So, the big drug companies aren't doing the actual innovative parts of research. They're just grinding through the large and expensive trials to standards set by national regulations. So, why have the drug companies at all? Dump them and have the final large-scale drug testing procedures done by government agencies as a public service. Approved drugs get released to the public domain, so they'll be manufactured (cheap and competitively) as generics. The trials are already rigidly defined methods and standards --- not an area where you need the mythical "free enterprise innovation," just routine bureaucratic administration and recording of results. No profit motive for hiding adverse symptoms; no gigantic advertising budgets (which are much larger than R&D budgets); no obscene profit margins --- you'd be able to produce/distribute drugs at vastly reduced cost, with far more transparency about effects. "We the people" are already paying for the fundamental research (through government grants) that initially develops most drugs --- so why should we get gouged by big pharma to complete the routine testing cycle, and introduce profit-motivated conflicts-of-interest against full transparency and disclosure?
By that logic, though, there's nothing particularly special about your concept of "code accompanying the data." PDF is an "important (by installed base) piece of software" --- and whatever archived VMs that still have a working JavaScript interpreter (web browser) will *also* have a working PDF reader. While you're making a big deal of keeping the "code" (XML/JavaScript) with the data, this is actually entirely irrelevant to what the mechanism you propose relies on: constantly maintaining a working "chain" of VMs for VMs for VMs for whatever systems are (were) commonly in use. This approach might well work; after all, storage is cheap these days. However, it is prone to catastrophic failure: if the "chain" of generating new VMs is ever broken, you're left with an extremely complicated and opaque mess of bits that would require re-inventing entire (dead) operating systems to restore.
An alternate approach to maintaining ever increasing opaque complexity (better not let anything important slip into the cracks) is to try to come up with clever ways to produce formats/archives that would be especially fast/easy to reverse-engineer and bootstrap from first principles if no "living" interpreter could be found. This is a hard problem, if not impossible to find a satisfactory answer, but worth thinking about. If you can popularize such a format, then you'll have both the protection you propose ("eternal" support in nested VMs), *and* a backup plan for recovering information if, over the decades, you misjudge what technological branches will be faithfully preserved for posterity.
Finally, one potential monkey wrench in the works of your plans to always have a chain of older operating systems: operating systems are becoming increasingly dependent not only on self-contained binaries on a machine, but internet connections to gigantic networks of services. What happens when you try to boot up Windows 2038 in the year 2065 (through a few intermediate virtual machines), only to find that the OS needs to connect to several hundred servers/services that were scrapped twenty years ago? So, for your proposal to work, you also need to force operating system designers not to create any external dependencies --- exactly opposite to the current trend of "cloudifying" everything in sight. Increasing integration with "the cloud" would be fatal to your data-preservation method.
PDF readers have an install base of pretty much every current computer on the planet. In fact, Microsoft Office has an install base at least able to *read* the formats of pretty much every current computer on the planet. So does Adobe Flash. If your argument is security-through-install-base, then why aren't these approximately as "safe" as JavaScript? I'd consider an MS Office document or a flash application to be a pretty iffy long-term archival format; however, according to an "install base" criteria, they seem like perfectly good choices. In fact, that's the same logic that encouraged so many people to use Office '97 back in '97: "everyone uses it; stop being silly and bothering me about 'open standards.'" I don't disagree that a wide install base is one ingredient in increasing the probability of format longevity; but I think you'll need more sophisticated criteria than that to not get seriously blindsided by widespread future changes --- "everyone switched to Python 5 a decade ago --- the last time anyone would have been running a JavaScript interpreter, they were still using *magnetic* storage media. Good luck getting one of those working!"
From a future data recovery standpoint, how is the "code" any more useful than data? You'd still need to be able to figure out how to execute the code itself --- the code is just an especially complex and capable file format (which likely makes it very difficult to figure out if you've lost the execution instructions). Some file formats are already complete programming languages --- like PostScript. Do you think you could make much sense of a PostScript representation of a document if you started without a PostScript interpreter available (or at least a comprehensive PostScript specification, and a heck of a lot of free time)? Why is JavaScript any more likely to be well-known in the year 2100 than PDF? Or any easier to reverse engineer? Your trick of embedding XSL only "worked" because you were lucky enough for XSL to stick around as a commonly used file format --- or did you have a magical future-seeing crystal ball in the '90's (and then, why didn't you warn anyone about 9/11)?
Shhh! Stop giving away the secrets to my free energy perpetual motion machine! I usually just tell people it's "cold fusion" to make it sound more sciency and protect my real methods.
That's strange, since the whole time I was in school, I was well below the threshold of what the government defines as poverty.
Well, that just shows the problem with trying to define "poverty" with the most simplistic way (annual income filed on a 1040-EZ). A billionaire who gives enough to charity to add up to $0 annual taxable income is not poor. A playboy frat kid coasting through college on daddy's money into a guaranteed high-dollar position at daddy's firm is not poor. While the simplistic "poverty line" definition is useful in some cases for generally-correct classification, there are certainly plenty of exceptional cases where the simplicity is obviously inadequate. If all "poor" people were just college students living the good life before (nearly guaranteed) placement into well-above-poverty positions, then I wouldn't be worried about "poverty" as a problem. Unfortunately, that's not the case --- and, regardless of the fine details in exactly where you draw the lines, being *actually* poor is a significantly sucky thing (that I don't think is alleviated by access to big flat panel TVs).
I believe in rewarding somebody who does something good. However I don't believe in rewarding anybody who hasn't done anything at all.
I also believe in rewarding folks who do good. But to go with that, it's vital to have systems where people have the *opportunity* to do things in the first place. Extremes of poverty suck most because they steal away that opportunity --- not absolutely; you can always find the few exceptions to prove the rule who rose out of poverty --- but it's a far more uphill battle, often requiring work and effort that would be "heroic" for middle-class just to stay above water. Poverty means you probably won't have good access to education, or even good nutrition (empty calories that make you fat are not a balanced diet for developing child minds); hence poor access to good jobs; even exclusion from the workforce. The same "human material" could be capable of so much more if given opportunity beyond poverty --- but instead, poverty becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of not being able to do anything at all, hence not getting rewarded, hence not being able to do anything at all.
We have real personal autonomy. Far more than we ever have.
Not if you're comparing a poor person today against a rich person of yesteryear (which seemed to be your contention above), unless you're using an especially circular definition of "autonomy" that means "has the biggest TV". Poor person on minimum wage: for at least 40 hours a week, someone else demands where you are, how you dress, what you do, what you say, when you go to the bathroom, even how you move ("your burger assembly time is dropping below 11.3 seconds! No dawdling!"). During the rest of your time, you can't do anything that would jeopardize your ability to serve your corporate masters --- not that you have much energy to do much after grueling days of manual labor. You live in a shitty, crime-ridden neighborhood (because that's all you can afford), one paycheck from being out on the street. You can't afford much travel (if any at all), you have no vacations, your food is cheap and terrible and dull (you can get fat, but not healthy and well-nourished). You call this "real personal autonomy" for the poor because they can choose from a large variety of TV programming. I'd call it a wage-slavery hellhole, with extremely limited options to get out (death, winning the lottery, death, crime, death), TV and car be damned.
But you come and tell me that cars are slave tools....I mean really?
Not entirely --- but the poorer you are, the more your car is a worker-subsidized way to get you to work rather than a self-empowering tool for leisurely road trips and exploration. When gas money is tight, you won't be hopping in the car to cruise 200 miles to visit Grandma or the beach over the weekend. You'll be spending the vas
Have you read much about the Luddites, aside from sophomoric propaganda setting them up as a straw man? Luddites weren't rich folks coming in to paternalistically interfere with the working classes based on some high-minded abstract idealism. They *were* the working class --- with a very direct "feet on the ground" experience of how technology (in the hands of the rich) was impacting their selves, their families, and their communities. Control over work was shifted entirely away from skilled craftsmen to industrial overlords; very little of the benefit of increased production came back to the workers, though the strain of toiling at ever higher rates, in unhealthy conditions, on extremely dangerous power equipment, for decreasing wages certainly did hit them hard. Initial impacts on "the clothes on your back" were actually quite *negative* --- early machine-made material was coarse, thin, and weak; reduced wages from competition with high-productivity machines made the working class only able to afford the mass-manufactured shoddy goods (with the vast majority being exported to profit the wealthy, rather than increasing overall living standards). Only later labor movement resistance --- (indirectly) inspired in part by Ned Ludd's Hammer --- gained back some of the advantages of mechanization (increased output) for the working class, as they collectively forced better labor conditions and guaranteed wages for more humane working hours by threat/action of strikes and sit-ins and lockouts.
I assume it's "intuitive" to you how the car gets energy to move in the case where it's standing still relative to the road, and the wind is rushing by: the car uses the force of the moving wind against its windmill structures to extract some energy, which can be used to turn the wheels and start moving forward. The same logic actually works to explain what's happening when the car is already moving at wind speed --- standing still in the air's reference frame, with the road rushing by underneath. In this case, the car now acts as a "road-mill" instead of a "wind-mill": the wheels catch the moving road (like the windmill blades catch the moving wind), extract energy, and use it to turn the windmill to start pushing the car forward relative to the "still" air: congrats, you're now moving faster than wind speed.
My paychecks for being a double-agent deep-cover reverse-psychology corporate shill seem to be getting lost in the mail; I haven't received one yet. Can you please pass this complaint --- err, observation --- along to the Illuminati (whichever sect is currently in power), and ask them to please double-check their payroll database? My address may have changed since your recruitment mind-control ray last contacted me. Thanks!
Disentangling the extent of genetic vs. cultural factors in monogamy will indeed be difficult to do. Understanding the mechanisms in related species can help with this: once you've identified what makes voles stay together, if you can show that humans are entirely lacking the corresponding genes/mechanisms, then you have evidence pointing more towards purely cultural monogamy. If you find that humans share similar structures, that get activated by and maintained for long periods after "pair bonding" events, then you have more evidence for a genetic component. I wouldn't rule out that a fair number of humans have significant "natural" predispositions towards monogamy --- mixed monogamous/polygamous behavior depending on individuals is observed in other species (some individuals of the species attempt to maintain monogamous relations, while others are "serial cheats"). While cultural pressures keep a lot of "unhappy" marriages together, there are also many individuals who report, from their own experience, lasting and devoted specific affection for paired mates; if not for life, then at least for many-year timescales (that would be useful for raising children from birth to self-sufficiency); it's not a-priori evident that some measure of "natural" monogamy doesn't exist alongside hump-everything instincts (buried under layers of cultural modification).
in nature, most males would jump on a female in heat
A somewhat unusual feature of homo sapiens is that being "in heat" is not strongly expressed: while there are some behavioral/hormonal changes throughout the female fertility cycles, human females don't give off an extremely obvious visual/pheromonal "I'm fertile right now!" indicator. This is compatible with using "sex anytime" for non-procreative reasons --- including maintaining pair bonding; this is not an adaptation that encourages "jump on the female right now to maximize procreative potential."
I strongly suspect the researchers' perception that humans are monogamous in nature is heavily skewed.
Why do you assume the researcher think humans are monogamous in nature? These researcher are interested in *voles* which are monogamous in nature.
If they wanted to study true human nature, they would have to raise kids in total isolation from the outside world and its norms/cultures/influences
Or, to pass Institutional Review Board ethics requirements while still usefully applying the scientific method, you do research on alternate related species that can eventually be checked/verified on human models without totally intrusive lifetime meddling.
Yes, for now you can still game the system --- the store pricing models are designed to maximize profit off the "average" customer, so if you're willing/able to stock up, opportunistically identify and take/avoid the good/bad bargains, you can nullify (or even benefit from) the pricing chicanery. Of course, it's game over for that once the stores roll out the logical goal of fine-grained individualized monitoring: the truly "personalized shopping experience," that Amazon has gotten some flak for flirting with, but which will eventually be hard to avoid in our corporate-centric nation. "Special deals, just for you": prices ("reduced" from the ridiculously marked up "default" on-shelf prices) displayed specially for your identity-tied shopping cart, algorithmically generated to maximize profit from your own purchasing behavior. Wave goodbye to meaningful comparison shopping or any market price transparency.
Kroger knows what kind of bread I buy and chips in $10-$20/mo for gas.
Krogers has probably raised your bread and chips price by $10-$20/mo to cover this exchange (well, spread over all your groceries, assuming you buy more than bread and chips). And you do realize that all those "amazing" "discounts" for loyalty card holders are just fabricated by jacking up the "non-card" price by several dollars? Don't think that the Invisible Markets Fairy is somehow assuring you're getting a fair deal in this exchange --- you're just getting shafted for your detailed buying data so Krogers can know how to mark up all the other products you buy while keeping you hooked with a few "amazing deal" loss-leaders. The better Krogers knows how to manipulate each consumer, the more (asymmetrical) advantage they'll have for subtly price gouging you with complex pricing schemes: "look, what a great deal on avocados today! Soap seems a little more expensive than I remembered, but I may as well pick it up while I'm here." The less Krogers can tell about the complex buying patterns of their customers, the more they'll be stuck simply competing on best price for each individual item, instead of elaborate pricing strategies to cause market confusion and make it harder for consumers to competitively shop around.
Well, I've already got the beard to be Amish... but I'm really not that much into blowing up my own worldly possessions (a bit too attached to the classic camera lens collection). I'm more partial to the Luddites --- which means blowing up the equipment used to reduce people to subservient interchangeable cogs in a corporate machine.
I don't really see how I could be identified as a slave. Especially today where it's rather easy to get away with not working at all. Hell, I did that for several years. Through student grants and other whatnots I was getting paid to go to college.
Well, it sounds like you don't really fall into the broader category of being poor in this country. Being "temporarily" poor while going to college --- before securing a solidly-above-median salary job --- isn't the same as being a career minimum wage worker, born to career minimum wage workers, with very little prospect of going to college in the first place (even if you're pretty smart).
but you're telling me that game of thrones is corporate propaganda to make me slave for the rich
It certainly isn't helping you to see the injustice in the system. And, if you're watching either the ads between, or the "news," you'll get a full-bore propaganda blast.
Wait a minute - are you one of those who insist that watching TV rots your brain?
Only some of it; I enjoy watching a few shows myself. I'm more of a "live free or die" type. If you offered the trade: live as a poor person today, or a rich person before ubiquitous cars and TVs, I'd take the choice that gave me real personal autonomy over a shiny TV and a shitty Taylorized job.
If things went your way, I'd have paid not less than $20,000 for all of this stuff.
Oh, boo hoo. Also, false --- why do you think "my way" of doing things means crappier TVs? I'm fine with a society with good TVs *and* good equality and opportunity for all. And, if we're talking about the poor --- a $3K home entertainment setup might be a bit of a stretch at two and a half months of minimum wage salary, which is hard to save up after rent and grocery bills.
Meanwhile, I'm having a hard time figuring out how a play would manage to include realistic looking dragons and very large and very acrobatic wolves.
You're missing some important equipment in the cranium department if this is the primary criterion by which you judge plays.
It used to be that only the very rich owned cars, later TV's, and then later personal computers, later mobile phones (remember when car phones were neat?). A rich person from yesterday would be envious of the wealth that a poor person has today.
So, a poor person has some shiny baubles --- a car to help them go to work for the rich, a TV to help them watch propaganda from the rich, a personal computer and mobile phone to keep them working for the rich 24/7. Yes, if you're happy being a slave with a giant shiny TV, then you might prefer being poor today to being rich a century ago. On the other hand, if you had some higher ideals --- a love of autonomy, freedom, self-actualization, intellectual expansion, etc., then you might rather be rich with the opportunity to explore/develop your own interests on your own terms (in a world with books, paintings, music, plays,... but no TV), than a wage slave with gold-plated chains.
It is allowed that people's labor has value --- yet few are in the position to elect not to sell it. Unless you're independently wealthy, you're pretty much forced to sell your labor to benefit those who *are* independently wealthy (and set the terms of employment to benefit themselves and their self-reinforcing ability to dictate the terms on which you must sell your labor). So, even if your data has theoretically "withholdable" value, in practice you may not find much success getting groceries, renting an apartment, or even getting a job if you don't "willingly pay" whatever chunk of data your plutocratic corporate overlords demand.
That's right --- before my biology "is talking" at all, if my rational mind knows I'm about to be in a situation without easy access to urinals, I'll squeeze out whatever I can in advance (despite feeling no biological need) to avoid later confrontation with biological imperatives.
Also, people cry when happy. I guess you'd avoid that type of happiness as well.
I said I tried to avoid situations that would make me cry when I didn't want to. But I'm not averse to happy crying (because that means I'm happy), so I've no need to avoid that type of situation at all.
we exert control over our biological impulses all the time, either ignoring them or choosing different ways/times to express them.
but we can also sometimes be "smarter" than our biology, and arrange situations in advance so biological impulses rarely need to "speak up" in the first place --- that's different from merely controlling/expressing impulses as they arrive. My biology only knows to start shouting about needing to pee when my bladder is full; my higher consciousness has a head start and will send me to the bathroom *before* I'm caught between needing to agonizingly "control" my biology or "express" myself with wet pants.
but just because biology is talking, doesn't mean you have to listen.
Even better to arrange in advance for your biology not to have reasons to say anything that you wouldn't agree with. Struggling for control should only be a backup plan.
Resource wealth and a measure of geographical freedom allowed a measure of social mobility.
The US has extremely low social mobility, tied with the UK for lowest mobility among developed nations. Since the UK is basically the opposite of what your theory says shaped US social mobility, I'd say your theory has some problems.
Australia has a similar history.
Then why did Australia end up with significantly higher social mobility and economic equality?
Hydrocarbon energy isn't "technology" any more than Niagra falls is technology. It's an energy source which was ultimately exploited using technology.
Fair enough; but if you want to stick with this pedantic distinction, then it's wrong to say that "hydrocarbons" were the force behind social changes --- since it was the *technology* using hydrocarbons, rather than the hydrocarbons themselves (just lying about in the ground) that allowed less manual-labor-centric societies.
No, but we will be before this century is out.
So, assuming we don't develop/use alternate energy sources (nuclear, solar, etc.) by the end of the century, society might start heading for trouble then. But that wouldn't explain unusually high social inequality in a country with, currently, unusually high (cheap and easily available) hydrocarbon consumption --- the US. Your argument that societies are "forced" to certain levels of inequality by (hydrocarbon) resource availability falls pretty flat in the face of evidence that the US is simultaneously quite rich in energy resources, yet extremely poor in equality and social mobility.
As always, they are promised something and given things either to quell outright rebellion
And rebellion is a risk because the "masses" have come to expect things that their overlords didn't want them to. If there was no counter-status-quo spread of ideological yearning for equality among the masses, then there would be no threat of rebellion from a passive and complacent populace.
My view is emperical, not theoretical.
Then why do you keep proposing theories that flatly contradict the empirical evidence?
I think you're just proving the parent poster's point. Yes, I've suffered the pains of really needing to pee on a long trip --- which teaches me it's a whole lot smarter to head to the bathroom in advance when I have the chance, instead of waiting for the most inconvenient time to be desperate. I've cried when I didn't want to --- which pretty much shows I would've been happier avoiding whatever situation lead to biologically unstoppable crying. Same with wanting to hit your boss/authority-figure: sure would have been nice to not end up under the heel of such a jerk in the first place. Always avoiding such situations isn't possible to do --- but that doesn't not make it a good idea to try (and hence succeed in some cases, if not in all). The result doesn't have to be a "boring" life, assuming you can find some positive ways to relieve boredom --- but if panicked confrontation with biological ultimatums is your only avenue of escape from banality, then I don't want to take away your few masochistic joys in a life of misery; go ahead and hold in that piss until you burst in pleasure.
I wish this were true, but it's not, or the USA wouldn't be trending so far in the other direction.
But then why is the US an outlier in equality/mobility? Why is the US more representative of human nature than Denmark, Canada, Australia, Germany, or Japan (for example)? Rather than attributing the rightward drift of the US to "human nature," wouldn't it make more sense to draw the conclusion that there's a positive feedback between high concentration of political/media/social control in the hands of a tiny wealthy elite, and policy shifts to favor further strengthening the power of the wealthy elite?
It wasn't human nature or technological development, per se, that allowed greater equality. It was the exploitation of hydrocarbon energy.
A.K.A. technological development (to extract and use hydrocarbons) --- how does this not fit perfectly under "technology"? And, as it became apparent that society didn't need the overwhelming majority of people to scratch furrows in fields with a stick, or hand-knit clothes, to assure a comfortable level of living for all, "the masses" started to demand/expect greater levels of access to art, culture, education, leisure, governance, autonomy, freedom.
but no ancient pre-hydrocarbon civilization voluntarily freed their slaves.
Fortunately, we're not a pre-hydrocarbon culture --- so why do you insist we stay in slavery? The wide variety of nations that manage more egalitarian/mobile societies than the US without falling into national destitution (even ones with lower per-capita resources) prove that we've got enough resources to support a significantly more egalitarian society than we have.
Humans weren't freed by idealism, despite the post facto explanations of religious movements and pandering politicians. They were freed by cheap energy.
Okey-dokey; so now that we've got the cheap energy, let's not let the ideology of pandering-to-the-wealthy politicians and religious movements (especially vocal in the US) push us in the wrong direction from freedom.
One can hardly call this "human nature" when pretty much every other developed country has higher equality and social mobility --- if anything, the US is bucking the trend of human nature to seek higher ideals of equality and freedom once technological development allows the satisfaction of lower needs. Of course, the key is not convincing more rich white male rich guys to marry their Mexican maids despite a complete lack of shared culture, but to create a society where there is a sense of shared culture and humanity between people in all walks of life. For example, having a robust and high-quality public education system so both the kids of millionaires and janitors grow up socializing together is a key component in more egalitarian societies. So to is having high minimum wage standards and social safety nets, so that even maids can have time/access to hobbies and culture and forming relationships outside of a depressed community of grinding poverty. When living on a lower quintile income isn't a death sentence for your children's hopes and dreams and future, then there is much less of a barrier to marrying for love across income lines.
or you end up with a very stratified society where virtually nobody marries anyone outside their current socio-economic caste.
Well, at least in the US, "very stratified society" is a fairly apt description. Some basic statistics are available in the Wikipedia article on US social mobility. While not "officially" enforced as in a caste system, the US has many institutions that discourage inter-class mixing. People of considerably different economic status generally grow up in different neighborhoods, go to different schools, and end up in a formally class-stratified workplace (with distinct "labor" vs. "management" roles, corresponding to large differentials in salary and social interaction). The US displays a combination of high inequality and low mobility generally only exceeded by considerably less developed nations.
Humans aren't entirely monogamous, but along the spectrum observed in other species --- from rigid monogamy to "mate with anything that moves" --- humans are at least semi-monogamous; frequently pair-bonding, if not for life, at least for the relatively long period for offspring to be born and reach self-sufficient maturity. Understanding the biological mechanisms backing "strongly monogamous" mammalian behavior may also provide information about what biological mechanisms contribute to humans' less total tendencies towards monogamy.
What decisions make you think Scalia is a "conservative hack"?... he's been pretty good on issues of civil liberties.
Well, he's often on the extreme cruel side of "law and order" thuggery. For example, when interviewed about whether the US use of torture conflicted with constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, Scalia justified torture by saying it's not protected against because it's not punishment:
"When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you."
In other words, "cruel and unusual" is perfectly OK so long as the government doesn't officially declare it as "punishment." This is the sort of sick and twisted "hackery" I've come to expect from Scalia --- fabricating weaselly "strict constructionist" arguments to perfectly match whatever conclusions an extreme right authoritarian wants. A civil liberties decision that actually protects the rights of generally poor and disenfranchised citizens rather than the wealthy and megacorporations is a welcome action.
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So, the big drug companies aren't doing the actual innovative parts of research. They're just grinding through the large and expensive trials to standards set by national regulations. So, why have the drug companies at all? Dump them and have the final large-scale drug testing procedures done by government agencies as a public service. Approved drugs get released to the public domain, so they'll be manufactured (cheap and competitively) as generics. The trials are already rigidly defined methods and standards --- not an area where you need the mythical "free enterprise innovation," just routine bureaucratic administration and recording of results. No profit motive for hiding adverse symptoms; no gigantic advertising budgets (which are much larger than R&D budgets); no obscene profit margins --- you'd be able to produce/distribute drugs at vastly reduced cost, with far more transparency about effects. "We the people" are already paying for the fundamental research (through government grants) that initially develops most drugs --- so why should we get gouged by big pharma to complete the routine testing cycle, and introduce profit-motivated conflicts-of-interest against full transparency and disclosure?
By that logic, though, there's nothing particularly special about your concept of "code accompanying the data." PDF is an "important (by installed base) piece of software" --- and whatever archived VMs that still have a working JavaScript interpreter (web browser) will *also* have a working PDF reader. While you're making a big deal of keeping the "code" (XML/JavaScript) with the data, this is actually entirely irrelevant to what the mechanism you propose relies on: constantly maintaining a working "chain" of VMs for VMs for VMs for whatever systems are (were) commonly in use. This approach might well work; after all, storage is cheap these days. However, it is prone to catastrophic failure: if the "chain" of generating new VMs is ever broken, you're left with an extremely complicated and opaque mess of bits that would require re-inventing entire (dead) operating systems to restore.
An alternate approach to maintaining ever increasing opaque complexity (better not let anything important slip into the cracks) is to try to come up with clever ways to produce formats/archives that would be especially fast/easy to reverse-engineer and bootstrap from first principles if no "living" interpreter could be found. This is a hard problem, if not impossible to find a satisfactory answer, but worth thinking about. If you can popularize such a format, then you'll have both the protection you propose ("eternal" support in nested VMs), *and* a backup plan for recovering information if, over the decades, you misjudge what technological branches will be faithfully preserved for posterity.
Finally, one potential monkey wrench in the works of your plans to always have a chain of older operating systems: operating systems are becoming increasingly dependent not only on self-contained binaries on a machine, but internet connections to gigantic networks of services. What happens when you try to boot up Windows 2038 in the year 2065 (through a few intermediate virtual machines), only to find that the OS needs to connect to several hundred servers/services that were scrapped twenty years ago? So, for your proposal to work, you also need to force operating system designers not to create any external dependencies --- exactly opposite to the current trend of "cloudifying" everything in sight. Increasing integration with "the cloud" would be fatal to your data-preservation method.
PDF readers have an install base of pretty much every current computer on the planet. In fact, Microsoft Office has an install base at least able to *read* the formats of pretty much every current computer on the planet. So does Adobe Flash. If your argument is security-through-install-base, then why aren't these approximately as "safe" as JavaScript? I'd consider an MS Office document or a flash application to be a pretty iffy long-term archival format; however, according to an "install base" criteria, they seem like perfectly good choices. In fact, that's the same logic that encouraged so many people to use Office '97 back in '97: "everyone uses it; stop being silly and bothering me about 'open standards.'" I don't disagree that a wide install base is one ingredient in increasing the probability of format longevity; but I think you'll need more sophisticated criteria than that to not get seriously blindsided by widespread future changes --- "everyone switched to Python 5 a decade ago --- the last time anyone would have been running a JavaScript interpreter, they were still using *magnetic* storage media. Good luck getting one of those working!"
From a future data recovery standpoint, how is the "code" any more useful than data? You'd still need to be able to figure out how to execute the code itself --- the code is just an especially complex and capable file format (which likely makes it very difficult to figure out if you've lost the execution instructions). Some file formats are already complete programming languages --- like PostScript. Do you think you could make much sense of a PostScript representation of a document if you started without a PostScript interpreter available (or at least a comprehensive PostScript specification, and a heck of a lot of free time)? Why is JavaScript any more likely to be well-known in the year 2100 than PDF? Or any easier to reverse engineer? Your trick of embedding XSL only "worked" because you were lucky enough for XSL to stick around as a commonly used file format --- or did you have a magical future-seeing crystal ball in the '90's (and then, why didn't you warn anyone about 9/11)?
Shhh! Stop giving away the secrets to my free energy perpetual motion machine! I usually just tell people it's "cold fusion" to make it sound more sciency and protect my real methods.
That's strange, since the whole time I was in school, I was well below the threshold of what the government defines as poverty.
Well, that just shows the problem with trying to define "poverty" with the most simplistic way (annual income filed on a 1040-EZ). A billionaire who gives enough to charity to add up to $0 annual taxable income is not poor. A playboy frat kid coasting through college on daddy's money into a guaranteed high-dollar position at daddy's firm is not poor. While the simplistic "poverty line" definition is useful in some cases for generally-correct classification, there are certainly plenty of exceptional cases where the simplicity is obviously inadequate. If all "poor" people were just college students living the good life before (nearly guaranteed) placement into well-above-poverty positions, then I wouldn't be worried about "poverty" as a problem. Unfortunately, that's not the case --- and, regardless of the fine details in exactly where you draw the lines, being *actually* poor is a significantly sucky thing (that I don't think is alleviated by access to big flat panel TVs).
I believe in rewarding somebody who does something good. However I don't believe in rewarding anybody who hasn't done anything at all.
I also believe in rewarding folks who do good. But to go with that, it's vital to have systems where people have the *opportunity* to do things in the first place. Extremes of poverty suck most because they steal away that opportunity --- not absolutely; you can always find the few exceptions to prove the rule who rose out of poverty --- but it's a far more uphill battle, often requiring work and effort that would be "heroic" for middle-class just to stay above water. Poverty means you probably won't have good access to education, or even good nutrition (empty calories that make you fat are not a balanced diet for developing child minds); hence poor access to good jobs; even exclusion from the workforce. The same "human material" could be capable of so much more if given opportunity beyond poverty --- but instead, poverty becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of not being able to do anything at all, hence not getting rewarded, hence not being able to do anything at all.
We have real personal autonomy. Far more than we ever have.
Not if you're comparing a poor person today against a rich person of yesteryear (which seemed to be your contention above), unless you're using an especially circular definition of "autonomy" that means "has the biggest TV". Poor person on minimum wage: for at least 40 hours a week, someone else demands where you are, how you dress, what you do, what you say, when you go to the bathroom, even how you move ("your burger assembly time is dropping below 11.3 seconds! No dawdling!"). During the rest of your time, you can't do anything that would jeopardize your ability to serve your corporate masters --- not that you have much energy to do much after grueling days of manual labor. You live in a shitty, crime-ridden neighborhood (because that's all you can afford), one paycheck from being out on the street. You can't afford much travel (if any at all), you have no vacations, your food is cheap and terrible and dull (you can get fat, but not healthy and well-nourished). You call this "real personal autonomy" for the poor because they can choose from a large variety of TV programming. I'd call it a wage-slavery hellhole, with extremely limited options to get out (death, winning the lottery, death, crime, death), TV and car be damned.
But you come and tell me that cars are slave tools....I mean really?
Not entirely --- but the poorer you are, the more your car is a worker-subsidized way to get you to work rather than a self-empowering tool for leisurely road trips and exploration. When gas money is tight, you won't be hopping in the car to cruise 200 miles to visit Grandma or the beach over the weekend. You'll be spending the vas
Have you read much about the Luddites, aside from sophomoric propaganda setting them up as a straw man? Luddites weren't rich folks coming in to paternalistically interfere with the working classes based on some high-minded abstract idealism. They *were* the working class --- with a very direct "feet on the ground" experience of how technology (in the hands of the rich) was impacting their selves, their families, and their communities. Control over work was shifted entirely away from skilled craftsmen to industrial overlords; very little of the benefit of increased production came back to the workers, though the strain of toiling at ever higher rates, in unhealthy conditions, on extremely dangerous power equipment, for decreasing wages certainly did hit them hard. Initial impacts on "the clothes on your back" were actually quite *negative* --- early machine-made material was coarse, thin, and weak; reduced wages from competition with high-productivity machines made the working class only able to afford the mass-manufactured shoddy goods (with the vast majority being exported to profit the wealthy, rather than increasing overall living standards). Only later labor movement resistance --- (indirectly) inspired in part by Ned Ludd's Hammer --- gained back some of the advantages of mechanization (increased output) for the working class, as they collectively forced better labor conditions and guaranteed wages for more humane working hours by threat/action of strikes and sit-ins and lockouts.
I assume it's "intuitive" to you how the car gets energy to move in the case where it's standing still relative to the road, and the wind is rushing by: the car uses the force of the moving wind against its windmill structures to extract some energy, which can be used to turn the wheels and start moving forward.
The same logic actually works to explain what's happening when the car is already moving at wind speed --- standing still in the air's reference frame, with the road rushing by underneath. In this case, the car now acts as a "road-mill" instead of a "wind-mill": the wheels catch the moving road (like the windmill blades catch the moving wind), extract energy, and use it to turn the windmill to start pushing the car forward relative to the "still" air: congrats, you're now moving faster than wind speed.
My paychecks for being a double-agent deep-cover reverse-psychology corporate shill seem to be getting lost in the mail; I haven't received one yet. Can you please pass this complaint --- err, observation --- along to the Illuminati (whichever sect is currently in power), and ask them to please double-check their payroll database? My address may have changed since your recruitment mind-control ray last contacted me. Thanks!
Disentangling the extent of genetic vs. cultural factors in monogamy will indeed be difficult to do. Understanding the mechanisms in related species can help with this: once you've identified what makes voles stay together, if you can show that humans are entirely lacking the corresponding genes/mechanisms, then you have evidence pointing more towards purely cultural monogamy. If you find that humans share similar structures, that get activated by and maintained for long periods after "pair bonding" events, then you have more evidence for a genetic component. I wouldn't rule out that a fair number of humans have significant "natural" predispositions towards monogamy --- mixed monogamous/polygamous behavior depending on individuals is observed in other species (some individuals of the species attempt to maintain monogamous relations, while others are "serial cheats"). While cultural pressures keep a lot of "unhappy" marriages together, there are also many individuals who report, from their own experience, lasting and devoted specific affection for paired mates; if not for life, then at least for many-year timescales (that would be useful for raising children from birth to self-sufficiency); it's not a-priori evident that some measure of "natural" monogamy doesn't exist alongside hump-everything instincts (buried under layers of cultural modification).
in nature, most males would jump on a female in heat
A somewhat unusual feature of homo sapiens is that being "in heat" is not strongly expressed: while there are some behavioral/hormonal changes throughout the female fertility cycles, human females don't give off an extremely obvious visual/pheromonal "I'm fertile right now!" indicator. This is compatible with using "sex anytime" for non-procreative reasons --- including maintaining pair bonding; this is not an adaptation that encourages "jump on the female right now to maximize procreative potential."
I strongly suspect the researchers' perception that humans are monogamous in nature is heavily skewed.
Why do you assume the researcher think humans are monogamous in nature? These researcher are interested in *voles* which are monogamous in nature.
If they wanted to study true human nature, they would have to raise kids in total isolation from the outside world and its norms/cultures/influences
Or, to pass Institutional Review Board ethics requirements while still usefully applying the scientific method, you do research on alternate related species that can eventually be checked/verified on human models without totally intrusive lifetime meddling.
Yes, for now you can still game the system --- the store pricing models are designed to maximize profit off the "average" customer, so if you're willing/able to stock up, opportunistically identify and take/avoid the good/bad bargains, you can nullify (or even benefit from) the pricing chicanery.
Of course, it's game over for that once the stores roll out the logical goal of fine-grained individualized monitoring: the truly "personalized shopping experience," that Amazon has gotten some flak for flirting with, but which will eventually be hard to avoid in our corporate-centric nation. "Special deals, just for you": prices ("reduced" from the ridiculously marked up "default" on-shelf prices) displayed specially for your identity-tied shopping cart, algorithmically generated to maximize profit from your own purchasing behavior. Wave goodbye to meaningful comparison shopping or any market price transparency.
Kroger knows what kind of bread I buy and chips in $10-$20/mo for gas.
Krogers has probably raised your bread and chips price by $10-$20/mo to cover this exchange (well, spread over all your groceries, assuming you buy more than bread and chips). And you do realize that all those "amazing" "discounts" for loyalty card holders are just fabricated by jacking up the "non-card" price by several dollars? Don't think that the Invisible Markets Fairy is somehow assuring you're getting a fair deal in this exchange --- you're just getting shafted for your detailed buying data so Krogers can know how to mark up all the other products you buy while keeping you hooked with a few "amazing deal" loss-leaders. The better Krogers knows how to manipulate each consumer, the more (asymmetrical) advantage they'll have for subtly price gouging you with complex pricing schemes: "look, what a great deal on avocados today! Soap seems a little more expensive than I remembered, but I may as well pick it up while I'm here." The less Krogers can tell about the complex buying patterns of their customers, the more they'll be stuck simply competing on best price for each individual item, instead of elaborate pricing strategies to cause market confusion and make it harder for consumers to competitively shop around.
Well, I've already got the beard to be Amish... but I'm really not that much into blowing up my own worldly possessions (a bit too attached to the classic camera lens collection). I'm more partial to the Luddites --- which means blowing up the equipment used to reduce people to subservient interchangeable cogs in a corporate machine.
I don't really see how I could be identified as a slave. Especially today where it's rather easy to get away with not working at all. Hell, I did that for several years. Through student grants and other whatnots I was getting paid to go to college.
Well, it sounds like you don't really fall into the broader category of being poor in this country. Being "temporarily" poor while going to college --- before securing a solidly-above-median salary job --- isn't the same as being a career minimum wage worker, born to career minimum wage workers, with very little prospect of going to college in the first place (even if you're pretty smart).
but you're telling me that game of thrones is corporate propaganda to make me slave for the rich
It certainly isn't helping you to see the injustice in the system. And, if you're watching either the ads between, or the "news," you'll get a full-bore propaganda blast.
Wait a minute - are you one of those who insist that watching TV rots your brain?
Only some of it; I enjoy watching a few shows myself. I'm more of a "live free or die" type. If you offered the trade: live as a poor person today, or a rich person before ubiquitous cars and TVs, I'd take the choice that gave me real personal autonomy over a shiny TV and a shitty Taylorized job.
If things went your way, I'd have paid not less than $20,000 for all of this stuff.
Oh, boo hoo. Also, false --- why do you think "my way" of doing things means crappier TVs? I'm fine with a society with good TVs *and* good equality and opportunity for all. And, if we're talking about the poor --- a $3K home entertainment setup might be a bit of a stretch at two and a half months of minimum wage salary, which is hard to save up after rent and grocery bills.
Meanwhile, I'm having a hard time figuring out how a play would manage to include realistic looking dragons and very large and very acrobatic wolves.
You're missing some important equipment in the cranium department if this is the primary criterion by which you judge plays.
It used to be that only the very rich owned cars, later TV's, and then later personal computers, later mobile phones (remember when car phones were neat?). A rich person from yesterday would be envious of the wealth that a poor person has today.
So, a poor person has some shiny baubles --- a car to help them go to work for the rich, a TV to help them watch propaganda from the rich, a personal computer and mobile phone to keep them working for the rich 24/7. Yes, if you're happy being a slave with a giant shiny TV, then you might prefer being poor today to being rich a century ago. On the other hand, if you had some higher ideals --- a love of autonomy, freedom, self-actualization, intellectual expansion, etc., then you might rather be rich with the opportunity to explore/develop your own interests on your own terms (in a world with books, paintings, music, plays, ... but no TV), than a wage slave with gold-plated chains.
It is allowed that people's labor has value --- yet few are in the position to elect not to sell it. Unless you're independently wealthy, you're pretty much forced to sell your labor to benefit those who *are* independently wealthy (and set the terms of employment to benefit themselves and their self-reinforcing ability to dictate the terms on which you must sell your labor). So, even if your data has theoretically "withholdable" value, in practice you may not find much success getting groceries, renting an apartment, or even getting a job if you don't "willingly pay" whatever chunk of data your plutocratic corporate overlords demand.
you just had to say that.
You mean you _choose_ to pee in a bathroom?
That's right --- before my biology "is talking" at all, if my rational mind knows I'm about to be in a situation without easy access to urinals, I'll squeeze out whatever I can in advance (despite feeling no biological need) to avoid later confrontation with biological imperatives.
Also, people cry when happy. I guess you'd avoid that type of happiness as well.
I said I tried to avoid situations that would make me cry when I didn't want to. But I'm not averse to happy crying (because that means I'm happy), so I've no need to avoid that type of situation at all.
we exert control over our biological impulses all the time, either ignoring them or choosing different ways/times to express them.
but we can also sometimes be "smarter" than our biology, and arrange situations in advance so biological impulses rarely need to "speak up" in the first place --- that's different from merely controlling/expressing impulses as they arrive. My biology only knows to start shouting about needing to pee when my bladder is full; my higher consciousness has a head start and will send me to the bathroom *before* I'm caught between needing to agonizingly "control" my biology or "express" myself with wet pants.
but just because biology is talking, doesn't mean you have to listen.
Even better to arrange in advance for your biology not to have reasons to say anything that you wouldn't agree with. Struggling for control should only be a backup plan.
Resource wealth and a measure of geographical freedom allowed a measure of social mobility.
The US has extremely low social mobility, tied with the UK for lowest mobility among developed nations. Since the UK is basically the opposite of what your theory says shaped US social mobility, I'd say your theory has some problems.
Australia has a similar history.
Then why did Australia end up with significantly higher social mobility and economic equality?
Hydrocarbon energy isn't "technology" any more than Niagra falls is technology. It's an energy source which was ultimately exploited using technology.
Fair enough; but if you want to stick with this pedantic distinction, then it's wrong to say that "hydrocarbons" were the force behind social changes --- since it was the *technology* using hydrocarbons, rather than the hydrocarbons themselves (just lying about in the ground) that allowed less manual-labor-centric societies.
No, but we will be before this century is out.
So, assuming we don't develop/use alternate energy sources (nuclear, solar, etc.) by the end of the century, society might start heading for trouble then. But that wouldn't explain unusually high social inequality in a country with, currently, unusually high (cheap and easily available) hydrocarbon consumption --- the US. Your argument that societies are "forced" to certain levels of inequality by (hydrocarbon) resource availability falls pretty flat in the face of evidence that the US is simultaneously quite rich in energy resources, yet extremely poor in equality and social mobility.
As always, they are promised something and given things either to quell outright rebellion
And rebellion is a risk because the "masses" have come to expect things that their overlords didn't want them to. If there was no counter-status-quo spread of ideological yearning for equality among the masses, then there would be no threat of rebellion from a passive and complacent populace.
My view is emperical, not theoretical.
Then why do you keep proposing theories that flatly contradict the empirical evidence?
I think you're just proving the parent poster's point. Yes, I've suffered the pains of really needing to pee on a long trip --- which teaches me it's a whole lot smarter to head to the bathroom in advance when I have the chance, instead of waiting for the most inconvenient time to be desperate. I've cried when I didn't want to --- which pretty much shows I would've been happier avoiding whatever situation lead to biologically unstoppable crying. Same with wanting to hit your boss/authority-figure: sure would have been nice to not end up under the heel of such a jerk in the first place. Always avoiding such situations isn't possible to do --- but that doesn't not make it a good idea to try (and hence succeed in some cases, if not in all). The result doesn't have to be a "boring" life, assuming you can find some positive ways to relieve boredom --- but if panicked confrontation with biological ultimatums is your only avenue of escape from banality, then I don't want to take away your few masochistic joys in a life of misery; go ahead and hold in that piss until you burst in pleasure.
I wish this were true, but it's not, or the USA wouldn't be trending so far in the other direction.
But then why is the US an outlier in equality/mobility? Why is the US more representative of human nature than Denmark, Canada, Australia, Germany, or Japan (for example)? Rather than attributing the rightward drift of the US to "human nature," wouldn't it make more sense to draw the conclusion that there's a positive feedback between high concentration of political/media/social control in the hands of a tiny wealthy elite, and policy shifts to favor further strengthening the power of the wealthy elite?
It wasn't human nature or technological development, per se, that allowed greater equality. It was the exploitation of hydrocarbon energy.
A.K.A. technological development (to extract and use hydrocarbons) --- how does this not fit perfectly under "technology"? And, as it became apparent that society didn't need the overwhelming majority of people to scratch furrows in fields with a stick, or hand-knit clothes, to assure a comfortable level of living for all, "the masses" started to demand/expect greater levels of access to art, culture, education, leisure, governance, autonomy, freedom.
but no ancient pre-hydrocarbon civilization voluntarily freed their slaves.
Fortunately, we're not a pre-hydrocarbon culture --- so why do you insist we stay in slavery? The wide variety of nations that manage more egalitarian/mobile societies than the US without falling into national destitution (even ones with lower per-capita resources) prove that we've got enough resources to support a significantly more egalitarian society than we have.
Humans weren't freed by idealism, despite the post facto explanations of religious movements and pandering politicians. They were freed by cheap energy.
Okey-dokey; so now that we've got the cheap energy, let's not let the ideology of pandering-to-the-wealthy politicians and religious movements (especially vocal in the US) push us in the wrong direction from freedom.
One can hardly call this "human nature" when pretty much every other developed country has higher equality and social mobility --- if anything, the US is bucking the trend of human nature to seek higher ideals of equality and freedom once technological development allows the satisfaction of lower needs. Of course, the key is not convincing more rich white male rich guys to marry their Mexican maids despite a complete lack of shared culture, but to create a society where there is a sense of shared culture and humanity between people in all walks of life. For example, having a robust and high-quality public education system so both the kids of millionaires and janitors grow up socializing together is a key component in more egalitarian societies. So to is having high minimum wage standards and social safety nets, so that even maids can have time/access to hobbies and culture and forming relationships outside of a depressed community of grinding poverty. When living on a lower quintile income isn't a death sentence for your children's hopes and dreams and future, then there is much less of a barrier to marrying for love across income lines.
or you end up with a very stratified society where virtually nobody marries anyone outside their current socio-economic caste.
Well, at least in the US, "very stratified society" is a fairly apt description. Some basic statistics are available in the Wikipedia article on US social mobility. While not "officially" enforced as in a caste system, the US has many institutions that discourage inter-class mixing. People of considerably different economic status generally grow up in different neighborhoods, go to different schools, and end up in a formally class-stratified workplace (with distinct "labor" vs. "management" roles, corresponding to large differentials in salary and social interaction). The US displays a combination of high inequality and low mobility generally only exceeded by considerably less developed nations.
Humans aren't entirely monogamous, but along the spectrum observed in other species --- from rigid monogamy to "mate with anything that moves" --- humans are at least semi-monogamous; frequently pair-bonding, if not for life, at least for the relatively long period for offspring to be born and reach self-sufficient maturity. Understanding the biological mechanisms backing "strongly monogamous" mammalian behavior may also provide information about what biological mechanisms contribute to humans' less total tendencies towards monogamy.
What decisions make you think Scalia is a "conservative hack"? ... he's been pretty good on issues of civil liberties.
Well, he's often on the extreme cruel side of "law and order" thuggery. For example, when interviewed about whether the US use of torture conflicted with constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, Scalia justified torture by saying it's not protected against because it's not punishment:
"When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you."
In other words, "cruel and unusual" is perfectly OK so long as the government doesn't officially declare it as "punishment." This is the sort of sick and twisted "hackery" I've come to expect from Scalia --- fabricating weaselly "strict constructionist" arguments to perfectly match whatever conclusions an extreme right authoritarian wants. A civil liberties decision that actually protects the rights of generally poor and disenfranchised citizens rather than the wealthy and megacorporations is a welcome action.