it’s time for John Q. to wake up and notice the distinctive smell of that something on the barbeque, being his own ass, and that the wealthy and powerful are greedily licking their chops. We have been poorly used by people without shame, conscience or apparent ability to transcend magical thinking. Let them have your network, and soon it’ll look like every other thing you see in America today. It will be just another corporate sewage pipe, and though you’ll be able to choose between chocolate or vanilla, it will still be sewage. When the weight of the parasite exceeds the weight of the host, the host typically dies. The parasite hasn’t the wit to know that it will starve, because all it knows to do is suck. It’s up to us to wake up as a society, and put those that make nothing save suffering, on an stunningly short leash, and maybe just a bit of muzzle time as well, for the general good of the species.
That's because there are a lot of folks out there who have little tolerance for other people's belief. By the way that goes both ways. There were people burning each other over toasty coals because they disagreed on the finer points of Jesus, long before science nerds heckled the faithful. In fact the holiest church in all of Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, has for generations had its door locked and unlocked by a Muslim family because the various sects of Christianity don't trust each other enough to give any one the keys. That my friend is being human.
So there is faith and then there's science. One is based on the unexplainable, and the other on empirical fact and data. The reason people get pissy about ID, is because its a belief looking for justification. That's really bad science, and when they catch scientists doing that (which happens every so often) they get their hands slapped and lab coats handed to them.
We now have so large a body of evidence, from so many fields (biology, material science, computer science, biiochemistry... it goes on and on) that we can actually point right at evolution as it happens/happened both micro and macro-evolution. Intelligent Design simply isn't necessary. If you choose to believe in God, you should be all the more joyful at your Lords cunning and brilliance to create space time that would result in atoms such that they can assemble themselves into mountains, or stars, or people. Its like epicycles, as long as you assume the earth is the center of the universe, you have to go through all kinds of ridiculous gyrations and complications to account for the behavior of the universe. The instant you give up trying to make it fit your pictures and just appreciate it the way it is, natural order arises and is self evident.,
I have no problem with people who believe in God. Science suggests a God isn't necessary for this universe to happen the way it happens/happened. Maybe God doesn't have an ego problem? That's where the faith comes in, eh?... Bon Apetite.
Actually you're right, it was a one of the subplots from the book Next, that doesn't make it any less significant. Michael Crichton was a licensed M.D. and there was always a thread of truth and solid research in his writing (Andromeda Strain and Coma for instance had solid basis in medical research.) I have a close friends who became a doctor after a very successful career as a researcher in biology (she graduated from Cal Tech in the early 80s.) Anyway, I had a number of conversations with her about the validity of the issues surrounding gene patents, the themes in that book and whether a person has any rights to his own genome. You'd be surprised how poorly you're protected, and how much power corporations wield in getting what they want. By monetizing genetic material, we've allow corporations to lay claim to that thing which maybe may in fact be at the very heart of who we are. Our genetic inheritance. There's nothing at all absurd about that.
The problem is that the crash is always proportional to the rise and we've risen higher than ever before. In fact with each new technology we inflate our populations, destroy more nonrenewable resources, leave less and less available for a fall-back option. In the very near future, we'll have to leave the planet or go extinct because we'll have effectively eliminated the other alternatives.
I'm sorry but your math is a little off. The current debt is a bit more than 14 T, and by best accounting there are not quite 140 M taxpayers which places the debt per taxpayer at around $104,000 each. With the average per capita income per tax payer this year being about just under $40K, to pay this off in seven years you'd have to pay just under $15 K per tax payer per year above and beyond the average $ 8.5 K each tax payer is already paying just to maintain the status quo. That comes to nearly $ 24K per year of taxes leaving you with just under $ 16K to live on. In other words, would you be able to live on 40% of your current income for 7 years to eliminate the National Debt? This doesn't even begin to take into account the millions who are now on the verge of financial collapse who would be pushed under the minimum income for paying taxes, additionally increasing the burden on those who are paying taxes.
You might have noticed how close we just came to defaulting, and the conservative representatives have made it abundantly clear, we aren't raising taxes on anything including $1000 cans of caviar. So suggesting we could bump everyone's tax rate by 25% is probably just a wee bit unlikely.
The folk who are saying we can just keep borrowing our way our of this are suffering from serious self delusion. The dollar is in horrible shape and the biggest holders of US Debt are quietly but urgently divesting themselves as quickly as possible from that debt because they're scared to death we're going to go boom. At least in the short term, things are ugly. We need to show great wisdom to navigate out of these choppy waters and the mixed nut selection we have today in D.C. doesn't strike me as having the requisite intelligence or sanity to carry the day.
That's the nature of all singularities (or in this case asymptotic curves in the approach to vertical lines), all the rules break down, and things get completely unpredictable. Long before we got close to any of these failures, the social fabric would disintegrate, the global infrastructure would collapse, resources would deplete, plant and animal diversity would evaporate, and life would get exceptionally challenging. If fact we would probably extinct ourselves. Of course life would almost certainly go on and in ten or twenty million years, things would be good as new sans people.
The real problem here is that as long as humanity chooses to function inside bankrupt games: 1) The National Sociopolitical State Game 2) The Personal Profit Game 3) The Socioreligious Game or 4) The Dictator Game, that the predictable outcome for humanity is repeating cycles of civilization then collapse ultimately using up all the nonrenewable resources and pinning humanity to a slow spiral down.
Sanity might look like a non centralized global authority, design expressly to come up with plans for sustainable human development ultimately resulting in mass migration off the planet (while preserving as much of its current value of the planet as possible.) Ultimately the small human remnant (maybe 100,000,000) on Earth might remain to enjoy and manage the garden planet for the future evolution of new sentient life (Primates, Cetaceans, Parrots and Crows and Cephalopods.) In any case there would be a wealth of new habitats, and humanity would have the technology to evolve itself into the endless forms and functions needed to inhabit these new habitats and thrive. We can't even begin to imagine the possibilities and permutations. None of that is possible however without first addressing the problems that face us today.
Could someone please sit down with key leaders and explain to them in plain English (or the languages of their choice) why virtually all the premises upon which our society is built, fail the test of exponential growth. Even the national debt. As it currently exists, if we were to take 100% of the income from every American today, it would not pay off the national debt. Its all a ponzi scheme and the idiots running the ship have simply run aground. Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels. We start by fixing the disaster that our economy(s) are/is, and we get on with the SANE job of designing then implementing sustainable future.
My darlings... the people that have ever greater control over the very atoms of modern life, from our government to our choice of breakfast cereal, have been busy reshaping the world in their own interest. Whatever purpose the patent system might have served when it was created, it now exists to bludgeon the common man into shutting up and doing what corporations tell him to do. IP has been collected and packaged like so many bad home loans, and now the laws are bent to give corporations dominion over what has been created, what will be created, and what can be created.
Endless armies of lawyer exist for no other purpose than to impose the corporate will on all comers and unless you have the bottomless resources of a corporation, you have virtually no hope of winning against them in a legal battle. Even if you do win, history tells us it will come at the cost of decades of abuse, with the likely loss of everything you ever held dear. No wonder most folks quit, or simply don't even try. Until we treat Capitalism as a religious belief and isolate it from the political and legal system the same way we do (or should do) with all other religions, there is no possibility that we will get the world back. When profit is the only motive, there is no such thing as enough. The patent system is just another pawn on the chessboard called life. What is your next mover?
A doctor receives a patient. The patient has cancer, and to the amazement of the doctor the man survives and is discovered to have extraordinary traits of interest to the doctor. The doctor patents the cell line he develops from the man, keeping him coming to his office for years after he has been cured on threat of relapse and death, all for the purpose of furthering his personal research. The doctor can make the argument that this ones man's year perhaps even decades of suffering will save thousands of lives and oh by way make the Doctor a very wealthy man. The doctor see's no point in informing the man, or his family of what he's doing in spite of the fact that he's been serving his own interests and not his patient for years and doing so through deception.
Does the Doctor own this man's genetic material? Should he? What are his rights? Should he be required to share his discovery and wealth with his patient? If the man finds out he's been egregiously abused and misused, what rights does he have? It is arguable the Doctor has the rights to them man's genome, and can legally force him to continue providing samples to further the Doctors research. It is also arguable that the Doctor has the right to force the man to deliver children, grand children any other descendants to determine whether or not they carry the patented genes and therefore legally bound to continue this medical slavery.
This is just one of the many reasons that the growth of open source genome research has been exponential. Reducing people to a commodity of genetic traits to be mined by patent hungry biotech businesses paints a very gloomy future for what it means to be human. You think farmers are having a hard time with Monsanto? Imagine when their lawyers show up at your door because a plasmid in one of their products becomes widely spread by common bacteria and they sue you into oblivion for stealing there IP because you got infected. The mind shudders at the depth and breadth of what will be possible, and how little protection the common man has today in the face of corporate power and depravity.
Wow... someones wearing their collar(s) a wee bit tight! Friend, if you'll put that koolaid down for a second, perhaps you'll notice that O and W have the same handlers. That's because most folks are now clear the nastiest job in D.C. is the guy whose hand is inserting in the Presidents rectum to move the mouth. And sadly that guy works for Corporate America. Republicrats now come in two flavors, "Bought and Sold" and "Extra-Crazy." Apparently you have a penchant for the second kind, its nice to have friends you can talk to, eh?;-)
Not to wander too far off the topic, but does it ever strike you funny these plots where plucky human beings give big bad aliens a lesson in guerrilla warfare? Like a life-form that traveled endless light-years doesn't have the technology to snuff the entire planet out like a candle. That these beings who are thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of years more advanced than us, are going to suffer from clinical stupidity or hubris.
Or even what the hell they're doing here in the first place? Here we are, this vanishingly tiny speck in space, and there are vast resources outweighing anything we have by many orders of magnitude laying all over the place. Anything that decided it wanted earth for any reason would have started with all the giant gas planets and icy bodies in the solar system first, we'd see them coming years in advance, and there wouldn't be a damn thing we could do about it. It be more like flat worms vs Cowboys... bang! squish!
Maybe that would be an interesting plot for a sci fi?
Mayhaps you're watching the wrong movies? Try the Cohen Brothers. If you can predict plot turns in a Cohen film with greater than 60% (random plus a skosh more that an a standard deviation), then my friend you are a cinema god and should be writing plots not watching them. As for the inspiration of movies, I tend to agree that most of the great plots have been taken (in most cases by ancient Greeks, ancient Romans and Shakespeare batting cleanup.) That doesn't mean you can't couch the plot in an interesting context to give it new and current meaning.
The Wachowsky's went so far as to say that they were deeply inspired by the classics when they conceived of the Matrix. That doesn't mean that the Matrix (I speak preferentially of the first episode) didn't have a wonderful mix of classic themes and new ways of seeing and expressing those themes. The philosophical conversation that post modern man is drifting through life in in some approximation of a sleep walking state is (in my opinion) brilliant and they handled that conversation deftly. That is completely separate from the cinematography, visualization, or CG action they brought to the party for everyone else. At least the Wachowskys had the artistic integrity not vomit a happy ending on its audience.
This weekend "The Tourist" premiered on Starz. It wasn't a bad movie, the stars were beautiful, and the plot was fun (if not more than a little fluffy.) Sadly, the entire plot was completely predictable ( figured that Johnny Depp was the mystery man in the first 15 minutes.) It was handled as a ham-fisted contrivance. Look over here! Don't look over there! Magic! I think not. This is the norm these days. Sadly, most popular movies are like most popular music these days. Flavorless, mindless, endless clones on a theme designed to distract you as Corporate America picks your pocket. Try foreign films. Try independent films. Try classic films. There is a world of cinema that is thoughtful, provocative, and satisfying. Just don't expect that to come from Hollywood, the bankers would never allow it.
Read my post, the problem is not inherently with capitalism or socialism. The problem is training people from birth to hold material gratification above their own humanity and/or the humanity of others. The reason the US system worked so well to begin with, is that through checks and balances it was designed to limit the damage the worst in people could illicit and empower the best that people could accomplish. Almost from the start, individual interests have been at war with these principles and what we see now are the results of a complete breakdown in those checks and balances.
People are prone to ideologies, superstitions and magical thinking. The current pervasive mental illness supposes that you can cut enough tax to make the government work while at the same time demanding more and more from that government. That is by very definition bankrupt. It only leaves the option for that government, to print money, and if you don't think that's a tax, you need to study basic economics. Socialist and Communist governments fair no better as long as the people running those governments are no different and certainly no better than the corporate thugs running America today. To quote The Who "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Its time for humanity to transform. Its time for humanity as a super-organism, to evolve to the next level, to literally grow up. As long as the dominant memes that give us the society we currently live by, are based on scarcity, *unenlightened self interest, domination, conflict and moral self righteousness, we are pretty much never going to reach operational escape velocity. Our modern societies are literally built to promote thinking that is based of thousands of years of fallacy. Why is it that all past civilizations collapsed? These are predictable cycles. It is time to transcend our history. Or we'll repeat it, with the major difference being that the next civilization to rise will not have the necessary resources to transcend.
Forgive me if this sounds airy-fairy. Its not. There is nothing mystical about letting real visionaries lead humanity in a radically different direction. It would however demand a large number of people suspending belief, because it is the very beliefs themselves that doom us to the outcomes those beliefs fulfill. I suggest that rather than a social ideology, we as a species migrate towards operational sanity.
Forget that... what about assassination by putting a virus in someones replicator that replicates a physical virus? In fact you could have the replicator manufacture a virus with a genetic lock to a single person, ensuring only that person would succumb to your specially engineered Ebola virus. You could do all kinds of very unpleasant mischief with such technology.
Actually the first replicators on Star Trek (Star Trek Enterprise), were assemblers, assembling food stuffs from raw molecular stock (also a great way to recycle organic waste on a ship.) The question is always one of energy. The energy required to assemble a steak is not insignificant. The energy required to replicate a steak from energy to matter however is stunning. Of course there may be all kinds of cool technologies to reduce the ridiculous amount of energy it would take using the tech we now have to perform that task. Matter Antimatter technology gives you almost unlimited energy, but I think there would probably be better ways to use it. If you remember the original Star Trek series food was manufactured (small colorful cubes and odd shapes) and replication was reserved for producing industrial components and ship parts. That seems much more likely to me.
Are you kidding? Do you have any clue as to the actual number of people in America today who are out of work? Add to that the virtual collapse of available jobs in government and public services, well you get the picture.
Tell me that every advance in productivity, every application of robotics, every technological enhancement that makes it possible for business to make more, better, cheaper products hasn't resulted in higher wages for the Board of Directors and lower wages for the common worker in real currency. We now live in a global economy that sees human labor as a commodity, and all of it is to serve a self obsessed, self indulgent, corporate elite.
You want unwavering indicators, here are a few that might help you hone in on an answer:
The average income for a middle class American in adjust dollars over the last 50 years
The ratio of income between the average worker and CEO of all American business over the last 50 years
The number of patents issued to corporations per year over the last 50 years
The number of patent attorneys employed per year over the last 50 years
The number of exceptions, exclusions and abridgments to your civil rights enacted per year over last 50 years
The number of people in prison per year over the last 50 years
The number of people on food stamps, food lines, homeless and living with friends or relatives over the last 50 years
What you will see is a mass migration into poverty and population control. We are being herded into oblivion. You honestly tell me if you had a billion dollars how eager you would be to help the masses vs feathering your own nest. We've built a society of bottomless appetites, with fewer and fewer souls who can feed that hunger. Can you see any way for the common man to make out in such a world?
Let me put it another way. The greater people are responsible for the future. Until the masses hold wisdom more highly than gratification, dignity above notoriety, justice above animal revenge and compassion above dominion, we can pretty much predict how it will all turn out. We have done a spectacular job of teaching our children to be fat, stupid and ready to dance to any tune their corporate masters may choose to play. What indicators are you looking at?
So you just hack the ISP content for all the Republican Senators and Congressmen, and share with the voting public their personal chats with hookers, lobbyists, porn habits, kinks, fetishes, and conversations with people they would prefer you not know about.
The stupid sword cuts both ways, and the I bet that law would go away in a heartbeat if the Majority Whip woke up one morning with a compromising picture of himself with a sheep displayed on the Guardian.
I'm not going make a statement one way or the other on fudged data. If his actions were clearly inappropriate there are plenty of scientific bodies whose only reason for existence is managing scientific professional integrity. If he has done something truly inappropriate, he will be dealt with.
What I will respond to is THE VAST body of work pointing to dramatic changes in global climate. I ask those with an ideological position to defend, to stop for just a moment look at the remarkable amount of indisputable evidence that is now available. Its positively mind numbing.
Your comment about temperature is both uninformed and ludicrous. Scientists have taken wood samples from redwoods and bristlecone pines and with that information they can give you precise climatic information for specific areas including annual rainfall, temperature, and occurrence of catastrophic events. By analyzing human dwelling all over the world we can accurately determine climate through fauna and flora for those regions, spores, seeds and pollen. They tell us precisely what grew, and tell what the climatic conditions were there and when. We have antarctic ice cores with trapped atmospheric samples, we have ocean cores with samples of everything from diatoms to volcanic ash, we have fossils and minerals with trapped air and water going back millions of years, we have rock cores which elegantly give us clear records of temperature over centuries. The body of evidence is overwhelming and rich. Thousands of different sources from hundred of different fields of study, all forming a clear and cohesive picture. Whatever you've been reading, its inaccurate, incomplete, and puts ideology before simple fact and truth. You can absolutely criticize one or two individuals for their poor performance, but that doesn't even begin to indict the work of tens of thousands of scientist all over the world who work in vastly different fields but have all come to the same inescapable conclusion.
The models and theories make specific predictions. Many of those predictions have come to pass. Here are just a few recent facts which are completely incontestable:
The ice caps are melting: If you haven't read about the disappearing artic ice cap in summer try this source. While some would applaud the economic benefit of opening a new shipping lane, the loss of extinction of many vital species including the loss of arctic krill would produce a devastating crash in global fish stocks and the probable extinction of a variety of whales, seals, penguins, and polar bears.
Glaciers everywhere are vanishing: Look here for a synopsis. The impact of this is that nearly half the worlds population uses glacial melt for drinking water and for agriculture. When they melt the economic cost (not to mention the cost in human suffering or destabilized governments) will be profound.
The oceans are changing:Rising sea levels, dropping salinity, increased acidity due to CO2, increasing temperature, and changing currents are all occurring as we speak, and all predictable results of global climate change. The impacts will grow and be devastating. Some include loss of coastal land and cities, weather changes, crash in vital fish populations, crash in all marine life, The ocean are the engine behind climate. Disturbing its integrity has far reaching impact. Already, low lying islands in Polynesia are disappearing and their inhabitants are being displaced.
Animal are migrating away from the heat: Research is now showing us how climate change is impacting animal migration and we are only now beginning to under
I'm sorry, my friend, but the scope of my response limited the number of items I could mention. I could just as easily refer you to ten thousand like items (literally and from many different fields.) So no, I wasn't cherry picking, I was picking at random. By the way cherry picking implies there are a limited number of cherries, and that one needs to pick to support ones position, I'm picking from a pretty large pool of facts here.
In addition you advertise your ignorance of the topic. We have incredibly accurate data regarding global environment going back tens of millions of years. We have pristine samples of atmosphere trapped in ice, ocean water trapped in minerals, ocean floor cores, rock cores, and fossils in amber. We have a ridiculous abundance of data regarding precise weather models going back nearly to the dinosaurs. These models include atmospheric chemistry including carbon, global and local temperature, land and ocean flora and fauna, salinity, currents, pretty much the whole enchilada.
Here the problem with "Real Cherry Picking", you only look for the evidence that justifies your position, instead of basing your position on the body of evidence.
Personally, I say to hell with another grant for research, that's how the government has avoided taking any real responsibility for the situation we now find ourselves in. I say we modify our behavior, to begin easing out problematic industries. Monsanto was all about plastics in the 60s. They saw the way the wind was blowing and now they're all about biotech and food crops. There is no reason we couldn't provide fossil fuel manufacturers incentives to move into thorium reactors, wind and ocean power, geothermal, even co-generation and energy reclamation. These are huge opportunities and given the right tax breaks could prove a boon to everyone. Or you can just hunker down on your ideology, and make everyone you disagree with wrong while you keep doing nothing.
It is well known that a tremendous amount of the resistance and FUD being thrown at global warming involves money from fossil fuel producers. In fact the very same people from Wall-Street who brought you scientific evidence that cigarettes were good for you are behind a lot of these arguments and in 50 years they've gotten very good at obfuscating the truth and persuading people for the right price. So before we look at both sides of this issue we have to keep asking ourselves to be honest about our motives. The Libertarians among us find the idea of global warming distasteful because it flies in the face of their romantic ideals regarding the enterprise of man. Sadly they also seemed to have missed that fact that, today the primary enterprise of man is greed and self interest to the detriment of the world at large. We sadly bump up against the dark side of our nature, and as our founding fathers saw, we need to check and balance the worst of us, to create an environment where the best of us may flourish. I applaud the Libertarian ideal, and for that matter the Communist ideal, both are grounded in high aspirations and are the response to seeing the world filled with evil. I simply say that they are unrealistic, and that in practice both have proven less than ideal.
By the way, You're right, consensus by itself would be a poor thing to rely on. There was a consensus among the majority of Germans that invading other countries was a good idea in WWII. Scientists as a body should always be poked and prodded to make sure they aren't simply being intellectually lazy, or defending ideological turf. All of that said, when you have such a remarkable body of evidence, you need to honestly look at why there is a consensus.
By the very same basis, there is a consensus that relativity accurately describes the macro universe under nearly all conditions. We can say that because there is now a ridiculous amount of evidence to support the claim. By the way, when relativity dethroned Newtonian Physics, it didn't eliminate it. Newtonian Physics got us to the moon, and under normal conditions (the space-time circumstance likely to be encountered by human beings) its still a perfectly useful and effective body of work. When the theory that effective describes both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics arrives, we won't throw Relativity away either. Even scientific revolutions these days, tend to be finer cuts on less accurate descriptions about the universe. The days of discovering we simply had it all wrong and misinterpreted billions of pieces of information and experimental data are if not completely gone then at least vanishingly unlikely.
The key has always been to look at the big picture and ask yourself with complete intellectual honesty what does it say. Sadly, I can't imagine anyone today looking at how our industry has abused the planet and say with a straight face that we're heading towards a happy ending. That isn't to say we're nailed to rails (though by all sane reckoning that time is close at hand), I am saying that changing the way we do things to include environmental sanity (for instance living by the old camping maxim "don't Sh*t where you eat") would probably serve us well, even if global climate change turns out to be a tempest in a teapot.
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it’s time for John Q. to wake up and notice the distinctive smell of that something on the barbeque, being his own ass, and that the wealthy and powerful are greedily licking their chops. We have been poorly used by people without shame, conscience or apparent ability to transcend magical thinking. Let them have your network, and soon it’ll look like every other thing you see in America today. It will be just another corporate sewage pipe, and though you’ll be able to choose between chocolate or vanilla, it will still be sewage. When the weight of the parasite exceeds the weight of the host, the host typically dies. The parasite hasn’t the wit to know that it will starve, because all it knows to do is suck. It’s up to us to wake up as a society, and put those that make nothing save suffering, on an stunningly short leash, and maybe just a bit of muzzle time as well, for the general good of the species.
That's because there are a lot of folks out there who have little tolerance for other people's belief. By the way that goes both ways. There were people burning each other over toasty coals because they disagreed on the finer points of Jesus, long before science nerds heckled the faithful. In fact the holiest church in all of Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, has for generations had its door locked and unlocked by a Muslim family because the various sects of Christianity don't trust each other enough to give any one the keys. That my friend is being human.
So there is faith and then there's science. One is based on the unexplainable, and the other on empirical fact and data. The reason people get pissy about ID, is because its a belief looking for justification. That's really bad science, and when they catch scientists doing that (which happens every so often) they get their hands slapped and lab coats handed to them.
We now have so large a body of evidence, from so many fields (biology, material science, computer science, biiochemistry... it goes on and on) that we can actually point right at evolution as it happens/happened both micro and macro-evolution. Intelligent Design simply isn't necessary. If you choose to believe in God, you should be all the more joyful at your Lords cunning and brilliance to create space time that would result in atoms such that they can assemble themselves into mountains, or stars, or people. Its like epicycles, as long as you assume the earth is the center of the universe, you have to go through all kinds of ridiculous gyrations and complications to account for the behavior of the universe. The instant you give up trying to make it fit your pictures and just appreciate it the way it is, natural order arises and is self evident.,
I have no problem with people who believe in God. Science suggests a God isn't necessary for this universe to happen the way it happens/happened. Maybe God doesn't have an ego problem? That's where the faith comes in, eh?... Bon Apetite.
Actually you're right, it was a one of the subplots from the book Next, that doesn't make it any less significant. Michael Crichton was a licensed M.D. and there was always a thread of truth and solid research in his writing (Andromeda Strain and Coma for instance had solid basis in medical research.) I have a close friends who became a doctor after a very successful career as a researcher in biology (she graduated from Cal Tech in the early 80s.) Anyway, I had a number of conversations with her about the validity of the issues surrounding gene patents, the themes in that book and whether a person has any rights to his own genome. You'd be surprised how poorly you're protected, and how much power corporations wield in getting what they want. By monetizing genetic material, we've allow corporations to lay claim to that thing which maybe may in fact be at the very heart of who we are. Our genetic inheritance. There's nothing at all absurd about that.
The problem is that the crash is always proportional to the rise and we've risen higher than ever before. In fact with each new technology we inflate our populations, destroy more nonrenewable resources, leave less and less available for a fall-back option. In the very near future, we'll have to leave the planet or go extinct because we'll have effectively eliminated the other alternatives.
I'm sorry but your math is a little off. The current debt is a bit more than 14 T, and by best accounting there are not quite 140 M taxpayers which places the debt per taxpayer at around $104,000 each. With the average per capita income per tax payer this year being about just under $40K, to pay this off in seven years you'd have to pay just under $15 K per tax payer per year above and beyond the average $ 8.5 K each tax payer is already paying just to maintain the status quo. That comes to nearly $ 24K per year of taxes leaving you with just under $ 16K to live on. In other words, would you be able to live on 40% of your current income for 7 years to eliminate the National Debt? This doesn't even begin to take into account the millions who are now on the verge of financial collapse who would be pushed under the minimum income for paying taxes, additionally increasing the burden on those who are paying taxes.
You might have noticed how close we just came to defaulting, and the conservative representatives have made it abundantly clear, we aren't raising taxes on anything including $1000 cans of caviar. So suggesting we could bump everyone's tax rate by 25% is probably just a wee bit unlikely.
The folk who are saying we can just keep borrowing our way our of this are suffering from serious self delusion. The dollar is in horrible shape and the biggest holders of US Debt are quietly but urgently divesting themselves as quickly as possible from that debt because they're scared to death we're going to go boom. At least in the short term, things are ugly. We need to show great wisdom to navigate out of these choppy waters and the mixed nut selection we have today in D.C. doesn't strike me as having the requisite intelligence or sanity to carry the day.
That's the nature of all singularities (or in this case asymptotic curves in the approach to vertical lines), all the rules break down, and things get completely unpredictable. Long before we got close to any of these failures, the social fabric would disintegrate, the global infrastructure would collapse, resources would deplete, plant and animal diversity would evaporate, and life would get exceptionally challenging. If fact we would probably extinct ourselves. Of course life would almost certainly go on and in ten or twenty million years, things would be good as new sans people.
The real problem here is that as long as humanity chooses to function inside bankrupt games: 1) The National Sociopolitical State Game 2) The Personal Profit Game 3) The Socioreligious Game or 4) The Dictator Game, that the predictable outcome for humanity is repeating cycles of civilization then collapse ultimately using up all the nonrenewable resources and pinning humanity to a slow spiral down.
Sanity might look like a non centralized global authority, design expressly to come up with plans for sustainable human development ultimately resulting in mass migration off the planet (while preserving as much of its current value of the planet as possible.) Ultimately the small human remnant (maybe 100,000,000) on Earth might remain to enjoy and manage the garden planet for the future evolution of new sentient life (Primates, Cetaceans, Parrots and Crows and Cephalopods.) In any case there would be a wealth of new habitats, and humanity would have the technology to evolve itself into the endless forms and functions needed to inhabit these new habitats and thrive. We can't even begin to imagine the possibilities and permutations. None of that is possible however without first addressing the problems that face us today.
Could someone please sit down with key leaders and explain to them in plain English (or the languages of their choice) why virtually all the premises upon which our society is built, fail the test of exponential growth. Even the national debt. As it currently exists, if we were to take 100% of the income from every American today, it would not pay off the national debt. Its all a ponzi scheme and the idiots running the ship have simply run aground. Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels. We start by fixing the disaster that our economy(s) are/is, and we get on with the SANE job of designing then implementing sustainable future.
My darlings... the people that have ever greater control over the very atoms of modern life, from our government to our choice of breakfast cereal, have been busy reshaping the world in their own interest. Whatever purpose the patent system might have served when it was created, it now exists to bludgeon the common man into shutting up and doing what corporations tell him to do. IP has been collected and packaged like so many bad home loans, and now the laws are bent to give corporations dominion over what has been created, what will be created, and what can be created.
Endless armies of lawyer exist for no other purpose than to impose the corporate will on all comers and unless you have the bottomless resources of a corporation, you have virtually no hope of winning against them in a legal battle. Even if you do win, history tells us it will come at the cost of decades of abuse, with the likely loss of everything you ever held dear. No wonder most folks quit, or simply don't even try. Until we treat Capitalism as a religious belief and isolate it from the political and legal system the same way we do (or should do) with all other religions, there is no possibility that we will get the world back. When profit is the only motive, there is no such thing as enough. The patent system is just another pawn on the chessboard called life. What is your next mover?
Here's the really ugly part
A doctor receives a patient. The patient has cancer, and to the amazement of the doctor the man survives and is discovered to have extraordinary traits of interest to the doctor. The doctor patents the cell line he develops from the man, keeping him coming to his office for years after he has been cured on threat of relapse and death, all for the purpose of furthering his personal research. The doctor can make the argument that this ones man's year perhaps even decades of suffering will save thousands of lives and oh by way make the Doctor a very wealthy man. The doctor see's no point in informing the man, or his family of what he's doing in spite of the fact that he's been serving his own interests and not his patient for years and doing so through deception.
Does the Doctor own this man's genetic material? Should he? What are his rights? Should he be required to share his discovery and wealth with his patient? If the man finds out he's been egregiously abused and misused, what rights does he have? It is arguable the Doctor has the rights to them man's genome, and can legally force him to continue providing samples to further the Doctors research. It is also arguable that the Doctor has the right to force the man to deliver children, grand children any other descendants to determine whether or not they carry the patented genes and therefore legally bound to continue this medical slavery.
This is just one of the many reasons that the growth of open source genome research has been exponential. Reducing people to a commodity of genetic traits to be mined by patent hungry biotech businesses paints a very gloomy future for what it means to be human. You think farmers are having a hard time with Monsanto? Imagine when their lawyers show up at your door because a plasmid in one of their products becomes widely spread by common bacteria and they sue you into oblivion for stealing there IP because you got infected. The mind shudders at the depth and breadth of what will be possible, and how little protection the common man has today in the face of corporate power and depravity.
Wow... someones wearing their collar(s) a wee bit tight! Friend, if you'll put that koolaid down for a second, perhaps you'll notice that O and W have the same handlers. That's because most folks are now clear the nastiest job in D.C. is the guy whose hand is inserting in the Presidents rectum to move the mouth. And sadly that guy works for Corporate America. Republicrats now come in two flavors, "Bought and Sold" and "Extra-Crazy." Apparently you have a penchant for the second kind, its nice to have friends you can talk to, eh? ;-)
Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Sigourney Weaver... ewwwww...
Not to wander too far off the topic, but does it ever strike you funny these plots where plucky human beings give big bad aliens a lesson in guerrilla warfare? Like a life-form that traveled endless light-years doesn't have the technology to snuff the entire planet out like a candle. That these beings who are thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of years more advanced than us, are going to suffer from clinical stupidity or hubris.
Or even what the hell they're doing here in the first place? Here we are, this vanishingly tiny speck in space, and there are vast resources outweighing anything we have by many orders of magnitude laying all over the place. Anything that decided it wanted earth for any reason would have started with all the giant gas planets and icy bodies in the solar system first, we'd see them coming years in advance, and there wouldn't be a damn thing we could do about it. It be more like flat worms vs Cowboys... bang! squish!
Maybe that would be an interesting plot for a sci fi?
Mayhaps you're watching the wrong movies? Try the Cohen Brothers. If you can predict plot turns in a Cohen film with greater than 60% (random plus a skosh more that an a standard deviation), then my friend you are a cinema god and should be writing plots not watching them. As for the inspiration of movies, I tend to agree that most of the great plots have been taken (in most cases by ancient Greeks, ancient Romans and Shakespeare batting cleanup.) That doesn't mean you can't couch the plot in an interesting context to give it new and current meaning.
The Wachowsky's went so far as to say that they were deeply inspired by the classics when they conceived of the Matrix. That doesn't mean that the Matrix (I speak preferentially of the first episode) didn't have a wonderful mix of classic themes and new ways of seeing and expressing those themes. The philosophical conversation that post modern man is drifting through life in in some approximation of a sleep walking state is (in my opinion) brilliant and they handled that conversation deftly. That is completely separate from the cinematography, visualization, or CG action they brought to the party for everyone else. At least the Wachowskys had the artistic integrity not vomit a happy ending on its audience.
This weekend "The Tourist" premiered on Starz. It wasn't a bad movie, the stars were beautiful, and the plot was fun (if not more than a little fluffy.) Sadly, the entire plot was completely predictable ( figured that Johnny Depp was the mystery man in the first 15 minutes.) It was handled as a ham-fisted contrivance. Look over here! Don't look over there! Magic! I think not. This is the norm these days. Sadly, most popular movies are like most popular music these days. Flavorless, mindless, endless clones on a theme designed to distract you as Corporate America picks your pocket. Try foreign films. Try independent films. Try classic films. There is a world of cinema that is thoughtful, provocative, and satisfying. Just don't expect that to come from Hollywood, the bankers would never allow it.
Read my post, the problem is not inherently with capitalism or socialism. The problem is training people from birth to hold material gratification above their own humanity and/or the humanity of others. The reason the US system worked so well to begin with, is that through checks and balances it was designed to limit the damage the worst in people could illicit and empower the best that people could accomplish. Almost from the start, individual interests have been at war with these principles and what we see now are the results of a complete breakdown in those checks and balances.
People are prone to ideologies, superstitions and magical thinking. The current pervasive mental illness supposes that you can cut enough tax to make the government work while at the same time demanding more and more from that government. That is by very definition bankrupt. It only leaves the option for that government, to print money, and if you don't think that's a tax, you need to study basic economics. Socialist and Communist governments fair no better as long as the people running those governments are no different and certainly no better than the corporate thugs running America today. To quote The Who "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Its time for humanity to transform. Its time for humanity as a super-organism, to evolve to the next level, to literally grow up. As long as the dominant memes that give us the society we currently live by, are based on scarcity, *unenlightened self interest, domination, conflict and moral self righteousness, we are pretty much never going to reach operational escape velocity. Our modern societies are literally built to promote thinking that is based of thousands of years of fallacy. Why is it that all past civilizations collapsed? These are predictable cycles. It is time to transcend our history. Or we'll repeat it, with the major difference being that the next civilization to rise will not have the necessary resources to transcend.
Forgive me if this sounds airy-fairy. Its not. There is nothing mystical about letting real visionaries lead humanity in a radically different direction. It would however demand a large number of people suspending belief, because it is the very beliefs themselves that doom us to the outcomes those beliefs fulfill. I suggest that rather than a social ideology, we as a species migrate towards operational sanity.
Forget that... what about assassination by putting a virus in someones replicator that replicates a physical virus? In fact you could have the replicator manufacture a virus with a genetic lock to a single person, ensuring only that person would succumb to your specially engineered Ebola virus. You could do all kinds of very unpleasant mischief with such technology.
Actually the first replicators on Star Trek (Star Trek Enterprise), were assemblers, assembling food stuffs from raw molecular stock (also a great way to recycle organic waste on a ship.) The question is always one of energy. The energy required to assemble a steak is not insignificant. The energy required to replicate a steak from energy to matter however is stunning. Of course there may be all kinds of cool technologies to reduce the ridiculous amount of energy it would take using the tech we now have to perform that task. Matter Antimatter technology gives you almost unlimited energy, but I think there would probably be better ways to use it. If you remember the original Star Trek series food was manufactured (small colorful cubes and odd shapes) and replication was reserved for producing industrial components and ship parts. That seems much more likely to me.
Are you kidding? Do you have any clue as to the actual number of people in America today who are out of work? Add to that the virtual collapse of available jobs in government and public services, well you get the picture.
Tell me that every advance in productivity, every application of robotics, every technological enhancement that makes it possible for business to make more, better, cheaper products hasn't resulted in higher wages for the Board of Directors and lower wages for the common worker in real currency. We now live in a global economy that sees human labor as a commodity, and all of it is to serve a self obsessed, self indulgent, corporate elite.
You want unwavering indicators, here are a few that might help you hone in on an answer:
What you will see is a mass migration into poverty and population control. We are being herded into oblivion. You honestly tell me if you had a billion dollars how eager you would be to help the masses vs feathering your own nest. We've built a society of bottomless appetites, with fewer and fewer souls who can feed that hunger. Can you see any way for the common man to make out in such a world?
Let me put it another way. The greater people are responsible for the future. Until the masses hold wisdom more highly than gratification, dignity above notoriety, justice above animal revenge and compassion above dominion, we can pretty much predict how it will all turn out. We have done a spectacular job of teaching our children to be fat, stupid and ready to dance to any tune their corporate masters may choose to play. What indicators are you looking at?
Apparently Not... :-)
So you just hack the ISP content for all the Republican Senators and Congressmen, and share with the voting public their personal chats with hookers, lobbyists, porn habits, kinks, fetishes, and conversations with people they would prefer you not know about.
The stupid sword cuts both ways, and the I bet that law would go away in a heartbeat if the Majority Whip woke up one morning with a compromising picture of himself with a sheep displayed on the Guardian.
I'm not going make a statement one way or the other on fudged data. If his actions were clearly inappropriate there are plenty of scientific bodies whose only reason for existence is managing scientific professional integrity. If he has done something truly inappropriate, he will be dealt with.
What I will respond to is THE VAST body of work pointing to dramatic changes in global climate. I ask those with an ideological position to defend, to stop for just a moment look at the remarkable amount of indisputable evidence that is now available. Its positively mind numbing.
Your comment about temperature is both uninformed and ludicrous. Scientists have taken wood samples from redwoods and bristlecone pines and with that information they can give you precise climatic information for specific areas including annual rainfall, temperature, and occurrence of catastrophic events. By analyzing human dwelling all over the world we can accurately determine climate through fauna and flora for those regions, spores, seeds and pollen. They tell us precisely what grew, and tell what the climatic conditions were there and when. We have antarctic ice cores with trapped atmospheric samples, we have ocean cores with samples of everything from diatoms to volcanic ash, we have fossils and minerals with trapped air and water going back millions of years, we have rock cores which elegantly give us clear records of temperature over centuries. The body of evidence is overwhelming and rich. Thousands of different sources from hundred of different fields of study, all forming a clear and cohesive picture. Whatever you've been reading, its inaccurate, incomplete, and puts ideology before simple fact and truth. You can absolutely criticize one or two individuals for their poor performance, but that doesn't even begin to indict the work of tens of thousands of scientist all over the world who work in vastly different fields but have all come to the same inescapable conclusion.
The models and theories make specific predictions. Many of those predictions have come to pass. Here are just a few recent facts which are completely incontestable:
But is this unholy mating happening on an "Open Surface???" Inquiring minds!
No that goes to shepherds... Woolite anyone?
Followed by "Open Experience" -> "Open Opinion" -> "Open Illusion" -> "Wish the damn thing had an Opening" and finally just "Open Wallet".
I'm sorry, my friend, but the scope of my response limited the number of items I could mention. I could just as easily refer you to ten thousand like items (literally and from many different fields.) So no, I wasn't cherry picking, I was picking at random. By the way cherry picking implies there are a limited number of cherries, and that one needs to pick to support ones position, I'm picking from a pretty large pool of facts here.
In addition you advertise your ignorance of the topic. We have incredibly accurate data regarding global environment going back tens of millions of years. We have pristine samples of atmosphere trapped in ice, ocean water trapped in minerals, ocean floor cores, rock cores, and fossils in amber. We have a ridiculous abundance of data regarding precise weather models going back nearly to the dinosaurs. These models include atmospheric chemistry including carbon, global and local temperature, land and ocean flora and fauna, salinity, currents, pretty much the whole enchilada.
Here the problem with "Real Cherry Picking", you only look for the evidence that justifies your position, instead of basing your position on the body of evidence.
Personally, I say to hell with another grant for research, that's how the government has avoided taking any real responsibility for the situation we now find ourselves in. I say we modify our behavior, to begin easing out problematic industries. Monsanto was all about plastics in the 60s. They saw the way the wind was blowing and now they're all about biotech and food crops. There is no reason we couldn't provide fossil fuel manufacturers incentives to move into thorium reactors, wind and ocean power, geothermal, even co-generation and energy reclamation. These are huge opportunities and given the right tax breaks could prove a boon to everyone. Or you can just hunker down on your ideology, and make everyone you disagree with wrong while you keep doing nothing.
It is well known that a tremendous amount of the resistance and FUD being thrown at global warming involves money from fossil fuel producers. In fact the very same people from Wall-Street who brought you scientific evidence that cigarettes were good for you are behind a lot of these arguments and in 50 years they've gotten very good at obfuscating the truth and persuading people for the right price. So before we look at both sides of this issue we have to keep asking ourselves to be honest about our motives. The Libertarians among us find the idea of global warming distasteful because it flies in the face of their romantic ideals regarding the enterprise of man. Sadly they also seemed to have missed that fact that, today the primary enterprise of man is greed and self interest to the detriment of the world at large. We sadly bump up against the dark side of our nature, and as our founding fathers saw, we need to check and balance the worst of us, to create an environment where the best of us may flourish. I applaud the Libertarian ideal, and for that matter the Communist ideal, both are grounded in high aspirations and are the response to seeing the world filled with evil. I simply say that they are unrealistic, and that in practice both have proven less than ideal.
By the way, You're right, consensus by itself would be a poor thing to rely on. There was a consensus among the majority of Germans that invading other countries was a good idea in WWII. Scientists as a body should always be poked and prodded to make sure they aren't simply being intellectually lazy, or defending ideological turf. All of that said, when you have such a remarkable body of evidence, you need to honestly look at why there is a consensus.
By the very same basis, there is a consensus that relativity accurately describes the macro universe under nearly all conditions. We can say that because there is now a ridiculous amount of evidence to support the claim. By the way, when relativity dethroned Newtonian Physics, it didn't eliminate it. Newtonian Physics got us to the moon, and under normal conditions (the space-time circumstance likely to be encountered by human beings) its still a perfectly useful and effective body of work. When the theory that effective describes both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics arrives, we won't throw Relativity away either. Even scientific revolutions these days, tend to be finer cuts on less accurate descriptions about the universe. The days of discovering we simply had it all wrong and misinterpreted billions of pieces of information and experimental data are if not completely gone then at least vanishingly unlikely.
The key has always been to look at the big picture and ask yourself with complete intellectual honesty what does it say. Sadly, I can't imagine anyone today looking at how our industry has abused the planet and say with a straight face that we're heading towards a happy ending. That isn't to say we're nailed to rails (though by all sane reckoning that time is close at hand), I am saying that changing the way we do things to include environmental sanity (for instance living by the old camping maxim "don't Sh*t where you eat") would probably serve us well, even if global climate change turns out to be a tempest in a teapot.