I'll second any recommendation for Kim Stanley Robinson. His other works should definitely be explored, too - Particularly The Wild Shore and The Gold Coast...
I'll second that - Kim Stanley Robinson is definitely one of the best modern sci-fi authors. Right up there with Ken MacLeod - and filling out the other side of the political spectrum, too! (sort of...)
The Red/Blue/Green mars series is quite good.
As is his California triptych (Wild Shore, Gold Coast, Pacific Edge). Gold Coast may be his best work.
Yeah, this sounds like a good idea, but it probably wouldn't mix too well with the other big Harvey Mudd College tradition. I mean, doesn't alcohol affect your sense of balance?
Well that was fun, I've never trolled before... Personally I hope we do find out, but I was feeling pretty down this morning and felt like spreading it around. Haha!
No matter how many statistical guesses different scientists make, the question of habitable planets, not to mention the question of other intelligences, will not be answered without actually going out and visiting them. This will not happen in your lifetime. You will not know. Sorry!
There have been numerous cases of successful cooperatives. Many have also been pressured out of existence by their larger, corporate competitors, and not always fairly. BTW, that is the case for the first co-op in America, probably the one you heard about. It's not quite that it "didn't work out," but rather that they let others buy into it, and the absentee owners ended up selling it off bit by bit for their own short-term gain.
If anything, absentee ownership is usually a good short-term deal for the absentee owners, but bad for the people whose lives are actually involved. Which is pretty much what we have with modern-day nation-straddling corporations and amalgamated mutual funds.
It's kinda like, you could try to build a near-utopian village, but even if it could last, if it's surrounded by a world that doesn't want to play along, your obstacles will be legion.
The 50-year old Mondragon coops in Spain have been pretty successful, but they're finding it difficult to compete with corporate globalization.
The thing is, there are many problems with giant corporations - it all boils down generally to "they're just not very human", in my opinion anyway. I would be largely in favor of laws to limit company sizes, and also perhaps something like democratically legislated salary ratios... Not popular, especially in "every man for himself" America, but oh well.
Labor changes don't have to mean unions. My personal favorite is for a slow change to cooperatives...
I also think it might be worthwhile to point out that the aristocracy in France enjoyed their own little utopia at one time. Too bad that utopia rested on the shoulders of the multitudes. Now there is arguably a rich aristocracy in the western world, whose little utopia of wealth rests on the shoulders of the whole planet.
To be successful, I'd say just the opposite - 'never settle'. If you accept life as it comes, in due process, you will be eliminated as you violate the basic principle of evolution. You have to innovate and improve every second of your life. Now thats easier said than done. But I'd say this style of life would be much satisfying than sitting on a lazy-boy, gulping down beer and cheering for some football team.
Innovate and improve what?
And who says that accepting life as it comes means being utterly passive?
It's not a black/white, either/or choice. There is something to be said for recognizing that not everything is inside one's control, and simply accepting many things would alleviate much stress and unhappiness.
At the same time, you're right - life is also a struggle - you have to work at it. And we all have to work together to make the world we want, too.
I agree that we all measure our success based on something. We measure it based on our values. If your values tell you that you have to compete with your Nobel-prize-winning brother, you may be destined for disappointment. However, if your values tell you that you love genetics and want to spend your life researching that, and then you happen to win the Nobel prize, then good for you!
Half the challenge of life seems to me to be figuring out what your own success values are. We can decide for ourselves what will make us happy people. Unfortunately we must first get over the hurdle of figuring out whether or not the things that our culture says constitute success and happiness are really the right thing for us.
First get yourself one copy each of three books: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge, all by Kim Stanley Robinson. Then read them each through once. Take your time...
Now, after reading those books, rethink all your values, and change all your goals.
That's my suggestion. Granted it might not work for you, but it's doing wonders for me.
I just wanted to reply in thanks for what you wrote - you said everything I'd wanted to say, and better than I probably would have said it. I agree with you 100% there.
Your post is all the more eerie as I am currently reading The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson, an excellent novel which features as part of its backdrop a world where the US military/industrial machine has grown larger than ever. Oddly enough, reading this book, written in the 80s, I'm constantly struck that I feel I am living in the times it describes. We're there now, and we have a choice of what kind of world we want to build.
I know you're a troll, but I can't resist pointint out the idiocy of this comment:
It is quite arrogant to believe you can actually fuck up the environment. The earth was around way before we came along and it has done just fine. It think it's so funny and stupid when people make comments like "we'll destroy the earth"...
Nowhere in his post does he say anything about destroying the earth. No rational person believes we are destroying the earth. However, we have many opportunities to fuck up our environment. We are a biological organism, and we cannot live under certain circumstances. If we screw up our current environment enough, our lives will go bye-bye. You are right - the earth was around long before we came, and by implication it may very well be around long after we disappear. The question is: when and how will we disappear, and will the reason(s) be any of our doing?
Sure, you're going to have your Kennedys and whatnot gain their position from the money Daddy made - but what else would you have people gain their influence from?
What does money have to do with being good at communicating? The answer: money shouldn't have anything to do with communication at all.
To examine your analogies, Frank Sinatra sang well, so he sang. Pete plays soccer, well, so he plays soccer. These are inherent abilities, or skills that can be practised and improved.
Spending and collecting money may be skills, but they should should not be important in politics, just like soccer is not important in singing. The important aspect of democratic politics is not how loud you can talk (how much money you can spend) but what you are saying. In other words, the value of political speech is the content, not the volume, and therefore being able to drown out others by virtue of how much money you have (or directly owning a TV network, etc) is an unfair use of speech, skewing the political system.
Money in politics is akin to slander, abusing your freedom of speech to gain power...
We all participate in making the world into whatever we want it to be. I, for one, will continue to participate in and support the free, community options.
There is no reason there can't be nationwide wireless availability without the oversight of corporate greed.
And besides, as far as visionary thinking goes these days, isn't "nationwide" a little small? I should think world-wide cooperation is a more worthy challenge...
I didn't like Bicentennial Man. I thought the movie was predictable, over-directed, and too sappy for its own good. I particularly didn't like the fact that, when I saw it, the boom mike appeared in every other scene. Apparently I saw the only badly edited version of this film in existence (in the theatre, not on video), since no one else ever seems to mention this when this film comes up.
I'll second that (well, the excellence of the books, anyway - I like his political and economic biases because I share them, but that's neither here nor there).
The Mars trilogy is an excellent series that not only makes valiant attempts to get the science right (or at least plausible), but realistically explores its human effects.
Aside from that, the books are just plain inspiring - even if you don't agree with all the political or economic tendencies of the characters, Robinson at least has an ability to show people actively engaged in their world and trying to make something out of their lives. At least with me, it inspired me to get off my ass and do the same. I might not want to live in a world exactly like the one that evolves in those books, but he makes it very clear that the world evolves as a result of the actions of those involved in it, and if we don't like the way things are, we can either become active agents for change, or stop complaining;-)
Needless to say I'm a major fan of hard science fiction, but almost everything I've read/seen, that I would classify "Hard Science Fiction" ultimatly ends up being distopian. It's hard to choose something from that catagory for a 'favorite universe'. No matter how good the Mars series is by Robinson..."
Funny you should figure Robinson's Mars trilogy as dystopian hard sci-fi, since it's very much a utopian effort. I suppose I could see how there are dystopian elements in it, since he doesn't ignore human frailties and, well, doesn't lie. It's not utopian in the sense of depicting a Utopia and saying "hey, let's all live here, it's wonderful!" - rather, it's a utopian exercise. That's what I loved about it - he was looking at the world and saying, OK, it's a dirty place, and humans aren't perfect, but maybe, given the opportunity, we could look at the best things from our past and learn from them and try to build something even better.
In a way, it's exactly what the colonies did in America 200+ years ago.
It's not really that hard sci-fi necessarily ends up dystopian, but rather that good hard sci-fi doesn't gloss over the blemishes of human nature and "the world", but rather deals with them up front, face-to-face. What I like about Robinson is that he tends towards optimism. He doesn't look at the world and say "well, it's going to hell in a handbasket, better get used to it," - instead he suggests we might be able to make the world be whatever we want it to be. And seeing that, we have the chance to realize that we already make the world what we want it to be. If it will be a certain way, it is because of who we are and how we behave - the choices we make every day.
The Mars series introduces the reader to a whole bunch of very cool technologies (space elevators, a lot of terraforming, and some genetic engineering) that ultimatly get wrapped up in a whole bunch of very very wordy politics that lead to 2 wars.
I liked the politics, personally. And didn't you notice that the revolutions in the books (OK, wars) got progressively less violent? I think that's a pretty good goal.
By the end of the story nobody is really any better off,
Really? Nobody is better off? I kinda like the society he tried to build. Sure there are some perhaps unrealistic goals or ideals, but that's what drives us, isn't it? I wouldn't like to live in a society that just gave up...
Earth is a f'king sess pool that can't shovel its population off the planet fast enough, and the the rest of the solar system is weighed down by billions of people who now live 500-1000 years thanks to genetic engineering. Very very good books, but not a happy universe that I'd like to live in.
That's kinda the point... As usual, the bad things are things to keep an eye out for, and the good things are things to shoot for. It's better than the stories that say "Wow, we could live forever, wouldn't that be neat!" or "Oooh, lookout, the population will just keep growing and growing... The future's gonna suck."
It's a real world, with projected problems that the people are actually dealing with.
I like a good fantasy as much as the next person, but Sci-fi tends towards the escapist and it's so wonderfully refreshing to see it showing realistic people actually dealing with potential problems. It makes you think maybe we could actually do that now.
If the books make you think it's not a happy universe that you'd like to live in, doesn't it follow that one should act to help keep the real world from becoming like that? No one else is going to do it for us. I for one find myself in a real universe that I don't think is happy and that I don't enjoy living in as much as I could, so I work for change, both in my personal life and in the lives of others.
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard."
You don't have to pay your taxes, you know. There may be some consequences, but you don't have to pay them. You could take a page from the War Tax Resitors' book...
The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive.
They're talking about government monopolies and organizations, but it's important to remember that this applies to any organization - government bureau or private corporation. Witness the RIAA/MPAA members trying to save their aging business models. That's only one example off the top of my head that gets discussed here a lot.
All groups of people who get together to do something recognize that what they are doing is their way of life, their means of existence, and they are afraid of losing that, so they try to protect it at all costs. How willing would you be to give up your paycheck if it seemed your organization was obsolete or useless?
Well, I'd be willing, but most people don't seem to be so willing. I think this is harder for organizations that aren't democratically structured... The few people at the top will do what they can to protect their extra-large paychecks, even when it's not in the interest of the lower-paid individuals in the org.
Hmm, who holds the copyright for my face? Me, my parents, or God? Or do we all hold copyright together? What about other members of society for various amendments and adjustments, like scars, etc?
Slashdot Mirror
...you really shouldn't store bananas in a refridgerator. They belong out on the counter. Keeping them cold just ruins them...
I can state with no doubt that you did not read the article.
I'll second any recommendation for Kim Stanley Robinson. His other works should definitely be explored, too - Particularly The Wild Shore and The Gold Coast...
I'll second that - Kim Stanley Robinson is definitely one of the best modern sci-fi authors. Right up there with Ken MacLeod - and filling out the other side of the political spectrum, too! (sort of...)
The Red/Blue/Green mars series is quite good.
As is his California triptych (Wild Shore, Gold Coast, Pacific Edge). Gold Coast may be his best work.
Yeah, this sounds like a good idea, but it probably wouldn't mix too well with the other big Harvey Mudd College tradition. I mean, doesn't alcohol affect your sense of balance?
Well that was fun, I've never trolled before... Personally I hope we do find out, but I was feeling pretty down this morning and felt like spreading it around. Haha!
No matter how many statistical guesses different scientists make, the question of habitable planets, not to mention the question of other intelligences, will not be answered without actually going out and visiting them. This will not happen in your lifetime. You will not know. Sorry!
There have been numerous cases of successful cooperatives. Many have also been pressured out of existence by their larger, corporate competitors, and not always fairly. BTW, that is the case for the first co-op in America, probably the one you heard about. It's not quite that it "didn't work out," but rather that they let others buy into it, and the absentee owners ended up selling it off bit by bit for their own short-term gain.
If anything, absentee ownership is usually a good short-term deal for the absentee owners, but bad for the people whose lives are actually involved. Which is pretty much what we have with modern-day nation-straddling corporations and amalgamated mutual funds.
It's kinda like, you could try to build a near-utopian village, but even if it could last, if it's surrounded by a world that doesn't want to play along, your obstacles will be legion.
The 50-year old Mondragon coops in Spain have been pretty successful, but they're finding it difficult to compete with corporate globalization.
The thing is, there are many problems with giant corporations - it all boils down generally to "they're just not very human", in my opinion anyway. I would be largely in favor of laws to limit company sizes, and also perhaps something like democratically legislated salary ratios... Not popular, especially in "every man for himself" America, but oh well.
Labor changes don't have to mean unions. My personal favorite is for a slow change to cooperatives...
I also think it might be worthwhile to point out that the aristocracy in France enjoyed their own little utopia at one time. Too bad that utopia rested on the shoulders of the multitudes. Now there is arguably a rich aristocracy in the western world, whose little utopia of wealth rests on the shoulders of the whole planet.
The 21st century should be interesting...
To be successful, I'd say just the opposite - 'never settle'. If you accept life as it comes, in due process, you will be eliminated as you violate the basic principle of evolution. You have to innovate and improve every second of your life. Now thats easier said than done. But I'd say this style of life would be much satisfying than sitting on a lazy-boy, gulping down beer and cheering for some football team.
Innovate and improve what?
And who says that accepting life as it comes means being utterly passive?
It's not a black/white, either/or choice. There is something to be said for recognizing that not everything is inside one's control, and simply accepting many things would alleviate much stress and unhappiness.
At the same time, you're right - life is also a struggle - you have to work at it. And we all have to work together to make the world we want, too.
I agree that we all measure our success based on something. We measure it based on our values. If your values tell you that you have to compete with your Nobel-prize-winning brother, you may be destined for disappointment. However, if your values tell you that you love genetics and want to spend your life researching that, and then you happen to win the Nobel prize, then good for you!
Half the challenge of life seems to me to be figuring out what your own success values are. We can decide for ourselves what will make us happy people. Unfortunately we must first get over the hurdle of figuring out whether or not the things that our culture says constitute success and happiness are really the right thing for us.
First get yourself one copy each of three books: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge, all by Kim Stanley Robinson. Then read them each through once. Take your time...
Now, after reading those books, rethink all your values, and change all your goals.
That's my suggestion. Granted it might not work for you, but it's doing wonders for me.
I just wanted to reply in thanks for what you wrote - you said everything I'd wanted to say, and better than I probably would have said it. I agree with you 100% there.
Your post is all the more eerie as I am currently reading The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson, an excellent novel which features as part of its backdrop a world where the US military/industrial machine has grown larger than ever. Oddly enough, reading this book, written in the 80s, I'm constantly struck that I feel I am living in the times it describes. We're there now, and we have a choice of what kind of world we want to build.
I know you're a troll, but I can't resist pointint out the idiocy of this comment:
It is quite arrogant to believe you can actually fuck up the environment. The earth was around way before we came along and it has done just fine. It think it's so funny and stupid when people make comments like "we'll destroy the earth"...
Nowhere in his post does he say anything about destroying the earth. No rational person believes we are destroying the earth. However, we have many opportunities to fuck up our environment. We are a biological organism, and we cannot live under certain circumstances. If we screw up our current environment enough, our lives will go bye-bye. You are right - the earth was around long before we came, and by implication it may very well be around long after we disappear. The question is: when and how will we disappear, and will the reason(s) be any of our doing?
You obviously never met the dog my family had when I was growing up. His name was "Shiney".
...we could all work together to make the world a better -- OOOH!!! SHINEY!!
Sure, you're going to have your Kennedys and whatnot gain their position from the money Daddy made - but what else would you have people gain their influence from?
From voters.
What does money have to do with being good at communicating? The answer: money shouldn't have anything to do with communication at all.
To examine your analogies, Frank Sinatra sang well, so he sang. Pete plays soccer, well, so he plays soccer. These are inherent abilities, or skills that can be practised and improved.
Spending and collecting money may be skills, but they should should not be important in politics, just like soccer is not important in singing. The important aspect of democratic politics is not how loud you can talk (how much money you can spend) but what you are saying. In other words, the value of political speech is the content, not the volume, and therefore being able to drown out others by virtue of how much money you have (or directly owning a TV network, etc) is an unfair use of speech, skewing the political system.
Money in politics is akin to slander, abusing your freedom of speech to gain power...
We all participate in making the world into whatever we want it to be. I, for one, will continue to participate in and support the free, community options.
There is no reason there can't be nationwide wireless availability without the oversight of corporate greed.
And besides, as far as visionary thinking goes these days, isn't "nationwide" a little small? I should think world-wide cooperation is a more worthy challenge...
I didn't like Bicentennial Man. I thought the movie was predictable, over-directed, and too sappy for its own good. I particularly didn't like the fact that, when I saw it, the boom mike appeared in every other scene. Apparently I saw the only badly edited version of this film in existence (in the theatre, not on video), since no one else ever seems to mention this when this film comes up.
Probably because Psychohistory and the foundation series in general have so many faults...
I'll second that (well, the excellence of the books, anyway - I like his political and economic biases because I share them, but that's neither here nor there).
;-)
The Mars trilogy is an excellent series that not only makes valiant attempts to get the science right (or at least plausible), but realistically explores its human effects.
Aside from that, the books are just plain inspiring - even if you don't agree with all the political or economic tendencies of the characters, Robinson at least has an ability to show people actively engaged in their world and trying to make something out of their lives. At least with me, it inspired me to get off my ass and do the same. I might not want to live in a world exactly like the one that evolves in those books, but he makes it very clear that the world evolves as a result of the actions of those involved in it, and if we don't like the way things are, we can either become active agents for change, or stop complaining
Needless to say I'm a major fan of hard science fiction, but almost everything I've read/seen, that I would classify "Hard Science Fiction" ultimatly ends up being distopian. It's hard to choose something from that catagory for a 'favorite universe'. No matter how good the Mars series is by Robinson..."
Funny you should figure Robinson's Mars trilogy as dystopian hard sci-fi, since it's very much a utopian effort. I suppose I could see how there are dystopian elements in it, since he doesn't ignore human frailties and, well, doesn't lie. It's not utopian in the sense of depicting a Utopia and saying "hey, let's all live here, it's wonderful!" - rather, it's a utopian exercise. That's what I loved about it - he was looking at the world and saying, OK, it's a dirty place, and humans aren't perfect, but maybe, given the opportunity, we could look at the best things from our past and learn from them and try to build something even better.
In a way, it's exactly what the colonies did in America 200+ years ago.
It's not really that hard sci-fi necessarily ends up dystopian, but rather that good hard sci-fi doesn't gloss over the blemishes of human nature and "the world", but rather deals with them up front, face-to-face. What I like about Robinson is that he tends towards optimism. He doesn't look at the world and say "well, it's going to hell in a handbasket, better get used to it," - instead he suggests we might be able to make the world be whatever we want it to be. And seeing that, we have the chance to realize that we already make the world what we want it to be. If it will be a certain way, it is because of who we are and how we behave - the choices we make every day.
The Mars series introduces the reader to a whole bunch of very cool technologies (space elevators, a lot of terraforming, and some genetic engineering) that ultimatly get wrapped up in a whole bunch of very very wordy politics that lead to 2 wars.
I liked the politics, personally. And didn't you notice that the revolutions in the books (OK, wars) got progressively less violent? I think that's a pretty good goal.
By the end of the story nobody is really any better off,
Really? Nobody is better off? I kinda like the society he tried to build. Sure there are some perhaps unrealistic goals or ideals, but that's what drives us, isn't it? I wouldn't like to live in a society that just gave up...
Earth is a f'king sess pool that can't shovel its population off the planet fast enough, and the the rest of the solar system is weighed down by billions of people who now live 500-1000 years thanks to genetic engineering. Very very good books, but not a happy universe that I'd like to live in.
That's kinda the point... As usual, the bad things are things to keep an eye out for, and the good things are things to shoot for. It's better than the stories that say "Wow, we could live forever, wouldn't that be neat!" or "Oooh, lookout, the population will just keep growing and growing... The future's gonna suck."
It's a real world, with projected problems that the people are actually dealing with.
I like a good fantasy as much as the next person, but Sci-fi tends towards the escapist and it's so wonderfully refreshing to see it showing realistic people actually dealing with potential problems. It makes you think maybe we could actually do that now.
If the books make you think it's not a happy universe that you'd like to live in, doesn't it follow that one should act to help keep the real world from becoming like that? No one else is going to do it for us. I for one find myself in a real universe that I don't think is happy and that I don't enjoy living in as much as I could, so I work for change, both in my personal life and in the lives of others.
In my opinion, good fiction inspires...
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard."
You don't have to pay your taxes, you know. There may be some consequences, but you don't have to pay them. You could take a page from the War Tax Resitors' book...
The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive.
They're talking about government monopolies and organizations, but it's important to remember that this applies to any organization - government bureau or private corporation. Witness the RIAA/MPAA members trying to save their aging business models. That's only one example off the top of my head that gets discussed here a lot.
All groups of people who get together to do something recognize that what they are doing is their way of life, their means of existence, and they are afraid of losing that, so they try to protect it at all costs. How willing would you be to give up your paycheck if it seemed your organization was obsolete or useless?
Well, I'd be willing, but most people don't seem to be so willing. I think this is harder for organizations that aren't democratically structured... The few people at the top will do what they can to protect their extra-large paychecks, even when it's not in the interest of the lower-paid individuals in the org.
And now I've gone off-topic. Wheeee!!
Hmm, who holds the copyright for my face? Me, my parents, or God? Or do we all hold copyright together? What about other members of society for various amendments and adjustments, like scars, etc?