McCain is a unipolar imperialist bent on the maintenance of global American hegemony.
Obama is somewhat different.
Obama is a multipolar imperialist bent on the maintenance of regional hegemony.
McCain primarily represents the interests of the ruling elites of the war machine.
Obama is somewhat different.
Obama primarily represents the interests of the ruling elites of the industrial and culture machine.
Secondarily McCain represents the interests of the delusional working and middle classes - those people who think Rush Limbaugh is a fount of wisdom.
Secondarily Obama represents the interests of differently deluded working and middle classes - those people who think that recycling will save industrial civilisation from the second law of thermodynamics.
since we're dealing with a pantomime, a mediated abstraction, when examining the campaigns of a one party system with two right wings, one wing being somewhat less right wing than the other, an examination of the facts would be useful:
1. The money that could have gone to fund a transition to a post-petroleum society is being pissed away on shoring up the interests of parasitic speculators, which is what passes for the "financial sector" for the past several decades.
2. As the investments in the war machines have already been made, one can only expect more Resource Wars (Klare) to break out. As American industrial civilisation craps itself into a self-destructive death spiral of rage, filth, and stupidity it will seek to maintain the interests of its nominal constituency - the residents of those who live in an apparatus best described as the singel greatest misappropriation of resources i nthe history of the earth: the suburbs. As this is completely unsustainable, the society will lurch from one fix to another, resulting in more Resource Wars, until it results in complete bankruptcy and collapse.
3. Obama is no Marxist, McCain is no fascist. But they both work for and support a machine that runs on blind sub-ideological desire. A machine that is not sustainable, and incapable of reform, as reform would preclude its existence.
4. Importantly, the rest of the world IS DONE WITH THE USA. If McCain is elected, it will signal to the world that America has NOT learned its lesson, and the rest of the world will simply pull the plug. It will hurt to lose the USA, but it will hurt more to keep it around. This would FORCE the USA into a multipolar geopolitical role. Since it only makes 1/8 of its own oil, the USA would quickly descend into something above a third world status, but significantly below the rest of the industrialised countries. Think of the UK in the early 1950s.
So, that's your choice: vote for McCain to keep the empire rolling and collapse into a bankrupt heap of garbage, or vote for Obama and build down into a local power and use what little leverage is left to prepare for the energy transition and hopefully avert complete catastrophe.
Besides the above noted and obvious problems, there are sub-problems that are just as nasty.
Flash
We all know Flash sucks. But alternatives to it require hiring an engineer.
invisibility
You can draw a picture in PostScript by typing to the interpreter. Then Fontographer came along and that was followed by FreeHand and Illustrator and then Quark and InDesign. The code became invisible. Where is the Quark and InDesign tool for the web? Cuz Dreamweaver sure ain't it, especially with how CSS dominates graphic dicussion.
Proprietary Browsing.
Every browser is different and they all suck in different ways. MS has been especially egregious with IE.
TLD
is US centric. Is insufficient. Is a mess.
Squatting
Personally, I would cheerfully put a bullet in the head of every sitename squatter on the planet.
Code
It's code centric. It shouldn't be. It should be design centric. Then we could dump all these expensive programmers and get some work done.
Scalability
covered in the article, still true.
Argh. with the advent of CSS, AJAX, and Web2.0 everything is getting this creepy sameness. It's getting boring. Something's gotta give. Soon.
Sure the prices may double, but will they find enough customers when they quadruple? Quintuple?
Oil is cheaper right now due to economic catastrophe, but that doesn't put more oil in the ground.
Think of it as a savings account with zero interest. What's there is there. Now add this: Every withdrawal from here on in has a fee atttached to it. And this fee only increases (as oil only becomes more difficult to extract).
That's the actual framework you're dealing with. Don't like it? Tough shit.
Make plans or have Mother Nature make them for you.
Canada. It's not optimal, and has a host of contradictions that are very difficult and complex, but overall, it's very similar to the USA, only more rational.
and after all of this an eloquent thoughtful (and by world standards) centrist is actually facing significant opposition from a third rate pilot and POW turned right wing hack and his "prom queen" veep choice? What the fuck is wrong with you people?
If you have any sense, get out now, before the border closes, and the country sinks into a blackhole of debt, financial ruin, infrastructural collapse, and fascist tail chasing. Seriously. Just pack your bags and go. If you'e reading this site, it is likely you have skillsets that are desirable all over the world.
And if you think Obama's gonna fix it all, you're fucking dreaming.
HA. Yeah, that would be usefully true if jetliners had a decent glide ratio. as it is, once the engines cut out, they fall out of the skies like stones. So, sure, you get to "come down for free" but nose down at 800 mph...
Now, perhaps, but until when? Oil spiked to almost $150 a barrel this year. If it goes up to $150 and STAYS THERE, the airline industry as we know it will simply disappear.
you had damn well better have a VERY effective train system installed BEFORE that happens.
Computer and processor: 500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher
Memory 256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher
Now look at MS Office 2000.
"16 megabytes (MB) of RAM... plus an additional 4 MB of RAM for each application running simultaneously"
So, if you're only running MS Word, you're looking at 20 megs.
Now, use MS Word 2000. Use MS Word 2007. Other than UI details it is functionally identical, and there is absolutely NO reason for it to be 15x as big. It's just crappy programming practices faced with zero penalty for wasting RAM.
but if the pay-per-use service is not 10x better and not cheaper than the _free_ service then how would you figure that having less money flowing in the economy would mean that my 10x worse and 10x more expensive service will thrive?
Exactly. The "hedonics" of the pay service had better be freakin' brilliant, otherwise, "free" will win. He also said iTunes will win over some other service, but he's such an idiot, he fails to realise that iTunes succeeds BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER. why buy the entire CD for $18 when you can DL your favourite song for $1? The combination of hedonics and economics makes iTunes irresistible, and it is identical to what made Napster irresistible - FREE music will always be more attractive than music you have to pay for. Music is a composition of 1's and 0's and software is the same.
The hunker down mentality you mention IS the most prevalent. People tend to starve in place.
Andrew Keen, whose picture makes him look like a douchebag, wrote:
Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?
Depends on the depth of unemployment. For one thing, Zero is Slave Wages, and people will sell themselves into slavery long before they starve, so yes, one could make a case for Zero Wages as the future of labour. A depressing and dystopian vision of future labour, not one without precedent.
For another - if you're dealing with people who have no money, they will sell their computer and cut their internet off before they starve, making the whole point completely moot.
He then blathered on:
One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals.
His position is deeply flawed. If money is tight, not only will companies seek cheap or free solutions, individuals who are far less capitalised will do much the same. Also, if money is so tight that blog based news suffers THIS DOES NOT MEAN that there will be some magical investment in paid journalism.
I humbly submit that Keen is a Troll, and he spews this nonsense just to get noticed and get his page count up.
Fine. DIE OFF. Drive your car and drive your society over the cliff.
In 1000 years, people will look back and SCORN people like you. Your graves will be robbed - the metal caskets will be worth more for their steel than your worthless bones, which they will pee on when they're finished.
The left is weak and ineffective and want to destroy confederation by alienating the west. I'll vote federal Liberal again when they realize that Canada exists west of the Ontario/Alberta border.
Please stop talking with your ass, like a typical Conservative. There is no Ontario/Alberta border, unless you call the 1000km BETWEEN ON and AB, which is presently occupied by Manitoba and Saskatchewan, a "border".
Well, with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word, you will need one of these puppies just to run Word and Windows 7 anyway.
Vista's MINIMUM memory requirement is 512 megs.
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
Personally, I don't find Vista any more useful than Win2k. More stable, yes, but I don't see how upping the RAM req by an order of magnitude was required to make Win2k more stable. All it needed was better programming and better testing.
I think what we have going now is the kind of thing that happened when gas was cheap: SUVs. When gas is expensive (viz Europe and Japan) the average car gets Really Small and Efficient. When RAM was really expensive, programming was tight and efficient. Now that RAM is measured in gigs and drives in terabytes, there is no incentive to do efficient programming or wrangle in feature creep and bloatware.
Eventually we will hit some physical / cost limit on RAM, and then good programming will become a requirement. OF course, by then, there won't be anyone left who knows how to do that...
A majority govt. So, with the voting of this mediocre election, the NDP, Greens, and Liberals would form a majority coalition govt.
It is critical that Canada mobilises itself, quickly. We're in great danger from our "friends to the south". don't be fooled by Obama. He's a universe better than McCain, but it's just the difference between a unipolar imperialist (McCian) and a multipolar imperialist (Obama). They're both imperialists. And don't think Obama's going to be all sweet and nice to Canada. NAFTA was crafted to remove Canada's molecular patrimony regardless of Canadian needs. If you think he's going to let that go, you're crazy.
No. What you do is what the europeans have been doing for decades: coalition governments. So, what you'd get is a "liberal" govt, with 1/3 of the cabinet NDP in the portfolios they need (labour, housing, welfare, etc.) and let the Greens have Environment.
Bingo. That would kick ass and put Canada aright.
The problem is the NDP leadership is a bunch of whiny 5 year olds, the Liberal leadership is too interested in knifing each other in the back to care, and they're both sceptical of the greens because, unlike in the USA, the Greens are actually more right wing than the Liberals in terms of fiscal ideas. I'm surprised Harper hasn't offered to go down on May for Green support to greenwash the Conservatives.
sigh. Still, Harper faced the most inarticulate and inept Liberal candidate in decades, and wasn't able to get a majority, so that shows you how little support the conservatives actually have.
Argh. I really dig Canada, but their politics are completely fucked.
There is nothing wrong with the current U.S. government - it is ignoring the constitution which is the problem.
I call bullshit. Your ideas of the electoral college is a disaster. You lack of representational democracy is a disaster. Your wedding of the executive and the military is a disaster. Your senate vs. house is a structural mess that only works for the interests of entrenched power. The appointment of Supreme Court justices by the Executive makes them political pawns.
There is PLENTY wrong with the constitution itself and there is VASTLY more wrong with the US gov. If you can't see that after 8 years of the Bush Junta, the loss of New Orleans, the currently collapsing economy, the failed war on drugs, the security theatre of the DHS, two failed wars, and a national debt that will obviously never get paid back, are deep and powerful indications that there is something DEEPLY wrong with the american government, then, well, you're either not paying attention, or your being willfully ignorant (which I equate with evil) or you are simply an idiot.
Hate to break it to you, but you're going to move closer to work. A LOT closer to work.
Or, continue bombing the crap out of the third world for resource plunder. Frankly, after having opened the US Treasury to the kleptocrats, I don't think the USA will even have the economic resources to continue with the global plunder routine, so you'll have to scale back at home.
No. Because the physics of aerodynamics and thermodynamics works against that.
The battery pack, from their own literature, states:
The pack operates at a nominal 375 volts, stores about 53 kilowatt hours of electric energy, and delivers up to 200 kilowatts of electric power.
Now the trike I linked to uses 750w - so just on poewr alone, the Tesla equals 266 electric trikes. True, Tesla will seat two, but odds are, it will usually seat one yuppie jackass on his way to work up and down I-280 or 101.
Tesla, like the idiocy of "trickle down economics" serves the rich and powerful, and squanders an enormous amount of resources that could and should be better directed to masses of people we need to move from home to work.
Slashdot Mirror
fuckers. Long live youtube.
Obama is somewhat different.
Obama is a multipolar imperialist bent on the maintenance of regional hegemony.
McCain primarily represents the interests of the ruling elites of the war machine.
Obama is somewhat different.
Obama primarily represents the interests of the ruling elites of the industrial and culture machine.
Secondarily McCain represents the interests of the delusional working and middle classes - those people who think Rush Limbaugh is a fount of wisdom.
Secondarily Obama represents the interests of differently deluded working and middle classes - those people who think that recycling will save industrial civilisation from the second law of thermodynamics.
since we're dealing with a pantomime, a mediated abstraction, when examining the campaigns of a one party system with two right wings, one wing being somewhat less right wing than the other, an examination of the facts would be useful:
1. The money that could have gone to fund a transition to a post-petroleum society is being pissed away on shoring up the interests of parasitic speculators, which is what passes for the "financial sector" for the past several decades.
2. As the investments in the war machines have already been made, one can only expect more Resource Wars (Klare) to break out. As American industrial civilisation craps itself into a self-destructive death spiral of rage, filth, and stupidity it will seek to maintain the interests of its nominal constituency - the residents of those who live in an apparatus best described as the singel greatest misappropriation of resources i nthe history of the earth: the suburbs. As this is completely unsustainable, the society will lurch from one fix to another, resulting in more Resource Wars, until it results in complete bankruptcy and collapse.
3. Obama is no Marxist, McCain is no fascist. But they both work for and support a machine that runs on blind sub-ideological desire. A machine that is not sustainable, and incapable of reform, as reform would preclude its existence.
4. Importantly, the rest of the world IS DONE WITH THE USA. If McCain is elected, it will signal to the world that America has NOT learned its lesson, and the rest of the world will simply pull the plug. It will hurt to lose the USA, but it will hurt more to keep it around. This would FORCE the USA into a multipolar geopolitical role. Since it only makes 1/8 of its own oil, the USA would quickly descend into something above a third world status, but significantly below the rest of the industrialised countries. Think of the UK in the early 1950s.
So, that's your choice: vote for McCain to keep the empire rolling and collapse into a bankrupt heap of garbage, or vote for Obama and build down into a local power and use what little leverage is left to prepare for the energy transition and hopefully avert complete catastrophe.
RS
Flash
We all know Flash sucks. But alternatives to it require hiring an engineer.
invisibility
You can draw a picture in PostScript by typing to the interpreter. Then Fontographer came along and that was followed by FreeHand and Illustrator and then Quark and InDesign. The code became invisible. Where is the Quark and InDesign tool for the web? Cuz Dreamweaver sure ain't it, especially with how CSS dominates graphic dicussion.
Proprietary Browsing.
Every browser is different and they all suck in different ways. MS has been especially egregious with IE.
TLD
is US centric. Is insufficient. Is a mess.
Squatting
Personally, I would cheerfully put a bullet in the head of every sitename squatter on the planet.
Code
It's code centric. It shouldn't be. It should be design centric. Then we could dump all these expensive programmers and get some work done.
Scalability
covered in the article, still true.
Argh. with the advent of CSS, AJAX, and Web2.0 everything is getting this creepy sameness. It's getting boring. Something's gotta give. Soon.
RS
Insightful? I don't think so. More a troll than anything else.
before it is too late.
Oil is cheaper right now due to economic catastrophe, but that doesn't put more oil in the ground.
Think of it as a savings account with zero interest. What's there is there. Now add this: Every withdrawal from here on in has a fee atttached to it. And this fee only increases (as oil only becomes more difficult to extract).
That's the actual framework you're dealing with. Don't like it? Tough shit.
Make plans or have Mother Nature make them for you.
RS
Canada. It's not optimal, and has a host of contradictions that are very difficult and complex, but overall, it's very similar to the USA, only more rational.
I left years ago when the getting was good.
Stuff it, dork.
RS
Do yourself a favour: GET THE FUCK OUT NOW.
The country's been insolvent since January.
It's not run under the rule of law as there is no guarantee of habeus corpus.
It invaded another country, unprovoked.
One election was a failure.
And another seems to have been stolen.
and after all of this an eloquent thoughtful (and by world standards) centrist is actually facing significant opposition from a third rate pilot and POW turned right wing hack and his "prom queen" veep choice? What the fuck is wrong with you people?
If you have any sense, get out now, before the border closes, and the country sinks into a blackhole of debt, financial ruin, infrastructural collapse, and fascist tail chasing. Seriously. Just pack your bags and go. If you'e reading this site, it is likely you have skillsets that are desirable all over the world.
And if you think Obama's gonna fix it all, you're fucking dreaming.
RS
RS
I had no idea jetliners could glide at all - for (literally) decades I figured they dropped like rocks.
Good to know this isn't so.
best to all who set me straight on this.
Rs
HW
Now, perhaps, but until when? Oil spiked to almost $150 a barrel this year. If it goes up to $150 and STAYS THERE, the airline industry as we know it will simply disappear.
you had damn well better have a VERY effective train system installed BEFORE that happens.
RS
MS Office 2007, from the MS Website requires:
Computer and processor: 500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher
Memory 256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher
Now look at MS Office 2000.
"16 megabytes (MB) of RAM... plus an additional 4 MB of RAM for each application running simultaneously"
So, if you're only running MS Word, you're looking at 20 megs.
Now, use MS Word 2000. Use MS Word 2007. Other than UI details it is functionally identical, and there is absolutely NO reason for it to be 15x as big. It's just crappy programming practices faced with zero penalty for wasting RAM.
RS
Exactly. The "hedonics" of the pay service had better be freakin' brilliant, otherwise, "free" will win. He also said iTunes will win over some other service, but he's such an idiot, he fails to realise that iTunes succeeds BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER. why buy the entire CD for $18 when you can DL your favourite song for $1? The combination of hedonics and economics makes iTunes irresistible, and it is identical to what made Napster irresistible - FREE music will always be more attractive than music you have to pay for. Music is a composition of 1's and 0's and software is the same.
The hunker down mentality you mention IS the most prevalent. People tend to starve in place.
RS
Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?
Depends on the depth of unemployment. For one thing, Zero is Slave Wages, and people will sell themselves into slavery long before they starve, so yes, one could make a case for Zero Wages as the future of labour. A depressing and dystopian vision of future labour, not one without precedent.
For another - if you're dealing with people who have no money, they will sell their computer and cut their internet off before they starve, making the whole point completely moot.
He then blathered on:
One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals.
OR, as economic problems tighten, corporations will go to Open source solutions due to their low costs, and they will advocate a collective shared effort in order to develop a software resource "commons" that everyone can leverage to their own advantage.
His position is deeply flawed. If money is tight, not only will companies seek cheap or free solutions, individuals who are far less capitalised will do much the same. Also, if money is so tight that blog based news suffers THIS DOES NOT MEAN that there will be some magical investment in paid journalism.
I humbly submit that Keen is a Troll, and he spews this nonsense just to get noticed and get his page count up.
RS
Fine. DIE OFF. Drive your car and drive your society over the cliff.
In 1000 years, people will look back and SCORN people like you. Your graves will be robbed - the metal caskets will be worth more for their steel than your worthless bones, which they will pee on when they're finished.
RS
Please stop talking with your ass, like a typical Conservative. There is no Ontario/Alberta border, unless you call the 1000km BETWEEN ON and AB, which is presently occupied by Manitoba and Saskatchewan, a "border".
RS
Vista's MINIMUM memory requirement is 512 megs.
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
Personally, I don't find Vista any more useful than Win2k. More stable, yes, but I don't see how upping the RAM req by an order of magnitude was required to make Win2k more stable. All it needed was better programming and better testing.
I think what we have going now is the kind of thing that happened when gas was cheap: SUVs. When gas is expensive (viz Europe and Japan) the average car gets Really Small and Efficient. When RAM was really expensive, programming was tight and efficient. Now that RAM is measured in gigs and drives in terabytes, there is no incentive to do efficient programming or wrangle in feature creep and bloatware.
Eventually we will hit some physical / cost limit on RAM, and then good programming will become a requirement. OF course, by then, there won't be anyone left who knows how to do that...
RS
Liberal
Popular Vote: 26.24%
NDP
Popular Vote: 18.20%
Green
Popular Vote: 6.80%
Add that up, and it comes to: 51.24%
A majority govt. So, with the voting of this mediocre election, the NDP, Greens, and Liberals would form a majority coalition govt.
It is critical that Canada mobilises itself, quickly. We're in great danger from our "friends to the south". don't be fooled by Obama. He's a universe better than McCain, but it's just the difference between a unipolar imperialist (McCian) and a multipolar imperialist (Obama). They're both imperialists. And don't think Obama's going to be all sweet and nice to Canada. NAFTA was crafted to remove Canada's molecular patrimony regardless of Canadian needs. If you think he's going to let that go, you're crazy.
RS
Bingo. That would kick ass and put Canada aright.
The problem is the NDP leadership is a bunch of whiny 5 year olds, the Liberal leadership is too interested in knifing each other in the back to care, and they're both sceptical of the greens because, unlike in the USA, the Greens are actually more right wing than the Liberals in terms of fiscal ideas. I'm surprised Harper hasn't offered to go down on May for Green support to greenwash the Conservatives.
sigh. Still, Harper faced the most inarticulate and inept Liberal candidate in decades, and wasn't able to get a majority, so that shows you how little support the conservatives actually have.
Argh. I really dig Canada, but their politics are completely fucked.
RS
Grrrrr.
rs
I call bullshit. Your ideas of the electoral college is a disaster. You lack of representational democracy is a disaster. Your wedding of the executive and the military is a disaster. Your senate vs. house is a structural mess that only works for the interests of entrenched power. The appointment of Supreme Court justices by the Executive makes them political pawns.
There is PLENTY wrong with the constitution itself and there is VASTLY more wrong with the US gov. If you can't see that after 8 years of the Bush Junta, the loss of New Orleans, the currently collapsing economy, the failed war on drugs, the security theatre of the DHS, two failed wars, and a national debt that will obviously never get paid back, are deep and powerful indications that there is something DEEPLY wrong with the american government, then, well, you're either not paying attention, or your being willfully ignorant (which I equate with evil) or you are simply an idiot.
RS
Or, continue bombing the crap out of the third world for resource plunder. Frankly, after having opened the US Treasury to the kleptocrats, I don't think the USA will even have the economic resources to continue with the global plunder routine, so you'll have to scale back at home.
RS
The battery pack, from their own literature, states:
The pack operates at a nominal 375 volts, stores about 53 kilowatt hours of electric energy, and delivers up to 200 kilowatts of electric power.
Now the trike I linked to uses 750w - so just on poewr alone, the Tesla equals 266 electric trikes. True, Tesla will seat two, but odds are, it will usually seat one yuppie jackass on his way to work up and down I-280 or 101.
Tesla, like the idiocy of "trickle down economics" serves the rich and powerful, and squanders an enormous amount of resources that could and should be better directed to masses of people we need to move from home to work.
RS