If all those vaccines you got didn't prevent you from contracting these illnesses, what was the point of getting them?
You seem to have two lines of reasoning going on:
(1) Parents who don't get vaccinations place their own children at risk, and should be charged with child abuse.
(2) Parents who don't get vaccinations place other people's children at risk, and should be charged with creating a public health hazard.
For #1, how can you logically not apply this to, say, letting your child go swimming in the ocean? [Parents who don't keep their kids out of the ocean place those children at risk, and so they should be charged with child abuse.]
For #2, if you got vaccinations, how are you at risk?
Have you ever debated with people who resorted to emotional arguements filled with logical inconsistencies. I'd be funny if you ranted about that in a separate thread.
Children who do not get the vaccines (without a documented medical needs exemption) should not be permitted to go to school or participate in activities with other children. Parents who do not vaccinate their children (again without a medical needs exemption) should have to explain to a court why they think they are entitled to put their child and others at risk of some very serious diseases.
So, just to be sure I understand your argument regarding the public health issue:
Parents who DO NOT get their children vaccinated risk spreading diease to the children of parents who DO get thier children vaccinated.
Your child being obese is not going to result in another child becoming sick. Vaccines serve two purposes. One is prevention of a disease in a person and the other is to prevent transmission of that disease.
So you are suggesting that my child being not vaccinated is going to cause another child to get a disease?
Remind me: What was the point of the vaccinations?
I'm of a mind that people like this should be charged with child abuse, regardless of their intentions.
Does this extend to all behavior that can be shown to be statistically more likely to result in injury, illness, or death?
There are millions of children who are obese due to diet. Parents are in charge of the diet, obesity statistically leads to illness and death, so by your logic, shouldn't parents of obese children should be charged with child abuse?
The Amish ride around in buggies, which result in a negligible number of child deaths. By comparison, loading a kid up in an automobile results in thousands of kids dying each year. Should parents who put their kids in cars be charged with child abuse?
Where do you draw the line between what risky behavior should be penalized with child abuse charges, and which risky behaviors are permissible.
Should you be required to explain to a court why you put your child in an automobile, or why you take him to McDonalds once a week, when you KNOW that these behaviors statistically increase the risk of him dying?
What if I happen to believe that evolution should be allowed to run its course, that all of these vaccinations are making us weaker a species, and that if a child is destined to succumb to one of these diseases, then that is nature's way.
Is this a point of view that constitutes child abuse?
People all over the developed worrd are making far more risky decisions involving their children every day. Why are anti-vaccination parents singled out for persecution?
I've lived both places too, and "cold and vicious" won't matter much.
City thugs are going to be completely out of their element once they get beyond the suburbs. Will they even *recognize* food when they see it? What are they going to do with a field of wheat or soybeans? Jump into a combine and harvest it? Lol...
It's funny you should mention Germany and Sweden. The entire EU is currently collapsing. Have you heard nothing of PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) economies? Greece just effectively defaulted on their debt a few days ago, Ireland has already gone tits-up, and Italy is next on the chopping block. They keep pouring money into Greece to postpone the inevitable: A complete banking collapse. Once Italy goes, France goes, Germany can't contain anything at that point, and that's the end of the Euro.
What's this have to do with oil? See for yourself:
The PIIGS economies are imploding, and they just happen to be the ones most dependent on oil.
There is no time to develop nuclear plants on a scale to replace oil. You cannot just re-train a bunch of paper-shuffling office drones to go out and build nuclear plants. The number of engineers required to build what needs to be built, in the time frame in which it needs to be built, simply does not exist. Before you create enough nuclear engineers to build all the plants, you'll be out of time.
There is no conceivable alternative energy infrastructure that can take the place of oil in the time frame that we need it to take place.
There is no way that I'd be able to convince you of this in a Slashdot post. You will have to research it for yourself. You can start with dieoff.org and theoildrum.com, and from there you will probably find the right keywords to type into Google to do further research.
You have very little time left to get to a rural setting, away from dense populations.
Out here in rural, we know how to grow food. We have livestock. We are excellent marksmen, and we take care of our neighbors. Your talk of "rural poor" brings a smile to my face: The rural poor are my friends, family, and neighbors.
Poor does not mean that you are starving, or that you do not have a fulfilling life.
As the oil dries up, and the cost of growing and shipping food to the cities begins to manifest itself in shortages, how do you think the "urban poor" are going to fare? Are they going to plant a garden on the sidewalk? Or move some goats and chickens into the apartment with them? Of course not.
But do you think the urban poor will just passively sit back and starve to death? No. They will revolt. First the cities will burn, then the violence will spread to the suburbs. It's a long way from the middle of the city to rural, and a lot of well-armed marksmen to get through on the way.
Are your odds of survival 100% in rural? Of course not. Are they better than the 25% odds you might have in the cities or suburbs. Yes, by a long shot.
If you wait until the day the U.S. govt cannot borrow any more to start your subsistence farm, you stand little chance of actually succeeding.
The time to start is now.
The world economy is going to collapse. Fossil fuels have enabled us to grow our population from around 1B in 1850 to 7B. That's a 7-fold increase in people in 150 years. And the majority of this is due to oil. And oil has peaked. There is nowhere to go but down.
Overlay a graph of world oil production with a graph of world population. It is no coincidence that they line up almost exactly. When the oil curve begins its descent, ask yourself what is going to happen to the population curve.
This is the beginning of it. Oil production has peaked. We simply cannot extract oil from the ground any faster than we are today, but the population continues to grow.
The downside of the oil curve will be much steeper than the upswing.
There is no renewable resource or technology that can begin to compete with the energy efficiency of oil. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear... there is not enough time or resources to replace the energy demands in the time frame we need it.
Over the next several decades, there is going to be a vast thinning of the human population. For the first time in human history, world population is going to decline.
The first manifestations of it is what we are seeing now. People who cannot get jobs, wages being cut, pensions being slashed, municipal bankruptcies... These things lead to social unrest, and when the changes that people expect never come to pass, rioting and revolution are not far away. The cities will burn.
Ultimately, the trouble is that most people won't know what to blame for their predicament. They'll point their fingers at "the rich", or "the poor", or "the capitalists", or "the communists". But the reality is, with oil running out, we simply cannot sustain 7B people on this planet. A vast number have to die.
If you have the financial means, secure yourself a homestead in a rural area now. Begin acquiring the means of production: Tools, farming equipment, livestock. And remember that knowledge and experience will be your two greatest assets, not your possessions. All your possessions will do you no good at all if you don't know how to use them, and the skills you need to survive in a rural setting are not something you can learn overnight.
If we're lucky, we may have a few years yet before things start getting really bad. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Look at the oil production curve and how many years it took to reach it's peak, and consider that the downside will be several-fold faster. If population must decrease in anything close to the same time frame, it's going to be a very rough ride for most. Safe havens will be far away from the cities and suburbs.
When social networks enable a segment of the population to challenge an oppressive government in the middle east, those social networks are championed.
When social networks enable a segment of the population to challenge an oppressive government in Europe, those social networks are vilified.
Anyone else see the reports of Facebook taking down pages where people were organizing riots? Or hear the reports of RIM assisting the UK government in catching those using its services to organize riots?
Can you imagine the outcry if these companies had turned against the popular uprisings in the middle east. But when its rich white European oligarchy that is being challenged... silence.
Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, CNN, NPR... all propaganda stations that paint the rioters in the most demeaning light possible. "Mindless violence", they call it.
Want something a little less biased toward the Western oligarchy? The hypocrisy is not lost on the Arab media. Read Al-Jazeera Just as when the mideast riots broke out, they are currently the only ones giving the oppressed an equal voice in the media.
For the rest of Europe: this discontent is coming soon to a city near you.
The only way this was contained last night was due to a vast deployment of security forces. This is costing the government tens of millions every day. Money that they cannot afford to spend. When the security forces inevitably pull back, the rioting will resume, because the underlying cause of the riots is not going to be addressed, any more than it was addressed in Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, etc.
As the austerity measures throughout Europe begin to kick in, and the European economies slowly descend into a pit of despair, a civil war between the haves and the have-nots is inevitable. And unlike in WWII, there will be no convincing the poor, unwashed masses that their enemies are the poor, unwashed masses in the neighboring country. This time, thanks to our communication channels, the have-nots will know who their real enemies are, and what we're seeing now across the UK is the beginning of what will likely be regarded as WWIII. But it will be more akin to a global civil war, rather than a world war as we are accustomed to thinking of it.
America is not immune. Once the dam breaks in Europe, it'll be less than 12 months before the unrest reaches our shores.
Invest in gold, guns, food, and farmland, and if you value your life, get far away from the cities and suburbs while you still have time.
Ok, save this post. Bookmark it, copy and paste it, or whatever. I'll tell you exactly how this is all going to go down, and approximately how soon your finances -- and America in general -- will be in the gutter.
The S&P rating is just the first irreparable crack in the dam. Moodys and Fitch will follow up with ratings downgrades shortly. The time frame here is weeks to months, not months to years.
The first major cracks in the dam happened back in 2007-2008 with oil prices skyrocketing, major banks failing, and the housing market collapsing, but they managed to plaster (paper) over this crack well enough to buy us a few years. However, without addressing the fundamental problems, it was just a matter of time before more cracks started showing up.
They can't paper over this crack. The S&P downgrade is going to have a negative effect on treasuries and bonds. Not just at the federal level, but at the municipal level as well. In the coming weeks, you'll see thousands of municipal bonds be downgraded, as many, many state and local budgets are intimately dependent on federal spending.
The negative effect is of course that investors will start to see these investments as more risky, and demand higher interest rates, just like when your credit rating goes down and you can't get low interest credit cards any more.
We are now officially in the "feedback" phase.
The ratings downgrade will cause interest rates to go up. Rising interest rates means that the federal government is even in worse fiscal shape than now, necessitating even greater cuts if they hope to improve their credit rating. And of course, any federal cuts are going to negatively impact employment and the economy in general, and thus tax revenues will go down.
Basically, the fed is up against the wall now. If they try to stimulate the economy via QE3, the ratings agencies will kick them down another notch, sending interest rates even higher. But if there is no QE3, the economy crashes immediately.
Either way, the end result is the same: America defaults. Either we default outright by not paying our bills, or we perform the functional equivalent of default by printing our way out of debt. Whether or not you want to label the latter a default is academic, because the effect it has on the US is the same: Investors are going to stop buying treasuries, and we're going to be forced to live within our means.
As stated above, the time frame until Moodys and Fitch follow up with a ratings downgrade is a matter of weeks to months. And S&P will probably downgrade us again before the end of the year, because once Moodys and Fitch downgrade, the prospects of America paying its debts becomes significantly worse.
America's bonds will be rated junk (speculative) status inside of three years. This is optimistic. Depending on how fast things escalate, it could be as little as three months. This is how long you have to get your shit together before it all comes crashing down.
If you have money, now is the time to invest in guns, gold, and food. If you can, move out to the country and learn how to homestead, because what's going on in London hotspots right now is going to be happening in cities around the world: The cities will burn.
I won't be coming back to debate this. If you've had ear to the ground, you already know what's coming and you've been getting prepared. If you've got your head in the sand like 99% of the population, no amount of facts, reasoning, or logic is going to convince you of what's coming. If you're part of the 1% that is not afraid to face reality, but nobody has sent you the wakeup call yet, well, consider this it. Get on the web, research "peak oil", "die-off", and start reading zerohedge. That will get you pointed in the right direction.
I doubt I've posted more than 10-20 times to Slashdot, but I would not be where I am today without the knowledge and insight I've gained from the people here. You have helped make me make a good bit of money doing an easy job (IT), and it gave me the resources that I needed to save myself from the coming shitstorm. Take care, and good luck everyone:-)
Thought experiment repost... (posted anonymously by accident)
The year is 2850. Humans have created wormholes, and these wormholes allow them to effectively teleport from Earth to any region of space where a wormhole has been established. After 150 years of development, the farthest spaceport established is now one light-week from Earth.
A camera at this spaceport constantly beams a signal back to Earth, and one day it records a murder. A week later, when the signal reaches Earth, police jump on the case. Before they run off to investigate, however, a technical consultant at the police department -- who is an ardent Slashdot reader -- informs the investigators that, from their frame of reference on Earth, this murder just happened a few minutes ago, and not a week ago as the police may have naively assumed.
The police exchange perplexed looks, and then teleport to the remote spaceport and begin investigating the spaceport residents.
At the spaceport, nobody seems to recall a murder taking place that day. However, they all clearly recall one from a week ago, and show the police the body. The body matches the one shown murdered in the video, and after taking reports, the somewhat bewildered police take the body and teleport back to Earth with it.
Back on Earth, the police tell the aforementioned technical consultant that he must have been wrong, as everyone on the spaceport agreed that the murder actually took place a week ago. The consultant smiles, and proceeds to explain to the police that this is expected: From the reference frame of those on the spaceport, the murder actually took place a week ago, and only from the point of view of those on Earth did it just take place a few hours ago.
The police are thoroughly confused by this twist of logic, and resign themselves to simply not understanding the mysteries of space and time. Nonetheless, they have a job to do, and so they proceed to take the body down to the coroner. They tell the coroner that they have the body of a man that was just killed a few hours ago, and to look for any clues that may reveal the identity of the murderer. The coroner takes one look at the body and tells the police that they are crazy -- and that this person has clearly been dead for a week, and not for a few hours as the police claim.
And so there lies the conundrum: Who is wrong? (1) The police, spaceport residents, coroner, and the dead guy, who all seem to agree that the event took place a week ago or (2) the educated Slashdot reader who says that, from somebody's point of view, this guy just died a few hours ago?
Essentially, any entity could hijack your software and make it their own.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
The only people who would be remotely interested in the underlying code would be other developers, and if they really wanted it that badly, then they could simply duplicate it. A decompiler does not output beautiful code, but for the purpose of figuring out how somebody did something tricky, it's good enough. A decent programmer can fill in the rest of the details.
You seem to be imagining a situation where a team of programmers takes something the Linux kernel and makes huge changes to it that results in a noticeably distinct piece of software, and keeps it closed source in order to make a profit. You might get some rogue group trying this from time to time, but there's no business model here. It takes a lot of resources to do something like this, and without copyright there just isn't any way to make money off of it. End users don't care, and it's not like you are going to hold the rest of the kernel team hostage over the code. They'd just take whatever bits they liked, reverse-engineer them, and incorporate them into the mainline kernel.
If there were no copyrights at all, anyone could pick up any GPL project, modify it with some uber-cool new feature that everyone just has to have, then redistribute it without ever showing the source code to their modification, essentially turning it in a closed source project.
You have blinders on. What good would it do to close the source if people could copy freely copy the software? End users don't care if the source is available or not. If someone did decide to close source a modification to software, it would be relatively trivial to decompile and duplicate it if that were important. Copyright is the only thing preventing this.
The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here.
You are wrong. Take Ardour or gEDA for example. I'm sure you will point out how unsophisticated these are compared to their commercial counterparts, but these programs are quite functional and suitable for 75% of what people need to do. If there were no commercial software counterparts to these, you'd better believe the companies that needed the software would contribute resources to seeing that the free versions did what they needed them to do.
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Unsubstantiated bullshit.
Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
You jest, but I don't think you're really all that far off. From the article:
Experts said IPTi involved giving babies doses of an older anti-malaria drug, Fansidar... In early studies, it was shown to decrease malaria cases about 25 percent. But each dose provided protection for only a month.
Since it is not safe or practical to give Fansidar constantly to babies... World Health Organization scientists had doubts about it.
The health agency's objections were met with "intense and aggressive opposition" from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation
What do you want to bet this is exactly the kind of "cure" that the Gates Foundation is looking for: The kind that you need to keep buying every month for the rest of your life.
For instance, as useful as Google is, it's a pain to try to perform queries for things such as "a disease that begins with the letter 'c' and involves a body's inability to produce energy from flour-based foods".
I just typed in "disease digest flour" (minus the quotes) into Google, and the third match was Celiac Disease, which I'm assuming is the correct answer. It didn't seem like much of a pain in the ass to me -- it took less than 15 seconds, including the time to think up the search terms. I don't see where an "ontology" buys you anything here. It just makes it 10x harder to write up a document on the backend.
I've seen this argument before; that the semantic web and ontologies somehow make searches easier, but I've never seen anyone actually give an example that wasn't easily disproven. It's always been arguments like yours: a little hand-waving and the claim that "this is hard using search engines, but easy using the semantic web", and then wording a query in a way that is deliberately obtuse ("inability to produce energy") so as to confuse a search engine.
So... I'm calling you on this. I've illustrated that using the search engine isn't really as hard as you're making it out to be here. Care to try again?
While you will be able to copy the binary if I release it (and assuming you can break whatever DRM I use) I will not be required to give out the source.
In this case the source is irrelevant. In the absence of copyright laws the binary can be freely copied, cracked, decompiled, and reverse engineered. If your software was at all popular, the resources you would have to expend to keep the source hidden would far outweigh any benefits of doing so. You'd be one man against an army of thousands, and there would be no way you could win.
The only reason you can benefit with closed source today is because existing laws give you powerful weapons (lawyers and judges) to fight with. The GPL is just a counter-tactic that says tells us we need to pick up the same weapons in order to level the playing field.
If it were up to most of us who license code under the GPL (and I'm one of them), the world would be a better place if both sides could agree to put down their weapons. But that means abolishing copyright laws, and as the aggressors, your side has to make the first move.
I have to wonder about the long term viability of this project. With India's struggling masses, you have to wonder if the money might be better spent elsewhere.
With equal access to education, maybe they could learn to do a lot more stuff for themselves. Perhaps they could learn enough to be able to contribute something valuable to society, and then have the ability to buy vaccines on their own.
This same defense against providing equal access to educational resources always comes up in these discussions: "These people don't need access to education, they just need to survive!". It's a deceptive, emotionally-charged argument -- the equivalent of "But think of the children!" -- and it can be succinctly refuted with the adage: "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime."
No real surprise, incidently, that Bill Gates wants to give them fish instead of teaching them to fish for themselves. Megacorps and the uber-rich don't get to where they are with without plenty of people to exploit along the way...
Slashdot Mirror
if your kid's going to be sharing a space with others then you've got to respect those others' basic right to health
Could you explain why you got vaccinated?
Such objections are a danger to public health.
If all those vaccines you got didn't prevent you from contracting these illnesses, what was the point of getting them?
You seem to have two lines of reasoning going on:
(1) Parents who don't get vaccinations place their own children at risk, and should be charged with child abuse.
(2) Parents who don't get vaccinations place other people's children at risk, and should be charged with creating a public health hazard.
For #1, how can you logically not apply this to, say, letting your child go swimming in the ocean? [Parents who don't keep their kids out of the ocean place those children at risk, and so they should be charged with child abuse.]
For #2, if you got vaccinations, how are you at risk?
Have you ever debated with people who resorted to emotional arguements filled with logical inconsistencies. I'd be funny if you ranted about that in a separate thread.
Children who do not get the vaccines (without a documented medical needs exemption) should not be permitted to go to school or participate in activities with other children. Parents who do not vaccinate their children (again without a medical needs exemption) should have to explain to a court why they think they are entitled to put their child and others at risk of some very serious diseases.
So, just to be sure I understand your argument regarding the public health issue:
Parents who DO NOT get their children vaccinated risk spreading diease to the children of parents who DO get thier children vaccinated.
Is that correct?
Your child being obese is not going to result in another child becoming sick. Vaccines serve two purposes. One is prevention of a disease in a person and the other is to prevent transmission of that disease.
So you are suggesting that my child being not vaccinated is going to cause another child to get a disease?
Remind me: What was the point of the vaccinations?
You're trying to modify your position now to obscure what I was objecting to.
I don't disagree with your concerns about the risk to public safety. But that is not how you started off your post. Here are your words:
I'm of a mind that people like this should be charged with child abuse
Do you want to recant that statement? If not, I would like to know how you defend it. The threat to public safety is a separate issue.
Please, oh please let Darwin be right at least this one time and let the stupid and gullible die off.
Just to be clear on your position:
Evolution that selects for intelligence: good.
Evolution that selects for measels resistance: bad.
Do I have it right?
I'm of a mind that people like this should be charged with child abuse, regardless of their intentions.
Does this extend to all behavior that can be shown to be statistically more likely to result in injury, illness, or death?
There are millions of children who are obese due to diet. Parents are in charge of the diet, obesity statistically leads to illness and death, so by your logic, shouldn't parents of obese children should be charged with child abuse?
The Amish ride around in buggies, which result in a negligible number of child deaths. By comparison, loading a kid up in an automobile results in thousands of kids dying each year. Should parents who put their kids in cars be charged with child abuse?
Where do you draw the line between what risky behavior should be penalized with child abuse charges, and which risky behaviors are permissible.
Should you be required to explain to a court why you put your child in an automobile, or why you take him to McDonalds once a week, when you KNOW that these behaviors statistically increase the risk of him dying?
What if I happen to believe that evolution should be allowed to run its course, that all of these vaccinations are making us weaker a species, and that if a child is destined to succumb to one of these diseases, then that is nature's way.
Is this a point of view that constitutes child abuse?
People all over the developed worrd are making far more risky decisions involving their children every day. Why are anti-vaccination parents singled out for persecution?
Modern society counteracts evolution by protecting the weak...
Isn't this what vaccines do?
Here's the answer you are looking for:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm179225.htm
Beer is not regulated by the FDA, but rather ATF, and they do not have labeling laws.
I've lived both places too, and "cold and vicious" won't matter much.
City thugs are going to be completely out of their element once they get beyond the suburbs. Will they even *recognize* food when they see it? What are they going to do with a field of wheat or soybeans? Jump into a combine and harvest it? Lol...
It's funny you should mention Germany and Sweden. The entire EU is currently collapsing. Have you heard nothing of PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) economies? Greece just effectively defaulted on their debt a few days ago, Ireland has already gone tits-up, and Italy is next on the chopping block. They keep pouring money into Greece to postpone the inevitable: A complete banking collapse. Once Italy goes, France goes, Germany can't contain anything at that point, and that's the end of the Euro.
What's this have to do with oil? See for yourself:
http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/files/2010/04/oil_eurotrib.png
The PIIGS economies are imploding, and they just happen to be the ones most dependent on oil.
There is no time to develop nuclear plants on a scale to replace oil. You cannot just re-train a bunch of paper-shuffling office drones to go out and build nuclear plants. The number of engineers required to build what needs to be built, in the time frame in which it needs to be built, simply does not exist. Before you create enough nuclear engineers to build all the plants, you'll be out of time.
Maybe if we started 20 years ago.
There is no conceivable alternative energy infrastructure that can take the place of oil in the time frame that we need it to take place.
There is no way that I'd be able to convince you of this in a Slashdot post. You will have to research it for yourself. You can start with dieoff.org and theoildrum.com, and from there you will probably find the right keywords to type into Google to do further research.
You have very little time left to get to a rural setting, away from dense populations.
Out here in rural, we know how to grow food. We have livestock. We are excellent marksmen, and we take care of our neighbors. Your talk of "rural poor" brings a smile to my face: The rural poor are my friends, family, and neighbors.
Poor does not mean that you are starving, or that you do not have a fulfilling life.
As the oil dries up, and the cost of growing and shipping food to the cities begins to manifest itself in shortages, how do you think the "urban poor" are going to fare? Are they going to plant a garden on the sidewalk? Or move some goats and chickens into the apartment with them? Of course not.
But do you think the urban poor will just passively sit back and starve to death? No. They will revolt. First the cities will burn, then the violence will spread to the suburbs. It's a long way from the middle of the city to rural, and a lot of well-armed marksmen to get through on the way.
Are your odds of survival 100% in rural? Of course not. Are they better than the 25% odds you might have in the cities or suburbs. Yes, by a long shot.
If you wait until the day the U.S. govt cannot borrow any more to start your subsistence farm, you stand little chance of actually succeeding.
The time to start is now.
The world economy is going to collapse. Fossil fuels have enabled us to grow our population from around 1B in 1850 to 7B. That's a 7-fold increase in people in 150 years. And the majority of this is due to oil. And oil has peaked. There is nowhere to go but down.
Overlay a graph of world oil production with a graph of world population. It is no coincidence that they line up almost exactly. When the oil curve begins its descent, ask yourself what is going to happen to the population curve.
This is the beginning of it. Oil production has peaked. We simply cannot extract oil from the ground any faster than we are today, but the population continues to grow.
The downside of the oil curve will be much steeper than the upswing.
There is no renewable resource or technology that can begin to compete with the energy efficiency of oil. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear... there is not enough time or resources to replace the energy demands in the time frame we need it.
Over the next several decades, there is going to be a vast thinning of the human population. For the first time in human history, world population is going to decline.
The first manifestations of it is what we are seeing now. People who cannot get jobs, wages being cut, pensions being slashed, municipal bankruptcies... These things lead to social unrest, and when the changes that people expect never come to pass, rioting and revolution are not far away. The cities will burn.
Ultimately, the trouble is that most people won't know what to blame for their predicament. They'll point their fingers at "the rich", or "the poor", or "the capitalists", or "the communists". But the reality is, with oil running out, we simply cannot sustain 7B people on this planet. A vast number have to die.
If you have the financial means, secure yourself a homestead in a rural area now. Begin acquiring the means of production: Tools, farming equipment, livestock. And remember that knowledge and experience will be your two greatest assets, not your possessions. All your possessions will do you no good at all if you don't know how to use them, and the skills you need to survive in a rural setting are not something you can learn overnight.
If we're lucky, we may have a few years yet before things start getting really bad. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Look at the oil production curve and how many years it took to reach it's peak, and consider that the downside will be several-fold faster. If population must decrease in anything close to the same time frame, it's going to be a very rough ride for most. Safe havens will be far away from the cities and suburbs.
When social networks enable a segment of the population to challenge an oppressive government in the middle east, those social networks are championed.
When social networks enable a segment of the population to challenge an oppressive government in Europe, those social networks are vilified.
Anyone else see the reports of Facebook taking down pages where people were organizing riots? Or hear the reports of RIM assisting the UK government in catching those using its services to organize riots?
Can you imagine the outcry if these companies had turned against the popular uprisings in the middle east. But when its rich white European oligarchy that is being challenged... silence.
Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, CNN, NPR... all propaganda stations that paint the rioters in the most demeaning light possible. "Mindless violence", they call it.
Want something a little less biased toward the Western oligarchy? The hypocrisy is not lost on the Arab media. Read Al-Jazeera Just as when the mideast riots broke out, they are currently the only ones giving the oppressed an equal voice in the media.
For the rest of Europe: this discontent is coming soon to a city near you.
The only way this was contained last night was due to a vast deployment of security forces. This is costing the government tens of millions every day. Money that they cannot afford to spend. When the security forces inevitably pull back, the rioting will resume, because the underlying cause of the riots is not going to be addressed, any more than it was addressed in Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, etc.
As the austerity measures throughout Europe begin to kick in, and the European economies slowly descend into a pit of despair, a civil war between the haves and the have-nots is inevitable. And unlike in WWII, there will be no convincing the poor, unwashed masses that their enemies are the poor, unwashed masses in the neighboring country. This time, thanks to our communication channels, the have-nots will know who their real enemies are, and what we're seeing now across the UK is the beginning of what will likely be regarded as WWIII. But it will be more akin to a global civil war, rather than a world war as we are accustomed to thinking of it.
America is not immune. Once the dam breaks in Europe, it'll be less than 12 months before the unrest reaches our shores.
Invest in gold, guns, food, and farmland, and if you value your life, get far away from the cities and suburbs while you still have time.
Heh heh...
Ok, save this post. Bookmark it, copy and paste it, or whatever. I'll tell you exactly how this is all going to go down, and approximately how soon your finances -- and America in general -- will be in the gutter.
The S&P rating is just the first irreparable crack in the dam. Moodys and Fitch will follow up with ratings downgrades shortly. The time frame here is weeks to months, not months to years.
The first major cracks in the dam happened back in 2007-2008 with oil prices skyrocketing, major banks failing, and the housing market collapsing, but they managed to plaster (paper) over this crack well enough to buy us a few years. However, without addressing the fundamental problems, it was just a matter of time before more cracks started showing up.
They can't paper over this crack. The S&P downgrade is going to have a negative effect on treasuries and bonds. Not just at the federal level, but at the municipal level as well. In the coming weeks, you'll see thousands of municipal bonds be downgraded, as many, many state and local budgets are intimately dependent on federal spending.
The negative effect is of course that investors will start to see these investments as more risky, and demand higher interest rates, just like when your credit rating goes down and you can't get low interest credit cards any more.
We are now officially in the "feedback" phase.
The ratings downgrade will cause interest rates to go up. Rising interest rates means that the federal government is even in worse fiscal shape than now, necessitating even greater cuts if they hope to improve their credit rating. And of course, any federal cuts are going to negatively impact employment and the economy in general, and thus tax revenues will go down.
Basically, the fed is up against the wall now. If they try to stimulate the economy via QE3, the ratings agencies will kick them down another notch, sending interest rates even higher. But if there is no QE3, the economy crashes immediately.
Either way, the end result is the same: America defaults. Either we default outright by not paying our bills, or we perform the functional equivalent of default by printing our way out of debt. Whether or not you want to label the latter a default is academic, because the effect it has on the US is the same: Investors are going to stop buying treasuries, and we're going to be forced to live within our means.
As stated above, the time frame until Moodys and Fitch follow up with a ratings downgrade is a matter of weeks to months. And S&P will probably downgrade us again before the end of the year, because once Moodys and Fitch downgrade, the prospects of America paying its debts becomes significantly worse.
America's bonds will be rated junk (speculative) status inside of three years. This is optimistic. Depending on how fast things escalate, it could be as little as three months. This is how long you have to get your shit together before it all comes crashing down.
If you have money, now is the time to invest in guns, gold, and food. If you can, move out to the country and learn how to homestead, because what's going on in London hotspots right now is going to be happening in cities around the world: The cities will burn.
I won't be coming back to debate this. If you've had ear to the ground, you already know what's coming and you've been getting prepared. If you've got your head in the sand like 99% of the population, no amount of facts, reasoning, or logic is going to convince you of what's coming. If you're part of the 1% that is not afraid to face reality, but nobody has sent you the wakeup call yet, well, consider this it. Get on the web, research "peak oil", "die-off", and start reading zerohedge. That will get you pointed in the right direction.
I doubt I've posted more than 10-20 times to Slashdot, but I would not be where I am today without the knowledge and insight I've gained from the people here. You have helped make me make a good bit of money doing an easy job (IT), and it gave me the resources that I needed to save myself from the coming shitstorm. Take care, and good luck everyone :-)
Thought experiment repost... (posted anonymously by accident)
The year is 2850. Humans have created wormholes, and these wormholes allow them to effectively teleport from Earth to any region of space where a wormhole has been established. After 150 years of development, the farthest spaceport established is now one light-week from Earth.
A camera at this spaceport constantly beams a signal back to Earth, and one day it records a murder. A week later, when the signal reaches Earth, police jump on the case. Before they run off to investigate, however, a technical consultant at the police department -- who is an ardent Slashdot reader -- informs the investigators that, from their frame of reference on Earth, this murder just happened a few minutes ago, and not a week ago as the police may have naively assumed.
The police exchange perplexed looks, and then teleport to the remote spaceport and begin investigating the spaceport residents.
At the spaceport, nobody seems to recall a murder taking place that day. However, they all clearly recall one from a week ago, and show the police the body. The body matches the one shown murdered in the video, and after taking reports, the somewhat bewildered police take the body and teleport back to Earth with it.
Back on Earth, the police tell the aforementioned technical consultant that he must have been wrong, as everyone on the spaceport agreed that the murder actually took place a week ago. The consultant smiles, and proceeds to explain to the police that this is expected: From the reference frame of those on the spaceport, the murder actually took place a week ago, and only from the point of view of those on Earth did it just take place a few hours ago.
The police are thoroughly confused by this twist of logic, and resign themselves to simply not understanding the mysteries of space and time. Nonetheless, they have a job to do, and so they proceed to take the body down to the coroner. They tell the coroner that they have the body of a man that was just killed a few hours ago, and to look for any clues that may reveal the identity of the murderer. The coroner takes one look at the body and tells the police that they are crazy -- and that this person has clearly been dead for a week, and not for a few hours as the police claim.
And so there lies the conundrum: Who is wrong? (1) The police, spaceport residents, coroner, and the dead guy, who all seem to agree that the event took place a week ago or (2) the educated Slashdot reader who says that, from somebody's point of view, this guy just died a few hours ago?
If the objectives of the GPL are of significant importance to you, then you need to be a Copyright supporter.
You don't seem to get it. The objectives of the GPL will be fulfilled the day copyrights are abolished.
Essentially, any entity could hijack your software and make it their own.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
The only people who would be remotely interested in the underlying code would be other developers, and if they really wanted it that badly, then they could simply duplicate it. A decompiler does not output beautiful code, but for the purpose of figuring out how somebody did something tricky, it's good enough. A decent programmer can fill in the rest of the details.
You seem to be imagining a situation where a team of programmers takes something the Linux kernel and makes huge changes to it that results in a noticeably distinct piece of software, and keeps it closed source in order to make a profit. You might get some rogue group trying this from time to time, but there's no business model here. It takes a lot of resources to do something like this, and without copyright there just isn't any way to make money off of it. End users don't care, and it's not like you are going to hold the rest of the kernel team hostage over the code. They'd just take whatever bits they liked, reverse-engineer them, and incorporate them into the mainline kernel.
If there were no copyrights at all, anyone could pick up any GPL project, modify it with some uber-cool new feature that everyone just has to have, then redistribute it without ever showing the source code to their modification, essentially turning it in a closed source project.
You have blinders on. What good would it do to close the source if people could copy freely copy the software? End users don't care if the source is available or not. If someone did decide to close source a modification to software, it would be relatively trivial to decompile and duplicate it if that were important. Copyright is the only thing preventing this.
The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here.
You are wrong. Take Ardour or gEDA for example. I'm sure you will point out how unsophisticated these are compared to their commercial counterparts, but these programs are quite functional and suitable for 75% of what people need to do. If there were no commercial software counterparts to these, you'd better believe the companies that needed the software would contribute resources to seeing that the free versions did what they needed them to do.
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Unsubstantiated bullshit.
Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
You jest, but I don't think you're really all that far off. From the article:
What do you want to bet this is exactly the kind of "cure" that the Gates Foundation is looking for: The kind that you need to keep buying every month for the rest of your life.
For instance, as useful as Google is, it's a pain to try to perform queries for things such as "a disease that begins with the letter 'c' and involves a body's inability to produce energy from flour-based foods".
I just typed in "disease digest flour" (minus the quotes) into Google, and the third match was Celiac Disease, which I'm assuming is the correct answer. It didn't seem like much of a pain in the ass to me -- it took less than 15 seconds, including the time to think up the search terms. I don't see where an "ontology" buys you anything here. It just makes it 10x harder to write up a document on the backend.
I've seen this argument before; that the semantic web and ontologies somehow make searches easier, but I've never seen anyone actually give an example that wasn't easily disproven. It's always been arguments like yours: a little hand-waving and the claim that "this is hard using search engines, but easy using the semantic web", and then wording a query in a way that is deliberately obtuse ("inability to produce energy") so as to confuse a search engine.
So... I'm calling you on this. I've illustrated that using the search engine isn't really as hard as you're making it out to be here. Care to try again?
While you will be able to copy the binary if I release it (and assuming you can break whatever DRM I use) I will not be required to give out the source.
In this case the source is irrelevant. In the absence of copyright laws the binary can be freely copied, cracked, decompiled, and reverse engineered. If your software was at all popular, the resources you would have to expend to keep the source hidden would far outweigh any benefits of doing so. You'd be one man against an army of thousands, and there would be no way you could win.
The only reason you can benefit with closed source today is because existing laws give you powerful weapons (lawyers and judges) to fight with. The GPL is just a counter-tactic that says tells us we need to pick up the same weapons in order to level the playing field.
If it were up to most of us who license code under the GPL (and I'm one of them), the world would be a better place if both sides could agree to put down their weapons. But that means abolishing copyright laws, and as the aggressors, your side has to make the first move.
I have to wonder about the long term viability of this project. With India's struggling masses, you have to wonder if the money might be better spent elsewhere.
With equal access to education, maybe they could learn to do a lot more stuff for themselves. Perhaps they could learn enough to be able to contribute something valuable to society, and then have the ability to buy vaccines on their own.
This same defense against providing equal access to educational resources always comes up in these discussions: "These people don't need access to education, they just need to survive!". It's a deceptive, emotionally-charged argument -- the equivalent of "But think of the children!" -- and it can be succinctly refuted with the adage: "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime."
No real surprise, incidently, that Bill Gates wants to give them fish instead of teaching them to fish for themselves. Megacorps and the uber-rich don't get to where they are with without plenty of people to exploit along the way...
Hm, ok, it's a new slashdot low... I didn't read the article, the summary, or even the 2nd paragraph of the post I was replying to. :-)