You know, the problem with the Soviets wasn't that they were communists. That was a threat to the capitalists, not to the citizenry at large. The problem with the Soviets was that they were totalitarian rather than Democratic.
Conversely, the problem with Americans is that they're capitalists. Capitalism is tantamount to Totalitarianism, while Communism is tantamount to Democracy.
Capitalism and Totalitarianism are about the arbitrary wielding of power by the few with no consideration to the consequences of society at large.
Democracy is about the right of the common citizen to have a voice in how collective efforts are administered, and Communism is about the right of the common citizen to have a share in what collective efforts produce.
In the end, Capitalism beat Totalitarianism because it is more viciously exploitative. In a totalitarian communist state, the value structure places a burden on the leadership to care for the people. That they do or do not shirk that burden is not the point.. the point is that by shifting to a capitalist social structure, they can continue to have power, but not even have to pay lip service to the concept of social responsibility.
That's why there were so many people starving to death and turning to prostitution and crime when the USSR fell, while we were bombarded with happy pictures of young women who finally got to wear silk stockings and expensive jewelery.
I guess I've got no problem restricting certain things to those tasked with raising the next generation (we'll leave just what those things are for another day), but no one ever asked to be born.
Actually, they (sperm) had to voluntarily participate in a race up a vaginal canal, and they had to win if they were to have the privilege of being born.
And after they (sperm) arrived at the finish line and met themselves (egg), they (sperm) dove into themselves (egg), and themselves (egg) took steps (hard shell) to protect themselves from all the others who didn't win the race but still wanted to be born.
You weren't born because you asked to be born. You were born because you fought to be born and won, while the multitude who were your peers failed to be born despite their best efforts, and died in the attempt.
If anyone is unhappy with how it turned out, no one is stopping them from taking a nap in the snow. Those who expect to lead the grasshoppers life while I lead the ants life and then compel my kid through economics to care for them in their old age in addition to caring for me, well, I WANT them to go take a nap in the snow.
If they want to wait till their retirement age before they do, I guess that's ok...
The current situation is the result of adhering to Capitalist values. It's the inevitable result, and it plays out again and again through human history. If you don't think the current situation is capitalistic, it's because your understanding of what capitalism means is flawed.
Make no mistake, those who are running the monopolies and control the information you receive do understand, much better than you do. That is why they are running the show, because they are working the system as it is meant to be worked. They will actively attempt to confuse the issue at every possible opportunity because they do not want you to understand, because they do not want you motivated to put a stop to it.
Capitalism is about creating social order through Monopolies and maintaining that social order through Dynasties. It always has been. It is not there to serve the likes of you, it is there to serve the likes of Rockefeller.
Now all that said, I'm still confused by your post. How does equating reproduction to adulthood lead you to say, " legislating adulthood is easy"? Are you suggesting that we restrict adult privileges to parents or force people to breed when it's time for them to become an "adult"?
I'm suggesting that motivation is a key element to adulthood, particularly when we're talking about how a society would measure it and assign responsibility for collective power. I'm not saying we should force people to breed, but I am suggesting that we should restrict adult privileges to parents, and we should not permit the distribution of tools that facilitate continuing to remain at the emotional and mental state of a child. Birth control for people in their 30s who have families already is not the same as using birth control to neuter yourself and live a self-centered life forever.
You know from experience how having a family to be responsible for changes your outlook. It's easy for a person who isn't taking such responsibility to amass considerable economic and political power in their career, because they've got a lot less on their plate. The question is, do you want that power concentrated in the hands of someone who is at the same level of maturity you were a decade ago? If you do, well, you're in your perfect world, and you can see the consequences littered about you in the decadence that continues to thrive amongst the wreckage that is our global economy.
Nice to see Capitalism is continuing to make things more efficient, eliminate waste and allowing more people to have access to more stuff for less effort. Clearly, it's a great vehicle for generating wealth and plenty.
Totally got distracted from my actual point there.... legislating adulthood is easy. If you're a parent, responsible for the next generation of humanity, tied to the future of mankind, having experienced all those painful changes that come with being responsible for someone elses life, you're an adult. If you haven't experienced this yet, you're not an adult. If you never experience it, you never become an adult, just a wrinkly creepy version of Peter Pan.
Yeah, whatever. It's a terrible thing to have to execute someone. It shouldn't be something you can support from arms length. It shouldn't be something you hire a professional to do for you, so you can keep your hands clean and remain philosophical about it. If you, as a community, are deciding to execute someone, and you as an individual are supporting the decision, then you should have to confront the consequences, see the blood and pain, and have good reason not to be cavalier about it.
Societies that have an executioner who takes them into a room where no one can see and makes the person disappear are the barbaric ones, while those societies where the citizens stone the person to death are the civilized ones. It has nothing to do with the pain suffered by the dying, and everything to do with the pain suffered by the living.
Killing people doesn't make you manly and tough. But hiring someone else to do it for you does makes you cowardly and small.
Personally I cannot wait till China gets into it with another country, they will literally slaughter everyone in sight. The world will cry foul and run crying to the U.S..
Hopefully it will be Israel... please, please, please let it happen to Israel...
Is somebody going to invade us? Hmm, that might not end well [wikipedia.org] for them either.
One of my ancestors invaded you. He helped set your White House on fire. That was the last attempt made, and it was successful.
As for why you are no threat in the space race, it's because NASA is in a shambles and can't perform launches. You can't even meet your ISS obligations, you're relying on other nations to do it for you.
Your militia of rednecks with shotguns doesn't even enter into the equation. If another nation wants to put space weapons in the sky and drop shit on your heads like you guys did to the people of Iraq, there's not a damned thing that you can do to stop them. Look forward to receiving your just reward for being a bunch of immoral, vicious, selfish and evil bastards. I know I'm looking forward to it...
You hit the nail right on the head. The US is in the middle of a total meltdown, and if anyone is sending up space weapons, it's going to be their rivals. America doesn't stand a chance. Therefore, they want competition outlawed.
Seriously... who gives a shit what he thinks? He's the captain of a sinking ship.
For the first time in a long time, the superbowl was worth watching. In most years, the game completely sucks, and the only interesting thing about it is the commercials.
If you say so... never actually watched it before...
Who cares? They fucking pay gazillions of dollars to force us to watch the things because they're a craptastic waste of attention. How about the web rescues people from the ads that did get aired?
I'll tell you what - you give me a few suitcases of that soon to be worthless money, I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?), and we'll call it even.
Replace the beads with rare earth magnets and spools of copper wire for my turbines and motors, throw in a cow, some chickens and some tempered glass to expand my aquaponic setup and you've got a deal.
Banks create money on a grand scale, and contrary to what people would expect, it doesn't cause rampant inflation.
You mean, US banks print money on a grand scale, and trade that money for real goods from foreign nations who never redeem them for American made goods because they'd rather trade them back and forth for oil, so the devaluation effects are never felt in the US?
Sorry, that was last millennium. This is the new millennium. The money is starting to come home. Those greenbacks are now bad cheques that MUST bounce, and so protectionism is the new order of the day.
Man, the way they keep printing that money, I'm not really sure if I want to work for it any more. I mean, what's it going to be worth in 5 years? Why bother?
I'm going to make a still and go back to bartering. This money stuff is a total rip off.
1) It's ridiculously improbable that Moore could predict the level to which we would progress over a period of decades. If I ran a car company, and made a prediction that our cars would increase in fuel efficiency by this precise amount per year for the next 30 years, and we always did, what would you think? Would you think I was a prophet, or would you think we were holding back to match the targets I set?
2) It's standard industry practice to intentionally cripple processors within the same architecture in the name of artificial scarcity. AMD and Intel both do it, and have since the days of the 486 processor. What I'm describing isn't inconsistent with their behavior, it's totally consistent. You just don't believe that they would do it to the degree that I'm describing.
3) Intel followed up the P4 architecture years later with the Pentium M/Core/Core2/Atom architectures, and these kicked the living shit out of the P4 architecture. None of these are much more than a P3 with a smaller fab process.
4) There is no way in the world that Intel didn't know that this would be true. They already had the old architecture kicking around, waiting to be manufactured on a smaller scale, and they're too intelligent not to have done tests. They had to know, and yet they sold P4s for years before they ditched the architecture in favor of the old design.
5) Finally, there's billions of dollars to be gained by forcing people through the endless upgrade scheme, and no risk. If you hold back and lose the performance crown, you just hold back a little less, and you retake it.
On the other hand, if you come out with your best right away, and raise the bar high, and someone beats your best, you've got nothing left in the tank to retake the lead. Plus, the best you can manage will hit commodity pricing in a span of a few years, which isn't particularly profitable. The incentives create a pressure to put out something just better enough to justify exclusive pricing, then stick with that until it reaches the commodity pricing point, then do it again.
Intel are not altruists. They do precisely what will make the most money, and this is it. No other conclusion makes sense, considering the motives and pressures of the situation. It's obvious.
The same is true of Intel and AMD and most large corporate 'competitors'. They have unspoken agreements to compete in the areas that work out well for companies in their sector. It isn't beneficial to either company to throw all their technology onto the table at once, much better to be way ahead of the curve and release in tiny increments with consumers buying each generation of technology. That way, if your discoveries do ever lag behind pace, the consumer never sees it.
That's a very politically correct way of saying the exact same thing...
Come on... look on the bright side. Instead of your child getting blown apart by a land mine left over from the last invasion, they can get blown apart by a hunter-killer drone. That's WAY cooler.
Reminds me of Stephen King's The Dark Tower... maybe they could dress it up like a bear...
For fucks sake... what the hell do you guys think a "Multiplier Lock" is?
They don't just intentionally cripple architectures, they intentionally cripple perfectly working chips within the same architecture for the sake of creating artifical scarcity and speeding up obsolescence. They do it right in front of your face, and they always have. You're acting like this is a radical crackpot theory that came out of an LSD-pickled brain. It's not. It's business as usual.
You would be an absolute idiot to take this path, and probably accused of criminal negligence should improper data disclosure ever reach the point where a federal prosecutor got involved in a case where the data in question "Really Mattered."
Warmer... warmer... warmer...
Who would find this an appealing alternative to the status quo?
That's an interesting way of looking at it...you honestly believe that Intel deliberately designed a slower architecture (spending billions in the process) just for the hell of it?
No, I believe they designed a slower architecture so they could make billions of dollars and drive their product into immediate obsolescence and make billions of dollars more so they could drive their production into immediate obsolescence and make billions of dollars more so they could... ah hell, you get the idea.
Not really, especially in the days when you had Intel and AMD racing to be the producer of the fastest chip.
Yeah, right. I remember a time they improved their process, and it sped things up too much, so they switched to a different architecture that would slow things back down. It was the P4. Then, after a while, they couldn't make that dog's breakfast architecture perform even with the improved fabrication. So, they switched back to their previous architecture. That's what we're buying now... P4 era fabrication technology with a slightly polished P3 architecture.
You're a pretty uncommon user, unless you're interested in really low-end models.
Well, one of my players has voice recording through a front mounted microphone, and in addition, has a line input that allows me to plug it into a mixing board and record sets. I can even plug an non-amplified electric guitar into it and record off that. I consider that device to be superior to an iPod, even if it isn't as pretty and flashy.
Another player can be broken in half and used as a USB thumb drive, which makes it trivially easy to use.
I consider both of these devices functionally superior, which is why I own them.
As far as I'm concerned, if the device has DRM on it, it's a low-end model. If it has DRM on it, it's not really my device. It's more of a tool to interact with my service provider. Considering that fact, if I was ever going to take possession of such a device and use it, I'd expect to receive it for free. The idea of actually paying for one of Apple's portable devices seems like something only a sucker would do. Fool and his money...
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You know, the problem with the Soviets wasn't that they were communists. That was a threat to the capitalists, not to the citizenry at large. The problem with the Soviets was that they were totalitarian rather than Democratic.
Conversely, the problem with Americans is that they're capitalists. Capitalism is tantamount to Totalitarianism, while Communism is tantamount to Democracy.
Capitalism and Totalitarianism are about the arbitrary wielding of power by the few with no consideration to the consequences of society at large.
Democracy is about the right of the common citizen to have a voice in how collective efforts are administered, and Communism is about the right of the common citizen to have a share in what collective efforts produce.
In the end, Capitalism beat Totalitarianism because it is more viciously exploitative. In a totalitarian communist state, the value structure places a burden on the leadership to care for the people. That they do or do not shirk that burden is not the point.. the point is that by shifting to a capitalist social structure, they can continue to have power, but not even have to pay lip service to the concept of social responsibility.
That's why there were so many people starving to death and turning to prostitution and crime when the USSR fell, while we were bombarded with happy pictures of young women who finally got to wear silk stockings and expensive jewelery.
I guess I've got no problem restricting certain things to those tasked with raising the next generation (we'll leave just what those things are for another day), but no one ever asked to be born.
Actually, they (sperm) had to voluntarily participate in a race up a vaginal canal, and they had to win if they were to have the privilege of being born.
And after they (sperm) arrived at the finish line and met themselves (egg), they (sperm) dove into themselves (egg), and themselves (egg) took steps (hard shell) to protect themselves from all the others who didn't win the race but still wanted to be born.
You weren't born because you asked to be born. You were born because you fought to be born and won, while the multitude who were your peers failed to be born despite their best efforts, and died in the attempt.
If anyone is unhappy with how it turned out, no one is stopping them from taking a nap in the snow. Those who expect to lead the grasshoppers life while I lead the ants life and then compel my kid through economics to care for them in their old age in addition to caring for me, well, I WANT them to go take a nap in the snow.
If they want to wait till their retirement age before they do, I guess that's ok...
if you dislike it i suggest you go live in north korea.
I was more thinking the thing to do was live right where I am now and drive people who think like you do into the ocean with no boat...
Wow, doublethink much?
The current situation is the result of adhering to Capitalist values. It's the inevitable result, and it plays out again and again through human history. If you don't think the current situation is capitalistic, it's because your understanding of what capitalism means is flawed.
Make no mistake, those who are running the monopolies and control the information you receive do understand, much better than you do. That is why they are running the show, because they are working the system as it is meant to be worked. They will actively attempt to confuse the issue at every possible opportunity because they do not want you to understand, because they do not want you motivated to put a stop to it.
Capitalism is about creating social order through Monopolies and maintaining that social order through Dynasties. It always has been. It is not there to serve the likes of you, it is there to serve the likes of Rockefeller.
Now all that said, I'm still confused by your post. How does equating reproduction to adulthood lead you to say, " legislating adulthood is easy"? Are you suggesting that we restrict adult privileges to parents or force people to breed when it's time for them to become an "adult"?
I'm suggesting that motivation is a key element to adulthood, particularly when we're talking about how a society would measure it and assign responsibility for collective power. I'm not saying we should force people to breed, but I am suggesting that we should restrict adult privileges to parents, and we should not permit the distribution of tools that facilitate continuing to remain at the emotional and mental state of a child. Birth control for people in their 30s who have families already is not the same as using birth control to neuter yourself and live a self-centered life forever.
You know from experience how having a family to be responsible for changes your outlook. It's easy for a person who isn't taking such responsibility to amass considerable economic and political power in their career, because they've got a lot less on their plate. The question is, do you want that power concentrated in the hands of someone who is at the same level of maturity you were a decade ago? If you do, well, you're in your perfect world, and you can see the consequences littered about you in the decadence that continues to thrive amongst the wreckage that is our global economy.
Nice to see Capitalism is continuing to make things more efficient, eliminate waste and allowing more people to have access to more stuff for less effort. Clearly, it's a great vehicle for generating wealth and plenty.
Totally got distracted from my actual point there.... legislating adulthood is easy. If you're a parent, responsible for the next generation of humanity, tied to the future of mankind, having experienced all those painful changes that come with being responsible for someone elses life, you're an adult. If you haven't experienced this yet, you're not an adult. If you never experience it, you never become an adult, just a wrinkly creepy version of Peter Pan.
Yeah, whatever. It's a terrible thing to have to execute someone. It shouldn't be something you can support from arms length. It shouldn't be something you hire a professional to do for you, so you can keep your hands clean and remain philosophical about it. If you, as a community, are deciding to execute someone, and you as an individual are supporting the decision, then you should have to confront the consequences, see the blood and pain, and have good reason not to be cavalier about it.
Societies that have an executioner who takes them into a room where no one can see and makes the person disappear are the barbaric ones, while those societies where the citizens stone the person to death are the civilized ones. It has nothing to do with the pain suffered by the dying, and everything to do with the pain suffered by the living.
Killing people doesn't make you manly and tough. But hiring someone else to do it for you does makes you cowardly and small.
Personally I cannot wait till China gets into it with another country, they will literally slaughter everyone in sight. The world will cry foul and run crying to the U.S..
Hopefully it will be Israel... please, please, please let it happen to Israel...
Is somebody going to invade us? Hmm, that might not end well [wikipedia.org] for them either.
One of my ancestors invaded you. He helped set your White House on fire. That was the last attempt made, and it was successful.
As for why you are no threat in the space race, it's because NASA is in a shambles and can't perform launches. You can't even meet your ISS obligations, you're relying on other nations to do it for you.
Your militia of rednecks with shotguns doesn't even enter into the equation. If another nation wants to put space weapons in the sky and drop shit on your heads like you guys did to the people of Iraq, there's not a damned thing that you can do to stop them. Look forward to receiving your just reward for being a bunch of immoral, vicious, selfish and evil bastards. I know I'm looking forward to it...
You hit the nail right on the head. The US is in the middle of a total meltdown, and if anyone is sending up space weapons, it's going to be their rivals. America doesn't stand a chance. Therefore, they want competition outlawed.
Seriously... who gives a shit what he thinks? He's the captain of a sinking ship.
For the first time in a long time, the superbowl was worth watching. In most years, the game completely sucks, and the only interesting thing about it is the commercials.
If you say so... never actually watched it before...
Who cares? They fucking pay gazillions of dollars to force us to watch the things because they're a craptastic waste of attention. How about the web rescues people from the ads that did get aired?
I'll tell you what - you give me a few suitcases of that soon to be worthless money, I'll give you some worthless goods in exchange (perhaps some brightly colored beads?), and we'll call it even.
Replace the beads with rare earth magnets and spools of copper wire for my turbines and motors, throw in a cow, some chickens and some tempered glass to expand my aquaponic setup and you've got a deal.
Banks create money on a grand scale, and contrary to what people would expect, it doesn't cause rampant inflation.
You mean, US banks print money on a grand scale, and trade that money for real goods from foreign nations who never redeem them for American made goods because they'd rather trade them back and forth for oil, so the devaluation effects are never felt in the US?
Sorry, that was last millennium. This is the new millennium. The money is starting to come home. Those greenbacks are now bad cheques that MUST bounce, and so protectionism is the new order of the day.
Man, the way they keep printing that money, I'm not really sure if I want to work for it any more. I mean, what's it going to be worth in 5 years? Why bother?
I'm going to make a still and go back to bartering. This money stuff is a total rip off.
What are you basing your uninformed opinion on?
1) It's ridiculously improbable that Moore could predict the level to which we would progress over a period of decades. If I ran a car company, and made a prediction that our cars would increase in fuel efficiency by this precise amount per year for the next 30 years, and we always did, what would you think? Would you think I was a prophet, or would you think we were holding back to match the targets I set?
2) It's standard industry practice to intentionally cripple processors within the same architecture in the name of artificial scarcity. AMD and Intel both do it, and have since the days of the 486 processor. What I'm describing isn't inconsistent with their behavior, it's totally consistent. You just don't believe that they would do it to the degree that I'm describing.
3) Intel followed up the P4 architecture years later with the Pentium M/Core/Core2/Atom architectures, and these kicked the living shit out of the P4 architecture. None of these are much more than a P3 with a smaller fab process.
4) There is no way in the world that Intel didn't know that this would be true. They already had the old architecture kicking around, waiting to be manufactured on a smaller scale, and they're too intelligent not to have done tests. They had to know, and yet they sold P4s for years before they ditched the architecture in favor of the old design.
5) Finally, there's billions of dollars to be gained by forcing people through the endless upgrade scheme, and no risk. If you hold back and lose the performance crown, you just hold back a little less, and you retake it.
On the other hand, if you come out with your best right away, and raise the bar high, and someone beats your best, you've got nothing left in the tank to retake the lead. Plus, the best you can manage will hit commodity pricing in a span of a few years, which isn't particularly profitable. The incentives create a pressure to put out something just better enough to justify exclusive pricing, then stick with that until it reaches the commodity pricing point, then do it again.
Intel are not altruists. They do precisely what will make the most money, and this is it. No other conclusion makes sense, considering the motives and pressures of the situation. It's obvious.
The same is true of Intel and AMD and most large corporate 'competitors'. They have unspoken agreements to compete in the areas that work out well for companies in their sector. It isn't beneficial to either company to throw all their technology onto the table at once, much better to be way ahead of the curve and release in tiny increments with consumers buying each generation of technology. That way, if your discoveries do ever lag behind pace, the consumer never sees it.
That's a very politically correct way of saying the exact same thing...
Come on... look on the bright side. Instead of your child getting blown apart by a land mine left over from the last invasion, they can get blown apart by a hunter-killer drone. That's WAY cooler.
Reminds me of Stephen King's The Dark Tower... maybe they could dress it up like a bear...
For fucks sake... what the hell do you guys think a "Multiplier Lock" is?
They don't just intentionally cripple architectures, they intentionally cripple perfectly working chips within the same architecture for the sake of creating artifical scarcity and speeding up obsolescence. They do it right in front of your face, and they always have. You're acting like this is a radical crackpot theory that came out of an LSD-pickled brain. It's not. It's business as usual.
You would be an absolute idiot to take this path, and probably accused of criminal negligence should improper data disclosure ever reach the point where a federal prosecutor got involved in a case where the data in question "Really Mattered."
Warmer... warmer... warmer...
Who would find this an appealing alternative to the status quo?
That's an interesting way of looking at it...you honestly believe that Intel deliberately designed a slower architecture (spending billions in the process) just for the hell of it?
No, I believe they designed a slower architecture so they could make billions of dollars and drive their product into immediate obsolescence and make billions of dollars more so they could drive their production into immediate obsolescence and make billions of dollars more so they could... ah hell, you get the idea.
Why are you so sure they didn't do this?
Not really, especially in the days when you had Intel and AMD racing to be the producer of the fastest chip.
Yeah, right. I remember a time they improved their process, and it sped things up too much, so they switched to a different architecture that would slow things back down. It was the P4. Then, after a while, they couldn't make that dog's breakfast architecture perform even with the improved fabrication. So, they switched back to their previous architecture. That's what we're buying now... P4 era fabrication technology with a slightly polished P3 architecture.
One might even interpret it as a self fulfilling prophecy.
Why sell chips that are 10x as fast, when you can sell chips that are 2x as fast, then sell the same people new chips that are 2x as fast, repeatedly.
It almost seems like a cartel engaged in price fixing. I expect that time will reveal that is what it always has been...
You're a pretty uncommon user, unless you're interested in really low-end models.
Well, one of my players has voice recording through a front mounted microphone, and in addition, has a line input that allows me to plug it into a mixing board and record sets. I can even plug an non-amplified electric guitar into it and record off that. I consider that device to be superior to an iPod, even if it isn't as pretty and flashy.
Another player can be broken in half and used as a USB thumb drive, which makes it trivially easy to use.
I consider both of these devices functionally superior, which is why I own them.
As far as I'm concerned, if the device has DRM on it, it's a low-end model. If it has DRM on it, it's not really my device. It's more of a tool to interact with my service provider. Considering that fact, if I was ever going to take possession of such a device and use it, I'd expect to receive it for free. The idea of actually paying for one of Apple's portable devices seems like something only a sucker would do. Fool and his money...