At some point, it might just make sense to wonder if the filaments that are being observed in interstellar space have an electromagnetic origin, akin to that of a novelty plasma globe. It's unfortunate that theorists seem to go to such great lengths to avoid investigating that possibility.
Theorists have to match their theory to observation. All you have for your claim here is "filaments" which would occur just due to the combination of gravity, supernova, and photon radiation pressure of normal stars. You need something more, say like actual measurements of the field strength of the EM fields allegedly creating these filaments.
It's interesting to contrast theoretical conversations about the interstellar medium against actual observations by radio astronomers of HI hydrogen gas at the 21-cm wavelength.
No theoretical conversation here. I'm quite aware of and have seen the vast clouds of matter that lie around us, including the space between us and the center of the Milky Way. A decent telescope will show you this.
Because you know of a few examples of "failure" to manipulate power with wealth you think you have the rich pegged.
Pretty much. These are mind you, some of the best historical examples of power through wealth.
They buy and sell you my friend. You have no idea of their reach and power, nor of what they really think of you, if they bother to think about you at all.
I'm not your friend. And I think you "peg" yourself with that line of bullshit. I think you don't have a clue of their reach and power, or you wouldn't be making such a big deal of it now.
The real problem here is not the companies, it's the government.
Oh please, the companies write the rules for the government to enforce.
Who has the pricing power here? There's only one federal level government in the US and it happens to have monopoly power on a variety of things including the use of force to enforce federal level law, collect taxes, and the issuing of currency. In comparison, even if one considers the largest of companies and other concentrations of assets, there are hundreds to thousands such with conflicting interests. And what companies even knew about the NSA's activities, much less "wrote the rules" for them?
It's bizarre how people in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary such as this NSA power grab (which no business would be able to attempt), exaggerate the relative power of businesses versus government.
other than the rainbow which was put there by the almighty as a promise to not end the world again by flood most natural phenomena are pretty irregular, aren't they?
The rainbow is part of the Bifrost bridge connecting Midgar (Earth) to Valhalla. Any alternate interpretation is vile propaganda spread by Christian heretics trying to sap our precious bodily fluids and turn us away from honor.
Perhaps that is just the fallacy of thinking of atoms and particles interchangeably, all the while ignoring the enormous gravity field in very close proximity.
No, I don't think that's even relevant here. Radiation pressure is well known to push gas around, the heliosphere is a great example of this and we see similar examples around other stars. If there were such a highly directional radiation source dominating our interstellar environment, it would have pushed away from the galactic center the gas clouds we see around us. Since they still are here, then we don't have such an environment.
Ok, I think you're right here. I guess my opinion here is that it looked to me like the poster I was replying to thought that was the prime ingredient. And well, I just don't think wealth by itself is that big a deal. For example, two of the best historical examples of power via wealth are Crassus (who among other things was a key player in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire) and Richard Neville (16th Earl of Warwick). Each was able to parlay their wealth into considerable political power (and in turn obtain considerably more wealth), but in the end they fell due in large part to the limitations of power via wealth. For example, Crassus apparently needed to bolster his power with military victories (he fought against both the huge slave revolt led by Spartacus and the Parthians, finding defeat and ignominious execution from the latter). Neville did well as long as his king was in power, but his wealth evaporated when a hostile king was in power - and he made a lot of enemies who helped that other king establish themselves).
A third example is the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (who dominated central India during the 17th century). After ruthlessly imprisoning his father and killing his other three brothers, he obtained control of the vast wealth of central India, making him the most wealthy power of that time. He then embarked on a program of military expansion and the propagation (often by force) of the Islam religion. In about twenty years, he had depleted his treasury, squandering that vast wealth. So he had both great wealth and great power, yet they weren't enough to achieve his goals.
And by his death, the empire was weakened though it would last another century and a half before being taken over completely by the British.
If your opponent intentionally tries to be unpredictable, the game is no fun. Try playing chess with someone who isn't making tactical moves, but just acting unpredictably - you might lose a few games due to over-thinking, but overall, you'll probably win, and get no satisfaction out of it because chess is a highly tactical game, and an unpredictable player removes a large part of the tactical element, making the game not fun.
It works in chess as well. The randomness is just more subtle. White noise is almost never a good strategy (outside of say, "Rocks, Paper, and Scissors"), but incorporating a moderate amount of randomness can slide your game into a state that the foe hasn't seen before.
As for our own governments being a greater threat than the threat of foreign invasion, despite some examples you could give me I am afraid you are lacking in imagination or much knowledge of history.
Even foreign invasions can be due to failures of governance. For example, during the Second World War, I'd chalk up the invasions of Russia, France, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan to the weaknesses and poor judgment of their respective governments.
Yes I think there are around 400 to 500 of them which collectively own and control our system. They can be trusted because of their mass wealth and the fact that any thing they want whether legal or not will be given to them. They have no reason to get involved with messy religious martyrdom products practiced by poor ignorant brown people. I mean after all they select few have no souls to begin with so why bother with anything other than money an power. If they gamble their money away the government will always cover the lost since they are to-big-to-fail and it was really the consumers fault somehow anyway,
I don't get why people think that tremendous wealth is a key to power. Power can always just take wealth or sell its exclusive services for a high price. But in contrast, the kind of power the NSA exercises here can't be created with just wealth.
As to your complaint about food stamps and such, remember the saying that "a government powerful enough to give you everything you need, is also powerful enough to take away everything you have." All these little services are power - both because of the transfer of wealth (which among other things can be partly diverted for projects such as SNAP) and because creation of a public good inevitably leads to regulation of consumption of that public good to avoid tragedy of commons issues. Consider for that last point, the necessity of collecting information about the potential consumers of the good (who has your mental health data for your mental health care?), enforcement of law (just about every bureau and department has some sort of law enforcement group), and the need to regulate related human behavior (selling food stamps for cash).
Your post is a great example of how people can complain about government abuses of power and yet at the same time advocate giving that government power to abuse. It's all the same government. Why can you trust it with food stamps or mental health care when you can't trust it not to nose around in your affairs or with military matters?
You are being short sighted and you and your family with pay, one way or another...
I'd rather my family pay for their own services rather than my family pay with a loss of freedom. With freedom comes risk. I think that's a great tradeoff.
Any civilization which has similar conflicts of interest in their history is going to have a similar history. They might be peaceful enough to avoid a body count, but they will have relatively stupid decisions made because it was in someone's particular interest to make those decisions.
You can to some degree (for example, they tend to correlate with current sunspot number) and it takes some time for them to get to Earth. Even an unexpected event yield a couple of days warning. It might not be enough time for an Apollo mission, but it sure isn't enough time for a deep space mission which has weeks before the crew can reach any other sort of shelter.
My point invokes the "slipperly slope" argument. Take it however you wish.
I take it to mean that you don't know how to argue. We're a long way from having to deal with same sex corporate marriages, for example.
For instance, if I own a yacht, but list it as property of a corporation
That's a non sequitur. Either you own the yacht directly or through ownership of the corporation, or you do not. That ownership can be seized. Annuities might be a gimmick to get around that (say you give the yacht to someone on the condition that you get to sail the yacht for the rest of your life), but they're not a corporation-based loophole.
I understand the motivation to preserve wealth and not hand over millions of hard earned dollars to a nursing home. An advantage of having a socialist government is that everyone, through broad taxation, could potentially get the nursing home care that is needed without leaving the rest of their family impoverished.
Well, it's not working in the US is it? I guess we just need to do it harder and maybe it won't fail epically this time.
As to your concerns about the loopholes, why get rid of a useful legal device for structuring businesses merely because there are loopholes in the US government's good intentions? How about getting rid of the loopholes first?
No, they don't. Bail outs, rent seeking which guarantees business, easy credit, that sort of thing generates short term thinkers in the business world. Similar largess to citizens (such as public pensions or the health care stuff advocated by the poster I replied to) does the same for citizens.
Newspapers don't have the authority to change the classification of information in the US government. It is by necessity going to be a small group that has such power.
Once you get a circular argument that it's classified because the government says it is, you can punish anyone for possessing/distributing/whatever classified documents.
Well, the US does have the abominable ITAR regulations (where one can be punished for discussing common domain knowledge without having any sort of connection to government). So your concerns aren't ill-founded.
Oh, and yea, I know that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive, but since the law as written often has no basis on reality on the usage of terms as understood by anyone, then it becomes quickly pointless to even have a discussion in those terms.
The dictionary definition remains quite appropriate. The classification is by a US government authority not by the media. And so we have a current example of public knowledge that also happens to be classified knowledge.
If it is available from a public web site then the information is no longer "classified"
You are wrong here. As has been noted repeatedly, public information can still be classified information. Secret information != classified information.
This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.
By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?
Yes. What's so hard to understand here? There are a bunch of federal employees and contractors who simply aren't allowed to have access to various sorts of classified information, no matter where that information comes from or how public it is.
Being a child for almost a century implies you would need care givers for the same amount of time.
It hasn't been true in the past that children have always required caregivers.
. Kids don't work, cook or clean. All they do is take.
Your kids perhaps, but it's not true in general (particularly outside of the developed world where most kids reside).
And that's a rather strange attitude to take, I might add. If you have kids who don't work, cook, or clean, then you end up with adult children who can't work, cook, or clean. And whom can only take.
What I'll say now is that I see no reason for the pretense of playing adult, especially when it results in such children as you describe above. It's just a rather phony act and looks rather harmful to the next generation.
The Apollo missions had deep space radiation exposure of around 7-10 days. Their radiation solutions (which mostly amounted to not launching during a solar flare) aren't going to extend to journeys which last much longer than that.
Farmers already replicate food just fine so there isn't a lot of demand right there. And it's kind of nice to get what you want in a manufactured on the spot fine china cup, but that's not exactly near future tech.
Someone has to pay for that. That results in reduced economic activity and reduces the number of small businesses as well.
A lot of effort goes into reducing risks throughout modern society and IMHO most of it just isn't worth it. It's overpriced, ineffective, subject to corruption, and generates moral hazard (in particular, creating a society chock full of short term thinkers).
Slashdot Mirror
At some point, it might just make sense to wonder if the filaments that are being observed in interstellar space have an electromagnetic origin, akin to that of a novelty plasma globe. It's unfortunate that theorists seem to go to such great lengths to avoid investigating that possibility.
Theorists have to match their theory to observation. All you have for your claim here is "filaments" which would occur just due to the combination of gravity, supernova, and photon radiation pressure of normal stars. You need something more, say like actual measurements of the field strength of the EM fields allegedly creating these filaments.
It's interesting to contrast theoretical conversations about the interstellar medium against actual observations by radio astronomers of HI hydrogen gas at the 21-cm wavelength.
No theoretical conversation here. I'm quite aware of and have seen the vast clouds of matter that lie around us, including the space between us and the center of the Milky Way. A decent telescope will show you this.
Because you know of a few examples of "failure" to manipulate power with wealth you think you have the rich pegged.
Pretty much. These are mind you, some of the best historical examples of power through wealth.
They buy and sell you my friend. You have no idea of their reach and power, nor of what they really think of you, if they bother to think about you at all.
I'm not your friend. And I think you "peg" yourself with that line of bullshit. I think you don't have a clue of their reach and power, or you wouldn't be making such a big deal of it now.
The real problem here is not the companies, it's the government.
Oh please, the companies write the rules for the government to enforce.
Who has the pricing power here? There's only one federal level government in the US and it happens to have monopoly power on a variety of things including the use of force to enforce federal level law, collect taxes, and the issuing of currency. In comparison, even if one considers the largest of companies and other concentrations of assets, there are hundreds to thousands such with conflicting interests. And what companies even knew about the NSA's activities, much less "wrote the rules" for them?
It's bizarre how people in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary such as this NSA power grab (which no business would be able to attempt), exaggerate the relative power of businesses versus government.
other than the rainbow which was put there by the almighty as a promise to not end the world again by flood most natural phenomena are pretty irregular, aren't they?
The rainbow is part of the Bifrost bridge connecting Midgar (Earth) to Valhalla. Any alternate interpretation is vile propaganda spread by Christian heretics trying to sap our precious bodily fluids and turn us away from honor.
Perhaps that is just the fallacy of thinking of atoms and particles interchangeably, all the while ignoring the enormous gravity field in very close proximity.
No, I don't think that's even relevant here. Radiation pressure is well known to push gas around, the heliosphere is a great example of this and we see similar examples around other stars. If there were such a highly directional radiation source dominating our interstellar environment, it would have pushed away from the galactic center the gas clouds we see around us. Since they still are here, then we don't have such an environment.
Ok, I think you're right here. I guess my opinion here is that it looked to me like the poster I was replying to thought that was the prime ingredient. And well, I just don't think wealth by itself is that big a deal. For example, two of the best historical examples of power via wealth are Crassus (who among other things was a key player in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire) and Richard Neville (16th Earl of Warwick). Each was able to parlay their wealth into considerable political power (and in turn obtain considerably more wealth), but in the end they fell due in large part to the limitations of power via wealth. For example, Crassus apparently needed to bolster his power with military victories (he fought against both the huge slave revolt led by Spartacus and the Parthians, finding defeat and ignominious execution from the latter). Neville did well as long as his king was in power, but his wealth evaporated when a hostile king was in power - and he made a lot of enemies who helped that other king establish themselves).
A third example is the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (who dominated central India during the 17th century). After ruthlessly imprisoning his father and killing his other three brothers, he obtained control of the vast wealth of central India, making him the most wealthy power of that time. He then embarked on a program of military expansion and the propagation (often by force) of the Islam religion. In about twenty years, he had depleted his treasury, squandering that vast wealth. So he had both great wealth and great power, yet they weren't enough to achieve his goals.
And by his death, the empire was weakened though it would last another century and a half before being taken over completely by the British.
The gas clouds, which we see around us, would have been blown away by a single, highly directional radiation source strong enough to manifest here.
If your opponent intentionally tries to be unpredictable, the game is no fun. Try playing chess with someone who isn't making tactical moves, but just acting unpredictably - you might lose a few games due to over-thinking, but overall, you'll probably win, and get no satisfaction out of it because chess is a highly tactical game, and an unpredictable player removes a large part of the tactical element, making the game not fun.
It works in chess as well. The randomness is just more subtle. White noise is almost never a good strategy (outside of say, "Rocks, Paper, and Scissors"), but incorporating a moderate amount of randomness can slide your game into a state that the foe hasn't seen before.
As for our own governments being a greater threat than the threat of foreign invasion, despite some examples you could give me I am afraid you are lacking in imagination or much knowledge of history.
Even foreign invasions can be due to failures of governance. For example, during the Second World War, I'd chalk up the invasions of Russia, France, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan to the weaknesses and poor judgment of their respective governments.
Yes I think there are around 400 to 500 of them which collectively own and control our system. They can be trusted because of their mass wealth and the fact that any thing they want whether legal or not will be given to them. They have no reason to get involved with messy religious martyrdom products practiced by poor ignorant brown people. I mean after all they select few have no souls to begin with so why bother with anything other than money an power. If they gamble their money away the government will always cover the lost since they are to-big-to-fail and it was really the consumers fault somehow anyway,
I don't get why people think that tremendous wealth is a key to power. Power can always just take wealth or sell its exclusive services for a high price. But in contrast, the kind of power the NSA exercises here can't be created with just wealth.
As to your complaint about food stamps and such, remember the saying that "a government powerful enough to give you everything you need, is also powerful enough to take away everything you have." All these little services are power - both because of the transfer of wealth (which among other things can be partly diverted for projects such as SNAP) and because creation of a public good inevitably leads to regulation of consumption of that public good to avoid tragedy of commons issues. Consider for that last point, the necessity of collecting information about the potential consumers of the good (who has your mental health data for your mental health care?), enforcement of law (just about every bureau and department has some sort of law enforcement group), and the need to regulate related human behavior (selling food stamps for cash).
Your post is a great example of how people can complain about government abuses of power and yet at the same time advocate giving that government power to abuse. It's all the same government. Why can you trust it with food stamps or mental health care when you can't trust it not to nose around in your affairs or with military matters?
You are being short sighted and you and your family with pay, one way or another...
I'd rather my family pay for their own services rather than my family pay with a loss of freedom. With freedom comes risk. I think that's a great tradeoff.
Any civilization which has similar conflicts of interest in their history is going to have a similar history. They might be peaceful enough to avoid a body count, but they will have relatively stupid decisions made because it was in someone's particular interest to make those decisions.
And now if you ban the freedom of the press
Aside from a small number of exceptions, members of the military are not members of the press.
except you can't predict flares
You can to some degree (for example, they tend to correlate with current sunspot number) and it takes some time for them to get to Earth. Even an unexpected event yield a couple of days warning. It might not be enough time for an Apollo mission, but it sure isn't enough time for a deep space mission which has weeks before the crew can reach any other sort of shelter.
My point invokes the "slipperly slope" argument. Take it however you wish.
I take it to mean that you don't know how to argue. We're a long way from having to deal with same sex corporate marriages, for example.
For instance, if I own a yacht, but list it as property of a corporation
That's a non sequitur. Either you own the yacht directly or through ownership of the corporation, or you do not. That ownership can be seized. Annuities might be a gimmick to get around that (say you give the yacht to someone on the condition that you get to sail the yacht for the rest of your life), but they're not a corporation-based loophole.
I understand the motivation to preserve wealth and not hand over millions of hard earned dollars to a nursing home. An advantage of having a socialist government is that everyone, through broad taxation, could potentially get the nursing home care that is needed without leaving the rest of their family impoverished.
Well, it's not working in the US is it? I guess we just need to do it harder and maybe it won't fail epically this time.
As to your concerns about the loopholes, why get rid of a useful legal device for structuring businesses merely because there are loopholes in the US government's good intentions? How about getting rid of the loopholes first?
No, they don't. Bail outs, rent seeking which guarantees business, easy credit, that sort of thing generates short term thinkers in the business world. Similar largess to citizens (such as public pensions or the health care stuff advocated by the poster I replied to) does the same for citizens.
Once you get a circular argument that it's classified because the government says it is, you can punish anyone for possessing/distributing/whatever classified documents.
Well, the US does have the abominable ITAR regulations (where one can be punished for discussing common domain knowledge without having any sort of connection to government). So your concerns aren't ill-founded.
Oh, and yea, I know that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive, but since the law as written often has no basis on reality on the usage of terms as understood by anyone, then it becomes quickly pointless to even have a discussion in those terms.
The dictionary definition remains quite appropriate. The classification is by a US government authority not by the media. And so we have a current example of public knowledge that also happens to be classified knowledge.
If it is available from a public web site then the information is no longer "classified"
You are wrong here. As has been noted repeatedly, public information can still be classified information. Secret information != classified information.
This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.
By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?
Yes. What's so hard to understand here? There are a bunch of federal employees and contractors who simply aren't allowed to have access to various sorts of classified information, no matter where that information comes from or how public it is.
Being a child for almost a century implies you would need care givers for the same amount of time.
It hasn't been true in the past that children have always required caregivers.
. Kids don't work, cook or clean. All they do is take.
Your kids perhaps, but it's not true in general (particularly outside of the developed world where most kids reside).
And that's a rather strange attitude to take, I might add. If you have kids who don't work, cook, or clean, then you end up with adult children who can't work, cook, or clean. And whom can only take.
What I'll say now is that I see no reason for the pretense of playing adult, especially when it results in such children as you describe above. It's just a rather phony act and looks rather harmful to the next generation.
Well, I guess my point is that I see children playing grown up in this thread. Skip that pretense and your life will be better.
The Apollo missions had deep space radiation exposure of around 7-10 days. Their radiation solutions (which mostly amounted to not launching during a solar flare) aren't going to extend to journeys which last much longer than that.
Farmers already replicate food just fine so there isn't a lot of demand right there. And it's kind of nice to get what you want in a manufactured on the spot fine china cup, but that's not exactly near future tech.
I think it might be because the hedge fund market is already crowded. They'd end up working for someone else.
Someone has to pay for that. That results in reduced economic activity and reduces the number of small businesses as well.
A lot of effort goes into reducing risks throughout modern society and IMHO most of it just isn't worth it. It's overpriced, ineffective, subject to corruption, and generates moral hazard (in particular, creating a society chock full of short term thinkers).