Sigh, you're confused. I'm not suggesting writing a new Constitution... not at all! I'm talking about amending the Constitution.
Amending the Constitution with a constitutional convention. I am not confused here. You just aren't considering what a constitutional convention is. It's not a little amendment like the usual process, but a complete rewrite just like the original drafting of the US Constitution was. Sure, you might end up with a spelling correction on paragraph 5 of article 8. Or you could end up with a little more than that.
The states also had input into the usual process via the Senate and approval of usual amendments via the state legislatures. That's been partly broken with the 17th Amendment, but it was also the power that the states were intended to have with respect to amending the Constitution.
Go ahead & disclose it, you're corporations, you're above the law. The govt can't tell you what to do.
Nothing will happen, I promise you. Union carbide killed 8000 people and.... nothing. nada. zip. Same goes for the Exxon Valdez & BP.
Isn't this very timidity firm evidence that Google and company aren't as powerful as you claim? Here we have a government agency costing US businesses a lot of money and what do they do? Write letters. It doesn't get any clearer than that who's in charge. It's not Google.
So the modification of millions of cars will lead to a lot of small electrical problems due to fault installation.
The resulting economic activity would be scored a win by a lot of politicians and bureaucrats. They can't force you to do something productive, but they have no trouble forcing you to chase your tail.
The statement I was responding is you claiming people are "forced". I'm simply pointing they aren't forced because they can just not live there. You know, like how if a private company makes a product you don't like, you don't have to buy it. You aren't "forced" to buy it.
You don't have to live there in order to be forced to interact with the town in question. For example, Brasilia has been used as an example of such a planned town. Because it is also the center of government for Brazil, that means a lot of people are forced to interact with its planning and design even though they don't live there (or they worked for a government agency which forced them to move there in order to keep their job).
Second, the meaning of "force" as I use it, is quite legitimate. You can say that you were "forced" to stand in line for the movie. Nobody will mistakenly assume you meant that you were dragged off the street by armed goons and frogmarched to the theater.
But I guess my point here is that we have people in this thread bragging about destroying the functionality of towns in the face of known public demand for that functionality and then asserting that the destruction was "desirable". It doesn't make sense. Then these bad ideas get applied at a larger scale. Speaking of participation-dependent force at the national or global level is a whole different ball game than it is for a small town.
It was intended to be used regularly, which was possible when only 13 states existed.
I see no evidence for that.I would instead argue that because the hurdle to a constitutional convention is very large, then it is intended to be very infrequent and used only as a last resort. And in addition, the need just isn't there. The Constitution works well.
And that might even work for a few cycles until someone got enough power and gamed the system to pass their amended version and end this attempt at a representative democracy.
This is exactly what Constitutional Conventions were intended to prevent, the ability for too much power to form in the hands of the federal government to the point that democracy becomes ineffective.
Nah, it'd just be a game of Russian roulette that would end with the sort of failure I described. The process is too unstable for the purpose.
There's no reason for a complete rewrite of the underlying constitution every few years (unless you're trying to destroy the democracy in question). But that's what you are inviting with such a scheme. And eventually someone would successfully rewrite that constitution to end the cycle in their favor. Something like how Mohammad decreed that there would be no prophets after him.
"Consumption" is just the name for one end of a pipe. The other end is the productive activity that is enabled by that consumption.
Reducing consumption (more popularly called cut spending and austerity) is one of the highest priorities we have according to many different groups.
But that's not one of the highest priorities of society as a whole. Plus, the general problem with that sort of consumption is that someone created public goods (usually involving a transfer of wealth from parts of society in the process) and then exploited the hell out of them. It's a net drag on society to have that sort of thing go on.
The main check given to the states is the ability to amend the Constitution through a convention. Since this hasn't happened since the Constitution was ratified, it's pretty clear that this mechanism is ineffective.
What's the reasoning for this? Because something really dramatic hasn't been done, it's ineffective? A Constitutional convention is the equivalent of large scale nuclear warfare for US politics. It'll be invoked only when something seriously wrong happens.
I would like it if such a convention were to come together regularly, every few years or more often.)
And that might even work for a few cycles until someone got enough power and gamed the system to pass their amended version and end this attempt at a representative democracy.
Even if that were true, good governments don't stay good. This is also the sort of power that can make a government go bad. It gives them too much power over the citizenry.
How about finding a way to eliminate our dependence on crude oil?
We already have plenty of ways to do that. They just aren't economical at the moment.
The West would be so much stronger, if it weren't us having to pay jizya to those crude savages in the Middle East.
We're paying for stuff that runs our society. So it's not a "jizya", but a legit payment for goods rendered. And those "savages" will either use the wealth to build modern societies or they'll be driving camels in a few generations. That problem is its own solution.
At present our economy is based solely on the creation of infinite products out of finite resources
Premise is wrong. The economy is about the same thing that economies are about - distributing scarce resources to make things and services of value which are themselves scarce. If it were somehow true, then why would producing infinite products of value out of finite base materials be somehow "stupid" rather than really useful? Last I checked, infinite was bigger than finite so that looks to me to be stretching the usefulness of those finite resources quite a bit.
Simply put our economy is incompatible with the environment and this cannot be fixed unless our economic system is changed, which is highly unlikely to happen.
There are other choices such as accepting some degree of harm to the environment, which don't require this supposed "fix".
If every person on Earth gave a dime each to develop tech that would allow for highly efficient and cost effective recycling methods it would have been done within a year and we wouldn't even have this conversation.
Right. I bet at least two orders of magnitude more has been burned on recycling technologies than the mere $700 million you propose here. And that huge spending resulted in the "hardly efficient" recycling methods you complain about. Now, if this recycling demonstration were done in Earth orbit, I'd be willing to pony up. But otherwise, it just isn't that useful compared to the other things I could be doing with my dime or my ten dollar bill.
The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.
And it has an obvious problem. You can only eliminate the pollution by eliminating the productive activity that lead to the pollution. That's why no one considers it. We have higher priorities than stop polluting the planet.
Niven's "A World Out of Time" proposes a mechanism for a stable totalitarian government based on the idea of a "hydraulic empire". The idea is that if a society is controlled by access to a vital scarce resource (such as water in ancient Egypt, supposedly) and has no external threats, then it can last a long time. In Niven's story, such a government failed only when they goof badly while piloting the Earth to Saturn. The society in question wasn't challenged prior to that point and collapsed quickly as a result (with most of the Earth becoming uninhabitable as a result).
if the U.S. armed forces having much better weaponry is of no concern because a lot of the soldiers will defect to the rebellion, then what do the rebels need their guns for, exactly
As the other replier noted, who are they going to defect to? In addition to the military power of an armed populace, you also end up with a populace educated about basic military weapons. Civilians have something to offer rather than just being a passive prize to be fought over.
They can just raid the armories with the help of the defectors (see Libya for a recent example of how this works).
Being armed in the first place greatly expedites this particular process.
Indeed. Now do you have something to say about that? We can impose arbitrary constraints and challenges on the residents of a town. You imply as much (as long as it doesn't suck so much that most people leave). So what is the reason for doing so?
You're like some AGW alarmist suggesting all the CO2 trapped in the earth would somehow be released.
No. Because they often don't realize that it is absurd to make such a suggestion.
Somewhere where many people cycle rather than drive has
- less air pollution
- less congestion (faster journeys for those that do need to drive, buses, etc)
- lower rates of motor vehicle injury/death
- less expenditure on roads (fewer needed, slower to wear out)
- more independence for children (and others unable to drive)
- healthier people (lower cost, whoever is paying, and more productive)
- lower fuel consumption (money and/or CO2, whichever you prefer)
- less noise
So? You could make that above list twice as long and it still would remain that people prefer cars when they can have them and use them. I don't mind that there are towns forcing people to use bikes, public transportation, or whatever. But I gather these sorts of places are heralded as the future, not eclectic curiosities. That just doesn't make sense.
At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
There are other ways humans can change that. For example, flood control made flooding events more extreme by not giving the water a place to go. Forest fires were made more extreme by many decades of aggressive wildfire fighting.
I think the point here is that you flip a fair coin 1000 times. Let's say it's just usual mix of heads and tails. That sequence of events, despite being unremarkable, has only a probability of 0.5^1000 of occurring (roughly on the order of 1 in a googol cubed chance). I'd be foolish to make a big deal of that low probability. Even though a given set of flips is exceedingly rare, there are 2^1000 such possible combinations of 1000 flips.
Saying that the particular trajectory of Sandy is relatively infrequent tells us nothing about the overall frequency of hurricanes that do similar things or whether there is any change in the probabilities of such events happening.
Maybe not everywhere, but the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc would disagree, as well as plenty of towns elsewhere. (Also many poor countries.)
They'd also agree too. The population isn't some monolithic ideological bloc.
So...? I don't see how this means it's a desirable adaptation, or better than the alternatives.
You wrote:
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient, as is done in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.
In other words, when people had a choice, they chose cars. That indicates cars are a desirable adaptation in the absence of meddling to the people who actually make the choices.
I see a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of "desirable". Sure, I can meddle in the costs and benefits of choices, to make other choices more desirable. But what is the point of doing so? As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of warping transportation so that bicycles are more desirable is to make quirky towns. There's no real value to it.
Crystals/chemicals/etc don't really have many options to form 'differently'.
When you say 'differently', are you quoting someone? On Earth, we don't actually have this experience. There's a vast number of such chemicals and crystals formed under subtly different conditions and chemical composition. For gypsum, merely changing the quantity of water changes the mineral. We also can partly (not even fully) substitute other elements for calcium and sulfur to get new minerals.
For your premise, that all of those minerals formed via some process other than one that involves water, would require a huge coincidence that the rover could somehow find all of these minerals which happened to form without water even though all of our experience tells us is unlikely.
That's not my premise. We already know water exists on Mars. We see it directly in Mars's atmosphere. The polar caps show evidence of the presence of water ice. The previous poster asserted something stronger than merely the presence of water:
All three of those require not just water, but often standing pools of water.
and
As the parent said, there is ample evidence of water having been on mars. Lots of water.
Unlike Earth, there's been a very long time geologically to concentrate water in calcium sulfate, to create those perchlorates, and so on. We know the conditions are vastly different. I think it's a bit foolish to so confidently extrapolate from our limited experiences on Earth to that of Mars without acknowledging that we don't have supporting evidence for this sort of intuition.
Such undue certainty has been wrong in the past and it will be wrong in the future.
The intention is that bicycles are used for shorter journeys (to work, shops, school etc), for health, environment and economic reasons.
And the practice is that bicycles just aren't that useful to people.
Wide, high-speed roads
You mention one adaptation to humans right there. "Wide". And choosing high-speed roads instead of say, high speed bicycle lanes or rail lines, is another adaptation.
No, because that CO2 is locked up in rock and if we manage to partly boil the oceans, we'll create a very efficient process for transferring heat to space while simultaneously getting rid of the cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh, you're confused. I'm not suggesting writing a new Constitution... not at all! I'm talking about amending the Constitution.
Amending the Constitution with a constitutional convention. I am not confused here. You just aren't considering what a constitutional convention is. It's not a little amendment like the usual process, but a complete rewrite just like the original drafting of the US Constitution was. Sure, you might end up with a spelling correction on paragraph 5 of article 8. Or you could end up with a little more than that.
The states also had input into the usual process via the Senate and approval of usual amendments via the state legislatures. That's been partly broken with the 17th Amendment, but it was also the power that the states were intended to have with respect to amending the Constitution.
Those apparently would be criminal acts. Jail time is also on the menu.
Go ahead & disclose it, you're corporations, you're above the law. The govt can't tell you what to do.
Nothing will happen, I promise you. Union carbide killed 8000 people and.... nothing. nada. zip. Same goes for the Exxon Valdez & BP.
Isn't this very timidity firm evidence that Google and company aren't as powerful as you claim? Here we have a government agency costing US businesses a lot of money and what do they do? Write letters. It doesn't get any clearer than that who's in charge. It's not Google.
Any deadly aircraft operating on public roads should certainly be tracked.
My F-117 is a stealth aircraft for a reason.
So the modification of millions of cars will lead to a lot of small electrical problems due to fault installation.
The resulting economic activity would be scored a win by a lot of politicians and bureaucrats. They can't force you to do something productive, but they have no trouble forcing you to chase your tail.
I agree and I moved out. California didn't need me and I sure didn't need the abuse that I would get from California.
The statement I was responding is you claiming people are "forced". I'm simply pointing they aren't forced because they can just not live there. You know, like how if a private company makes a product you don't like, you don't have to buy it. You aren't "forced" to buy it.
You don't have to live there in order to be forced to interact with the town in question. For example, Brasilia has been used as an example of such a planned town. Because it is also the center of government for Brazil, that means a lot of people are forced to interact with its planning and design even though they don't live there (or they worked for a government agency which forced them to move there in order to keep their job).
Second, the meaning of "force" as I use it, is quite legitimate. You can say that you were "forced" to stand in line for the movie. Nobody will mistakenly assume you meant that you were dragged off the street by armed goons and frogmarched to the theater.
But I guess my point here is that we have people in this thread bragging about destroying the functionality of towns in the face of known public demand for that functionality and then asserting that the destruction was "desirable". It doesn't make sense. Then these bad ideas get applied at a larger scale. Speaking of participation-dependent force at the national or global level is a whole different ball game than it is for a small town.
It was intended to be used regularly, which was possible when only 13 states existed.
I see no evidence for that.I would instead argue that because the hurdle to a constitutional convention is very large, then it is intended to be very infrequent and used only as a last resort. And in addition, the need just isn't there. The Constitution works well.
And that might even work for a few cycles until someone got enough power and gamed the system to pass their amended version and end this attempt at a representative democracy.
This is exactly what Constitutional Conventions were intended to prevent, the ability for too much power to form in the hands of the federal government to the point that democracy becomes ineffective.
Nah, it'd just be a game of Russian roulette that would end with the sort of failure I described. The process is too unstable for the purpose.
There's no reason for a complete rewrite of the underlying constitution every few years (unless you're trying to destroy the democracy in question). But that's what you are inviting with such a scheme. And eventually someone would successfully rewrite that constitution to end the cycle in their favor. Something like how Mohammad decreed that there would be no prophets after him.
Reducing consumption (more popularly called cut spending and austerity) is one of the highest priorities we have according to many different groups.
But that's not one of the highest priorities of society as a whole. Plus, the general problem with that sort of consumption is that someone created public goods (usually involving a transfer of wealth from parts of society in the process) and then exploited the hell out of them. It's a net drag on society to have that sort of thing go on.
The main check given to the states is the ability to amend the Constitution through a convention. Since this hasn't happened since the Constitution was ratified, it's pretty clear that this mechanism is ineffective.
What's the reasoning for this? Because something really dramatic hasn't been done, it's ineffective? A Constitutional convention is the equivalent of large scale nuclear warfare for US politics. It'll be invoked only when something seriously wrong happens.
I would like it if such a convention were to come together regularly, every few years or more often.)
And that might even work for a few cycles until someone got enough power and gamed the system to pass their amended version and end this attempt at a representative democracy.
Good governments can handle this kind of power.
Even if that were true, good governments don't stay good. This is also the sort of power that can make a government go bad. It gives them too much power over the citizenry.
How about finding a way to eliminate our dependence on crude oil?
We already have plenty of ways to do that. They just aren't economical at the moment.
The West would be so much stronger, if it weren't us having to pay jizya to those crude savages in the Middle East.
We're paying for stuff that runs our society. So it's not a "jizya", but a legit payment for goods rendered. And those "savages" will either use the wealth to build modern societies or they'll be driving camels in a few generations. That problem is its own solution.
At present our economy is based solely on the creation of infinite products out of finite resources
Premise is wrong. The economy is about the same thing that economies are about - distributing scarce resources to make things and services of value which are themselves scarce. If it were somehow true, then why would producing infinite products of value out of finite base materials be somehow "stupid" rather than really useful? Last I checked, infinite was bigger than finite so that looks to me to be stretching the usefulness of those finite resources quite a bit.
Simply put our economy is incompatible with the environment and this cannot be fixed unless our economic system is changed, which is highly unlikely to happen.
There are other choices such as accepting some degree of harm to the environment, which don't require this supposed "fix".
If every person on Earth gave a dime each to develop tech that would allow for highly efficient and cost effective recycling methods it would have been done within a year and we wouldn't even have this conversation.
Right. I bet at least two orders of magnitude more has been burned on recycling technologies than the mere $700 million you propose here. And that huge spending resulted in the "hardly efficient" recycling methods you complain about. Now, if this recycling demonstration were done in Earth orbit, I'd be willing to pony up. But otherwise, it just isn't that useful compared to the other things I could be doing with my dime or my ten dollar bill.
The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.
And it has an obvious problem. You can only eliminate the pollution by eliminating the productive activity that lead to the pollution. That's why no one considers it. We have higher priorities than stop polluting the planet.
Niven's "A World Out of Time" proposes a mechanism for a stable totalitarian government based on the idea of a "hydraulic empire". The idea is that if a society is controlled by access to a vital scarce resource (such as water in ancient Egypt, supposedly) and has no external threats, then it can last a long time. In Niven's story, such a government failed only when they goof badly while piloting the Earth to Saturn. The society in question wasn't challenged prior to that point and collapsed quickly as a result (with most of the Earth becoming uninhabitable as a result).
if the U.S. armed forces having much better weaponry is of no concern because a lot of the soldiers will defect to the rebellion, then what do the rebels need their guns for, exactly
As the other replier noted, who are they going to defect to? In addition to the military power of an armed populace, you also end up with a populace educated about basic military weapons. Civilians have something to offer rather than just being a passive prize to be fought over.
They can just raid the armories with the help of the defectors (see Libya for a recent example of how this works).
Being armed in the first place greatly expedites this particular process.
Appealing to absurdity.
Indeed. Now do you have something to say about that? We can impose arbitrary constraints and challenges on the residents of a town. You imply as much (as long as it doesn't suck so much that most people leave). So what is the reason for doing so?
You're like some AGW alarmist suggesting all the CO2 trapped in the earth would somehow be released.
No. Because they often don't realize that it is absurd to make such a suggestion.
Somewhere where many people cycle rather than drive has
- less air pollution
- less congestion (faster journeys for those that do need to drive, buses, etc)
- lower rates of motor vehicle injury/death
- less expenditure on roads (fewer needed, slower to wear out)
- more independence for children (and others unable to drive)
- healthier people (lower cost, whoever is paying, and more productive)
- lower fuel consumption (money and/or CO2, whichever you prefer)
- less noise
So? You could make that above list twice as long and it still would remain that people prefer cars when they can have them and use them. I don't mind that there are towns forcing people to use bikes, public transportation, or whatever. But I gather these sorts of places are heralded as the future, not eclectic curiosities. That just doesn't make sense.
At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
There are other ways humans can change that. For example, flood control made flooding events more extreme by not giving the water a place to go. Forest fires were made more extreme by many decades of aggressive wildfire fighting.
I think the point here is that you flip a fair coin 1000 times. Let's say it's just usual mix of heads and tails. That sequence of events, despite being unremarkable, has only a probability of 0.5^1000 of occurring (roughly on the order of 1 in a googol cubed chance). I'd be foolish to make a big deal of that low probability. Even though a given set of flips is exceedingly rare, there are 2^1000 such possible combinations of 1000 flips.
Saying that the particular trajectory of Sandy is relatively infrequent tells us nothing about the overall frequency of hurricanes that do similar things or whether there is any change in the probabilities of such events happening.
So if someone built a city that could only be navigated by brachiation (traveling through trees), then you have no problem with that?
Maybe not everywhere, but the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc would disagree, as well as plenty of towns elsewhere. (Also many poor countries.)
They'd also agree too. The population isn't some monolithic ideological bloc.
So...? I don't see how this means it's a desirable adaptation, or better than the alternatives.
You wrote:
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient, as is done in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.
In other words, when people had a choice, they chose cars. That indicates cars are a desirable adaptation in the absence of meddling to the people who actually make the choices.
I see a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of "desirable". Sure, I can meddle in the costs and benefits of choices, to make other choices more desirable. But what is the point of doing so? As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of warping transportation so that bicycles are more desirable is to make quirky towns. There's no real value to it.
Crystals/chemicals/etc don't really have many options to form 'differently'.
When you say 'differently', are you quoting someone? On Earth, we don't actually have this experience. There's a vast number of such chemicals and crystals formed under subtly different conditions and chemical composition. For gypsum, merely changing the quantity of water changes the mineral. We also can partly (not even fully) substitute other elements for calcium and sulfur to get new minerals.
For your premise, that all of those minerals formed via some process other than one that involves water, would require a huge coincidence that the rover could somehow find all of these minerals which happened to form without water even though all of our experience tells us is unlikely.
That's not my premise. We already know water exists on Mars. We see it directly in Mars's atmosphere. The polar caps show evidence of the presence of water ice. The previous poster asserted something stronger than merely the presence of water:
All three of those require not just water, but often standing pools of water.
and
As the parent said, there is ample evidence of water having been on mars. Lots of water.
Unlike Earth, there's been a very long time geologically to concentrate water in calcium sulfate, to create those perchlorates, and so on. We know the conditions are vastly different. I think it's a bit foolish to so confidently extrapolate from our limited experiences on Earth to that of Mars without acknowledging that we don't have supporting evidence for this sort of intuition.
Such undue certainty has been wrong in the past and it will be wrong in the future.
The intention is that bicycles are used for shorter journeys (to work, shops, school etc), for health, environment and economic reasons.
And the practice is that bicycles just aren't that useful to people.
Wide, high-speed roads
You mention one adaptation to humans right there. "Wide". And choosing high-speed roads instead of say, high speed bicycle lanes or rail lines, is another adaptation.
No, because that CO2 is locked up in rock and if we manage to partly boil the oceans, we'll create a very efficient process for transferring heat to space while simultaneously getting rid of the cause.