anyone can go to a library, and assuming the locality is solvent and can pay the paycheques for librarians, acquisitions, and cleaning staff, the library can stay open indefinitely. This is not to say that libraries never close down. What I am saying is: given adequate support, libraries can stay open indefinitely. Two examples: NY Public Library. Library of Congress.
The same cannot be said for a given website. Google (or any other commercial website) might be big today, but once the ad revenue (business model) collapses, they're toast and their huge volume of books, videos, etc. will go offline. If their board of directors can demonstrate that Google (or whatever corporation that sells shares) would make serious bank in another industry (say, breakfast cereal or carpeting or concrete or maid services - whatever) the shareholders would vote for that product to get a better return on investment, and those jillions of books and videos would be reduced to essentially what they are: unwanted webservers that would be zeroed out and sold.
Bradbury's a bit of a cranky right wing dipshit, but even a stopped clock is right once a day.
Reacting to antitrust concerns expressed by European regulators, Microsoft plans to offer a version in Europe that has the browser removed.
But the rest of you people are totally fucked and will have to deal with what MS deigns to grant you.
Nice.
RS
Won't Win Wars
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Wars are won on the ground, and not by killing people. You kill the army trying to kill you, but everyone else you co-opt through good deeds done for compassionate reasons.
When you DON'T do that the results are obvious.
Germany: won. We destroyed the army, roughed up the citizens for being a bunch of nasty losers, and then set about making them BFFs.
Vietnam: Lost. We blasted the NVA, turned the VC into terrorists, ruined the food supply, killed the citizenry, treated them like dirt, carpet bombed the place, and generally acted like a belligerent bunch of assholes.
Iraq: draw. We destroyed the army, and then sat on our hands as the country fell apart, causing great immiseration of the citizenry. We handed over the meatiest stuff to political cronies. After several years of clear failure, Iraq is now a marginal state whose future is up for grabs.
Afghanistan: lost. We went into afghanistan. Fail. No one wins in afghanistan. Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Alexander the Great, the British,the Russians, now the USA. Afghanistan is not winnable, no matter how nice you are to anyone there. The way you be nice to these people is to leave them the fuck alone and let them stew in their own pathetic juices.
Art Schools are the worst for whiny incompetent self absorbed losers with entitlement issues. I should know - I've attended three and have an advanced degree in fine arts. The few people that were "real" are to this day some of my closest friends and colleagues. The rest were fucking morons I couldn't stand then and have no time for now.
If they want something done, they need to take the responsibility to make sure it happens and then GET OFF THEIR LAZY BUTTS and MAKE IT FUCKING HAPPEN.
You don't have to be nice. You don't have to share. And these people need to learn that they need to depend on themselves and be competent on such self-reliance. When they do that, they become better people.
That said, if someone's presentation is fucked because their laptop puked blood and died, then: Yes, you would win big karma points letting them use your machine. But if they're bugging you for your machine to check facebook, they're leeches who should just choke on their own tongues.
Read the comments in this thread, and you will find that most of them are FAR behind what you and I are talking about.
Your sarcasm is not grounded - while it is true that comm devices are computers, their capabilities are limited. We do not YET have a true "iPhone" that is also a full on desk/laptop level computer.
What I was pointing out was an obvious point, true, made clear years ago, true, but still not (yet) implemented. Your snarky sarcasm simply comes off as hipsterism.
What i see is this, and I see it in the next 5 years:
something like an iPhone with HDMI out and USB ports. You plug in a screen and a mouse/keyboard and you have a full on computer running fucking Microsoft Office or the Adobe Suite, or whatever. It takes calls and it runs video, etc. You want ot watch a movie? You got to AppleTV / whatever and it streams a movie to your HD screen. it might not be HD at frist - perhaps just heavily compressed 720i - but eventually HD comes into play.
With whatever variant of USB is available, you have access to external drives for data and media.
This was all outlined to me, personally, by A Very Important Person ten years ago. It has taken a while for it to get here due to the vagaries of the market, and will act as the physical manifestation of the kind of convergence envisioned by Jenkins and others.
If this is too elementary for you, then please do us all the kind favour of either exercising your glorious genius and INVENT SOMETHING BETTER, or fuck off, shut up, and keep your snark to yourself.
An artist did print ready work from a communication device, rather than a laptop or desktop computer, that's the news.
sure, it's not the first time, but the point is much more subtle: why use a laptop or desktop computer?
What this is is the next level of miniaturisation, and it is an important one. There is fundamentally no difference between an iPhone or iPod and a computer - they all have input devices (keypads, sensitive screens, cameras), RAM, Storage, and output (audio, video, files).
an iPhone with a beefier processor, some USB ports and a mini HDMI port (a la Macbook) and you have your next desktop replacement device. Not only would you have phone calls, but with an HDMI - VGA adaptor, you have a screen to do world processing, image editing, video editing, audio editing, 3D, whatever.
Actually, that's a vaguely known number. Gasoline at this time is generally seen as between 7:1 and 10:1 EROEI, depending on where the oil is coming from. Oil in general is around 15:1 to 20:1, and dropping. Quickly. Some say that Oil is almost 7:1 and gas is around 3:1, but I find that difficult to believe.
When oil reaches 1:1 we will no longer pump it out for fuel.
No no no. It was not a money loser, if you're making something of value. But if you're making fuel, it's not super profitable. The corn lobby saw the "good press" the Brazilians were getting with sugar ethanol, and saw an opportunity to buy off the government to fork over huge sums to their pockets.
The U.S. govt is owned and operated by large corporations who are in the process of looting the treasury by insisting on subsidies: corporate welfare. The govt didn't "save" ethanol - the ethanol lobby simply got on the gravy train. Given the political importance of Iowa in presidential elections, and the over-representation of low population rural states in the Senate, (Wyoming gets the same as NY, CA, TX, etc.) and the importance of certain politicians from those states on key committees, the ethanol lobby had an easier time pulling money than a crackhead could stick up a 7-11 for twenty bucks and a bigGulp.
You have it exactly backwards: Govt didn't save the ethanol industry. the ethanol industry simply muscled their way in and grabbed the cash. Government isn't the problem here - it's the LACK of government that's the problem. It's the spinelessness of the Democratic party that's always on its knees blowing their donors, and the corruption of the Republicans doling out billions to their frat brothers.
Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things?:
Umm, the American Ethanol Debacle is not a product of government, as much as it is a product of government corrupted by private interests, in this case the mid-western corn lobby.
Corn Ethanol in general is an OK fuel, if you use it within a short distance of where it was made. It's Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) is so low that you end up burning up all your energy profit transporting it. IIRC, it has an EROEI of (at best) 1.5 to 2. Many studies show it has a negative EROEI. (Pimentel et al)
Other forms of ethanol require technologies that don't exist yet (algae etc.) or massive amounts of land to be cleared for energy crops (viz sugar, soybeans) that would better be used FEEDING PEOPLE rather than schlepping fat suburbanites in their SUVs three blocks to go pick up a pack of smokes and some beer.
I'm a professor at a university, and I would be proud if you were one of my students, except for one thing: you need to work on your spelling...
Your points are articulate and well taken, esp:
We as a society need to learn some egalitarianism about knowledge.
This is true, and I would submit, present society is completely upside down in its priorities, as
the future is NOT going to need vastly MORE information workers, financial planners, psychologists, public relations assistants, etc. The energy crisis will see to that. Over the next few decades, the people who can frame a house, esp. a solar zero-footprint house will be useful. Someone who can install solar pv cells will be useful. Someone who can install insulation will be useful. Someone who can retrofit a house with non-lead pipe will be useful. Someone who can install a slate roof will be useful. Someone who knows how to set up a high intensity permaculture food garden will be of value. Etc and so on.
Assistant program managers for advertising sales account executives will not be useful. They perform no useful function as it is.
Psychologists helping people find their inner child will not be useful. We will need people to find their inner adult, and that happens through hard work done well.
Production assistants for crappy TV shows will not be useful, as there will be fewer and eventually no TV shows left that will be able to afford such luxuries. People will learn to entertain themselves and each other in a direct live and localised context.
Dark Ox - I think you have it scoped really well. My only advice to you would be: learn how to play an instrument and sing as best you can. Then you'll never lack for entertainment. Guitar, flute, percussion, whatever - find some people (girlfriend/wife comes in handy here) who can also play or sing with you. Collect a bunch of songbooks. These become skills you can pass along, making society richer and better.
it's as abundant as uranium. In other words, not that abundant. Also, there are no europium mines - europium is usually found in conjunction with other metals and needs to be separated out - very energy intensive process.
that study was shown to be utter bullshit. google and read the critiques - they are not hard to find. The methodology was crap, and it was based on bogus assumptions.
There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases.
Which references the following passage:
Why? Because improvements in fuel economy effectively make fuel less expensive, and when costs fall, demand tends to rise. As driving has grown cheaper in recent decades, people have done more of it - choosing to drive to work instead of taking the bus, for example, or buying a second car, or moving to a house with a longer commute, or sending the kids to college with cars of their own. Between 1983 and 2001, data from the Energy Information Administration show, the annual amount of driving by the average American household rose from 16,800 vehicle-miles to more than 23,000.
This is known as a variant of Jevon's Paradox.
Jevons is ONLY correct if the supply of energy resource is A: available and B: steady or increasing in availability. This is true because with steady or increasing availability, price remains stable or decreases. However, if the availability is not steady and/or decreasing, then conservation is the only possible route for economic growth, as one must reduce one's consumption *below* the depletion curve in order for "extra" resource to be put into expanded production.
This also eventually fails. Energetic resources (oil, coal, gas, uranium, the gallium in solar cells, etc.) eventually give out, and are never uniformly distributed. What happens is you run up against asymmetries and granularities. The asymmetries result in cartels, and testing the granularities results in Very Bad Things like revolutions.
So, basically, the article is essentially correct, if we were living in the 1990s. But we are not. We are either at or very near peak oil production, and from here (or the very near future) it is a constant down slope in energy availability. Unfortunately Solar/Wind/Nuclear etc. is not ramping up fast enough and is ill suited to many basic applications and materials (such as carbon fibre, plastics, and fertiliser) and it seems very likely that we will get "caught out" in the mid 20teens, making the 2020s a rather dire time.
According to the,a href="http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf">Hirsh Report it takes 20 years of expensive conversion efforts to shift society to a new energy paradigm. 10 years is a bare minimum and likely to be difficult. We're still talking about trying to save the Happy Motoring Culture, which is another way of saying, we're caught with our pants down.
Make plans or have them made for you.
And remember, Mother Nature's plans do not include your survival, much less comfort.
The problem is that news needs to be critical information, and not just entertainment, in order for democracy to work
100% correct. unfortunately, since the fall of the CCCP, the news industry has slowly collapsed into a sensationalistic grab bag of titillation and distraction.
The city of the future will need food, clothing, competent shelter, and transportation.
Like all the cities of the past, media was not high on the list of necessities. In fact, it wasn't on the list because te technology didn't exist. And media won't be high on the list in the future, either.
To quote Brecht:
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching that's where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn for once the way world is run
Whatever words you twist or lies you tell
FOOD is the first thing - morals follow on.
So first make sure that those
Who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving!
What keeps mankind alive?
WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE?
The fact that millions
Are daily tortured stifled punished silenced and oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive
Thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
And for once you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
The average city of 2050 will more resemble Calcutta than Dubai.
what I was responding to was what you wrote:
There is a full blown war being fought in that country right now, and if the "freindly" government falls, it doesn't look real good for Israel, and western civilization. The apocalypse COULD BE only a year away.
And NONE of what you mentioned in your pathetic retort refuted my point. THERE WILL BE NO APOCALYPSE, at least one sparked by a bunch of idiots in south central asia. you want apocalypse? Continue Capitalist Industrial business as usual until the clathrates melt. THEN you'll have an apocalypse, albeit, one that will take a few thousand years to come to an ugly fruition.
You're a typical fear-mongering American who thinks that when the people you've butchered, ripped off and abused for decades finally grow some cajones and kick back, it's suddenly the end of civilisation. Moron. Piss off.
I don't live in the USA, and I don't live in Israel. If they "got ahold" of some nukes, how many does Pakistan have? Last I read, about 60, and they aren't all on missiles, and the military people in PAK have enough sense to no let these lunkheads get access to the codes. So, they would have to use them as something put on a boat and floated into a harbour. Let's pretend that they do get some missiles with nukes, do you think they're going after Western Civ first? No. They'll go after Western Civ's proxy, India (IND). Let's further pretend that they get as many as 20 (roughly 1/3 of the stockpile) in usuable order on missiles, which AFAIK, is extremely unlikely even for PAK today.
So, they use some nukes on IND first. Bombay, New Dehli, a few other big cities disappear. Grossly wounded, there are still hundreds of millions of Angry Indians left, and they collectively march across the border and commence slaughter, with the approval and sanction of the UN. Game over. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, let's say they go for another Western Proxy, Israel. Let's say they dump all 20 on Israel, somehow (even though they don't have a delivery system). What happens? A devastated Israel responds with its own nukes and it has dozens more than PAK and PAK is reduced to a glowing parking lot. Game over. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, let's say they go for the gusto, and somehow get all twenty - fuck it - ALL SIXTY nukes into the USA and set them off. The USA military responds and with one submarine turns PAK into a glowing parking lot. Millions die, in the USA and PAK. But not in Europe or Japan, or Germany or France or Italy or Finland or Russia. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, kindly quit with the fear mongering bullshit.
The apocalypse is NOT a year away. There will be no apocalypse. There is way too much money to be made and too much power to grab for something as self-absorbed and self-indulgent as an apocalypse to occur.
The USA is bankrupt, and will have to retreat from unipolar status fairly soon. When that happens, it will become less of a target.
The Phoenix Metro area has around 4.2 million, Tuscon Metro has around 1 million, so call it 5 million. And now your math is wrong.
OK, let's use metro areas. I was off by 1.5. So, cross multiply and divide and you get 108 years. Wooptie doo.
I can assure you that once the oil crunch really hits later next decade, Phoenix will not be such a booming destination.
You certainly have my sympathy about the political and material planning situation there. If I were you, I'd move the hell out of there. This presumes that you can, and you may have a number of really good reasons why you can't.
If you can, get out ASAP. And here's to hoping this boondoggle doesn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The same cannot be said for a given website. Google (or any other commercial website) might be big today, but once the ad revenue (business model) collapses, they're toast and their huge volume of books, videos, etc. will go offline. If their board of directors can demonstrate that Google (or whatever corporation that sells shares) would make serious bank in another industry (say, breakfast cereal or carpeting or concrete or maid services - whatever) the shareholders would vote for that product to get a better return on investment, and those jillions of books and videos would be reduced to essentially what they are: unwanted webservers that would be zeroed out and sold.
Bradbury's a bit of a cranky right wing dipshit, but even a stopped clock is right once a day.
RS
But the rest of you people are totally fucked and will have to deal with what MS deigns to grant you.
Nice.
RS
When you DON'T do that the results are obvious.
Germany: won. We destroyed the army, roughed up the citizens for being a bunch of nasty losers, and then set about making them BFFs.
Vietnam: Lost. We blasted the NVA, turned the VC into terrorists, ruined the food supply, killed the citizenry, treated them like dirt, carpet bombed the place, and generally acted like a belligerent bunch of assholes.
Iraq: draw. We destroyed the army, and then sat on our hands as the country fell apart, causing great immiseration of the citizenry. We handed over the meatiest stuff to political cronies. After several years of clear failure, Iraq is now a marginal state whose future is up for grabs.
Afghanistan: lost. We went into afghanistan. Fail. No one wins in afghanistan. Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Alexander the Great, the British,the Russians, now the USA. Afghanistan is not winnable, no matter how nice you are to anyone there. The way you be nice to these people is to leave them the fuck alone and let them stew in their own pathetic juices.
RS
Art Schools are the worst for whiny incompetent self absorbed losers with entitlement issues. I should know - I've attended three and have an advanced degree in fine arts. The few people that were "real" are to this day some of my closest friends and colleagues. The rest were fucking morons I couldn't stand then and have no time for now.
If they want something done, they need to take the responsibility to make sure it happens and then GET OFF THEIR LAZY BUTTS and MAKE IT FUCKING HAPPEN.
You don't have to be nice. You don't have to share. And these people need to learn that they need to depend on themselves and be competent on such self-reliance. When they do that, they become better people.
That said, if someone's presentation is fucked because their laptop puked blood and died, then: Yes, you would win big karma points letting them use your machine. But if they're bugging you for your machine to check facebook, they're leeches who should just choke on their own tongues.
RS
Read the comments in this thread, and you will find that most of them are FAR behind what you and I are talking about.
Your sarcasm is not grounded - while it is true that comm devices are computers, their capabilities are limited. We do not YET have a true "iPhone" that is also a full on desk/laptop level computer.
What I was pointing out was an obvious point, true, made clear years ago, true, but still not (yet) implemented. Your snarky sarcasm simply comes off as hipsterism.
What i see is this, and I see it in the next 5 years:
something like an iPhone with HDMI out and USB ports. You plug in a screen and a mouse/keyboard and you have a full on computer running fucking Microsoft Office or the Adobe Suite, or whatever. It takes calls and it runs video, etc. You want ot watch a movie? You got to AppleTV / whatever and it streams a movie to your HD screen. it might not be HD at frist - perhaps just heavily compressed 720i - but eventually HD comes into play.
With whatever variant of USB is available, you have access to external drives for data and media.
This was all outlined to me, personally, by A Very Important Person ten years ago. It has taken a while for it to get here due to the vagaries of the market, and will act as the physical manifestation of the kind of convergence envisioned by Jenkins and others.
If this is too elementary for you, then please do us all the kind favour of either exercising your glorious genius and INVENT SOMETHING BETTER, or fuck off, shut up, and keep your snark to yourself.
RS
sure, it's not the first time, but the point is much more subtle: why use a laptop or desktop computer?
What this is is the next level of miniaturisation, and it is an important one. There is fundamentally no difference between an iPhone or iPod and a computer - they all have input devices (keypads, sensitive screens, cameras), RAM, Storage, and output (audio, video, files).
an iPhone with a beefier processor, some USB ports and a mini HDMI port (a la Macbook) and you have your next desktop replacement device. Not only would you have phone calls, but with an HDMI - VGA adaptor, you have a screen to do world processing, image editing, video editing, audio editing, 3D, whatever.
It's the next big deal.
RS
When oil reaches 1:1 we will no longer pump it out for fuel.
RS
Abso-fucking-lutely true...
RS
The U.S. govt is owned and operated by large corporations who are in the process of looting the treasury by insisting on subsidies: corporate welfare. The govt didn't "save" ethanol - the ethanol lobby simply got on the gravy train. Given the political importance of Iowa in presidential elections, and the over-representation of low population rural states in the Senate, (Wyoming gets the same as NY, CA, TX, etc.) and the importance of certain politicians from those states on key committees, the ethanol lobby had an easier time pulling money than a crackhead could stick up a 7-11 for twenty bucks and a bigGulp.
You have it exactly backwards: Govt didn't save the ethanol industry. the ethanol industry simply muscled their way in and grabbed the cash. Government isn't the problem here - it's the LACK of government that's the problem. It's the spinelessness of the Democratic party that's always on its knees blowing their donors, and the corruption of the Republicans doling out billions to their frat brothers.
RS
Umm, the American Ethanol Debacle is not a product of government, as much as it is a product of government corrupted by private interests, in this case the mid-western corn lobby.
Corn Ethanol in general is an OK fuel, if you use it within a short distance of where it was made. It's Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) is so low that you end up burning up all your energy profit transporting it. IIRC, it has an EROEI of (at best) 1.5 to 2. Many studies show it has a negative EROEI. (Pimentel et al)
Other forms of ethanol require technologies that don't exist yet (algae etc.) or massive amounts of land to be cleared for energy crops (viz sugar, soybeans) that would better be used FEEDING PEOPLE rather than schlepping fat suburbanites in their SUVs three blocks to go pick up a pack of smokes and some beer.
Ethanol IS a scam.
And not even a very smart one.
RS
RS
Your points are articulate and well taken, esp:
We as a society need to learn some egalitarianism about knowledge.
This is true, and I would submit, present society is completely upside down in its priorities, as the future is NOT going to need vastly MORE information workers, financial planners, psychologists, public relations assistants, etc. The energy crisis will see to that. Over the next few decades, the people who can frame a house, esp. a solar zero-footprint house will be useful. Someone who can install solar pv cells will be useful. Someone who can install insulation will be useful. Someone who can retrofit a house with non-lead pipe will be useful. Someone who can install a slate roof will be useful. Someone who knows how to set up a high intensity permaculture food garden will be of value. Etc and so on.
Assistant program managers for advertising sales account executives will not be useful. They perform no useful function as it is.
Psychologists helping people find their inner child will not be useful. We will need people to find their inner adult, and that happens through hard work done well.
Production assistants for crappy TV shows will not be useful, as there will be fewer and eventually no TV shows left that will be able to afford such luxuries. People will learn to entertain themselves and each other in a direct live and localised context.
Dark Ox - I think you have it scoped really well. My only advice to you would be: learn how to play an instrument and sing as best you can. Then you'll never lack for entertainment. Guitar, flute, percussion, whatever - find some people (girlfriend/wife comes in handy here) who can also play or sing with you. Collect a bunch of songbooks. These become skills you can pass along, making society richer and better.
best regards,
it's as abundant as uranium. In other words, not that abundant. Also, there are no europium mines - europium is usually found in conjunction with other metals and needs to be separated out - very energy intensive process.
RS
that study was shown to be utter bullshit. google and read the critiques - they are not hard to find. The methodology was crap, and it was based on bogus assumptions.
There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases.
Which references the following passage:
Why? Because improvements in fuel economy effectively make fuel less expensive, and when costs fall, demand tends to rise. As driving has grown cheaper in recent decades, people have done more of it - choosing to drive to work instead of taking the bus, for example, or buying a second car, or moving to a house with a longer commute, or sending the kids to college with cars of their own. Between 1983 and 2001, data from the Energy Information Administration show, the annual amount of driving by the average American household rose from 16,800 vehicle-miles to more than 23,000.
This is known as a variant of Jevon's Paradox.
Jevons is ONLY correct if the supply of energy resource is A: available and B: steady or increasing in availability. This is true because with steady or increasing availability, price remains stable or decreases. However, if the availability is not steady and/or decreasing, then conservation is the only possible route for economic growth, as one must reduce one's consumption *below* the depletion curve in order for "extra" resource to be put into expanded production.
This also eventually fails. Energetic resources (oil, coal, gas, uranium, the gallium in solar cells, etc.) eventually give out, and are never uniformly distributed. What happens is you run up against asymmetries and granularities. The asymmetries result in cartels, and testing the granularities results in Very Bad Things like revolutions.
So, basically, the article is essentially correct, if we were living in the 1990s. But we are not. We are either at or very near peak oil production, and from here (or the very near future) it is a constant down slope in energy availability. Unfortunately Solar/Wind/Nuclear etc. is not ramping up fast enough and is ill suited to many basic applications and materials (such as carbon fibre, plastics, and fertiliser) and it seems very likely that we will get "caught out" in the mid 20teens, making the 2020s a rather dire time.
According to the ,a href="http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf">Hirsh Report it takes 20 years of expensive conversion efforts to shift society to a new energy paradigm. 10 years is a bare minimum and likely to be difficult. We're still talking about trying to save the Happy Motoring Culture, which is another way of saying, we're caught with our pants down.
Make plans or have them made for you.
And remember, Mother Nature's plans do not include your survival, much less comfort.
RS
Misleading title...
RS
100% correct. unfortunately, since the fall of the CCCP, the news industry has slowly collapsed into a sensationalistic grab bag of titillation and distraction.
Here's a nice short documentary on this by Adam Curtis.
RS
to eat them.
Totally. But not as much of a shithole as Calcutta.
Like all the cities of the past, media was not high on the list of necessities. In fact, it wasn't on the list because te technology didn't exist. And media won't be high on the list in the future, either.
To quote Brecht:
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching that's where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn for once the way world is run
Whatever words you twist or lies you tell
FOOD is the first thing - morals follow on.
So first make sure that those
Who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving!
What keeps mankind alive?
WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE?
The fact that millions
Are daily tortured stifled punished silenced and oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive
Thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
And for once you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
The average city of 2050 will more resemble Calcutta than Dubai.
Word.
RS
what I was responding to was what you wrote: There is a full blown war being fought in that country right now, and if the "freindly" government falls, it doesn't look real good for Israel, and western civilization. The apocalypse COULD BE only a year away.
And NONE of what you mentioned in your pathetic retort refuted my point. THERE WILL BE NO APOCALYPSE, at least one sparked by a bunch of idiots in south central asia. you want apocalypse? Continue Capitalist Industrial business as usual until the clathrates melt. THEN you'll have an apocalypse, albeit, one that will take a few thousand years to come to an ugly fruition.
You're a typical fear-mongering American who thinks that when the people you've butchered, ripped off and abused for decades finally grow some cajones and kick back, it's suddenly the end of civilisation. Moron. Piss off.
RS
I don't live in the USA, and I don't live in Israel. If they "got ahold" of some nukes, how many does Pakistan have? Last I read, about 60, and they aren't all on missiles, and the military people in PAK have enough sense to no let these lunkheads get access to the codes. So, they would have to use them as something put on a boat and floated into a harbour. Let's pretend that they do get some missiles with nukes, do you think they're going after Western Civ first? No. They'll go after Western Civ's proxy, India (IND). Let's further pretend that they get as many as 20 (roughly 1/3 of the stockpile) in usuable order on missiles, which AFAIK, is extremely unlikely even for PAK today.
So, they use some nukes on IND first. Bombay, New Dehli, a few other big cities disappear. Grossly wounded, there are still hundreds of millions of Angry Indians left, and they collectively march across the border and commence slaughter, with the approval and sanction of the UN. Game over. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, let's say they go for another Western Proxy, Israel. Let's say they dump all 20 on Israel, somehow (even though they don't have a delivery system). What happens? A devastated Israel responds with its own nukes and it has dozens more than PAK and PAK is reduced to a glowing parking lot. Game over. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, let's say they go for the gusto, and somehow get all twenty - fuck it - ALL SIXTY nukes into the USA and set them off. The USA military responds and with one submarine turns PAK into a glowing parking lot. Millions die, in the USA and PAK. But not in Europe or Japan, or Germany or France or Italy or Finland or Russia. Did Western Civ end? No.
So, kindly quit with the fear mongering bullshit.
The apocalypse is NOT a year away. There will be no apocalypse. There is way too much money to be made and too much power to grab for something as self-absorbed and self-indulgent as an apocalypse to occur.
The USA is bankrupt, and will have to retreat from unipolar status fairly soon. When that happens, it will become less of a target.
OK, let's use metro areas. I was off by 1.5. So, cross multiply and divide and you get 108 years. Wooptie doo.
I can assure you that once the oil crunch really hits later next decade, Phoenix will not be such a booming destination.
You certainly have my sympathy about the political and material planning situation there. If I were you, I'd move the hell out of there. This presumes that you can, and you may have a number of really good reasons why you can't.
If you can, get out ASAP. And here's to hoping this boondoggle doesn't happen.
good luck, and kind regards.
RS
rails are rails. The NE corridor does both - there is no reason those lines can't do both, either.