A corporation being a legal entity is completely irrelevant to it's actual definition. A corporation will never be more than a collection of people
"A legal entity" is exactly the actual defintion of a corporation. It is not a collection of people, it is a structure of organizing people; the people can be completely replaced but the corporation survives.
We can argue ab out whether such monsters should be permitted to exist, whether we should allow the state to create immortal sociopaths; but that's what they are.
Clinton's actions were not comparable. He cleaned house at the beginning of his term, common practice; Bush did the same at the start of his term, unremarkably.
What's remarkable here is the unprecedented mid-term selective firing of prosecutors, apparently politically motivated
If there is no god, then there are no "rights" other than what man creates for himself.
Of course there are several non-theistic theories of rights, based on ideas of human nature and our minimum needs to have the ability to achieve happiness.
I like Kerry Thornley's formulation:
There are at least seven natural rights, or the Tao of human activity in society possesses seven attributes, or people are like machines only in the respect that they don't work good if you neglect their maintenance requirements.
What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food,clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.
We are further encouraged to argue about whether rights must be earned or whether it is the duty of the government to guarantee them. Everyone necessarily struggles for their rights, and no government can ever guarantee anything except death and taxes.
All that bickering begs the relevant question: What can we do in voluntary cooperation to see that our natural rights, our intimate functional needs, are respected? Without that much, human beings are incapable of behaving as constructively rational and loving members of any population.
Invoking theism, as usual, explains nothing. We have no signed statement from any god or group of gods laying out rights; and even if we did, supernatualism in ethics or politics is simply the ultimate "might makes right" argument. Why should the opinions of some deity or deities determine what is right, other than the arguement "you're going to hell if you disagree"?
It's not the kernel that defines linux, more importantly it is the compilers and development tool chain. Secondarily it is the packaging mechanisms, such as apt, rpm, etc. We may see the day (not neccessarily what I wish) when most popular distributions of linux no longer use the Torvalds kernel.
No.
Linux is the kernel. The typical system that sits on top of a Linux kernel is GNU.
That's why RMS makes a big point of the "GNU/Linux" thing: a GNU system can sit on top of a BSD kernel, or the HURD, as well as a Linux kernel.
Certain in common an informal useage, "Linux" has come to be used as a short form of "GNU/Linux". But if it's not sitting on top of the Torvalds kernel, it's completely inaccurate to call it "Linux".
it's not in business to let you code an app that is fun, it's in business to make money.
If it wants to make money off of the development of good software, it's going to have to attract and hire talented and creative developers.
If it wants to attract and hire talented and creative developers, it's going to have to allow for the coding to be fun, to some degree.
Sure, some businesses can get by with legions of cubicle-drones who are competent but uninsipred. But if you're doing anything that's challenging, if you need good developers, you'll have to keep the talent satisfied if you want to make money.
Is the AED training available to the public yet, or will I lose my certification at some point? Anyone?
AED training is available to the general public, indeed that's the whole idea: put them everywhere and make them idiot-proof. (Though they still need to work on that.)
The "medical professional" training I think varies a little bit between the Red Cross and American Heart Association standards, but covers the two-rescuer protocol, plus maybe the use of a ambu bag, and maybe cricoid pressure if that's still in there (wasn't covered in my last training). But it's not like anyone checks your documents if you sign up for the "medical professional" level class.
people won't perform first aid on others, especially here in the US, where, if the person dies or doesn't recover 100% without a medical bill, you'll get sued, because there's a slim possibility that your actions caused more harm than good
You can be sued for anything in this country. But thanks to Good Samaritan laws in every state (and in D.C.), you cannot be successfully sued for providing first aid, provided that you act as a volunteer (don't accept any compensation), act in a reasonable and prudent manner (don't do stuff you know you're not supposed to), and don't abandon the victim once you start.
So please - don't be afraid to help. You have the law on your side.
When it comes to CPR, you're doing it on someone with no pulse. The person is dead. You can't make them any worse off than that.
Fingerprints might be a good way to get a good first pass for suspects, but in general the public has way too much confidence in how well the retrieved prints identify culprits.
That is true when we speak of "the scientific method".
"Computer science", however, means only the organized body of knowledge about computers; it's "science" in the sense of "the motion picture arts and sciences", or even "mathematical sciences", not in the sense of the natural or experimental sciences.
One can, occasionally, approach topics relevant to computer science using the experimental scientific method; experiments on computer interfaces, for example. But most computer science has little of the scientific method about it.
Cutting down the forest - increases GDP for that year. It totally forgets to mention that either stuff is built on the cleared land or generally more trees are planted for harvest later. It's a renewable resource.
Farmed trees are highly renewable resources. Forests are not; forests are ecosystems in which trees are just one member. Old growth forests are irreplacable.
The Oil spill - Doesn't help GDP. First, the value of the oil is lost. Then vast amounts of resources(money) are spent to clean up the mess.
But all that spent money is goods and services that increase the GDP. And all the guys who worked to make and ship the oil that got spilled still got paid, making the money dance.
The cancer diagnosis - What, it's better for them to be undiagnosed? GDP increases come from successul diagnosis and treatment of cancers, allowing the victim to continue working.
It's better for them to not get cancer in the first place. But then oncolosists are out of business, pharaceutical revenues are down, et cetera. Preventing that cancer in the first place can (depending on the economic "value" of the person) decrease the GDP. Eating right and exercising and refraining from smoking just doesn't cause as much economic consumption as a course of chemo and radiation and some surgery.
GDP is a number. It may be the most common number, but it's just a number.
It is, unfortunately, the number most often used to measure how well a nation is providing for the needs of its citizens. The point is that it is in fact a very poor measure of this.
Nothing will ever successfully address the global warming problem if it isn't economically viable.
The fact that it's difficult to find a economically viable renewable energy solutions shows that it's our economic system that's not viable.
So long as economist don't know how to subtract, and as long as polluters get to externalize their costs, economic reality and physical reality will not correspond.
What matters in determining intelligence is the thought behind the action. Was it instinct? Mimicry? Or innovation?
Applying that criterion leads to solipism, as there's only one being whose thoughs I have access too. The rest of you all may be behaving by instinct or mimicry, but I know I'm thinking.
The way to distinguish intelligent tool-making and use from instinctual behaviors like web spinning is by the flexibility and adaptability of the behavior. Can it be altered through learning? When circumstances change, does the organism repeat unsuccessful behaviors or does it alter them to work?
Re:If you do not have rule by majority....
on
From Bess to Worse
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
then what do you have? Dictatorship? Facism? Elitism?
A constitutional government is one in which the powers of government are spelled out and limited ahead of time, disallowing simple majority rule, the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch" scenario.
A democratic republic is a government in which people act indirectly, electing capable citizens as legislators who (in theory) thoroughly investigate and debate issues before acting, preventing simple mob rule.
A constitutional democratic republic - which in theory is what the U.S. is - is a pretty good idea.
Of course, in real life people often elect idiots, not capable citizens. And once governments get power, we see that they don't necessarily feel bound by the constitution, and don't necessarily bother to thoroughly investigate anything but act in ways that pander to popular prejudices.
As Douglas Adams once put it, people are a problem.
there is very little point in discussing morality, at least outside of Philosophy classes, because people approach it from radically different angles.
Many of those angles, however, are logically or factually deficient; they rest on factually incorrect beliefs or on logical fallacies.
Through discussion and debate, such shortcomings in arguments can be found.
If I had to guess, I'd say about 90% of people's "moral dilemmas" are really nothing more than ways of gauging the relative acceptability of various courses of action within their peer groups
Yes, confusing social mores with ethical behavior is exactly the sort of mistake that can be discovered through discussion and debate.
the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth. So don't worry about having a weak moral sense; there are other ways to lead a good life.
Bill Gates does not seem like a particually happy person to me, so I have to question your assumption that being the richest person on Earth is necessarily "leading a good life"; certainly I know people several orders of magnitude less rich who seem to be enjoying life much more.
Instead, study the laws that apply directly to you, and the reactions of the neighborhoods you find yourself in, and determine from those studies what the boundaries of acceptable behavior are.
Laws, mores, and ethics are very different things.
It is generally illegal in most parts of the U.S. to smoke cannbis; it is in keeping with the mores of some American subcultures and in violation of others; it is completely ethical under any reasonable ethical system. Eating dogshit is legal, and not particularly unethical, but a strong violation of social norms. Being a money-grubbing bastard who'd sell his self-respect to the highest bidder is legal, and admirible behavior in some American subcultures, but is unethical and corrosive to the soul, destructive of any chance of deep happiness.
I think the question author of TFA really wants to ask is whether the slashdot community would find him acceptable if it learned that he was doing this proxy bypass of high school rules.
I think the author of the TFA wanted to see and learn from a discussion in which various facts he was not aware of might be produced, and in which different lines of reasoning considering what to do about those facts could be analyzed -.i.e., an ethical discussion. Among those facts might be "people will [love|hate] you for doing this", and we might discuss what to do about that.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
All you have to do is broaden your definition of 'we' to include anybody with a human lineage, and then 'our' culture will be preserved...you could probably assemble a crew of people that just wanted to get away from the rest of us
Getting a crew together isn't the hard part. (If all else fails, there's always the old British solution for stocking colonies.) It's the expense of building such a thing.
As you noted, past colonization has had economic motivations, so that it was possible for a group much larger than the colonists to fund the colony in expectation of profits. There aren't any here.
Building a MegaArk would require a substantial fraction of the resources of the human race. It's unlikely that a large part of human civilization would find the vague satisfaction of knowing that something with a human lineage was out there somewhere among the stars, to be enough of a benefit to bear the cost.
It would require an almost religious imperitive, the sort that made the construction of medieval cathedrals into multi-generation projects.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Would it really need to survive unchanged? I mean as long as
it survived with a reasonable level of know how, it would probably be
alright.
It it doesn't survive unchanged enough to still be part of our culture,
why are we bothering to send it?
We'd have to spend a whole lot of resources to send a bunch of Terrans
(maybe by this time Solarians, memebers of a system-wide culture) off to
colonize another star. Our motivation to bear the expense would be to
spread and preserve our culture.
But after seven generations on the Ark, why would their descendants care
about that mission? By this time the vast majority of them are quite comfy
living on the Ark (or else they've killed each other off). There might be a
handful of people interested in a colony, but not enough to make a go of
it.
Isolated from Earth, they will have developed their own unique culture,
and not care much about ours - and not care about colonization. (In fact
after a few generations of isolation and genetic drift, the population might
well have formed a distinct species.)
Say you need 1,000 people minimum to make a colony, and one out of a
thousand Arkians would be interested and qualified. Then you need a million
Arkians, not the 50,000 asumed in TFA. Twenty times the size at the same
radius (IIRC, a larger radius on a spinning object makes for structural
difficulty, but my physics is rusty and I'm lazy) makes the Ark 200 km
long. For comparison, Phobos is 22 km in diameter, Saturn's moon Phoebe is
220 km. We're talking about a ship getting into the range of a large
asteroid or small moon. (Yes, yes, cue Obi-Wan saying "That's no moon...")
If we did imagine a MegaArk with a population in the millions, much more
likely is that it develops it own unique culture that keeps going across
the stars, maybe every so often letting some malcontents off to have a go
at their own version of utopian civilization-building.
Nice to imagine, but not a simple matter of spreading our own civilization
across the stars. So why would we bother with such a huge expense?
Instead, it would be more practical to build a whole bunch of O'Neill cylinders
in the Solar neighborhood, close enough to share culture and keep
exchanging people. Maybe in a few billion years when the Sun runs down, all
these cylinders migrate in a cloud to a nearby red dwarf.
We will (if we manage to not wipe ourselves out in the next 100 years or
so) send probes to other stars. Maybe even freeze a few people and send
them out on kamikaze exploratory missions. But interstellar colonization
will only happen if new physics and/or new biology (life extension) makes
trips possible in a single human lifetime, so that colonies preserve our
species and culture.
These atrocities were over long before WWII; however, imperialist rule
of the Philippines continued until 1946.
The only physical delivery of aid after Yoyang (Dec. of
2004) was by U.S. Marine helicopter, I was there to document it and took
hundreds of photos:
It may be that aid from other nations was delivered by the U.S.; thanks
to our obscene military spending, we are the best at putting boots on the
ground. As I've documented
for you though, the stuff they were delivering was part of a multi-national
relief effort, including substantial contributions from the Japanese. And
Japanese doctors and
other relief personnel were dispatched to aid relief efforts.
American soldiers were not trained that anyone who
surrenders is not a human being, and it's OK to kill them)
Undoubtedly, they do not
regard the shooting of Filipinos just as they would the shooting of white
troops. This is partly because they are "only niggers," and partly because
they despise them for their treacherous servility... The soldiers feel
they are fighting with savages, not with soldiers...
Those and other policies don't make it seem like Japan has
reformed it's traditional belief in racial superiority (by way of
comparison, Americans, not being homogonous, cannot have a collective
national belief in racial superiority if they wanted to).
Of course there was an American collective national belief in the racial
superiority of whites, up until the late 1960s (and still persisting in
some quarters today).
Certainly Japan was strict immigration and naturalization laws, but that
is distinct from racism. It's a crowded country. Lack of overtime laws is
irrelevant to the question of racism.
Certainly racism does exist in Japan, primarily in the older
generations; I got a few dirty looks from old Japanese men when I visited
just for being a white guy, and there are businesses that post
"Nihonjin-only" signs. On the other hand, white guys are hot property
among young Japanese girls. Attitudes change across generations, as they
always have.
Legally, Japan is signatory to the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
you regret to mention that it was agreed between representatives of Hawaii and President McKinley....Now, was the overthrow of the Monarchy(only a few years earlier) a violent taste of American expansionism. Maybe.
There's no "maybe" about it; the U.S. has even offered an official apology. The "representatives" you speak of were shills for American interests with no authority to speak for the people of Hawaii.
Now I don't know about, but in the midst of having entire villages wiped out by Japanese tests, I don't think any Chinese person in the entire country saw the occupation by Japan as a good thing.
And just where did I ever suggest that any of them did?
No, the attack was unprovoked. You seem to think embargoes to stop the extraordinarily violent expansion of a country allied with Hitler (who was seen as one of the greatest threats ever face with the outbreak of full conflict in Europe) is not allowed.
I didn't say that embargoes weren't allowed. But they were certainly provocative. If you have a hornet's nest outside your door, knocking it down with a stick might be justified and ethical and the right thing to do, but don't act surprised when they try to sting you.
The issue I have is with the popular myth that the noble and pure U.S. was quietly minding its own business when suddenly, out of nowhere, comes Pearl Harbor. But the fact is the U.S. had been meddling in the Pacific for decades (Perry's Black Ships, the Spanish-American War, the Phillipines, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa), even if we had swung back to a somewhat more isolationist policy during the Depression. And the attack came after a run-up including not just embargos against Japan but covert financial and military support to Chinese forces fighting the Japanese invasion.
U.S. actions were provokative (that does not mean they were not justified, only that they were certain to provoke a response) and while Japan's desires were imperialistic, the U.S. had been evincing similar desires in the Pacific for a long time, though being somewhat less bloody about it.
It probably has something to do with the fact that I've spent most my adult life living in Japan working here and have always been interested in how cultures progress over time.
Where about? I'm coming to Osaka for the spring. Perhaps we can continue the debate over a biiru. (I know, it's a sizable country, but odds are good you're either around Tokyo or Kansai.)
Slashdot Mirror
Get a copy of Harlan Ellison's screenplay.
And weep that it will never be made.
"A legal entity" is exactly the actual defintion of a corporation. It is not a collection of people, it is a structure of organizing people; the people can be completely replaced but the corporation survives.
We can argue ab out whether such monsters should be permitted to exist, whether we should allow the state to create immortal sociopaths; but that's what they are.
Clinton's actions were not comparable. He cleaned house at the beginning of his term, common practice; Bush did the same at the start of his term, unremarkably.
What's remarkable here is the unprecedented mid-term selective firing of prosecutors, apparently politically motivated
Of course there are several non-theistic theories of rights, based on ideas of human nature and our minimum needs to have the ability to achieve happiness.
I like Kerry Thornley's formulation:
Invoking theism, as usual, explains nothing. We have no signed statement from any god or group of gods laying out rights; and even if we did, supernatualism in ethics or politics is simply the ultimate "might makes right" argument. Why should the opinions of some deity or deities determine what is right, other than the arguement "you're going to hell if you disagree"?
No.
Linux is the kernel. The typical system that sits on top of a Linux kernel is GNU.
That's why RMS makes a big point of the "GNU/Linux" thing: a GNU system can sit on top of a BSD kernel, or the HURD, as well as a Linux kernel.
Certain in common an informal useage, "Linux" has come to be used as a short form of "GNU/Linux". But if it's not sitting on top of the Torvalds kernel, it's completely inaccurate to call it "Linux".
Well, no, since RMS has never been part of the "open source" community. He is a leader in the "free software" community.
If it wants to make money off of the development of good software, it's going to have to attract and hire talented and creative developers.
If it wants to attract and hire talented and creative developers, it's going to have to allow for the coding to be fun, to some degree.
Sure, some businesses can get by with legions of cubicle-drones who are competent but uninsipred. But if you're doing anything that's challenging, if you need good developers, you'll have to keep the talent satisfied if you want to make money.
Where's that?
"Clinically dead" is a type of dead, though it is a type that's sometimes reversible.
Presumably, rescue breathing - "mouth-to-mouth" - will still be used for people in respiratory arrest but who still have a pulse.
AED training is available to the general public, indeed that's the whole idea: put them everywhere and make them idiot-proof. (Though they still need to work on that.)
The "medical professional" training I think varies a little bit between the Red Cross and American Heart Association standards, but covers the two-rescuer protocol, plus maybe the use of a ambu bag, and maybe cricoid pressure if that's still in there (wasn't covered in my last training). But it's not like anyone checks your documents if you sign up for the "medical professional" level class.
You can be sued for anything in this country. But thanks to Good Samaritan laws in every state (and in D.C.), you cannot be successfully sued for providing first aid, provided that you act as a volunteer (don't accept any compensation), act in a reasonable and prudent manner (don't do stuff you know you're not supposed to), and don't abandon the victim once you start.
So please - don't be afraid to help. You have the law on your side.
When it comes to CPR, you're doing it on someone with no pulse. The person is dead. You can't make them any worse off than that.
Indeed, one study suggests over 1,000 fingerprint matching errors a year.
Fingerprint matching is bad science.
A Turing Machine is a computer, is it not?
That is true when we speak of "the scientific method".
"Computer science", however, means only the organized body of knowledge about computers; it's "science" in the sense of "the motion picture arts and sciences", or even "mathematical sciences", not in the sense of the natural or experimental sciences.
One can, occasionally, approach topics relevant to computer science using the experimental scientific method; experiments on computer interfaces, for example. But most computer science has little of the scientific method about it.
We're not. The amount of oil burned in the U.S. for electricity generation is tiny. Oil goes for heating, transportation, and chemical feedstock.
Of course, "clean burning" doesn't mean anything in terms of CO2 emissions.
Farmed trees are highly renewable resources. Forests are not; forests are ecosystems in which trees are just one member. Old growth forests are irreplacable.
But all that spent money is goods and services that increase the GDP. And all the guys who worked to make and ship the oil that got spilled still got paid, making the money dance.
It's better for them to not get cancer in the first place. But then oncolosists are out of business, pharaceutical revenues are down, et cetera. Preventing that cancer in the first place can (depending on the economic "value" of the person) decrease the GDP. Eating right and exercising and refraining from smoking just doesn't cause as much economic consumption as a course of chemo and radiation and some surgery.
It is, unfortunately, the number most often used to measure how well a nation is providing for the needs of its citizens. The point is that it is in fact a very poor measure of this.
The fact that it's difficult to find a economically viable renewable energy solutions shows that it's our economic system that's not viable.
So long as economist don't know how to subtract, and as long as polluters get to externalize their costs, economic reality and physical reality will not correspond.
Applying that criterion leads to solipism, as there's only one being whose thoughs I have access too. The rest of you all may be behaving by instinct or mimicry, but I know I'm thinking.
The way to distinguish intelligent tool-making and use from instinctual behaviors like web spinning is by the flexibility and adaptability of the behavior. Can it be altered through learning? When circumstances change, does the organism repeat unsuccessful behaviors or does it alter them to work?
A constitutional government is one in which the powers of government are spelled out and limited ahead of time, disallowing simple majority rule, the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch" scenario.
A democratic republic is a government in which people act indirectly, electing capable citizens as legislators who (in theory) thoroughly investigate and debate issues before acting, preventing simple mob rule.
A constitutional democratic republic - which in theory is what the U.S. is - is a pretty good idea.
Of course, in real life people often elect idiots, not capable citizens. And once governments get power, we see that they don't necessarily feel bound by the constitution, and don't necessarily bother to thoroughly investigate anything but act in ways that pander to popular prejudices.
As Douglas Adams once put it, people are a problem.
Many of those angles, however, are logically or factually deficient; they rest on factually incorrect beliefs or on logical fallacies.
Through discussion and debate, such shortcomings in arguments can be found.
Yes, confusing social mores with ethical behavior is exactly the sort of mistake that can be discovered through discussion and debate.
Bill Gates does not seem like a particually happy person to me, so I have to question your assumption that being the richest person on Earth is necessarily "leading a good life"; certainly I know people several orders of magnitude less rich who seem to be enjoying life much more.
Laws, mores, and ethics are very different things.
It is generally illegal in most parts of the U.S. to smoke cannbis; it is in keeping with the mores of some American subcultures and in violation of others; it is completely ethical under any reasonable ethical system. Eating dogshit is legal, and not particularly unethical, but a strong violation of social norms. Being a money-grubbing bastard who'd sell his self-respect to the highest bidder is legal, and admirible behavior in some American subcultures, but is unethical and corrosive to the soul, destructive of any chance of deep happiness.
I think the author of the TFA wanted to see and learn from a discussion in which various facts he was not aware of might be produced, and in which different lines of reasoning considering what to do about those facts could be analyzed -.i.e., an ethical discussion. Among those facts might be "people will [love|hate] you for doing this", and we might discuss what to do about that.
Getting a crew together isn't the hard part. (If all else fails, there's always the old British solution for stocking colonies.) It's the expense of building such a thing.
As you noted, past colonization has had economic motivations, so that it was possible for a group much larger than the colonists to fund the colony in expectation of profits. There aren't any here.
Building a MegaArk would require a substantial fraction of the resources of the human race. It's unlikely that a large part of human civilization would find the vague satisfaction of knowing that something with a human lineage was out there somewhere among the stars, to be enough of a benefit to bear the cost.
It would require an almost religious imperitive, the sort that made the construction of medieval cathedrals into multi-generation projects.
It it doesn't survive unchanged enough to still be part of our culture, why are we bothering to send it?
We'd have to spend a whole lot of resources to send a bunch of Terrans (maybe by this time Solarians, memebers of a system-wide culture) off to colonize another star. Our motivation to bear the expense would be to spread and preserve our culture.
But after seven generations on the Ark, why would their descendants care about that mission? By this time the vast majority of them are quite comfy living on the Ark (or else they've killed each other off). There might be a handful of people interested in a colony, but not enough to make a go of it.
Isolated from Earth, they will have developed their own unique culture, and not care much about ours - and not care about colonization. (In fact after a few generations of isolation and genetic drift, the population might well have formed a distinct species.)
Say you need 1,000 people minimum to make a colony, and one out of a thousand Arkians would be interested and qualified. Then you need a million Arkians, not the 50,000 asumed in TFA. Twenty times the size at the same radius (IIRC, a larger radius on a spinning object makes for structural difficulty, but my physics is rusty and I'm lazy) makes the Ark 200 km long. For comparison, Phobos is 22 km in diameter, Saturn's moon Phoebe is 220 km. We're talking about a ship getting into the range of a large asteroid or small moon. (Yes, yes, cue Obi-Wan saying "That's no moon...")
If we did imagine a MegaArk with a population in the millions, much more likely is that it develops it own unique culture that keeps going across the stars, maybe every so often letting some malcontents off to have a go at their own version of utopian civilization-building.
Nice to imagine, but not a simple matter of spreading our own civilization across the stars. So why would we bother with such a huge expense?
Instead, it would be more practical to build a whole bunch of O'Neill cylinders in the Solar neighborhood, close enough to share culture and keep exchanging people. Maybe in a few billion years when the Sun runs down, all these cylinders migrate in a cloud to a nearby red dwarf.
We will (if we manage to not wipe ourselves out in the next 100 years or so) send probes to other stars. Maybe even freeze a few people and send them out on kamikaze exploratory missions. But interstellar colonization will only happen if new physics and/or new biology (life extension) makes trips possible in a single human lifetime, so that colonies preserve our species and culture.
Perhaps I've been unclear. The American atrocities I'm speaking of predate WWII by several decades. Again I refer you to Wikipedia on war crimes during the Philippine-American War.
These atrocities were over long before WWII; however, imperialist rule of the Philippines continued until 1946.
It may be that aid from other nations was delivered by the U.S.; thanks to our obscene military spending, we are the best at putting boots on the ground. As I've documented for you though, the stuff they were delivering was part of a multi-national relief effort, including substantial contributions from the Japanese. And Japanese doctors and other relief personnel were dispatched to aid relief efforts.
During the Philippine-American War, prisoners were indeed killed. General Jacob Smith directed "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me." Smith ordered that anyone over the age of ten who had not proven to be a friendly could be and should be killed.
After all, it's not like they were killing white men. As one contemporary account put it:
Of course there was an American collective national belief in the racial superiority of whites, up until the late 1960s (and still persisting in some quarters today).
Certainly Japan was strict immigration and naturalization laws, but that is distinct from racism. It's a crowded country. Lack of overtime laws is irrelevant to the question of racism.
Certainly racism does exist in Japan, primarily in the older generations; I got a few dirty looks from old Japanese men when I visited just for being a white guy, and there are businesses that post "Nihonjin-only" signs. On the other hand, white guys are hot property among young Japanese girls. Attitudes change across generations, as they always have.
Legally, Japan is signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
There's no "maybe" about it; the U.S. has even offered an official apology. The "representatives" you speak of were shills for American interests with no authority to speak for the people of Hawaii.
And just where did I ever suggest that any of them did?
I didn't say that embargoes weren't allowed. But they were certainly provocative. If you have a hornet's nest outside your door, knocking it down with a stick might be justified and ethical and the right thing to do, but don't act surprised when they try to sting you.
The issue I have is with the popular myth that the noble and pure U.S. was quietly minding its own business when suddenly, out of nowhere, comes Pearl Harbor. But the fact is the U.S. had been meddling in the Pacific for decades (Perry's Black Ships, the Spanish-American War, the Phillipines, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa), even if we had swung back to a somewhat more isolationist policy during the Depression. And the attack came after a run-up including not just embargos against Japan but covert financial and military support to Chinese forces fighting the Japanese invasion.
U.S. actions were provokative (that does not mean they were not justified, only that they were certain to provoke a response) and while Japan's desires were imperialistic, the U.S. had been evincing similar desires in the Pacific for a long time, though being somewhat less bloody about it.
Where about? I'm coming to Osaka for the spring. Perhaps we can continue the debate over a biiru. (I know, it's a sizable country, but odds are good you're either around Tokyo or Kansai.)