You make an example out of them with your vastly superior firepower. Galt's Gulch wasn't just a bunch of rich dudes hiding out, but also the greatest technology center in the world along with a very competent military force. Thus is the power of science fiction.
Is Thiel planning to have a navy as well?
Sounds like he'll lean on some developed world navies. But if he's planning to go it alone, yes. They could always just not put these things right off the coast of Somalia or North Korea. Pirates aren't found everywhere. Don't put them next to poor people or authoritarian states. That leaves a lot of ocean.
Ah, the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" myth. Who knows -- perhaps once the majority of Africans have overthrown brutal despots, eradicated malaria and other diseases, and found reliable clean water they'll be able to start working on that.
Well, there we go. Another Slashdot solution. What's the next problem in the queue?
Because I present the fantasy of "Things Go As Planned"? Here's my suggestion. Take as much of this hardcore shit as you can and then start operating heavy machinery.
Just because you assert that people stopping spreading measles could not account for a drastic decrease in reported cases
Yes. Because it's quite clear that people didn't stop spreading measles. The parts of the world that don't have universal immunizations still have serious problems with the disease.
We require evidence on this to make an informed decision.
And we have that information. You insist on a particular testing ritual which is not justified in this case due the strength of the observation.
Here's a topical example. Yellowstone National Park has recently banned all use of remote control drones because someone dropped one into the Grand Prismatic Spring this summer, an activity which was illegal in more than one way even before the ban.
Meanwhile this "heavy-handed authority" is soon going to allow copper mining in a forest sacred to the natives of the region.
Because raping mother Earth for profit really shows off their light touch?
...and then his plans to live to 120 are spoiled when he's mugged by a starving beggar with an assault rifle, or is attacked by pirates or the warships of a rogue nation, or maybe just when his house falls down on his head.
Or maybe none of these things happens and he achieves the goal.
If pirates attack is Galt's Gulch island or the mercenary soldiers he had hired to protect the island, imprison him and take over all his wealth, would he just shrug and accept his fate?
The most successful pirate, Ragnar DanneskjÃld was a founding member of Galt's Gulch. You just make sure the people with the guns are on board and that they aren't all under a single point of control.
Supposedly brilliant chap, and just because one stupid railroad executive refused to build a railroad track to his pet project he just gives up?
Sounds like you ought to read the book sometime. You could alternate it with something like Das Kapital, if you're afraid of picking up Rand cooties.
I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.
I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.
Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to abuse.
You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the developed world too, but you can't be stopped from caring about it. And as a result, those sort of decisions have a lot more push back and don't go as far.
The US-equivalent is the Salton Sea which was made by an epic mistake, the accidental redirecting of the entire Colorado River into Imperial Valley for a couple of years at the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the US or Mexican governments (the flooding actually originated on the Mexican side of the border) contributed much to the effort of restoring the previous state. It took the regional railroad (which was greatly impaired by the flood waters to stop the flooding.
Freedom kept the Imperial Valley from just being the Salton Sea. Lack of freedom damned the Aral Sea.
It took one or two guys on 4wd offroad vehicles, after tearing down and shooting up the private property signs and fences, then doing donuts and running all over the site one day, to destroy all the work I'd done terracing and replanting the site, and turn much of it into gravel and gullies in the next rains.
If a couple of off-roaders can set you back to square one, then you are doing it wrong. Nature is not all-enduring, but it can take a beating (such as the forest fire, which was much worse). I also see this sort of flawed thinking in environmental science fiction all the time where there is some fragile terraforming ecosystem that requires constant human attention. Bonus cliche points, if their animal companion/mascot looks on as they toil away desperately trying to save the gimpy tree for the future of their new world.
My view is that this is not ecosystem restoration or the terraforming equivalent, but landscaping. Its private property and if you want to make it look pretty, that's fine with me. Off roaders in that situation were committing a variety of crimes in trespassing on the property and vandalizing it. Too bad you didn't catch them. But it would have taken more than that to derail a proper land restoration project. Sorry.
News flash, the pools change color overtime time anyway. Birds drown in them because they think they are normal lakes, dirty sediment water runs off in to it and other animals fall in.
And people dump all kinds of crap in those pools too. The problem isn't that humanity is evil, though obviously that is a seductive narrative for the occasion, but simply that there's so many people visiting.
If you were to drop a bison in, it would quickly, over the course of a few days be rendered down (in the original sense of the word) to at most a few tens of kilograms of bone. Further, they aren't the smartest animals in the Park, but they're smart enough to avoid Grand Prismatic. So on the animal side you're left with things like hapless ducks who didn't get the memo.
On the plant side, you basically have wind-blown leaves (wood is durable, but it doesn't grow in hot springs for some reason) which don't last either. The spring happens to be set back from the hillside behind it so you're not getting a lot of silt. There's not a lot of natural mass going into Grand Prismatic.
On the other hand, if a hundred thousand tourists per year (of the many more visitors who actually walk by the hot spring) each toss a penny into the spring (which isn't hard to do since the boardwalk goes up to the edge of the spring), then you're adding 200 kg of copper and zinc to that spring every year. And those coins tend to stick around even in weakly acidic waters of Grand Prismatic. I think the National Park Service has been successful at keeping people from dumping a lot of junk in the spring, but it is a never ending battle. Evil humanity has been kept at bay, yay. But if they stopped doing it, human litter would probably plug up the spring (third largest in the world) in a few decades.
A much smaller spring is far more susceptible to this sort of problem. The popular Morning Glory Pool has changed its colors over the years due to human litter (coins, beer cans, etc). And they're pretty sure it's human because they dredge up the debris in the pool every so often to keep it active (and there apparently is a noticeable difference before and after).
So no one does the blinded RCT to begin with (ie collects reliable evidence), then once weak, possibly confounded, evidence is available it becomes unethical to get the good evidence... Great plan to filter out worthless drugs before deciding to recommend them to 100% of the population!
Where is this weak, possibly confounded evidence? Just because you assert something doesn't make it true. There are too many orders of magnitude of difference to explain with such platitudes.
At this point, I really don't see the point of continuing this argument. Ignoring a several orders of magnitude bit of evidence just because it doesn't complete a certain ritual is disingenuous.
Did you miss the first 2 words of my post - "Until now"?
There's no evidence that now is different from the past few centuries. We still have both comparative advantage and Jevons paradox. We also have a massive global increase in employment with employees still finding new jobs when the old ones get obsoleted.
Another clear example is the 'polite rage'. Studies have shown that the more polite a society, the more seething rage develops inside it. Where a traditional brash American northerner gets angry, but never fights for honor, a traditionally polite American southerner stays polite until you go to far and then goes for blood.
If it's to fall, it'll be due to people who were raised on the idea that physical violence against innocents is a virtue and who thus support societal institutions that use it as their primary means of motivation against adult subjects, contrary to the human drives towards freedom and creativity.
I missed the memo where entitled snowflakes have a clue how to prevent that. My bet is that when the dastardly Poles attack that radio station everyone will fall in line as planned.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Thiel planning to have a navy as well?
Sounds like he'll lean on some developed world navies. But if he's planning to go it alone, yes. They could always just not put these things right off the coast of Somalia or North Korea. Pirates aren't found everywhere. Don't put them next to poor people or authoritarian states. That leaves a lot of ocean.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
So what? You could always just not do that.
People with that much money store it at the bank and the money just lies there.
Right. What's the interest rate of a bank account again? And even if they really do dump it in a bank, what does the bank do with that money again?
Ah, the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" myth. Who knows -- perhaps once the majority of Africans have overthrown brutal despots, eradicated malaria and other diseases, and found reliable clean water they'll be able to start working on that.
Well, there we go. Another Slashdot solution. What's the next problem in the queue?
It's not that hard to dump a bunch of people in holes and have them restart civilization afterward.
But it is basing this decision because of the religious beliefs of another group; ie, the religion of making more money out of nothing.
Looks more like their "religion" is making money by selling copper mined from the ground. That's a bit more than "nothing".
Because I present the fantasy of "Things Go As Planned"? Here's my suggestion. Take as much of this hardcore shit as you can and then start operating heavy machinery.
Just because you assert that people stopping spreading measles could not account for a drastic decrease in reported cases
Yes. Because it's quite clear that people didn't stop spreading measles. The parts of the world that don't have universal immunizations still have serious problems with the disease.
We require evidence on this to make an informed decision.
And we have that information. You insist on a particular testing ritual which is not justified in this case due the strength of the observation.
Meanwhile this "heavy-handed authority" is soon going to allow copper mining in a forest sacred to the natives of the region.
Because raping mother Earth for profit really shows off their light touch?
Nonetheless, these are cures. And they're likely to get better over the next ten years as well as the next fifty.
I wouldn't call cutting out a group of cancer cells a cure even though it means you no longer have that cancer.
I would.
That last group has been around since the beginning of mankind. It is no way related to the 'everyone's a winner' crowd.
I have to disagree. I think the "everyone's a winner" group is a substantial subset of the masochistic side of the authoritarian crowd.
Citation needed.
Always willing to provide.
Once again, you are assuming that the rest of the world is like America.
That would be the smart money bet.
I thought that we were in favour of legalizing (or decriminalizing, at least) the so-called "illegal drugs".
I notice that hasn't actually resulted in legalization at the federal level - even though the last three presidents all admit to illegal drug use.
...and then his plans to live to 120 are spoiled when he's mugged by a starving beggar with an assault rifle, or is attacked by pirates or the warships of a rogue nation, or maybe just when his house falls down on his head.
Or maybe none of these things happens and he achieves the goal.
I highly doubt that we will find that many in next 50 years, not to mention 10.
I guess you haven't been paying attention. Lot of varieties of cancer are already curable - if caught in time.
If pirates attack is Galt's Gulch island or the mercenary soldiers he had hired to protect the island, imprison him and take over all his wealth, would he just shrug and accept his fate?
The most successful pirate, Ragnar DanneskjÃld was a founding member of Galt's Gulch. You just make sure the people with the guns are on board and that they aren't all under a single point of control.
Supposedly brilliant chap, and just because one stupid railroad executive refused to build a railroad track to his pet project he just gives up?
Sounds like you ought to read the book sometime. You could alternate it with something like Das Kapital, if you're afraid of picking up Rand cooties.
I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.
I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.
Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to abuse.
You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the developed world too, but you can't be stopped from caring about it. And as a result, those sort of decisions have a lot more push back and don't go as far.
The US-equivalent is the Salton Sea which was made by an epic mistake, the accidental redirecting of the entire Colorado River into Imperial Valley for a couple of years at the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the US or Mexican governments (the flooding actually originated on the Mexican side of the border) contributed much to the effort of restoring the previous state. It took the regional railroad (which was greatly impaired by the flood waters to stop the flooding.
Freedom kept the Imperial Valley from just being the Salton Sea. Lack of freedom damned the Aral Sea.
It took one or two guys on 4wd offroad vehicles, after tearing down and shooting up the private property signs and fences, then doing donuts and running all over the site one day, to destroy all the work I'd done terracing and replanting the site, and turn much of it into gravel and gullies in the next rains.
If a couple of off-roaders can set you back to square one, then you are doing it wrong. Nature is not all-enduring, but it can take a beating (such as the forest fire, which was much worse). I also see this sort of flawed thinking in environmental science fiction all the time where there is some fragile terraforming ecosystem that requires constant human attention. Bonus cliche points, if their animal companion/mascot looks on as they toil away desperately trying to save the gimpy tree for the future of their new world.
My view is that this is not ecosystem restoration or the terraforming equivalent, but landscaping. Its private property and if you want to make it look pretty, that's fine with me. Off roaders in that situation were committing a variety of crimes in trespassing on the property and vandalizing it. Too bad you didn't catch them. But it would have taken more than that to derail a proper land restoration project. Sorry.
Well that and heavy-handed authoritarian responses, sure.
News flash, the pools change color overtime time anyway. Birds drown in them because they think they are normal lakes, dirty sediment water runs off in to it and other animals fall in.
And people dump all kinds of crap in those pools too. The problem isn't that humanity is evil, though obviously that is a seductive narrative for the occasion, but simply that there's so many people visiting.
If you were to drop a bison in, it would quickly, over the course of a few days be rendered down (in the original sense of the word) to at most a few tens of kilograms of bone. Further, they aren't the smartest animals in the Park, but they're smart enough to avoid Grand Prismatic. So on the animal side you're left with things like hapless ducks who didn't get the memo.
On the plant side, you basically have wind-blown leaves (wood is durable, but it doesn't grow in hot springs for some reason) which don't last either. The spring happens to be set back from the hillside behind it so you're not getting a lot of silt. There's not a lot of natural mass going into Grand Prismatic.
On the other hand, if a hundred thousand tourists per year (of the many more visitors who actually walk by the hot spring) each toss a penny into the spring (which isn't hard to do since the boardwalk goes up to the edge of the spring), then you're adding 200 kg of copper and zinc to that spring every year. And those coins tend to stick around even in weakly acidic waters of Grand Prismatic. I think the National Park Service has been successful at keeping people from dumping a lot of junk in the spring, but it is a never ending battle. Evil humanity has been kept at bay, yay. But if they stopped doing it, human litter would probably plug up the spring (third largest in the world) in a few decades.
A much smaller spring is far more susceptible to this sort of problem. The popular Morning Glory Pool has changed its colors over the years due to human litter (coins, beer cans, etc). And they're pretty sure it's human because they dredge up the debris in the pool every so often to keep it active (and there apparently is a noticeable difference before and after).
So no one does the blinded RCT to begin with (ie collects reliable evidence), then once weak, possibly confounded, evidence is available it becomes unethical to get the good evidence... Great plan to filter out worthless drugs before deciding to recommend them to 100% of the population!
Where is this weak, possibly confounded evidence? Just because you assert something doesn't make it true. There are too many orders of magnitude of difference to explain with such platitudes.
At this point, I really don't see the point of continuing this argument. Ignoring a several orders of magnitude bit of evidence just because it doesn't complete a certain ritual is disingenuous.
Did you miss the first 2 words of my post - "Until now"?
There's no evidence that now is different from the past few centuries. We still have both comparative advantage and Jevons paradox. We also have a massive global increase in employment with employees still finding new jobs when the old ones get obsoleted.
Another clear example is the 'polite rage'. Studies have shown that the more polite a society, the more seething rage develops inside it. Where a traditional brash American northerner gets angry, but never fights for honor, a traditionally polite American southerner stays polite until you go to far and then goes for blood.
Completely explains the internet.
If it's to fall, it'll be due to people who were raised on the idea that physical violence against innocents is a virtue and who thus support societal institutions that use it as their primary means of motivation against adult subjects, contrary to the human drives towards freedom and creativity.
I missed the memo where entitled snowflakes have a clue how to prevent that. My bet is that when the dastardly Poles attack that radio station everyone will fall in line as planned.