The funny thing is, no matter what you end up giving to these organizations, you'll end up subjected to the predicted dooms anyway. I.e. church attendence doesn't save you from Hell; DOE funding isn't increasing gasoline supplies; and finally, NASA still wouldn't be able to stop that asteroid.
First, we assume the tunnels don't collapse from the earth shocks from a strike that's large enough to warrant packing whole city populations into them.
Second, small strikes would leave many areas indirectly affected (nuclear winter), so a tunnel shelter isn't going to help.
Third, about the only thing a shelter like that would help with is protection from a heat pulse. When a strike is large enough, the debris from the forming crater will enter low orbits and then re-enter, which raises air temperature to lethal levels.
Fourth, if the strike is large enough, extended sheltering isn't going to help unless the protected population density is low. For tunnels, this doesn't translate into putting entire city populations into something like the Chunnel. Vast sections will have to be reserved for fuel storage and food production. The tunnel will have to function as a small town for about 10 years. The Chunnel could support at most 4000 people if properly stocked beforehand with fuel, food, seeds, animals, recycling equipment and materials, and finally all manner of tools.
If the strike is large enough, the very structure of Human civilization will demand that a major fraction of the race simply die off. No preparations have been to save such numbers of people. If another Chicxulub is coming, and Humanity doesn't stop it from impacting the Earth, then over 95% of the race will perish within a year (and at least 50% in the first week -- that heat pulse is incredibly deadly). I'd say 99% will perish within 20 years. This may leave about 50 million people scraping out their livings in the New Stone Age.
Stephen Baxter wrote a good novel called "Evolution" about how life reacts (poorly) to these strikes. Among other treatments, it will really reset your expectations about our chances.
It is if said "free software" (like BitTorrent) ITSELF facilitates piracy. After all, America's legal system has issued utterances of worse logic than that.
Funny part is, when the book came out in 1962, Boorstin was traveling in Europe. Time magazine (IIRC) called him a traitor for suggesting that Americans would be so stupid to allow such a thing to happen.
In what is now well established as the MBA mentality, such a guy is only demonstrating that he is uncontrollable. An uncontrolled asset is an unproductive asset. After all, the executives are the only authorized sources of work; in pure Taylorist terms, the workers are only fit to follow directions.
That probably explains a lot about Apple's dry period.
Your reply is a short and sweet "complete avoidance of dealing with the topic". But don't let that stop you. Keep opening your mouth so we can see how foolish the Neo-Conservative viewpoint really is.
BTW, while we're on the topic of your fantasy world, the Republican backlash in the Congress is well in motion. I look forward to the time Bush is well roasted by the REAL fiscal conservatives. Or is that just more "hating America"?
There are 3 reasons why this is generally so in America:
Death of the commons. The "respect of private property" is out of control in America and has simply led to excessive ownership-by-exclusion. Communities would much rather spend their resources (ruinously) courting corporations than providing services to the general populace. But it doesn't end there. Private small ownerships are becoming subservient to private large ownerships, such as the example of tearing down existing neighborhoods to clear land for companies to build on.
Extraordinary profit needs. Businesses don't think this is profitable enough to do -- compared to things like selling cellphones, offering payday loans, and engaging in currency speculation. In short, too many people are busily pursuing luxuries and profiteering, over pursuing necessities and investment.
Theft culture. By the previous points, America has a culture of theft, and has every expectation that stealing is normal. Even if this is only a viewpoint, it's still a viewpoint that deters investment in such a scheme.
Have you considered that the Two Smilin' Johns (Kerry and Edwards) don't think that they actually lost? After all, their class won the election with as much of a "mandate" as you can get: 99% of the vote went to the American Corporate War Party.
Kerry and Edwards were so light on Bush's incredible mistakes and astonishing frauds that we can only say it was collusion.
After all, Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Lieberman and Rockefeller all voted YES (amongst the 77 Senators who did) on that amazing blank check known as the 2002 Iraq War Resolution. There is no rational reason for them to vote YES on such a blatant surrender of authorization to a man they claim they "opposed". You can't tell me in all sanity that these folks were NOT able to tell they were being lied to on a daily basis. I could see that clearly as an educated man living and working in the Midwest. The only sane answer is that they were in collusion, as they are all members of the American Corporate War Party... all working towards the American Imperium's hegemonic supremacy throughout the world, particularly in the oil-producing center we call the "Middle East".
Hillary Clinton is merely being groomed to take over in 2008 for another 8-year run of Neo-Liberals, after denouncing the mess of the last 8 years of Neo-Conservatives. More oil will be stolen (Venezuela, you're not far down the list), more American troops will die, and even more American jobs will be lost. Then another 8-year Neo-Con Regime can take over, after the required ritual of denouncing the mess of the last 8 years of Neo-Liberals. Etc.
It's as plain as the nose on your face. Metaphorically speaking, Kerry nearly broke an ankle running up to the podium to concede the election. That's because although he lost, his real party won, as it will continue to win until the next American Civil War erupts... and he and his ilk will just live in enclaves or in exile as befits such mega-millionaires.
Well then, the other half of the taxes must therefore be paid by individuals... who are subject to confiscations, imprisonment and actual death for the crimes that corporations are only lightly fined for. So, what's your point, exactly? That I should be able to pay a fine for killing someone simply because I pay taxes? What level will the fine be? Can I get away will killing someone for a small fraction of my yearly profits this year? Under this rule, I could kill someone for 200 bucks.
Why do you operate under the assumption that corporations cannot be significantly or effectively punished under law? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Do you ever ask yourself ANY questions about why you believe anything?
Michael Moore and people like myself are not going away. Capitalism without social responsibility is evil and WILL be stopped.
For matters of irresponsibilities, all you'd have to do are:
yank the corporate charter, and
forbid the resulting entity to reincorporate in some other jurisdiction.
(You'd have to be careful with defining this, since it's too easy for a board of directors to sell off assets to their friends and then reincorporate those pieces into a new entity. To avoid this dodge, you'd have to identify people and property. A good measure is a "Ten Percent Rule"... where groups of no more than 10% of the assets, debts, officers, and rank-and-file employees can be collected into other corporations for the term of the punishment. In effect, if a corporation seeks to dodge the punishment, they are forced to break themselves up.)
Once the charter is lost, the business entity will have to conduct business in an environment of personal responsibility. Look at this this way... say you (say, XYZ Heavy Equipment Leasing, Inc.) supplied leased bulldozers to ABC Toxic Removal Services, Inc. ABC was then discovered simply dumping toxic waste to avoid certain processing fees with authorized waste sites (after all, paying processing fees doesn't contribute to increasing stockholder value, does it?). Under the law, the new entity "ABC Toxic Removal Services, Noninc." inherits your leasing contracts, and also under the law a defined set of people (let's call them "temporary principals") in the "new" business are personally responsible for the contract, not just the business entity itself. So, if "ABC Toxic Removal Services, Noninc." fails to make a leasing payment, you can drag however many of those "temporary principals" into civil court and force them to pay you from their own wealth... income, cars, homes, land, savings, etc.
Now, if you were a corporate officer who would potentially be on this list of "temporary principals", how responsible would YOUR actions be?
Don't be sad, be glad. One thing you have to do in your life is the "right-sizing" of your pool of friends. Eventually, you have to remove all the vampires (i.e. life-draining leeches) and ogres (i.e. abusive bullies) from your life lest they drag you down into being some pot-bellied loser sitting in some shitty apartment watching another inane "reality" show.
All good judgment, but you are decidedly off on your cavalier casting aside of the problems of the US patenting system. Defending a patent beyond the expiration date is simply a matter of continual updates and refilings. Remember, corporations can always summon monstrous resources over anything an individual can have. Money alone paves much of this road. But you would find that if you had the labor time to invest in it, you could extend your patents indefinitely with all the tricks that can be applied.
It's just the usual. Corporations own almost completely the patenting, trademark and copyright systems in the United States. "Normal" rules increasingly don't apply to them. Hence, your judgment on this issue is bound to be significantly off.
I have seen shops that Net revenue >$10 million/year, and they depend on a app written in BASIC!!!! as their life-blood. [...] Holy shit people, it might be time to upgrade!
Why? BASIC still runs on XP in a cmd window. But who even needs XP? Why run into device problems? Just run FreeDOS. You can't beat the price. That allows you to pickup 486s at some local shop for $30 to run the app, too.
Furthermore, the physical process that the BASIC program controls, still runs and makes the company money. Really, would paying for some dweeb to port the app to VB.net make any productive sense?
If we techs expect to be hired to take care of productive computer infrastructure, then we'd better understand the concept of return-on-investment.
Considering the patenting system strongly favors the large producer, I can't agree with your assumptions, hence I can't reach your conclusion. It is always the duty of private industry to pay attention to profit motive and to grasp opportunity when it arises. With rising energy costs, those craven cowards in private industry should be moving towards the SPS project.
Other than that, I think you're right about NASA's focus. If they really want to be a National Aerospace and Space Administration, they'd better fucking go back to earning it with the pushing of the envelope that can only (naturally?) fall to a well-funded government agency. Instead of pretending "we" benefit from our tax money going to fund this boondoggle agency, we should instead see them innovate with their yearly billions as you indicate.
Aha! Doing the most in the environment of expending the least effort. See what I mean? Spreadsheets train us to optimize, which leads to over-optimization.
I work in IT. Laziness is the name of the game. Why else would we want to configure a computer remotely instead of going out and physically doing it? Leaves more time to read Slashdot.
Have you considered the mechanisms that created the artificial emergency of that deadline in the first place? I think that behind it, you'd find another guy like you, fiddling with a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets are the grease under our skids in our race to the bottom. That's essentially what I'm saying.
Just toss a few price quotes at your boss. The price of a Halon recharge alone would turn his hair white (or whiter, if so already). Nothing like enormous contractor charges to shut moron management right the fuck up.
Although I depsise the Western Military Machine (i.e. America, Britain, France, etc.), I have to credit where it's due: the West has been improving land mines so that any field laid with it will probably not be the sorrow of the future like the old ones were. The old ones were incapable of shutting themselves off. The news ones have all kinds of shutdown criteria. It's only what we should expect from applying technology to this terrible weapon.
Don't get me wrong. I think land mines are one of the 20th Century's worst widespread inventions (with the spreadsheet being Bad Widespread Invention #1). Their use should be so tightly controlled that they should be quite the rarity. But there are no real rules in war, even by the allegedly "civilized" nations (as America's behavior in Iraq more than demonstrates). So landmine use tends to expand since those damned things are so handy for terrorizing a populace and securing a border.
He spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars at NASA on video conferencing equipment, but wouldn't spend the 1/2 million dollars for an independent safety study regarding the deblating of shuttle foam insulation.
That's because a bean counter considers papers and contacts vitally important, and nasty physical things like foam unimportant. Those engineers will fix it all anyway, right? You paid (say) Morton Thiokol for all that foam anyway, right? As far as an administrator knows, his ass was therefore covered. But at times, he's unsure. So, it's time for another fucking meeting. Get on the conf call, folks.
"What? The shuttle disintegrated over Texas? Better hold a conf call on that. Gotta make sure our asses are covered."
To an administrator, a telephone is a thousand times more useful than an engineer. And that's where it ALL GOES WRONG!
The Dollar is heading for a serious and long overdue devaluation. Considering how it's fallen against the Euro in the last year, this devaluation is arguably already occuring. It is also important to note that oil producers are shrinking their Dollar-denominated currency reserves, and are coming for more favor the Euro and Yen.
This is more than just a correction. It's fucking JUSTICE. America's decades of bluster and attacks have not made any lasting friendships, to say the least. When people talk about the warhawks coming home to roost, they don't mention those birds will be clutching great clawfuls of progressively worthless dollar bills. The Almighty Dollar is coming home, and he wants in BAD.
I say "ensure it" by giving private industry and the profit motive their day in the sun. NASA was only used as a Cold War weapon anyway; it's not like it served any practical purpose.
NASA should be disbanded. Things like Solar Power Satellites have their own compelling economics. Private industry will eventually wise up and sniff around that profit center. We just have to get out of their way.
Sure, it was an accident, but a foreseeable one for a professional experienced in the business of that particular corner of aerospace. It was the lack of concern for the extent of tile damage that led to the disaster. And that's entirely culpable.
OK, my words were a bit redundant. I meant the Midwest will depopulate and that will mean less highly-insular motherfuckers. The thousands who will leave (seeking jobs in America's cities) will be exposed to urbanites, hence will face diversity and resultantly find that that's not so bad. It's very easy in the Midwest to completely avoid people. The lack of public transportation alone determines this. In cities there is an unavoidable "shoulder rub" effect.
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The funny thing is, no matter what you end up giving to these organizations, you'll end up subjected to the predicted dooms anyway. I.e. church attendence doesn't save you from Hell; DOE funding isn't increasing gasoline supplies; and finally, NASA still wouldn't be able to stop that asteroid.
What good will that do?
First, we assume the tunnels don't collapse from the earth shocks from a strike that's large enough to warrant packing whole city populations into them.
Second, small strikes would leave many areas indirectly affected (nuclear winter), so a tunnel shelter isn't going to help.
Third, about the only thing a shelter like that would help with is protection from a heat pulse. When a strike is large enough, the debris from the forming crater will enter low orbits and then re-enter, which raises air temperature to lethal levels.
Fourth, if the strike is large enough, extended sheltering isn't going to help unless the protected population density is low. For tunnels, this doesn't translate into putting entire city populations into something like the Chunnel. Vast sections will have to be reserved for fuel storage and food production. The tunnel will have to function as a small town for about 10 years. The Chunnel could support at most 4000 people if properly stocked beforehand with fuel, food, seeds, animals, recycling equipment and materials, and finally all manner of tools.
If the strike is large enough, the very structure of Human civilization will demand that a major fraction of the race simply die off. No preparations have been to save such numbers of people. If another Chicxulub is coming, and Humanity doesn't stop it from impacting the Earth, then over 95% of the race will perish within a year (and at least 50% in the first week -- that heat pulse is incredibly deadly). I'd say 99% will perish within 20 years. This may leave about 50 million people scraping out their livings in the New Stone Age.
Stephen Baxter wrote a good novel called "Evolution" about how life reacts (poorly) to these strikes. Among other treatments, it will really reset your expectations about our chances.
I wasn't aware Free Software was piracy.
It is if said "free software" (like BitTorrent) ITSELF facilitates piracy. After all, America's legal system has issued utterances of worse logic than that.
Should the internet be shut down because it facilitates piracy?
Only the parts NOT used for Homeland Security. Har har! But then, I'm sure officers will be trading MP3s and the like on even THAT remaining piece.
Funny part is, when the book came out in 1962, Boorstin was traveling in Europe. Time magazine (IIRC) called him a traitor for suggesting that Americans would be so stupid to allow such a thing to happen.
"Treason is just a matter of dates."
In what is now well established as the MBA mentality, such a guy is only demonstrating that he is uncontrollable. An uncontrolled asset is an unproductive asset. After all, the executives are the only authorized sources of work; in pure Taylorist terms, the workers are only fit to follow directions.
That probably explains a lot about Apple's dry period.
Your reply is a short and sweet "complete avoidance of dealing with the topic". But don't let that stop you. Keep opening your mouth so we can see how foolish the Neo-Conservative viewpoint really is.
BTW, while we're on the topic of your fantasy world, the Republican backlash in the Congress is well in motion. I look forward to the time Bush is well roasted by the REAL fiscal conservatives. Or is that just more "hating America"?
Have you considered that the Two Smilin' Johns (Kerry and Edwards) don't think that they actually lost? After all, their class won the election with as much of a "mandate" as you can get: 99% of the vote went to the American Corporate War Party.
... all working towards the American Imperium's hegemonic supremacy throughout the world, particularly in the oil-producing center we call the "Middle East".
... and he and his ilk will just live in enclaves or in exile as befits such mega-millionaires.
Kerry and Edwards were so light on Bush's incredible mistakes and astonishing frauds that we can only say it was collusion.
After all, Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Lieberman and Rockefeller all voted YES (amongst the 77 Senators who did) on that amazing blank check known as the 2002 Iraq War Resolution. There is no rational reason for them to vote YES on such a blatant surrender of authorization to a man they claim they "opposed". You can't tell me in all sanity that these folks were NOT able to tell they were being lied to on a daily basis. I could see that clearly as an educated man living and working in the Midwest. The only sane answer is that they were in collusion, as they are all members of the American Corporate War Party
Hillary Clinton is merely being groomed to take over in 2008 for another 8-year run of Neo-Liberals, after denouncing the mess of the last 8 years of Neo-Conservatives. More oil will be stolen (Venezuela, you're not far down the list), more American troops will die, and even more American jobs will be lost. Then another 8-year Neo-Con Regime can take over, after the required ritual of denouncing the mess of the last 8 years of Neo-Liberals. Etc.
It's as plain as the nose on your face. Metaphorically speaking, Kerry nearly broke an ankle running up to the podium to concede the election. That's because although he lost, his real party won, as it will continue to win until the next American Civil War erupts
Well then, the other half of the taxes must therefore be paid by individuals ... who are subject to confiscations, imprisonment and actual death for the crimes that corporations are only lightly fined for. So, what's your point, exactly? That I should be able to pay a fine for killing someone simply because I pay taxes? What level will the fine be? Can I get away will killing someone for a small fraction of my yearly profits this year? Under this rule, I could kill someone for 200 bucks.
Why do you operate under the assumption that corporations cannot be significantly or effectively punished under law? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Do you ever ask yourself ANY questions about why you believe anything?
Michael Moore and people like myself are not going away. Capitalism without social responsibility is evil and WILL be stopped.
- yank the corporate charter, and
- forbid the resulting entity to reincorporate in some other jurisdiction.
(You'd have to be careful with defining this, since it's too easy for a board of directors to sell off assets to their friends and then reincorporate those pieces into a new entity. To avoid this dodge, you'd have to identify people and property. A good measure is a "Ten Percent Rule"Once the charter is lost, the business entity will have to conduct business in an environment of personal responsibility. Look at this this way
Now, if you were a corporate officer who would potentially be on this list of "temporary principals", how responsible would YOUR actions be?
Don't be sad, be glad. One thing you have to do in your life is the "right-sizing" of your pool of friends. Eventually, you have to remove all the vampires (i.e. life-draining leeches) and ogres (i.e. abusive bullies) from your life lest they drag you down into being some pot-bellied loser sitting in some shitty apartment watching another inane "reality" show.
All good judgment, but you are decidedly off on your cavalier casting aside of the problems of the US patenting system. Defending a patent beyond the expiration date is simply a matter of continual updates and refilings. Remember, corporations can always summon monstrous resources over anything an individual can have. Money alone paves much of this road. But you would find that if you had the labor time to invest in it, you could extend your patents indefinitely with all the tricks that can be applied.
It's just the usual. Corporations own almost completely the patenting, trademark and copyright systems in the United States. "Normal" rules increasingly don't apply to them. Hence, your judgment on this issue is bound to be significantly off.
I have seen shops that Net revenue >$10 million/year, and they depend on a app written in BASIC!!!! as their life-blood. [...] Holy shit people, it might be time to upgrade!
Why? BASIC still runs on XP in a cmd window. But who even needs XP? Why run into device problems? Just run FreeDOS. You can't beat the price. That allows you to pickup 486s at some local shop for $30 to run the app, too.
Furthermore, the physical process that the BASIC program controls, still runs and makes the company money. Really, would paying for some dweeb to port the app to VB.net make any productive sense?
If we techs expect to be hired to take care of productive computer infrastructure, then we'd better understand the concept of return-on-investment.
Considering the patenting system strongly favors the large producer, I can't agree with your assumptions, hence I can't reach your conclusion. It is always the duty of private industry to pay attention to profit motive and to grasp opportunity when it arises. With rising energy costs, those craven cowards in private industry should be moving towards the SPS project.
Other than that, I think you're right about NASA's focus. If they really want to be a National Aerospace and Space Administration, they'd better fucking go back to earning it with the pushing of the envelope that can only (naturally?) fall to a well-funded government agency. Instead of pretending "we" benefit from our tax money going to fund this boondoggle agency, we should instead see them innovate with their yearly billions as you indicate.
Aha! Doing the most in the environment of expending the least effort. See what I mean? Spreadsheets train us to optimize, which leads to over-optimization.
I work in IT. Laziness is the name of the game. Why else would we want to configure a computer remotely instead of going out and physically doing it? Leaves more time to read Slashdot.
Have you considered the mechanisms that created the artificial emergency of that deadline in the first place? I think that behind it, you'd find another guy like you, fiddling with a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets are the grease under our skids in our race to the bottom. That's essentially what I'm saying.
Just toss a few price quotes at your boss. The price of a Halon recharge alone would turn his hair white (or whiter, if so already). Nothing like enormous contractor charges to shut moron management right the fuck up.
Although I depsise the Western Military Machine (i.e. America, Britain, France, etc.), I have to credit where it's due: the West has been improving land mines so that any field laid with it will probably not be the sorrow of the future like the old ones were. The old ones were incapable of shutting themselves off. The news ones have all kinds of shutdown criteria. It's only what we should expect from applying technology to this terrible weapon.
Don't get me wrong. I think land mines are one of the 20th Century's worst widespread inventions (with the spreadsheet being Bad Widespread Invention #1). Their use should be so tightly controlled that they should be quite the rarity. But there are no real rules in war, even by the allegedly "civilized" nations (as America's behavior in Iraq more than demonstrates). So landmine use tends to expand since those damned things are so handy for terrorizing a populace and securing a border.
He spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars at NASA on video conferencing equipment, but wouldn't spend the 1/2 million dollars for an independent safety study regarding the deblating of shuttle foam insulation.
That's because a bean counter considers papers and contacts vitally important, and nasty physical things like foam unimportant. Those engineers will fix it all anyway, right? You paid (say) Morton Thiokol for all that foam anyway, right? As far as an administrator knows, his ass was therefore covered. But at times, he's unsure. So, it's time for another fucking meeting. Get on the conf call, folks.
"What? The shuttle disintegrated over Texas? Better hold a conf call on that. Gotta make sure our asses are covered."
To an administrator, a telephone is a thousand times more useful than an engineer. And that's where it ALL GOES WRONG!
The Dollar is heading for a serious and long overdue devaluation. Considering how it's fallen against the Euro in the last year, this devaluation is arguably already occuring. It is also important to note that oil producers are shrinking their Dollar-denominated currency reserves, and are coming for more favor the Euro and Yen.
This is more than just a correction. It's fucking JUSTICE. America's decades of bluster and attacks have not made any lasting friendships, to say the least. When people talk about the warhawks coming home to roost, they don't mention those birds will be clutching great clawfuls of progressively worthless dollar bills. The Almighty Dollar is coming home, and he wants in BAD.
I say "ensure it" by giving private industry and the profit motive their day in the sun. NASA was only used as a Cold War weapon anyway; it's not like it served any practical purpose.
NASA should be disbanded. Things like Solar Power Satellites have their own compelling economics. Private industry will eventually wise up and sniff around that profit center. We just have to get out of their way.
Sure, it was an accident, but a foreseeable one for a professional experienced in the business of that particular corner of aerospace. It was the lack of concern for the extent of tile damage that led to the disaster. And that's entirely culpable.
Yes. So? Do I have to wait until the Official English Language Committee issues Change Order #349-88EB-2423 ("Normalization of Urban/Rural Terms")?
WE MAKE THE LANGUAGE. Google is now a verb. Email is now a word. Language follows use.
OK, my words were a bit redundant. I meant the Midwest will depopulate and that will mean less highly-insular motherfuckers. The thousands who will leave (seeking jobs in America's cities) will be exposed to urbanites, hence will face diversity and resultantly find that that's not so bad. It's very easy in the Midwest to completely avoid people. The lack of public transportation alone determines this. In cities there is an unavoidable "shoulder rub" effect.