Well it was probably a bad example in specifics since Libertarianism hasn't really ever existed on any large scale so there is no precedent for it. The key point is you would have wealthy and powerful people who could use to their wealth to dominate their society. No they wouldn't have government interference, and politicians pandering to their special interests, but they also wouldn't have any regulating influence, and in that vacuum the people with the money, and no scruples, would aways have the edge and usually win.
So in a Libertarian system how would you do railroads differently or at all. Let two competing interests build two railroads to serve the same markets so there is competition but twice the capital required and twice as much land wasted on right of ways. Why stop at two, how about three or four. Or of course maybe you couldn't build a railroad at all because one or a handful of Libertarian land owners could refuse to grant a critical right of way.
I think what I am saying is we are gravitating to government and social systems at extremes.
We do need government and a state to engage in activities that are for the common good and to check those that seek to take advantage and abuse their fellow citizens. But at the same time the state needs to be ruthlessly held in check to keep it from growing beyond reason and intruding in to the lives of its citizens where it doesn't belong.
Todays Socialist Democrats and Fascist Republicans are building a state that is completely dominating our lives in partnership with their corprate benefactors. The Libertarians would put us in a world without sufficient government to keep a society of hundreds of millions of people functioning properly which is why no one takes them seriously.
Moderation is the key to good government and we have no moderate leaders. We need politicians who abhor passing laws and creating government programs and bureaucracies but who are willing to do just that when there is a real and legitimate need and it is in the public interest. Right now we have professional politicians who live to churn incomprehensible bills that are pandering to one special interest after another but when looked at holistically are giant piles of steaming crap, not sound policy. Today's politicians seem to live to churn out bad legislation that each year costs us more and more money and produce less and less for benefit for the public good.
"The other thing to understand is if American's really wanted fiscal spending, then it would happen."
I am relatively sure the vast majority of American's want their taxes reduced. American's universally hate the IRS and payroll taxes, they just can't do anything about it.
It is probably true they could care less if spending is or isn't cut to pay for their tax cuts, and if the U.S. destructs one day under a massive debt burden. After all American's wrongly think they can use credit cards to make ends meet. But this is the role national leaders and economists are supposed to fill, to insure the U.S. budget and the national economy are on a sound footing, something ALL of today's leaders are failing miserably at because they are both corrupt and incompetent.
I want payroll taxes completely out of my life and would gladly sign a sheet of paper renouncing all future claims to social security, medicare or unemployment insurance to get it. I would give anything to opt out of the Democrat's Socialist agenda. I want to make my own way in the world, and live or die based on my choices and not have a nanny state making my decisions for me. I want money I make in my pocket and not disappearing in to a bureaucracy possibly never to be seen again.
I want nothing to do with funding the American military at its current size, nor with sinking $400 million in insane wars like the one in Iraq, nor do I want to live in an ever expanding police state, nor do I want my tax dollars going to subsidize giant corporations who don't need it and who should sink or swim in free markets on their own merits. I opt out of the Republican agenda too and most Americans probably would as well if they really thought about it today. The Republican rank and file is increasingly sick of the monster the Republican party has turned in to I was in a small minority before the war that saw through the web of lies used to justify it, but since then most Americans have come to their senses and realize it was a war based on lies, and a massive waste of their money and American lives. I'll support a military adequate to defend the U.S. from aggression but that is a small fraction of what we have today.
I think you are wrong, American's do want a return to sane and thoughtful government with fiscal responsibility. The fundamental problem is there is an entrenched two party system which has a stranglehold on the ballot box. Neither party is offering people the government they really want, and both parties are aggressively snuffing out any viable independent or third party to protect their monopoly on power. People hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils but nearly everyone hates it at this point. If there was a viable alternative with savvy, responsible leaders offering fiscal sanity, defense instead of offense, and an end to corruption American's would be there in a heart beat.
The problem is in an $10 trillion dollar economy any party that gains power is very likely to be completely corrupted in a heart beat which is what your post suggested. There also aren't many great people left who would devote their lives to public service without the promise of a big payoff for themselves and their friends.
Well the Libertarian's aren't even close to garnering enough votes to make difference so no they aren't a viable option.
A case could be made that their form of government would be as bad if not worse than what we have. The fatal flaw in Libertarianism is it would let loose the wolves of Capitalism and they would devour the nation and most of its people in a sea of unchecked greed. My image of Libertarianism in practice would the robber baron's of the late 1800's who manipulated markets, ran monopolies and who accumulated vast wealth unchecked except by feuds with each other. For example railroad tycoons who devastated farmers by charging just enough to ship their goods to market that the farmers made nothing or lost money for their hard work.
My guess is Libertarianism would lead to massive imbalances in wealth distribution, a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people living in poverty. Of course the current Fascist leaning system under the Republican's is heading down the same road.
I think this creedo is probably the one that will hold sway in the U.S., U.K. and most of the world in the future:
"In the..... State the individual is not suppressed, but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier is not weakened but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The..... State organizes the nation, but it leaves sufficient scope to individuals; it has limited useless or harmful liberties and has preserved those that are essential. It cannot be the individual who decides in this matter, but only the State."
It really is starting to describe what is happening in the U.S. and the U.K. in particular. If you don't recognize it it is part of Mussolini's Fascist doctrine the word to fill in the blank "......" is the "Fascist" State.
Humorous but the underlying sinister truth is that the Republican party of today isn't a conservative one or one favoring small government. There have always been Republican's who espouse and advocate those principals and settled in to the Republican party only because they only had two choices and the Democrats were an even worse choice than Republicans.
The truth is the only parties which advocate fiscal conservativism tends to be the ones which have no control of the purse strings.
In practice modern Republican's do still want to slash spending on Democratically backed Socialist programs like Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid or anything they perceive as transferring wealth from affluent tax payers to the poor. But at the same time they are just as eager to redirect extravegent sums in to Defense and espionage something which was true of both Bush and Reagan who are the two biggest creators of national debt in U.S. history. And also in to gigantic give aways to corprate benefactors which they've done in a huge way in Medicare D, corporate farm subsidies, their "energy" bill, and massive defense contracting and Iraqi reconstruction bonanzas.
Massive tax cuts coupled with massive defense spending is the Republican strategy for bankrupting the U.S. government and when it heads to bankruptcy because of their policies they will solve the problem by dismantling entitlements and blame it all on them (though Social Security surpluses for example have been helping fund rampant spending elsewhere).
Basically the two political choices Americans have today are:
A. A Democratic party which is Socialist leaning and which will squander big sums on social programs and pork if in power
B. A Republican party that is Fascist leaning and which will squander vast sums on military spending and filling the pockets of the big corporations and wealthy party members who back them and reap windfalls out of the pockets of taxpayers.
There simply is NO viable political option today which advocates slashing the size of the American government and its out of control spending. Its not clear you could stop rampant growth of the U.S. government at this point without economic upheaval. The American economy has become massively dependent on government spending and it keeps the economy afloat at a time when the U.S. economy manufactures or exports next to nothing. Health care spending, and defense spending, much of it paid for with money borrowed from foreigners keeps America's economy.
At this point your two options are to vote Democrat and Socialist or vote Republican and Fascist. There is no libertarian or fiscal conservative option.
Well it would definitely be better, and is in fact ALWAYS better, if there is grid lock in the U.S. political system by having both parties in power in different branches so they can check, balance and investigate each other.
But it is extraordinarily naive to think the Democrats would be any better or different from the Republicans on national security related power grabs and oppression. Both parties are in a desperate contest to out do each other on making American's safe, and stripping their civil liberties in the process, because there is a perception that Americans want to be made "safe" above all else, if such a thing is even possible. Not sure most American's really do want to be made safe other than the media and politicans keep telling them thats what they want and need in the wake of 9/11.
It is a simple fact that when you are in power in a government as powerful as America's there is a natural tendency to grab more power for yourselves, your party and the government you run. There is also a never ending pressure to create an ever more powerful state because it promotes "order" and established powers love "order". "order" is seen as more profitable than freedom, do your own thing anarchy. There was at one time supposed to be conservatives who opposed this big government trend but if there was ever such a movement they have been castrated. In reality they probably really only oppose big government when it interfered with business. They probably love big government if it keeps working people in line and they can land big government contracts.
There wont be a significant reassertion of civil liberties and reigning in of the rising police state in the U.S. and U.K. until something happens that exposes how rampantly out of control the secret apparatus of the police state got and how abusive it was. Now this is an area where Democrats gaining power might help because they might actually investigate all the abuses that have occurred in the last 6 years, versus the blatant Republican white washing, of things like torture, rendition, stripping people of basic due process, domestic spying, DOD propaganda programs, data mining, and who know what else that is still secret.
There are a lot of parallels between now and about 1970. Then it was a fundamentally flawed war in Vietnam and now its Iraq. Nixon and the CIA in particular were massively abusing their power and trampling civil liberties, today the Bush administration and assorted agencies are doing the same. We need something like a Church committee to shine a spotlight on all the abuses so there will be a revulsion at them and a move to reign them in again. The FISA court the Bush administration is now circumventing was put in place largely as a result of massive domestic spying abuses by Nixon and the CIA and later exposed by Democrats.
Hopefully the U.S. will have a anti war and anti police state reaction today like we had in the early 70's. Its unfortunately quite possible we will see no such introspection and we will just plunge further in to a police state and launching of wars of aggression against anyone that doesn't do what we tell them to do.
I think its possible that things have changed in recent years and it is more likely the establishment is now seeking to manipulate elections more heavily than they did in the 70's-90's. It should be noted the Kennedy-Nixon election was manipulated by a rich establishment player, Joe Kennedy, to keep the Nixon out of office.
"But the president themself is more of a pawn in that war than an emblem of it."
I would say they are both a pawn AND an emblem of it. There aren't many politicians in this country that are going to get elected without backing from the established powers. It does happen but the established powers normally seek to prevent it and remedy it when it happens, Jimmy Carter being the best recent example of a President the establishment abhored, and worked really hard to replace with an establishment favorites, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Carter was elected by popular revulsion at establishment corruption in the Nixon administration and it happened against the will of the establishment.
As I recall one tool the establishment used to get rid of Carter was to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis, probably including bribing Iran with arms if they would hold the American embassy hostages until after Carter lost the election, and then release them more or less the day Reagan took office giving his Presidency a HUGE and undeserved boost.
Clinton's election was also an abberation. As you recall it happened in part because a rogue element, Ross Perot, entered the picture and altered the election out of establishment control. Were it not for him George H.W. Bush might have stayed in power and the Clintons would be a footnote in history.
Three cardinal sins by the Clintons that made the establishment hate them were the attempt to socialize healthcare which turned a powerful establishment lobby against them, cutting defense spending which turned the most powerful lobby in the U.S. against them, and not being friendly to big energy for the trifecta. As a result the establishment sought to destroy Clinton's presidency for eight years, with scandal charges and impeachment. They failed but they did manage to severely injure the Democratic party and laid the foundation for 2000.
It is my speculation that in the wake of Carter and Clinton the established powers have probably adopted a more aggressive stance in insuring the outcome they want in presidential, congressional elections including:
- For example, serious and pervasive electoral chicanery in Florida which is the ultimate swing state for more than 8 years.
- Manipulation of the Democratic primaries to, for example, destroy a populist rogue in Dean, and replace him with an incompetent establishment candidate in Kerry so they were insured a win in 2004. Howard Dean smacked in every respect of another Carter to the establishment, he nearly won and the establishment intervened just in the nick of time and shredded him through advertising campaigns and electoral manipulation through the corprate controlled news networks.
The established powers do have a problem though. If your average Joe decides they like some populist candidate the establishmen hates, and they can't brainwash them out of it through the media they are screwed.
The one and only solution is you put in place a voting system that can be manipulated to insure the "correct" outcome. You don't have to manipulate it a lot in an electoral college, you just have to be able to swing a small number of votes in a few key states. You can write off the possibility as conspiracy theory and paranoia, but it is a simple fact that elections have been manipulated for as long as there have been elections. The U.S. is not immune to it. The Kennedy-Nixon election was manipulated, so was Bush-Gore in Florida. Its highly likely it was manipulated again in 2004. Black box electronic voting just make it WAY easier to do and a lot harder to detect.
The establishment, the Bush administration in particular, is constantly singing prai
Re:Queensland Univ is running the HyShot program
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New Jet Engine Tested
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"First application for Mach 7+ won't be passenger travel"
I think its a subject for debate if this will ever be viable for passenger travel. People like to throw that out to get more press, more funding and to deflect attention from the fact this is military research first and foremost, if not really totally. There are more than a few issues using this for commercial travel:
- safety - comfort - economics - scaling
Traveling at those speeds places enormous stresses on the vehicle both from dynamic pressure and temperature and those problems get worse the larger the vehicle is. It will take some enormous advancements to make a relatively large passenger vehicle that is safe and reusable enough to fly on a daily basis, and that will keep the passengers from panicing.
When the Concorde has already been grounded due to economic, environmental and safety issues just imagine this vehicle multiplying all of those problems. The sonic boom problems will be on the same level as Space Shuttle reentry and people would get tired of them on a daily basis if they are over populated areas, confining high speed flights to over ocean.
You would need airports with liquid hydrogen facilities to fuel it, and the challenges of a daily use passenger vehicle using cryo fuels has been barely touched.
True you would get there really fast but the ticket price would probably be out of reach for all but the super rich. Though if fossil fuel prices keep exploding maybe a hydrogen vehicle would be cheaper some day:)
This is in fact military research because various militaries are willing to spend vast sums of our tax dollars to be able to spy on people or deliver bombs anywhere in the world in a couple hours. The U.S. spent billions on nuclear propulsion during the cold war, though it was totally impractical, for the same objective. The military can already deliver bombs with missiles but a bomber is better due to recall and adaptability in flight. They can spy with satellites and drones but a reusable vehicle that can go anywhere without any advance notice and that is high and fast enough to overfly unfriendly countires with missiles with impunity is appealing to the U.S. and U.K air forces. For spying though its open to debate if a less exotic vehicle like Global Hawk with stealth capabilities is just as good if not better, other than it takes somewhat longer to get to the target. Better because its much cheaper and easier to support, maintain and fly.
You make some valid points and I could see some truth in what you say especially if its a private packing an M-16 though...
"there is a lot to be said for insulating decisionmakers from physical danger"... I would part ways with you on this one. If you look at the chicken hawks in the white house this is exactly their problem. Bush lives an extraordinarily insulated existence, he is probably in danger to an extent, but there is an enormous security apparatus insulating him from every danger. He has reached the point he can wave his hand, make a decree and people he dislikes will die or disappear in to a rathole to be tortured for life. Its been widely reported he wanted to bomb the offices of Al Jazeera because he didn't like their reporting on Iraq and him, and Tony Blair had to talk him back to sanity.
It must be an extraordinary power trip and psychologically devastating to have the power to kill others at your whim while you yourself are sitting in a cocoon of safety. I can kill you but you can't touch me.
The U.S. and Israel in particular are establishing a long track record of pilots sitting in relative safety lobbying bombs in to inhabited buildings where they have absolutely no idea who is inside. They suspect they are combatants but often as not, as in today's bombing of an alleged hideout north of Baghdad, there are either some innocent women and children in the building or nothing but innocents because the intelligence was bad, and a pilot at 10,000 ft is going to kill everyone in the building because he was ordered to and he has such distance and isolation from the killing that it doesn't really affect him. You put someone in charge of a robot with a machine gun it is completely open to debate if he will be careful and only attack clear targets, though again he is looking through a soda straw, or he will start playing a first person shooter and gun down everything in sight.
At the outbreak of the Iraq invasion there was a famous attempt to take out Saddam in a bunker. Well the fact is the intelligence and all the remote decision making was completely wrong. There was no bunker there at all, it was just a residential area full of innocents and they were taken out from on high.
The thing I would most like to see today if Bush wants to salvage his credibility on Iraq is for his daughters to sign up for the Army or Marines and volunteer for patrol duty in Iraq like so many other kids are doing today. I wager he would have a whole new outlook on the grievous mistakes he made there if his daughters were in imminent danger of dieing because of it.
I see isolation from danger as an inherently bad thing if you are in the business of killing other people. I suspect it promotes a detachment and willingness to kill more not less.
"While they are harming a human, it's ultimately a human that makes the decision to fire."
True but it is a human being probably some distance away, probably out of harms way and looking through a soda straw. In this respect they are a lot like pilots of tactical aircraft already are and have been for a long while. They are seeing vehicles or people at a distance and making snap judgments on whether they are innocent civilians or legitimate combatants. They make snap decisions, pull a trigger and people a long way away die. Often those who die were legitimate targets, often they were innocents. The real issue here has nothing to do with the laws of robotics and wont until these vehicles have an AI sufficient to operate autonomously something I hope will never happen but probably will.
A better work of fiction for this topic is "Ender's game", engaging in war and killing by remote control. It is a form of warfare that will probably be best practiced by people bordering on children who grew up playing video games. People whose minds are easily shaped and who can easily be trained to be disconnected, passionless killers.
It is a form of killing that is somewhat easier psychologically on soldiers but this may well not be a good thing. It helps create indifference to the consequences of your actions, and leads to a psychology of shooting first and never asking questions later in many people.
In many respect wars were far better affairs when they involved people with swords and spears standing toe to toe and looking in each others eyes as they kill each other.
War through remotely controlled machines is likely to do nothing but glorify and encourage war. When its immediate, bloody, dangerous and horrifying it encourages the people who practice it to work to avoid it whenever possible. It is a problem with all the chicken hawks in the Bush administration, that with the exception of Rumsfeld, that all of them ducked military service and seem to have no concept of its horrors or why its good to avoid it whenever possible. Rumsfeld is I believe an exception since I think he was a Navy fighter pilot but there again he was waging war from a distance using a machine. You wonder if he would have different attitudes to war if he'd packed an M-16 through the jungles of Vietnam and had shot people close up. He probably would have either come to abhor war or developed a greater bloodthirst than he already has.
To put it another way modern technology is making warfare far to clean and remote.
"And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?"
Asimov's "laws" are designed to provoke thought, to engage philosophical and ethical thinking. As others have said here the actual works were intended to make you thinks why these laws which sounded so right at face value they were in fact not always good laws. And to make think not only about how robots would think, but people too.
Unfortunately in this day and age problem no one does care about weighing these ethical, social and philosophical issues but we should. We are seeing many instances where government and corporate entities are making decisions that are, to say the least disturbing, because no thought is given to the deeper issues underlying them.
"all the places you've outsourced production to from nationalizing the production plants to reap the rewards themselves, or the countries currently engaged in "free trade" with you simply realizing that it is in their best interest to quit those deals and protect their domestic production with tariffs, resulting in sharp decrease in your ability to export your products, will result in complete economic chaos in the US, whose economy is heavily in debt to begin with."
This is really not a likely scenario. A more likely one is already happening. Giant corporations are globalizing and they increasingly have no real allegiance to a single nation. Some of them will fail, some will rise, it is distinctly possible many will be owned and run by Chinese and Indians which would be a little worse for the U.S. middle class than if they are run by Americans but not really a lot different. The fact is you need to stop thinking of globalized corporatons as being American, European or Chinese. They are already nearly transnational and going to just get more so.
These globalized corporations are going to completely screw workers who are overpriced in the newly globalized world market and that is where all the economic grief and misery is going to be. They are just going to move exportable jobs to wherever the cheapest, qualified and most subservient work force is. They will sell the goods to wherever there are people who can afford to buy them. At the moment the strategy is to raise a few hundred million Indians and Chinese in to something resembling a new American middle class and sell all the goods to them as America's middle class goes broke.
Governments have tarriffs against U.S. goods already but the WTO is slowly dismantling them. If and when they are gone the U.S. still couldn't export goods to places like China. The fundamental problem is labor in the U.S. is simply priced out of the globalized market. The U.S. simply isn't going to export anything other than things like wheat, cotten and corn where the U.S. has a tangible edge(a large land mass good for growing them, good agricultural techniques and huge subsidies).
The most likely scenario is that there will be a very wealthy, relatively small transnational elite who will have most of the world's wealth and continue to live while. Low skill workers will be homogenized on brutal leveling playing field. Workers now in destitute poverty in Asia will be raised a little, but not a lot. Workers in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan will be completely hammered by plunging wage rates and unemployment while they have to live in countries with an entrenched high cost of living. They are going to be the big losers in the new world regime. When you can harness the billion plus workers in China and India you are certain to have vastly more labor than you can harness with limited world resources. When labor is in surplus the inevitable result is plunging salaries for workers.
If you are a low skill worker nearly your only option is getting a government or service job that can't easily be exported and are the booming sector in the U.S. and hope you die before the U.S. economy collapses and all those jobs disappear too. America's greatest generation grew up in the depths of dispair in the depression, so the silver lining is that maybe economic collapse in the U.S. will form a new generation of Americans that aren't spoiled rotten and fuel a resurgence of the U.S. in 40-50 years.
"Take a look at Iraq. It seems that, if they really want it, the handful of civilians have a reasonable chance."
For a successful guerrilla war you need to have a large number of people who rabidly hate the entity in power, and whom will provide a base for the insurgency, money, food, intelligence and cover. Unfortunately most American's could care less about the evisceration of the their civil liberties, or the incompetence and corruption of their government. They only thing they REALLY hate about their government is the IRS and oppressive taxation. As long as they have a relatively good standard of living though there is absolutely no chance of any organized armed resistance to the U.S. government. There would have to be a serious economic collapse that puts large numbers of people out of work, out of their homes and in to starvation before its likely. Unfortunately this is a distinct possibility in the not so distant future. The incompetence of the Bush administration, staggering current account deficits (budget and trade deficits), and globalization, are laying the foundation for a future economic collapse in the U.S. though many of its globalized corporations would ride it out unharmed. The U.S. simply isn't producing anything the world wants and its economic prosperity is increasingly based on service jobs and accounting tricks. In a lot of ways the U.S. is a giant Enron just waiting for something to break confidence in it and it will crumble.
The insurgency in Iraq has a completely different dynamic. There 20% of the people, Sunni Arabs, who were sitting at the pinnacle of political and economic power, overnight had that power completely erased and transferred to the 60% of the people they've brutally suppressed for decades, who also happen to be a religious sect they view as blasphemers and despise. They were also pushed en masse in to unemployment. Many of these were well trained soldiers and Saddam loyalists. When you take everything a group has overnight and push them in to abject poverty you have what it takes to fuel a revolt.
U.S. military power might be largely impotent if you had 20+% of the U.S population so desperate that they would rather die than live in misery. We aren't at all close to that at this point though. Its rather likely the U.S. is going to see another decade or two of plunging in to Fascism and economic dispair among workers before there is any chance of an armed revolt.
It might have described Churchill but it didn't really describe FDR.
Britain and the U.S. in the 20-30's were in fact pretty Fascist leaning especially in the wealthy and ruling elites. Its a dirty little secret that MANY affluent Americans and American businesses were aggressive investors and supporters of Nazi Germany's economy. George W.'s grandfather Prescott was for a long period the U.S. banker and broker for the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest industrialist dynasties. The Thyssen family was integral in helping the Nazi party gain power, they helped finance them, and united Germany industrialists behind them. Fritz Thyssen wrote a rather boring book about it called "I Paid Hitler". Prescott's Union Banking was seized by the Roosevelt administration for trading with the enemy when war was declared against Germany much to the embarrassment of the Bush family.
Britain's King Edward was almost certainly a Fascist sympathizer and Hitler probably would have reinstated him as his pupper leader if he'd conquered the U.K.
During this era the U.S. and to a lesser extent the U.K. were rascist societies, segregation and antisemitism were very pronounced. In this respect they had a lot in common with Nazi Germany though they won't admit it to themselves.
The U.S., U.K. and Germany were rabidly anti communist and were pretty much on the same page in seeking the downfall of Stalin, the Soviet Union and Communis,. Hitler did at times expect the U.K. and the U.S. to ally with Germany. They didn't presumably because they eventually realized the danger that Germany would dominate the world under Hitler, and the U.S. and U.K. wanted that job and the wealth that flowed from it. Both Hitler and the Allies allied with Stalin when they saw strategic advantage in it but in reality all three nations wanted nothing more than to wipe Communism off the face of the planet.
I would be inclined to say Churchill probably could have been labelled a Fascist were it not for the fact he is famous for having battled the world's most notorious Fascist power. In a lot of ways it was two Fascists duking it out for supremacy.
Now Roosevelt is such a strange duck I'm not sure you could categorize him. I would label him substantially more a Socialist than Fascist though. Like Churchill his political leaning was heavily shaped by the fact he reigned through a depression and a world war. Under the many strains of the Depression there was widespread expectation that the U.S. should have seen a full fledged Fascist revolution. In many respects you can thank FDR and his advisors for staving it off. He did it through a lot of pro worker and socialist programs and not through Fascism. He was pro military and did institute a near police state during World War II but there was an obvious unavoidable necessity for it since the entire world was arming at a furious pace and invading each other. By contrast the wars created under the Bush administration are largely wars of choice, and the staggering sums being spent on the military, and the power being given to it are completely disproportionate to the threats in the world.
" I have a hard time not seeing the governments of Stalin or Mao as anything but fascist."
Well technically they weren't, they were very Socialist and totalitarian and they actively discouraged private ownership of capital as well as religion. They were theoretically pro labor while Fascist regimes are anti labor and pro business. In practice they weren't very pro labor, they were pro party elite which did create a Fascist tinge. Worker centric states have never really come in to existence.
Fascist states are usually Capitalist economies, and very pro plutocracy. The just aren't really free market either because the government heavily intervenes whenever it suits them and in particular when they see the opportunity to enrich party members using the state's power and wealth.
Russia and China didn't really start their race to Fascism until the era of Yelsin or really Putin, and in China in the last 20-30 years when they abandoned state ownership and allowed private ownership of Capital. As is typical in Fascist states party members grabbed the lion's share of the assets and wealth and became rich overnight with government and party backing. Most big Chinese companies are run or have huge stakes owned by favored party members which is a classic sign of a Fascist state.
This free market economy with massive government intervention to benefit party member's wealth is a leading indicator of the fact the U.S. is turning very Fascist as well.
"8. Religion and Government are Intertwined "
I would say this is a pretty simplistic assertion. But Stalin and Mao actively suppressed religion which is an indicator of a Socialist totalitarian state, and usually not a Fascist one. Fascist states tend to use religion as a means for controlling and manipulating people because it works really well, especially when you play a dominant religion against minorities. Religious bigotry and hatred is one of the most powerful forms of bigotry and hatred. Socialist/Communist states just use different means to accomplish the same ends, propaganda and personality cults, jailing people for unorthodox thought and aggressively controlling what people think using non religious tactics but which achieve the same end.
Use of religion to control people isn't really special to Fascism anyway. Religions are designed to control and manipulate people, in large numbers, by their very nature so all sorts social systems exploit them to that end.
China is kind of an anomaly on the Fascism and Religion fronts perhaps due to their rapid stealth transition to Fascism in the last couple decades. They don't really use religion as a tool for controlling people at all. They are using a mix of old and new tools, propaganda and censorship, mixed with greed.
A bottomline is liberal participatory Democracies are in fact a rare and endangered species. Most political systems gravitate to abuse, where the people who acquire power use it and abuse it to enrich and empower themselves. The old axiom of power corrupting is very true. For a government to not land in various forms of totalitarianism they need to be carefully and aggressively structured to minimize the power and wealth of political leaders and then you need a bunch of people to get in to political positions who are idealists who focus on the common good. This is rare indeed. Most people who reach high political positions are there for the power and wealth they can garner for themselves and their affluent friends.
America's founding fathers made a noble effort to structure a government that would be a liberal representative Democracy but it appears they did in fact fail and this is no more evident than it is today.
"The more they sell, the cheaper they are to make."
To an extent, since volume does drive down price but there is a hard wall at which prices are not going to go below on things like display, battery, CPU and RAM. I imagine the touchscreen costs quite a bit more than a simple LCD and keyboard.
What you are looking for is really Negorponte's $100 laptop. If it survives and gets rolling, which is still a big if, I'm sure they can sell it to low income American's not just Africans and Asians. They aren't targeting Americans because even poor rural American's are less in need than the extremely poor, isolated and at risk children in Africa and parts of Asia.
Negroponte designed their machine from the ground up to achieve the lowest cost possible. Microsoft and its partners did not on this. This device is designed for road warriors with a lot of money to burn. I wish them luck, well not really, but has been already belabored here, this thing is hitting an already known bad bad market niche, its too big, too little and too expensive all at the same time. I really hope they hardened the screen so it doesn't get scratched trashed by carrying it around without a cover.
Uncle Bill also wants his cut out of this and that alone pushes the price out of the range you are looking for, which is why Negroponte didn't use Windows on his $100 laptop.
It could also just be a continuation of the status quo at NASA and a sign Griffin is losing the battle to reform NASA. There is a huge, powerful, entrenched bureaucracy at NASA in its manned space program. They spend the lion's share of NASA's budget and have for its entire existence. They are at a cross roads now. They've spent vast sums on two completely failed programs, the Shuttle and the ISS. They need to perpetuate their empire and protect their jobs program. The solution.... they are going to continue to squander money on ISS, Shuttle and the small army that feeds off them, AND they are going to start spending new vast sums on the their next gig at the same time.
If you were trying to right the situation at NASA chances are you would kill Shuttle and ISS outright and turn the ISS over to the Russians. They are already completely responsible for keeping it alive, and probably will continue with a modest budget and goals. If they were free of NASA interference maybe they could make a modest success out of it.
NASA would then be free to cull out all the dead weight in those programs and start a smaller leaner program to develop new launch vehicles that work. After that maybe they could get to the Moon and Mars. If all the money, people and time being squandered trying in vain to make the shuttle and ISS work were put in to a new program it might succeed. As it is Shuttle and ISS will continue to drain resources both from the new manned space program and EVERYTHING else NASA does. If there is a money contest between JPL or other unmanned programs that produce a LOT for very little money, and the manned space program that produces very little for a LOT of money, the manned space program wins every time. It is glamorous, it creates more jobs and as a result has more political support from politicians who want the prestige and the job programs in their district.
The dirty secret about NASA like all bureaucracies is the ones which are most successful and most powerful are the ones which are least efficient and most wasteful because they employ the most people and spend the most money and that translates in to power in bureaucracies. Doing more with less does not.
Its a good strategy for the game developer and for people that want to spend a lot of money for status. Not sure it would be good for people who want to play a fun game.
It kind of sounds like their game is going to be constantly pushing you to spend more on it, the more you spend the more status you have, which is good for the game developer.
Its cool for someone who willing to burn real money for in game status.
It might be cool for a good pirate since you can steal someone else's gold, that is certainly some positive education for kids playing it. Why work if you can just steal from others.
Though of course if you are the repeatedly the victim of a group of skilled and dedicated pirates and you lose all of your gold including all the cash you sunk in it you would probably quit playing fairly quickly.
I think you didn't read my whole post. I pointed out the issue with skill based rewards. Most games do have them to an extent, for example the Priest and Hunter epic quest in WoW have skill based quests you must complete mostly without help and without much time investment if you are good enough to do them.
But, skill based rewards could well turn in to just as big a time sink as farming if the quest is so hard that its extremely difficult to complete successfully. If its really difficult and very few will achieve it, it will be even more frustrating to people than time based farming quests are to you. If its too easy everyone will do it and suddenly the reward will become so common no one will covet having it.
And again, once someone figures out the strategy for it and posts it online, or builds a mod to help with it, or you get all their guildies to help all of sudden it wont take so much skill and again everyone will get the coveted item at which point its not so coveted.
You seem to be looking for something that in reality doesn't exist. You want some uber reward that only you with your uber skills can get, and you can get with little time investment. Meanwhile everyone else without your uber skills will never be able to get it. Some game company should try implementing this on a large scale, but I wager their game will crater because of the difficulty of designing quests that are achievable with skill but not too achievable.
"You've just proven my point. Your arguments stem 100% from opposing religious people (the "religious right" you refer to) "
I didn't prove anything except in your own mind. I just stated the obvious that there is a block of religious fundamentalists, which are widely understood to be right wing, they are conservative Republicans after all, who are leading the opposition to embryonic stem cell research, just as they are leading the drive to outlaw abortion, censor the media, and to curb the rights of homosexuals. If you don't understand this basic dynamic of politics in the U.S. especially since 2000 you are just not paying attention or are clueless.
"As far as cloning goes, even Bill Clinton has spoken against it."
Uh, Bill Clinton is pretty religious though its open to debate how much of it is facade to get elected, the same can be said of George W. I doubt you are going to find many politicians supporting cloning at this point just because its controversial and they are certain to lose more support than they win if they did support it.
When it comes to politicians their stance on issues isn't really based on ethics or religion most of the time anyway. They are crunching numbers on how many people they win versus how many they lose by taking a stand on an issue. If a big block is vehemently enough opposed to something they wont vote for you because of it and you don't want to lose that block you will take their position.
I think you probably will find a lot of opposition to cloning until it happens, and it will inevitably happen. The first person cloned will probably live in a media circus just like Dolly the sheep did, but once the technological hurdles are cleared and you clone humans without serious side effects people will realize cloned people are no different than anyone else. They aren't likely to be any more different from the rest of us than identical twins are. Do you have some "ethical" problem with identical twins? Catholics and other assorted religious fundamentalists will probably oppose it forever. They are entrenched in a man and a wife marrying for life and having babies whenever they have sex and are intolerant of anything else. It is unfortunately a life style that has lead us to the staggering overpopulation this world suffers, because Catholics and the religious right in particular actively obstruct contraception. They are really fond of forcing people to give birth to unwanted children. If you've read Freakonomics there is a strong case that the declining crime rate you see in the U.S. now is correlated to the fact that people could opt for legal abortion in the 1970's. Prior to that there was a much higher birth rate for unwanted children being born in to families that couldn't or didn't want to take proper care of them and those unwanted children disproportionately turned to crime.
"Couldn't the same be said of cloning? The ethics side of embrionic stem cell research is rooted in more than just the conception issue. Look at the big picture."
Well you see I have no issue with cloning either at a fundamental level. The only real ethical issue I can see with it is if its not extremely reliable, which it isn't at present. It would be poor ethics to artificially produce cloned human being with serious defects. If the birth defects are as low or lower than normal reproduction I don't really see why its a problem. If it reaches the point its reliable I have no more problem with a cloned human than I do with identical twins. They are going to grow up in to a different person than the person they were cloned from. The only thing that is the same is the DNA and DNA really isn't anything special. So ethically there is an issue if it results in people who suffer. I'm not sure what the ethical issue is if it results in healthy individuals. Its really not different from other forms of artificial insemination already being practiced.
Cloning would have practical ethical issues if it were used to eliminate genetic diversity, for example cloning one person a million times. At a practical level genetic diversity is good since it leads to resistance to threats like diseases.
Now if you want to take a religious approach chances are you are going to be fundamentally opposed to it no matter what real issues are.
"Again, labelling most groups opposing this research as religious."
Well to solve this dispute you would have to do an in depth study on who does actually oppose it. It is clear most of the opposition in the Bush administration is coming from the religious right so I think the burden of proof is on you not me, to prove there is major opposition to it not coming from religion.
"The problem is that it's not your fault. It's a game-design fault. Why does the game require ridiculous amounts of game time?"
The answer is pretty simple. If its relatively easy to get extravagantly good rewards then everyone would have them and the wouldn't be anything special. Everyone would have them so they would be average not exceptional.
Online games require status symbols, things that are very difficult to get that other players will drool over and wish they had.
Now you can have rewards that require great skill and you can get quickly if you are very good or very lucky. Then you could get uber rewards without much time investment. But.... if they require really great skill chances are you are going to fail repeatedly trying to get them in which case they take forever too and you may NEVER succeed and get them which is frustrating too. Or people are going to find cheats to get them at which point everyone will get them, or guilds will help their players get them even though the player doesn't have the skill.
Its just a fact of life. These games, if they are interesting, are going to have goals that do require a painful amount of time and effort. Some people deem them worthwhile because the reward is so nice and they want something most people don't have. I assure you WoW is way less bad than EQ was in require you to sink huge amounts of time to obtain goals. Everquest was truth in advertising since many quests did take forever.
Another area where WoW is a lot better than EQ in its reward scheme since most good items are soulbound when you use them which precludes a LOT of items from being farmed, and it precludes people from reselling their uber gear to losers for gold when they upgrade. The BOE's and tradeitems are where most of the farming occurs in WoW.
Online games are like the real world. They mostly operate on free markets, with some intrusion from the government/game company. If things can be bought and sold and there is demand then people will and they will profit if they are good at it. It is pretty annoying sometimes when it turn in to blatant profiteering, but it also adds a lot of interest to the game since you do learn to play the market, look for deal and opportunities. It really is part of the experience. Its a reason I play online versus single player games. Single player games get to be extremely predictable and boring once you figure out the AI. Interacting with other people adss massive amounts of depth and interest and the economy is an integral part of that.
In a utopia maybe Socialism would solve all these problems but that is more than a bit naive. When you create massive government social programs that insure everyone a good life, whether they work or not, you create a system in which no one has an incentive to work at all.
Socialism is just too utopian. In practice socialist governments usually end up just as corrupt as the capitalist system they rail again. Just look at Brazil for example. They started out looking like an answer to Capitalist exploitation but once they gained power it corrupted them to the point they are just as bad as the people they replaced.
I'm not sure it is possible to have a political and economic system that really works on the scale it has to work in a world with 6 billion people. They all turn in to systems where one group gains power and uses it to line their own pockets at the expense of those without the power. Its rare indeed for someone to gain significant power and be idealistic and benevolent enough to not abuse and exploit it.
I tend to favor Libertarian, I really want to be left to my own devices and to get back out of life what I put in to it. I don't need 90% of what government does for or to me. I think they should be left to maybe building roads. The key qualification is such a system needs a mechanism to keep the predators from exploiting that freedom at the expense of others. That is the rub, how do you prevent people from exploiting each other and without instituting an intrusive, overly large, excessively powerful government that intrudes in everyone's lives.
I am all for a social safety net to care for those who can't care for themselves but how do you do that without a bunch of freeloaders exploiting it and living off the hard work of others. This in turn drains people of the will to work and take care of themselves because so much of their income is taxed away to support people who are getting a free ride of their hard work. It promotes a system in which nothing gets done.
"Um, hello, which country in the world consumes most of the world's resources?"
So what happens when China and India adopt the same lifestyle. They are buying cars, building freeways and being put in high rise apartments with all the appliances you need to have a comfortable American lifestyle at a breathtaking pace. China is building a new urban city the size of Philadelphia every few months. They are already consuming the lion's share of the worlds cement supply to fuel a massive urban building boom.
The world wont be able to indict the U.S. over this "using the world's resources" much longer. China and India are going to blow by the U.S. in resource consumption up until the world hits severe shortages in oil, concrete, steel etc. China is working hard to lock up long term control of things like oil supplies and they have money to spend to do it. Their attempt to buy Unocal was but one example of this. They have sealed deals with Venezuela for long term oil supplies and Venezuela is a big oil supplier to the U.S. and their government hates the Bush administration with a passion. If China succeeds in their long term strategy, and they do think and plan for the long term like most Fascist regimes, it is likely the West will wake up one day to see extreme shortages in basic resources, the Western lifestyle will crater and the Chinese will be the one's "consuming the world's resources".
"So if the people are there, and they need something to do to pay for food and a roof, where's your beef?"
There is no beef if they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, of if the West lifts them up without destroying their own workers and economies in the process. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. Greedy politicians and businessmen in the West are raising them up, not because of any benevolent desire to see them well fed and housed. They are exploiting them because they work cheap, they are docile because they live in a repressive society in the case of China, and they work in places with next to no pollution controls, no insurance, no safety regulation and no workplace standards. A western worker simply can't complete with them no matter how hard they try unless the clock is turned back to 1900 and they are willing to work in conditions as bad as the Chinese work in today.
Those multinational also want to raise them up in to middle class consumers because they need new markets to grow. Capitalism demands constant growth. As I said previously they aren't stopping to think about the consequences of raising another billion people in to a wasteful American life style. The skyrocketing price of oil is just a hint at what the results will be, the earth will run out of resources.
Bottomline stop pretending like this is about improving the welfare of the world's poor. Its about making a beloved buck, both by Wastern Capitalists and Chinese Fascists, and its about screwing Western workers who've become too expensive and spoiled, and replacing them cheap, easily exploited workers in a repressive dictatorship in China.
" An ethical dilemma exists without it being religious."
Like I said, maybe they are different, but in the case of embryonic stem cells the lion's share of the dilemma is based on religion, and religous obsession with the sanctity of life at conception, not ethics. People who are not obsessed with the sanctity of life at conception, due to religious belief, are VERY unlikely to oppose this research.
"First of all, it's not a con that adult stem cell research has better results. It's true."
Of course, you don't know why that is. Maybe its because embryonic research has been completely hamstrung by all the groups, mostly religious, who have sought to obstruct it. For example in the U.S., for Federally funded institutions, they are forced to work with now relatively ancient stem cell lines that are old and polluted. Did it ever occur to you they might be having poor results because of the "ethical" constraints that have been placed on their research.
"Second, I'll admit that if you admit you're a religous bigot. Why don't you just admit you hate religious people?"
Uh because I don't. The only thing I oppose is the level and extent to which people with a particular religious viewpoint are seeking to inflict their views on the rest of us. Especially if it means, as it MAY, in this case that it is seeking to block medical research that might save people from years of suffering. When it comes to Federal funding of this research if the people who oppose it are in the majority then their opinion should perhaps take precedence, if this is a democracy. But if people who oppose this research are in the minority, which they were in California, then they shouldn't be allowed to obstruct this research.
My main objection is to a vocal minority who uses heavy handed tactics, blackmail, boycotts and threats, to get their way over the will of the rest of us. Unfortunately the vocal minority is obsessed with things like this so they often shout louder and shout down people who want to see embryonic research continue. Most supporters of this research aren't going to resort to bare knuckle brawling to defend their viewpoint so they frequently lose to a vocal and obsessed minority.
"That fact is there are numerous reasons to oppose Prop 71 as both an ethical and taxpayer issue"
Those weren't the issues you raised in your original post so its kind of late to change the subject. You were opposed to embryonic stem cell research on "ethical ground" and because it was supposedly yielding no useful results.
"So if you want less population growth, what's happening in Asia right now is good news, not bad news."
There isn't anything good about whats happening in Asia now unless you are profiting from it. Industrializing 2+ billion people, giving them cars, freeways and modern amenities is going to drain the planet of resources and destroy the environment barring major breakthroughs in things like steel and energy production. Sure maybe as they urbanize they will reproduce less but the gains from lower population growth are "out there" while the turmoil that will come from this massive industrialization of so many people is going to hammer the world in the near term which is all that matters to me.
The U.S. pushed this affluent industrialized life style excess to its limits in the last century with a much smaller population. If India and China do it, which they are, the results are going to be cataclysmic.
As for me being happy about China controlling their population, well its pretty much already too late for my lifetime.
"Don't get too attached to your preconceptions about the power elite and class war. As long as you frame it that way, you're perpetuating the problem, not solving it."
I have no clue what you are trying to say here. This is such a vague statement its not something that can be countered. I suspect you are doing what most people do when the subject of class warfare comes up. Deny it and make out like the person that raised it is a crackpot. It is the beauty of modern class warfare that the ruling elite has managed to con workers to such an extent that workers deny it exists or is happening or they suffer because of it. In effect working people have unilaterally disarmed and the rich are laughing all the way to the bank. They can sucker dumb workers in to voting for people like George W. and his faux Republican friends using wedge issues and fear mongering, and then George W. and friends screw them coming and going economically which at the end of they is the one issue that really matters.
If you want to see understand the Bush administrations attitude towards workers you need to look no further than Elaine Chow, the Labor secretary. Her family are relatively recent emigres from China, and they made their fortune on container shipping from China to the U.S. She is a poster child for making money by outsourcing American jobs to China. She is openly contemptuous of American workers and she is the LABOR SECRETARY.
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Well it was probably a bad example in specifics since Libertarianism hasn't really ever existed on any large scale so there is no precedent for it. The key point is you would have wealthy and powerful people who could use to their wealth to dominate their society. No they wouldn't have government interference, and politicians pandering to their special interests, but they also wouldn't have any regulating influence, and in that vacuum the people with the money, and no scruples, would aways have the edge and usually win.
So in a Libertarian system how would you do railroads differently or at all. Let two competing interests build two railroads to serve the same markets so there is competition but twice the capital required and twice as much land wasted on right of ways. Why stop at two, how about three or four. Or of course maybe you couldn't build a railroad at all because one or a handful of Libertarian land owners could refuse to grant a critical right of way.
I think what I am saying is we are gravitating to government and social systems at extremes.
We do need government and a state to engage in activities that are for the common good and to check those that seek to take advantage and abuse their fellow citizens. But at the same time the state needs to be ruthlessly held in check to keep it from growing beyond reason and intruding in to the lives of its citizens where it doesn't belong.
Todays Socialist Democrats and Fascist Republicans are building a state that is completely dominating our lives in partnership with their corprate benefactors. The Libertarians would put us in a world without sufficient government to keep a society of hundreds of millions of people functioning properly which is why no one takes them seriously.
Moderation is the key to good government and we have no moderate leaders. We need politicians who abhor passing laws and creating government programs and bureaucracies but who are willing to do just that when there is a real and legitimate need and it is in the public interest. Right now we have professional politicians who live to churn incomprehensible bills that are pandering to one special interest after another but when looked at holistically are giant piles of steaming crap, not sound policy. Today's politicians seem to live to churn out bad legislation that each year costs us more and more money and produce less and less for benefit for the public good.
"The other thing to understand is if American's really wanted fiscal spending, then it would happen."
I am relatively sure the vast majority of American's want their taxes reduced. American's universally hate the IRS and payroll taxes, they just can't do anything about it.
It is probably true they could care less if spending is or isn't cut to pay for their tax cuts, and if the U.S. destructs one day under a massive debt burden. After all American's wrongly think they can use credit cards to make ends meet. But this is the role national leaders and economists are supposed to fill, to insure the U.S. budget and the national economy are on a sound footing, something ALL of today's leaders are failing miserably at because they are both corrupt and incompetent.
I want payroll taxes completely out of my life and would gladly sign a sheet of paper renouncing all future claims to social security, medicare or unemployment insurance to get it. I would give anything to opt out of the Democrat's Socialist agenda. I want to make my own way in the world, and live or die based on my choices and not have a nanny state making my decisions for me. I want money I make in my pocket and not disappearing in to a bureaucracy possibly never to be seen again.
I want nothing to do with funding the American military at its current size, nor with sinking $400 million in insane wars like the one in Iraq, nor do I want to live in an ever expanding police state, nor do I want my tax dollars going to subsidize giant corporations who don't need it and who should sink or swim in free markets on their own merits. I opt out of the Republican agenda too and most Americans probably would as well if they really thought about it today. The Republican rank and file is increasingly sick of the monster the Republican party has turned in to I was in a small minority before the war that saw through the web of lies used to justify it, but since then most Americans have come to their senses and realize it was a war based on lies, and a massive waste of their money and American lives. I'll support a military adequate to defend the U.S. from aggression but that is a small fraction of what we have today.
I think you are wrong, American's do want a return to sane and thoughtful government with fiscal responsibility. The fundamental problem is there is an entrenched two party system which has a stranglehold on the ballot box. Neither party is offering people the government they really want, and both parties are aggressively snuffing out any viable independent or third party to protect their monopoly on power. People hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils but nearly everyone hates it at this point. If there was a viable alternative with savvy, responsible leaders offering fiscal sanity, defense instead of offense, and an end to corruption American's would be there in a heart beat.
The problem is in an $10 trillion dollar economy any party that gains power is very likely to be completely corrupted in a heart beat which is what your post suggested. There also aren't many great people left who would devote their lives to public service without the promise of a big payoff for themselves and their friends.
Well the Libertarian's aren't even close to garnering enough votes to make difference so no they aren't a viable option.
..... State the individual is not suppressed, but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier is not weakened but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The ..... State organizes the nation, but it leaves sufficient scope to individuals; it has limited useless or harmful liberties and has preserved those that are essential. It cannot be the individual who decides in this matter, but only the State."
A case could be made that their form of government would be as bad if not worse than what we have. The fatal flaw in Libertarianism is it would let loose the wolves of Capitalism and they would devour the nation and most of its people in a sea of unchecked greed. My image of Libertarianism in practice would the robber baron's of the late 1800's who manipulated markets, ran monopolies and who accumulated vast wealth unchecked except by feuds with each other. For example railroad tycoons who devastated farmers by charging just enough to ship their goods to market that the farmers made nothing or lost money for their hard work.
My guess is Libertarianism would lead to massive imbalances in wealth distribution, a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people living in poverty. Of course the current Fascist leaning system under the Republican's is heading down the same road.
I think this creedo is probably the one that will hold sway in the U.S., U.K. and most of the world in the future:
"In the
It really is starting to describe what is happening in the U.S. and the U.K. in particular. If you don't recognize it it is part of Mussolini's Fascist doctrine the word to fill in the blank "......" is the "Fascist" State.
Humorous but the underlying sinister truth is that the Republican party of today isn't a conservative one or one favoring small government. There have always been Republican's who espouse and advocate those principals and settled in to the Republican party only because they only had two choices and the Democrats were an even worse choice than Republicans.
The truth is the only parties which advocate fiscal conservativism tends to be the ones which have no control of the purse strings.
In practice modern Republican's do still want to slash spending on Democratically backed Socialist programs like Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid or anything they perceive as transferring wealth from affluent tax payers to the poor. But at the same time they are just as eager to redirect extravegent sums in to Defense and espionage something which was true of both Bush and Reagan who are the two biggest creators of national debt in U.S. history. And also in to gigantic give aways to corprate benefactors which they've done in a huge way in Medicare D, corporate farm subsidies, their "energy" bill, and massive defense contracting and Iraqi reconstruction bonanzas.
Massive tax cuts coupled with massive defense spending is the Republican strategy for bankrupting the U.S. government and when it heads to bankruptcy because of their policies they will solve the problem by dismantling entitlements and blame it all on them (though Social Security surpluses for example have been helping fund rampant spending elsewhere).
Basically the two political choices Americans have today are:
A. A Democratic party which is Socialist leaning and which will squander big sums on social programs and pork if in power
B. A Republican party that is Fascist leaning and which will squander vast sums on military spending and filling the pockets of the big corporations and wealthy party members who back them and reap windfalls out of the pockets of taxpayers.
There simply is NO viable political option today which advocates slashing the size of the American government and its out of control spending. Its not clear you could stop rampant growth of the U.S. government at this point without economic upheaval. The American economy has become massively dependent on government spending and it keeps the economy afloat at a time when the U.S. economy manufactures or exports next to nothing. Health care spending, and defense spending, much of it paid for with money borrowed from foreigners keeps America's economy.
At this point your two options are to vote Democrat and Socialist or vote Republican and Fascist. There is no libertarian or fiscal conservative option.
Well it would definitely be better, and is in fact ALWAYS better, if there is grid lock in the U.S. political system by having both parties in power in different branches so they can check, balance and investigate each other.
But it is extraordinarily naive to think the Democrats would be any better or different from the Republicans on national security related power grabs and oppression. Both parties are in a desperate contest to out do each other on making American's safe, and stripping their civil liberties in the process, because there is a perception that Americans want to be made "safe" above all else, if such a thing is even possible. Not sure most American's really do want to be made safe other than the media and politicans keep telling them thats what they want and need in the wake of 9/11.
It is a simple fact that when you are in power in a government as powerful as America's there is a natural tendency to grab more power for yourselves, your party and the government you run. There is also a never ending pressure to create an ever more powerful state because it promotes "order" and established powers love "order". "order" is seen as more profitable than freedom, do your own thing anarchy. There was at one time supposed to be conservatives who opposed this big government trend but if there was ever such a movement they have been castrated. In reality they probably really only oppose big government when it interfered with business. They probably love big government if it keeps working people in line and they can land big government contracts.
There wont be a significant reassertion of civil liberties and reigning in of the rising police state in the U.S. and U.K. until something happens that exposes how rampantly out of control the secret apparatus of the police state got and how abusive it was. Now this is an area where Democrats gaining power might help because they might actually investigate all the abuses that have occurred in the last 6 years, versus the blatant Republican white washing, of things like torture, rendition, stripping people of basic due process, domestic spying, DOD propaganda programs, data mining, and who know what else that is still secret.
There are a lot of parallels between now and about 1970. Then it was a fundamentally flawed war in Vietnam and now its Iraq. Nixon and the CIA in particular were massively abusing their power and trampling civil liberties, today the Bush administration and assorted agencies are doing the same. We need something like a Church committee to shine a spotlight on all the abuses so there will be a revulsion at them and a move to reign them in again. The FISA court the Bush administration is now circumventing was put in place largely as a result of massive domestic spying abuses by Nixon and the CIA and later exposed by Democrats.
Hopefully the U.S. will have a anti war and anti police state reaction today like we had in the early 70's. Its unfortunately quite possible we will see no such introspection and we will just plunge further in to a police state and launching of wars of aggression against anyone that doesn't do what we tell them to do.
I think its possible that things have changed in recent years and it is more likely the establishment is now seeking to manipulate elections more heavily than they did in the 70's-90's. It should be noted the Kennedy-Nixon election was manipulated by a rich establishment player, Joe Kennedy, to keep the Nixon out of office.
"But the president themself is more of a pawn in that war than an emblem of it."
I would say they are both a pawn AND an emblem of it. There aren't many politicians in this country that are going to get elected without backing from the established powers. It does happen but the established powers normally seek to prevent it and remedy it when it happens, Jimmy Carter being the best recent example of a President the establishment abhored, and worked really hard to replace with an establishment favorites, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Carter was elected by popular revulsion at establishment corruption in the Nixon administration and it happened against the will of the establishment.
As I recall one tool the establishment used to get rid of Carter was to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis, probably including bribing Iran with arms if they would hold the American embassy hostages until after Carter lost the election, and then release them more or less the day Reagan took office giving his Presidency a HUGE and undeserved boost.
Clinton's election was also an abberation. As you recall it happened in part because a rogue element, Ross Perot, entered the picture and altered the election out of establishment control. Were it not for him George H.W. Bush might have stayed in power and the Clintons would be a footnote in history.
Three cardinal sins by the Clintons that made the establishment hate them were the attempt to socialize healthcare which turned a powerful establishment lobby against them, cutting defense spending which turned the most powerful lobby in the U.S. against them, and not being friendly to big energy for the trifecta. As a result the establishment sought to destroy Clinton's presidency for eight years, with scandal charges and impeachment. They failed but they did manage to severely injure the Democratic party and laid the foundation for 2000.
It is my speculation that in the wake of Carter and Clinton the established powers have probably adopted a more aggressive stance in insuring the outcome they want in presidential, congressional elections including:
- For example, serious and pervasive electoral chicanery in Florida which is the ultimate swing state for more than 8 years.
- Manipulation of the Democratic primaries to, for example, destroy a populist rogue in Dean, and replace him with an incompetent establishment candidate in Kerry so they were insured a win in 2004. Howard Dean smacked in every respect of another Carter to the establishment, he nearly won and the establishment intervened just in the nick of time and shredded him through advertising campaigns and electoral manipulation through the corprate controlled news networks.
The established powers do have a problem though. If your average Joe decides they like some populist candidate the establishmen hates, and they can't brainwash them out of it through the media they are screwed.
The one and only solution is you put in place a voting system that can be manipulated to insure the "correct" outcome. You don't have to manipulate it a lot in an electoral college, you just have to be able to swing a small number of votes in a few key states. You can write off the possibility as conspiracy theory and paranoia, but it is a simple fact that elections have been manipulated for as long as there have been elections. The U.S. is not immune to it. The Kennedy-Nixon election was manipulated, so was Bush-Gore in Florida. Its highly likely it was manipulated again in 2004. Black box electronic voting just make it WAY easier to do and a lot harder to detect.
The establishment, the Bush administration in particular, is constantly singing prai
"First application for Mach 7+ won't be passenger travel"
:)
I think its a subject for debate if this will ever be viable for passenger travel. People like to throw that out to get more press, more funding and to deflect attention from the fact this is military research first and foremost, if not really totally. There are more than a few issues using this for commercial travel:
- safety
- comfort
- economics
- scaling
Traveling at those speeds places enormous stresses on the vehicle both from dynamic pressure and temperature and those problems get worse the larger the vehicle is. It will take some enormous advancements to make a relatively large passenger vehicle that is safe and reusable enough to fly on a daily basis, and that will keep the passengers from panicing.
When the Concorde has already been grounded due to economic, environmental and safety issues just imagine this vehicle multiplying all of those problems. The sonic boom problems will be on the same level as Space Shuttle reentry and people would get tired of them on a daily basis if they are over populated areas, confining high speed flights to over ocean.
You would need airports with liquid hydrogen facilities to fuel it, and the challenges of a daily use passenger vehicle using cryo fuels has been barely touched.
True you would get there really fast but the ticket price would probably be out of reach for all but the super rich. Though if fossil fuel prices keep exploding maybe a hydrogen vehicle would be cheaper some day
This is in fact military research because various militaries are willing to spend vast sums of our tax dollars to be able to spy on people or deliver bombs anywhere in the world in a couple hours. The U.S. spent billions on nuclear propulsion during the cold war, though it was totally impractical, for the same objective. The military can already deliver bombs with missiles but a bomber is better due to recall and adaptability in flight. They can spy with satellites and drones but a reusable vehicle that can go anywhere without any advance notice and that is high and fast enough to overfly unfriendly countires with missiles with impunity is appealing to the U.S. and U.K air forces. For spying though its open to debate if a less exotic vehicle like Global Hawk with stealth capabilities is just as good if not better, other than it takes somewhat longer to get to the target. Better because its much cheaper and easier to support, maintain and fly.
You make some valid points and I could see some truth in what you say especially if its a private packing an M-16 though...
... I would part ways with you on this one. If you look at the chicken hawks in the white house this is exactly their problem. Bush lives an extraordinarily insulated existence, he is probably in danger to an extent, but there is an enormous security apparatus insulating him from every danger. He has reached the point he can wave his hand, make a decree and people he dislikes will die or disappear in to a rathole to be tortured for life. Its been widely reported he wanted to bomb the offices of Al Jazeera because he didn't like their reporting on Iraq and him, and Tony Blair had to talk him back to sanity.
"there is a lot to be said for insulating decisionmakers from physical danger"
It must be an extraordinary power trip and psychologically devastating to have the power to kill others at your whim while you yourself are sitting in a cocoon of safety. I can kill you but you can't touch me.
The U.S. and Israel in particular are establishing a long track record of pilots sitting in relative safety lobbying bombs in to inhabited buildings where they have absolutely no idea who is inside. They suspect they are combatants but often as not, as in today's bombing of an alleged hideout north of Baghdad, there are either some innocent women and children in the building or nothing but innocents because the intelligence was bad, and a pilot at 10,000 ft is going to kill everyone in the building because he was ordered to and he has such distance and isolation from the killing that it doesn't really affect him. You put someone in charge of a robot with a machine gun it is completely open to debate if he will be careful and only attack clear targets, though again he is looking through a soda straw, or he will start playing a first person shooter and gun down everything in sight.
At the outbreak of the Iraq invasion there was a famous attempt to take out Saddam in a bunker. Well the fact is the intelligence and all the remote decision making was completely wrong. There was no bunker there at all, it was just a residential area full of innocents and they were taken out from on high.
The thing I would most like to see today if Bush wants to salvage his credibility on Iraq is for his daughters to sign up for the Army or Marines and volunteer for patrol duty in Iraq like so many other kids are doing today. I wager he would have a whole new outlook on the grievous mistakes he made there if his daughters were in imminent danger of dieing because of it.
I see isolation from danger as an inherently bad thing if you are in the business of killing other people. I suspect it promotes a detachment and willingness to kill more not less.
"While they are harming a human, it's ultimately a human that makes the decision to fire."
True but it is a human being probably some distance away, probably out of harms way and looking through a soda straw. In this respect they are a lot like pilots of tactical aircraft already are and have been for a long while. They are seeing vehicles or people at a distance and making snap judgments on whether they are innocent civilians or legitimate combatants. They make snap decisions, pull a trigger and people a long way away die. Often those who die were legitimate targets, often they were innocents. The real issue here has nothing to do with the laws of robotics and wont until these vehicles have an AI sufficient to operate autonomously something I hope will never happen but probably will.
A better work of fiction for this topic is "Ender's game", engaging in war and killing by remote control. It is a form of warfare that will probably be best practiced by people bordering on children who grew up playing video games. People whose minds are easily shaped and who can easily be trained to be disconnected, passionless killers.
It is a form of killing that is somewhat easier psychologically on soldiers but this may well not be a good thing. It helps create indifference to the consequences of your actions, and leads to a psychology of shooting first and never asking questions later in many people.
In many respect wars were far better affairs when they involved people with swords and spears standing toe to toe and looking in each others eyes as they kill each other.
War through remotely controlled machines is likely to do nothing but glorify and encourage war. When its immediate, bloody, dangerous and horrifying it encourages the people who practice it to work to avoid it whenever possible. It is a problem with all the chicken hawks in the Bush administration, that with the exception of Rumsfeld, that all of them ducked military service and seem to have no concept of its horrors or why its good to avoid it whenever possible. Rumsfeld is I believe an exception since I think he was a Navy fighter pilot but there again he was waging war from a distance using a machine. You wonder if he would have different attitudes to war if he'd packed an M-16 through the jungles of Vietnam and had shot people close up. He probably would have either come to abhor war or developed a greater bloodthirst than he already has.
To put it another way modern technology is making warfare far to clean and remote.
"And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?"
Asimov's "laws" are designed to provoke thought, to engage philosophical and ethical thinking. As others have said here the actual works were intended to make you thinks why these laws which sounded so right at face value they were in fact not always good laws. And to make think not only about how robots would think, but people too.
Unfortunately in this day and age problem no one does care about weighing these ethical, social and philosophical issues but we should. We are seeing many instances where government and corporate entities are making decisions that are, to say the least disturbing, because no thought is given to the deeper issues underlying them.
"all the places you've outsourced production to from nationalizing the production plants to reap the rewards themselves, or the countries currently engaged in "free trade" with you simply realizing that it is in their best interest to quit those deals and protect their domestic production with tariffs, resulting in sharp decrease in your ability to export your products, will result in complete economic chaos in the US, whose economy is heavily in debt to begin with."
This is really not a likely scenario. A more likely one is already happening. Giant corporations are globalizing and they increasingly have no real allegiance to a single nation. Some of them will fail, some will rise, it is distinctly possible many will be owned and run by Chinese and Indians which would be a little worse for the U.S. middle class than if they are run by Americans but not really a lot different. The fact is you need to stop thinking of globalized corporatons as being American, European or Chinese. They are already nearly transnational and going to just get more so.
These globalized corporations are going to completely screw workers who are overpriced in the newly globalized world market and that is where all the economic grief and misery is going to be. They are just going to move exportable jobs to wherever the cheapest, qualified and most subservient work force is. They will sell the goods to wherever there are people who can afford to buy them. At the moment the strategy is to raise a few hundred million Indians and Chinese in to something resembling a new American middle class and sell all the goods to them as America's middle class goes broke.
Governments have tarriffs against U.S. goods already but the WTO is slowly dismantling them. If and when they are gone the U.S. still couldn't export goods to places like China. The fundamental problem is labor in the U.S. is simply priced out of the globalized market. The U.S. simply isn't going to export anything other than things like wheat, cotten and corn where the U.S. has a tangible edge(a large land mass good for growing them, good agricultural techniques and huge subsidies).
The most likely scenario is that there will be a very wealthy, relatively small transnational elite who will have most of the world's wealth and continue to live while. Low skill workers will be homogenized on brutal leveling playing field. Workers now in destitute poverty in Asia will be raised a little, but not a lot. Workers in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan will be completely hammered by plunging wage rates and unemployment while they have to live in countries with an entrenched high cost of living. They are going to be the big losers in the new world regime. When you can harness the billion plus workers in China and India you are certain to have vastly more labor than you can harness with limited world resources. When labor is in surplus the inevitable result is plunging salaries for workers.
If you are a low skill worker nearly your only option is getting a government or service job that can't easily be exported and are the booming sector in the U.S. and hope you die before the U.S. economy collapses and all those jobs disappear too. America's greatest generation grew up in the depths of dispair in the depression, so the silver lining is that maybe economic collapse in the U.S. will form a new generation of Americans that aren't spoiled rotten and fuel a resurgence of the U.S. in 40-50 years.
"Take a look at Iraq. It seems that, if they really want it, the handful of civilians have a reasonable chance."
For a successful guerrilla war you need to have a large number of people who rabidly hate the entity in power, and whom will provide a base for the insurgency, money, food, intelligence and cover. Unfortunately most American's could care less about the evisceration of the their civil liberties, or the incompetence and corruption of their government. They only thing they REALLY hate about their government is the IRS and oppressive taxation. As long as they have a relatively good standard of living though there is absolutely no chance of any organized armed resistance to the U.S. government. There would have to be a serious economic collapse that puts large numbers of people out of work, out of their homes and in to starvation before its likely. Unfortunately this is a distinct possibility in the not so distant future. The incompetence of the Bush administration, staggering current account deficits (budget and trade deficits), and globalization, are laying the foundation for a future economic collapse in the U.S. though many of its globalized corporations would ride it out unharmed. The U.S. simply isn't producing anything the world wants and its economic prosperity is increasingly based on service jobs and accounting tricks. In a lot of ways the U.S. is a giant Enron just waiting for something to break confidence in it and it will crumble.
The insurgency in Iraq has a completely different dynamic. There 20% of the people, Sunni Arabs, who were sitting at the pinnacle of political and economic power, overnight had that power completely erased and transferred to the 60% of the people they've brutally suppressed for decades, who also happen to be a religious sect they view as blasphemers and despise. They were also pushed en masse in to unemployment. Many of these were well trained soldiers and Saddam loyalists. When you take everything a group has overnight and push them in to abject poverty you have what it takes to fuel a revolt.
U.S. military power might be largely impotent if you had 20+% of the U.S population so desperate that they would rather die than live in misery. We aren't at all close to that at this point though. Its rather likely the U.S. is going to see another decade or two of plunging in to Fascism and economic dispair among workers before there is any chance of an armed revolt.
It might have described Churchill but it didn't really describe FDR.
Britain and the U.S. in the 20-30's were in fact pretty Fascist leaning especially in the wealthy and ruling elites. Its a dirty little secret that MANY affluent Americans and American businesses were aggressive investors and supporters of Nazi Germany's economy. George W.'s grandfather Prescott was for a long period the U.S. banker and broker for the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest industrialist dynasties. The Thyssen family was integral in helping the Nazi party gain power, they helped finance them, and united Germany industrialists behind them. Fritz Thyssen wrote a rather boring book about it called "I Paid Hitler". Prescott's Union Banking was seized by the Roosevelt administration for trading with the enemy when war was declared against Germany much to the embarrassment of the Bush family.
Britain's King Edward was almost certainly a Fascist sympathizer and Hitler probably would have reinstated him as his pupper leader if he'd conquered the U.K.
During this era the U.S. and to a lesser extent the U.K. were rascist societies, segregation and antisemitism were very pronounced. In this respect they had a lot in common with Nazi Germany though they won't admit it to themselves.
The U.S., U.K. and Germany were rabidly anti communist and were pretty much on the same page in seeking the downfall of Stalin, the Soviet Union and Communis,. Hitler did at times expect the U.K. and the U.S. to ally with Germany. They didn't presumably because they eventually realized the danger that Germany would dominate the world under Hitler, and the U.S. and U.K. wanted that job and the wealth that flowed from it. Both Hitler and the Allies allied with Stalin when they saw strategic advantage in it but in reality all three nations wanted nothing more than to wipe Communism off the face of the planet.
I would be inclined to say Churchill probably could have been labelled a Fascist were it not for the fact he is famous for having battled the world's most notorious Fascist power. In a lot of ways it was two Fascists duking it out for supremacy.
Now Roosevelt is such a strange duck I'm not sure you could categorize him. I would label him substantially more a Socialist than Fascist though. Like Churchill his political leaning was heavily shaped by the fact he reigned through a depression and a world war. Under the many strains of the Depression there was widespread expectation that the U.S. should have seen a full fledged Fascist revolution. In many respects you can thank FDR and his advisors for staving it off. He did it through a lot of pro worker and socialist programs and not through Fascism. He was pro military and did institute a near police state during World War II but there was an obvious unavoidable necessity for it since the entire world was arming at a furious pace and invading each other. By contrast the wars created under the Bush administration are largely wars of choice, and the staggering sums being spent on the military, and the power being given to it are completely disproportionate to the threats in the world.
" I have a hard time not seeing the governments of Stalin or Mao as anything but fascist."
Well technically they weren't, they were very Socialist and totalitarian and they actively discouraged private ownership of capital as well as religion. They were theoretically pro labor while Fascist regimes are anti labor and pro business. In practice they weren't very pro labor, they were pro party elite which did create a Fascist tinge. Worker centric states have never really come in to existence.
Fascist states are usually Capitalist economies, and very pro plutocracy. The just aren't really free market either because the government heavily intervenes whenever it suits them and in particular when they see the opportunity to enrich party members using the state's power and wealth.
Russia and China didn't really start their race to Fascism until the era of Yelsin or really Putin, and in China in the last 20-30 years when they abandoned state ownership and allowed private ownership of Capital. As is typical in Fascist states party members grabbed the lion's share of the assets and wealth and became rich overnight with government and party backing. Most big Chinese companies are run or have huge stakes owned by favored party members which is a classic sign of a Fascist state.
This free market economy with massive government intervention to benefit party member's wealth is a leading indicator of the fact the U.S. is turning very Fascist as well.
"8. Religion and Government are Intertwined "
I would say this is a pretty simplistic assertion. But Stalin and Mao actively suppressed religion which is an indicator of a Socialist totalitarian state, and usually not a Fascist one. Fascist states tend to use religion as a means for controlling and manipulating people because it works really well, especially when you play a dominant religion against minorities. Religious bigotry and hatred is one of the most powerful forms of bigotry and hatred. Socialist/Communist states just use different means to accomplish the same ends, propaganda and personality cults, jailing people for unorthodox thought and aggressively controlling what people think using non religious tactics but which achieve the same end.
Use of religion to control people isn't really special to Fascism anyway. Religions are designed to control and manipulate people, in large numbers, by their very nature so all sorts social systems exploit them to that end.
China is kind of an anomaly on the Fascism and Religion fronts perhaps due to their rapid stealth transition to Fascism in the last couple decades. They don't really use religion as a tool for controlling people at all. They are using a mix of old and new tools, propaganda and censorship, mixed with greed.
A bottomline is liberal participatory Democracies are in fact a rare and endangered species. Most political systems gravitate to abuse, where the people who acquire power use it and abuse it to enrich and empower themselves. The old axiom of power corrupting is very true. For a government to not land in various forms of totalitarianism they need to be carefully and aggressively structured to minimize the power and wealth of political leaders and then you need a bunch of people to get in to political positions who are idealists who focus on the common good. This is rare indeed. Most people who reach high political positions are there for the power and wealth they can garner for themselves and their affluent friends.
America's founding fathers made a noble effort to structure a government that would be a liberal representative Democracy but it appears they did in fact fail and this is no more evident than it is today.
"The more they sell, the cheaper they are to make."
To an extent, since volume does drive down price but there is a hard wall at which prices are not going to go below on things like display, battery, CPU and RAM. I imagine the touchscreen costs quite a bit more than a simple LCD and keyboard.
What you are looking for is really Negorponte's $100 laptop. If it survives and gets rolling, which is still a big if, I'm sure they can sell it to low income American's not just Africans and Asians. They aren't targeting Americans because even poor rural American's are less in need than the extremely poor, isolated and at risk children in Africa and parts of Asia.
Negroponte designed their machine from the ground up to achieve the lowest cost possible. Microsoft and its partners did not on this. This device is designed for road warriors with a lot of money to burn. I wish them luck, well not really, but has been already belabored here, this thing is hitting an already known bad bad market niche, its too big, too little and too expensive all at the same time. I really hope they hardened the screen so it doesn't get scratched trashed by carrying it around without a cover.
Uncle Bill also wants his cut out of this and that alone pushes the price out of the range you are looking for, which is why Negroponte didn't use Windows on his $100 laptop.
It could also just be a continuation of the status quo at NASA and a sign Griffin is losing the battle to reform NASA. There is a huge, powerful, entrenched bureaucracy at NASA in its manned space program. They spend the lion's share of NASA's budget and have for its entire existence. They are at a cross roads now. They've spent vast sums on two completely failed programs, the Shuttle and the ISS. They need to perpetuate their empire and protect their jobs program. The solution.... they are going to continue to squander money on ISS, Shuttle and the small army that feeds off them, AND they are going to start spending new vast sums on the their next gig at the same time.
If you were trying to right the situation at NASA chances are you would kill Shuttle and ISS outright and turn the ISS over to the Russians. They are already completely responsible for keeping it alive, and probably will continue with a modest budget and goals. If they were free of NASA interference maybe they could make a modest success out of it.
NASA would then be free to cull out all the dead weight in those programs and start a smaller leaner program to develop new launch vehicles that work. After that maybe they could get to the Moon and Mars. If all the money, people and time being squandered trying in vain to make the shuttle and ISS work were put in to a new program it might succeed. As it is Shuttle and ISS will continue to drain resources both from the new manned space program and EVERYTHING else NASA does. If there is a money contest between JPL or other unmanned programs that produce a LOT for very little money, and the manned space program that produces very little for a LOT of money, the manned space program wins every time. It is glamorous, it creates more jobs and as a result has more political support from politicians who want the prestige and the job programs in their district.
The dirty secret about NASA like all bureaucracies is the ones which are most successful and most powerful are the ones which are least efficient and most wasteful because they employ the most people and spend the most money and that translates in to power in bureaucracies. Doing more with less does not.
Its a good strategy for the game developer and for people that want to spend a lot of money for status. Not sure it would be good for people who want to play a fun game.
It kind of sounds like their game is going to be constantly pushing you to spend more on it, the more you spend the more status you have, which is good for the game developer.
Its cool for someone who willing to burn real money for in game status.
It might be cool for a good pirate since you can steal someone else's gold, that is certainly some positive education for kids playing it. Why work if you can just steal from others.
Though of course if you are the repeatedly the victim of a group of skilled and dedicated pirates and you lose all of your gold including all the cash you sunk in it you would probably quit playing fairly quickly.
I think you didn't read my whole post. I pointed out the issue with skill based rewards. Most games do have them to an extent, for example the Priest and Hunter epic quest in WoW have skill based quests you must complete mostly without help and without much time investment if you are good enough to do them.
But, skill based rewards could well turn in to just as big a time sink as farming if the quest is so hard that its extremely difficult to complete successfully. If its really difficult and very few will achieve it, it will be even more frustrating to people than time based farming quests are to you. If its too easy everyone will do it and suddenly the reward will become so common no one will covet having it.
And again, once someone figures out the strategy for it and posts it online, or builds a mod to help with it, or you get all their guildies to help all of sudden it wont take so much skill and again everyone will get the coveted item at which point its not so coveted.
You seem to be looking for something that in reality doesn't exist. You want some uber reward that only you with your uber skills can get, and you can get with little time investment. Meanwhile everyone else without your uber skills will never be able to get it. Some game company should try implementing this on a large scale, but I wager their game will crater because of the difficulty of designing quests that are achievable with skill but not too achievable.
"You've just proven my point. Your arguments stem 100% from opposing religious people (the "religious right" you refer to) "
I didn't prove anything except in your own mind. I just stated the obvious that there is a block of religious fundamentalists, which are widely understood to be right wing, they are conservative Republicans after all, who are leading the opposition to embryonic stem cell research, just as they are leading the drive to outlaw abortion, censor the media, and to curb the rights of homosexuals. If you don't understand this basic dynamic of politics in the U.S. especially since 2000 you are just not paying attention or are clueless.
"As far as cloning goes, even Bill Clinton has spoken against it."
Uh, Bill Clinton is pretty religious though its open to debate how much of it is facade to get elected, the same can be said of George W. I doubt you are going to find many politicians supporting cloning at this point just because its controversial and they are certain to lose more support than they win if they did support it.
When it comes to politicians their stance on issues isn't really based on ethics or religion most of the time anyway. They are crunching numbers on how many people they win versus how many they lose by taking a stand on an issue. If a big block is vehemently enough opposed to something they wont vote for you because of it and you don't want to lose that block you will take their position.
I think you probably will find a lot of opposition to cloning until it happens, and it will inevitably happen. The first person cloned will probably live in a media circus just like Dolly the sheep did, but once the technological hurdles are cleared and you clone humans without serious side effects people will realize cloned people are no different than anyone else. They aren't likely to be any more different from the rest of us than identical twins are. Do you have some "ethical" problem with identical twins? Catholics and other assorted religious fundamentalists will probably oppose it forever. They are entrenched in a man and a wife marrying for life and having babies whenever they have sex and are intolerant of anything else. It is unfortunately a life style that has lead us to the staggering overpopulation this world suffers, because Catholics and the religious right in particular actively obstruct contraception. They are really fond of forcing people to give birth to unwanted children. If you've read Freakonomics there is a strong case that the declining crime rate you see in the U.S. now is correlated to the fact that people could opt for legal abortion in the 1970's. Prior to that there was a much higher birth rate for unwanted children being born in to families that couldn't or didn't want to take proper care of them and those unwanted children disproportionately turned to crime.
"Couldn't the same be said of cloning? The ethics side of embrionic stem cell research is rooted in more than just the conception issue. Look at the big picture."
Well you see I have no issue with cloning either at a fundamental level. The only real ethical issue I can see with it is if its not extremely reliable, which it isn't at present. It would be poor ethics to artificially produce cloned human being with serious defects. If the birth defects are as low or lower than normal reproduction I don't really see why its a problem. If it reaches the point its reliable I have no more problem with a cloned human than I do with identical twins. They are going to grow up in to a different person than the person they were cloned from. The only thing that is the same is the DNA and DNA really isn't anything special. So ethically there is an issue if it results in people who suffer. I'm not sure what the ethical issue is if it results in healthy individuals. Its really not different from other forms of artificial insemination already being practiced.
Cloning would have practical ethical issues if it were used to eliminate genetic diversity, for example cloning one person a million times. At a practical level genetic diversity is good since it leads to resistance to threats like diseases.
Now if you want to take a religious approach chances are you are going to be fundamentally opposed to it no matter what real issues are.
"Again, labelling most groups opposing this research as religious."
Well to solve this dispute you would have to do an in depth study on who does actually oppose it. It is clear most of the opposition in the Bush administration is coming from the religious right so I think the burden of proof is on you not me, to prove there is major opposition to it not coming from religion.
"The problem is that it's not your fault. It's a game-design fault. Why does the game require ridiculous amounts of game time?"
The answer is pretty simple. If its relatively easy to get extravagantly good rewards then everyone would have them and the wouldn't be anything special. Everyone would have them so they would be average not exceptional.
Online games require status symbols, things that are very difficult to get that other players will drool over and wish they had.
Now you can have rewards that require great skill and you can get quickly if you are very good or very lucky. Then you could get uber rewards without much time investment. But.... if they require really great skill chances are you are going to fail repeatedly trying to get them in which case they take forever too and you may NEVER succeed and get them which is frustrating too. Or people are going to find cheats to get them at which point everyone will get them, or guilds will help their players get them even though the player doesn't have the skill.
Its just a fact of life. These games, if they are interesting, are going to have goals that do require a painful amount of time and effort. Some people deem them worthwhile because the reward is so nice and they want something most people don't have. I assure you WoW is way less bad than EQ was in require you to sink huge amounts of time to obtain goals. Everquest was truth in advertising since many quests did take forever.
Another area where WoW is a lot better than EQ in its reward scheme since most good items are soulbound when you use them which precludes a LOT of items from being farmed, and it precludes people from reselling their uber gear to losers for gold when they upgrade. The BOE's and tradeitems are where most of the farming occurs in WoW.
Online games are like the real world. They mostly operate on free markets, with some intrusion from the government/game company. If things can be bought and sold and there is demand then people will and they will profit if they are good at it. It is pretty annoying sometimes when it turn in to blatant profiteering, but it also adds a lot of interest to the game since you do learn to play the market, look for deal and opportunities. It really is part of the experience. Its a reason I play online versus single player games. Single player games get to be extremely predictable and boring once you figure out the AI. Interacting with other people adss massive amounts of depth and interest and the economy is an integral part of that.
In a utopia maybe Socialism would solve all these problems but that is more than a bit naive. When you create massive government social programs that insure everyone a good life, whether they work or not, you create a system in which no one has an incentive to work at all.
Socialism is just too utopian. In practice socialist governments usually end up just as corrupt as the capitalist system they rail again. Just look at Brazil for example. They started out looking like an answer to Capitalist exploitation but once they gained power it corrupted them to the point they are just as bad as the people they replaced.
I'm not sure it is possible to have a political and economic system that really works on the scale it has to work in a world with 6 billion people. They all turn in to systems where one group gains power and uses it to line their own pockets at the expense of those without the power. Its rare indeed for someone to gain significant power and be idealistic and benevolent enough to not abuse and exploit it.
I tend to favor Libertarian, I really want to be left to my own devices and to get back out of life what I put in to it. I don't need 90% of what government does for or to me. I think they should be left to maybe building roads. The key qualification is such a system needs a mechanism to keep the predators from exploiting that freedom at the expense of others. That is the rub, how do you prevent people from exploiting each other and without instituting an intrusive, overly large, excessively powerful government that intrudes in everyone's lives.
I am all for a social safety net to care for those who can't care for themselves but how do you do that without a bunch of freeloaders exploiting it and living off the hard work of others. This in turn drains people of the will to work and take care of themselves because so much of their income is taxed away to support people who are getting a free ride of their hard work. It promotes a system in which nothing gets done.
"Um, hello, which country in the world consumes most of the world's resources?"
So what happens when China and India adopt the same lifestyle. They are buying cars, building freeways and being put in high rise apartments with all the appliances you need to have a comfortable American lifestyle at a breathtaking pace. China is building a new urban city the size of Philadelphia every few months. They are already consuming the lion's share of the worlds cement supply to fuel a massive urban building boom.
The world wont be able to indict the U.S. over this "using the world's resources" much longer. China and India are going to blow by the U.S. in resource consumption up until the world hits severe shortages in oil, concrete, steel etc. China is working hard to lock up long term control of things like oil supplies and they have money to spend to do it. Their attempt to buy Unocal was but one example of this. They have sealed deals with Venezuela for long term oil supplies and Venezuela is a big oil supplier to the U.S. and their government hates the Bush administration with a passion. If China succeeds in their long term strategy, and they do think and plan for the long term like most Fascist regimes, it is likely the West will wake up one day to see extreme shortages in basic resources, the Western lifestyle will crater and the Chinese will be the one's "consuming the world's resources".
"So if the people are there, and they need something to do to pay for food and a roof, where's your beef?"
There is no beef if they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, of if the West lifts them up without destroying their own workers and economies in the process. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. Greedy politicians and businessmen in the West are raising them up, not because of any benevolent desire to see them well fed and housed. They are exploiting them because they work cheap, they are docile because they live in a repressive society in the case of China, and they work in places with next to no pollution controls, no insurance, no safety regulation and no workplace standards. A western worker simply can't complete with them no matter how hard they try unless the clock is turned back to 1900 and they are willing to work in conditions as bad as the Chinese work in today.
Those multinational also want to raise them up in to middle class consumers because they need new markets to grow. Capitalism demands constant growth. As I said previously they aren't stopping to think about the consequences of raising another billion people in to a wasteful American life style. The skyrocketing price of oil is just a hint at what the results will be, the earth will run out of resources.
Bottomline stop pretending like this is about improving the welfare of the world's poor. Its about making a beloved buck, both by Wastern Capitalists and Chinese Fascists, and its about screwing Western workers who've become too expensive and spoiled, and replacing them cheap, easily exploited workers in a repressive dictatorship in China.
" An ethical dilemma exists without it being religious."
Like I said, maybe they are different, but in the case of embryonic stem cells the lion's share of the dilemma is based on religion, and religous obsession with the sanctity of life at conception, not ethics. People who are not obsessed with the sanctity of life at conception, due to religious belief, are VERY unlikely to oppose this research.
"First of all, it's not a con that adult stem cell research has better results. It's true."
Of course, you don't know why that is. Maybe its because embryonic research has been completely hamstrung by all the groups, mostly religious, who have sought to obstruct it. For example in the U.S., for Federally funded institutions, they are forced to work with now relatively ancient stem cell lines that are old and polluted. Did it ever occur to you they might be having poor results because of the "ethical" constraints that have been placed on their research.
"Second, I'll admit that if you admit you're a religous bigot. Why don't you just admit you hate religious people?"
Uh because I don't. The only thing I oppose is the level and extent to which people with a particular religious viewpoint are seeking to inflict their views on the rest of us. Especially if it means, as it MAY, in this case that it is seeking to block medical research that might save people from years of suffering. When it comes to Federal funding of this research if the people who oppose it are in the majority then their opinion should perhaps take precedence, if this is a democracy. But if people who oppose this research are in the minority, which they were in California, then they shouldn't be allowed to obstruct this research.
My main objection is to a vocal minority who uses heavy handed tactics, blackmail, boycotts and threats, to get their way over the will of the rest of us. Unfortunately the vocal minority is obsessed with things like this so they often shout louder and shout down people who want to see embryonic research continue. Most supporters of this research aren't going to resort to bare knuckle brawling to defend their viewpoint so they frequently lose to a vocal and obsessed minority.
"That fact is there are numerous reasons to oppose Prop 71 as both an ethical and taxpayer issue"
Those weren't the issues you raised in your original post so its kind of late to change the subject. You were opposed to embryonic stem cell research on "ethical ground" and because it was supposedly yielding no useful results.
"So if you want less population growth, what's happening in Asia right now is good news, not bad news."
There isn't anything good about whats happening in Asia now unless you are profiting from it. Industrializing 2+ billion people, giving them cars, freeways and modern amenities is going to drain the planet of resources and destroy the environment barring major breakthroughs in things like steel and energy production. Sure maybe as they urbanize they will reproduce less but the gains from lower population growth are "out there" while the turmoil that will come from this massive industrialization of so many people is going to hammer the world in the near term which is all that matters to me.
The U.S. pushed this affluent industrialized life style excess to its limits in the last century with a much smaller population. If India and China do it, which they are, the results are going to be cataclysmic.
As for me being happy about China controlling their population, well its pretty much already too late for my lifetime.
"Don't get too attached to your preconceptions about the power elite and class war. As long as you frame it that way, you're perpetuating the problem, not solving it."
I have no clue what you are trying to say here. This is such a vague statement its not something that can be countered. I suspect you are doing what most people do when the subject of class warfare comes up. Deny it and make out like the person that raised it is a crackpot. It is the beauty of modern class warfare that the ruling elite has managed to con workers to such an extent that workers deny it exists or is happening or they suffer because of it. In effect working people have unilaterally disarmed and the rich are laughing all the way to the bank. They can sucker dumb workers in to voting for people like George W. and his faux Republican friends using wedge issues and fear mongering, and then George W. and friends screw them coming and going economically which at the end of they is the one issue that really matters.
If you want to see understand the Bush administrations attitude towards workers you need to look no further than Elaine Chow, the Labor secretary. Her family are relatively recent emigres from China, and they made their fortune on container shipping from China to the U.S. She is a poster child for making money by outsourcing American jobs to China. She is openly contemptuous of American workers and she is the LABOR SECRETARY.