Exponentially? I doubt that. The use of that term smacks of corporate propaganda.
It's not unusual for a good made in the West to cost, say, $10 when its Chinese-made equivalent costs less than $1. The most recent example I noticed were handmade tobacco pipes, which can be had wholesale from China nowadays for less than $5, while US or European-made pipes sell for $40 or more.
That doesn't work for limited resources. Though applied to energy now, the right of government to impose quotas has been recognized for decades in fishing and hunting.
The OP may be referring to the fact that, one China is no longer dependent on the US as an importer of its goods, it may call the US's tab and collapse the US economy in an instant. Surely you haven't missed the fact that China bought up much of America's debt.
Please, your visions of ever more Americans sitting on their butts and drawing a government check to do nothing have nothing to do with the reality. Social benefits in the US are negligible compared to most other developed nations and don't amount to a real income for the vast majority of recipients. Lose your job in the US, and you're more likely to desperately scramble to find work than rest on your laurels. Many of my relatives live in a depressed area of Appalachia and face a dearth of employment, but they feel they have to find something fast, because unemployment isn't enough to live on.
Even when you've got mothers who survive on welfare, getting them into work is going to require more social welfare programs than less, namely adequate daycare for the children. Countries that offer good daycare have no problem attracting women into the workforce over welfare.
You might yearn for it, but you're just one person and statistically negligible. No major American company is going to base their business plan on you and decide to keep everything local.
Those people will have jobs and purpose and will not require tax dollars in social programs now.
Even highly protectionist countries have had strong social spending. Having a manufacturing base at home doesn't magically eradicate poverty. Socialism as a phenomenon arose in the 19th century after Europe became highly industrialized and millions were employed at textile mills and factories. Countries building their own stuff have had problems with poverty comparable or even worse to what the US is currently undergoing.
I've always found it interesting how we assume that aliens will follow time at the same rate we do.
One might imagine that things like reaction time have to be relatively close to things like gravity, because otherwise species could be wiped out by falling rocks and such.
In any event, I've always imagined that SETI might just be a waste of time, because civilizations might only use radio waves for a comparatively miniscule amount of time before they hit some technological singularity and find some other means of communication. Maybe I've been reading too much Vernor Vinge, who emphasises the swift and sudden disruption a singularity might bring in books like Marooned in Realtime, but there's got to be a pretty decent probability that any civilizations technologically advanced enough to talk to us have already surpassed us.
Minimum wage and worker safety laws alone would make many goods exponentially higher were they produced in the US. You'd also have to stop workers from unionizing, because that would also make prices somewhat higher, so quality of life for workers wouldn't be terribly high either.
A lot of those clothes labelled "Made in USA" were being produced in Saipan by exploited workers who didn't even get federal minimum wage. Even when "Made in USA" was seen more often, that doesn't mean it was good for the American people.
Though I couldn't link to it now, several weeks ago I read an analysis of this plan that was rather pessimistic. Earlier Russian scientific communities were, for all the lip service paid to science, really dedicated to furthering atomic weaponry. There was never a great diversity of scientific exploration going on within them, and Russia thus has no experience with establishing communities that can actually create profitable technologies that will boost the country's economy.
The Tea Party Movement is nearly 100% about a return to the States that which the Federal government has hijacked unconstitutionally over the past 80 years.
I have relatives who participate in Tea Party rallies. All of them without exception oppose social welfare programs, whether it's the federal, state or local government that is running them. There's been plenty of commentary recently about how sensible federalists like Ron Paul have been marginalized even further in the Republican Party by the Tea Party phenomenon. No, Tea Partiers aren't about devolving things to the states. They are mainly about complaining about any government spending at all, at any level.
When I read the article, I mused that the damage done by a mere misfired power beam might be nothing compared to the damage that the space elevator the beam powers might do if it falls. One of the most interesting scenes for me in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars was the vision of the descent of a Mars space elevator after it is severed from the asteroid it is tethered to: a white hot ribbon of carbon lacerating the entire circumference of the planet, even wrapping around twice for added damage if it is long enough.
It's a bit sobering to think that even if mankind solved the plague of nuclear weapons, there's new ways to rain down mass destruction from orbit.
Except the Tea Party hasn't been saying anything like that at all. Their platform, inasmuch as they have any coherent platform, is not about reducing social programs at the federal level because the states can do it better. Rather, their rhetoric is about ending social programs entirely. The common claim "People don't work hard if they get this or that for free, and stop spending my tax money on other people" says nothing about devolving the welfare state to the individual states.
The larger governments get, the more inefficient and corrupt they get. It just happens.
The European Union has a population larger than the United States and yet it manages just fine. Not all members have the same welfare state as the Nordic countries, but all do have more social programs than the US.
They are against so called health care reform because they recognize it for what it is, a bailout for dinosaur insurance companies
Tea Party opposition to health care reform began long before the bill took its final form as a mandate for Americans to purchase health insurance from private companies. Indeed, much Tea Party debate sounds as if they still believe a public option was part of the deal.
As for the US supposedly unable to afford a welfare state, the institution of the welfare state actually boosted the economies of a number of countries. A more educated, more content and healthier citizenry is simply more productive.
It's gratifying to see they are doing this in a "bottom-up" fashion instead of a "top-down" organization, as so many of those are just front groups for various monied interests.
There's been plenty of examples of supposedly grassroots events being in fact organized by large, highly funded Republican groups. It's just like those old protests against the Iraq War where the marches were organized by extreme groups like International ANSWER without participants knowing about it. True grassroots events of late have been few. In many cases, a sincere public is being manipulated by very organized groups.
Every new federal agency becomes a permanent fixture, never to be disbanded. Every entitlement and social program will never be repealed no matter how bankrupt.
Behold the real problem in American politics: corruption and ossification. The rest of the developed world ought to serve as proof that the welfare state does work, though it requires flexibility, constant reevaluation of programs, and relatively honest functionaries. The Tea Party folks are foolishly desiring an end to the government as a principle, when they ought to be electing better politicians who might bring a successful political culture into Washington.
Though American by origin, I've lived in Finland for some years. From this vantage point, the entire Tea Party platform seems based on ignorance. Working towards a smaller government? No, you won't progress towards a higher standard of living without a stronger welfare state. (For all the supposed higher taxes of Nordic Europe, I have more spending money left over at the end of the month than I ever did in the US, and families here typically own two homes.)
In one of his short stories collected in Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven introduced an alien species that had developed the power to attract prey towards it telepathically. Consequently, these aliens no longer had a need to move around to sustain itself, and evolved into a sessile species that just sat there like a rock. At a time when health experts complain that young people are becoming too sedentary, is the potential of mind-controlled technology really that good a thing?
Versions of Gnash have frequently segfaulted on my Linux box (the segfault is reported by dmesg), yet I've never had a browser crash because of it. I had thought that plugins were already isolated enough from the application as a whole.
They were overtaken by barbarians and their civilization utterly collapsed, leading to the Dark Ages.
You ought to read a more recent history book. The phrase "Dark Ages" fell out of favour among historians decades ago, and the eastern half of the Roman Empire continued on in its course as the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years.
I've often seen the development of advanced robotics technology in Japan attributed to the desire of the Japanese to overcome their falling birthrates without allowing massive immigration. (The current demographics of Japan are wacky beyond anything in the US or the EU, see for example Coulmas' Population Decline and Ageing in Japan). If there aren't enough Japanese entering the workforce to sweep floors, assemble parts and care for the elderly, then they feel the need to develop machines that can do it instead. Different social pressures could understandably lead to different technological developments. After all, didn't the Romans treat potential new technologies as mere toys because they had endless slave labor?
The collection I mentioned above contains an afterword by Niven about how, in the mid-1990s, some of what he predicted seemed to be finally coming true. Of course Niven liked to create a good story, but in this case he was trying to be prescient.
In a sense, we've already outpaced science fiction. As recently as the 1990s, I enjoyed Larry Niven's Gil "the Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander), which foresaw a future so dependent on organ transplants for longevity that even the simplest of crimes like jaywalking would get the death penalty. With China in the news at the time for executing prisoners and harvesting organs, that kind of dystopian future seemed completely plausible. Niven didn't foresee alloplasty (gadgets instead of organs) becoming an alternative for centuries. But already stem cell research, nanotechnology and tissue printing shows that we are jumping directly to modifying the human body through purely artificial means.
Indeed, Finland is rather rural, and becoming even more so as young people leave the dwindling towns in the north to move down to the Helsinki metropolitan area. However, Finland is not at all "steppe", which you only arrive at by going a couple of thousand kilometers southeast into Russia, but rather consists of forests, meadows and lakes.
The end of homebrew
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the things that impressed me about early computer companies as chronicled in 's Fire in the Valley is how DIY they were. Early computers were kits: you were supposed to assemble them yourself, and the seller had no problem with people figuring out how it all worked. If a part broke, you could replace it yourself with a soldering iron. Of course, by the time that the Apple II and Macintosh came along, consumers were essentially getting a magical box that worked if you just plugged it in, and Apple didn't think it desirable that people be tinkering with it.
Consider this development along with yesterday's story on amateur radio, where so much is going on now in software, with people using mainly expensive radios with everything on inscrutable ICs, and fewer and fewer hams are building their own equipment. Radio Shack no longer offers the range of retail components that they did just a decade ago. As time goes by, there's less and less electronics in our daily lives which we have any chance of understanding ourselves. Technology companies have become a priesthood.
When I was pursuing licenses in the mid-1990s, ARRL manuals repeatedly stated that those topics were to be avoided. FCC Part 97 strongly suggests that communications not delve into any issues considered controversial.
There's plenty. No privacy in your conversation. Talking about anything really serious (politics, religion, business) is forbidden, as FCC regulations require that one's communications be limited to informal matters and technical reports and be non-profit in nature. Amateur radio will not seem like an intriguing substitution for a mobile phone to the vast majority of people.
I enjoyed amateur radio before the wide availability of the Internet, but looking back, it's a real shame that so much of the international communications that amateur radio brought me consisting only of us listing our equipment instead of engaging in any real intercultural exchange.
I'd like to know just how people come up with the assertion that the pronunciation of words (such as Knight) have drastically changed when there aren't recordings of such words to be heard.
The K continues to be pronounced in other Germanic languages. Compare German Knabe to English knave. The logical conclusion is that English innovated in pronunciation (and stagnated in spelling) while other languages in this instance retained older features.
The reconstruction of older stages of a language is not perfect -- in his compendium of Latin pronunciation Vox Latina, W. Sidney Allen notes that we may never know the minute details that distinguished the accent of one Roman city from adjacent regions. However, in the main, determining the general phonology of earlier stages of a language is considered reliable. The science of historical linguistics is over 200 years old now and it retains the same fundamentals though some theories come and go.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not unusual for a good made in the West to cost, say, $10 when its Chinese-made equivalent costs less than $1. The most recent example I noticed were handmade tobacco pipes, which can be had wholesale from China nowadays for less than $5, while US or European-made pipes sell for $40 or more.
That doesn't work for limited resources. Though applied to energy now, the right of government to impose quotas has been recognized for decades in fishing and hunting.
The OP may be referring to the fact that, one China is no longer dependent on the US as an importer of its goods, it may call the US's tab and collapse the US economy in an instant. Surely you haven't missed the fact that China bought up much of America's debt.
Please, your visions of ever more Americans sitting on their butts and drawing a government check to do nothing have nothing to do with the reality. Social benefits in the US are negligible compared to most other developed nations and don't amount to a real income for the vast majority of recipients. Lose your job in the US, and you're more likely to desperately scramble to find work than rest on your laurels. Many of my relatives live in a depressed area of Appalachia and face a dearth of employment, but they feel they have to find something fast, because unemployment isn't enough to live on.
Even when you've got mothers who survive on welfare, getting them into work is going to require more social welfare programs than less, namely adequate daycare for the children. Countries that offer good daycare have no problem attracting women into the workforce over welfare.
You might yearn for it, but you're just one person and statistically negligible. No major American company is going to base their business plan on you and decide to keep everything local.
Even highly protectionist countries have had strong social spending. Having a manufacturing base at home doesn't magically eradicate poverty. Socialism as a phenomenon arose in the 19th century after Europe became highly industrialized and millions were employed at textile mills and factories. Countries building their own stuff have had problems with poverty comparable or even worse to what the US is currently undergoing.
One might imagine that things like reaction time have to be relatively close to things like gravity, because otherwise species could be wiped out by falling rocks and such.
In any event, I've always imagined that SETI might just be a waste of time, because civilizations might only use radio waves for a comparatively miniscule amount of time before they hit some technological singularity and find some other means of communication. Maybe I've been reading too much Vernor Vinge, who emphasises the swift and sudden disruption a singularity might bring in books like Marooned in Realtime , but there's got to be a pretty decent probability that any civilizations technologically advanced enough to talk to us have already surpassed us.
Minimum wage and worker safety laws alone would make many goods exponentially higher were they produced in the US. You'd also have to stop workers from unionizing, because that would also make prices somewhat higher, so quality of life for workers wouldn't be terribly high either.
A lot of those clothes labelled "Made in USA" were being produced in Saipan by exploited workers who didn't even get federal minimum wage. Even when "Made in USA" was seen more often, that doesn't mean it was good for the American people.
Though I couldn't link to it now, several weeks ago I read an analysis of this plan that was rather pessimistic. Earlier Russian scientific communities were, for all the lip service paid to science, really dedicated to furthering atomic weaponry. There was never a great diversity of scientific exploration going on within them, and Russia thus has no experience with establishing communities that can actually create profitable technologies that will boost the country's economy.
I have relatives who participate in Tea Party rallies. All of them without exception oppose social welfare programs, whether it's the federal, state or local government that is running them. There's been plenty of commentary recently about how sensible federalists like Ron Paul have been marginalized even further in the Republican Party by the Tea Party phenomenon. No, Tea Partiers aren't about devolving things to the states. They are mainly about complaining about any government spending at all, at any level.
When I read the article, I mused that the damage done by a mere misfired power beam might be nothing compared to the damage that the space elevator the beam powers might do if it falls. One of the most interesting scenes for me in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars was the vision of the descent of a Mars space elevator after it is severed from the asteroid it is tethered to: a white hot ribbon of carbon lacerating the entire circumference of the planet, even wrapping around twice for added damage if it is long enough.
It's a bit sobering to think that even if mankind solved the plague of nuclear weapons, there's new ways to rain down mass destruction from orbit.
Except the Tea Party hasn't been saying anything like that at all. Their platform, inasmuch as they have any coherent platform, is not about reducing social programs at the federal level because the states can do it better. Rather, their rhetoric is about ending social programs entirely. The common claim "People don't work hard if they get this or that for free, and stop spending my tax money on other people" says nothing about devolving the welfare state to the individual states.
The European Union has a population larger than the United States and yet it manages just fine. Not all members have the same welfare state as the Nordic countries, but all do have more social programs than the US.
Tea Party opposition to health care reform began long before the bill took its final form as a mandate for Americans to purchase health insurance from private companies. Indeed, much Tea Party debate sounds as if they still believe a public option was part of the deal.
As for the US supposedly unable to afford a welfare state, the institution of the welfare state actually boosted the economies of a number of countries. A more educated, more content and healthier citizenry is simply more productive.
There's been plenty of examples of supposedly grassroots events being in fact organized by large, highly funded Republican groups. It's just like those old protests against the Iraq War where the marches were organized by extreme groups like International ANSWER without participants knowing about it. True grassroots events of late have been few. In many cases, a sincere public is being manipulated by very organized groups.
Behold the real problem in American politics: corruption and ossification. The rest of the developed world ought to serve as proof that the welfare state does work, though it requires flexibility, constant reevaluation of programs, and relatively honest functionaries. The Tea Party folks are foolishly desiring an end to the government as a principle, when they ought to be electing better politicians who might bring a successful political culture into Washington.
Though American by origin, I've lived in Finland for some years. From this vantage point, the entire Tea Party platform seems based on ignorance. Working towards a smaller government? No, you won't progress towards a higher standard of living without a stronger welfare state. (For all the supposed higher taxes of Nordic Europe, I have more spending money left over at the end of the month than I ever did in the US, and families here typically own two homes.)
In one of his short stories collected in Tales of Known Space , Larry Niven introduced an alien species that had developed the power to attract prey towards it telepathically. Consequently, these aliens no longer had a need to move around to sustain itself, and evolved into a sessile species that just sat there like a rock. At a time when health experts complain that young people are becoming too sedentary, is the potential of mind-controlled technology really that good a thing?
Versions of Gnash have frequently segfaulted on my Linux box (the segfault is reported by dmesg), yet I've never had a browser crash because of it. I had thought that plugins were already isolated enough from the application as a whole.
You ought to read a more recent history book. The phrase "Dark Ages" fell out of favour among historians decades ago, and the eastern half of the Roman Empire continued on in its course as the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years.
I've often seen the development of advanced robotics technology in Japan attributed to the desire of the Japanese to overcome their falling birthrates without allowing massive immigration. (The current demographics of Japan are wacky beyond anything in the US or the EU, see for example Coulmas' Population Decline and Ageing in Japan ). If there aren't enough Japanese entering the workforce to sweep floors, assemble parts and care for the elderly, then they feel the need to develop machines that can do it instead. Different social pressures could understandably lead to different technological developments. After all, didn't the Romans treat potential new technologies as mere toys because they had endless slave labor?
The collection I mentioned above contains an afterword by Niven about how, in the mid-1990s, some of what he predicted seemed to be finally coming true. Of course Niven liked to create a good story, but in this case he was trying to be prescient.
In a sense, we've already outpaced science fiction. As recently as the 1990s, I enjoyed Larry Niven's Gil "the Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ), which foresaw a future so dependent on organ transplants for longevity that even the simplest of crimes like jaywalking would get the death penalty. With China in the news at the time for executing prisoners and harvesting organs, that kind of dystopian future seemed completely plausible. Niven didn't foresee alloplasty (gadgets instead of organs) becoming an alternative for centuries. But already stem cell research, nanotechnology and tissue printing shows that we are jumping directly to modifying the human body through purely artificial means.
Indeed, Finland is rather rural, and becoming even more so as young people leave the dwindling towns in the north to move down to the Helsinki metropolitan area. However, Finland is not at all "steppe", which you only arrive at by going a couple of thousand kilometers southeast into Russia, but rather consists of forests, meadows and lakes.
Consider this development along with yesterday's story on amateur radio, where so much is going on now in software, with people using mainly expensive radios with everything on inscrutable ICs, and fewer and fewer hams are building their own equipment. Radio Shack no longer offers the range of retail components that they did just a decade ago. As time goes by, there's less and less electronics in our daily lives which we have any chance of understanding ourselves. Technology companies have become a priesthood.
When I was pursuing licenses in the mid-1990s, ARRL manuals repeatedly stated that those topics were to be avoided. FCC Part 97 strongly suggests that communications not delve into any issues considered controversial.
There's plenty. No privacy in your conversation. Talking about anything really serious (politics, religion, business) is forbidden, as FCC regulations require that one's communications be limited to informal matters and technical reports and be non-profit in nature. Amateur radio will not seem like an intriguing substitution for a mobile phone to the vast majority of people.
I enjoyed amateur radio before the wide availability of the Internet, but looking back, it's a real shame that so much of the international communications that amateur radio brought me consisting only of us listing our equipment instead of engaging in any real intercultural exchange.
The K continues to be pronounced in other Germanic languages. Compare German Knabe to English knave. The logical conclusion is that English innovated in pronunciation (and stagnated in spelling) while other languages in this instance retained older features.
The reconstruction of older stages of a language is not perfect -- in his compendium of Latin pronunciation Vox Latina , W. Sidney Allen notes that we may never know the minute details that distinguished the accent of one Roman city from adjacent regions. However, in the main, determining the general phonology of earlier stages of a language is considered reliable. The science of historical linguistics is over 200 years old now and it retains the same fundamentals though some theories come and go.