Not even close. The developed world pollutes a lot less than it used to.
(though these days, a lot of it is from China, since we've outsourced a lot of our industry over there, but pollution doesn't respect national boundaries, and travels by air
Pollution does respect distance however.
It's not like we've stopped or even reduced our petroleum consumption.
Which turns out to be irrelevant to the level of pollution.
The economy is terrible, and will have a "double dip" before too long.
Nothing to do with my assertions.
The people for the megacities will come from our rapidly expanding population.
I don't see how what's predicted there isn't in the cards for us: giant megacities full of crime and pollution, and a fascist government with massive police brutality due to the high crime, excess population, and high unemployment.
The fact that we're not heading that way doesn't enter into your reckoning? Where's the people for these megacities going to come from? Where's the pollution going to come from?
Sure, fascism and such are always going to be a threat.
What does present-day China have to do with anything?
It was in the future, when the Judge Dread thing was churned out. It's worth noting that the US is actually growing at a faster rate than China is currently and in turn, the growth rate of the US is almost entirely due to immigration - both directly and via elevated fertility of first generation immigrants! We have vastly different population dynamics in the present than were in the Judge Dread stories and movie.
Yet not a single politician will touch the population explosion issue
I'm puzzled. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, the US's "Global Health Initiative" has as one of its strategies:
The United States Government Global Health Initiative Strategy Family Planning and Reproductive Health:
Prevent 54 million unintended pregnancies. This will be accomplished
by reaching a modern contraceptive prevalence rate of 35 percent across assisted countries and reducing from 24
to 20 percent the proportion of women aged 18-24 who have their first birth before age 18.
There's no word on the time frame over which these goals are to be implemented. But for ten years, that would be 5.4 births prevented per year. At today's roughly 80 million population growth per year, that's almost 7% reduction in the rate of growth. That's a pretty big "touch".
and few will admit that growth is an environmental horror story and that the world economy is based upon growth
Which isn't actually true in either case. I wouldn't expect most people to admit things that aren't true, would you? Growth isn't necessarily population growth. And economics still works even in a world that isn't growing.
Which is a very English thing to do. I must admit that futurism sounds moderately less embarrassing than futurology. And if the only name collision is an art movement from last century, I have no qualms about it.
Melding technology into our bodies is not going to evolve us as a species.
And why is that consideration important? For example, we might be able to create intelligence that will live much longer than life on Earth has lived to this point. We may have already created various systems that will outlive the Sun. Evolution is not the only way.
There are several cases of technology and knowledge development that I think are worthy of consideration. The most important is the development of writing. Often, this rather mundane technology had all sorts of mysticism attached to it, such as the Egyptians' use of it to help the dead transition to their afterlives. Or to turn defeat into victory.
Another example would be the development of modern medicine particularly in the early days when it required numerous cadavers to learn the principles of the medical knowledge of that day. In England and elsewhere, medicine was associated with a nasty black market in human corpses.
Then there's the reactions to modern urbanization and its problems (such as conservatism, environmentalism, and city planning) which often have historical antecedents.
Finally, the technologies of the past shape how we view it. For example, the biggest distinction is between history and prehistory. Make a guess what technology development divides those two periods.
The big corporations who paid the inventor two billion wouldn't be so big and have two billion to pay the guy if the oil industry wasn't heavily regulated by government, which limited competition and allowed those corporations to grow so big.
Reading up on it some more, the inventor already owned a fair-sized oil company some of which he grew through outright government intervention (via real estate deals with large government contributions).
But his profits from fracking came from the huge value of oil released by fracking, not from unusual concentration of oil industry resources via government interference.
An attempt to sorta politely end a conversation that couldn't proceed due to your unwillingness to even tip your hat to actual documented fact.
You need more practice then. Because you failed just as hard as this task as you did at your original argument.
I'll finish then by summarizing my position. The US Supreme Court does treat corporations similarly to people particularly in political and economic areas of protection (such as free speech and protection from unlawful or arbitrary seizure of assets). They don't treat corporations as people. The "corporate personhood" scheme is a legal fiction of convenience, not an equating of corporations with people.
Further, this was done because of real abuses such as taxation, seizure of assets, and suppression of speech that would be grossly illegal, if it happened to people who weren't associated with a corporation.
Further, crimes don't just magically happen. People cause them. It makes no sense to go after an inanimate object rather than the people who committed the crime - not just because it punishes the innocent for the benefit of the guilty, but also because it provides an easy, low cost way to evade the law. It's a lot easier to make a new corporation than it is to serve a prison sentence.
Which doesn't say much. I'll just note that a lot of the opinion on this subject depends on whether knowledge of personal finance ends up being an obstacle to the interests of the person with the opinion.
For example, if you want government to be spending a lot of money, say because you're a Keynesian or just want to get a lot of money to your cronies, then peoples' knowledge of personal finance will probably get in your way and thus, be deemed harmful.
Number of times we we have need an air superiority fighter, like the F-35, in the last two decades: 0.
The Iraqi invasion (and the preceding Persian Gulf war which conveniently falls just outside your scope) was a counterexample. Conducting a massive invasion without getting air superiority would have been foolish. Even if all Iraq did was to scout with its air forces, that still would have led to greater casualties and a more costly fight.
Police are armed, but that doesn't make them "armed forces". Another bit of nuance is that armed forces can police civilian populations, but they can't be federal armed forces. So the national guards of the states can do various sorts of policing (they are armed forces of the states not of the federal government).
Who said anything about trespass? That dung heap may be on someone else's property. Human interaction is far more complicated than merely bad guys being prevented from doing bad things to people by regulation.
Ok, it's going to be empty rejoiners then. I'll just note that the US Supreme Court has yet to recognize the full range of personal rights and privileges such as voting, serving on a jury, getting a driver's license, getting married, etc. This is a firm counter to the claim that somehow reading more on the subject will change the US Supreme Court's opinion on corporations.
There are two things to note. First, it doesn't actually demonstrate an opposition to critical thinking (though the part about "challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority" do imply that whoever wrote and inserted that section does to a degree). Note that it is claimed in the story that the clause was left in by accident.
Even if the Texas Republicans retained an opposition to so-called "Higher Order Thinking Skills" program that doesn't mean that they oppose it on critical thinking grounds.
Nor does it demonstrate that the "right-wing" is using force to implement this opposition.
that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation
No, I asked for evidence not a citation. The two aren't the same. Even if they were beautifully cited, the two examples you gave earlier would not be evidence of the claim that some group of people identifiable as "right-wing" "quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction".
Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.
Such as in Catholic schools? They are far from ideology-free (as a number of Slashdotters have complained about over the years), but they do teach a lot of the tools for critical thinking (as those same Slashdotters often demonstrate).
Also, this is a fallacy since we were discussing the different claim that some group was "forcibly opposing" critical thinking.
When people say "the right wing does this" it is not necessarily the right wing, but the right wing is sitting idly by letting things happen, while feeding THEIR children full of values.
You should really think about what you're saying here. "Sitting idly by" is far from the original poster's claim of "forcibly opposing".
You also have the unexamined assumption that doing something would be better than not doing something. Do you really want a "right-wing" fix for whatever educational shortcomings they happen to think exists?
Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?
I ask again, do you have evidence of your assertion that the "right wing" forcibly opposes critical thinking, particularly with respect to your example ("teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising")?
Slashdot Mirror
Pollution is constantly getting worse
Not even close. The developed world pollutes a lot less than it used to.
(though these days, a lot of it is from China, since we've outsourced a lot of our industry over there, but pollution doesn't respect national boundaries, and travels by air
Pollution does respect distance however.
It's not like we've stopped or even reduced our petroleum consumption.
Which turns out to be irrelevant to the level of pollution.
The economy is terrible, and will have a "double dip" before too long.
Nothing to do with my assertions.
The people for the megacities will come from our rapidly expanding population.
Which is not rapidly expanding.
Not at all. But I have read a few stories years ago.
I don't see how what's predicted there isn't in the cards for us: giant megacities full of crime and pollution, and a fascist government with massive police brutality due to the high crime, excess population, and high unemployment.
The fact that we're not heading that way doesn't enter into your reckoning? Where's the people for these megacities going to come from? Where's the pollution going to come from?
Sure, fascism and such are always going to be a threat.
What does present-day China have to do with anything?
It was in the future, when the Judge Dread thing was churned out. It's worth noting that the US is actually growing at a faster rate than China is currently and in turn, the growth rate of the US is almost entirely due to immigration - both directly and via elevated fertility of first generation immigrants! We have vastly different population dynamics in the present than were in the Judge Dread stories and movie.
Yet not a single politician will touch the population explosion issue
I'm puzzled. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, the US's "Global Health Initiative" has as one of its strategies:
The United States Government Global Health Initiative Strategy Family Planning and Reproductive Health:
Prevent 54 million unintended pregnancies. This will be accomplished by reaching a modern contraceptive prevalence rate of 35 percent across assisted countries and reducing from 24 to 20 percent the proportion of women aged 18-24 who have their first birth before age 18.
There's no word on the time frame over which these goals are to be implemented. But for ten years, that would be 5.4 births prevented per year. At today's roughly 80 million population growth per year, that's almost 7% reduction in the rate of growth. That's a pretty big "touch".
and few will admit that growth is an environmental horror story and that the world economy is based upon growth
Which isn't actually true in either case. I wouldn't expect most people to admit things that aren't true, would you? Growth isn't necessarily population growth. And economics still works even in a world that isn't growing.
It's how they're used together. Since when do "primordial elements", whatever that shit is, have "fervor"?
Which is a very English thing to do. I must admit that futurism sounds moderately less embarrassing than futurology. And if the only name collision is an art movement from last century, I have no qualms about it.
Any truly serious attempt to predict the future has to start with the acknowledgement that predicting the future in any meaningful way is impossible.
So as AC replier noted, you're making a prediction about the future and expecting it to be right. That is self-contradictory.
Melding technology into our bodies is not going to evolve us as a species.
And why is that consideration important? For example, we might be able to create intelligence that will live much longer than life on Earth has lived to this point. We may have already created various systems that will outlive the Sun. Evolution is not the only way.
Reading biographies of individual people implies that individual people have individually changed the world. By and large that is not true.
So what other sort of people are there than individual people?
but its vision of the future was dead-on: 98% unemployment; fascist cops who act as judge, jury, and executioner; drug gangs run amok, etc.
Dead on to what? China doesn't have these problems, for example.
There are several cases of technology and knowledge development that I think are worthy of consideration. The most important is the development of writing. Often, this rather mundane technology had all sorts of mysticism attached to it, such as the Egyptians' use of it to help the dead transition to their afterlives. Or to turn defeat into victory.
Another example would be the development of modern medicine particularly in the early days when it required numerous cadavers to learn the principles of the medical knowledge of that day. In England and elsewhere, medicine was associated with a nasty black market in human corpses.
Then there's the reactions to modern urbanization and its problems (such as conservatism, environmentalism, and city planning) which often have historical antecedents.
Finally, the technologies of the past shape how we view it. For example, the biggest distinction is between history and prehistory. Make a guess what technology development divides those two periods.
The big corporations who paid the inventor two billion wouldn't be so big and have two billion to pay the guy if the oil industry wasn't heavily regulated by government, which limited competition and allowed those corporations to grow so big.
Reading up on it some more, the inventor already owned a fair-sized oil company some of which he grew through outright government intervention (via real estate deals with large government contributions).
But his profits from fracking came from the huge value of oil released by fracking, not from unusual concentration of oil industry resources via government interference.
An attempt to sorta politely end a conversation that couldn't proceed due to your unwillingness to even tip your hat to actual documented fact.
You need more practice then. Because you failed just as hard as this task as you did at your original argument.
I'll finish then by summarizing my position. The US Supreme Court does treat corporations similarly to people particularly in political and economic areas of protection (such as free speech and protection from unlawful or arbitrary seizure of assets). They don't treat corporations as people. The "corporate personhood" scheme is a legal fiction of convenience, not an equating of corporations with people.
Further, this was done because of real abuses such as taxation, seizure of assets, and suppression of speech that would be grossly illegal, if it happened to people who weren't associated with a corporation.
Further, crimes don't just magically happen. People cause them. It makes no sense to go after an inanimate object rather than the people who committed the crime - not just because it punishes the innocent for the benefit of the guilty, but also because it provides an easy, low cost way to evade the law. It's a lot easier to make a new corporation than it is to serve a prison sentence.
As far as I know, there isn't a connection.
Which doesn't say much. I'll just note that a lot of the opinion on this subject depends on whether knowledge of personal finance ends up being an obstacle to the interests of the person with the opinion.
For example, if you want government to be spending a lot of money, say because you're a Keynesian or just want to get a lot of money to your cronies, then peoples' knowledge of personal finance will probably get in your way and thus, be deemed harmful.
Given that any police force today would comprehensively outgun any armed forces around in the 18th century when the US constituation was written
So what? Even if the above assertion were true, today's military forces outgun today's police forces.
Number of times we we have need an air superiority fighter, like the F-35, in the last two decades: 0.
The Iraqi invasion (and the preceding Persian Gulf war which conveniently falls just outside your scope) was a counterexample. Conducting a massive invasion without getting air superiority would have been foolish. Even if all Iraq did was to scout with its air forces, that still would have led to greater casualties and a more costly fight.
Police are armed, but that doesn't make them "armed forces". Another bit of nuance is that armed forces can police civilian populations, but they can't be federal armed forces. So the national guards of the states can do various sorts of policing (they are armed forces of the states not of the federal government).
Who said anything about trespass? That dung heap may be on someone else's property. Human interaction is far more complicated than merely bad guys being prevented from doing bad things to people by regulation.
Ok, it's going to be empty rejoiners then. I'll just note that the US Supreme Court has yet to recognize the full range of personal rights and privileges such as voting, serving on a jury, getting a driver's license, getting married, etc. This is a firm counter to the claim that somehow reading more on the subject will change the US Supreme Court's opinion on corporations.
There are two things to note. First, it doesn't actually demonstrate an opposition to critical thinking (though the part about "challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority" do imply that whoever wrote and inserted that section does to a degree). Note that it is claimed in the story that the clause was left in by accident.
Even if the Texas Republicans retained an opposition to so-called "Higher Order Thinking Skills" program that doesn't mean that they oppose it on critical thinking grounds.
Nor does it demonstrate that the "right-wing" is using force to implement this opposition.
that I cannot meet your demands this very night to provide a citation
No, I asked for evidence not a citation. The two aren't the same. Even if they were beautifully cited, the two examples you gave earlier would not be evidence of the claim that some group of people identifiable as "right-wing" "quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction".
Perhaps I should defy you to demonstrate that the Right actually PROMOTES critical thinking instruction in schools.
Such as in Catholic schools? They are far from ideology-free (as a number of Slashdotters have complained about over the years), but they do teach a lot of the tools for critical thinking (as those same Slashdotters often demonstrate).
Also, this is a fallacy since we were discussing the different claim that some group was "forcibly opposing" critical thinking.
When people say "the right wing does this" it is not necessarily the right wing, but the right wing is sitting idly by letting things happen, while feeding THEIR children full of values.
You should really think about what you're saying here. "Sitting idly by" is far from the original poster's claim of "forcibly opposing".
You also have the unexamined assumption that doing something would be better than not doing something. Do you really want a "right-wing" fix for whatever educational shortcomings they happen to think exists?
Given that there is opposition to teaching evolution in some states, and that some state legislature tried to pass a law that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter be exactly equal to three, how is it that you assert that the opposition to critical thinking on the part of the right wing is just my imagination?
I ask again, do you have evidence of your assertion that the "right wing" forcibly opposes critical thinking, particularly with respect to your example ("teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising")?
I'm fairly sure you can figure out that by constraints I didn't mean random ones.
I know no such thing - even now.
I'm fairly sure you would favor a constraint that keeps me from placing a 20 foot high pile of dung next to your bedroom window, for example.
But what happens when that dung heap was there before I built my house? Constraints shouldn't exist just because they favor my interests.