Your fundamental point is good. This doesn't tell us much for sure until there's a more scientific survey.
But my _hunch_ is that they are "relatively" exclusory groups. Multiple programs are for geeks. How many people can't be bothered with Firefox because they "already know how to use IE?"
Its because you sound so much cooler talking about revolution than talking about campaigning for election, right? Actually putting liberty, to say nothing of your life, on the line, has nothing to do with your tough talk.
A freshman congressman has diddley individual power. The party leader tells him when to go to the bathroom.
So, ok. No revolution talk. Let's send an army of Mr. Smiths to Washington.
1. $5 million should assure a representative win. At least $10 million for a successful senate run.
2. 435 representatives and 100 senators.
3. But we only need 2/3 to overturn an executive veto, so that's 290 representatives and 67 senators.
4. So, initially, we should only have to raise 2.12 billion to get congress back in the hands of the people.
5. But we'll need to demonstrate that we are good for at least another 2.12 billion to assure reelection so they won't have to deal with corporate lobbyists and fundraising 10 hours/day.
6. Wikipedia says 62 million people voted for Bush in 2004 so they are presumable happy. The money will have to be raised from the remaining 60 million people who can be bothered enough about politics to vote.
7. That means we need to get about $35 per candidate from every person in the country who voted for someone except Bush and a commitment for another $35 per candidate in subsequent elections. Or should we expand to include commitments to support state and local races too? Shouldn't be more than a couple hundred per election if each and every one of the 60 million chip in.
Anyway, let's get to it!
Who wants to start the web site?
[Sadly, anyone who knows me would know that I'm being sarcastic. My hunch is that we are seriously on the track of "We are going to take it. We will be fooled again." until things are so bad there is rioting in the streets and we do have a de facto revolution (in about 30 years) But, what the hey, if the above sounds practical to you, go for it.]
The committee probably won't even know what they're doing.
That's the way the game is played. Probably won't even be read and a few of the senators will very likely say they never realized the effects of what they were signing -- hoping, I guess, nobody will notice how stupid that makes them sound.
Nobody in good faith is going to stop this practice of tacking poison onto major bills because it is a well-ingrained practice that works for both parties.
Did you notice the references to radiation sickness in the article?
Yup. And if one city gets nuked, the rest of the country can send in the Red Cross. If a whole country gets nuked, lots of luck on farmer Brown coming to town with his veterinary supplies to make things better.
Any guesses on the second wave of death after radiation and before starvation? I vote cholera. Americans can hardly imagine water born death but I have two direct ancestors who died of cholera: one in the civil war (remember its disease that kills the most people in a war) and one two years before a (now) major metropolitan area put in a water system in 1870.
That link says some pretty bizarre things. Instead of one 20 megaton warhead, we are supposed to take comfort that MIRVs carry a dozen warheads of "only" 300 kilotons and "therefore" the cities wouldn't really be destroyed. According to Wikipedia, the Nagasaki bomb was a whole whopping TWENTY kilotons. So call me crazy but I figure a MIRV would effectively destroy a metropolis.
Remember, nothing will work. CARS newer than the early seventies won't work. The EMF will take out everything solid-state. In WWII electronics meant tubes and cars were mechanical. Without an intrastructure, will offshore oil rigs have a port to unload in? Will there be oil refining? How will it get transported and distributed? Even if you have a nuke plant outside of town and can string some distribution back up, will even a nuke plant run forever without lubrication or is beef tallow adequate?
A person better hope oil gets distributed because, even with the die-off, those cans in the grocery store won't last long. And plows and combines don't run on hay. How many farmers _have_ work horses (did you know there are differences between riding horses and plow horses?), much less have the equipment and knowledge and two-bottom plow to hitch them up to?
It is tempting to say that we would only slip back to the Romans without oil and electricity but we would still have to relearn how to create the intense fire in a primitive iron foundry.
And there would still be the sticky little problem of overpopulation. Tribes _are_ a social organization. Tribes are not a post-war state of anarchy. And according to my old anthropology book even in established hunter and gather societies:
"Equipped with knowledge of virtually every edible plant and with effective means of exploiting most vegetables and animals, population density varied according to the abundance of resources. It ranged from one person per square mile--and rarely more than this--to one person per 50 to 100 square miles." (Anthropology Today, CRM, 1971)
Do the math of what the first few years of a post-nuke world would be like without an infrastructure for gas and electricity.
In the main, it really needs to be said that survivalists are losers. They are so often people who are marginalized and fantasize that if society were only shattered, they would have the opportunity to rise to the top. Because society hasn't valued them, they dismiss the importance of society. But instead of some noble savage fantasy, a post-nuke world would more likely offer them the opportunity to club a widow to steal the last can of spaghettios from her children.
Kids raised indoors on computers will adapt better than their parents to a career in cubicle indenture.
I used to think so. It seemed like everything was gearing our kids for a job on the lunar research colony. After 10 hours in the research cube, they could retire to the "living": cube and play Doom, golf or interactive porn. Instant and microwaved food. Life under artificial light.
But lately I sense that the future doesn't feel that progressive. Maybe learning to spear a carp and skin a rat has value. Remember, dandelions and cattails _are_ edible.
After all the killer asteroid movies, wouldn't increasing Mars' mass with asteroids be worrisome to the inhabitants? Which is to say, after the tech is available to get to Mars regularly, will the world really agree to wait a few hundred years to round up asteroids and bulk the planet up? Always seemed to me like it would be inhabited long before that.
Maybe there are some other feasible modifications like the solar lens Robinson wrote about?
More than a couple decades of international home BBSes like CompuServe and over a decade of home internet availability and the majority of Americans still don't have a clue that the internet is an INTERNATIONAL entity? What do these people surveyed think Congress is going to do -- carpet bomb internet HQ with MK77?
Maybe if he relaxed at "ye old inn to supp upon oxen" and meditated a bit on whether we share _anything_ with France he would realize how utterly stupid the "Freedom Fries" movement was at multiple levels. Or he's just pig ignorant.
I've gotten pretty irritated at "Old Europe" bashing. It is so typical of an immature bully attitude in the U.S. Precisely because it is "old" Europe, if we had a bit of civilization and historical awareness, what could France alone with it's misadventures in Vietnam and Algeria have taught us _not_ to do? The U.S. is acting like a stupid bratty child in front of an adult who understands from their own youth that being an asshole doesn't turn out well and it's embarrassing to be a part of.
Anyway, as long as a flying Citreon that serves raw fish isn't the end product, I'm excited that this collaboration could produce a utterly cool plane.
I've also decided to go on a huge roadtrip in 2015, but I too have no idea how I'll get there...
Yawn. Indeed.
I forget. Is this before or during the Mars trip?
Lose your credibility, you've pretty much lost everything. It really isn't the 60's anymore.
"Results talk" has been replaced with "Let me tell you a story". Hardly NASA's primary fault, of course, without a national vision and funding.
If your office is using inkjets, and you have more than 2 employees, then your IT or management are being extremely stupid.
I don't remember ever working in an office that had an ink jet printer. I remember employees _asking_ for one (and being told it was stupid). I've had a home laser since '92 -- and it weighed about 40 pounds.
You want to save money beyond switching to laser: tonerrefillkits.com.
You'll almost always get one good refill for around $20. You might get two refills from a catridge particularly if you have some.pdf manuals to print because the cylinders usually start to wear at the edges. I got a little wild with the soldering iron the first time, but it really does take about 5 minutes when you get the hang of it.
Why pay tuition when most larger universities are so impersonal they won't notice another person in the room? Today, we have the MIT on-line class notes.
Oddly, it could work for the exceptional person because there are some opportunities to test for credit and a few accredited universities that will accept tests. One university in particular offered as many concentrations as a person could get through "passing" the GRE Subject Tests.
And there are a few major distance universities around the world. Cranking up the motivation to read from home is probably harder than dropping into lectures.
Since this track is more-or-less a test of the exceptional person, it's a little irresponsible as a general recommendation of course.
Isn't the core point that it is becoming increasinly painful to watch efforts being spent on refining a dead technology? We knew all along that the shuttle was a highly unsatisfactory compromise but we didn't make the effort to move on to the next stage in the 80s and 90s.
When Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood he came away with an observation. The psycho-criminals he met were invariably heavily tatooed and that led him to speculations about the craziness trying to come out. So I think an interviewee with a lot of modification would have his stability looked at suspiciously or be considered a bit socially retarded for falling for a fashion emulating psycho-criminals. Would you come into an interview for a professional or managerial job in biker leathers and chains?
Personally, I always had a bit of bemusement. The guys with two-feet of hair in the late seventies had an easy fashion fix. But scrubbing those tats, oh -- around this decade, was going to hurt -- the pocketbook if nothing else.
I still know Linux has some serious limitations. We need to get over them instead of brushing off people who are frustrated.
Absolutely. And that starts with the unglamorous job of documentation. Excluding some notable manuals for the major projects at the classy end and "read the source comments" on the low end, linux documentation typically seems to fall along the line of:
Do A. Worked? Good! Now do B. Worked? Good! Now do C. Worked? Good! Now do D. Worked? Good! Success!
It shouldn't be necessary to point out to someone with programming experience that the above is NOT going to lead to a successful install for those who did not have a happy moment with one or more of A, B, C or D. Work out the combinations on that to compute the odds of user satisfaction with the documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet there are entire towns we could condemn to recreate a more profitable economic entity!
BWAHHHAAAAHHHAAA!! What sport.
So many plants and animals, so little time -- some of them with quite amazing effects.
Your fundamental point is good. This doesn't tell us much for sure until there's a more scientific survey.
But my _hunch_ is that they are "relatively" exclusory groups. Multiple programs are for geeks. How many people can't be bothered with Firefox because they "already know how to use IE?"
Its because you sound so much cooler talking about revolution than talking about campaigning for election, right? Actually putting liberty, to say nothing of your life, on the line, has nothing to do with your tough talk.
A freshman congressman has diddley individual power. The party leader tells him when to go to the bathroom.
So, ok. No revolution talk. Let's send an army of Mr. Smiths to Washington.
1. $5 million should assure a representative win. At least $10 million for a successful senate run.
2. 435 representatives and 100 senators.
3. But we only need 2/3 to overturn an executive veto, so that's 290 representatives and 67 senators.
4. So, initially, we should only have to raise 2.12 billion to get congress back in the hands of the people.
5. But we'll need to demonstrate that we are good for at least another 2.12 billion to assure reelection so they won't have to deal with corporate lobbyists and fundraising 10 hours/day.
6. Wikipedia says 62 million people voted for Bush in 2004 so they are presumable happy. The money will have to be raised from the remaining 60 million people who can be bothered enough about politics to vote.
7. That means we need to get about $35 per candidate from every person in the country who voted for someone except Bush and a commitment for another $35 per candidate in subsequent elections. Or should we expand to include commitments to support state and local races too? Shouldn't be more than a couple hundred per election if each and every one of the 60 million chip in.
Anyway, let's get to it!
Who wants to start the web site?
[Sadly, anyone who knows me would know that I'm being sarcastic. My hunch is that we are seriously on the track of "We are going to take it. We will be fooled again." until things are so bad there is rioting in the streets and we do have a de facto revolution (in about 30 years) But, what the hey, if the above sounds practical to you, go for it.]
The committee probably won't even know what they're doing.
That's the way the game is played. Probably won't even be read and a few of the senators will very likely say they never realized the effects of what they were signing -- hoping, I guess, nobody will notice how stupid that makes them sound.
Nobody in good faith is going to stop this practice of tacking poison onto major bills because it is a well-ingrained practice that works for both parties.
Terrorists are bribing our senators too? Oh, my!
Did you notice the references to radiation sickness in the article?
Yup. And if one city gets nuked, the rest of the country can send in the Red Cross. If a whole country gets nuked, lots of luck on farmer Brown coming to town with his veterinary supplies to make things better.
Any guesses on the second wave of death after radiation and before starvation? I vote cholera. Americans can hardly imagine water born death but I have two direct ancestors who died of cholera: one in the civil war (remember its disease that kills the most people in a war) and one two years before a (now) major metropolitan area put in a water system in 1870.
Nuclear myths
"Always look on the bright side of life."
That link says some pretty bizarre things. Instead of one 20 megaton warhead, we are supposed to take comfort that MIRVs carry a dozen warheads of "only" 300 kilotons and "therefore" the cities wouldn't really be destroyed. According to Wikipedia, the Nagasaki bomb was a whole whopping TWENTY kilotons. So call me crazy but I figure a MIRV would effectively destroy a metropolis.
Remember, nothing will work. CARS newer than the early seventies won't work. The EMF will take out everything solid-state. In WWII electronics meant tubes and cars were mechanical. Without an intrastructure, will offshore oil rigs have a port to unload in? Will there be oil refining? How will it get transported and distributed? Even if you have a nuke plant outside of town and can string some distribution back up, will even a nuke plant run forever without lubrication or is beef tallow adequate?
A person better hope oil gets distributed because, even with the die-off, those cans in the grocery store won't last long. And plows and combines don't run on hay. How many farmers _have_ work horses (did you know there are differences between riding horses and plow horses?), much less have the equipment and knowledge and two-bottom plow to hitch them up to?
It is tempting to say that we would only slip back to the Romans without oil and electricity but we would still have to relearn how to create the intense fire in a primitive iron foundry.
And there would still be the sticky little problem of overpopulation. Tribes _are_ a social organization. Tribes are not a post-war state of anarchy. And according to my old anthropology book even in established hunter and gather societies:
"Equipped with knowledge of virtually every edible plant and with effective means of exploiting most vegetables and animals, population density varied according to the abundance of resources. It ranged from one person per square mile--and rarely more than this--to one person per 50 to 100 square miles." (Anthropology Today, CRM, 1971)
Do the math of what the first few years of a post-nuke world would be like without an infrastructure for gas and electricity.
In the main, it really needs to be said that survivalists are losers. They are so often people who are marginalized and fantasize that if society were only shattered, they would have the opportunity to rise to the top. Because society hasn't valued them, they dismiss the importance of society. But instead of some noble savage fantasy, a post-nuke world would more likely offer them the opportunity to club a widow to steal the last can of spaghettios from her children.
Isn't that a well-known Air Force recruiting point? Press the button and back to base by dinner time.
Kids raised indoors on computers will adapt better than their parents to a career in cubicle indenture.
I used to think so. It seemed like everything was gearing our kids for a job on the lunar research colony. After 10 hours in the research cube, they could retire to the "living": cube and play Doom, golf or interactive porn. Instant and microwaved food. Life under artificial light.
But lately I sense that the future doesn't feel that progressive. Maybe learning to spear a carp and skin a rat has value. Remember, dandelions and cattails _are_ edible.
After all the killer asteroid movies, wouldn't increasing Mars' mass with asteroids be worrisome to the inhabitants? Which is to say, after the tech is available to get to Mars regularly, will the world really agree to wait a few hundred years to round up asteroids and bulk the planet up? Always seemed to me like it would be inhabited long before that.
Maybe there are some other feasible modifications like the solar lens Robinson wrote about?
More than a couple decades of international home BBSes like CompuServe and over a decade of home internet availability and the majority of Americans still don't have a clue that the internet is an INTERNATIONAL entity? What do these people surveyed think Congress is going to do -- carpet bomb internet HQ with MK77?
Many people who ordered from chemical suppliers, even frickin plastic tubes and such from many years ago are getting threatening letters.
Electronic components too.
Only criminals would order an eprom programmer.
He can't mean heartland. "Somebody blew up downtown Iowa. How horrible! Where's Iowa?"
One assumes even suicide bombers have standards. Who wants to take out the Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace?
I think it is between the articles that say the U.S. is a Christian nation and that stem cells have souls.
Or not. Obviously, it is always a question of RATIONALLY applying the PRINCIPLES to current situations.
You honor, I didn't rob the bank. I was just driving the getaway car?
I don't think so.
It's hard enough to get me out for this sort of thing when it's 0F. At -100F, it better be REALLY, REALLY pretty.
Maybe if he relaxed at "ye old inn to supp upon oxen" and meditated a bit on whether we share _anything_ with France he would realize how utterly stupid the "Freedom Fries" movement was at multiple levels. Or he's just pig ignorant.
I've gotten pretty irritated at "Old Europe" bashing. It is so typical of an immature bully attitude in the U.S. Precisely because it is "old" Europe, if we had a bit of civilization and historical awareness, what could France alone with it's misadventures in Vietnam and Algeria have taught us _not_ to do? The U.S. is acting like a stupid bratty child in front of an adult who understands from their own youth that being an asshole doesn't turn out well and it's embarrassing to be a part of.
Anyway, as long as a flying Citreon that serves raw fish isn't the end product, I'm excited that this collaboration could produce a utterly cool plane.
I've also decided to go on a huge roadtrip in 2015, but I too have no idea how I'll get there...
Yawn. Indeed.
I forget. Is this before or during the Mars trip?
Lose your credibility, you've pretty much lost everything. It really isn't the 60's anymore.
"Results talk" has been replaced with "Let me tell you a story". Hardly NASA's primary fault, of course, without a national vision and funding.
If your office is using inkjets, and you have more than 2 employees, then your IT or management are being extremely stupid.
.pdf manuals to print because the cylinders usually start to wear at the edges. I got a little wild with the soldering iron the first time, but it really does take about 5 minutes when you get the hang of it.
I don't remember ever working in an office that had an ink jet printer. I remember employees _asking_ for one (and being told it was stupid). I've had a home laser since '92 -- and it weighed about 40 pounds.
You want to save money beyond switching to laser: tonerrefillkits.com.
You'll almost always get one good refill for around $20. You might get two refills from a catridge particularly if you have some
Why pay tuition when most larger universities are so impersonal they won't notice another person in the room? Today, we have the MIT on-line class notes.
Oddly, it could work for the exceptional person because there are some opportunities to test for credit and a few accredited universities that will accept tests. One university in particular offered as many concentrations as a person could get through "passing" the GRE Subject Tests.
And there are a few major distance universities around the world. Cranking up the motivation to read from home is probably harder than dropping into lectures.
Since this track is more-or-less a test of the exceptional person, it's a little irresponsible as a general recommendation of course.
Have to agree. And, hey. He's in Canada. Water is one of their natural resources.
Isn't the core point that it is becoming increasinly painful to watch efforts being spent on refining a dead technology? We knew all along that the shuttle was a highly unsatisfactory compromise but we didn't make the effort to move on to the next stage in the 80s and 90s.
Had to think about it.
When Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood he came away with an observation. The psycho-criminals he met were invariably heavily tatooed and that led him to speculations about the craziness trying to come out. So I think an interviewee with a lot of modification would have his stability looked at suspiciously or be considered a bit socially retarded for falling for a fashion emulating psycho-criminals. Would you come into an interview for a professional or managerial job in biker leathers and chains?
Personally, I always had a bit of bemusement. The guys with two-feet of hair in the late seventies had an easy fashion fix. But scrubbing those tats, oh -- around this decade, was going to hurt -- the pocketbook if nothing else.
I still know Linux has some serious limitations. We need to get over them instead of brushing off people who are frustrated.
Absolutely. And that starts with the unglamorous job of documentation. Excluding some notable manuals for the major projects at the classy end and "read the source comments" on the low end, linux documentation typically seems to fall along the line of:
Do A. Worked? Good!
Now do B. Worked? Good!
Now do C. Worked? Good!
Now do D. Worked? Good!
Success!
It shouldn't be necessary to point out to someone with programming experience that the above is NOT going to lead to a successful install for those who did not have a happy moment with one or more of A, B, C or D. Work out the combinations on that to compute the odds of user satisfaction with the documentation.