Sure, those are obvious differences, but it's hubris to think that we're immune to serious collapse just because our civilisation is more advanced and extensive. I wouldn't call comparisons to past past civilisations "analogies", I'd call these a "warning." These are not an apples and oranges comparison: these are all apples, they're just different flavours.
My point is not that there aren't such dangers, but that the people speaking of such dangers tend to not understand how things work and propose solutions that make our more serious problems worse. For example, someone seriously proposed this in a recent argument over what was creating and distributing wealth in our world today:
Eliminate the trade conditions which seduce the East and Africa into being crippled exporters, and stop propping up their corrupt governments, and they'd start to see the independent flourishing that European nations began to experience last century.
Stop global trade, the primary engine of wealth distribution (and a considerable tool of wealth creation as well) in the world today and somehow all those poor countries would do better.
As I see it, the poster really wanted to protect their developed world economy from labor competition by the rest of the world and just rationalized this fantasy out of thin air. It was what they wanted, therefore it must be good for the rest of the world. I imagine if unpopular rich people had wanted it instead, then it would be automatically bad.
Another classic example is the ongoing decades-old drive to conserve cheap, plentiful electricity. All sorts of bad laws have been passed to control the non-problem of people leaving their lights on or using a less energy efficient clothes washing machine.
Technology allows you stretch your resources (e.g. modern farming) but if you aren't mindful of what you're doing, things can stretch to breaking point. Again, modern farming is a good case in point--we seem to be hitting the limits of what we can produce per acre. Perhaps proposals for for dealing with finite resources are often poorly though through--I don't know--but that doesn't mean that resources aren't finite and that you shouldn't consider what to do about that. Being bigger just means you risk falling harder.
Well, who's doing that? For all the talk of finite resources and using them up, the developed world has come up with some pretty good solutions that will work for a while (far more than long enough to come up with better solutions when the need should arise). They also aren't the ones doing most of the growing.
As I see it, even if we turn out to occasionally do the Easter Island thing, most of the subsequent harm is going to fall on those who mismanage their resources the most and who grew the most. That's what used to be called the Third World.
People like Al Gore try to guilt trip the developed world into doing foolish things. But that's not where the problems truly lie. My take is that it would be better to do nothing than to set up expensive resource and pollution regulating mechanisms in the absence of credible need.
For example, markets have natural and very effective mechanisms for regulating the consumption of finite resources. As a resource grows more scarce, the supply of it declines and the price increases. That naturally reduces demand for that resource. So in this case, doing nothing aside from buying resources on a market automatically introduces a regulating mechanism into resource consumption.
Not yet it hasn't happened to the US, but the symptoms are there.
Of course they are. Such things as using resources more efficiently or going after resources that were harder to get before. Before comparing current human civilization to past ones, keep in mind that there are unique differences to our civilization now.
It's great that you know about Easter Island and the Anasazis. But there are flaws in those analogies. They couldn't fluidly move from one place to another. They didn't have global extent.
They couldn't develop new technologies to get around their dependency on certain critical resources or adapt to changes in their world. They didn't have a huge, extremely rapid disaster warning and response system.
This is the point: you can argue about climate and incomplete data, yada, yada, but climate is just one thing that can go wrong.
So what? Just because you're aware, doesn't mean that you aren't part of the problem. Doing stupid stuff just because climate changes or resources are finite is no better than doing stupid stuff because the Moon is made of green cheese. They are just as much a non sequitur.
I find observations about "finite resources" are typically followed by poorly thought out proposals to create artificial scarcity (because making something even more scarce or requiring even more finite resources to obtain is a great resource management technique). For example, your story about California water issues is an example. They made water artificially cheap for urban areas and now they're paying the price. Observations about "climate change" are a prelude to proposals for huge societal sacrifices for the illusion of maintaining a particular arbitrary climate. California again is a great example of this with near unique fuel blends required in the state which means that people pay a premium for these blends. They could have shaved some cost off and still maintain whatever ecological goals they had just by requiring blends that are used commonly elsewhere in the US.
Thrashing about from imaginary dangers also obscures the more realistic dangers. For example, you'll see a lot more talk in the media about the loss of arable land from AGW even though deforestation and bad farming practices are more dangerous in this regard.
If that were the case, they would be championing a balanced budget through higher and more progressive personal income and capital gains taxes while reducing corporate taxes and nationalizing healthcare.
Eh, I see that as having at least a moderately negative effect on the US economy. What's the case for paying more taxes or having a more progressive income tax when a lot of the concentrating of wealth is due to how those taxes get spent?
And nationalizing healthcare US-style is likely to be an epic fail, based on what's gone before.
Republican tax policies have been shown scientifically to be quite harmful to economies
It's possible to show scientifically all sorts of things. The most notorious examples are scientifically showing that smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Uh, 2-11% increase in the top end. Pretty simple mathematics
You do realize that we can get that sort of increase by chance from the small number of such storms. And what's with that huge uncertainty in the increase of number of storms? With that much range, 0% is pretty darn close.
And if global warming doesn't stop, then yes we will have 700 MPH hurricanes.
Well, why don't we have 700 MPH hurricanes now? Because global warming has stopped far short of that state for the entirety of Earth's history. It's a pretty easy to satisfy "if".
his central message is that humanity changing the climate in ways that will have serious negative implications for ourselves. That is not a message that is easy to dispute.
It's not easy to support either. It's not easy to deduce anything about climate because of how weak and incomplete our measurements of it are.
The point is that if you over-use your resources really bad things begin to happen. This has happened many times in the past without fossil fuels. Examples include: Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Sumerians.
But it didn't happen in the US which has a history of serially overusing resources.
When you're in the middle of nowhere, you aren't covered by anyone's 911 service. If the dispatcher didn't know about Burning Man, they might call out search & rescue I guess.
First of all, I don't know anywhere in North America where you aren't covered by some sort of government agency that provides emergency services.
I actually did the totally brilliant move of rolling a pickup truck on a dirt road about 20 miles away from where Burning Man is held (but at a different time of the year) and broke my arm in two places including a compound fracture.
We were about 10 miles away from cell phone coverage. We had one of those emergency satellite-based emergency things which we activated and I hitched a ride on my boss's rental SUV. When we got within range, we were able to make that 911 call. Shortly, thereafter I got to chat with a friendly deputy sheriff about the accident and picked up by volunteer first responders (they aren't licensed paramedics) traveling by ambulance. About 20 miles later, we switched to an ambulance which drove the rest of the 120 or so miles to Reno.
So emergency services may be somewhat problematic, but I don't think it'd be too hard to work something out for a week long thing. I seem to recall that the event organizers have organized some degree of basic infrastructure (for example, they have clean up crews that work for a few weeks after the event to effectively scrub the lake floor clean and there's some rudimentary zoning in the camp).
That's ten times what you get with Earth based solar cells that don't need a propulsion system (with propellant), transmitter, heat management and their own support structure.
And which both have to support their own weight against Earth gravity and don't experience a serious cost versus mass trade off.
Space based solar power will only ever be useful for applications where you really can't have a ground based power plant, and that excludes all civilian applications.
The obvious rebuttal is disaster relief. Since all civilian applications aren't excluded, your argument needs work.
Do you have any idea of the sheer amount of prototypes that have been built in the last century that went nowhere? What surprises me are people like you who seem to have no critical thinking skills whatsoever.
OTOH, I'm not surprised by your lack of critical thinking skills. I merely stated something which is pretty obvious. A prototype is almost never as good as a polished product.
Now we could continue to debate the quality of my critical thinking skills or we could do something productive. I leave it up to you.
Suppose instead you get 100 watts peak per kg including those supplemental systems and can direct that power at one of a number of ground stations (with a preference for those that are experiencing high load). Then your 1 kg of payload consumes a few hundred dollars of propellant in exchange for about $900 dollars of electricity. It's not going to work with current launch systems, but it might with what we have in a few decades.
It's worth noting also that such a system is basically a fancy solar sail. That gives us both considerable maneuvering capability and some degree of natural heat management.
More like 15-25%. Same goes for cell lifetime which also clobbers Earth-side solar cells too.
> the fractional increase in cost of using high-tech panels is smaller
That is the most bizarre argument I've heard in a while.
It may be bizarre, but it is a mostly correct observation. The cost of putting stuff in orbit is currently at best around $4k per kg. SpaceX might drop that down as low as $2k per kg. And if reusable space vehicles can bring access to space down to the level of modern airlines (that is, roughly three times the cost of propellant), then you can get the cost down to about $100 to $300 per kg. So there is a weight advantage to using more efficient solar cells which can translate into significant savings.
Against that, you have to consider that such solar cells will probably be more susceptible to degradation from space-based radiation sources.
The place where we can expect improvement is in the transmitter. That's got a lot of tricky parts that need to be quite durable. The antenna is already pretty good, and there probably isn't too much improvement possible...not if you want efficient reception.
It's worth noting that if the system delivers less than about 100 W per sq meter, then it's probably not competitive with ground-based solar power (except in unusual situations such such as being near the poles or for disaster relief). At 100 W per sq meter and 40 sq kilometers, that's 40 MW of power.
For disaster relief, you're not delivering 40 MW of power and hence don't need anything like that much antenna area. At 100 W per sq meter and a 100 meter by 25 meter antenna, you're looking at roughly 250kW of generation capacity which is reasonable for the needs of a large installation.
Also, nice mixing of units, can I get this in LoC or hogsheads?
As an aside, can you, off the top of your head name something that is 40 square kilometers in area? Now, can you name something that is a football field (no matter the flavor of football you happen to relate more to) in size? Now consider that a lot of places throughout the world have football fields. That makes football fields as a unit of area quite relevant to this particular problem.
The energy needed to put solar cells into orbit is not recouped over their lifetime outside the protecting atmosphere.
It doesn't take that much energy. I think it's more to make them in the first place. Well, maybe I'll run some numbers to see what the relative costs are.
The technology will improve. It surprises me how people can live any time in the last century and not get that a prototype is going to be a bit clunkier than the final products? A 40 square km antenna may be impractical even for a prototype, but a football field-sized ground antenna wouldn't be.
Median global income has grown in the last 60 years. Standards of living have improved globally over that time as well.
The move to the cities in industrial revolutionary Britain was little to do with prospects, and a lot to do with changed countryside management. But even those who moved, found that they were mostly chasing an impossible dream, unless they were the very first to get in on the game.
Or they then moved to the US where things were considerably better. And of course, England is doing a lot better now than it was then. So something changed over that time.
My father was born during the Spanish civil war. In cooperation with American firms, the country was fed exactly the same bull that Chinese people are being fed now.
Except that economically, the Chinese are vastly better off than they were in the 70s.
Is it true that we enjoy a labour aristocracy in the West?
I wouldn't refer to developed world workers in that inane way. I'd just say that they have an unjustified sense of entitlement (which is what I actually have said in the past).That Chinese worker works hard too and he or she earns about a quarter to a sixth what the developed world worker currently does. If you want to keep earning that premium, you need to have something special to offer. Currently, that special thing is nearness to the wealthiest markets on Earth. But what happens when China catches up? Then you're no longer near the the wealthiest markets on Earth. And you've been hamstringing your society for the however many decades it takes China to do that.
Eliminate the trade conditions which seduce the East and Africa into being crippled exporters, and stop propping up their corrupt governments, and they'd start to see the independent flourishing that European nations began to experience last century.
Yea, right. Discard the best parts of their economies and they'll magically start "independently flourishing". They don't start the societies or infrastructure to magically create independently flourishing countries.
And after all, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea did that and look how badly they turned out. The US did that in the 19th century and that was a total fail too.
It's interesting how self-serving your incredibly bad advice is.
Next time, maybe haul your fat ass on your legs, rather than relying on a big oil-burner while increasing backcountry erosion, and you might get to where you want to go.
At 20MPH in rough road conditions? Not ever going to happen even if you're Iron Man-level fit though I suppose you might be able to do it on a mountain bike, but that's going to be a different sort of kidney busting.
And what happens if he's trying to haul half a ton of stuff? There are other reasons to having a vehicle than merely tooling down the block because you're lazy.
I think people who think 'we just need to fix the system' are totally deluded. People have been saying that since the founding of the USA.
And they've been right in the past. A lot of things have been fixed and work pretty well now.
The entire US style system is corrupt but most are simply not intelligent enough, nor educated enough to recognize how corrupt the modern western world has become.
Corrupt compared to what? The world has always been rotten to the core. And compared to other governments and societies, the US is a bit better than the median of the pack.
Add up all the wars america has been involved in, over the last 60 years
You do realize that's a pretty small number of wars for a global power? Especially one that was in a undeclared state of war with another global power (the USSR) for most of that period?
What's special about countries like the US isn't the scale of the corruption, but the potential for harm. You don't have to worry about Belgium or Finland trying to create a massive empire or nuking the world. I still see room for the usual fixes in here.
Maybe. But I have to agree with the other poster. This gives the public hooks in which to both understand what is going on and care.
It's like someone who admits to adultery to fake an alibi for a murder
How strong was that case for murder? Unless you can get more info at this time, getting the NSA on the equivalent of adultery may be among the better choices possible. Keep in mind that they haven't solved the problem of security leaks. If they plea for adultery now, they still have to worry about those bodies getting revealed later no matter how carefully they vet their people.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, those are obvious differences, but it's hubris to think that we're immune to serious collapse just because our civilisation is more advanced and extensive. I wouldn't call comparisons to past past civilisations "analogies", I'd call these a "warning." These are not an apples and oranges comparison: these are all apples, they're just different flavours.
My point is not that there aren't such dangers, but that the people speaking of such dangers tend to not understand how things work and propose solutions that make our more serious problems worse. For example, someone seriously proposed this in a recent argument over what was creating and distributing wealth in our world today:
Eliminate the trade conditions which seduce the East and Africa into being crippled exporters, and stop propping up their corrupt governments, and they'd start to see the independent flourishing that European nations began to experience last century.
Stop global trade, the primary engine of wealth distribution (and a considerable tool of wealth creation as well) in the world today and somehow all those poor countries would do better.
As I see it, the poster really wanted to protect their developed world economy from labor competition by the rest of the world and just rationalized this fantasy out of thin air. It was what they wanted, therefore it must be good for the rest of the world. I imagine if unpopular rich people had wanted it instead, then it would be automatically bad.
Another classic example is the ongoing decades-old drive to conserve cheap, plentiful electricity. All sorts of bad laws have been passed to control the non-problem of people leaving their lights on or using a less energy efficient clothes washing machine.
Technology allows you stretch your resources (e.g. modern farming) but if you aren't mindful of what you're doing, things can stretch to breaking point. Again, modern farming is a good case in point--we seem to be hitting the limits of what we can produce per acre. Perhaps proposals for for dealing with finite resources are often poorly though through--I don't know--but that doesn't mean that resources aren't finite and that you shouldn't consider what to do about that. Being bigger just means you risk falling harder.
Well, who's doing that? For all the talk of finite resources and using them up, the developed world has come up with some pretty good solutions that will work for a while (far more than long enough to come up with better solutions when the need should arise). They also aren't the ones doing most of the growing.
As I see it, even if we turn out to occasionally do the Easter Island thing, most of the subsequent harm is going to fall on those who mismanage their resources the most and who grew the most. That's what used to be called the Third World.
People like Al Gore try to guilt trip the developed world into doing foolish things. But that's not where the problems truly lie. My take is that it would be better to do nothing than to set up expensive resource and pollution regulating mechanisms in the absence of credible need.
For example, markets have natural and very effective mechanisms for regulating the consumption of finite resources. As a resource grows more scarce, the supply of it declines and the price increases. That naturally reduces demand for that resource. So in this case, doing nothing aside from buying resources on a market automatically introduces a regulating mechanism into resource consumption.
Not yet it hasn't happened to the US, but the symptoms are there.
Of course they are. Such things as using resources more efficiently or going after resources that were harder to get before. Before comparing current human civilization to past ones, keep in mind that there are unique differences to our civilization now.
It's great that you know about Easter Island and the Anasazis. But there are flaws in those analogies. They couldn't fluidly move from one place to another. They didn't have global extent.
They couldn't develop new technologies to get around their dependency on certain critical resources or adapt to changes in their world. They didn't have a huge, extremely rapid disaster warning and response system.
This is the point: you can argue about climate and incomplete data, yada, yada, but climate is just one thing that can go wrong.
So what? Just because you're aware, doesn't mean that you aren't part of the problem. Doing stupid stuff just because climate changes or resources are finite is no better than doing stupid stuff because the Moon is made of green cheese. They are just as much a non sequitur.
I find observations about "finite resources" are typically followed by poorly thought out proposals to create artificial scarcity (because making something even more scarce or requiring even more finite resources to obtain is a great resource management technique). For example, your story about California water issues is an example. They made water artificially cheap for urban areas and now they're paying the price. Observations about "climate change" are a prelude to proposals for huge societal sacrifices for the illusion of maintaining a particular arbitrary climate. California again is a great example of this with near unique fuel blends required in the state which means that people pay a premium for these blends. They could have shaved some cost off and still maintain whatever ecological goals they had just by requiring blends that are used commonly elsewhere in the US.
Thrashing about from imaginary dangers also obscures the more realistic dangers. For example, you'll see a lot more talk in the media about the loss of arable land from AGW even though deforestation and bad farming practices are more dangerous in this regard.
If that were the case, they would be championing a balanced budget through higher and more progressive personal income and capital gains taxes while reducing corporate taxes and nationalizing healthcare.
Eh, I see that as having at least a moderately negative effect on the US economy. What's the case for paying more taxes or having a more progressive income tax when a lot of the concentrating of wealth is due to how those taxes get spent?
And nationalizing healthcare US-style is likely to be an epic fail, based on what's gone before.
Republican tax policies have been shown scientifically to be quite harmful to economies
It's possible to show scientifically all sorts of things. The most notorious examples are scientifically showing that smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Uh, 2-11% increase in the top end. Pretty simple mathematics
You do realize that we can get that sort of increase by chance from the small number of such storms. And what's with that huge uncertainty in the increase of number of storms? With that much range, 0% is pretty darn close.
And if global warming doesn't stop, then yes we will have 700 MPH hurricanes.
Well, why don't we have 700 MPH hurricanes now? Because global warming has stopped far short of that state for the entirety of Earth's history. It's a pretty easy to satisfy "if".
his central message is that humanity changing the climate in ways that will have serious negative implications for ourselves. That is not a message that is easy to dispute.
It's not easy to support either. It's not easy to deduce anything about climate because of how weak and incomplete our measurements of it are.
The point is that if you over-use your resources really bad things begin to happen. This has happened many times in the past without fossil fuels. Examples include: Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Sumerians.
But it didn't happen in the US which has a history of serially overusing resources.
I'm more worried about what happens to this era of people. History is a notoriously feeble judge.
but what is lobbying exactly if not a nice term for legalized corruption
It's exercise of the First Amendment right to petition government for redress of grievances.
When you're in the middle of nowhere, you aren't covered by anyone's 911 service. If the dispatcher didn't know about Burning Man, they might call out search & rescue I guess.
First of all, I don't know anywhere in North America where you aren't covered by some sort of government agency that provides emergency services.
I actually did the totally brilliant move of rolling a pickup truck on a dirt road about 20 miles away from where Burning Man is held (but at a different time of the year) and broke my arm in two places including a compound fracture.
We were about 10 miles away from cell phone coverage. We had one of those emergency satellite-based emergency things which we activated and I hitched a ride on my boss's rental SUV. When we got within range, we were able to make that 911 call. Shortly, thereafter I got to chat with a friendly deputy sheriff about the accident and picked up by volunteer first responders (they aren't licensed paramedics) traveling by ambulance. About 20 miles later, we switched to an ambulance which drove the rest of the 120 or so miles to Reno.
So emergency services may be somewhat problematic, but I don't think it'd be too hard to work something out for a week long thing. I seem to recall that the event organizers have organized some degree of basic infrastructure (for example, they have clean up crews that work for a few weeks after the event to effectively scrub the lake floor clean and there's some rudimentary zoning in the camp).
That's ten times what you get with Earth based solar cells that don't need a propulsion system (with propellant), transmitter, heat management and their own support structure.
And which both have to support their own weight against Earth gravity and don't experience a serious cost versus mass trade off.
Space based solar power will only ever be useful for applications where you really can't have a ground based power plant, and that excludes all civilian applications.
The obvious rebuttal is disaster relief. Since all civilian applications aren't excluded, your argument needs work.
Do you have any idea of the sheer amount of prototypes that have been built in the last century that went nowhere? What surprises me are people like you who seem to have no critical thinking skills whatsoever.
OTOH, I'm not surprised by your lack of critical thinking skills. I merely stated something which is pretty obvious. A prototype is almost never as good as a polished product.
Now we could continue to debate the quality of my critical thinking skills or we could do something productive. I leave it up to you.
Suppose you get 10Wp per kg
Suppose instead you get 100 watts peak per kg including those supplemental systems and can direct that power at one of a number of ground stations (with a preference for those that are experiencing high load). Then your 1 kg of payload consumes a few hundred dollars of propellant in exchange for about $900 dollars of electricity. It's not going to work with current launch systems, but it might with what we have in a few decades.
It's worth noting also that such a system is basically a fancy solar sail. That gives us both considerable maneuvering capability and some degree of natural heat management.
And transmission losses take 1/2 of that.
More like 15-25%. Same goes for cell lifetime which also clobbers Earth-side solar cells too.
> the fractional increase in cost of using high-tech panels is smaller
That is the most bizarre argument I've heard in a while.
It may be bizarre, but it is a mostly correct observation. The cost of putting stuff in orbit is currently at best around $4k per kg. SpaceX might drop that down as low as $2k per kg. And if reusable space vehicles can bring access to space down to the level of modern airlines (that is, roughly three times the cost of propellant), then you can get the cost down to about $100 to $300 per kg. So there is a weight advantage to using more efficient solar cells which can translate into significant savings.
Against that, you have to consider that such solar cells will probably be more susceptible to degradation from space-based radiation sources.
The place where we can expect improvement is in the transmitter. That's got a lot of tricky parts that need to be quite durable. The antenna is already pretty good, and there probably isn't too much improvement possible...not if you want efficient reception.
It's worth noting that if the system delivers less than about 100 W per sq meter, then it's probably not competitive with ground-based solar power (except in unusual situations such such as being near the poles or for disaster relief). At 100 W per sq meter and 40 sq kilometers, that's 40 MW of power.
For disaster relief, you're not delivering 40 MW of power and hence don't need anything like that much antenna area. At 100 W per sq meter and a 100 meter by 25 meter antenna, you're looking at roughly 250kW of generation capacity which is reasonable for the needs of a large installation.
Also, nice mixing of units, can I get this in LoC or hogsheads?
As an aside, can you, off the top of your head name something that is 40 square kilometers in area? Now, can you name something that is a football field (no matter the flavor of football you happen to relate more to) in size? Now consider that a lot of places throughout the world have football fields. That makes football fields as a unit of area quite relevant to this particular problem.
The problem there is that hitting a football field sized antenna is harder than hitting one that cover 30 square kilometers.
Ok, so it's harder. The point of a prototype also is to explore and help make easier what is hard about doing something which you haven't done before.
The energy needed to put solar cells into orbit is not recouped over their lifetime outside the protecting atmosphere.
It doesn't take that much energy. I think it's more to make them in the first place. Well, maybe I'll run some numbers to see what the relative costs are.
The technology will improve. It surprises me how people can live any time in the last century and not get that a prototype is going to be a bit clunkier than the final products? A 40 square km antenna may be impractical even for a prototype, but a football field-sized ground antenna wouldn't be.
And yet it doesn't.
Median global income has grown in the last 60 years. Standards of living have improved globally over that time as well.
The move to the cities in industrial revolutionary Britain was little to do with prospects, and a lot to do with changed countryside management. But even those who moved, found that they were mostly chasing an impossible dream, unless they were the very first to get in on the game.
Or they then moved to the US where things were considerably better. And of course, England is doing a lot better now than it was then. So something changed over that time.
My father was born during the Spanish civil war. In cooperation with American firms, the country was fed exactly the same bull that Chinese people are being fed now.
Except that economically, the Chinese are vastly better off than they were in the 70s.
Is it true that we enjoy a labour aristocracy in the West?
I wouldn't refer to developed world workers in that inane way. I'd just say that they have an unjustified sense of entitlement (which is what I actually have said in the past) .That Chinese worker works hard too and he or she earns about a quarter to a sixth what the developed world worker currently does. If you want to keep earning that premium, you need to have something special to offer. Currently, that special thing is nearness to the wealthiest markets on Earth. But what happens when China catches up? Then you're no longer near the the wealthiest markets on Earth. And you've been hamstringing your society for the however many decades it takes China to do that.
Eliminate the trade conditions which seduce the East and Africa into being crippled exporters, and stop propping up their corrupt governments, and they'd start to see the independent flourishing that European nations began to experience last century.
Yea, right. Discard the best parts of their economies and they'll magically start "independently flourishing". They don't start the societies or infrastructure to magically create independently flourishing countries.
And after all, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea did that and look how badly they turned out. The US did that in the 19th century and that was a total fail too.
It's interesting how self-serving your incredibly bad advice is.
You were talking about using your 4x4 to go to places you "wanted to see". That's not a survival use of your 4x4.
I didn't realize those were survival use only. You learn something new on Slashdot every day.
So you don't have a reason for thinking that. How come I'm not surprised?
Those things sound like they'll burn explosively on their own without the need for adding anything to get it started.
Next time, maybe haul your fat ass on your legs, rather than relying on a big oil-burner while increasing backcountry erosion, and you might get to where you want to go.
At 20MPH in rough road conditions? Not ever going to happen even if you're Iron Man-level fit though I suppose you might be able to do it on a mountain bike, but that's going to be a different sort of kidney busting.
And what happens if he's trying to haul half a ton of stuff? There are other reasons to having a vehicle than merely tooling down the block because you're lazy.
I think people who think 'we just need to fix the system' are totally deluded. People have been saying that since the founding of the USA.
And they've been right in the past. A lot of things have been fixed and work pretty well now.
The entire US style system is corrupt but most are simply not intelligent enough, nor educated enough to recognize how corrupt the modern western world has become.
Corrupt compared to what? The world has always been rotten to the core. And compared to other governments and societies, the US is a bit better than the median of the pack.
Add up all the wars america has been involved in, over the last 60 years
You do realize that's a pretty small number of wars for a global power? Especially one that was in a undeclared state of war with another global power (the USSR) for most of that period?
What's special about countries like the US isn't the scale of the corruption, but the potential for harm. You don't have to worry about Belgium or Finland trying to create a massive empire or nuking the world. I still see room for the usual fixes in here.
It's like someone who admits to adultery to fake an alibi for a murder
How strong was that case for murder? Unless you can get more info at this time, getting the NSA on the equivalent of adultery may be among the better choices possible. Keep in mind that they haven't solved the problem of security leaks. If they plea for adultery now, they still have to worry about those bodies getting revealed later no matter how carefully they vet their people.