Swear words have been made of a whole host of different classes of words. Some cultures use sex, things like fuck and cunt. Some use human waste, things like piss and shit. Some cultures use religion, things like tabernacle. Disease, racism, bestiality, questionable parentage, the list goes on.
But the reason they're bad has nothing to do with what they mean.
The purpose of a swear word is to bypass the rational mind and evoke emotional responses in other people against their will.
Or, to put it another way, when you swear in the presence of other people, you're making them irrational and stupid.
Depending on when and how you do that, the effect can range from annoyance and settling back down into thought all the way to a series of escalating irrational reactions that lead to death.
That is why it's not an acceptable thing to do. It's like screaming "Fire" when there isn't one. It hurts people.
It's amazing how quickly you can get a child to stop swearing when you simply explain this to them instead of issuing ultimatums. Shame grown adults are incapable of getting the point...
Unless you can take "your" data and keep it in your pocket, you can't own it. All you can do is sic tax-paid thugs on people for doing things with data that you don't like, and then only if there are arbitrary rules in place that say you can do it.
Tim, you're a dickhead. If you want to enforce what people are doing with bits and bytes that you claim are your own, why don't you go grab a stick and enforce it yourself rather than fucking with the legal infrastructure.
Google doesn't make money off search, they make money off ads. They make pretty much ALL their money off ads. Your statement is nonsense, just like this ruling.
Perhaps the reason some businesses "don't want the headache" is do to the attitude of some IT departments. In my dealings, some of them (READ SOME) have the attitude that they are doing you a favor, just talking to you.
They are. Tactical and strategic decisions rely on good information, and that means information technology. Without them, you're deaf, dumb and blind.
When you get down to it, an organization relies on the executive to have a "big picture" view and use that perspective to bring an intelligence to the actions of those that operate underneath them. As information technology makes this big picture easy to see for every member of the organization, it carves into the tasks that made the executive important in the first place.
I had a discussion at work about this recently, and I came to realize why I don't like new games.
It used to be, most games were simple to know, but challenging to play. But nowadays, it's the other way around. It's challenging and time consuming to know all the various aspects of the game, but if you do, it's trivial easy to win.
If I had no personal projects to consume as much free time as I can spare to work on them between family and work, perhaps boredom might drive me to explore all the stuff put into modern games. But I have lots of things that I want to do and not enough time, and for me, a game that requires me to spend a lot of time learning about the game and its world and customizing things is a pain in the ass that I won't bother taking the time to go through.
There's no money to be made off people like me, and all the skills normally associated with creating modern games bring no competitive advantage. I'm most likely in the minority, considering the market penetration level of modern video gaming. But for a lot of people, Linux is both an agenda and a personal project, so they have no shortage of useful places to put their spare time.
I've watched people playing games and spend hours doing menial tasks like farming or mining, and they think it's so great that there's this level of realism, and all I can think is, why don't you go spend hours of your time growing plants, then you can eat the food instead of just looking at it on a screen.
The inane stupidity of it blows me away. And it's considered progress.
They obviously have never seen our cats. Stress reducers? I don't think so.
You misunderstand the mechanism by which the protection is granted.
Endless years of kitty drama builds a general tolerance to drama in a person.
Then when the frustrating external event occurs that would have caused a normal person to blow a valve and die, you're emotionally prepared to roll your eyes, throw the instigator across the room and go back to your Sudoku.
The author doesn't deserve shit. If someone from the Olympics had come up and asked him to customize his game for their site and offered him compensation before the fact, he would be entitled to something. But they didn't ask him because they didn't need him, so he isn't.
If "they" are able to solve their problem without waking you up and asking you to take time out of your day to help them out, then "they" don't owe you anything. That's it, that's all. End of story.
This doofus is the same as the other doofus who sued someone for money because they used a picture of a building he took several years ago while wandering around the city. He did nothing, he deserved nothing. This is no different.
As an aside, if you don't care what I do or did, don't make stupid comments about how I should go do something myself before I mouth off. I put my money where my mouth is every fucking day, and I'll be fucked if I let you paint me as someone who doesn't when you don't know a damned thing.
You people with your overinflated sense of entitlement... you make me want to fucking puke. Go off in the corner and die quietly.
Here's an idea... you go do something meaningful, you fucking wanker. Then come back and bitch. You make me sick.
Among other things, my past projects bring food to millions of people and medicine to billions of people who otherwise wouldn't have had access to it. And I'm just getting started... I'll hit the peak of my power and influence in 15-20 years time.
I don't need to live off my past achievements using some fucked up copyright regime as a vehicle for to subvert the police into supporting my protection racket either, because I've got skills and am in demand. So you'll excuse me if I find this dude's after-the-fact bitching and money grubbing rather pathetic.
Sorry, no glass houses here. Try next door. You fucking wanker.
Aside from that, for someone who is competent it's faster to type than it is to speak, and it's much faster to twitch your hand half an inch than it is to wave it around touching the screen.
Everything outlined in the article is leading away from integrating technology into your core capacities. It's about taking a tool and turning into a third party agent that you need to interact with as though it were some sort of person.
Making a more efficient computer interface means making the muscle movements involved more subtle, not replacing what efficiencies we have with new paradigms that require gross muscle movements and voice strain.
Integrating mouse gestures into the operating system and and moving to one-handed chording keyboards as a standard would be the right direction.
If the brainless masses want Fisher-Price toys, fine. But lets not pretend that Fisher-Price make better tools.
Mobs don't act irrationally. Mobs occur when a tipping point occurs in the population. The population realizes that the system acts against them at every turn and they collectively realize that they are ready to actively destroy it. Then they set out to do so.
Mobs are the natural counterbalance to corruption.
OMG they copied this guys cheap and nasty little game and made another cheap and nasty little game just like it to entertain the kids for 30 seconds on the olympic site!
Before, it was just a cheap and nasty little game no one cared about, but now it's being seen by billions! Clearly, this guy deserves a palace and a new car with solid gold hubcaps.
Here's an idea... go do something meaningful, you fucking wanker. Then come back and bitch about how much you're entitled to. You make me sick.
1) The doctor votes against the interests of the people who voted for him, and they instantly revoke their votes from him, permanently, forever. By his betrayal, he ensures that he has no political power.
2) The religious leader leads his people, and they vote for him because they believe in him. Democracy working as it should.
3) Random thug tells 10 people that they better vote for him, or else. Except, the people he told it to all have recordings of what he said. So they publicize it, and then they refuse to do what he said. If he acts against a single one of them, that is recorded too. So, everyone in town reacts to the threat by banding together and removing his capacity to harm his fellows by whatever means necessary.
Nope, no possibility of corruption at all. Corruption only works when it is secret, or when people are captive to their leadership. By removing secrecy, by removing restrictions of choice, by removing terms of office, corruption cannot take roots, despite the efforts of the corrupt. That is the point.
With a less corruptable form of democracy, in which you are able to vote on every issue, or just the ones that you feel competent to speak to.
To deal with the fact that every person cannot know everything, you should be able to assign your vote to any other individual whom you trust to do a good job, and have their vote carry the weight of yours.
So, you can vote for your mom, your mom can pass your vote and her vote to the town doctor, the town doctor can pass half the towns votes to a clever responsible guy he knows in the big city, and that guys opinion carries a lot of weight because a lot of people trust him.
You should be able to revoke your attribution at any time, instantly. Therefore, there is no possibility of corruption.
That is how I plan to organize society to operate without currency. By having it work on trust and leadership instead of systematic compulsion, ignorance and powerlessness.
Oh, and most animals, including humans, aren't particularly lazy. If they were, recreational pursuits would not exist. You've just spent too much time in the company of people who have been forced to work too much on things that have no importance, and your perspective has been skewed accordingly.
On the other hand, Brin seems to think that the transparent society won't be so bad, because people, given access to total information about each other, will learn to be courteous and restrained in their use of that power, perhaps partly because they'll see their own foibles reflected in others. There, I think Brin is smoking some serious crack.
Now, I'm not a religious man, but they solved that one long ago. Everyone picks up a rock, and you keep throwing rocks at the offender until they're dead. Then you put them in a hole. That is how you deal with the ones who don't develop a sense of courtesy.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally.
That's heretic. I'm going to report this; bloody communist pagans.
Wow clever. So when do we pass laws to enforce participation on those that don't give a damn now?
We do it at the same time that we're removing taxation laws. It's a re-implementation of the same thing, except you're not insulated from understanding of what's going on, and your contribution isn't abstracted to the point that it can be perverted to a purpose you wouldn't have willingly agreed to.
If you spend a dozen days a month actually working on and with the critical infrastructure that supports your life rather than paying taxes equal to a couple of days worth of work for some private party, you know your hard work isn't going to go up some politicians nose while food supplies dwindle, then see him get first crack at the food supply while people do without. You really don't see an improvement there?
The guy who wrote that article is an idiot. He talks about the "transparent society" without considering that other things in society are going to have to change alongside.
If you're going to have a transparent society, and you don't want to be powerless, you need to bloody participate. You need to break down the ultra-specialization that has become so commonplace in modern society, educate yourself about the various sectors that sustain your life and your society, and participate in each of them actively.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally.
Another example, government. Government isn't supposed to "serve" the people, it is supposed to "be" the people. The matters that government are concerned with should be the very first things that are made transparent, not the inside of your refrigerator.
If all you want to do is sit around in blissful ignorance while the government runs your life, then a transparent society isn't going to make you particularly happy.
If you actually want to be an active participant in your society and work at making it better, transparency is necessary to get started.
This guy clearly doesn't want the responsibility that the loss of ignorance brings with it, but personally, I'll be fucked if I'm going to remain quietly ignorant so people like him can remain blissfully happy.
Chicks don't sit around fantasizing about the guy who says the magic words and then they welcome him into their warm inviting embrace and tell them it's ok to be a geek.
They fantasize about a powerful, dominant man who will take them and force them to feel things that blow their mind.
They want you to do for them what you wish they would do for you, make it ok to ignore all this PC bullshit and act like a primitive human being.
If you're too submissive to do that, or if you SEEM too submissive to do it, they aren't interested. With good reason.
Grow some stones and start unleashing your inner asshole. Then you'll get girls.
The fabber should be able to recycle things made via a similar fabber.
They should have an integrated wireless connection and be designed to set up a peer to peer mesh network, then automatically share any new design that is loaded into them with any other similar devices within range.
That should pretty much destroy the justification for intellectual property laws... everyone will be scratching their own itches, automatically sharing what they create and automatically being able to leverage other peoples creations.
Then we just need an extraterrestrial based power generation infrastructure to feed the things, a democratic-communistic society based around the maintenance of the critical infrastructure that drives everyones newfound empowerment.
The problem is capitalism, and private property in general. The tragedy of the commons, the commonly accepted justification for its existence, only occurs when the interests of the individual are not in sync with the interests of the society. This is an example of a system that ill suits its participants, and is something that can be solved with a better system and better infrastructure. The current system is one that is intrinsicly unfriendly to the creation of subsystems that result in "plenty for everyone". We're actively destroying our more intelligent systems and creating scarcity at this point, they call it "privatization".
These various artificial scarcity conditions are meant to deal with the fact that a few rich people control everything you need to live. If there wasn't the illusion that you might get leverage through these artifical scarcity rules, people would see how powerless they really are, and then they'd revolt and kill the rich bastards and take what they need. That's how WWII started, with enforced systematic economic hopelessness.
As the fictions start coming down and more and more people realize that their leverage was never real leverage at all, just a fiction, the disparity will become increasingly obvious, and there will be a revolt. It's just a matter of time.
I think oceanic power generation has a lot of potential. I figure it will fit the bill once it's undergone more research, development and refinement in the field.
I don't find it hard to envision a series of such generators along coastlines driving always on, reliable, automated transportation systems that are designed around them.
Once you'd created such an artifact, it would grant reliable transportation to it's region for as long as you continued to maintain it. That leaves a lot of room for new ventures towards greater achievements.
There have been great advancements in using sails for industrial shipping, that's something you could put together with a system such as I've described and create a reliable and sustainable global transportation network for people to gather around.
People should be busting their ass towards achieving such goals now, while there's fuel left.
1) A basic paved road, with maintenance, infrastructure to create fuel, infrastructure to transport fuel, infrastructure to create cars, infrastructure to maintain cars, training in driving, compensation for human error
2) A basic rail system, with maintenance, a renewable energy system, with maintenance
The rail system has a greater upfront cost, but negligible ongoing cost. They did feasibility studies in my region, and determined that it would take around 20 million dollars to set it up.
They didn't have the budget, and they're not allowed to save for next year or their funding gets reduced, so they instead blew their 5 million buying buses that kneel to let disabled passengers on and have a signal system to change traffic lights.
Total waste of money, doesn't fix the transportation problems, leaves us relying on fossil fuels, and if the political system allowed them to save up for new infrastructure with their federal money, they could have paid for it in less than 5 years with the money they wasted on nothing at all.
Someone here is ignorant and naive, but it isn't me.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are swear words bad?
Swear words have been made of a whole host of different classes of words. Some cultures use sex, things like fuck and cunt. Some use human waste, things like piss and shit. Some cultures use religion, things like tabernacle. Disease, racism, bestiality, questionable parentage, the list goes on.
But the reason they're bad has nothing to do with what they mean.
The purpose of a swear word is to bypass the rational mind and evoke emotional responses in other people against their will.
Or, to put it another way, when you swear in the presence of other people, you're making them irrational and stupid.
Depending on when and how you do that, the effect can range from annoyance and settling back down into thought all the way to a series of escalating irrational reactions that lead to death.
That is why it's not an acceptable thing to do. It's like screaming "Fire" when there isn't one. It hurts people.
It's amazing how quickly you can get a child to stop swearing when you simply explain this to them instead of issuing ultimatums. Shame grown adults are incapable of getting the point...
Unless you can take "your" data and keep it in your pocket, you can't own it. All you can do is sic tax-paid thugs on people for doing things with data that you don't like, and then only if there are arbitrary rules in place that say you can do it.
Tim, you're a dickhead. If you want to enforce what people are doing with bits and bytes that you claim are your own, why don't you go grab a stick and enforce it yourself rather than fucking with the legal infrastructure.
All I want is a big fat steak, a side order of fries, a case of beer, a bottle of scotch, a big fat joint, a backrub and a blowjob.
Is that too much to ask?
It means they're vendors reselling what Google is selling, you twit. Do you think the guy selling Windows out of his shop competes with Microsoft?
Google doesn't make money off search, they make money off ads. They make pretty much ALL their money off ads. Your statement is nonsense, just like this ruling.
Perhaps the reason some businesses "don't want the headache" is do to the attitude of some IT departments. In my dealings, some of them (READ SOME) have the attitude that they are doing you a favor, just talking to you.
They are. Tactical and strategic decisions rely on good information, and that means information technology. Without them, you're deaf, dumb and blind.
When you get down to it, an organization relies on the executive to have a "big picture" view and use that perspective to bring an intelligence to the actions of those that operate underneath them. As information technology makes this big picture easy to see for every member of the organization, it carves into the tasks that made the executive important in the first place.
Perhaps they're conscious of that threat?
I had a discussion at work about this recently, and I came to realize why I don't like new games.
It used to be, most games were simple to know, but challenging to play. But nowadays, it's the other way around. It's challenging and time consuming to know all the various aspects of the game, but if you do, it's trivial easy to win.
If I had no personal projects to consume as much free time as I can spare to work on them between family and work, perhaps boredom might drive me to explore all the stuff put into modern games. But I have lots of things that I want to do and not enough time, and for me, a game that requires me to spend a lot of time learning about the game and its world and customizing things is a pain in the ass that I won't bother taking the time to go through.
There's no money to be made off people like me, and all the skills normally associated with creating modern games bring no competitive advantage. I'm most likely in the minority, considering the market penetration level of modern video gaming. But for a lot of people, Linux is both an agenda and a personal project, so they have no shortage of useful places to put their spare time.
I've watched people playing games and spend hours doing menial tasks like farming or mining, and they think it's so great that there's this level of realism, and all I can think is, why don't you go spend hours of your time growing plants, then you can eat the food instead of just looking at it on a screen.
The inane stupidity of it blows me away. And it's considered progress.
Meh. Who cares if they bring games or not.
They obviously have never seen our cats. Stress reducers? I don't think so.
You misunderstand the mechanism by which the protection is granted.
Endless years of kitty drama builds a general tolerance to drama in a person.
Then when the frustrating external event occurs that would have caused a normal person to blow a valve and die, you're emotionally prepared to roll your eyes, throw the instigator across the room and go back to your Sudoku.
The author doesn't deserve shit. If someone from the Olympics had come up and asked him to customize his game for their site and offered him compensation before the fact, he would be entitled to something. But they didn't ask him because they didn't need him, so he isn't.
If "they" are able to solve their problem without waking you up and asking you to take time out of your day to help them out, then "they" don't owe you anything. That's it, that's all. End of story.
This doofus is the same as the other doofus who sued someone for money because they used a picture of a building he took several years ago while wandering around the city. He did nothing, he deserved nothing. This is no different.
As an aside, if you don't care what I do or did, don't make stupid comments about how I should go do something myself before I mouth off. I put my money where my mouth is every fucking day, and I'll be fucked if I let you paint me as someone who doesn't when you don't know a damned thing.
You people with your overinflated sense of entitlement... you make me want to fucking puke. Go off in the corner and die quietly.
errr... what the fuck?
Here's an idea... you go do something meaningful, you fucking wanker. Then come back and bitch. You make me sick.
Among other things, my past projects bring food to millions of people and medicine to billions of people who otherwise wouldn't have had access to it. And I'm just getting started... I'll hit the peak of my power and influence in 15-20 years time.
I don't need to live off my past achievements using some fucked up copyright regime as a vehicle for to subvert the police into supporting my protection racket either, because I've got skills and am in demand. So you'll excuse me if I find this dude's after-the-fact bitching and money grubbing rather pathetic.
Sorry, no glass houses here. Try next door. You fucking wanker.
Aside from that, for someone who is competent it's faster to type than it is to speak, and it's much faster to twitch your hand half an inch than it is to wave it around touching the screen.
Everything outlined in the article is leading away from integrating technology into your core capacities. It's about taking a tool and turning into a third party agent that you need to interact with as though it were some sort of person.
Making a more efficient computer interface means making the muscle movements involved more subtle, not replacing what efficiencies we have with new paradigms that require gross muscle movements and voice strain.
Integrating mouse gestures into the operating system and and moving to one-handed chording keyboards as a standard would be the right direction.
If the brainless masses want Fisher-Price toys, fine. But lets not pretend that Fisher-Price make better tools.
Mobs don't act irrationally. Mobs occur when a tipping point occurs in the population. The population realizes that the system acts against them at every turn and they collectively realize that they are ready to actively destroy it. Then they set out to do so.
Mobs are the natural counterbalance to corruption.
OMG they copied this guys cheap and nasty little game and made another cheap and nasty little game just like it to entertain the kids for 30 seconds on the olympic site!
Before, it was just a cheap and nasty little game no one cared about, but now it's being seen by billions! Clearly, this guy deserves a palace and a new car with solid gold hubcaps.
Here's an idea... go do something meaningful, you fucking wanker. Then come back and bitch about how much you're entitled to. You make me sick.
1) The doctor votes against the interests of the people who voted for him, and they instantly revoke their votes from him, permanently, forever. By his betrayal, he ensures that he has no political power.
2) The religious leader leads his people, and they vote for him because they believe in him. Democracy working as it should.
3) Random thug tells 10 people that they better vote for him, or else. Except, the people he told it to all have recordings of what he said. So they publicize it, and then they refuse to do what he said. If he acts against a single one of them, that is recorded too. So, everyone in town reacts to the threat by banding together and removing his capacity to harm his fellows by whatever means necessary.
Nope, no possibility of corruption at all. Corruption only works when it is secret, or when people are captive to their leadership. By removing secrecy, by removing restrictions of choice, by removing terms of office, corruption cannot take roots, despite the efforts of the corrupt. That is the point.
With a less corruptable form of democracy, in which you are able to vote on every issue, or just the ones that you feel competent to speak to.
To deal with the fact that every person cannot know everything, you should be able to assign your vote to any other individual whom you trust to do a good job, and have their vote carry the weight of yours.
So, you can vote for your mom, your mom can pass your vote and her vote to the town doctor, the town doctor can pass half the towns votes to a clever responsible guy he knows in the big city, and that guys opinion carries a lot of weight because a lot of people trust him.
You should be able to revoke your attribution at any time, instantly. Therefore, there is no possibility of corruption.
That is how I plan to organize society to operate without currency. By having it work on trust and leadership instead of systematic compulsion, ignorance and powerlessness.
Oh, and most animals, including humans, aren't particularly lazy. If they were, recreational pursuits would not exist. You've just spent too much time in the company of people who have been forced to work too much on things that have no importance, and your perspective has been skewed accordingly.
On the other hand, Brin seems to think that the transparent society won't be so bad, because people, given access to total information about each other, will learn to be courteous and restrained in their use of that power, perhaps partly because they'll see their own foibles reflected in others. There, I think Brin is smoking some serious crack.
Now, I'm not a religious man, but they solved that one long ago. Everyone picks up a rock, and you keep throwing rocks at the offender until they're dead. Then you put them in a hole. That is how you deal with the ones who don't develop a sense of courtesy.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally.
That's heretic. I'm going to report this; bloody communist pagans.
Who are you calling a pagan?
Wow clever. So when do we pass laws to enforce participation on those that don't give a damn now?
We do it at the same time that we're removing taxation laws. It's a re-implementation of the same thing, except you're not insulated from understanding of what's going on, and your contribution isn't abstracted to the point that it can be perverted to a purpose you wouldn't have willingly agreed to.
If you spend a dozen days a month actually working on and with the critical infrastructure that supports your life rather than paying taxes equal to a couple of days worth of work for some private party, you know your hard work isn't going to go up some politicians nose while food supplies dwindle, then see him get first crack at the food supply while people do without. You really don't see an improvement there?
The guy who wrote that article is an idiot. He talks about the "transparent society" without considering that other things in society are going to have to change alongside.
If you're going to have a transparent society, and you don't want to be powerless, you need to bloody participate. You need to break down the ultra-specialization that has become so commonplace in modern society, educate yourself about the various sectors that sustain your life and your society, and participate in each of them actively.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally.
Another example, government. Government isn't supposed to "serve" the people, it is supposed to "be" the people. The matters that government are concerned with should be the very first things that are made transparent, not the inside of your refrigerator.
If all you want to do is sit around in blissful ignorance while the government runs your life, then a transparent society isn't going to make you particularly happy.
If you actually want to be an active participant in your society and work at making it better, transparency is necessary to get started.
This guy clearly doesn't want the responsibility that the loss of ignorance brings with it, but personally, I'll be fucked if I'm going to remain quietly ignorant so people like him can remain blissfully happy.
Those sorts of people are MEANT to be powerless.
Chicks don't want to be convinced.
Chicks don't sit around fantasizing about the guy who says the magic words and then they welcome him into their warm inviting embrace and tell them it's ok to be a geek.
They fantasize about a powerful, dominant man who will take them and force them to feel things that blow their mind.
They want you to do for them what you wish they would do for you, make it ok to ignore all this PC bullshit and act like a primitive human being.
If you're too submissive to do that, or if you SEEM too submissive to do it, they aren't interested. With good reason.
Grow some stones and start unleashing your inner asshole. Then you'll get girls.
The fabber should be able to recycle things made via a similar fabber.
They should have an integrated wireless connection and be designed to set up a peer to peer mesh network, then automatically share any new design that is loaded into them with any other similar devices within range.
That should pretty much destroy the justification for intellectual property laws... everyone will be scratching their own itches, automatically sharing what they create and automatically being able to leverage other peoples creations.
Then we just need an extraterrestrial based power generation infrastructure to feed the things, a democratic-communistic society based around the maintenance of the critical infrastructure that drives everyones newfound empowerment.
The problem is capitalism, and private property in general. The tragedy of the commons, the commonly accepted justification for its existence, only occurs when the interests of the individual are not in sync with the interests of the society. This is an example of a system that ill suits its participants, and is something that can be solved with a better system and better infrastructure. The current system is one that is intrinsicly unfriendly to the creation of subsystems that result in "plenty for everyone". We're actively destroying our more intelligent systems and creating scarcity at this point, they call it "privatization".
These various artificial scarcity conditions are meant to deal with the fact that a few rich people control everything you need to live. If there wasn't the illusion that you might get leverage through these artifical scarcity rules, people would see how powerless they really are, and then they'd revolt and kill the rich bastards and take what they need. That's how WWII started, with enforced systematic economic hopelessness.
As the fictions start coming down and more and more people realize that their leverage was never real leverage at all, just a fiction, the disparity will become increasingly obvious, and there will be a revolt. It's just a matter of time.
"such that they can run forever without a fuel source"
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Electricity isn't a fuel, moron.
I think oceanic power generation has a lot of potential. I figure it will fit the bill once it's undergone more research, development and refinement in the field.
I don't find it hard to envision a series of such generators along coastlines driving always on, reliable, automated transportation systems that are designed around them.
Once you'd created such an artifact, it would grant reliable transportation to it's region for as long as you continued to maintain it. That leaves a lot of room for new ventures towards greater achievements.
There have been great advancements in using sails for industrial shipping, that's something you could put together with a system such as I've described and create a reliable and sustainable global transportation network for people to gather around.
People should be busting their ass towards achieving such goals now, while there's fuel left.
What is the real human cost difference between:
1) A basic paved road, with maintenance, infrastructure to create fuel, infrastructure to transport fuel, infrastructure to create cars, infrastructure to maintain cars, training in driving, compensation for human error
2) A basic rail system, with maintenance, a renewable energy system, with maintenance
The rail system has a greater upfront cost, but negligible ongoing cost. They did feasibility studies in my region, and determined that it would take around 20 million dollars to set it up.
They didn't have the budget, and they're not allowed to save for next year or their funding gets reduced, so they instead blew their 5 million buying buses that kneel to let disabled passengers on and have a signal system to change traffic lights.
Total waste of money, doesn't fix the transportation problems, leaves us relying on fossil fuels, and if the political system allowed them to save up for new infrastructure with their federal money, they could have paid for it in less than 5 years with the money they wasted on nothing at all.
Someone here is ignorant and naive, but it isn't me.