, destroying rather than creating.
Hell, the concept that people deserve economic rent from this artificial form of property is so deep-set that you, an average Joe on the street, accepts it at face value without considering how society can evolve to jettison it, now that it threatens to become overtly harmful. Kevin Carson has a good article on such institutions of social engineering here: http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8271 that might get you thinking.
Chrysler brought the front-engine, front-wheel-drive minivan into mass production because it allowed them to leverage the K-car platform as a people-mover for suburbia. So your analogy is more apt than you think.
Thanks, I'll keep my hippie bus
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And by leg room and cabin space, they are all still drastically inferior to my 20-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with the argument you're making, it's just me being bitter because manufacturers chasing higher profit margins flooded the market with space-inefficient front-engine, front-wheel-drive designs based on sedan chassis. Anybody wanting something with a stronger chassis had no choice but an even more space-inefficient SUV, which also only came into existence because it leveraged truck production capacity, not because it was a sane design for a utility vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
You have not provided any positive definition of the word "republic," only asserted it as a simple antonym of monarchy. As I understand the "republic, not democracy" meme, those who buy into it (and I am rather sympathetic myself) are bemoaning the fact that the central government is controlled by a specific, entrenched political class who determine the choices set in front of the electorate. This situation is just as dangerous as an unfettered monarch, albeit in different ways. Simple assertions that the system is supposed to be a democracy do not address the division of labor which creates specalists in manipulating the levers of centralized power.
UNDERsteer, in a rear-engine car? I think you have a bit of confusion in terms there. Oversteer is what occurs when the rear of a vehicle loses traction due to weight imbalance. Additionally, Ralph Nader's criticism of the similarly rear-engined Corvair (and its contemporary Volkswagens) in "Unsafe at Any Speed" had a lot to do with that vehicle's use of a swing-axle transaxle, in which the rear axle's suspension only has one, vertical, degree of freedom and thus has a tendency to bounce upwards during oversteer incidents and risk overturning the whole car. 1969 and later Beetles had independent rear suspension, which does not exhibit this behavior. The Corvair was killed before it could be evolved in this direction.
Additionally, Porsche fanatics will tell you that the 911's rear engine placement is actually an advantage in terms of traction during corner exit, so long as you are not foolish enough to lift the throttle in mid-turn.
Yes, and now you have a thoroughly subsidized monocultural food production system which breeds antibiotic-resistant bacteria and outputs decidely non-nutritious food at its most affordable levels; and the abusive working conditions you decry have simply been moved offshore, leaving the corporations who contract for such cheap labor to enforce our enlightened norms, if they feel like it. The moneyed interests which benefit from these arrangements have much more influence over the people in power than do you, the single voter. So while these problems may, eventually, be addressed by the government, it will not happen until they are almost catastrophes. This is the downside to such a heavily centralized republic.
What if the tech is used on a character who's supposed to look slightly inhuman? I'm thinking chiefly of Data from Star Trek, whom Brent Spiner has said he will never play again since an immortal android doesn't age. But if you could reset his looks to 1987, while also setting the character further apart from the normal humans surrounding him, I think that would be an enhancement rather than a drawback.
Just thought I'd let you know.
I don't think that's quite a fair assertion to make. Local elected officials' hands are generally tied by policies set at the national and state levels. California is a strong example of this. Someone up above mentioned the extreme imbalance of tax payments made to the federal government vs. returns received. And I have experienced firsthand the enforced impotence of well-meaning school district officials in repairing severely outdated school plants due to positively Byzantine and constantly shifting state funding rules (which are typically rigged to benefit huge districts like Los Angeles). These are but two examples. The social engineering policies that define our society are set at the highest levels, and the power brokers at those levels do indeed come from an elite background or are validated by the elites who control the political and financial machinery. Populists and guys next door can make it to national office, usually in the House of Representatives, but they quickly learn to toe their party's line or be marginalized.
The American republic may have a system vaguely resembling democracy, but it is hardly participatory, and that is where the populist rage you decry comes from. It is especially intensified by the ease of individual interconnectivity that modern information technology enables. As these interconnected individuals come to feel more disempowered, their rhetoric becomes more intense. The same thing happened with liberals under Bush.
His basic philosophy is old bug is better than new bug
Having driven both, I must say that I agree.
Science is all about having replicable results... how could someone replicate your results if you failed to list all the procedures you used?
Part of it is that Next Generation ran longer and thus had a better opportunity to develop all the characters, making it more disappointing when the movies degenerated into Picard/Data stories. Insurrection and Nemesis were Rick Berman's incompetent attempts to balance the desires of both Star Trek fans and general audiences, something that JJ Abrams seems to have done quite deftly.
In a way, the wormhole aliens were simply a logical extension of the ideas they began exploring with the character of Q. Q chose to present himself as easily relatable, essentially a human with boundless control over space and time. However, it was easy for Picard to dismiss Q as a god due to his human appearance, which included such flaws as hubris and a willingness to pass judgment. The Prophets, on the other hand, had a completely different non-linear perspective that was not friendly to human comprehension (or easy writing). Thus Sisko and co. had a much harder time dismissing them.
The theme of relating to superhuman intelligences is found throughout Star Trek. It's just too bad that later attempts at exploring it failed so miserably, such as the Q episodes of Voyager.
Please elaborate on your metrics of efficiency. I would also like to hear about specific social improvements that are a direct result of the school system.
The front companies provide the illusion of choice, but the American Medical Association holds a monopoly on licensing for conventional care, the drug companies are focused mainly on securing patent monopolies above anything else, and the insurance companies themselves have an army of lobbyists to keep them in their places of privilege.
Note also that neither Clinton nor Obama seriously advocated for a single-payer system during the recent election. Both proposed federal subsidies for existing insurance companies, touting it as the more politically realistic choice. I don't support state-monopolized medicine myself, but I can't see such a proposal as anything other than crackpot realism, which is the first refuge of scoundrels.
Why bother involving yourself with the existing parties or trying to seize a seat in Congress? There are far too many compromises down that road. Get involved in transforming your local politics away from a pathetic sideshow, and build sustainable institutions on the local level. Disregard what the national government is trying to do. It will collapse in upon itself.
Counterproductive, unsustainable, divisive policies like this one might appear to be the roots of dystopia to most people, but it really amounts to the last desperate thrashings of a dinosaur as it drowns in a tar pit.
A whole lot of people are having their daily lives derailed or impinged upon right now, thanks to the government's poor economic policy. In addition, the spigot of foreign lending that kept consumer spending growing over the past decade is being cut off, meaning that the politicians in Washington won't have an easy time papering their way out of this. Change that affects the daily lives of everyone in the country is occurring, right now.
You're the one who reduced the argument to absurdity. The grandparent poster was arguing against a specific legal construct instituted by governments to enable capitalist production and exchange, and you skip straight to the tired old statist argument of warlordism in response.
How is state-granted limited liability and corporate personhood a necessity for an effective legal system, or even the institution of private property? Your argument does not follow. It seems like you're just trying to head off legitimate criticisms of government before they become inconvenient for you to argue against.
The only aspect of your post that might hold any water as a response to the GP is your assertion that modern economies would not arise without the corporate form. This is true on its face, since corporations dominate modern trade. But why should I believe that the modern global economy is the endpoint of human evolution, just because we've managed to put producers on the opposite side of the globe from their consumers? In fact, it certainly isn't, if we're going to be bumping up against resource shortages as the article at the top of the page suggests.
The most effective argument against existing governments is not that they do not provide an effective legal system, or that they impede trade or production. The most effective argument is that they provide a single point of failure for all of the society they encompass, and lend inertia to unsustainable economic arrangements.
Opt-in would be an important component, yes. I can see something like this as a caching service run on nodes of a wireless mesh network, occasionally exchanging checksums or updating RSS feeds with the upstream servers of their most popular content. And anybody in the area with storage space and/or processing power to burn could volunteer as an alternate caching server, so you don't have to jerry-rig a giant hard drive to a WRT54G or something.
Widespread implementation of a concept like this would probably have the side-effect of forcing dynamic Web applications to decentralize. We're seeing the first wave of this with stuff like XULRunner and Apple pushing "Save as Web App..." with the next version of Safari.
It would have the probable effect that people would simply ignore the government and get on with their own business. I find this preferable to the idolatrous, slightly more intellectual version of celebrity culture we have now.
In reading through these posts, it seems to me that your particular brand of nutjobbery involves making broad generalizations about human nature and then backing them up with either contrived scenarios, such as the point here where you guarantee what will occur in 15 minutes of daycare, or further generalizations about history or culture. Since you concentrate on the abstract, imploring your opponent to use his imagination to bring out the details of the reality around him, it is a style of argument very befitting a filmmaker. And the fact that so much effort has gone into such a voluminous Slashdot postcount perhaps implies why that movie in your sig seems to be perpetually in production.
These two qualities are cornerstones of capitalism as we know it. All I'm looking for is an admission that the market system would evolve into something radically different without such distortions, an idea not put forward by most writers I see who split hairs between mercantilism and capitalism. If you're not one of these writers, I apologize.
Of course something twenty years (or even ten years) newer is going to offer superior crash safety. Materials and manufacturing technologies will have seen to that. However, every modern minivan I've experienced offers inferior handling and traction (partly thanks to that extended wheelbase), meaning you have less of an opportunity to avoid a crash in the first place. This also leads to increased maneuvering difficulty when parking. For these reasons, I'll gladly take taller and shorter any day. Volkswagen's engineers chose this layout even though the Vanagon/T3 was to be a clean-sheet design, which could've easily taken advantage of the front-engine chassis and drivetrains they were abandoning the Beetle for. It would be a decade before economies of scale would win out over space-efficiency considerations.
And if modern minivans do offer more leg room, it comes mainly at the expense of cargo space, requiring you to dispose of passenger seating in order to carry anything bigger than a couple of suitcases or a few gym bags. You might not find this compromise as ridiculous as I do, but as more and more people take up car-pooling, many of them will probably come around to my point of view. It's just too bad that the last developer of rear-engine vehicles in the Western world is Porsche, who have been focused on sports cars and ludicrously high profits for decades. Crash-engineering a cab-over design to modern standards would yield a substantial commercial advantage.
There's another way to look at this that makes a lot more sense: intellectual property law subsidizes monolithic methods of information distribution. The music, publishing, software, and movie industries are all deeply distorted by this intervention, and widespread information technology is eating into their subsidies. These markets have been so distorted for so long (since 1787, as a matter of fact!) that the massive enterprises which control them have no incentive to come up with new distribution mechanisms that compensate and still guarantee some form of income. They're so big and well-entrenched that they can simply exercise influence with the central government, destroying rather than creating.
Hell, the concept that people deserve economic rent from this artificial form of property is so deep-set that you, an average Joe on the street, accepts it at face value without considering how society can evolve to jettison it, now that it threatens to become overtly harmful. Kevin Carson has a good article on such institutions of social engineering here: http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8271 that might get you thinking.
Then how come they're all granted limited liability by the government, and recognized as notional persons in government courts?
Chrysler brought the front-engine, front-wheel-drive minivan into mass production because it allowed them to leverage the K-car platform as a people-mover for suburbia. So your analogy is more apt than you think.
And by leg room and cabin space, they are all still drastically inferior to my 20-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with the argument you're making, it's just me being bitter because manufacturers chasing higher profit margins flooded the market with space-inefficient front-engine, front-wheel-drive designs based on sedan chassis. Anybody wanting something with a stronger chassis had no choice but an even more space-inefficient SUV, which also only came into existence because it leveraged truck production capacity, not because it was a sane design for a utility vehicle.