For a lengthier explanation of the obvious, the reason we can't have flying cars is because they are aircraft, that would cost a fortune to manufacture.
Furthermore, aircraft, including robot aircraft, require tremendous labor in the form of inspections and maintenance. If you skimp on those, you risk near certain death. (versus a car where if you skip maintenance you only risk death a small fraction of the time)
Finally, aircraft, ESPECIALLY helicopters need tremendous amounts of light oil to run. This is a limited, global resource that supply : demand ensures will always remain expensive.
Uh, if you RTFA, you'll see the problem is the computer isn't running the BACKUP oxygen supply. It requires manual activation which is flat out retarded design.
"Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are too sparse to power a modern economy."
The facts disagree with your statement. While Wind/Hydro I have not looked into worldwide availability for, solar is trivial to calculate. You figure out the sun hours for a site, or the average for a whole state, and your efficiency percentage, and do a little arithmetic.
There is more than enough solar in a 100x100 mile area of Arizona to power the entire energy needs of the United States. (check google maps, that leaves most of the state untouched)
The Saraha desert could power all of Europe and Africa the same way.
But...solar plants are expensive! Sorta. In the long run, a photovoltaic cell is just atoms of silicon and some rare earths (or carbon if you use dye) arranged a certain way. Every last cell is the exact same as every other cell, all the way across the desert. So if you can work out a way to produce this identical object cheaply (there are a lot of possibilities for that) your cost savings apply to ALL the cells you produce.
I predict (feel free to quote me on this in 10 years) that in 10 years time, solar cell produced electricity will cost less than coal per watt per day. (note I am neglecting the storage requirements because that's a whole different problem)
100% would mean there is absolutely no chance at all, short of aliens or intervention by a deity, that a particular side in a legal case could be correct.
For example, the chance that Nidal Malik Hasan did not in fact shoot those people is approximately 0, making the prosecution's case (that he is guilty of murder) essentially 100%. The only way Hasan could be innocent is if there were a conspiracy of hundreds of people, many of whom willing to die, in order to make Hasan receive the death penalty. Or if God/aliens were to have inserted illusions of Hasan shooting those people into the brains of the dozens of direct witnesses. (and teleporting Hasan to the scene, and placing the smoking gun into his hand, etc)
Preponderence of evidence means that if there is a straw more evidence for one side or the other, you are supposed to take the side with more persuasive evidence. The chance that you did not pirate certain files, if they have your IP doing it, is less than 51% unless you can show something clear and convincing. (for instance, that you do not own a computer)
Great article, $11,000 for a 4k 55" screen is actually cheap compared to what they used to cost.
Obviously, there's no reason why they won't eventually cost $1100, so I'm stoked to hear this.
It's going to be a long time, though. Remember all those people who claimed to not be able to tell the difference between 480p and 1080p? Well, the difference between 1080p and 4k will be REALLY difficult to spot. So there may not be the kind of forces pushing adoption that there were for high def. Not to mention the enormous logistic problems with distributing high quality 4k video. (it's 4x the number of pixels over 1080p, so 4x the file sizes for good quality. a 50 gig blu ray would need to be 200 gig.)
Sounds like at least another 10-15 years before we see these things everywhere. That's 2 or 3 console generations.
Keep in mind that they only need to show there is a 51% chance it was you to win in court.
In your analogy, at least 51% of the time a murderer probably uses their own car.
So if the MPAA lawyers show up in court with a printout from your ISP saying that you were using X IP at a particular time, and they have a log from a hacked client showing that X IP downloaded a movie they own at that time....bam, automatic win.
Because a rational, scientific view of the evidence would be that this method of data collection works at LEAST 51% of the time.
Now, in practice courts give lawyers a chance to try all kind of things to slow down the process...but the way the system works, it is "justice" for you to pay some kind of civil penalty for your misdeed. Now, the actual dollar amounts specified by the law are ridiculous...but JUDGES DON'T MAKE THE LAW, they just INTERPRET it.
Uh...troll? Even if an airstrike were authorized, wouldn't it make sense to use another drone? Iran does have air defenses, it would suck royally to lose a few manned aircraft in an attack as well. (look, I'm aware that Iran would have a rough time shooting down a U.S. plane, but if you were the commander in chief, you'd have to consider the consequences if they managed it)
Not to mention act of war, yada yada. NEXT, a BLU-82? First of all, that thing has to be dropped from a slow moving transport plane - hardly the right aircraft for invading airspace and trying to escape afterwards. Second, such a bomb would most likely kill innocent people, making them doubly so an act of war. A hellfire missile fired directly onto the wreckage would at least minimize the number of additional people killed. (wouldn't kill anyone as long as whoever was poking at the wreckage took cover)
FINALLY, who says that we knew where the drone was?
There's a very, very simple reason why this tech isn't going anywhere. It has nothing to do with whether or not the maintainence problems are solvable at some cost.
All wave energy is is water pushed by wind. Thus, you are capturing energy that was originally offshore winds. For any given number of dollars, you could try to tap this energy source by :
Placing your device in the air, where all the internal workings are available for inspection and you can choose a location with relatively rare adverse weather events (like the interior of a country away from the coast)
Placing your device under water, with all the maintenance costs that involves and the need for scuba gear and high $$$ divers to even work on it.
Unless we somehow run out of good spots to put windmills on land, it will always make more sense to spend the next marginal dollar on another windmill (or solar panel, when the price per panel finally gets cheap enough)
It's possible in theory that some day wave generators might be cheap enough to be worth using instead of burning natural gas or coal. But at that point, wind and/or solar will by definition be even cheaper THAN THAT because the same materials science that made the wave generators work has made the solar/wind even cheaper!
To not violate thermodynamics you need a gradient that is changing. Earth produces a gradient that is almost static.
Second, even if you found a source of free energy (free as in energy available to do work, not free as in dollars) from gravity, there's the little problem that as a force it is billions of times weaker than E&M, which technically is the force that a mechanical generator uses.
Why didn't we do this before? I see nothing in this article describing anything in the technology that wasn't technically possible 20 or 40 years ago. There's not even sophisticated CFD behind the design : it appears to just be a float on the end of a rod.
That isn't good for it's future prospects, then : if the technology has not advanced, then likely this machine will face the difficulties that they had last time they tried this.
I'm imagining all kinds of horrible sea life buildup and corrosion and damage in storms causing it to be uneconomical. Each unit has a whole generator, transformer, cables, everything that it needs to support.
The trachea is composed of 2 symmetric halves, you could say that there are 2 half tracheas. You might have 2 eyes, but the second eye isn't redundant, it's for depth perception. Same with 2 ears. You need both kidneys under cases of heavy load. Same with needing 2 lungs if you get a UTI. The second testes is a spare, as well as the second ovary, I agree there.
The heart is composed of 2 separate hearts, you just need both to survive. And there's a terrible design flaw here, obviously : the coronary arteries are barely adequate even under ideal conditions.
And 2 women that both admit consenting to sex with him, and maybe sorta possibly having second thoughts during the act is a serious felony? (note that neither women screamed NO or fought or do anything that would CLEARLY tell an aroused male with his penis in the good spot that he had to stop. Whatever the legal requirement is, the human race wouldn't exist if males found it easy to stop having sex)
Heck, each of them would have let it go had they not met each other and feared STDs that they did not contract, or we would have heard about it. (because once they knew he wasn't using protection with multiple women, they rationally feared disease). They told their story, and it's some prosecutor somewhere that sees an opportunity to make a name for themself.
And the maximum penalty for the charges he faces (that have not been filed) is 4 years in the world's most pleasant prison system.
It's the DEGREE of fees. It would be like going to a restraunt and finding that the first steak is $10 but if you want more food the "overrage" steak is $50. That is, if you left the restraunt and came back you could eat 2 steaks for $20, or if you sat down and ate 2 at once it would cost you $70.
That's how these overrage fees work. Since there's generally 0 or 1 competitor that can offer a comparable product (no, satellite and wireless internet is not really the same tier as a wired system) they can get away with this.
Now, if these extra charges were REALISTIC compared to their costs + 15 percent profit I'd be fine with them.
What would a realistic fee be? Well, how much is actually providing the bandwidth (versus running the wires themselves or advertising or tech support etc) actually costing the company? That is, what percentage of their total revenue goes to upgrading network switches, paying for higher quality wire, etc.
That percentage is roughly what your fees should be going up by. The math isn't hard to understand.
Suppose there's a $20 "base fee" that gets you 50 gigs a month, and providing more bandwidth costs 30% of the ISP's budget. Then the fee to double the 50 gigs to 100 gigs should be about 6 dollars.
The power company in many states is regulated this way. A slight wrinkle in this is the power company IS allowed to charge people who consume too much power a penalty fee but this is because generating excess power causes pollution and thus it's in the public's best interest for private individuals to make their homes as efficient as possible. Extra internet traffic only costs a small amount more energy.
Notice that every rebuttal made by AT&T is simply a statement by AT&T that they PROMISE not to do what is in their own best interest!
For example, if there is 1 fewer wireless company, there WILL be less total job positions needed. That is an obvious truth of economics : one fewer company means more consolidation, fewer independent cell towers needed, etc. Yet AT&T PROMISES to hire more Americans as CSRs, despite the fact that it would be cheaper for them to keep outsourcing.
AT&T will find it easier to raise prices with the merger because with 1 fewer competitor, the Nash Equilibrium inches closer to monopoly prices. AT&T PROMISES to do otherwise.
AT&T has no competitor to fight for rural broadband market share, yet they PROMISE to build the wires anyway.
And so on and so forth. Every rebuttal basically says "well, maybe it doesn't make market sense, but we have plans to do X if we get our way".
Think about who made this report : some lawyers and marketing folks in AT&T's executive branch. Those people are not going to be unbiased.
Is "cyberwarfare" even technically or practically POSSIBLE? Or does it depend on the side being attacked being a total moron? I've never quite gotten my head around this : if you isolate the systems that can actually do bad things in the real world from external network access, for the most part the enemy can't do shit to you. As long as you keep those power stations and water pumps and all the other useful infrastructure, both civilian and military, on air gapped internal networks, it's going to be darn hard to sabotage them from across the globe.
Not impossible, I suppose...could fake a phone call. But cold war saboteurs could do the same thing, so nothing has changed there.
Now if you start connecting all your critical systems to the internet, and you don't use firewalls or they have security flaws, and you frequently stick thumbdrives full of possible viruses into your air gapped computers...well...I suppose you get what you deserve, then.
Obviously the exact same technique won't work because scale does matter to the laws of physics. However, the fact that sperm/eggs/entire human embryos can be frozen and reused shows that freezing entire human beings is possible in theory.
As a matter of fact, there are techniques that might work for entire human beings. Google for the Japanese "Cell alive" system.
"Of modest use". You could buy CENTURIES to work on the mortality problem if this technique worked. With enough centuries to work on the bio sciences, eventually we would learn how to strip down and overhaul the whole damn human body, replacing every last broken cell if we had to.
Not to mention if you ever (within 50-1000 years) developed molecular nanotechnology, you could just deconstruct the frozen human body to a molecular mapping in a computer, repair all the damage in software, and print out a new body with all the problems fixed. While doing this, make a backup copy so if the original were to be killed you can still bring them back.
I guess in the loooooooonnnngggg run mortality would win. The universe will run out of fuel, etc. But a lifespan of potentially millions or billions of years is so close to immortality by our standards we might as well call it that.
Sure be nice if we could work on freezing entire human beings this same way. Maybe humanity as a species isn't endangered, but "natural" death means that every human being alive today will be gone within slightly over a century, gone like they never existed in the first place. You could view this as extinction of all of humanity and replacing it with a new population.
This, by the way, is the reason so many of us believe religious fairy tales. Because if we let those stories go..acknowledge that the most accurate view of the world is based on empirical evidence...then we know that when we die, it's oblivion forever like we never lived in the first place.
I know that you feel angry because you don't trust the government, and you wish the government were much smaller. However, this is not a feasible solution. You can't revert a whole country to 1912. The USA wasn't even a superpower then. Viable solutions include reforming the government in the USA in smaller ways or jumping ship and joining a winning team. The real reason China is successful today is because they have changed in massive ways. Their government is obviously doing radically different things than they did in 1980. They have adapted for modern conditions.
The US government has not changed. It still tried to do things the way they were done in 1980 or earlier, and it's political system works like it did in the 19th century.
The most successful countries that people want to live in have huge socialist governments, vast labor unions, and everything else you probably hate. Some of these countries are failing (Greece/France) but others are huge successes (Germany/Sweden/etc)
That's my point. China and Singapore are the same country. China has at least as many obstacles to setting up a business as does the USA, and it has massive social programs and social controls that are far more sweeping than the USA has.
Switzerland is not a model for the rest of the world. It is a very small country that specializes in doing things that other countries won't. (like banking freedoms) It does things that only work because the country is small and unique. If the USA tried that model, it would fail due to size.
What I'm saying is, New Deal policies are an excellent idea if you are talking about capital/labor/land that would OTHERWISE BE WASTED. During major depressions, there are huge amounts of all 3 of those things that are not being used. During the current slump, there's something like 20% of the working adults who are being underutilized or unemployed. All those people could be doing SOMETHING of use rather than nothing.
This is NOT the broken window fallacy, this is like paying people who would otherwise be breaking windows to repair all the cracks in the sidewalk and clean up the town. Technically, there is little direct economic benefit from either.
Slashdot Mirror
For a lengthier explanation of the obvious, the reason we can't have flying cars is because they are aircraft, that would cost a fortune to manufacture.
Furthermore, aircraft, including robot aircraft, require tremendous labor in the form of inspections and maintenance. If you skimp on those, you risk near certain death. (versus a car where if you skip maintenance you only risk death a small fraction of the time)
Finally, aircraft, ESPECIALLY helicopters need tremendous amounts of light oil to run. This is a limited, global resource that supply : demand ensures will always remain expensive.
$$$$$$
Nope, ain't happening.
Uh, if you RTFA, you'll see the problem is the computer isn't running the BACKUP oxygen supply. It requires manual activation which is flat out retarded design.
"Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are too sparse to power a modern economy."
The facts disagree with your statement. While Wind/Hydro I have not looked into worldwide availability for, solar is trivial to calculate. You figure out the sun hours for a site, or the average for a whole state, and your efficiency percentage, and do a little arithmetic.
There is more than enough solar in a 100x100 mile area of Arizona to power the entire energy needs of the United States. (check google maps, that leaves most of the state untouched)
The Saraha desert could power all of Europe and Africa the same way.
But...solar plants are expensive! Sorta. In the long run, a photovoltaic cell is just atoms of silicon and some rare earths (or carbon if you use dye) arranged a certain way. Every last cell is the exact same as every other cell, all the way across the desert. So if you can work out a way to produce this identical object cheaply (there are a lot of possibilities for that) your cost savings apply to ALL the cells you produce.
I predict (feel free to quote me on this in 10 years) that in 10 years time, solar cell produced electricity will cost less than coal per watt per day. (note I am neglecting the storage requirements because that's a whole different problem)
100% would mean there is absolutely no chance at all, short of aliens or intervention by a deity, that a particular side in a legal case could be correct.
For example, the chance that Nidal Malik Hasan did not in fact shoot those people is approximately 0, making the prosecution's case (that he is guilty of murder) essentially 100%. The only way Hasan could be innocent is if there were a conspiracy of hundreds of people, many of whom willing to die, in order to make Hasan receive the death penalty. Or if God/aliens were to have inserted illusions of Hasan shooting those people into the brains of the dozens of direct witnesses. (and teleporting Hasan to the scene, and placing the smoking gun into his hand, etc)
Preponderence of evidence means that if there is a straw more evidence for one side or the other, you are supposed to take the side with more persuasive evidence. The chance that you did not pirate certain files, if they have your IP doing it, is less than 51% unless you can show something clear and convincing. (for instance, that you do not own a computer)
"preponderance" means 51%. What else would it mean?
Great article, $11,000 for a 4k 55" screen is actually cheap compared to what they used to cost.
Obviously, there's no reason why they won't eventually cost $1100, so I'm stoked to hear this.
It's going to be a long time, though. Remember all those people who claimed to not be able to tell the difference between 480p and 1080p? Well, the difference between 1080p and 4k will be REALLY difficult to spot. So there may not be the kind of forces pushing adoption that there were for high def. Not to mention the enormous logistic problems with distributing high quality 4k video. (it's 4x the number of pixels over 1080p, so 4x the file sizes for good quality. a 50 gig blu ray would need to be 200 gig.)
Sounds like at least another 10-15 years before we see these things everywhere. That's 2 or 3 console generations.
Keep in mind that they only need to show there is a 51% chance it was you to win in court.
In your analogy, at least 51% of the time a murderer probably uses their own car.
So if the MPAA lawyers show up in court with a printout from your ISP saying that you were using X IP at a particular time, and they have a log from a hacked client showing that X IP downloaded a movie they own at that time....bam, automatic win.
Because a rational, scientific view of the evidence would be that this method of data collection works at LEAST 51% of the time.
Now, in practice courts give lawyers a chance to try all kind of things to slow down the process...but the way the system works, it is "justice" for you to pay some kind of civil penalty for your misdeed. Now, the actual dollar amounts specified by the law are ridiculous...but JUDGES DON'T MAKE THE LAW, they just INTERPRET it.
Uh...troll? Even if an airstrike were authorized, wouldn't it make sense to use another drone? Iran does have air defenses, it would suck royally to lose a few manned aircraft in an attack as well. (look, I'm aware that Iran would have a rough time shooting down a U.S. plane, but if you were the commander in chief, you'd have to consider the consequences if they managed it)
Not to mention act of war, yada yada. NEXT, a BLU-82? First of all, that thing has to be dropped from a slow moving transport plane - hardly the right aircraft for invading airspace and trying to escape afterwards. Second, such a bomb would most likely kill innocent people, making them doubly so an act of war. A hellfire missile fired directly onto the wreckage would at least minimize the number of additional people killed. (wouldn't kill anyone as long as whoever was poking at the wreckage took cover)
FINALLY, who says that we knew where the drone was?
That's tides, not waves.
There's a very, very simple reason why this tech isn't going anywhere. It has nothing to do with whether or not the maintainence problems are solvable at some cost.
All wave energy is is water pushed by wind. Thus, you are capturing energy that was originally offshore winds. For any given number of dollars, you could try to tap this energy source by :
Placing your device in the air, where all the internal workings are available for inspection and you can choose a location with relatively rare adverse weather events (like the interior of a country away from the coast)
Placing your device under water, with all the maintenance costs that involves and the need for scuba gear and high $$$ divers to even work on it.
Unless we somehow run out of good spots to put windmills on land, it will always make more sense to spend the next marginal dollar on another windmill (or solar panel, when the price per panel finally gets cheap enough)
It's possible in theory that some day wave generators might be cheap enough to be worth using instead of burning natural gas or coal. But at that point, wind and/or solar will by definition be even cheaper THAN THAT because the same materials science that made the wave generators work has made the solar/wind even cheaper!
Oh really...
To not violate thermodynamics you need a gradient that is changing. Earth produces a gradient that is almost static.
Second, even if you found a source of free energy (free as in energy available to do work, not free as in dollars) from gravity, there's the little problem that as a force it is billions of times weaker than E&M, which technically is the force that a mechanical generator uses.
Why didn't we do this before? I see nothing in this article describing anything in the technology that wasn't technically possible 20 or 40 years ago. There's not even sophisticated CFD behind the design : it appears to just be a float on the end of a rod.
That isn't good for it's future prospects, then : if the technology has not advanced, then likely this machine will face the difficulties that they had last time they tried this.
I'm imagining all kinds of horrible sea life buildup and corrosion and damage in storms causing it to be uneconomical. Each unit has a whole generator, transformer, cables, everything that it needs to support.
The trachea is composed of 2 symmetric halves, you could say that there are 2 half tracheas. You might have 2 eyes, but the second eye isn't redundant, it's for depth perception. Same with 2 ears. You need both kidneys under cases of heavy load. Same with needing 2 lungs if you get a UTI. The second testes is a spare, as well as the second ovary, I agree there.
The heart is composed of 2 separate hearts, you just need both to survive. And there's a terrible design flaw here, obviously : the coronary arteries are barely adequate even under ideal conditions.
And 2 women that both admit consenting to sex with him, and maybe sorta possibly having second thoughts during the act is a serious felony? (note that neither women screamed NO or fought or do anything that would CLEARLY tell an aroused male with his penis in the good spot that he had to stop. Whatever the legal requirement is, the human race wouldn't exist if males found it easy to stop having sex)
Heck, each of them would have let it go had they not met each other and feared STDs that they did not contract, or we would have heard about it. (because once they knew he wasn't using protection with multiple women, they rationally feared disease). They told their story, and it's some prosecutor somewhere that sees an opportunity to make a name for themself.
And the maximum penalty for the charges he faces (that have not been filed) is 4 years in the world's most pleasant prison system.
It's the DEGREE of fees. It would be like going to a restraunt and finding that the first steak is $10 but if you want more food the "overrage" steak is $50. That is, if you left the restraunt and came back you could eat 2 steaks for $20, or if you sat down and ate 2 at once it would cost you $70.
That's how these overrage fees work. Since there's generally 0 or 1 competitor that can offer a comparable product (no, satellite and wireless internet is not really the same tier as a wired system) they can get away with this.
Now, if these extra charges were REALISTIC compared to their costs + 15 percent profit I'd be fine with them.
What would a realistic fee be? Well, how much is actually providing the bandwidth (versus running the wires themselves or advertising or tech support etc) actually costing the company? That is, what percentage of their total revenue goes to upgrading network switches, paying for higher quality wire, etc.
That percentage is roughly what your fees should be going up by. The math isn't hard to understand.
Suppose there's a $20 "base fee" that gets you 50 gigs a month, and providing more bandwidth costs 30% of the ISP's budget. Then the fee to double the 50 gigs to 100 gigs should be about 6 dollars.
The power company in many states is regulated this way. A slight wrinkle in this is the power company IS allowed to charge people who consume too much power a penalty fee but this is because generating excess power causes pollution and thus it's in the public's best interest for private individuals to make their homes as efficient as possible. Extra internet traffic only costs a small amount more energy.
Notice that every rebuttal made by AT&T is simply a statement by AT&T that they PROMISE not to do what is in their own best interest!
For example, if there is 1 fewer wireless company, there WILL be less total job positions needed. That is an obvious truth of economics : one fewer company means more consolidation, fewer independent cell towers needed, etc. Yet AT&T PROMISES to hire more Americans as CSRs, despite the fact that it would be cheaper for them to keep outsourcing.
AT&T will find it easier to raise prices with the merger because with 1 fewer competitor, the Nash Equilibrium inches closer to monopoly prices. AT&T PROMISES to do otherwise.
AT&T has no competitor to fight for rural broadband market share, yet they PROMISE to build the wires anyway.
And so on and so forth. Every rebuttal basically says "well, maybe it doesn't make market sense, but we have plans to do X if we get our way".
Think about who made this report : some lawyers and marketing folks in AT&T's executive branch. Those people are not going to be unbiased.
Is "cyberwarfare" even technically or practically POSSIBLE? Or does it depend on the side being attacked being a total moron? I've never quite gotten my head around this : if you isolate the systems that can actually do bad things in the real world from external network access, for the most part the enemy can't do shit to you. As long as you keep those power stations and water pumps and all the other useful infrastructure, both civilian and military, on air gapped internal networks, it's going to be darn hard to sabotage them from across the globe.
Not impossible, I suppose...could fake a phone call. But cold war saboteurs could do the same thing, so nothing has changed there.
Now if you start connecting all your critical systems to the internet, and you don't use firewalls or they have security flaws, and you frequently stick thumbdrives full of possible viruses into your air gapped computers...well...I suppose you get what you deserve, then.
Obviously the exact same technique won't work because scale does matter to the laws of physics. However, the fact that sperm/eggs/entire human embryos can be frozen and reused shows that freezing entire human beings is possible in theory.
As a matter of fact, there are techniques that might work for entire human beings. Google for the Japanese "Cell alive" system.
"Of modest use". You could buy CENTURIES to work on the mortality problem if this technique worked. With enough centuries to work on the bio sciences, eventually we would learn how to strip down and overhaul the whole damn human body, replacing every last broken cell if we had to.
Not to mention if you ever (within 50-1000 years) developed molecular nanotechnology, you could just deconstruct the frozen human body to a molecular mapping in a computer, repair all the damage in software, and print out a new body with all the problems fixed. While doing this, make a backup copy so if the original were to be killed you can still bring them back.
I guess in the loooooooonnnngggg run mortality would win. The universe will run out of fuel, etc. But a lifespan of potentially millions or billions of years is so close to immortality by our standards we might as well call it that.
Sure be nice if we could work on freezing entire human beings this same way. Maybe humanity as a species isn't endangered, but "natural" death means that every human being alive today will be gone within slightly over a century, gone like they never existed in the first place. You could view this as extinction of all of humanity and replacing it with a new population.
This, by the way, is the reason so many of us believe religious fairy tales. Because if we let those stories go..acknowledge that the most accurate view of the world is based on empirical evidence...then we know that when we die, it's oblivion forever like we never lived in the first place.
I know that you feel angry because you don't trust the government, and you wish the government were much smaller. However, this is not a feasible solution. You can't revert a whole country to 1912. The USA wasn't even a superpower then. Viable solutions include reforming the government in the USA in smaller ways or jumping ship and joining a winning team. The real reason China is successful today is because they have changed in massive ways. Their government is obviously doing radically different things than they did in 1980. They have adapted for modern conditions.
The US government has not changed. It still tried to do things the way they were done in 1980 or earlier, and it's political system works like it did in the 19th century.
The most successful countries that people want to live in have huge socialist governments, vast labor unions, and everything else you probably hate. Some of these countries are failing (Greece/France) but others are huge successes (Germany/Sweden/etc)
That's my point. China and Singapore are the same country. China has at least as many obstacles to setting up a business as does the USA, and it has massive social programs and social controls that are far more sweeping than the USA has.
Switzerland is not a model for the rest of the world. It is a very small country that specializes in doing things that other countries won't. (like banking freedoms) It does things that only work because the country is small and unique. If the USA tried that model, it would fail due to size.
Name a successful world economy that works this way.
What I'm saying is, New Deal policies are an excellent idea if you are talking about capital/labor/land that would OTHERWISE BE WASTED. During major depressions, there are huge amounts of all 3 of those things that are not being used. During the current slump, there's something like 20% of the working adults who are being underutilized or unemployed. All those people could be doing SOMETHING of use rather than nothing.
This is NOT the broken window fallacy, this is like paying people who would otherwise be breaking windows to repair all the cracks in the sidewalk and clean up the town. Technically, there is little direct economic benefit from either.