"What really goads me lately is this massive latching on by the current mainstream press that Work/Life balance is some evil concept."
The origin of this concept is simple. We live in an economic system dominated by Capitalism. If you ever listen to news reports on quarterly economic results a key factor in them is productivity and worker productivity. Economies that have low productivity tend to do worse than those with high productivity. Productivity means you produce more with fewer expensive inputs to the system like wages.
Now as an average worker productivity isn't the most important thing in the world. Sure you would like to be more productive rather than less and you might strive for improved efficiency to get more done in less time. But if you are the economists in the Department of Treasury or a CEO of a large business one of the things you care about most is milking the maximum productivity out of your work force because it maximizes your productivity. This quest for productivity is why coal miners in China work 7 days days a week, 12+ hours a day, because the produce more coal and they still get paid just enough to survive.
Places like France offer a lot of work/life balance to their workers, including lots of vacation time and relatively few total hours worked per week, but the French economy is relatively stagnant and not very competitive on the world stage. It has low productivity.
You might argue that if you are happy and not burned out you are more productive. This is true in some jobs but not most.
The U.S. around 1900 also made people work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. But over time unions and labor regulation and better work/life balance reduced that to 40 hour weeks and high wages. The only problem is in a globalized world American labor is no longer even remotely competitive and U.S. workers are getting creamed in many sectors by workers in China and India. In China low wages and longer hours translates in to high productivity.
Now workers in China probably aren't the happiest in the world, and in some fields American workers with good work/life balance will kick their butts, because a worker that isn't burned out and is happy with their job is probably going to be more creative, useful and innovative. Unfortunately in a lot of industries brutual productivity translates in to profitability. Software programming could end up falling in either camp. Some is not very creative and best done by people working long hours for no money, some requires very able workers who are very happy.
What I want to know is what the hell happens after gen Z and why the hell did we start with X. Is the rapture really coming so we only needed to cover 3 generations?
The basic problem in education is when it transitioned from being somewhat hard to get to being mandatory. It was touted as a great thing when America introduced universal public education. How could you question that. Its obviously essential that all of the members of your society have basic reading and math skills. Illiterate adults are a serious drain on an economy.
The problem is when you made education mandatory lots of people stopped valuing it. It turned in to something you had to get through to make it to adulthood. Most kids started hating it. You also had a situation where you had some bright intelligent kids who probably did value their education, did well in school, and wanted to succeed, thrown in the middle of large numbers of kids who hate school, hate people who do well in school and ridicule and bully kids who do well at it. Its kind of a system designed to fail. No Child Left Behind is just the pinnacle of the brokenness. Rather than focusing resources on the kids who are most able and will be the future technologists and captains of industry all the focus is on trying to make the worst students who hate education the most, just pass a rudimentary skills test. I could be wrong but I think India's schools do the opposite of No Child Left Behind, and look for the best students, fast track them and spare no expense on them.
Of course India has a very stratified society and someone is going to rant at me about how all children are equal in America and stratifying our education is bad. If America wants to succeed in a globalized world stratification is urgently needed so you get the talented kids out of lowest common denominator public schools where they are surrounded by kids who are going to fail in school and try to take down the talented kids with them.
"In short, the ABA had worked to prevent law schools from proliferating to the point it's at today"
An especially brilliant example of this trend is Regent University, Pat Robertson's law school. As nearly as I can tell the main requirement for entry and graduation is you need to be a devout Christian and pay the fee. Not only is this place churning out a lot of lawyers but many of them have been fast tracked in to high ranking positions in the Executive branch of the U.S. government, positions far beyond what their capabilities, experience or academic qualifications indicate they are qualified for. Kind of a sad commentary on what happens on a country where you fail to maintain separation of church and state, and let people's religious affiliation become a prominent part of their resume.
"Either you're a troll most wily, or else a moral vacuum. You don't see what the moral issue is of it being legal for a US company or person to aid in the oppression of the people of another country? Really?"
Well considering the U.S. government has been known to engage in oppression, and you presumably don't have an issue with U.S. companies working with the U.S. government I'm not exactly seeing your point. The U.S. government using U.S. telco's to spy on its citizens is the obvious latest example. Rendition, especially when it snatches innocent people, which it has, is some pretty serious oppression too. One innocent guy was snatched, disappeared without word to his family for months, and was probably tortured to a degree tried to take it to the U.S. courts. The U.S. courts threw his completely valid case out because what he was complaining about was a government secret. His only crime was his name was the same of some Islamic militatnt the U.S. did want to torture. That is both some serious oppression and stupidity too.
The U.S. government has propped up dozens of brutally oppressive right wing dictators over the last hundred years. As long as they were anti communist they could oppress, murder and torture with U.S. assistance and blessing. Its REALLY hard for the U.S. to be all holier than though about repressive regimes since it helped to install so many over the years. The only repressive regimes the U.S. dislikes are the ones that don't do what the U.S. tells them to like Saddam from 1990 on, he was fine before that, and Panama when the U.S. invaded them because they stopped being a U.S. stooge.
The point is government oppression happens all over the place all the time and pretending you can draw a line here and say this is OK and this isn't is folly.
Here is a thought experiment. Let's say tens of thousands of people were to try to march through the streets of Washington D.C. demanding the overthrow of the Bush administration because the elections thats installed them in power were suspect to say, they've been violating our Constitution wholesale and getting away with it, started a war based on lies that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and are destroying the U.S. economy. They might be ignored if it was empty hand waving and speeches and they went home. If the marches happened everyday and started to challenge the authority of the government I can assure you the Bush administration would be throwing thousands of people in jail, and breaking some heads, just like the Burmese government is. Its what governments do when their power is challenged. Obviously the Burmese government is among the worst on the planet, but the Chinese government is pretty bad too and we do business with them on a massive scale. Where exactly are you going to draw the line on governments its OK to do business with and those that aren't.
A lot of people and countries might be of the opinion doing business with the U.S. is morally reprehensible, at least as long as the Bush administration or one like it is in power and as long as the U.S. is engaged in the cruel follies like the occupation of Iraq.
"More people died in religious wars as percentage of population than any other wars in the history of this planet."
That's kind of a grand statement, do you have any actual data to back it up?
The Civil War killed more American than any other in its history. You could maybe claim the bible thumping Northern Abolitionists were responsible for it but its a stretch.
Spanish American war... no real religious angle there other than American protests were maybe not so fond of Spanish Catholics, it was mostly yellow journalism from the Hearst newspaper empire and the unbridled American Imperialism seeking to add Cuba and the Philippines to the American portfolio at the expense of Spanish imperialism.
Then of course you have the wars that killed more people than any wars in history. World War I was sparked by Serbian nationalists killing an heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, followed by a cascade of alliances pulling in one combatant after another. There wasn't really any good reason for it, it just happened, millions died, can't blame religion for it other than when religious con men cheered it on from the pulpit and helped sucker young men in to feeding themselves in to the meat grinder. That is one thing you can blame religion for, talking young men in to joining the military.
Then there is World War II well again not really any religious angle there other than the Nazi's had some pretty...interesting...takes on religion. They certinaly did use religion as a tool for manipulating the masses but again it would be a stretch to call it a religious war. That is something else you can hang on religion, it really is an opiate for the masses, and is one of the more effective ways to manipulating large numbers of people in to thinking and do what you you want.
Korea and Vietnam, purely economic idealogy and nationalist aspirations. In South Vietnam the puppets America propped up tending to be Catholic which was reviled by the Nationalist because it was the religion the French introduced during their brutal colonial occupation. It was almost entirely a war about nationalism and economics.
It is probably fair to say that in the last couple centuries religion has been a factor in wars but there really haven't been all that many religious wars that I can think of. Northern Ireleand certainly had a big religious component, but Irish nationalist was just as important if not more so.
It would probably be a better assertion that religion certainly has been used in a tool to promote and encourage wars, but at heart wars are just about one group or person seeking power and wealth at the expense of another.
The single scariest thing I can think of linking religion and militarism is the extent to which the American military, especially the United States Air Force and the Air Force Academy, have been taken over by born again Christians. These are the people who run a nuclear arsenal big enough to actually creat an apocalypse. The U.S. military seems to think strong religious background might is desirable for people in this position of responsibility, I personally don't think people who subscribe to an apocryphal religion should be allowed anywhere near nuclear weapons.
Time for the obligatory quote from John Brunner's, "The Sheep Look Up":
"I'm referring specifically to apparently normal children, without obvious physical or mental defects. I'm convinced people are subconsciously aware of what's going on, and becoming alarmed by it. For example, there's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only to look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises"
Its largely forgotten but "Anarchists" were, in the early 20th century, what "Terrorists" are today. They were used by governments to terrorize their people to justify their power grabs. Anyone who was against abusive, power mad, greedy politicians and governments was a bomb throwing "Anarchist". The term anarchist was used in nearly every other sentence in political speeches to evoke fear, just like terrorist is used today.
Probably the single most effective methodology for countering Anarchism and Terrorism would be good governance. But it seems nearly impossible for people who acquire political power to govern wisely and effectively. The quickly become drunk on their power. They tax one group to line the pockets of another. They persecute one group to curry favor with another. They make Anarchists and Libertarians look good by comparison, more so everyday.
"Finally, IMHO, it wouldn't be able to beat the F-22 is most engagements."
The Japanese aren't trying to beat an F-22 They are just looking for a fighter that will beat the current and future Chinese, Russian and North Koreans models which are substantially less than an F-22. Chances are that could be done with a jet much less sophisticated and much cheaper than the F-22. A key problem with the F-22 is it was so long in development its not exactly state of the art in some areas. Japan could well reverse engineer a lot of the advances in the F-22 for a lot less money than it took the U.S. to do them the first time over the last 20 going on 30 years. The basic shape is out there for everyone to see and stealth techniques aren't exactly secret anymore. I imagine people are also figuring out where the engines get their power for supercruise. The radar might be hard to match but who knows, the U.S. doesn't exactly have a monopoly on engineering and electronics talent any more. Thrust vectoring is also not something the U.S. has a monopoly on.
All the Japanese have to do is develop jets better than the ones they have, and the ones their potential adversaries have, or yank America's chain hard enough they will cave and let them have F-22's or F-35's. The one and only way to offset the staggering R&D costs of the F-22 is to start exporting them. I can't really see any country outside the U.S. being foolish enough to spend $120-$360 million a copy for them though when they could build a good enough jet for half or a third the price which seems to be what they are exploring.
"Japan entered World War II with the intent of conquering Asia. They invaded China (without ever formally declaring War since both China and Japan feared it would cause their trading partners to stop supplying them) for it's resources and eventually The Philippines which was an act of war against the US."
Its true Japan was engaged in a long and brutal war with China but they invaded Manchuria in 1931 long before there was anything resembling a World War. They were seeking to gain control of a resource rich area to fuel their industrial and military expansion, in much the same way the U.S. seized the American Southwest from Mexico and the Philippines from Spain. All the European colonial powers seized their empires from someone else and use them to propel their economic success. Japan was just a little late joining the club, stepped on the toes of the old school colonial powers, and were especially brutal about it. All of the western colonial powers, including the U.S. and Japan had been carving up, exploiting and abusing China for the better part of a century prior to 1931. This exploitation of China led to the Boxer Rebellion in 1899 for example when the Chinese tried to drive out all the foreign devils who were exploiting them, German, British, American and Japanese alike,
There is some irony if you look at modern Manchuria because Japan has returned there in a huge way today, and is doing basically what it wanted to do in the 1930's but today its regained control of the region just by spending money and building factories there.
The point everyone, especially in America, seems to forget is that the U.S., the U.K. and the Dutch provoked Japan in to expanding the war in China in to the World War in the Pacific, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. They did this by embargoing oil supplies to Japan, Roosevelt on July 21, 1941, followed a few days later by the British and the Dutch. The Dutch and British oil fields in what is now Indonesia were of particular importance to Japan and the spigot from them was shut off. The Japanese basically considered that the opening salvo in the war in the Pacific. The embargo left Japan with no alternative but to seize all the oil fields in the Pacific otherwise their military and their economy would have been starved for energy, or they would have had to submit to demands from the U.S. British and Dutch which would have been capitulation in their book which is something they would never have considered. So they drove the British, Dutch and U.S. out of the eastern Pacific by seizing Singapore, the Philippines, the East Indies and its oil fields. Once again the U.S. had seized of control the Philippines itself in the Spanish American war, a war largely fabricated by the U.S. and the Hearst newspaper enterprise, to fuel an American expansion just like Japan invading Manchuria. The U.S. had also been fighting an insurgency in the Philippines for several decades early in the 20th centure, a war full of American atrocities, including torture. Japan's atrocities in China were probably on a larger scale but America didn't really have any moral high ground to stand on after what it had done in the Philippines in the early 20th century and all the western powers had done in China in the 19th century.
I think mostly what I'm saying is your post is a little bit steeped in anti Japanese propaganda originated from World War II. The allies had a lot of skeletons in their closets too and they weren't the champions of freedom and goodness their propaganda painted them to be. They won the war and it just so happens the people that win wars always paint themselves as good and right, and the people that lose usually get tarred as monsters. Stalin killed more innocent people than the German holocaust or the Japanese in China ever did but the Soviet Union wasn't on the losing end of the war so we choose to forget it.
As for Japanese brutality much of this perception ca
You argument makes no sense. That $360 million per copy is money that didn't go to other weapons systems and its money that got tacked on to the national debt or taken out of tax payers pockets. THAT IS WHAT AN F-22 COST US, and you can't spin it any other way. Just because its sunk cost doesn't change the fact is money tacked on to the national debt, for which we the U.S. had to borrow money and is paying interest. The F-22 R&D program went on far longer than it was supposed to, suffered huge overruns, pretty much the standard procedure for every big Lockheed contract.
At the moment that kind of money would have been better spent on patrol vehicles for Iraq designed to withstand IED's. It could better go to repairing all the M-1's and Bradley's that were completely worn out in Iraq. If we actually needed an armored fighting force for an emergency right now, the U.S. doesn't really have one. The Army and Marines are completely broken with most of their working equipment tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the rest in depots in the U.S. broken down and and worn out.
The problem with the Air Force is that it has completely outstripped every adversary to the point they are mostly just squandering money competing with themselves. Russia and China are the only two potential adversaries that could even remotely challenge the U.S. in the air. The odds of China and the U.S. going to war now are really slim. China is every Republican businessman's wet dream, a gigantic pool of dirt cheap labor to profit from. China is bleeding the U.S. white in trade deficit the old fashioned capitalist way. They are so mutually dependent economically a war is the last thing on their minds. Russia is getting rich off its oil and gas reserves. It has no reason to throw all that away in a foolish war. It can control Europe just by threatening to turn off the gas pipelines in the middle of winter.
So who exactly is the F-22 or B-2 needed to fight? They are ridiculously expensive cold war relics, which are almost completely worthless in a world in which all of America's enemies are using unconventional warfare, like hijacked planes, suicide bombers and IED's. No one is foolish enough to go one on one with the U.S. in a conventional war, everyone has figured out its really cheap and easy to tie the U.S. up in knots with unconventional methods.
They are also to expensive and to big a trophy target to risk them by sending them.. some place....dangerous....like a war. One lucky hit, or a mechanical problem over enemy territory and that F-22 and all that top secret technology is in an enemies hands.
The A-10 is probably the most useful airplane the U.S. has in the real wars the U.S. is fighting now, its ancient and dirt cheap but it does the job that needs done in the real wars American is fighting now.
That Red Flag exercise was really telling, it was mostly F-22's beating F-15's. F-15's have had complete air superiority in every war they've been in. At this point the Air Force is just beating itself at enormous expense to the American tax payer. No on else is really even trying any more. Most fighters being built by other countries are for potential wars against countries which aren't the United States and to maintain some pretense that they could defend their air space against the United States if they had to when they probably couldn't, even against F-15's, F-18's and F-117's.
"The Bill of Rights states that searches cannot be _unreasonable_, which the Courts have defined. You can be searched in airports by federal officers (TSA) when traveling because the extreme risk of a bomb makes searching everybody reasonable."
Using this rationale you can make EVERY search "reasonable". By this rationale you should be subject to search every time you board a bus, a subway or a train, in fact every time you are in a crowd of people. Bombs are a little more effective on an airplane but Madrid and London indicate they are quite effective on any form of mass transit. There were supposedly plots in Russia by Chechyans to rent apartments in high rises, and place huge bombs in them, or cause natural gas explosions. So using your line of reasoning, any search of any apartment is "reasonable".
I'm fine with metal detectors to detect guns. I'm OK with bomb sniffing dogs. I'm OK if you search someone at an airport when you have probable cause to believe they are doing something criminal, like carrying a gun, or a positive from a explosives sniffing dog.
But, this country officially hit police state status when you can be randomly and intrusively searched by some guy wearing rubber gloves in an airport. Last time I flew a 70 year old guy in front of me got the treatment in front of everyone, with a minimal table as the only privacy shield. The TSA lady whispered to me she had flagged him because he looked nervous. He was nervous because he was afraid of the fracking TSA anal probe which is exactly what he got.
The one good solution to 9/11 was armored and locked cockpit doors. It cost next to nothing, and cost no one any civil liberties. Sure there might still be a risk of a bomb and you should maybe try to minimize that where practical without intruding on civil liberties with explosives sniffers. But, as long as you have a first rate, locked, cockpit door the chances of someone using an airplane as a weapon and repeating 9/11 get dramatically lower. You might still lose a hundeed people to a bomb but that is a risk you just have to take as a society. A hundred plus people are killed in a car wrecks every day, and the world hardly notices.
Just solving 9/11 with cockpit doors would have saved this country a couple trillion dollars that we've squandered since on Homeland security, the TSA and random wars while we try to pretend squandering money was making us safe. That couple trillion dollars could have been used to work on clean renewable energy which would, more than anything else have made us safe. With clean renewable energy we stop waging wars in the Middle East that make everyone hate us. If we stop fighting wars and screwing people over for oil people stop hating us and terrorism eventually stops. We also stop overheating the planet which it appears is going to do more damage to western civilization than terrorism ever will. We also would have a lot healthier and happier economy. The economic ruin the Bush administration has wrought with wanton deficit spending, and foolish wars has also done more damage than terrorism every will.
"The userland tools and interfaces are far more important..."
Exactly....
So let's start a flame war here about KDE versus GNOME. That is the "current rift" killing Linux on the desktop, thank you Miguel de Icaza, Microsoft mole.
"what possible reason we would have for even wanting to waste billions of dollars on another trip to the moon for"
What reason did we have to waste a half a trillion dollars in Iraq? The one thing I love about George's war is it makes almost everything else look good by comparison.
Going back to the moon is a little pointless and silly, but just going there and collecting rocks would be better than squandering a half trillion in Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
The problem both China and the U.S. have in going back to the moon is it has absolutely no magic the second time around. The magic was already gone by the time Apollo 12 got there. After Apollo 11 everyone realized the people we were sending weren't doing anything really interesting and the Moon isn't a very interesting place. The only really interesting part about it was it was just really hard and dangerous as Apollo 1 and 13 proved.
I'm guessing maybe Griffin has realized this so I think this little tirade is an attempt to spark a new moon race, using China instead of Russia as the stalking horse. After all the race part was the basis for much of the excitement during Apollo, and really the only reason both the U.S. and the Soviet Union squandered so much money on it.. Its a little transparent but hey....whatever works to keep his funding.
I'm not sure there is even going to be much technology spin off like there was on Apollo. The bad thing about the current plans for return to the moon are they are doing everything almost exactly the same way they did it the first time just with incrementally improved rockets, materials and computers and most of those were developed before Orion not because of it. Maybe there will be some advancements when they start building a station on the Moon, but I have this sinking suspicious that will kind of end up being ISS, the sequel, with dirt. At least they will be able to get out of the tin cans, drive around and pick up rocks.
All in all, if we are going to blow a half trillion dollars, I think I would rather see it go to work on clean, renewable energy, with the method TBD, or maybe a crash campaign to build cars that get 100 MPG or run on clean fuels. I saw recently on the Discovery channel there are companies working on robotics to mass produce composite parts with an eye towards cutting the weight of cars in half which would yield huge fuel savings. Blow a few billion on things like that, it would also have an immediate impact on jobs and the economy where they are built if you can get the costs down.
"You wouldn't want something genetically removed by a forced abortion or immediate imprisonment when it is discovered you have the gene or are about to pass it on."
Homophobia is acute enough in many cultures that if a "gay gene" were discovered I assure you parents would abort a fetus that had it. Its a chronic problem in India that parents are aborting female children, though its against the law, because the parent's have to pay dowries to marry them off. Girls are considered a huge burden while boys are coveted. There is in fact a large number of single men in India who wont marry because the balance in the sexes has been skewed by the practice. If people could test to see if their kids were gay you can be sure some would abort kids that failed the test.
As far a genetic predisposition to crime I would agree its unlikely you would do anything drastic about. But you could easily see a paranoid police state might start "keeping an eye" on them.
I read recently there is an extremely high correlation between lead poisoning and criminal behavior. Lead poisoning apparently causes brain chemistry issues that cause people to act impulsively and without appreciating the consequences of their actions. There are some studies that show a strong correlation between drops in crime rates, and reductions of lead exposure to kids 10-20 years earlier. In particular when lead was banned in paint and when lead was removed as an additive in gasoline. Freakonomics suggested legalizing abortion was why there was a big drop in crime a few year ago. This study suggested it was more likely the introduction of unleaded gasoline. An idea that ties strongly back to the theme of "The Sheep Look Up", the consequences of poisoning our environment in the name of corporate greed.
As proof that Brunner, author of "The Sheep Look Up", "Shockwave Rider" and "Stand on Zanzibar" is in fact psychic or actually has a time machine is this classic quote from The Sheep, which is scary prescient:
"I'm referring specifically to apparently normal children, without obvious physical or mental defects. I'm convinced people are subconsciously aware of what's going on, and becoming alarmed by it. For example, there's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only to look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises"
"Then if every child grows up with this being the "norm" what happens ?"
There are prehistorical documentaries. Look for "V is for Vendetta", "The Sheep Look Up, "Minority Report", "THX 1138", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". When I read or saw all of these for the first time, little did I realize that they were written by people who were actually peering in to the future.
One has to wonder what happens if there is in fact a "gay gene" or a genetic predisposition to crime and disobedience.
The open source "community" doesn't exactly have the best track record developing complex GUI intensive applications. There is Gimp which is OK but not great. Firefox isn't exactly doing much as far as UI goes. KDE and Gnome both have... issues... in particular the fact that there are two desktops in the first place fragmenting application development and massively duplicating effort.
There are times when its not exactly bad to have one entity, whether it be a company or an individual, who puts an end to the bickering, makes a decision, sets the direction, imperfect though it may be, and makes everyone pull in the same direction. Linus serves that role for the kernel, SUN does it for Open Office.
Debate is good, expressing different views is good, one entity with poor vision dictating direction is bad. But, a project with a hundred chiefs and no Indians, and design by committee is not a always a prescription for success.
"...it seems like anyone could become a cybercriminal and make billions of dollars."
And the sad thing is it wouldn't exactly be that hard to fix it, or at least lower the risk. If either banks/credit companies or governments instituted a voluntary system to associate digital signatures with social security number, credit cards and bank accounts. If I had a PGP key that only I could authenticate and require it to be authenticated for all transactions involving my social security, credit cards and bank accounts. I would have some defense. With the current system I have none against identity theft. We are basically using 1930's era identification technology in a computer age which is why cybercrime is a booming business.
Hackers could still use key loggers to comprise a keyboard entered password for a digital signature but at least it would be possible to change it once the theft has been detected and fixed.
Funny, unfortunately its not an even remotely valid analogy. Someone elected governor has already cleared an extremely difficult political gauntlet exactly like the one they have to clear to get elected President. Making it to governor means you are vetted by your party, you have the ability to raise money, you can run the political machine necessary to get elected and you are electable at least in the microcosm of one state. People who want to be President are usually going to run for governor, Congress or be be a General just to prove they have the chops, its a logical, almost mandatory progression. The odds of two governors getting elected president back to back is probably more like 1 in 20. No conspiracy.
To get in to Skull and Bones the only gauntlet you've cleared is you got in to Yale, and you are probably the offspring of an affluent and powerful family. It says nothing about your political ability, intellect or anything else. George W. got in and he has shit for brains and was a coked up, drunken no good at the time. His own family didn't think he would amount to anything, they were betting on Jeb. It just shows how broken the American political system is that a spoiled rotten, preppy rich kid and Bonesman,can milk his family name and his rich friends to get elected President.
I should correct something in my previous post, the odds of two Bonesmen running against each other for President isn't anything like 1 in 100,000,000 because a relatively small ruling elite much of it coming out of places like Yale dominates most of the levers of power in this country, and manipulate into voting for the people they put up. They get a disproportionate number in to the centers of power, far more than they deserve, at least 1 to many in the case of George W.. I think Howard Dean went to Yale too so it was a trifecta. I don't think he is a bonesman....which is why he didn't even make the cut....
You could argue that making it through Ivy league schools is a relevant factor in winnowing the field to qualified candidates, but again the fact that George W made it through that gauntlet shows its more about powerful connections and not about having.....a brain.
"Globalization and the rise of third world countries to industrial status as well as the ever growing mixing of populations will slowly but surely unite the world."
Actually if you want to reference China as an example of "the rise of third world countries to industrial status" if the trend continues we are more likely going to exhaust this planets resource really fast and as the resource shortages intensify so is the likelihood of viscous wars over them.
In case you haven't noticed prices of things like oil, copper and most other natural resources are spiking due to huge increases in demand especially from India and China. We could well reach a point we are going to need to start mining asteroids for minerals sooner than later and the He3 on the Moon may well be crucial to our insatiable needs sooner than later. Its no accident that China, India, Japan and Russia with their long view of things are investing in their space programs, China especially. When resource shortages on this planet are already acute is not the time to start trying to develop the infrastructure and basic technology to start exploiting off world resources.
Unfortunately the rise to industrial status currently means consumerism, greed, automobiles, freeways and an unquenchable thirst for power, at the same time that we are doing almost nothing to develop clean, renewable, energy. The solution to powering China's industrial status is massive mining of coal by something resembling slave labor, burning it dirty and inefficient power plants and further poisoning the planet. Studies indicate China has either already passed the U.S. as the world's #1 producer of greenhouse gases or certainly will in the next couple years.
"When the guy asked the skull and crossbones question he'd gone off the deep end into tinfoil hat land."
How so?
Skull and Bones is a tiny fraternity full of powerful and wealthy people, with a bent for secrecy and power. Bush and Kerry ARE both members. What ARE the odds that two Bonesmen would end up running against each other for President of the United States, like 1 in a 100,000,000. His line of reasoning is a bit far fetched but certainly plausible, that Skull and Bones maneuvered two of its members in to the same presidential race so they had a lock on the most powerful political office in the world. Voters were kidding themselves they were choosing the president when it could have been decided by Bonesmen when they manuevered Kerry in to the Democratic nomation.
In particular there did seem to be concerted effort by the power elite to destroy Howard Dean who was a populist candidate the power elite dreaded making it to the White House. In to the void left by Dean stepped the ultimate power elite, establishment candidate, John Kerry, who in the general election was such a horrible candidate that he managed to get Bush reelected. I think there is almost no disputing George W. is one of the worst Presidents the U.S has ever had. It wasn't as obvious in 2004 as it is now, but a lot of people were finally figuring it out. But a lot of people still voted for Bush because Kerry seemed worse. Its mind boggling Bush got reelected and Kerry IS the one to thank for it. The U.S. will be lucky to recover from the devastation 8 years of Bush/Cheney have done to it.
So the guy is suggesting Kerry was a stalking horse of a sort, and was just elevated to the Democratic nomination to insure that Bush won the election. Bush was so bad he almost lost even running against the world's worst candidate in Kerry. Continuing the line of reason the Republicans still had to rig Ohio to win, Kerry knew it was rigged he didn't contest it because the puppetmaster Bonesmen pulling the strings told him not to because George W. was their chosen man of the two, after all he gave them all huge tax cuts and Bonesmen like their money, and he was handing out billions of our tax dollars to all their well connected corporations in a hundred different barrels of port.
Again, far fetched but plausible, and Universities used to be places where you taught people to think out of the box, not places you taser people for mentioning the name of a secret society that would rather not have its name mentioned. Bonesmen DO pull strings, all the time, and have an influence on our world disproportionate to their numbers. When you are pulling strings on the world stage you generally do prefer its done quietly.
I should add Von Braun stuck to their vision through a whole lot of adversity, and events they could never have predicted. Over the course of 40-50 years they made their vision come true. They weren't exactly pure as the driven snow but they were visionaries who made their vision come true when they could have quit a hundred times. They started out working for an unpredictable wacko in Nazi Germany. They had their entire country and all their labs blown out from under them. They and all their work could easily have landed in the hands of Stalin another unpredictable wacko. When they made it to the U.S. they landed in imprisonment and isolation in New Mexico for years. They stuck it out though, and when they got their chance at NASA they still made their dream come true.
I think they are a case study that runs counter to everything you are saying. They couldn't have predicted the course of events or any of the obstacles they were going to endure from 1930 to 1970 but they stayed true to their vision and made it happen anyway.
The death blow to the U.S. space program was the Space Shuttle and ISS so at least half of the problem was a collapse in technological evolution and vision which was Von Braun's department. There was certainly a failure of leadership and motivation too.
A key problem was about the same time as Apollo 11 Vietnam started really going sour and started draining the life out of America and bleeding the economy white which gets back to my original point. We would rather squander money on pointless wars than do something constructive. That is just a simple failure in leadership. The simple solution is to stop electing bad leaders.
"People can make grandiose visions and strive towards them."
As long as you are sure the vision is a sound one, the only way you are going to succeed with it is to avoid all the diversions and overcome the obstacles. You aren't going anywhere with the attitude that you should go with the flow and if some obstacle arises you just quit and do something else.
The visionaries are the people that make things happen in this world, they often fail but the ones that succeed are priceless. The wait and see'ers are the ones that kill you every time.
"In 1957, who could have predicted the next fifty years in space?"
Uh, Von Braun and most of his team back in the 40's when they were working on the V-2. They had plans for follow on generations of rockets to go in to orbit, the moon and Mars, plans they took to NASA and proceeded to build up through Apollo. They had a vision, they made it happen. If you want to be successful in hard things thats what it takes, a sound vision and a lot of hard work to attain it. Burt Ruttan is probably one of the few contemporaries with those qualities. Following your train of thought I don't think anything hard would ever be accomplished.
Don't think Von Braun envisioned the Space Shuttle in the 40's, I'm guessing if you showed him the idea he would have torn it apart, for no other reason than the huge amounts of dead weight you were lifting in to orbit for no particularly good reason. Not sure what he would have thought of ISS.....
Most science fiction writers are a little idealistic and thought we would stop killing each other in mostly pointless wars by now and join forces to fix our planet and move on to new ones. They were wrong. If we'd taken the half a trillion dollars we squandered in Iraq we would be well on our way to Mars, or to developing clean renewable energy sources. Unfortunately we are a deeply flawed species, and the intellectual gift we've been given is usually misguided and misdirected, especially when we elevate people to be our leaders who seem to have little or no intellect at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"What really goads me lately is this massive latching on by the current mainstream press that Work/Life balance is some evil concept."
The origin of this concept is simple. We live in an economic system dominated by Capitalism. If you ever listen to news reports on quarterly economic results a key factor in them is productivity and worker productivity. Economies that have low productivity tend to do worse than those with high productivity. Productivity means you produce more with fewer expensive inputs to the system like wages.
Now as an average worker productivity isn't the most important thing in the world. Sure you would like to be more productive rather than less and you might strive for improved efficiency to get more done in less time. But if you are the economists in the Department of Treasury or a CEO of a large business one of the things you care about most is milking the maximum productivity out of your work force because it maximizes your productivity. This quest for productivity is why coal miners in China work 7 days days a week, 12+ hours a day, because the produce more coal and they still get paid just enough to survive.
Places like France offer a lot of work/life balance to their workers, including lots of vacation time and relatively few total hours worked per week, but the French economy is relatively stagnant and not very competitive on the world stage. It has low productivity.
You might argue that if you are happy and not burned out you are more productive. This is true in some jobs but not most.
The U.S. around 1900 also made people work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. But over time unions and labor regulation and better work/life balance reduced that to 40 hour weeks and high wages. The only problem is in a globalized world American labor is no longer even remotely competitive and U.S. workers are getting creamed in many sectors by workers in China and India. In China low wages and longer hours translates in to high productivity.
Now workers in China probably aren't the happiest in the world, and in some fields American workers with good work/life balance will kick their butts, because a worker that isn't burned out and is happy with their job is probably going to be more creative, useful and innovative. Unfortunately in a lot of industries brutual productivity translates in to profitability. Software programming could end up falling in either camp. Some is not very creative and best done by people working long hours for no money, some requires very able workers who are very happy.
What I want to know is what the hell happens after gen Z and why the hell did we start with X. Is the rapture really coming so we only needed to cover 3 generations?
The basic problem in education is when it transitioned from being somewhat hard to get to being mandatory. It was touted as a great thing when America introduced universal public education. How could you question that. Its obviously essential that all of the members of your society have basic reading and math skills. Illiterate adults are a serious drain on an economy.
The problem is when you made education mandatory lots of people stopped valuing it. It turned in to something you had to get through to make it to adulthood. Most kids started hating it. You also had a situation where you had some bright intelligent kids who probably did value their education, did well in school, and wanted to succeed, thrown in the middle of large numbers of kids who hate school, hate people who do well in school and ridicule and bully kids who do well at it. Its kind of a system designed to fail. No Child Left Behind is just the pinnacle of the brokenness. Rather than focusing resources on the kids who are most able and will be the future technologists and captains of industry all the focus is on trying to make the worst students who hate education the most, just pass a rudimentary skills test. I could be wrong but I think India's schools do the opposite of No Child Left Behind, and look for the best students, fast track them and spare no expense on them.
Of course India has a very stratified society and someone is going to rant at me about how all children are equal in America and stratifying our education is bad. If America wants to succeed in a globalized world stratification is urgently needed so you get the talented kids out of lowest common denominator public schools where they are surrounded by kids who are going to fail in school and try to take down the talented kids with them.
"In short, the ABA had worked to prevent law schools from proliferating to the point it's at today"
An especially brilliant example of this trend is Regent University, Pat Robertson's law school. As nearly as I can tell the main requirement for entry and graduation is you need to be a devout Christian and pay the fee. Not only is this place churning out a lot of lawyers but many of them have been fast tracked in to high ranking positions in the Executive branch of the U.S. government, positions far beyond what their capabilities, experience or academic qualifications indicate they are qualified for. Kind of a sad commentary on what happens on a country where you fail to maintain separation of church and state, and let people's religious affiliation become a prominent part of their resume.
"Either you're a troll most wily, or else a moral vacuum. You don't see what the moral issue is of it being legal for a US company or person to aid in the oppression of the people of another country? Really?"
Well considering the U.S. government has been known to engage in oppression, and you presumably don't have an issue with U.S. companies working with the U.S. government I'm not exactly seeing your point. The U.S. government using U.S. telco's to spy on its citizens is the obvious latest example. Rendition, especially when it snatches innocent people, which it has, is some pretty serious oppression too. One innocent guy was snatched, disappeared without word to his family for months, and was probably tortured to a degree tried to take it to the U.S. courts. The U.S. courts threw his completely valid case out because what he was complaining about was a government secret. His only crime was his name was the same of some Islamic militatnt the U.S. did want to torture. That is both some serious oppression and stupidity too.
The U.S. government has propped up dozens of brutally oppressive right wing dictators over the last hundred years. As long as they were anti communist they could oppress, murder and torture with U.S. assistance and blessing. Its REALLY hard for the U.S. to be all holier than though about repressive regimes since it helped to install so many over the years. The only repressive regimes the U.S. dislikes are the ones that don't do what the U.S. tells them to like Saddam from 1990 on, he was fine before that, and Panama when the U.S. invaded them because they stopped being a U.S. stooge.
The point is government oppression happens all over the place all the time and pretending you can draw a line here and say this is OK and this isn't is folly.
Here is a thought experiment. Let's say tens of thousands of people were to try to march through the streets of Washington D.C. demanding the overthrow of the Bush administration because the elections thats installed them in power were suspect to say, they've been violating our Constitution wholesale and getting away with it, started a war based on lies that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and are destroying the U.S. economy. They might be ignored if it was empty hand waving and speeches and they went home. If the marches happened everyday and started to challenge the authority of the government I can assure you the Bush administration would be throwing thousands of people in jail, and breaking some heads, just like the Burmese government is. Its what governments do when their power is challenged. Obviously the Burmese government is among the worst on the planet, but the Chinese government is pretty bad too and we do business with them on a massive scale. Where exactly are you going to draw the line on governments its OK to do business with and those that aren't.
A lot of people and countries might be of the opinion doing business with the U.S. is morally reprehensible, at least as long as the Bush administration or one like it is in power and as long as the U.S. is engaged in the cruel follies like the occupation of Iraq.
"More people died in religious wars as percentage of population than any other wars in the history of this planet."
That's kind of a grand statement, do you have any actual data to back it up?
The Civil War killed more American than any other in its history. You could maybe claim the bible thumping Northern Abolitionists were responsible for it but its a stretch.
Spanish American war... no real religious angle there other than American protests were maybe not so fond of Spanish Catholics, it was mostly yellow journalism from the Hearst newspaper empire and the unbridled American Imperialism seeking to add Cuba and the Philippines to the American portfolio at the expense of Spanish imperialism.
Then of course you have the wars that killed more people than any wars in history. World War I was sparked by Serbian nationalists killing an heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, followed by a cascade of alliances pulling in one combatant after another. There wasn't really any good reason for it, it just happened, millions died, can't blame religion for it other than when religious con men cheered it on from the pulpit and helped sucker young men in to feeding themselves in to the meat grinder. That is one thing you can blame religion for, talking young men in to joining the military.
Then there is World War II well again not really any religious angle there other than the Nazi's had some pretty...interesting...takes on religion. They certinaly did use religion as a tool for manipulating the masses but again it would be a stretch to call it a religious war. That is something else you can hang on religion, it really is an opiate for the masses, and is one of the more effective ways to manipulating large numbers of people in to thinking and do what you you want.
Korea and Vietnam, purely economic idealogy and nationalist aspirations. In South Vietnam the puppets America propped up tending to be Catholic which was reviled by the Nationalist because it was the religion the French introduced during their brutal colonial occupation. It was almost entirely a war about nationalism and economics.
It is probably fair to say that in the last couple centuries religion has been a factor in wars but there really haven't been all that many religious wars that I can think of. Northern Ireleand certainly had a big religious component, but Irish nationalist was just as important if not more so.
It would probably be a better assertion that religion certainly has been used in a tool to promote and encourage wars, but at heart wars are just about one group or person seeking power and wealth at the expense of another.
The single scariest thing I can think of linking religion and militarism is the extent to which the American military, especially the United States Air Force and the Air Force Academy, have been taken over by born again Christians. These are the people who run a nuclear arsenal big enough to actually creat an apocalypse. The U.S. military seems to think strong religious background might is desirable for people in this position of responsibility, I personally don't think people who subscribe to an apocryphal religion should be allowed anywhere near nuclear weapons.
Time for the obligatory quote from John Brunner's, "The Sheep Look Up":
"I'm referring specifically to apparently normal children, without obvious physical or mental defects. I'm convinced people are subconsciously aware of what's going on, and becoming alarmed by it. For example, there's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only to look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises"
Its largely forgotten but "Anarchists" were, in the early 20th century, what "Terrorists" are today. They were used by governments to terrorize their people to justify their power grabs. Anyone who was against abusive, power mad, greedy politicians and governments was a bomb throwing "Anarchist". The term anarchist was used in nearly every other sentence in political speeches to evoke fear, just like terrorist is used today.
Probably the single most effective methodology for countering Anarchism and Terrorism would be good governance. But it seems nearly impossible for people who acquire political power to govern wisely and effectively. The quickly become drunk on their power. They tax one group to line the pockets of another. They persecute one group to curry favor with another. They make Anarchists and Libertarians look good by comparison, more so everyday.
"Finally, IMHO, it wouldn't be able to beat the F-22 is most engagements."
The Japanese aren't trying to beat an F-22 They are just looking for a fighter that will beat the current and future Chinese, Russian and North Koreans models which are substantially less than an F-22. Chances are that could be done with a jet much less sophisticated and much cheaper than the F-22. A key problem with the F-22 is it was so long in development its not exactly state of the art in some areas. Japan could well reverse engineer a lot of the advances in the F-22 for a lot less money than it took the U.S. to do them the first time over the last 20 going on 30 years. The basic shape is out there for everyone to see and stealth techniques aren't exactly secret anymore. I imagine people are also figuring out where the engines get their power for supercruise. The radar might be hard to match but who knows, the U.S. doesn't exactly have a monopoly on engineering and electronics talent any more. Thrust vectoring is also not something the U.S. has a monopoly on.
All the Japanese have to do is develop jets better than the ones they have, and the ones their potential adversaries have, or yank America's chain hard enough they will cave and let them have F-22's or F-35's. The one and only way to offset the staggering R&D costs of the F-22 is to start exporting them. I can't really see any country outside the U.S. being foolish enough to spend $120-$360 million a copy for them though when they could build a good enough jet for half or a third the price which seems to be what they are exploring.
"Japan entered World War II with the intent of conquering Asia. They invaded China (without ever formally declaring War since both China and Japan feared it would cause their trading partners to stop supplying them) for it's resources and eventually The Philippines which was an act of war against the US."
Its true Japan was engaged in a long and brutal war with China but they invaded Manchuria in 1931 long before there was anything resembling a World War. They were seeking to gain control of a resource rich area to fuel their industrial and military expansion, in much the same way the U.S. seized the American Southwest from Mexico and the Philippines from Spain. All the European colonial powers seized their empires from someone else and use them to propel their economic success. Japan was just a little late joining the club, stepped on the toes of the old school colonial powers, and were especially brutal about it. All of the western colonial powers, including the U.S. and Japan had been carving up, exploiting and abusing China for the better part of a century prior to 1931. This exploitation of China led to the Boxer Rebellion in 1899 for example when the Chinese tried to drive out all the foreign devils who were exploiting them, German, British, American and Japanese alike,
There is some irony if you look at modern Manchuria because Japan has returned there in a huge way today, and is doing basically what it wanted to do in the 1930's but today its regained control of the region just by spending money and building factories there.
The point everyone, especially in America, seems to forget is that the U.S., the U.K. and the Dutch provoked Japan in to expanding the war in China in to the World War in the Pacific, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. They did this by embargoing oil supplies to Japan, Roosevelt on July 21, 1941, followed a few days later by the British and the Dutch. The Dutch and British oil fields in what is now Indonesia were of particular importance to Japan and the spigot from them was shut off. The Japanese basically considered that the opening salvo in the war in the Pacific. The embargo left Japan with no alternative but to seize all the oil fields in the Pacific otherwise their military and their economy would have been starved for energy, or they would have had to submit to demands from the U.S. British and Dutch which would have been capitulation in their book which is something they would never have considered. So they drove the British, Dutch and U.S. out of the eastern Pacific by seizing Singapore, the Philippines, the East Indies and its oil fields. Once again the U.S. had seized of control the Philippines itself in the Spanish American war, a war largely fabricated by the U.S. and the Hearst newspaper enterprise, to fuel an American expansion just like Japan invading Manchuria. The U.S. had also been fighting an insurgency in the Philippines for several decades early in the 20th centure, a war full of American atrocities, including torture. Japan's atrocities in China were probably on a larger scale but America didn't really have any moral high ground to stand on after what it had done in the Philippines in the early 20th century and all the western powers had done in China in the 19th century.
I think mostly what I'm saying is your post is a little bit steeped in anti Japanese propaganda originated from World War II. The allies had a lot of skeletons in their closets too and they weren't the champions of freedom and goodness their propaganda painted them to be. They won the war and it just so happens the people that win wars always paint themselves as good and right, and the people that lose usually get tarred as monsters. Stalin killed more innocent people than the German holocaust or the Japanese in China ever did but the Soviet Union wasn't on the losing end of the war so we choose to forget it.
As for Japanese brutality much of this perception ca
You argument makes no sense. That $360 million per copy is money that didn't go to other weapons systems and its money that got tacked on to the national debt or taken out of tax payers pockets. THAT IS WHAT AN F-22 COST US, and you can't spin it any other way. Just because its sunk cost doesn't change the fact is money tacked on to the national debt, for which we the U.S. had to borrow money and is paying interest. The F-22 R&D program went on far longer than it was supposed to, suffered huge overruns, pretty much the standard procedure for every big Lockheed contract.
At the moment that kind of money would have been better spent on patrol vehicles for Iraq designed to withstand IED's. It could better go to repairing all the M-1's and Bradley's that were completely worn out in Iraq. If we actually needed an armored fighting force for an emergency right now, the U.S. doesn't really have one. The Army and Marines are completely broken with most of their working equipment tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the rest in depots in the U.S. broken down and and worn out.
The problem with the Air Force is that it has completely outstripped every adversary to the point they are mostly just squandering money competing with themselves. Russia and China are the only two potential adversaries that could even remotely challenge the U.S. in the air. The odds of China and the U.S. going to war now are really slim. China is every Republican businessman's wet dream, a gigantic pool of dirt cheap labor to profit from. China is bleeding the U.S. white in trade deficit the old fashioned capitalist way. They are so mutually dependent economically a war is the last thing on their minds. Russia is getting rich off its oil and gas reserves. It has no reason to throw all that away in a foolish war. It can control Europe just by threatening to turn off the gas pipelines in the middle of winter.
So who exactly is the F-22 or B-2 needed to fight? They are ridiculously expensive cold war relics, which are almost completely worthless in a world in which all of America's enemies are using unconventional warfare, like hijacked planes, suicide bombers and IED's. No one is foolish enough to go one on one with the U.S. in a conventional war, everyone has figured out its really cheap and easy to tie the U.S. up in knots with unconventional methods.
They are also to expensive and to big a trophy target to risk them by sending them
The A-10 is probably the most useful airplane the U.S. has in the real wars the U.S. is fighting now, its ancient and dirt cheap but it does the job that needs done in the real wars American is fighting now.
That Red Flag exercise was really telling, it was mostly F-22's beating F-15's. F-15's have had complete air superiority in every war they've been in. At this point the Air Force is just beating itself at enormous expense to the American tax payer. No on else is really even trying any more. Most fighters being built by other countries are for potential wars against countries which aren't the United States and to maintain some pretense that they could defend their air space against the United States if they had to when they probably couldn't, even against F-15's, F-18's and F-117's.
"The Bill of Rights states that searches cannot be _unreasonable_, which the Courts have defined. You can be searched in airports by federal officers (TSA) when traveling because the extreme risk of a bomb makes searching everybody reasonable."
Using this rationale you can make EVERY search "reasonable". By this rationale you should be subject to search every time you board a bus, a subway or a train, in fact every time you are in a crowd of people. Bombs are a little more effective on an airplane but Madrid and London indicate they are quite effective on any form of mass transit. There were supposedly plots in Russia by Chechyans to rent apartments in high rises, and place huge bombs in them, or cause natural gas explosions. So using your line of reasoning, any search of any apartment is "reasonable".
I'm fine with metal detectors to detect guns. I'm OK with bomb sniffing dogs. I'm OK if you search someone at an airport when you have probable cause to believe they are doing something criminal, like carrying a gun, or a positive from a explosives sniffing dog.
But, this country officially hit police state status when you can be randomly and intrusively searched by some guy wearing rubber gloves in an airport. Last time I flew a 70 year old guy in front of me got the treatment in front of everyone, with a minimal table as the only privacy shield. The TSA lady whispered to me she had flagged him because he looked nervous. He was nervous because he was afraid of the fracking TSA anal probe which is exactly what he got.
The one good solution to 9/11 was armored and locked cockpit doors. It cost next to nothing, and cost no one any civil liberties. Sure there might still be a risk of a bomb and you should maybe try to minimize that where practical without intruding on civil liberties with explosives sniffers. But, as long as you have a first rate, locked, cockpit door the chances of someone using an airplane as a weapon and repeating 9/11 get dramatically lower. You might still lose a hundeed people to a bomb but that is a risk you just have to take as a society. A hundred plus people are killed in a car wrecks every day, and the world hardly notices.
Just solving 9/11 with cockpit doors would have saved this country a couple trillion dollars that we've squandered since on Homeland security, the TSA and random wars while we try to pretend squandering money was making us safe. That couple trillion dollars could have been used to work on clean renewable energy which would, more than anything else have made us safe. With clean renewable energy we stop waging wars in the Middle East that make everyone hate us. If we stop fighting wars and screwing people over for oil people stop hating us and terrorism eventually stops. We also stop overheating the planet which it appears is going to do more damage to western civilization than terrorism ever will. We also would have a lot healthier and happier economy. The economic ruin the Bush administration has wrought with wanton deficit spending, and foolish wars has also done more damage than terrorism every will.
"The userland tools and interfaces are far more important..."
Exactly....
So let's start a flame war here about KDE versus GNOME. That is the "current rift" killing Linux on the desktop, thank you Miguel de Icaza, Microsoft mole.
"what possible reason we would have for even wanting to waste billions of dollars on another trip to the moon for"
What reason did we have to waste a half a trillion dollars in Iraq? The one thing I love about George's war is it makes almost everything else look good by comparison.
Going back to the moon is a little pointless and silly, but just going there and collecting rocks would be better than squandering a half trillion in Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
The problem both China and the U.S. have in going back to the moon is it has absolutely no magic the second time around. The magic was already gone by the time Apollo 12 got there. After Apollo 11 everyone realized the people we were sending weren't doing anything really interesting and the Moon isn't a very interesting place. The only really interesting part about it was it was just really hard and dangerous as Apollo 1 and 13 proved.
I'm guessing maybe Griffin has realized this so I think this little tirade is an attempt to spark a new moon race, using China instead of Russia as the stalking horse. After all the race part was the basis for much of the excitement during Apollo, and really the only reason both the U.S. and the Soviet Union squandered so much money on it.. Its a little transparent but hey....whatever works to keep his funding.
I'm not sure there is even going to be much technology spin off like there was on Apollo. The bad thing about the current plans for return to the moon are they are doing everything almost exactly the same way they did it the first time just with incrementally improved rockets, materials and computers and most of those were developed before Orion not because of it. Maybe there will be some advancements when they start building a station on the Moon, but I have this sinking suspicious that will kind of end up being ISS, the sequel, with dirt. At least they will be able to get out of the tin cans, drive around and pick up rocks.
All in all, if we are going to blow a half trillion dollars, I think I would rather see it go to work on clean, renewable energy, with the method TBD, or maybe a crash campaign to build cars that get 100 MPG or run on clean fuels. I saw recently on the Discovery channel there are companies working on robotics to mass produce composite parts with an eye towards cutting the weight of cars in half which would yield huge fuel savings. Blow a few billion on things like that, it would also have an immediate impact on jobs and the economy where they are built if you can get the costs down.
"You wouldn't want something genetically removed by a forced abortion or immediate imprisonment when it is discovered you have the gene or are about to pass it on."
Homophobia is acute enough in many cultures that if a "gay gene" were discovered I assure you parents would abort a fetus that had it. Its a chronic problem in India that parents are aborting female children, though its against the law, because the parent's have to pay dowries to marry them off. Girls are considered a huge burden while boys are coveted. There is in fact a large number of single men in India who wont marry because the balance in the sexes has been skewed by the practice. If people could test to see if their kids were gay you can be sure some would abort kids that failed the test.
As far a genetic predisposition to crime I would agree its unlikely you would do anything drastic about. But you could easily see a paranoid police state might start "keeping an eye" on them.
I read recently there is an extremely high correlation between lead poisoning and criminal behavior. Lead poisoning apparently causes brain chemistry issues that cause people to act impulsively and without appreciating the consequences of their actions. There are some studies that show a strong correlation between drops in crime rates, and reductions of lead exposure to kids 10-20 years earlier. In particular when lead was banned in paint and when lead was removed as an additive in gasoline. Freakonomics suggested legalizing abortion was why there was a big drop in crime a few year ago. This study suggested it was more likely the introduction of unleaded gasoline. An idea that ties strongly back to the theme of "The Sheep Look Up", the consequences of poisoning our environment in the name of corporate greed.
As proof that Brunner, author of "The Sheep Look Up", "Shockwave Rider" and "Stand on Zanzibar" is in fact psychic or actually has a time machine is this classic quote from The Sheep, which is scary prescient:
"I'm referring specifically to apparently normal children, without obvious physical or mental defects. I'm convinced people are subconsciously aware of what's going on, and becoming alarmed by it. For example, there's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only to look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises"
"Then if every child grows up with this being the "norm" what happens ?"
There are prehistorical documentaries. Look for "V is for Vendetta", "The Sheep Look Up, "Minority Report",
"THX 1138", "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984". When I read or saw all of these for the first time, little did I realize that they were written by people who were actually peering in to the future.
One has to wonder what happens if there is in fact a "gay gene" or a genetic predisposition to crime and disobedience.
The open source "community" doesn't exactly have the best track record developing complex GUI intensive applications. There is Gimp which is OK but not great. Firefox isn't exactly doing much as far as UI goes. KDE and Gnome both have ... issues ... in particular the fact that there are two desktops in the first place fragmenting application development and massively duplicating effort.
There are times when its not exactly bad to have one entity, whether it be a company or an individual, who puts an end to the bickering, makes a decision, sets the direction, imperfect though it may be, and makes everyone pull in the same direction. Linus serves that role for the kernel, SUN does it for Open Office.
Debate is good, expressing different views is good, one entity with poor vision dictating direction is bad. But, a project with a hundred chiefs and no Indians, and design by committee is not a always a prescription for success.
"...it seems like anyone could become a cybercriminal and make billions of dollars."
And the sad thing is it wouldn't exactly be that hard to fix it, or at least lower the risk. If either banks/credit companies or governments instituted a voluntary system to associate digital signatures with social security number, credit cards and bank accounts. If I had a PGP key that only I could authenticate and require it to be authenticated for all transactions involving my social security, credit cards and bank accounts. I would have some defense. With the current system I have none against identity theft. We are basically using 1930's era identification technology in a computer age which is why cybercrime is a booming business.
Hackers could still use key loggers to comprise a keyboard entered password for a digital signature but at least it would be possible to change it once the theft has been detected and fixed.
Funny, unfortunately its not an even remotely valid analogy. Someone elected governor has already cleared an extremely difficult political gauntlet exactly like the one they have to clear to get elected President. Making it to governor means you are vetted by your party, you have the ability to raise money, you can run the political machine necessary to get elected and you are electable at least in the microcosm of one state. People who want to be President are usually going to run for governor, Congress or be be a General just to prove they have the chops, its a logical, almost mandatory progression. The odds of two governors getting elected president back to back is probably more like 1 in 20. No conspiracy.
To get in to Skull and Bones the only gauntlet you've cleared is you got in to Yale, and you are probably the offspring of an affluent and powerful family. It says nothing about your political ability, intellect or anything else. George W. got in and he has shit for brains and was a coked up, drunken no good at the time. His own family didn't think he would amount to anything, they were betting on Jeb. It just shows how broken the American political system is that a spoiled rotten, preppy rich kid and Bonesman,can milk his family name and his rich friends to get elected President.
I should correct something in my previous post, the odds of two Bonesmen running against each other for President isn't anything like 1 in 100,000,000 because a relatively small ruling elite much of it coming out of places like Yale dominates most of the levers of power in this country, and manipulate into voting for the people they put up. They get a disproportionate number in to the centers of power, far more than they deserve, at least 1 to many in the case of George W.. I think Howard Dean went to Yale too so it was a trifecta. I don't think he is a bonesman....which is why he didn't even make the cut....
You could argue that making it through Ivy league schools is a relevant factor in winnowing the field to qualified candidates, but again the fact that George W made it through that gauntlet shows its more about powerful connections and not about having.....a brain.
"Globalization and the rise of third world countries to industrial status as well as the ever growing mixing of populations will slowly but surely unite the world."
Actually if you want to reference China as an example of "the rise of third world countries to industrial status" if the trend continues we are more likely going to exhaust this planets resource really fast and as the resource shortages intensify so is the likelihood of viscous wars over them.
In case you haven't noticed prices of things like oil, copper and most other natural resources are spiking due to huge increases in demand especially from India and China. We could well reach a point we are going to need to start mining asteroids for minerals sooner than later and the He3 on the Moon may well be crucial to our insatiable needs sooner than later. Its no accident that China, India, Japan and Russia with their long view of things are investing in their space programs, China especially. When resource shortages on this planet are already acute is not the time to start trying to develop the infrastructure and basic technology to start exploiting off world resources.
Unfortunately the rise to industrial status currently means consumerism, greed, automobiles, freeways and an unquenchable thirst for power, at the same time that we are doing almost nothing to develop clean, renewable, energy. The solution to powering China's industrial status is massive mining of coal by something resembling slave labor, burning it dirty and inefficient power plants and further poisoning the planet. Studies indicate China has either already passed the U.S. as the world's #1 producer of greenhouse gases or certainly will in the next couple years.
"When the guy asked the skull and crossbones question he'd gone off the deep end into tinfoil hat land."
How so?
Skull and Bones is a tiny fraternity full of powerful and wealthy people, with a bent for secrecy and power. Bush and Kerry ARE both members. What ARE the odds that two Bonesmen would end up running against each other for President of the United States, like 1 in a 100,000,000. His line of reasoning is a bit far fetched but certainly plausible, that Skull and Bones maneuvered two of its members in to the same presidential race so they had a lock on the most powerful political office in the world. Voters were kidding themselves they were choosing the president when it could have been decided by Bonesmen when they manuevered Kerry in to the Democratic nomation.
In particular there did seem to be concerted effort by the power elite to destroy Howard Dean who was a populist candidate the power elite dreaded making it to the White House. In to the void left by Dean stepped the ultimate power elite, establishment candidate, John Kerry, who in the general election was such a horrible candidate that he managed to get Bush reelected. I think there is almost no disputing George W. is one of the worst Presidents the U.S has ever had. It wasn't as obvious in 2004 as it is now, but a lot of people were finally figuring it out. But a lot of people still voted for Bush because Kerry seemed worse. Its mind boggling Bush got reelected and Kerry IS the one to thank for it. The U.S. will be lucky to recover from the devastation 8 years of Bush/Cheney have done to it.
So the guy is suggesting Kerry was a stalking horse of a sort, and was just elevated to the Democratic nomination to insure that Bush won the election. Bush was so bad he almost lost even running against the world's worst candidate in Kerry. Continuing the line of reason the Republicans still had to rig Ohio to win, Kerry knew it was rigged he didn't contest it because the puppetmaster Bonesmen pulling the strings told him not to because George W. was their chosen man of the two, after all he gave them all huge tax cuts and Bonesmen like their money, and he was handing out billions of our tax dollars to all their well connected corporations in a hundred different barrels of port.
Again, far fetched but plausible, and Universities used to be places where you taught people to think out of the box, not places you taser people for mentioning the name of a secret society that would rather not have its name mentioned. Bonesmen DO pull strings, all the time, and have an influence on our world disproportionate to their numbers. When you are pulling strings on the world stage you generally do prefer its done quietly.
I should add Von Braun stuck to their vision through a whole lot of adversity, and events they could never have predicted. Over the course of 40-50 years they made their vision come true. They weren't exactly pure as the driven snow but they were visionaries who made their vision come true when they could have quit a hundred times. They started out working for an unpredictable wacko in Nazi Germany. They had their entire country and all their labs blown out from under them. They and all their work could easily have landed in the hands of Stalin another unpredictable wacko. When they made it to the U.S. they landed in imprisonment and isolation in New Mexico for years. They stuck it out though, and when they got their chance at NASA they still made their dream come true.
I think they are a case study that runs counter to everything you are saying. They couldn't have predicted the course of events or any of the obstacles they were going to endure from 1930 to 1970 but they stayed true to their vision and made it happen anyway.
The death blow to the U.S. space program was the Space Shuttle and ISS so at least half of the problem was a collapse in technological evolution and vision which was Von Braun's department. There was certainly a failure of leadership and motivation too.
A key problem was about the same time as Apollo 11 Vietnam started really going sour and started draining the life out of America and bleeding the economy white which gets back to my original point. We would rather squander money on pointless wars than do something constructive. That is just a simple failure in leadership. The simple solution is to stop electing bad leaders.
"People can make grandiose visions and strive towards them."
As long as you are sure the vision is a sound one, the only way you are going to succeed with it is to avoid all the diversions and overcome the obstacles. You aren't going anywhere with the attitude that you should go with the flow and if some obstacle arises you just quit and do something else.
The visionaries are the people that make things happen in this world, they often fail but the ones that succeed are priceless. The wait and see'ers are the ones that kill you every time.
"In 1957, who could have predicted the next fifty years in space?"
Uh, Von Braun and most of his team back in the 40's when they were working on the V-2. They had plans for follow on generations of rockets to go in to orbit, the moon and Mars, plans they took to NASA and proceeded to build up through Apollo. They had a vision, they made it happen. If you want to be successful in hard things thats what it takes, a sound vision and a lot of hard work to attain it. Burt Ruttan is probably one of the few contemporaries with those qualities. Following your train of thought I don't think anything hard would ever be accomplished.
Don't think Von Braun envisioned the Space Shuttle in the 40's, I'm guessing if you showed him the idea he would have torn it apart, for no other reason than the huge amounts of dead weight you were lifting in to orbit for no particularly good reason. Not sure what he would have thought of ISS.....
Most science fiction writers are a little idealistic and thought we would stop killing each other in mostly pointless wars by now and join forces to fix our planet and move on to new ones. They were wrong. If we'd taken the half a trillion dollars we squandered in Iraq we would be well on our way to Mars, or to developing clean renewable energy sources. Unfortunately we are a deeply flawed species, and the intellectual gift we've been given is usually misguided and misdirected, especially when we elevate people to be our leaders who seem to have little or no intellect at all.