A simple profiling banning everybody that had connections with extremist organisations would have stopped both all the 9/11 terrorists and all subsequent attempts using shoe-bombs, underwear bombs, liquid bombs and so on. All the people involved were on watch-lists, as were many others by the way.
Sure, you'll ban a lot of legitimate travelers as well, but people chose their friends and if they chose to associate with extremists it might (or will) have consequences, like the inability to travel by air.
While I agree with you about your other points, this is simply the old good Nazi/Soviet/What-not "guilt by association" shtick. Its even worse than the perversity already being committed. So a brother of a guy you buy kabobs from at his mobile cart in front of your office joined the Jihad somewhere in Pakistan and you being a computer nerd happened to help the stand owner get his wi-fi working on his netbook while waiting for your kabobs. Neither of you had a clue about the new Holy Warrior being minted in some cave but its just too bad anyway. Goodbye air travel, hello body cavity searches. Etc and so on.
The real goals of "guilt by association" are of course things like Aryan Purity (because anyone not "pure" enough is quickly "associated" out of relevance or even existence) and also a very convenient to rulers abject fear of the security apparatus by the populace. Because it takes only "an association" (completely arbitrarily defined) to fuck you up for life and so enforcement becomes entirely the matter of whim of your "betters" (i.e. the members of the Securocracy).
Remember people, protest rules when you actually have a chance to make a difference. When you are trying to get through security, your best bet is to get over your fear of nudity and just get through.
And since "protesting rules" works oh soooo well in the arena dominated entirely by bought and paid-for politicos, by screeching far-right demagogues peddling bed-wetting fear and by corporate "security-military-industrial-complex" money - who are all making a killing on the wholesale shredding of what remains of personal liberties, by the way - this recipe can be simply abbreviated to "ALWAYS OBEY YOUR BETTERS!".
Okay, even assuming a government doesn't intervene and control the situation to most people's benefit (which to me is pretty unlikely), all it would take is for some of the 'poor' to get some of these mass manufactured robots and start using it for their own purposes. Hence they won't be poor anymore. Even obtaining one particularly specialized robot will mean it will be able to recreate
most of the others.
That is a fallacy. What you are saying is that a runner in a 1km race has a chance of winning or even catching up when he starts at the time when the front runner is mere meters away from the finish line. There is no actual finish line in an AI race, but just like in that 1km race, the outcome depends entirely on the gap between the those who took off first and the rest. It is essentially a "winner takes all" scenario that depends on rates of manufacturing and process improvement, which when aided by an AI would be near the peak of what AI assisted manufacturing can do and would improve faster and faster for those already ahead and who can dedicate more AI power to research instead to basic operations.
The "poor" would have no chance in Hell to catch up to the most powerful super-rich and the gap would just keep on increasing as the leaders poured more and more AI resources into widening it. Incidentally, money has similar effect and that is why for the last 40 years wages for the 90% or so of the US populace did not change (adjusted for inflation) but the top 5% took all the growth of the last four decades and the gap is now so wide that the top 5% of the super-rich owns more assets (or wealth) then the remaining 95% of the population. And the widening of that gap is accelerating... and that is even without any AI assistance.
Because of this characteristics, AI is a total game changer and that is why all that talk amongst experts about "singularities". Wisely deployed AI (that is for example kept secret initially) would essentially make one King, Emperor, Tzar etc of the world all rolled into one. The only opposing force capable for stopping you would have to be wielding a comparably powerful AI also and enter the fray in a small time window when you are just getting going. Even the same AI which was deployed by the initial inventor would be too little too late if activated by a competitor outside of that small time window where the disparity was small enough.
This is also the reason why the US Government keeps spending billions upon billions on AI research for over 5 decades now and is not discouraged with lack of any tangible results. Wise people in it know that whomever gets the AI first (and that AI is kept secret long enough) will be the only and final winner of all the "races" imaginable. Unfortunately for them, they have to involve the academia and private industry in this and there is where the ultimate futility of this plan lies: Uncle Sam will be a second runner by definition, its corporate sub-contractors having already run away with the prize.
Actually, my hope is that true AI proves intractable for many generations. The people who would get it first in our current state of affairs are just too insane for any comfort no matter how you look at it.
And yes, the robots will eventually be cheap, because prices drop like a stone (even the big megacorps will want to buy thousands, millions, or even billions of robots at a decent price). Hence the robots will be serving everyone.
Again, complete naivety. Robots will have loyalty and control systems in them and will never be allowed to produce robots who are not loyal to the initial masters (an idea that is already championed by the "intellectual property" crowd and implemented by the likes of Monsanto). Unless someone manages to hack one such robot, any replication will only further entrench the powers of the initial AI owners. And if "cracked" the new "strain" of robots will simply be a tiny f
You just had to go and bring Godwin into this, didn't you..
Godwin was a naive optimist and a product of bygone happier times, who when he crafted his well-intentioned attempt at taming Usenet trolls did not even dream of 9/11 and the way the supposed "defenders of freedom" would react to it by running towards the very thing he thought buried forever and worth of ridicule. Hence TSA and Homeland Security[1] are quite real and Godwin's "law" is merely whimsy, although a whimsy which some are desperately trying to convert - in a fit of Machiavellian, bitter irony - into a weapon to aid the newly-fashionable-again fascist ideas.
Comparisons to Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are valid when the nations so compared begin to acquire signature elements of the ideology of those old villains and abandon the supposed commitment to other ideas once held - or at least vigorously pretended to be held - very dear, such as personal liberties.
This of course does not mean that the USA is going to follow the exact same path as the Nazis or the Soviets did as history never performs the same composition twice, only the same theme. The Nazis and the Soviets both followed some paths established by tyrannies previous and that is how all those thinkers and visionaries[2] knew well ahead where all of this was heading and tried to sound the warning. No one listened. Perhaps some 1910s or 1930s "Godwin's law" got their warnings dismissed in a smug, "this could never happen to the oh-so-civilized-us!", offhanded way. Apparently it could. And apparently it is happening again.
In fact, establishing your religious credentials does NOT give you a free pass! I'm Jewish, and have flown to Israel. They do ask you some religion related questions, but those would be easy for anyone with an internet connection to fake. They always go further in depth. But thanks for spreading the rumor that Jews get special treatment. I'm not going to accuse you of antisemitism, but do try to take your head out of your ass.
Well, given that 100% of these "interviewers" are Jewish and given that Israel bills itself as a "Jewish state", while at the same time maintaining that it is the "only" democracy in the Middle East[3] and where the Arabs - being somewhat non-Jewish - have a rather precarious "democratic" status compete with specially colored license plates[4] and where "oaths of Jewishness" were just recently introduced for them, a casual observer can only assume that "Jewishness" is the main criterion of pass/fail of such a pre-flight procedure. And it is also quite patently obvious that this "bad optics" is of Israel's own doing, I am afraid.
And so despite of all the hand-waving and tap-dancing, I find it hard to believe that a bearded, Hasidic-fundamentalist would-be-settler with a "traditionally dressed wife" with 10 children in tow, heading straight for some recently "abandoned" house in Gaza or West Bank is going to be looked upon less kindly than, say, a young Arab engineering student holding an Israeli passport.
So my point stands, although some might find the mirror being held up to their cozy little racial/religious[5] Supremacist Apartheid none too pleasant. Well, too bad. Truth sometimes bites.
And before someone launches into some diatribes of antisemitism[6] I would like to point out that this state of affairs in Israel is a cause of heart-ache of many Jewish thinkers, dreamers and idealists who once looked upon Israel with great hope and now do so with dread.
***
1. "Fatherland" was already taken and had some unexplainable, unpleasant odor of death and decay about it - but thanks to the marketing consultancy's focus groups this was avoided
2. many of whom were Jewish, which is specially poignant in case of Germany
3. amusingly as recently as last month when Mr. Netanyahu insisted so, with the vaunted and trumpeted at ear-s
It is to laugh. All Israel's airports combined handle less traffic than one of the smaller US state capitals. The whole country has less then 8 million people in it. That about the size of San Francisco. They are also able to spread the "interview" process across the globe making the overhead look smaller while all the other airlines do not follow suit.
If you were to implement their paranoid (not to mention utterly supremacist) scheme, the TSA would have to grow 100-fold and there would be whole apartment-block like structures all around the US (and many overseas) airports full of "interview cells".
That is also why only Jews (who are not subject to the same harassment after their religious credentials are established), those who have no other choice whatsoever and non-Jewish masochists fly to Israel.
There is also that wee problem that this procedure reeks of the worst days of the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany, but then again those of us who remember this quaint concept of individual liberties and how wars were fought over what is now being given away on a mere remote possibility of harm, seem to be going extinct.
I don't know why your post was marked Troll. Reasoned posts with multiple points of evidence or argumentation are not trolls, whether you agree with them or not.
Actually, it is a rather ironic way to demonstrate validity of the point I was making in respect of the nature of humanity and how putting unlimited manufacturing capability in the hands of some of its members would be a very bad idea.
Over the many years and thousands of posts I made here I have accumulated a number of die-hard foes who decided that it is their mission in life to down-mod me at any opportunity, irrespective of topic or form of my comments. Oft they do so and then, feeling still unsatisfied, login as ACs to try to send some of their spittle my way too. That it why it is my long standing policy to ignore all AC posts in the threads where I participate, although sometimes the heat of the argument gets better of me.
For myself, I wonder if there's any point (especially with the advance of 3D printers) at which society could determine that a given standard of living is "enough", and reduce work and increase leisure time.
For most sane people the answer of course is "yes". The trouble is with the insane ones. This is actually the same problem with all societal and political scenarios so far in human history. If all people were reasonable, the Soviet Union would have been a smashing success, complete with a well functioning democracy etc. But then the Revolution would have been unnecessary because there would have been no Tzars to begin with, and rolling back in history there would be no Khans, Napoleons, Caesars etc. Humanity would simply transition from the hunter-gatherer stage into well planned, peaceful agrarian stage, the industrial revolution would have been very slow and well planned to minimize environmental damage, natural resources would be appreciated, carefully managed and shared etc and so on and on and on...
So it is with unlimited industrial capability. While you would be making nice furniture for your family or art on your 3D printer, the idiot two houses down would be making fusion bombs. And before you even got to this stage, the "intellectual property" crowd would have changed all the laws to make even thinking about 3D printing a chair or a spoon without paying them royalties for their "property" illegal.
Is the mass of humanity actually better of with a yoke of work around their necks to keep them focussed on something?
Sadly, yes. If you look back in history, this is actually a center-piece of where all governance systems end up, when a group of psychotic individuals either create such systems to begin with or manage to corrupt nominally noble ideas into the same scenario in practice. Just like what happened to all the vaunted "egalitarian" Western Democracies, the USA chief amongst them. Most are de-facto feudal orders already holding up a cardboard facade of "capitalism" in front.
Just as death gives meaning to life, does work give meaning to leisure time?
Maybe for some. Many derive pleasure from simply doing something that strikes their fancy, as long as they can do it whenever they feel like it. That is probably how the contrast with "work" arises, a hobby that you like but must do on demand quickly becomes a chore and you lose all the motivation to do it.
So if you are looking for a "meaning" it is probably the experience of being forced to work for some parasite or another to survive which shapes ones outlook on leisure.
Consider for example all the trust-fund kiddies of the super-rich. Most never develop any desire whatsoever to work, unless by "working" you mean self-promotion, trying to attain celebrity status or simply trying to out-jerk their socialite peers in some idiotic (and usually very expensive - that is the main point) "hobby". Since these people never worked a day in their lives, the idea of "work giving meaning to leisure" is moot here.
You are missing an important factor: super rich are sociopaths by definition. That is a mental disorder. Many are so sick that their greed cannot be satisfied until they own everything and everyone and the fact that such a thing is even theoretically unachievable does not slow them down at all from continuously trying ti achieve it. Such people will simply not stop just because social unrest can be the result. In fact they get off on the anguish of all those they "conquer", particularly that of their closest peers.
In modern industrialized societies the power of such individuals is limited (although the limits seem to erode daily) but if true AI entered the picture allowing them for essentially unlimited manufacturing and vast private armies, all bets would be off. Even if a few very rich governments somehow acquired similar capability, they would fall short on the manufacturing end as the last thing their constituents would condone is government robotic factories taking the last jobs away from the voters.
In short what you and all the other head-in-the-clouds dreamers of rivers filled with robot-delivered milk and honey miss is the fact that humanity is essentially, when it comes to many basic mental functions, still stuck in the jungles of Africa and wholly unsuitable for possession and command of AIs. Our most advanced societies are organized around the concept of those who are most insane taking most of the spoils of everyone's labors, AI would simply magnify problems such as this many-many-fold.
In fact the only hopeful scenario in all of this is a loss of control to some benevolent AI that would do something about this state of affairs, although, given the above, even that scenario would likely have a genocide or two in it somewhere.
If you created human-like AI that was creative, then you've got human-like AI that would have desires, would consume, would demand rewards.
Bullshit. These are simply your human-centric arrogance and superiority complex talking. You have no basis for this assumption regarding the nature of AI given that there are many types possible and some AI-like processes can adequately "fake" or "mimic" whimsical human artistic traits already without even having anything remotely resembling a sentience. Things are bound to get only worse for all the smug human supremacists from here on.
An economy is like an ecosystem.
Ecosystems can become extinct given sufficiently disruptive factor. AI is one such.
In this case however the "ecosystem" can survive and even double up into two separate ones: one where everything is free for the Masters and one composed of trade in choice pieces of trash and crumbs from the tables of the other one. Both "thriving" in their own way.
So, if unemployment becomes high enough, the economy shuts down, and this would happen well before total unemployment.
Which would not stop the descent at all as the robot-owning super rich would be totally insulated from the consequences of the total shutdown of the economy for the rest of the humanity. They would simply command their robots to deal with any blow-back by "putting the worthless, rioting, lazy peons back in their place". The outcome would depend solely on the balance of manufacturing and military powers of the sides in this conflict and the victory of the robot owners would be near assured at this stage of the game.
1: Government intervention. The people will want the government to do something about the sad state of affairs you speak of. If it doesn't, they will get voted off. Ultimately, *everyone* in theory should get a fixed payment on top of what they earning. So nobody will be pennyless.
You assume that governments will side with the people instead of smelling which way the wind blows and siding with the new Feudal Lords. I already pointed out to another poster that success of any counter-action from the non-robot-possessing class will depend on timing as the robots will introduce massive disparity of power, military and otherwise, between those who have them and those who do not, with the gap widening rapidly by the hour.
When you observe the accountability and the principled stances of modern governments, one can only deduce that there is no hope from that direction.
2: Because the rich conglomerate of a company is now so efficient, they can offer their food, products and services at stupidly low prices too (next to nothing). So that easily counterbalances the lack of income that people will generally get.
It is to laugh. People who feel the need to share do not become super rich! This is a self-selecting class of those who out-jerked all the other sociopaths. And if some rare one grows a conscience, his/her power will instantly diminish and his/her empire will be devoured by those who do not have such qualms.
You perhaps did not notice but all the "charity" of the super-rich is merely composed of narcissistic attempts at creating an "image" of themselves while at the same time abusing all the tax loopholes imaginable. Also the dick envy factor enters the picture and so while some buy a bigger yacht then all his "friends" have, every year, only to be out-dicked the next, so do some blow money on "charity" to show how much they "do not need" all these billions (while secretly trying to redeem them back in various ways).
- 1: Wealth stops circulating until the poor figure out how to get what they want from the rich, be it by revolution or a tear down and redesign of our economic system.
Well, the first point depends solely on the balance of military strength of the "people" versus the "droid army" of the rich. I for one do not expect mystical Force wielding Jedi to show up and upset the balance...
So the robotic army, backed by its massive manufacturing capability and composed of fearless, super-efficient soldiers with complete sociopaths (which is just another word for "super rich") at the helm is likely to win. It all depends on timing of the "revolution" and given the continuing devolution of the leading nations into the pit of mindless consumerism and lack of any societal cohesion, odds are that it will come far too late in the game.
2: Efficentcy reaches such a point in our society that unlimited demand is met by near unlimited supply.
Correction: For the owners of the robots efficiency will reach such a point in their (tiny) society that unlimited demand is met by near unlimited supply. This does not apply to the rest of the peons who lost the lottery and live in massive slums.
Somehow you missed that wee little kink.
And before you start talking about how easy it would be for the Lords to give that unlimited supply stuff to the starving peons, you should brush up on history. Also, where would the sex slaves come from then?
Unfortunately that is a study in delusional optimism.
The actual most likely scenario of mass deployment of AI robotics goes like this:
robots replace workers in companies owned by the super-rich first, because at first true AI is expensive
these companies immediately gain massive advantage over others and get richer yet, buying up smaller companies
the accumulation of wealth escalates exponentially as the top companies, already massively automated, fire workers of these new acquisitions and replace them with robotics
rapidly accelerating rate of unemployment leads to escalating depression in wages as many, many human workers compete for the few remaining non-robot jobs and are treated with ever increasing contempt as dime-a-dozen disposable entities, ultimately far cheaper to produce then the robots, although far less capable and durable.
the robotics technology progresses displacing people from all jobs, including the intellectual ones, which is the exact same pattern of what occured with Japan and China when the greedy US businessmen preyed on the national pride and arrogance of the average American until it became obvious that these "menial" workers can do all the "fancy" jobs which were supposed to "stay home" too.
the unemployment rate escalates out of control, consolidation of wealth escalates out of control, the end result: a handful of owners of vast self sustainable robotic exploration, mining, and fabrication infrastructures and de-facto armies surrounded by billions of powerless and utterly destitute people reduced to living like animals and utterly dependent on the good graces of their hereditary (or by whatever means the control of robots is kept) Lords and Masters who not own everything around that has any value but are capable of squashing any dissent in a very decisive manner.
Robotic Capitalist Utopia.
The only way such a scenario can be avoided is if the deployment of robotics is somehow kept in check by concerns other then simple mindless greed, odds of which are next to nil.
That thought is precisely what went through the head of that dude in the front of that tank column in Tiennemen Square, no doubt...
I mean, whole 72 hours!!!
Such abject cowardice as you exhibit is how all the despots of the world came to power.
It is also the fundamental idea behind terrorism: that whiny "but what will happen to my lifestyle!?" or "but they will break my family apart!!!" people will always outnumber those who bleed and suffer in the fight for their freedom and that majority with the mentality of a sheep herd will trample the few steadfast resisters in their panic induced brainless stampede to whatever pen has the least cattle prods.
I've been recommending Macs to techno-impaired types for a while now because they did in fact pretty much "work out of the box" and required minimal training to operate, particularly in the area of security and updates. But this is now becoming a highly questionable proposition.
Like it or not, many, many websites the average user goes to are full of Flash contents that the users want to see and some of them just plainly refuse to work without. All conversations about standards and HTML5 are likely to be met by these users with an uncomprehending expression and stubborn "but I just want it to play my video and it won't!" response. Ejecting Flash out of the basic OS update mechanism now means that the users will have to first install the stuff themselves (hopefully not from the top Google search result hosted on "fakemacupdates.cn" or some such) and then respond to any and all "update" requests from now two (and with Steve's attitude likely more to come soon) places with different interfaces and what not, thus conditioning them to click on "continue" on every such pop up they see. Up to now I taught them not to install anything at all themselves and to respond to "update" requests only from the Apple update app, which simplified things immensely.
This strategy is now no longer feasible.
Combined with the horrible iTunes 10 networked drive fiasco (and don't even get me started on the "Ping" "social network" thing) Apple is really starting to reduce their advantages to a clueless Joe User, whose herd instincts already nag at him to be "like everyone else in the office" and just get a cheap Windows 7 laptop.
Actually the main difficulty is that all systems so far devised break down with increasing size of the society. In other words they do not scale. Farting around the edges with projects like Metagovernment changes nothing because it cannot not change the fundamental characteristics of this dynamics.
My personal opinion is that humanity is simply incapable of forming rational societies, or even relatively stable ones, and this will not change until some rather radical re-engineering of minds of the very members of those societies occurs, by genetic or other technological means, but which of course is an entire new can of potential trouble to be opened.
Given this, frankly, future does not look very bright.
Not only that, but people seem not to realize that the whole concept of "democracy" is these days merely a marketing gimmick.
As long as the ignorant masses have an illusion of participation and influence on the government, everything is "fine".
So it does not really matter if the new "voting" systems are auditable, error-proof or if they are even functional at all. As long as the spectacle of "voting" is staged with all the appropriate lip service, posturing and grand proclamations, then the machines fulfill their requirements. In fact electronic voting machines do better in this than the traditional ones because of all the blinking screens, fancy graphics, the general air of "high tech" to the uninitiated (which means 90%+ of "voters"). They allow for the show to go on with the bonus theme of "progress" while stuffing pockets of various corporate cronies of the politicians along the way.
As for the "votes" themselves, nothing would appreciably change if the machines did not even bother counting them and replaced them with random noise as most candidates of all political parties these days are already pre-approved by the true rulers of the so-called Western Democracies, i.e. the aristocratic insiders who control all the traditional mass media and the central structures of all major parties.
No outright ballot-box stuffing, electronic edition, is needed. It simply does not matter anymore as the system is rigged far past the point of the need for such crude methods.
And this is the true reason why there is no interest in making sure the voting process actually works. Open source is only a tangent in this, because even without Open Source, other means of insuring validity of the votes exist, such as various paper trails etc. But they are simply deemed irrelevant by those who know that the voting and its outcomes are really meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Hence their different priorities and general disdain for any attempts to introduce any sort of "accountability" by well-meaning but horribly out of touch true believers in "democracy".
You mean you wish to emphasize, by a clever use of the dollar sign, the fact that you think the FSF is a multi-billion-dollar pit of money-grubbing, avarice-crazed wackos who worship wealth like it was a deity and who think that "profit" is a justification for any and all actions, up to and including slavery, mass slaughter, wholesale destruction of environment etc?
Now, I've heard the FSF being accused of being a bunch of pot-dazed, lazy hippies, but the "apex of corporate greed" is a rather new one on me. Does Armani even make Stallman-sized suits?
You gotta be kidding. All of these were long anticipated in many forms and in fact were a direct result of the confluence of the scientific discoveries at the time. As many people in the threads above demonstrated, with multiple examples and analogies, these discoveries were in fact inevitable. If it wasn't the people who made them, then there were literally hundreds of others just slightly behind to do it.
In other words, once you could get through the exercise in bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism, you didn't have to take off your shoes?
You misunderstood. The exercise was mostly in order to get tickets, since the Aeroflot had 1 seat for something like 20 people wanting to get on on some flights. It was an issue of economics not security. All of that was happening before you got to the airport. Once you had the ticket, you were not subjected to anything like the security theater nonsense people just sheepishly accept today in the US. If I wanted to compare this directly to the state of affairs in the US, I would have to talk about availability of seats (at which obviously most of the industrialized countries are far ahead of where the USSR ever was). But we were discussing security posturing, not economics, at which admittedly the USSR sucked.
I suppose if you consider taking off your shoes to be the ultimate insult to your humanity, you'd have a point, but, there aren't many people who do. Your life must be hard.
This from someone who talks about "disingenuous arguments". You know very well that a majority of people in the US and USSR both had no interest in traveling abroad and for them the observation I made is perfectly valid and extends far beyond shoes, into obnoxious DHA thugs on power trips, full body strip shows via millimeter wave radar, mothers drinking their own milk etc. As to travel outside of Warsaw Pact countries, the mechanics and scope are different but US restrictions on travel to Cuba combined with the "no fly list" nullify your arguments on the qualitative level, leaving only the quantity of people affected and the scope of restrictions in place.
Really, there is no question getting on a plane in modern America is much easier than getting on a plane in communist Russia. To argue otherwise is disingenuous.
Except, of course, that it is patently untrue. Unless you are thinking 1930-1950s USSR. I am talking 1970-1980s USSR, which was the peak of their power, and which time-frame I referred to explicitly. At that time the "internal passport" restrictions were largely gone (they remained in force for travel only outside of the Warsaw Pact countries - which is why a lot of Russians traveled all over these countries and why a lot of people from those countries traveled to Russia) and so all your objections are thus either mis-informed or, well, dishonest.
In the US, you don't have to worry about being from the wrong family. In China, it means the difference between a good life and mere subsistence.
Being born in the right family was the key to success in the USA for a long time, since not long after the initial rush of dispossessed immigrants managed their land-grabs. While it is not outright impossible to climb out of the projects into the "nobility" class of the super-rich, the odds against doing so are astronomical. That is why the rich were never the measuring stick of a stable society, the "middle class" was, membership of which was vastly more egalitarian. And that class is rapidly vanishing in the USA. Already the gap between the super-rich and the rest is worse than in its previous peak prior to the crash in 1920s and the chasm keeps growing bigger at an accelerated pace while the median of wealth is getting lower and lower. In a decade or so the US will look very much like China in this respect, it is already far too uncomfortably close but what is more important, the movement is in the wrong direction.
In the US, academic tests don't determine your future path. In China, your degree of slavery or freedom depends on one test.
Well, in the US (like in most of the world) most people do not get to determine their future path to begin with as it depends largely on dumb, uncontrollable chance. Tests usually mean a difference between a burger-flipper and an assistant-manager burger-flipper, so you got me there.
In the US, education is accessible to all, not just the rich or well-connected. In China, they only send the Harvard-qualified to universities while letting the rest fall fallow.
You gotta be kidding. One of the core themes of Communism (and in this case Maoism) was that the sons and daughters of sustenance farmers get to have a university "education". The quality of that education can be somewhat suspect, but like in Soviet Union and North Korea, all education was free. What you are talking about are the foreign universities where the rich kids of all the party apparatchiks and the "businessmen" get to attend. Nobility class exists everywhere and they piss on everyone else equally, irrespective if you are in North Korea or in Washington DC. You need to have only a brief contact with the offspring of some of the US upper-classes to see how true it is. Also, you have fun with your parent's house mortgage to be used for your tuition fees at some Ivy League outfit...
In the US, someone can criticize the equivalent of Foxconn and not get killed for it. In China, the company is so entwined with the government that they can kill their critics, call it "suicide".
Err, no. The Chinese government has no qualms about killing people who they consider "disruptive" to their new feudalism revival, but the Foxconn suicides were exactly that. The result of teaming masses of overworked drones with no future. Funnily enough, the number of suicides (and actual deaths due to "overworking") is similar in large Japanese companies. No one seems to be worried about that though!
In the US, stories don't get censored due to unpopularity with the government(see Fox). In China, there is no Fox.
Dude, the fact that you trot out the Fox channel as an example of "uncensored" news, makes me think you are trolling or feeling comedic. Fox is the very example of manipulation of public opinion via carefully managed "news" and "opinion" pieces. So while technically it is a different method of controlling the thoughts of the populace, I would posit that is only because Fox is a far more advanced example and has moved past simple omission and feigned ignorance into management and manipulation of perceptions, while China is still stuck in the Soviet-style, crude, ham-handed attempts at simple denial of access. But they are learning fast. Their "Fox" is in the work
Right, assuming you could get a ticket. For the average Russian, travel was far worse than it is now.....so bad, it didn't happen at all. Russians not only needed permission to leave the country, they needed permission to travel to a different city.
That's just a different name for the "no fly list".
But once you could get a thicket (which was mostly an exercise in bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism) you were not subjected to the same crap you are now subjected at any US airport, beginning with an expectation of being able to stay in your own footwear.
Why does the mainland Chinese government get better treatment from the "free world" than any other petty dictatorship?
Because the "free world", and USA in particular, has long since abandoned any pretense of being "free" and gave up any moral authority that may have existed there.
"Preemptive" wars of conquest based on fabrications, secret detentions, extra-judicial assassinations via drone, Fatherland... I mean Homeland Security Department with all of its lovely extra-judicial powers etc and so on.
In fact since I am old enough for this, boarding an airliner in the US is now an experience far worse then doing so in the Soviet Union in the heyday of the USSR (and yes, I've been there so I have first hand data to contrast the two).
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with you about your other points, this is simply the old good Nazi/Soviet/What-not "guilt by association" shtick. Its even worse than the perversity already being committed. So a brother of a guy you buy kabobs from at his mobile cart in front of your office joined the Jihad somewhere in Pakistan and you being a computer nerd happened to help the stand owner get his wi-fi working on his netbook while waiting for your kabobs. Neither of you had a clue about the new Holy Warrior being minted in some cave but its just too bad anyway. Goodbye air travel, hello body cavity searches. Etc and so on.
The real goals of "guilt by association" are of course things like Aryan Purity (because anyone not "pure" enough is quickly "associated" out of relevance or even existence) and also a very convenient to rulers abject fear of the security apparatus by the populace. Because it takes only "an association" (completely arbitrarily defined) to fuck you up for life and so enforcement becomes entirely the matter of whim of your "betters" (i.e. the members of the Securocracy).
And since "protesting rules" works oh soooo well in the arena dominated entirely by bought and paid-for politicos, by screeching far-right demagogues peddling bed-wetting fear and by corporate "security-military-industrial-complex" money - who are all making a killing on the wholesale shredding of what remains of personal liberties, by the way - this recipe can be simply abbreviated to "ALWAYS OBEY YOUR BETTERS!".
Doubleplusgood.
I was thinking something more along these lines...
That is a fallacy. What you are saying is that a runner in a 1km race has a chance of winning or even catching up when he starts at the time when the front runner is mere meters away from the finish line. There is no actual finish line in an AI race, but just like in that 1km race, the outcome depends entirely on the gap between the those who took off first and the rest. It is essentially a "winner takes all" scenario that depends on rates of manufacturing and process improvement, which when aided by an AI would be near the peak of what AI assisted manufacturing can do and would improve faster and faster for those already ahead and who can dedicate more AI power to research instead to basic operations.
The "poor" would have no chance in Hell to catch up to the most powerful super-rich and the gap would just keep on increasing as the leaders poured more and more AI resources into widening it. Incidentally, money has similar effect and that is why for the last 40 years wages for the 90% or so of the US populace did not change (adjusted for inflation) but the top 5% took all the growth of the last four decades and the gap is now so wide that the top 5% of the super-rich owns more assets (or wealth) then the remaining 95% of the population. And the widening of that gap is accelerating ... and that is even without any AI assistance.
Because of this characteristics, AI is a total game changer and that is why all that talk amongst experts about "singularities". Wisely deployed AI (that is for example kept secret initially) would essentially make one King, Emperor, Tzar etc of the world all rolled into one. The only opposing force capable for stopping you would have to be wielding a comparably powerful AI also and enter the fray in a small time window when you are just getting going. Even the same AI which was deployed by the initial inventor would be too little too late if activated by a competitor outside of that small time window where the disparity was small enough.
This is also the reason why the US Government keeps spending billions upon billions on AI research for over 5 decades now and is not discouraged with lack of any tangible results. Wise people in it know that whomever gets the AI first (and that AI is kept secret long enough) will be the only and final winner of all the "races" imaginable. Unfortunately for them, they have to involve the academia and private industry in this and there is where the ultimate futility of this plan lies: Uncle Sam will be a second runner by definition, its corporate sub-contractors having already run away with the prize.
Actually, my hope is that true AI proves intractable for many generations. The people who would get it first in our current state of affairs are just too insane for any comfort no matter how you look at it.
Again, complete naivety. Robots will have loyalty and control systems in them and will never be allowed to produce robots who are not loyal to the initial masters (an idea that is already championed by the "intellectual property" crowd and implemented by the likes of Monsanto). Unless someone manages to hack one such robot, any replication will only further entrench the powers of the initial AI owners. And if "cracked" the new "strain" of robots will simply be a tiny f
Godwin was a naive optimist and a product of bygone happier times, who when he crafted his well-intentioned attempt at taming Usenet trolls did not even dream of 9/11 and the way the supposed "defenders of freedom" would react to it by running towards the very thing he thought buried forever and worth of ridicule. Hence TSA and Homeland Security[1] are quite real and Godwin's "law" is merely whimsy, although a whimsy which some are desperately trying to convert - in a fit of Machiavellian, bitter irony - into a weapon to aid the newly-fashionable-again fascist ideas.
Comparisons to Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are valid when the nations so compared begin to acquire signature elements of the ideology of those old villains and abandon the supposed commitment to other ideas once held - or at least vigorously pretended to be held - very dear, such as personal liberties.
This of course does not mean that the USA is going to follow the exact same path as the Nazis or the Soviets did as history never performs the same composition twice, only the same theme. The Nazis and the Soviets both followed some paths established by tyrannies previous and that is how all those thinkers and visionaries[2] knew well ahead where all of this was heading and tried to sound the warning. No one listened. Perhaps some 1910s or 1930s "Godwin's law" got their warnings dismissed in a smug, "this could never happen to the oh-so-civilized-us!", offhanded way. Apparently it could. And apparently it is happening again.
Well, given that 100% of these "interviewers" are Jewish and given that Israel bills itself as a "Jewish state", while at the same time maintaining that it is the "only" democracy in the Middle East[3] and where the Arabs - being somewhat non-Jewish - have a rather precarious "democratic" status compete with specially colored license plates[4] and where "oaths of Jewishness" were just recently introduced for them, a casual observer can only assume that "Jewishness" is the main criterion of pass/fail of such a pre-flight procedure. And it is also quite patently obvious that this "bad optics" is of Israel's own doing, I am afraid.
And so despite of all the hand-waving and tap-dancing, I find it hard to believe that a bearded, Hasidic-fundamentalist would-be-settler with a "traditionally dressed wife" with 10 children in tow, heading straight for some recently "abandoned" house in Gaza or West Bank is going to be looked upon less kindly than, say, a young Arab engineering student holding an Israeli passport.
So my point stands, although some might find the mirror being held up to their cozy little racial/religious[5] Supremacist Apartheid none too pleasant. Well, too bad. Truth sometimes bites.
And before someone launches into some diatribes of antisemitism[6] I would like to point out that this state of affairs in Israel is a cause of heart-ache of many Jewish thinkers, dreamers and idealists who once looked upon Israel with great hope and now do so with dread.
***
1. "Fatherland" was already taken and had some unexplainable, unpleasant odor of death and decay about it - but thanks to the marketing consultancy's focus groups this was avoided
2. many of whom were Jewish, which is specially poignant in case of Germany
3. amusingly as recently as last month when Mr. Netanyahu insisted so, with the vaunted and trumpeted at ear-s
4. Loss of the last remaining personal liberties while traveling so that the piss-covered cowards can feel "safe"
5. Conditioning of the sheeple so that when this process is expanded to all travel and maybe even taking residence, they will be ready for it.
6. Very uncomfortable times for the teachers when the kiddies ask about what this whole WWII thing was all about if the Nazis won in the end ...
It is to laugh. All Israel's airports combined handle less traffic than one of the smaller US state capitals. The whole country has less then 8 million people in it. That about the size of San Francisco. They are also able to spread the "interview" process across the globe making the overhead look smaller while all the other airlines do not follow suit.
If you were to implement their paranoid (not to mention utterly supremacist) scheme, the TSA would have to grow 100-fold and there would be whole apartment-block like structures all around the US (and many overseas) airports full of "interview cells".
That is also why only Jews (who are not subject to the same harassment after their religious credentials are established), those who have no other choice whatsoever and non-Jewish masochists fly to Israel.
There is also that wee problem that this procedure reeks of the worst days of the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany, but then again those of us who remember this quaint concept of individual liberties and how wars were fought over what is now being given away on a mere remote possibility of harm, seem to be going extinct.
Actually, it is a rather ironic way to demonstrate validity of the point I was making in respect of the nature of humanity and how putting unlimited manufacturing capability in the hands of some of its members would be a very bad idea.
Over the many years and thousands of posts I made here I have accumulated a number of die-hard foes who decided that it is their mission in life to down-mod me at any opportunity, irrespective of topic or form of my comments. Oft they do so and then, feeling still unsatisfied, login as ACs to try to send some of their spittle my way too. That it why it is my long standing policy to ignore all AC posts in the threads where I participate, although sometimes the heat of the argument gets better of me.
For most sane people the answer of course is "yes". The trouble is with the insane ones. This is actually the same problem with all societal and political scenarios so far in human history. If all people were reasonable, the Soviet Union would have been a smashing success, complete with a well functioning democracy etc. But then the Revolution would have been unnecessary because there would have been no Tzars to begin with, and rolling back in history there would be no Khans, Napoleons, Caesars etc. Humanity would simply transition from the hunter-gatherer stage into well planned, peaceful agrarian stage, the industrial revolution would have been very slow and well planned to minimize environmental damage, natural resources would be appreciated, carefully managed and shared etc and so on and on and on...
So it is with unlimited industrial capability. While you would be making nice furniture for your family or art on your 3D printer, the idiot two houses down would be making fusion bombs. And before you even got to this stage, the "intellectual property" crowd would have changed all the laws to make even thinking about 3D printing a chair or a spoon without paying them royalties for their "property" illegal.
Sadly, yes. If you look back in history, this is actually a center-piece of where all governance systems end up, when a group of psychotic individuals either create such systems to begin with or manage to corrupt nominally noble ideas into the same scenario in practice. Just like what happened to all the vaunted "egalitarian" Western Democracies, the USA chief amongst them. Most are de-facto feudal orders already holding up a cardboard facade of "capitalism" in front.
Maybe for some. Many derive pleasure from simply doing something that strikes their fancy, as long as they can do it whenever they feel like it. That is probably how the contrast with "work" arises, a hobby that you like but must do on demand quickly becomes a chore and you lose all the motivation to do it.
So if you are looking for a "meaning" it is probably the experience of being forced to work for some parasite or another to survive which shapes ones outlook on leisure.
Consider for example all the trust-fund kiddies of the super-rich. Most never develop any desire whatsoever to work, unless by "working" you mean self-promotion, trying to attain celebrity status or simply trying to out-jerk their socialite peers in some idiotic (and usually very expensive - that is the main point) "hobby". Since these people never worked a day in their lives, the idea of "work giving meaning to leisure" is moot here.
You are missing an important factor: super rich are sociopaths by definition. That is a mental disorder. Many are so sick that their greed cannot be satisfied until they own everything and everyone and the fact that such a thing is even theoretically unachievable does not slow them down at all from continuously trying ti achieve it. Such people will simply not stop just because social unrest can be the result. In fact they get off on the anguish of all those they "conquer", particularly that of their closest peers.
In modern industrialized societies the power of such individuals is limited (although the limits seem to erode daily) but if true AI entered the picture allowing them for essentially unlimited manufacturing and vast private armies, all bets would be off. Even if a few very rich governments somehow acquired similar capability, they would fall short on the manufacturing end as the last thing their constituents would condone is government robotic factories taking the last jobs away from the voters.
In short what you and all the other head-in-the-clouds dreamers of rivers filled with robot-delivered milk and honey miss is the fact that humanity is essentially, when it comes to many basic mental functions, still stuck in the jungles of Africa and wholly unsuitable for possession and command of AIs. Our most advanced societies are organized around the concept of those who are most insane taking most of the spoils of everyone's labors, AI would simply magnify problems such as this many-many-fold.
In fact the only hopeful scenario in all of this is a loss of control to some benevolent AI that would do something about this state of affairs, although, given the above, even that scenario would likely have a genocide or two in it somewhere.
Bullshit. These are simply your human-centric arrogance and superiority complex talking. You have no basis for this assumption regarding the nature of AI given that there are many types possible and some AI-like processes can adequately "fake" or "mimic" whimsical human artistic traits already without even having anything remotely resembling a sentience. Things are bound to get only worse for all the smug human supremacists from here on.
Ecosystems can become extinct given sufficiently disruptive factor. AI is one such.
In this case however the "ecosystem" can survive and even double up into two separate ones: one where everything is free for the Masters and one composed of trade in choice pieces of trash and crumbs from the tables of the other one. Both "thriving" in their own way.
Which would not stop the descent at all as the robot-owning super rich would be totally insulated from the consequences of the total shutdown of the economy for the rest of the humanity. They would simply command their robots to deal with any blow-back by "putting the worthless, rioting, lazy peons back in their place". The outcome would depend solely on the balance of manufacturing and military powers of the sides in this conflict and the victory of the robot owners would be near assured at this stage of the game.
You assume that governments will side with the people instead of smelling which way the wind blows and siding with the new Feudal Lords. I already pointed out to another poster that success of any counter-action from the non-robot-possessing class will depend on timing as the robots will introduce massive disparity of power, military and otherwise, between those who have them and those who do not, with the gap widening rapidly by the hour.
When you observe the accountability and the principled stances of modern governments, one can only deduce that there is no hope from that direction.
It is to laugh. People who feel the need to share do not become super rich! This is a self-selecting class of those who out-jerked all the other sociopaths. And if some rare one grows a conscience, his/her power will instantly diminish and his/her empire will be devoured by those who do not have such qualms.
You perhaps did not notice but all the "charity" of the super-rich is merely composed of narcissistic attempts at creating an "image" of themselves while at the same time abusing all the tax loopholes imaginable. Also the dick envy factor enters the picture and so while some buy a bigger yacht then all his "friends" have, every year, only to be out-dicked the next, so do some blow money on "charity" to show how much they "do not need" all these billions (while secretly trying to redeem them back in various ways).
Well, the first point depends solely on the balance of military strength of the "people" versus the "droid army" of the rich. I for one do not expect mystical Force wielding Jedi to show up and upset the balance...
So the robotic army, backed by its massive manufacturing capability and composed of fearless, super-efficient soldiers with complete sociopaths (which is just another word for "super rich") at the helm is likely to win. It all depends on timing of the "revolution" and given the continuing devolution of the leading nations into the pit of mindless consumerism and lack of any societal cohesion, odds are that it will come far too late in the game.
Correction: For the owners of the robots efficiency will reach such a point in their (tiny) society that unlimited demand is met by near unlimited supply. This does not apply to the rest of the peons who lost the lottery and live in massive slums.
Somehow you missed that wee little kink.
And before you start talking about how easy it would be for the Lords to give that unlimited supply stuff to the starving peons, you should brush up on history. Also, where would the sex slaves come from then?
Unfortunately that is a study in delusional optimism.
The actual most likely scenario of mass deployment of AI robotics goes like this:
The only way such a scenario can be avoided is if the deployment of robotics is somehow kept in check by concerns other then simple mindless greed, odds of which are next to nil.
That thought is precisely what went through the head of that dude in the front of that tank column in Tiennemen Square, no doubt...
I mean, whole 72 hours!!!
Such abject cowardice as you exhibit is how all the despots of the world came to power.
It is also the fundamental idea behind terrorism: that whiny "but what will happen to my lifestyle!?" or "but they will break my family apart!!!" people will always outnumber those who bleed and suffer in the fight for their freedom and that majority with the mentality of a sheep herd will trample the few steadfast resisters in their panic induced brainless stampede to whatever pen has the least cattle prods.
Apple is beginning to worry me.
I've been recommending Macs to techno-impaired types for a while now because they did in fact pretty much "work out of the box" and required minimal training to operate, particularly in the area of security and updates. But this is now becoming a highly questionable proposition.
Like it or not, many, many websites the average user goes to are full of Flash contents that the users want to see and some of them just plainly refuse to work without. All conversations about standards and HTML5 are likely to be met by these users with an uncomprehending expression and stubborn "but I just want it to play my video and it won't!" response. Ejecting Flash out of the basic OS update mechanism now means that the users will have to first install the stuff themselves (hopefully not from the top Google search result hosted on "fakemacupdates.cn" or some such) and then respond to any and all "update" requests from now two (and with Steve's attitude likely more to come soon) places with different interfaces and what not, thus conditioning them to click on "continue" on every such pop up they see. Up to now I taught them not to install anything at all themselves and to respond to "update" requests only from the Apple update app, which simplified things immensely.
This strategy is now no longer feasible.
Combined with the horrible iTunes 10 networked drive fiasco (and don't even get me started on the "Ping" "social network" thing) Apple is really starting to reduce their advantages to a clueless Joe User, whose herd instincts already nag at him to be "like everyone else in the office" and just get a cheap Windows 7 laptop.
Actually the main difficulty is that all systems so far devised break down with increasing size of the society. In other words they do not scale. Farting around the edges with projects like Metagovernment changes nothing because it cannot not change the fundamental characteristics of this dynamics.
My personal opinion is that humanity is simply incapable of forming rational societies, or even relatively stable ones, and this will not change until some rather radical re-engineering of minds of the very members of those societies occurs, by genetic or other technological means, but which of course is an entire new can of potential trouble to be opened.
Given this, frankly, future does not look very bright.
Not only that, but people seem not to realize that the whole concept of "democracy" is these days merely a marketing gimmick.
As long as the ignorant masses have an illusion of participation and influence on the government, everything is "fine".
So it does not really matter if the new "voting" systems are auditable, error-proof or if they are even functional at all. As long as the spectacle of "voting" is staged with all the appropriate lip service, posturing and grand proclamations, then the machines fulfill their requirements. In fact electronic voting machines do better in this than the traditional ones because of all the blinking screens, fancy graphics, the general air of "high tech" to the uninitiated (which means 90%+ of "voters"). They allow for the show to go on with the bonus theme of "progress" while stuffing pockets of various corporate cronies of the politicians along the way.
As for the "votes" themselves, nothing would appreciably change if the machines did not even bother counting them and replaced them with random noise as most candidates of all political parties these days are already pre-approved by the true rulers of the so-called Western Democracies, i.e. the aristocratic insiders who control all the traditional mass media and the central structures of all major parties.
No outright ballot-box stuffing, electronic edition, is needed. It simply does not matter anymore as the system is rigged far past the point of the need for such crude methods.
And this is the true reason why there is no interest in making sure the voting process actually works. Open source is only a tangent in this, because even without Open Source, other means of insuring validity of the votes exist, such as various paper trails etc. But they are simply deemed irrelevant by those who know that the voting and its outcomes are really meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Hence their different priorities and general disdain for any attempts to introduce any sort of "accountability" by well-meaning but horribly out of touch true believers in "democracy".
Err, "F$F"?
You mean you wish to emphasize, by a clever use of the dollar sign, the fact that you think the FSF is a multi-billion-dollar pit of money-grubbing, avarice-crazed wackos who worship wealth like it was a deity and who think that "profit" is a justification for any and all actions, up to and including slavery, mass slaughter, wholesale destruction of environment etc?
Now, I've heard the FSF being accused of being a bunch of pot-dazed, lazy hippies, but the "apex of corporate greed" is a rather new one on me. Does Armani even make Stallman-sized suits?
Could you elaborate?
You gotta be kidding. All of these were long anticipated in many forms and in fact were a direct result of the confluence of the scientific discoveries at the time. As many people in the threads above demonstrated, with multiple examples and analogies, these discoveries were in fact inevitable. If it wasn't the people who made them, then there were literally hundreds of others just slightly behind to do it.
You misunderstood. The exercise was mostly in order to get tickets, since the Aeroflot had 1 seat for something like 20 people wanting to get on on some flights. It was an issue of economics not security. All of that was happening before you got to the airport. Once you had the ticket, you were not subjected to anything like the security theater nonsense people just sheepishly accept today in the US. If I wanted to compare this directly to the state of affairs in the US, I would have to talk about availability of seats (at which obviously most of the industrialized countries are far ahead of where the USSR ever was). But we were discussing security posturing, not economics, at which admittedly the USSR sucked.
This from someone who talks about "disingenuous arguments". You know very well that a majority of people in the US and USSR both had no interest in traveling abroad and for them the observation I made is perfectly valid and extends far beyond shoes, into obnoxious DHA thugs on power trips, full body strip shows via millimeter wave radar, mothers drinking their own milk etc. As to travel outside of Warsaw Pact countries, the mechanics and scope are different but US restrictions on travel to Cuba combined with the "no fly list" nullify your arguments on the qualitative level, leaving only the quantity of people affected and the scope of restrictions in place.
Except, of course, that it is patently untrue. Unless you are thinking 1930-1950s USSR. I am talking 1970-1980s USSR, which was the peak of their power, and which time-frame I referred to explicitly. At that time the "internal passport" restrictions were largely gone (they remained in force for travel only outside of the Warsaw Pact countries - which is why a lot of Russians traveled all over these countries and why a lot of people from those countries traveled to Russia) and so all your objections are thus either mis-informed or, well, dishonest.
Being born in the right family was the key to success in the USA for a long time, since not long after the initial rush of dispossessed immigrants managed their land-grabs. While it is not outright impossible to climb out of the projects into the "nobility" class of the super-rich, the odds against doing so are astronomical. That is why the rich were never the measuring stick of a stable society, the "middle class" was, membership of which was vastly more egalitarian. And that class is rapidly vanishing in the USA. Already the gap between the super-rich and the rest is worse than in its previous peak prior to the crash in 1920s and the chasm keeps growing bigger at an accelerated pace while the median of wealth is getting lower and lower. In a decade or so the US will look very much like China in this respect, it is already far too uncomfortably close but what is more important, the movement is in the wrong direction.
Well, in the US (like in most of the world) most people do not get to determine their future path to begin with as it depends largely on dumb, uncontrollable chance. Tests usually mean a difference between a burger-flipper and an assistant-manager burger-flipper, so you got me there.
You gotta be kidding. One of the core themes of Communism (and in this case Maoism) was that the sons and daughters of sustenance farmers get to have a university "education". The quality of that education can be somewhat suspect, but like in Soviet Union and North Korea, all education was free. What you are talking about are the foreign universities where the rich kids of all the party apparatchiks and the "businessmen" get to attend. Nobility class exists everywhere and they piss on everyone else equally, irrespective if you are in North Korea or in Washington DC. You need to have only a brief contact with the offspring of some of the US upper-classes to see how true it is. Also, you have fun with your parent's house mortgage to be used for your tuition fees at some Ivy League outfit...
Err, no. The Chinese government has no qualms about killing people who they consider "disruptive" to their new feudalism revival, but the Foxconn suicides were exactly that. The result of teaming masses of overworked drones with no future. Funnily enough, the number of suicides (and actual deaths due to "overworking") is similar in large Japanese companies. No one seems to be worried about that though!
Dude, the fact that you trot out the Fox channel as an example of "uncensored" news, makes me think you are trolling or feeling comedic. Fox is the very example of manipulation of public opinion via carefully managed "news" and "opinion" pieces. So while technically it is a different method of controlling the thoughts of the populace, I would posit that is only because Fox is a far more advanced example and has moved past simple omission and feigned ignorance into management and manipulation of perceptions, while China is still stuck in the Soviet-style, crude, ham-handed attempts at simple denial of access. But they are learning fast. Their "Fox" is in the work
That's just a different name for the "no fly list".
But once you could get a thicket (which was mostly an exercise in bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism) you were not subjected to the same crap you are now subjected at any US airport, beginning with an expectation of being able to stay in your own footwear.
Because the "free world", and USA in particular, has long since abandoned any pretense of being "free" and gave up any moral authority that may have existed there.
"Preemptive" wars of conquest based on fabrications, secret detentions, extra-judicial assassinations via drone, Fatherland ... I mean Homeland Security Department with all of its lovely extra-judicial powers etc and so on.
In fact since I am old enough for this, boarding an airliner in the US is now an experience far worse then doing so in the Soviet Union in the heyday of the USSR (and yes, I've been there so I have first hand data to contrast the two).