Yours is the attitude of an idiot refusing to acknowledge harsh reality. This is a world with fixed resources and a fixed amount of land. Humans have an almost limitless capacity for finding ways to enhance their own genetic survival and limit that of others. SOMEONE is always choosing whether others live or die, whether babies not their own get to be born or not. There are plenty of subtle ways to discourage or prevent childbirth; a gun is hardly required. Frankly something so obvious would actually work against anyone plotting such a thing on a grand scale. Right here in my own state, not even a century ago, people in "sanitariums" were being forcibly sterilized.
You don't seem to realize that circumstances WILL control the population, one way or another. The real question is whether we choose to control that process or let it happen to us seemingly at random (but not). I was suggesting a GLOBAL CONSENSUS to take control of the process and put a stop to the random shit hitting the fan: global wars, epidemics, genocide, starvation. Population pressure and competition for resources causes those things. Aren't you getting tired of those Christian Childrens' Fund commercials yet?
You see monsters under the bed even when there are none. That says more about your state of mind than my intent.
I think you've still failed to understand the dynamic, and your declaration that my conclusions are wrong doesn't make them wrong. Many other people smarter and more specialized than I have observed the same dynamic and processes and reached much the same conclusions. The problem is still a quantitative one and not a qualitative one, whether that fits your desired worldview or not. I don't find your refusal to acknowledge the problem useful nor in any way valuable.
I suspect you have a much more intimate familiarity with religion, delusion, and dogma than you would like the rest of us to know, after that screed. I didn't mention global warming, nor was I even specifically thinking of it at the time I wrote that. Your rant reveals far more about your own biases and beliefs than it does mine.
Ehrlich may have been off by many decades, but that doesn't make his observation of the problem entirely wrong. It's still quite likely that hundreds of millions of people are going to die of starvation in a relatively short span of time; my guess is that it will happen when petroleum becomes so scarce that it can no longer prop up agricultural yields and harvesting. Global warming causing a shift in temperate zones and a major loss of crop species or farmland is only a distant second theory. We're only able to feed as many people as we are now because of the input of petroleum into the process, from synthetic fertilizer made from it to insecticides derived from it to gasoline used to fuel the equipment, etc. When petroleum becomes truly scarce, which EVENTUALLY it will, we'll be in for a world of hurt, literally.
I'm not nearly so confident as you that we'll find some miraculous substitute to petroleum. Everything put forward so far will require more energy to produce than can ever be recovered as useful work... and that doesn't even factor in the other chemical uses of petroleum that will be even harder to replicate.
From my perspective, it's the simple fact that there have been too many fucking people engaged in these excesses that truly make them excesses in the first place. So yes, Mister Grumpy Old Man, overpopulation and by extension population density and overcrowding are pretty much the causes of every other problem we face.
The problem is STILL overpopulation. You might think those facts are a counter-argument, but they're not. The problem is both the total human population AND the fact that there are too many people living in those "first world" nations and consuming resources at that rate. Birthrates are ALWAYS higher in those regions where survival is least assured, but places outside population pressure on those first world nations (and leads to emigration). If the global population was an ideal 500 million, as Arthur C. Clarke and others have suggested, then even if those first world countries existed as such their populations would be dramatically less, the outside pressures dramatically less, and there would be dramatically less people consuming resources and producing that degree of toxic by-products. There's a lot more to population dynamics than your oversimplified argument acknowledges. Ergo, the problem is still overpopulation: reduce the global population, and the overconsumption is much less an issue because there is that much more resource to go around, and that much more land and ocean per capita to absorb and remediate the toxic effects.
As someone else suggested, I've never "done" drugs nor alcohol, so I don't really know which nasty thing has which exact effect. I think the context was sufficient to make my intent clear, though. I'd thank you for the information, but I *hope* I'll never actually need to know that.
The referenced article wasn't objective at all. It was just spiteful-sounding chest-thumping. It actually reads like a screed from someone who applied for a job at NVidia and got rejected. I likely won't bother reading anything from that site again. This was in fact the first and only time I've ever been to that site before and have never even heard of it until now, which is an indication to me just how marginal and unimportant it is. Why it was ever referenced at Slashdot mystifies me.
I suggest you research that further, especially if that Wikipedia page is the sum of your information. You don't seem to comprehend what has occurred in the last two or three hundred years. Your first and last sentences are dangerously misguided, dangerous because you might spread it further.
I know that pure socialism can't work, given Homo sapiens as it exists now, so I have a more than adequate understanding, thanks. Socialism is still prescriptive rather than descriptive, and that's the problem. What Sweden has isn't really very pure socialism either, regardless that some people call it such. With my blogging and commentary I'm hoping that just maybe I can help evolve a new breed that CAN make it work and make it descriptive, a breed that instinctively understands that cooperation can work just as well as competition (and make freeway driving more pleasant in the process). The best we can manage yet is an odd hybrid of the two.
I'm a contributing member of Project Honeypot, having been responsible for "catching" several spammers with my little honeypot, and I'm also contributing an MX record for its use. I think that's good enough. If everyone who had even a simple blog contributed to the Project, there'd be no place left for spammers to hide. Its http:BL database exists as a free resource for anyone to use. Not only do I contribute to Project Honeypot, I also use http:BL to help keep the comment spammers out of my blog:
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
You're quite the clueless indoctrinee, aren't you? The RIAA does in fact get armed thugs to forcibly break into people's houses: they're called marshals and police, and they're very good at ransacking houses and seizing personal property, and in general just taking orders from TPTB and not asking any critical questions. The fact that this activity is all "legal" is because the victors - the people with money and influence - are precisely the ones responsible for creating the laws that make THEIR activity "legal" and this activity "illegal".
It hardly matters that copyright is codified in the Constitution; it's not an infallible document, any more than the people who drafted it were infallible. There was just as much lobbying and distortion of the political process occurring back then as now. People who are adept at manipulating others tend to always get what they want, regardless whether it actually benefits the whole or not. Witness the current bailout shenanigans, and the EAGER involvement of so many members of Congress, irrespective of political party.
You need to find some better sources for your education and/or be more critical of those sources. You've been fed a diet of misleading propaganda and it's made you mentally anemic.
And what exactly is wrong with slow change, as opposed to the riotous wasteful "change" in, say, the United States? I'm not sure exactly what sort of "change" you are referencing; do you mean "change" like new cellphone models every six months and redesigned cars every year, or do you mean "change" of the sort that actually solves problems? Given your second sentence, I'd guess you meant the former, but that's not a sort of change I want nor endorse. That sort of change doesn't actually benefit the species, rather it benefits a minority that disadvantages the rest of the species in the process (concentration of wealth and resources). That sort of change is nothing more than the economic version of the Highlander story.
The Soviet Union didn't have a socialist economy and democratic government, which is what the parent considers a solution to this legalized selfishness. Communism was a failed perversion of socialism; it tried to establish an ethical economy through force of government (ethical hypocrisy), and then of course the people wielding the force couldn't help but abuse it.
It's a non sequitur to use Communism as a counter-argument to the parent.
"... And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out." Good thing the extended cut-off date was approved.
I'd wager that there's a statistically significant number of those procrastinators who are now gonna simply procrastinate until June, so that there will still be a tidal wave of demand, just delayed a few months. The delay might help and motivate some people to get off their asses, but not all.
And hell, if the shelves really get emptied, well, I probably won't need one of mine by then so that will be one less desperate family.
You might want to investigate the Kensington model K33197US power supply. It's a counter to your argument. I'd rather it be open source, but the thing is too ingenious and practical to ignore, regardless. The Kensington design is what the Green Plug should have been.
It case it wasn't obvious in my description, the major advantage that the Kensington design has over what Green Plug proposes is that the Kensington model requires no modification to the device: all the custom engineering, as it were, is in the tips that interface with devices. This eliminates the biggest single barrier to adoption. The device manufacturers don't have to do a thing for the Kensington paradigm to be adopted by consumers (though I'm sure they would fight it if it became a "movement").
I don't think this can happen. There are actually economic disincentives for those in control of the manufacturers to adopt a standard like this. I applaud the altruism here, but it fails to "incentivize" the standardization for the manufacturers. Manufacturers - those in control of mass production - are not so much intent on realizing the full collective efficiency and savings of mass production as they are in twisting the whole process to benefit them and slightly disadvantage those who buy their product. They waste resources and labor on unnecessarily frequent redesign cycles and impose planned obsolescence and proprietary schemes, all in the name of disproportionate profit. The end result is a waste and perversion of the collective potential of mass production.
What Green Plug proposes makes PERFECT sense from an altruistic, socialistic, Big Picture perspective... which also means it makes absolutely NO sense to these corporate CEOs because they expend NO mental energy on such unimportant things.
Having said that, I'd like to point out that one company has produced a power supply design that in some ways is actually BETTER than the Green Plug standard: Kensington. Yes, that Kensington. They have a series of true variable-output DC power supplies which have a rather unique way of powering a wide range of different devices that require different voltages and current; I have one myself, a model 33197 (I actually have "last year's" model that uses a rather proprietary cable, but apparently this most recent one uses a standard USB cable in the design. It has a five-pin DC output jack, to which a cable attaches that has a female plug on the other end; there is a series of "tips" which connect to the end of the cable, and it is these tips which actually determine both the physical attachment method to a device AND the voltage and current. There are tips available for virtually every laptop, cellphones, even one for my old HP iPAQ hx4700 (which is a REALLY weird one).
I believe the Kensington design works by the tips creating a feedback loop of some sort with the power supply proper, communicating through one or several of those pins precisely what voltage and current to supply. It strikes me as quite ingenious. I have no idea what specific mechanism this feedback loop employs, because I haven't yet reverse-engineered one of the tips to see what makes it tick.
So what Kensington has produced is a 3-24VDC, 6A, 120W variable output DC power supply that, with a proper tip, can power virtually any device that falls within its output specs. They have already anticipated the vast majority of common devices, and can easily produce others as the need arises. Of course I'd rather see the whole thing open sourced, but that again is the difference between altruism and harsh Darwinian reality. Regardless, I think what Kensington has created could very easily become a standard even superior to what Green Plug proposes.
Well, it might have been terrifying to the British, at least, the prospect of losing control of their prized resource.
That's exactly why I mentioned the American Revolution, because here and now the RIAA and its clients are like the British: fighting tooth and dirty nail to keep from losing control of their prized cash cow.
It worked well with Germany, kept them in line for decades, hasn't it? You have to at least bloody the bully's nose once, to clue him into the fact that you're willing to finish the job if he doesn't learn to at least pretend to be respectful. It's exactly why we (claim to) have a policy of no negotiation with terrorists.
Well, guess what: we have plenty of economic bullies and terrorists right here at home already; no need to import them, they're already native-born citizens, eager to beat up on their fellow Americans if it will put a few more bucks in their pockets. Perhaps it's time to do more than just slap a few wrists and chide, "Shame on you!"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, forgot to mention the obvious: the YouTube episodes have no commercials.
TOS episodes have also been available on YouTube for a while:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=20048A7C541C941C
And as this summation and others relate, MacGyver and other series are also available:
http://lifehacker.com/5061973/youtube-gets-full+length-episodes-of-star-trek-macgyver
Essentially the same series had already been made available for streaming at least several months ago.
Yours is the attitude of an idiot refusing to acknowledge harsh reality. This is a world with fixed resources and a fixed amount of land. Humans have an almost limitless capacity for finding ways to enhance their own genetic survival and limit that of others. SOMEONE is always choosing whether others live or die, whether babies not their own get to be born or not. There are plenty of subtle ways to discourage or prevent childbirth; a gun is hardly required. Frankly something so obvious would actually work against anyone plotting such a thing on a grand scale. Right here in my own state, not even a century ago, people in "sanitariums" were being forcibly sterilized.
You don't seem to realize that circumstances WILL control the population, one way or another. The real question is whether we choose to control that process or let it happen to us seemingly at random (but not). I was suggesting a GLOBAL CONSENSUS to take control of the process and put a stop to the random shit hitting the fan: global wars, epidemics, genocide, starvation. Population pressure and competition for resources causes those things. Aren't you getting tired of those Christian Childrens' Fund commercials yet?
You see monsters under the bed even when there are none. That says more about your state of mind than my intent.
Been there, said this in another reply you didn't read: NO, I haven't, and this is one bit of ignorance that doesn't make me nervous.
Where do I sign up? Can we keep it quiet?
I think you've still failed to understand the dynamic, and your declaration that my conclusions are wrong doesn't make them wrong. Many other people smarter and more specialized than I have observed the same dynamic and processes and reached much the same conclusions. The problem is still a quantitative one and not a qualitative one, whether that fits your desired worldview or not. I don't find your refusal to acknowledge the problem useful nor in any way valuable.
I suspect you have a much more intimate familiarity with religion, delusion, and dogma than you would like the rest of us to know, after that screed. I didn't mention global warming, nor was I even specifically thinking of it at the time I wrote that. Your rant reveals far more about your own biases and beliefs than it does mine.
Ehrlich may have been off by many decades, but that doesn't make his observation of the problem entirely wrong. It's still quite likely that hundreds of millions of people are going to die of starvation in a relatively short span of time; my guess is that it will happen when petroleum becomes so scarce that it can no longer prop up agricultural yields and harvesting. Global warming causing a shift in temperate zones and a major loss of crop species or farmland is only a distant second theory. We're only able to feed as many people as we are now because of the input of petroleum into the process, from synthetic fertilizer made from it to insecticides derived from it to gasoline used to fuel the equipment, etc. When petroleum becomes truly scarce, which EVENTUALLY it will, we'll be in for a world of hurt, literally.
I'm not nearly so confident as you that we'll find some miraculous substitute to petroleum. Everything put forward so far will require more energy to produce than can ever be recovered as useful work... and that doesn't even factor in the other chemical uses of petroleum that will be even harder to replicate.
From my perspective, it's the simple fact that there have been too many fucking people engaged in these excesses that truly make them excesses in the first place. So yes, Mister Grumpy Old Man, overpopulation and by extension population density and overcrowding are pretty much the causes of every other problem we face.
The problem is STILL overpopulation. You might think those facts are a counter-argument, but they're not. The problem is both the total human population AND the fact that there are too many people living in those "first world" nations and consuming resources at that rate. Birthrates are ALWAYS higher in those regions where survival is least assured, but places outside population pressure on those first world nations (and leads to emigration). If the global population was an ideal 500 million, as Arthur C. Clarke and others have suggested, then even if those first world countries existed as such their populations would be dramatically less, the outside pressures dramatically less, and there would be dramatically less people consuming resources and producing that degree of toxic by-products. There's a lot more to population dynamics than your oversimplified argument acknowledges. Ergo, the problem is still overpopulation: reduce the global population, and the overconsumption is much less an issue because there is that much more resource to go around, and that much more land and ocean per capita to absorb and remediate the toxic effects.
As someone else suggested, I've never "done" drugs nor alcohol, so I don't really know which nasty thing has which exact effect. I think the context was sufficient to make my intent clear, though. I'd thank you for the information, but I *hope* I'll never actually need to know that.
The referenced article wasn't objective at all. It was just spiteful-sounding chest-thumping. It actually reads like a screed from someone who applied for a job at NVidia and got rejected. I likely won't bother reading anything from that site again. This was in fact the first and only time I've ever been to that site before and have never even heard of it until now, which is an indication to me just how marginal and unimportant it is. Why it was ever referenced at Slashdot mystifies me.
I suggest you research that further, especially if that Wikipedia page is the sum of your information. You don't seem to comprehend what has occurred in the last two or three hundred years. Your first and last sentences are dangerously misguided, dangerous because you might spread it further.
I know that pure socialism can't work, given Homo sapiens as it exists now, so I have a more than adequate understanding, thanks. Socialism is still prescriptive rather than descriptive, and that's the problem. What Sweden has isn't really very pure socialism either, regardless that some people call it such. With my blogging and commentary I'm hoping that just maybe I can help evolve a new breed that CAN make it work and make it descriptive, a breed that instinctively understands that cooperation can work just as well as competition (and make freeway driving more pleasant in the process). The best we can manage yet is an odd hybrid of the two.
I'm a contributing member of Project Honeypot, having been responsible for "catching" several spammers with my little honeypot, and I'm also contributing an MX record for its use. I think that's good enough. If everyone who had even a simple blog contributed to the Project, there'd be no place left for spammers to hide. Its http:BL database exists as a free resource for anyone to use. Not only do I contribute to Project Honeypot, I also use http:BL to help keep the comment spammers out of my blog:
http://vulcantourist.info/media/PivotSpamLog.pdf
Kool-Aid is not a nutritional supplement. It's making you mentally anemic.
Duh!
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
You're quite the clueless indoctrinee, aren't you? The RIAA does in fact get armed thugs to forcibly break into people's houses: they're called marshals and police, and they're very good at ransacking houses and seizing personal property, and in general just taking orders from TPTB and not asking any critical questions. The fact that this activity is all "legal" is because the victors - the people with money and influence - are precisely the ones responsible for creating the laws that make THEIR activity "legal" and this activity "illegal".
It hardly matters that copyright is codified in the Constitution; it's not an infallible document, any more than the people who drafted it were infallible. There was just as much lobbying and distortion of the political process occurring back then as now. People who are adept at manipulating others tend to always get what they want, regardless whether it actually benefits the whole or not. Witness the current bailout shenanigans, and the EAGER involvement of so many members of Congress, irrespective of political party.
You need to find some better sources for your education and/or be more critical of those sources. You've been fed a diet of misleading propaganda and it's made you mentally anemic.
And what exactly is wrong with slow change, as opposed to the riotous wasteful "change" in, say, the United States? I'm not sure exactly what sort of "change" you are referencing; do you mean "change" like new cellphone models every six months and redesigned cars every year, or do you mean "change" of the sort that actually solves problems? Given your second sentence, I'd guess you meant the former, but that's not a sort of change I want nor endorse. That sort of change doesn't actually benefit the species, rather it benefits a minority that disadvantages the rest of the species in the process (concentration of wealth and resources). That sort of change is nothing more than the economic version of the Highlander story.
The Soviet Union didn't have a socialist economy and democratic government, which is what the parent considers a solution to this legalized selfishness. Communism was a failed perversion of socialism; it tried to establish an ethical economy through force of government (ethical hypocrisy), and then of course the people wielding the force couldn't help but abuse it.
It's a non sequitur to use Communism as a counter-argument to the parent.
Expect these any day now:
- Copyright Infringers' Registry
- Scarlet letters: tatooing the foreheads of infringers with a big red "P2P"
"... And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out." Good thing the extended cut-off date was approved.
I'd wager that there's a statistically significant number of those procrastinators who are now gonna simply procrastinate until June, so that there will still be a tidal wave of demand, just delayed a few months. The delay might help and motivate some people to get off their asses, but not all.
And hell, if the shelves really get emptied, well, I probably won't need one of mine by then so that will be one less desperate family.
You might want to investigate the Kensington model K33197US power supply. It's a counter to your argument. I'd rather it be open source, but the thing is too ingenious and practical to ignore, regardless. The Kensington design is what the Green Plug should have been.
It case it wasn't obvious in my description, the major advantage that the Kensington design has over what Green Plug proposes is that the Kensington model requires no modification to the device: all the custom engineering, as it were, is in the tips that interface with devices. This eliminates the biggest single barrier to adoption. The device manufacturers don't have to do a thing for the Kensington paradigm to be adopted by consumers (though I'm sure they would fight it if it became a "movement").
I don't think this can happen. There are actually economic disincentives for those in control of the manufacturers to adopt a standard like this. I applaud the altruism here, but it fails to "incentivize" the standardization for the manufacturers. Manufacturers - those in control of mass production - are not so much intent on realizing the full collective efficiency and savings of mass production as they are in twisting the whole process to benefit them and slightly disadvantage those who buy their product. They waste resources and labor on unnecessarily frequent redesign cycles and impose planned obsolescence and proprietary schemes, all in the name of disproportionate profit. The end result is a waste and perversion of the collective potential of mass production.
What Green Plug proposes makes PERFECT sense from an altruistic, socialistic, Big Picture perspective... which also means it makes absolutely NO sense to these corporate CEOs because they expend NO mental energy on such unimportant things.
Having said that, I'd like to point out that one company has produced a power supply design that in some ways is actually BETTER than the Green Plug standard: Kensington. Yes, that Kensington. They have a series of true variable-output DC power supplies which have a rather unique way of powering a wide range of different devices that require different voltages and current; I have one myself, a model 33197 (I actually have "last year's" model that uses a rather proprietary cable, but apparently this most recent one uses a standard USB cable in the design. It has a five-pin DC output jack, to which a cable attaches that has a female plug on the other end; there is a series of "tips" which connect to the end of the cable, and it is these tips which actually determine both the physical attachment method to a device AND the voltage and current. There are tips available for virtually every laptop, cellphones, even one for my old HP iPAQ hx4700 (which is a REALLY weird one).
I believe the Kensington design works by the tips creating a feedback loop of some sort with the power supply proper, communicating through one or several of those pins precisely what voltage and current to supply. It strikes me as quite ingenious. I have no idea what specific mechanism this feedback loop employs, because I haven't yet reverse-engineered one of the tips to see what makes it tick.
So what Kensington has produced is a 3-24VDC, 6A, 120W variable output DC power supply that, with a proper tip, can power virtually any device that falls within its output specs. They have already anticipated the vast majority of common devices, and can easily produce others as the need arises. Of course I'd rather see the whole thing open sourced, but that again is the difference between altruism and harsh Darwinian reality. Regardless, I think what Kensington has created could very easily become a standard even superior to what Green Plug proposes.
Well, it might have been terrifying to the British, at least, the prospect of losing control of their prized resource.
That's exactly why I mentioned the American Revolution, because here and now the RIAA and its clients are like the British: fighting tooth and dirty nail to keep from losing control of their prized cash cow.
It worked well with Germany, kept them in line for decades, hasn't it? You have to at least bloody the bully's nose once, to clue him into the fact that you're willing to finish the job if he doesn't learn to at least pretend to be respectful. It's exactly why we (claim to) have a policy of no negotiation with terrorists.
Well, guess what: we have plenty of economic bullies and terrorists right here at home already; no need to import them, they're already native-born citizens, eager to beat up on their fellow Americans if it will put a few more bucks in their pockets. Perhaps it's time to do more than just slap a few wrists and chide, "Shame on you!"