You could use a ground effect plane. It goes up to 300km/hour, but it flies really low. Get as close as you are allowed, then slow down and approach at 30km/hour. Alternatively, have a floating airport and use a shuttle boat with underwater wings.
Ships don't necessarily have to be slow, you know?
But the gamers evolve with the games. I've played my first computer game (ironically, it was called Last Mission) about 20 years ago. I've been learning to play more complex and more difficult games all these 20 years. Since it is unlikely that adults will ever stop playing games, we can be sure that there is a large audience that can handle somewhat demanding games.
There is no point in nit-picking. Computer viruses are commonly called self-replicating, even though they can't do that without an operating system and hardware to run on.
A robot that can do 90% of the job of self-replicating (with the remaining 10% done using cheap unskilled labour and cheap off-the-shelf parts) can be justifiably called "self-replicating" because of the economic implications.
Also, expect the technology to drastically improve in a few years. If you insist on dissing this robot because it is not perfect yet, you won't realise the promises of self-replication technology and the medium-term prospects.
Of course. My point was that while these reforms changed how we define the meter, the length remained the same. That's why we ended up with odd definitions such as 1/299792458 LS instead of a more reasonable one such as 1/300000000 LS. So in a sense the meter of today is the same as the meter of the Eratosthenes would be.
This happens in a lot of places, sadly, not just in the US and not just with the Republicans. Yesterday I was reading about the Cuvier vs. Geoffroy debate on animal classification in Coen's Art of Genes. It's not desribed in much detail, but it's still amazing how interested the public was and how motivated it was to learn the truth. Today you don't have many media outlets that really treat the public with respect and present the material on a sufficiently high level. Instead even PBS always feels that it needs to dumb things down to the LCD. In the same issue of their ScienceNOW they had a somewhat serious discussion of women in physics and a lot of silly jokes (including the wanna-be-comedian host) apparently intended to make science fun and interesting for people.
Science has all the answers. Science can solve all our problems. But you don't get airtime to say that on TV or radio. But those who deny it and argue for tolerance of religious views (i.e. creatinism, rights for cells, etc.) and for limitations on scientific research (the precautionary principle, etc.) do.
And the morons are extremely snub nowdays. Without knowing pretty much anything about the world (don't know genetics, biology, physics, astronomy, history, etc.) they bask in the warm glow of their ignorance and pretend that a mishmash of pseudoreligious/spiritual/mystical/pseudoscientifi c beliefs is a valid worldview.
I am sure it's better than the retarded design that was on several keyboards at my former job (after two days I went and bought a replacement keyboard for myself). The keyboards had the sleep/poweroff/standby keys right above the arrow keys and below the Del/End/PgDn. Yeah, I guess placing the key that turns off the computer and interrupts your work for several minutes right next to some of the most often used keys is a good idea. Seriously retarded and I suspect it was an intentional act of sabotage.
Thanks for the demonstrating the dangers of closed-mindedness and intellectual rigidity. I need to always keep that in mind myself, lest I fall into the same trap as you did.
This is semantics. There are different things that we can call being alive. Your definition is valid, but not helpful. My definition will be helpful and will inevitably become the accepted one.
These people will become immortal in the cybernetics sense, i.e. the patterns of their minds will be preserved. Sticking with the classical (physical) definition is wrong. You assign absolute meanings to things. That's hard to argue against, but it's just pointless. I can claim that a person with a plastic heart is not really alive, because a real heart doesn't beat in his chest. That would be precisely what you are doing.
Any other attempt to achieve immortality is just "fool's gold".
Even if profession has no effect, if you take 100 different professions (in a relatively small sample - say 10000), find for each one the percentage of girls/boys and then compare, you are probably bound to find some that produced slightly more boys and some that produced slightly more girls. You are then free to invent any explanation.
Of course, it's possible that they checked for it and have really found something. I don't know.
Wrong. You may be a radical transhumanist, but that doesn't make you right. What we consider to be ourselves depends on the way we currently live, which is the way that we evolved to live. It is beneficial for biological humans to think of our bodies as ourselves and there simply wasn't a possibility in the past to live differently. After uploading becomes possible, people will start experiementing with it (like they experiement with body modification today).
They will make copies and destroy the originals, they will make several copies and run them simultaneously, they will combine several copies back into one mind, they will transfer parts of their mind to other people, etc., etc., etc. While technically you may call what they would do - dying, one can technically call what you do everyday dying too - the sleep, the transition through time, the death of some cells, etc.
But this doesn't matter. What matters is the functionality and the consensus. Functionally making a copy and destroying the original will be living. And the consensus will form that this is indeed living. Soon people will no longer care about on what hardware they are running, how many copies there are and will not think twice about spawning another copy to perform some task and then copying parts of the copy back into the first copy. There is no reason why people should live linearly. This suggests even more extreme possibilities of people living in different temporal directions (inside a computer simulation it's possible), people being superpositions of others, and other extreme ways.
But regardless of how far we will go, one thing is certain - people will not think the way you do now and you will change your mind (both literally and figuratively speaking).
Japanese have 65-70% success rate in their 30-year NISTEP predictions. That's technology foresight. Futurology, as practiced by BT and Ian Pearson himself is not exactly quakery, but it isn't anything particularly good or useful either. It just so happens that the thinkers that actually understand where we are heading are transhumanist thinkers such as Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Nick Bostrom and the like. The futurologists are only gradually waking up to the ideas that were obvious to others at least a decade ago.
It is possible to predict the future. You start with the basics (laws of nature), add some understanding of our development speed (in many areas you can predict it quite easily) and then build models that make sense. Of course, you need to learn to be rational, otherwise your predictions will end up as nonsensical as what you just wrote.
It's interesting how the media works. Here we have the head of futurology unit of British Telecom. He isn't some random guy and he clearly did some studies about the future. He makes a speech (was it at Futurex), where he, no doubt speaks at length about the future, about likely developments, about his work, about BT plans, etc. But the media takes two soundbites and rehashes them endlessly, without analisys or as much as a second thought. As a result, we get a bunch (hundreds of, to be more precise) of identical articles titled "Download your brain by 2050" and the text centering around "The other prediction was talking yoghurt by 2020".
This is pathetic. The average reader/viewer/listner has no chance to form a coherent picture of the future, or even our current ideas of it. But sadly, this is typical for news coverage of all topics. And it's actually one of the problems - that we treat such items as "news", where you get a notable person speak, then a few hundreds of nearly identical articles appear, then silence. In the best case the meme of "Playstation 5 will be as powerful as a human brain" will spread and settle in the brains of the public.
Instead of starting a decades-long discussion of all the implications of the future changes, instead of purposefully changing our societies to adapt to the scientific and technological advances, instead of basing our research budgets on the goal of achieving the most desirable of all possible futures, we just live as if nothing important is happening. This is beyond sad.
I don't know how you can change that, may be it's impossible in the world of corrupt democracies and commercialised mass-media, but if you personally want to understand where we are heading, check out the links in the end of this post.
Ian Pearsen is late. I remember the idiotic 21st century forecast that BT produced five years ago. Only now he starts to get things that better thinkers realised a decade ago. For some people the idea of mind uploading is not new and they already managed to present a much more comprehensive picture of the future.
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The only thing that we may ask is that you keep the signature in the signature field of your preferences, so that it doesn't interfere with browsing for those of us that prefer to disable them.
By my definition, a healthy state cannot exist when its people aren't allowed to exercise such basic freedoms. This is only because you live in comfort. It was proven time and time again that when you give people political freedoms, but through them into poverty and remove the safety net, they always say that freedom from need is much more important than freedom of speech (as demonstrated in public opinion polls).
You pointed to Cuban propaganda about their elections, but that's just as silly as if I pointed you to American propaganda. No, it isn't. Did you read the linked text? Can you honestly and sincerely say that it's all lies? Can you say that the accusations it makes of the US are not true?
In Cuba anti-communist parties are not allowed and this is written in the Consitutional amendment (accepted by the popular vote). In the US only two parties are allowed and this is not written anywhere, but ensured by the existing corrupt system. You are a fool if you attack Cuba for not having freedom of speech, because this is completely and totally missing the point. Do you think that people on Haiti have more political control? Obviously not, so why do you attack Cuba first?
You think that the outward appearance is more important than the essence and you attack Cuba for jailing dissidents. This is silly. People like you (who believed that political freedoms should be instituted in Soviet Union at any cost) destroyed the Soviet society and condemned tens of millions of people to poverty. Western political freedoms are not universal, despite the lies and propaganda that you believe. Free and open elections are not basic human rights, there are societies that work differently.
You can be forgiven for not understanding that, though. If you live in a Western free market liberal democracy, you simply have no way to learn about other societies other than through the filter of biased school, biased media and biased political speeches of your leaders. But the reality is that noone in Cuba or Soviet Union cared or cares about your definition of healthy state (except the alien dissidents). Others think that a state cannot be healthy until there is no unemployment, no hunger and everyone has free education and free health care. Please do not force your beliefs on people in other societies, thank you.
I hope you are aware of the horrible prices paid by the victims of Comrade Stalin for such progress that occured in the Soviet Union. People were shot because they didn't want to conform to the norms of the new Soviet man. People were shot becuase they were "kulaks", having an extra cow compared to their neighbor. People were shot because Comrade Stalin was in the mood to shoot someone.
I was exposed to all this anti-soviet propaganda as well, so I know how you feel. But the facts do not agree with this story.
1) Kulaks weren't simply those with an extra cow. As about 1-2% of the total number of peasant homesteads were kulaks, you can easily see that their relative wealthiness was in most cases real. 2) Kulaks were not shot (there were some such cases, of course), they were sent to other settlements. 3) Local extremeties were responsible for the complications, not orders from Moscow. 4) Nobody shoot anyone just because Stalin was in a bad mood. It sounds impressive, but really this is just nonsense.
Everything I have read about the Soviet Union indicates that life was unhappy and darkly cynical, because the system didn't work well at all. Well, then don't believe everything you read.;)
Everything was shoddy, from the housing and the cars to the planes. I am sitting in an apartment in a Soviet-built house right now (built in 1987 - design called "137-series"). It's not shoddy at all (not lavish, though). Some cars (especially the most popular Lada) were shoddy, but so were American cars at some point. And the planes are fine (last time I flew on a Soviet-built motor-plane in 2003) if you do not compare them with Boeings built in 2005. What you read was simply not true - Soviet products were generally good (not excessively good), with some exceptions.
And people on the top of society always feared the midnight knock on the door, the trip to the mysterious places, the torture chambers and the KGB's bullet. First - not always, only in 1937-1939, when the Soviet society had only a few years left before the inevitable war with the most powerful evil force on Earth. The society could not afford any dissent, because if every single Soviet citizen didn't stand behind the mobilization effort, Hitler would destroy Soviet Union and then everyone else. Second, this was a part of the power struggle in the Party, not some evilness of communism. Stalin was not all-powerful in 1930s and there were indeed some, who wanted to overthrough him. The stories of conspiracies may sound outlandish today, but you should remember that even in the US in 1934 there was a plot to overthrough Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship (google "general Butler"), so there is nothing unbelievable about a Trotskist pact in the USSR.
If my memory serves, only Party functionaries and their friends were allowed to travel at all, let alone by plane. Sure, the official fares were cheap, but that was because demand was limited; nobody was allowed to fly them. You memory most certainly doesn't. Everyone was allowed to travel and everyone did. Notably, the amount of air travel in RSFSR in 1989 was thrice the air travel in Russia in 2005 (passenger*km).
The safety record of Soviet planes, alas, speaks for itself. What do you mean? During the Soviet time (not in 1990s, when Aeroflot was divided into 400+ companies) the safety record was excellent. The safety margin was usually 1.5 greater than in the West. Soviet planes may have not been most comfortable, most quiet and most efficient, but they were cerainly some of the safest. Any modern Russian air company that has both Boeings and Soviet planes would confirm it.
And finally, I drive an old Mercedes and really love it. I bought it five years ago for about the price of a new Ford Focus and driving it gives me much joy. I'm really sorry. A Trabant just won't do for me. Look, a Trabant is not an embodiment of all that was bad in socialism. Watch
You're right, of course. I didn't mean that "price liberalisation" caused hyperinflation, only that hyperinflation was one of the reasons why price liberalisation could not really help.
There were two separate sectors of economy - the production was managed according to the plan and money served only a technical function (resource allocation quotas and a way for mutual account settlement) and the consumption was a market with set prices.
Of course, as you describe, chaos ensued when these two sectors were combined.
You speak as though these repressive governments are a natural force which should just be accepted, like the weather, but that's absurd.
No, I am just saying that there must be a reason why communism became popular, why Castro became popular, and why they Castro is still popular. It is often said that people have the government they deserve. A slightly different thing is true - every nation has a ruling regime that is suited to its situation. If your country is a poor African nation torn by warlords battling over diamond mines, you can't have a Scandinavian welfare state with a socialist party at power. Similarly, if Cuba is communist with Castro for president, there must be a reason why. And it's not just because Castro is good at controlling Cubans with an iron fist.
I can suggest a better way for Cuban society to work. It involves the Cuban people taking responsibility for their own government.
Why don't you read something about the way elections are carried out in Cuba? You would be surprised to learn that Cuban people already take responsibility for their own government. Most people believe lies like this. But it makes no sense at all. Read the official Cuban position instead. And don't believe the Western governments, especially the US one. They lie all the time - the WMD in Iraq, the torture, the coup in Venezuela. There is no end to their lies. The human rights issue in Cuba and China is a red herring, a diversion used to further American political goals. In some respects the Cuban political system is more democratic than that of the US. But the US wants to promote its version of reality and it can do, thanks to the fact that most media in the USA is owned by 5 corporations all with strong ties to the ruling elite and the current presidential administration. The people in USA believe what they are told. And then there is the whole issue of legalised bribery... You are delusional if you sincerely believe that "repression in Cuba should not be tolerated". A puppet of the US elite.
The key difference between traditionalist social systems, such as the USSR and capitalist ones is that the former intend to eliminate suffering, while the latter aim to maximize the consumption. Yes, you couldn't get a Porsche 911 in Soviet Union (or East Germany), but let me tell you - I rode on one, I worked with people who sell them and nowhere it says that these things make you happier. Sure, some fools may believe that their life somehow becomes better because they drive a 911, but from the point of view of a Porsche dealer these are just expensive toys sold to rich suckers with too large ego.
Soviet Union didn't look kindly on its citizens trying to partake in such consumerist lifestyle. However, it did some nice things instead. For example, unemployment was eliminated in Soviet Union around 1930 once and for all. And it wasn't just any job - every citizen could expect to have a job adequate for his education and skills. There was free quality education and health care. While some may dwell on the fact that apartments weren't as lavish as those in Beverly Hills and note that about 1% of the people still lived in communal flats in 1980s, a more honest observer would note that Soviet people were essentially given quality apartments with all modern facilities and paid for those only about 4% of their income. Food consumption was very high, there was no hunger. In 1980s consumption of most food products per capita in the USSR was higher than in the US (with the exception of meat). Food was cheap, natural and healthy. Each city had good public transporation and in the biggest cities subway systems were constructed.
Yeah, sure may be Boeing is better. But then again, may be having cheap air and train tickets was worth something too. Even the poorest Sovet people could afford flying across Soviet Union to visit their friends or just travel around.
Communism (socialism) was indeed a resounding success in Soviet Union. People lived happy lives free from need and suffering. Of course, people are never content with what they had and so they started wondering if they could each get a Porsche. Sadly, noone told them that while there are systems to provide anyone with a moderate income and systems to provide a few with a luxurious lifestyle, there are no socio-economic systems to provide everyone with a luxurious lifestyle. So they took a system that worked and replaced it with the one that didn't.:(
I'd say "it always risks faults". Actually, shortages were a particular failure of the Soviet Union. It would have been possible to raise prices somewhat to balance the supply and demand, which would instantly eliminate shortages, like it happens in market economies by design. But it was a politically difficult decision and it wasn't done when it could have helped. When the government finally "liberated" the prices, it was too late - Soviet Union was destroyed, the planned economy lied in shambles and hyperinflation soared.
So it shouldn't be impossible to avoid shortages and rationing in a planned economy.
As for robots and fusion, it's coming. According to Japanese (NISTEP 2001 forecast), the robots (the big ones) will become mainstream around 2020 (in farming, households and elsewhere). Fusion is likely to take at least a decade more. Nanorobots can be expected in 2030s.
But I expect some elements of non-capitalistic economy to appear much earlier. We already have the open source movement. Soon we will have affordable 3D printers, then tabletop biotech. There are a lot of things that can be created this way. And then the robots arrive.
And these are just the inevitable things, who knows what can be done by sufficiently large groups of volunteers or by socialist governments around the world.
I am not trying to blame anyone for my personal problems, because I don't have any. I am fine in capitalist Russia, I would have been fine in the Soviet Union. What I am sad about is that the system which overall (not just for me) worked was destroyed and replaced with something which doesn't work.
My feelings towards Cuba are similar. Cuba is the way it is because of the reality it is in. The relatively minor repressions, certain limitations of freedom of speech are not caused by the evilness of Fidel - they are a natural result of Cuba's situation, just like they were in the Soviet Union. Because of this one should not be to quick to say "we will not tolerate repressions in Cuba", but instead ask himself a question: "Can I suggest a better way for Cuban society to work?" It's fine and dandy to pretend that capitalism, free market and liberal democracy are universal tools with a 100% success rate applicable everywhere, but reality is not like that. If you do not tolerate Cuba the way it is an do something stupid like asassinate Fidel, support dissidents, invade Cuba and plant a puppet government, etc., the most likely outcome will be more suffering.
Those who want to help Cubans should respect the specific circumstances they live in and provide help, not demand that Cubans change the way they live and adhere to some external standard of democracy and freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
You could use a ground effect plane. It goes up to 300km/hour, but it flies really low. Get as close as you are allowed, then slow down and approach at 30km/hour. Alternatively, have a floating airport and use a shuttle boat with underwater wings.
Ships don't necessarily have to be slow, you know?
But the gamers evolve with the games. I've played my first computer game (ironically, it was called Last Mission) about 20 years ago. I've been learning to play more complex and more difficult games all these 20 years. Since it is unlikely that adults will ever stop playing games, we can be sure that there is a large audience that can handle somewhat demanding games.
There is no point in nit-picking. Computer viruses are commonly called self-replicating, even though they can't do that without an operating system and hardware to run on.
A robot that can do 90% of the job of self-replicating (with the remaining 10% done using cheap unskilled labour and cheap off-the-shelf parts) can be justifiably called "self-replicating" because of the economic implications.
Also, expect the technology to drastically improve in a few years. If you insist on dissing this robot because it is not perfect yet, you won't realise the promises of self-replication technology and the medium-term prospects.
Of course. My point was that while these reforms changed how we define the meter, the length remained the same. That's why we ended up with odd definitions such as 1/299792458 LS instead of a more reasonable one such as 1/300000000 LS. So in a sense the meter of today is the same as the meter of the Eratosthenes would be.
No, the meter is as long as it always was, but we have found that the Earth diameter is not what we thought it was.
This happens in a lot of places, sadly, not just in the US and not just with the Republicans. Yesterday I was reading about the Cuvier vs. Geoffroy debate on animal classification in Coen's Art of Genes. It's not desribed in much detail, but it's still amazing how interested the public was and how motivated it was to learn the truth. Today you don't have many media outlets that really treat the public with respect and present the material on a sufficiently high level. Instead even PBS always feels that it needs to dumb things down to the LCD. In the same issue of their ScienceNOW they had a somewhat serious discussion of women in physics and a lot of silly jokes (including the wanna-be-comedian host) apparently intended to make science fun and interesting for people.
i c beliefs is a valid worldview.
Science has all the answers. Science can solve all our problems. But you don't get airtime to say that on TV or radio. But those who deny it and argue for tolerance of religious views (i.e. creatinism, rights for cells, etc.) and for limitations on scientific research (the precautionary principle, etc.) do.
And the morons are extremely snub nowdays. Without knowing pretty much anything about the world (don't know genetics, biology, physics, astronomy, history, etc.) they bask in the warm glow of their ignorance and pretend that a mishmash of pseudoreligious/spiritual/mystical/pseudoscientif
Well, Joseph Stalin happened to save the world from Fascism. I'd say that was quite an achievement.
I am sure it's better than the retarded design that was on several keyboards at my former job (after two days I went and bought a replacement keyboard for myself). The keyboards had the sleep/poweroff/standby keys right above the arrow keys and below the Del/End/PgDn. Yeah, I guess placing the key that turns off the computer and interrupts your work for several minutes right next to some of the most often used keys is a good idea. Seriously retarded and I suspect it was an intentional act of sabotage.
Thanks for the demonstrating the dangers of closed-mindedness and intellectual rigidity. I need to always keep that in mind myself, lest I fall into the same trap as you did.
This is semantics. There are different things that we can call being alive. Your definition is valid, but not helpful. My definition will be helpful and will inevitably become the accepted one.
These people will become immortal in the cybernetics sense, i.e. the patterns of their minds will be preserved. Sticking with the classical (physical) definition is wrong. You assign absolute meanings to things. That's hard to argue against, but it's just pointless. I can claim that a person with a plastic heart is not really alive, because a real heart doesn't beat in his chest. That would be precisely what you are doing.
Any other attempt to achieve immortality is just "fool's gold".
You say so, but you are wrong.
Even if profession has no effect, if you take 100 different professions (in a relatively small sample - say 10000), find for each one the percentage of girls/boys and then compare, you are probably bound to find some that produced slightly more boys and some that produced slightly more girls. You are then free to invent any explanation.
Of course, it's possible that they checked for it and have really found something. I don't know.
Wrong. You may be a radical transhumanist, but that doesn't make you right. What we consider to be ourselves depends on the way we currently live, which is the way that we evolved to live. It is beneficial for biological humans to think of our bodies as ourselves and there simply wasn't a possibility in the past to live differently. After uploading becomes possible, people will start experiementing with it (like they experiement with body modification today).
They will make copies and destroy the originals, they will make several copies and run them simultaneously, they will combine several copies back into one mind, they will transfer parts of their mind to other people, etc., etc., etc. While technically you may call what they would do - dying, one can technically call what you do everyday dying too - the sleep, the transition through time, the death of some cells, etc.
But this doesn't matter. What matters is the functionality and the consensus. Functionally making a copy and destroying the original will be living. And the consensus will form that this is indeed living. Soon people will no longer care about on what hardware they are running, how many copies there are and will not think twice about spawning another copy to perform some task and then copying parts of the copy back into the first copy. There is no reason why people should live linearly. This suggests even more extreme possibilities of people living in different temporal directions (inside a computer simulation it's possible), people being superpositions of others, and other extreme ways.
But regardless of how far we will go, one thing is certain - people will not think the way you do now and you will change your mind (both literally and figuratively speaking).
Japanese have 65-70% success rate in their 30-year NISTEP predictions. That's technology foresight. Futurology, as practiced by BT and Ian Pearson himself is not exactly quakery, but it isn't anything particularly good or useful either. It just so happens that the thinkers that actually understand where we are heading are transhumanist thinkers such as Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Nick Bostrom and the like. The futurologists are only gradually waking up to the ideas that were obvious to others at least a decade ago.
It is possible to predict the future. You start with the basics (laws of nature), add some understanding of our development speed (in many areas you can predict it quite easily) and then build models that make sense. Of course, you need to learn to be rational, otherwise your predictions will end up as nonsensical as what you just wrote.
This is pathetic. The average reader/viewer/listner has no chance to form a coherent picture of the future, or even our current ideas of it. But sadly, this is typical for news coverage of all topics. And it's actually one of the problems - that we treat such items as "news", where you get a notable person speak, then a few hundreds of nearly identical articles appear, then silence. In the best case the meme of "Playstation 5 will be as powerful as a human brain" will spread and settle in the brains of the public.
Instead of starting a decades-long discussion of all the implications of the future changes, instead of purposefully changing our societies to adapt to the scientific and technological advances, instead of basing our research budgets on the goal of achieving the most desirable of all possible futures, we just live as if nothing important is happening. This is beyond sad.
I don't know how you can change that, may be it's impossible in the world of corrupt democracies and commercialised mass-media, but if you personally want to understand where we are heading, check out the links in the end of this post.
Ian Pearsen is late. I remember the idiotic 21st century forecast that BT produced five years ago. Only now he starts to get things that better thinkers realised a decade ago. For some people the idea of mind uploading is not new and they already managed to present a much more comprehensive picture of the future.
Here are some of the resources outlining it:
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Nova - Infinite Secrets Of Archimedes - a documentary about this (though the latest X-Ray news not included).
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By my definition, a healthy state cannot exist when its people aren't allowed to exercise such basic freedoms.
This is only because you live in comfort. It was proven time and time again that when you give people political freedoms, but through them into poverty and remove the safety net, they always say that freedom from need is much more important than freedom of speech (as demonstrated in public opinion polls).
You pointed to Cuban propaganda about their elections, but that's just as silly as if I pointed you to American propaganda.
No, it isn't. Did you read the linked text? Can you honestly and sincerely say that it's all lies? Can you say that the accusations it makes of the US are not true?
In Cuba anti-communist parties are not allowed and this is written in the Consitutional amendment (accepted by the popular vote). In the US only two parties are allowed and this is not written anywhere, but ensured by the existing corrupt system. You are a fool if you attack Cuba for not having freedom of speech, because this is completely and totally missing the point. Do you think that people on Haiti have more political control? Obviously not, so why do you attack Cuba first?
You think that the outward appearance is more important than the essence and you attack Cuba for jailing dissidents. This is silly. People like you (who believed that political freedoms should be instituted in Soviet Union at any cost) destroyed the Soviet society and condemned tens of millions of people to poverty. Western political freedoms are not universal, despite the lies and propaganda that you believe. Free and open elections are not basic human rights, there are societies that work differently.
You can be forgiven for not understanding that, though. If you live in a Western free market liberal democracy, you simply have no way to learn about other societies other than through the filter of biased school, biased media and biased political speeches of your leaders. But the reality is that noone in Cuba or Soviet Union cared or cares about your definition of healthy state (except the alien dissidents). Others think that a state cannot be healthy until there is no unemployment, no hunger and everyone has free education and free health care. Please do not force your beliefs on people in other societies, thank you.
I hope you are aware of the horrible prices paid by the victims of Comrade Stalin for such progress that occured in the Soviet Union. People were shot because they didn't want to conform to the norms of the new Soviet man. People were shot becuase they were "kulaks", having an extra cow compared to their neighbor. People were shot because Comrade Stalin was in the mood to shoot someone.
;)
I was exposed to all this anti-soviet propaganda as well, so I know how you feel. But the facts do not agree with this story.
1) Kulaks weren't simply those with an extra cow. As about 1-2% of the total number of peasant homesteads were kulaks, you can easily see that their relative wealthiness was in most cases real.
2) Kulaks were not shot (there were some such cases, of course), they were sent to other settlements.
3) Local extremeties were responsible for the complications, not orders from Moscow.
4) Nobody shoot anyone just because Stalin was in a bad mood. It sounds impressive, but really this is just nonsense.
Everything I have read about the Soviet Union indicates that life was unhappy and darkly cynical, because the system didn't work well at all.
Well, then don't believe everything you read.
Everything was shoddy, from the housing and the cars to the planes.
I am sitting in an apartment in a Soviet-built house right now (built in 1987 - design called "137-series"). It's not shoddy at all (not lavish, though). Some cars (especially the most popular Lada) were shoddy, but so were American cars at some point. And the planes are fine (last time I flew on a Soviet-built motor-plane in 2003) if you do not compare them with Boeings built in 2005. What you read was simply not true - Soviet products were generally good (not excessively good), with some exceptions.
And people on the top of society always feared the midnight knock on the door, the trip to the mysterious places, the torture chambers and the KGB's bullet.
First - not always, only in 1937-1939, when the Soviet society had only a few years left before the inevitable war with the most powerful evil force on Earth. The society could not afford any dissent, because if every single Soviet citizen didn't stand behind the mobilization effort, Hitler would destroy Soviet Union and then everyone else. Second, this was a part of the power struggle in the Party, not some evilness of communism. Stalin was not all-powerful in 1930s and there were indeed some, who wanted to overthrough him. The stories of conspiracies may sound outlandish today, but you should remember that even in the US in 1934 there was a plot to overthrough Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship (google "general Butler"), so there is nothing unbelievable about a Trotskist pact in the USSR.
If my memory serves, only Party functionaries and their friends were allowed to travel at all, let alone by plane. Sure, the official fares were cheap, but that was because demand was limited; nobody was allowed to fly them.
You memory most certainly doesn't. Everyone was allowed to travel and everyone did. Notably, the amount of air travel in RSFSR in 1989 was thrice the air travel in Russia in 2005 (passenger*km).
The safety record of Soviet planes, alas, speaks for itself.
What do you mean? During the Soviet time (not in 1990s, when Aeroflot was divided into 400+ companies) the safety record was excellent. The safety margin was usually 1.5 greater than in the West. Soviet planes may have not been most comfortable, most quiet and most efficient, but they were cerainly some of the safest. Any modern Russian air company that has both Boeings and Soviet planes would confirm it.
And finally, I drive an old Mercedes and really love it. I bought it five years ago for about the price of a new Ford Focus and driving it gives me much joy. I'm really sorry. A Trabant just won't do for me.
Look, a Trabant is not an embodiment of all that was bad in socialism. Watch
You're right, of course. I didn't mean that "price liberalisation" caused hyperinflation, only that hyperinflation was one of the reasons why price liberalisation could not really help.
There were two separate sectors of economy - the production was managed according to the plan and money served only a technical function (resource allocation quotas and a way for mutual account settlement) and the consumption was a market with set prices.
Of course, as you describe, chaos ensued when these two sectors were combined.
Why don't you read something about the way elections are carried out in Cuba? You would be surprised to learn that Cuban people already take responsibility for their own government. Most people believe lies like this. But it makes no sense at all. Read the official Cuban position instead. And don't believe the Western governments, especially the US one. They lie all the time - the WMD in Iraq, the torture, the coup in Venezuela. There is no end to their lies. The human rights issue in Cuba and China is a red herring, a diversion used to further American political goals. In some respects the Cuban political system is more democratic than that of the US. But the US wants to promote its version of reality and it can do, thanks to the fact that most media in the USA is owned by 5 corporations all with strong ties to the ruling elite and the current presidential administration. The people in USA believe what they are told. And then there is the whole issue of legalised bribery... You are delusional if you sincerely believe that "repression in Cuba should not be tolerated". A puppet of the US elite.
The key difference between traditionalist social systems, such as the USSR and capitalist ones is that the former intend to eliminate suffering, while the latter aim to maximize the consumption. Yes, you couldn't get a Porsche 911 in Soviet Union (or East Germany), but let me tell you - I rode on one, I worked with people who sell them and nowhere it says that these things make you happier. Sure, some fools may believe that their life somehow becomes better because they drive a 911, but from the point of view of a Porsche dealer these are just expensive toys sold to rich suckers with too large ego.
:(
Soviet Union didn't look kindly on its citizens trying to partake in such consumerist lifestyle. However, it did some nice things instead. For example, unemployment was eliminated in Soviet Union around 1930 once and for all. And it wasn't just any job - every citizen could expect to have a job adequate for his education and skills. There was free quality education and health care. While some may dwell on the fact that apartments weren't as lavish as those in Beverly Hills and note that about 1% of the people still lived in communal flats in 1980s, a more honest observer would note that Soviet people were essentially given quality apartments with all modern facilities and paid for those only about 4% of their income. Food consumption was very high, there was no hunger. In 1980s consumption of most food products per capita in the USSR was higher than in the US (with the exception of meat). Food was cheap, natural and healthy. Each city had good public transporation and in the biggest cities subway systems were constructed.
Yeah, sure may be Boeing is better. But then again, may be having cheap air and train tickets was worth something too. Even the poorest Sovet people could afford flying across Soviet Union to visit their friends or just travel around.
Communism (socialism) was indeed a resounding success in Soviet Union. People lived happy lives free from need and suffering. Of course, people are never content with what they had and so they started wondering if they could each get a Porsche. Sadly, noone told them that while there are systems to provide anyone with a moderate income and systems to provide a few with a luxurious lifestyle, there are no socio-economic systems to provide everyone with a luxurious lifestyle. So they took a system that worked and replaced it with the one that didn't.
I'd say "it always risks faults". Actually, shortages were a particular failure of the Soviet Union. It would have been possible to raise prices somewhat to balance the supply and demand, which would instantly eliminate shortages, like it happens in market economies by design. But it was a politically difficult decision and it wasn't done when it could have helped. When the government finally "liberated" the prices, it was too late - Soviet Union was destroyed, the planned economy lied in shambles and hyperinflation soared.
So it shouldn't be impossible to avoid shortages and rationing in a planned economy.
As for robots and fusion, it's coming. According to Japanese (NISTEP 2001 forecast), the robots (the big ones) will become mainstream around 2020 (in farming, households and elsewhere). Fusion is likely to take at least a decade more. Nanorobots can be expected in 2030s.
But I expect some elements of non-capitalistic economy to appear much earlier. We already have the open source movement. Soon we will have affordable 3D printers, then tabletop biotech. There are a lot of things that can be created this way. And then the robots arrive.
And these are just the inevitable things, who knows what can be done by sufficiently large groups of volunteers or by socialist governments around the world.
I am not trying to blame anyone for my personal problems, because I don't have any. I am fine in capitalist Russia, I would have been fine in the Soviet Union. What I am sad about is that the system which overall (not just for me) worked was destroyed and replaced with something which doesn't work.
My feelings towards Cuba are similar. Cuba is the way it is because of the reality it is in. The relatively minor repressions, certain limitations of freedom of speech are not caused by the evilness of Fidel - they are a natural result of Cuba's situation, just like they were in the Soviet Union. Because of this one should not be to quick to say "we will not tolerate repressions in Cuba", but instead ask himself a question: "Can I suggest a better way for Cuban society to work?" It's fine and dandy to pretend that capitalism, free market and liberal democracy are universal tools with a 100% success rate applicable everywhere, but reality is not like that. If you do not tolerate Cuba the way it is an do something stupid like asassinate Fidel, support dissidents, invade Cuba and plant a puppet government, etc., the most likely outcome will be more suffering.
Those who want to help Cubans should respect the specific circumstances they live in and provide help, not demand that Cubans change the way they live and adhere to some external standard of democracy and freedom.