Superconducting coil around the equator power by solar panels seems feasible.
Could you somehow use solar wind itself to induce the current that produces the field that repels it? That kind of shield would be very useful for manned spacecraft.
Right, the biggest risk to you to keep filming is that you spend a few nights in jail, hurt your career, hire a lawyer, spend a few days over the next who knows how many months or years in court, etc.
No. What they'll do is take the camera. What are you going to do about it? It's your word against theirs in court, and they're the cop. And this is assuming they're a decent cop, rather than a corrupt one who'll simply shoot you and say they mistook your camera for a gun.
Which opens you up to all kinds of high circumstantial evidence prosecution. Evidence that you may have been involved in a crime coupled with a psychotic behavior in which you put your computer data at severe risk to handle an unexpected seizure?
How do they prove removing the USB drive caused the shutdown? The script is on the computer and thus unvailable with all other data. The USB drive itself can contain any data, giving you a perfectly nonpsychotic reason to keep it attached to your wrist.
About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning. If you think otherwise, I invite you to come to my house, and I will give you a free dinner while you explain "vectors" to my 15 year old daughter.
"15 year old" and "daughter" are abstract concepts. It's not possible to use English, or any language for that matter, without capability for abstract reasoning. So if your daughter can talk, she can reason; whether she wants to is another matter.
Most people simply have no use whatsoever for abstract math, so they won't put in the effort needed to become good or even passable at it. That's all there is to it.
You don't even know what it's being used for, so how can you call it a waste?
It's being used for providing cloud gaming - or somehing similar - services. nVidia GRID is specialized enough technology to pinpoint it, and furthermore, every user gets two SSDs. And waste or not, hosting a personal data center is pretty atypical.
Interesting business model: install the system for no upfront cost and sell the customer the electricity the panels on his roof produce at a rate lower than the local utility to pay the installments.
Well, when all you have to convince people that they should work for you is promises of eternal bliss after death without any kind of proof, you can't really expect nobel prize material to flock to you...
But that's not all fanatics have. It's just local flavoring. What their message is is the same as always before: "All your problems are caused by group X. Join me and take your revenge!"
Such memetic viruses don't strike at stupidity but at lack of self-awareness and -control - in other words, immaturity - and consequently, being smart - even Nobel-smart - doesn't help protect against them. In fact, should the infection take hold, all that intelligence will simply be used to construct elaborate rationalizations of the fanaticism's guise which make it even more virulent.
Fanaticism is a memetic disease. If you have lots of angry young people, you get outbreaks, just like with flu. And sooner or later one of these outbreaks mutates into a form that can cause an epidemic, or perhaps even a pandemic. In the 30's, we got fascism which eventually mutated into nazism; in the middle of the century we got small outbreaks of red terrorism, but thankfully general prosperity made the population too resistant for transmission to continue except in much-diluted form; and right now we're seeing an epidemic which is parasiting on Islam. Islam itself isn't the problem, it simply provides a new outer form - like robes for a ringwraith - for the same force that was behind Hitler and has now returned for round n+1. But the heart of this darkness is the same as it has always been.
The question is: what to do about all this? Is this some kind of inevitable function of human biology or merely an artifact from our cultural past? Would it be possible to rid the world of suhc maladjusted memes once and for all, or perhaps develop memes that work as antidotes - for example, surely knowing all this helps notice when someone's trying to pull the trick on you? As noted above, greater general prosperity would help a lot, but is not foolproof, is already being worked on, and perhaps most importantly, current iteration of the fanaticism pandemic seems to be evolving to get around it - bin Laden came from a very privileged background, and many people who have lived their entire lives in the West have gone to join Isis.
Of course, he was writing to kings, most of whom had an interest in keeping their country runnning for mutiple generations.
Except they didn't. Kings of old didn't give a shit about what happened to their countries after they died. Why would they had? They were divinely appointed to their office, so whatever happened as a result of said appointment wasn't really their problem. Peasant's starving because the king sold all of nation's wheat to fund a war waged for his ego? God's will.
And of course this is still the case with the modern aristocrats. Shut down the only factory in a city and kicked all the workers to the roadside? No problem, the Invisible Hand will sort the worthy from the undeserving. A homeless guy asks for money? Hell no, he's suffering penance for his sins - if he had some marketable skills or connections he'd be sleeping in a mansion. Roads crumbling from lack of repair? Invisible Hand must be getting ready to release a flying car. The planet getting warmer? No worries, the Invisible Hand will surely save such devoted servants! And figure out some way to kick that homeless man some more in the process for being economically worthless.
There comes a point of no return, when the damage already inflicted makes it impossible to rise funds to stop more from occurring. The question is, can this pathological secularized religion be removed from power before the damn cult dooms the entire country, and possibly whole West?
Our country's finances have always been the fault of the congress and its creature, the Federal Reserve.
No. The fault lies with voters who want both low taxes for themselves and a high developmental level for their country. Infrastructure, whether social or physical, is expensive; if you don't pay it with taxes you'll end up paying in some other way, such as through ever-growing debt and its consequences, whatever those will eventually turn out to be.
Stealing/theft is a word with multiple meanings. This is one of them.
Theft is a word with a single meaning which various business interests like to use in cases which don't involve it to set up an appeal to emotion. Such attempts should be resisted, not excused.
It's an example and all, but as developer born and raised in Detroit (the city proper) and a current resident of the city, is it necessary to kick the place even more?
Losers need to be made look bad at every opportunity, otherwise the winners might start wondering just what kind of society lets such things happen to innocent people. I mean, they might even suggest government should help pull them up from the ditch, and that's blashphemy against the Invisible Hand and the Church of Free Market.
Don't take it personally, it's not really Anonymous Coward speaking, but the voices - internalized memetic structures - in their head fighting for survival and territory.
Men are constantly portrayed in both advertising and entertainment as buffoons and simpletons when they are anywhere near the kitchen, the kids, or the laundry.
Men having to do women's work is pretty funny, yes. But at least even this poor bastard doesn't have enough experience to be good at it. So he just fell into the metaphorical open sewer manhole rather than having to actually live in one.
Everyone laughs when a man is kicked in the balls by a woman in a TV show/commercial. Where's the fake outrage about that violent sexisim in the name of humour?
Here in Finland we have a long tradition of military farces. It's because we live right next to (Soviet) Russia, so Finnish military is pretty bloody obviously vital for the country's continued existence, and valued accordingly. So why does such a society tolerate - and even support - subversions of it? Because they aren't subversions. Those military farces are actually subverting the scenario they show - that military is full of incompetent buffoons - by presenting it as ridiculous.
The "ballkicks as comedy" scenario is sexists, and propaganda besides, just armored in such a way as to give plausable deniability and deflect criticism. They're like a joke where the punchline is that a Jew doesn't want to eat Christian babies, or a black man doesn't want to rape white women, or a US cop lets that black man live: not funny, unless you have specific prejudices, which in turn get reinforced by watching their inverse being represented as the world being out of whack.
None of this is (necessarily) intentional on the writer's part. They're simply writing what the cultural "programs" they have acquired from their surroundings suggest. And programs that suggest actions that spread themselves become endemic, which is usually a good thing since it allows humans to predict each other's actions, but can also be a huge problem when one such program happens to be akin to a malevolent virus, like sexism and racism are. Not much can be done about them but to produce and release counter-memes which hopefully block the spread of such viruses but will of course also have other effects on their own, at least on the current developmental level of psychology.
The paper in on how the female experience is not the same as the male experience. It's less. Thus it makes sense to suggest an actual female researcher contribute to the effort.
Either your conclusions follow from your data with reasonable certainty, or they don't. A lack of female researcher might limit the scope of your conclusions - that is, you're missing something you could had reasonably concluded from the data - but it cannot invalidate an otherwise valid conclusion, unless your entire study was fatally flawed from the start, in which case adding one wouldn't help either.
And that third reviewer.. good lord what a tool. I'm not even sure i/want/ to read his review because you can't context any non offensive meaning out of that snippet.
How about the obvious: he's too lazy to analyze the conclusions of the paper based on evidence presented and just wants to rubber-stamp it?
Sounds an awful lot like that other "soft science", Economics.
The key difference between psychology and economics is that there's money in getting psychology correct (because it'll help you sell crap), while there's money in "proving" whatever economical hypothesis benefits the current elite.
Liars study psychology and practice economics.
Some researchers are finally getting away from the 'revealed wisdom' of Friedman and company, and hopefully Chicago School Economics will soon end up in the dust bin of history with phrenology and vital humors.
It doesn't really matter. Some other excuse for why the rich getting richer and the poor poorer is really in the best interests of those poor will take its place. And people will eat it right up, since it also excuses their dreams of getting rich themselves and lording it over the rest, who don't deserve it. And it doesn't help that Cold War mixed economics with nationalism to the point where people actually developed religious attachments to particular economical positions.
After all, phrenology might be in the dustbin of history, but the cause it served - dividing people into winners and losers so the former might be kept too busy oppressing the latter to start thinking for themselves rather than just doing what they're told - is still alive, as it has been for most of recorded history. It's like a memetic parasite living on noosphere and feeding on humanity generation after generation. Our future depends on killing it before advancing technology makes even losers able to destroy the world.
How many times would you have to get punched in the face before you started taking it out on them?
And if I did, I'd be taking out the predations of some punch-happy psycho on innocent people because I was too scared to confront the real culprit. That might make me a fine citizen for such bastions of greatness as North Korea or East Germany, but in the West, it just makes me a collaborator - a traitor to myself, my country, and humanity.
It's one thing to be a coward, it's another to internalize a lie and start actively serving it. At that point you've basically joined a cult, and all your perceptions get twisted by being filtered through its dogma; and because of such induced insanity, joining a cult sometimes ends very, very badly. As we have seen numerous times in the recent past.
A "lean" OS an OS where you easily add/enable just the pieces you want/need, not one that comes with everything and the kitchen sink preinstalled and enabled "just in case somebody needs it".
First implies the second. It can hardly get easier than installing drivers for everything under the Sun and letting unused ones lie waiting for their device to be connected.
The rest of the world is going faster, developing software for uses that you couldn't ever anticipate, on hardware that's not typical, and that's possbile only if your OS is a simple and reliable building block that scales well up and down and doesn't get in the way of doing unusual things.
Right, so how does software use this hardware? Either directly (we tried that; it was a bad idea), through proprietary interfaces (Glide, CUDA) or through standard interfaces (OpenGL, OpenCL). The last is best for end users but requires actively promoting these standard interfaces. So packaging their common bits into the OS makes perfect sense.
The basic failing of your argument is that you want an OS that doesn't make any tradeoffs at all, one that's perfectly tailorable to every possible use case. But in the real world, you make programs for specific use cases, and an OS is ultimately just a program. It too is designed with the needs of some small group of archetypical users in mind; the bigger and more varied this group, the less customized it is to anyone in particular.
TL;DR If every bit is precious to you, you'll just have to make your own custom OS with a hex editor.
But the thing is, an efficient department might not be in the manager's best interests. How do you show constant improvement if everything is already at 100%? Either push people beyond 100% - and accept that this will lead to everyone who can leaving and the rest spending all their time and effort looking busy and covering their ass - or make pointless changes to make yourself seem good.
It's easy to be a good manager, but almost impossible to be a good and ambitious one. First requires letting people do their jobs in peace, the second making changes. So if the boss cares about their career, whatever they're leading will usually be a complete mess, because they'll tinker with it to show off their skillz to their higher-ups, consequences be damned.
It's amazing your average corporation gets anything at all done, considering all the internal strife and associated disorganized chaos.
The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"
Not having to worry about my Steam downloads interfering my family's streaming video and still leaving enough room for comfortable web browsing and a torrent or two? All the while a computer is making a cloud backup?
Excess resources is what allows for growth, you know.
It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections.
A city upgrading to Gbps service makes countryside seem backwards in comparison, increasing the chances that local public services win their legal battle against entrenched private interests and are allowed to increase speeds.
Watching from the outside, it sure seems so. I wonder why, though? It couldn't possibly be because the country refused to give up racism when offered the carrot of a dream, so now it gets the stick of fire and brimstone, now could it?
Humanity seems utterly unable to learn tgat injustices are weaknesses that lead to destruction yet the universe seems just as unable to stop hammering the lesson home. Unmovable object of human stubborn evil meets the unstoppable force of obvious consequences. We haven't met any aliens because they're addicted to, mesmerized by and terrified of the epic farce that's human history. Assuming they're even alive anymore - not helping when able inserts them right back into the same pattern, after all, most likely by opening old scars.
We should really make ethics a branch of national defence, since most problems and threats originate from someone racking up bad karma in the name of short-term benefit.
But, unlike Greece, nobody is willing to give Argentina a bail out.
Nobody is willing to bail out Greece, either. What's being done in eurozone is transferring risk from private investors to taxpayers. Who, for some odd reason, seem to be turning against EU and its "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" economic ideology.
"Genius sells and idiot buys", like Helsingin Sanomat once said about modern art.
So if I go on vacation and someone moves into my house while I was gone, it's just "too bad, you weren't using it, just wait for them to leave and you can take it back?"
What ever made you think it's different? Not nature; leave a nest unguarded and some other critter claims it. "Property" is a social construct. If it becomes a tool for tyranny - if a few hoard everything and claim "property" as an excuse to enslave the rest - then it's on its way to the wastebasket of history.
Not that property is likely to last anyway. If 3D printers and other microproduction fulfils its promise, they'll finish what the industrial revolution started. Then what would be the point of hoarding, when you can instantiate any physical object you need, and let it be dissolved/recycled again when you no longer do?
Mind you, that was just frustration talking... because seriously, what is anyone going to do about this?
Stop believing in imaginary entities such as Disney, thus leaving all their "property" free for taking. For that matter, stop believing in imaginary chains of ownership altogether; if someone's not personally using some resource, it doesn't belong to him, no matter any paper says.
Capitalism is just a secularized religion. It's gods, and the divinely ordained order they live in, are no more immune to final sanction than any others that have guided civilizations in ages past. Invisible Hand either gets its shit together or smashes into the Ragnarock of reality, just like Historical Inevitability did in the USSR. Past accomplishments don't excuse continued lousy performance forever, for men or their gods.
You are confusing businesses with corporations. Not all businesses have shareholders and act in a sociopathic manner.
I'm not confusing anything, I'm simply focusing on corporations specifically.
Everyone seems to hate corporations, but bring up the idea of banning them in favor of a natural system (ie no government imposed "corporate veil" limiting the liability of the owners/shareholders) where the owners are actually responsible for the actions of their employees, and everyone goes crazy.
Without corporate veil you aren't going to get microprocessors, since those cost billions to develop and set up manufacturing for. You aren't going to get medicine either, for the same reason. Modern society can't function without Big Business, and Big Business can't exist without corporate veil. Problem isn't corporations in themselves, it's the social expectations and legal judgements guiding those corporations.
It's the "profit is all that matters" creed that has to go. But that's not going to be an easy battle, since Cold War left West with a religious attachment to an extreme form of capitalism. That secular religion needs to be either reformed or replaced. But of course the first hurdle is precisely that most people don't really consider it a religion - a social construct - but objective reality, thus effectively blinding them to any alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you somehow use solar wind itself to induce the current that produces the field that repels it? That kind of shield would be very useful for manned spacecraft.
No. What they'll do is take the camera. What are you going to do about it? It's your word against theirs in court, and they're the cop. And this is assuming they're a decent cop, rather than a corrupt one who'll simply shoot you and say they mistook your camera for a gun.
How do they prove removing the USB drive caused the shutdown? The script is on the computer and thus unvailable with all other data. The USB drive itself can contain any data, giving you a perfectly nonpsychotic reason to keep it attached to your wrist.
"15 year old" and "daughter" are abstract concepts. It's not possible to use English, or any language for that matter, without capability for abstract reasoning. So if your daughter can talk, she can reason; whether she wants to is another matter.
Most people simply have no use whatsoever for abstract math, so they won't put in the effort needed to become good or even passable at it. That's all there is to it.
So... Lasers&Lensflares ?-)
It's being used for providing cloud gaming - or somehing similar - services. nVidia GRID is specialized enough technology to pinpoint it, and furthermore, every user gets two SSDs. And waste or not, hosting a personal data center is pretty atypical.
Interesting business model: install the system for no upfront cost and sell the customer the electricity the panels on his roof produce at a rate lower than the local utility to pay the installments.
But that's not all fanatics have. It's just local flavoring. What their message is is the same as always before: "All your problems are caused by group X. Join me and take your revenge!"
Such memetic viruses don't strike at stupidity but at lack of self-awareness and -control - in other words, immaturity - and consequently, being smart - even Nobel-smart - doesn't help protect against them. In fact, should the infection take hold, all that intelligence will simply be used to construct elaborate rationalizations of the fanaticism's guise which make it even more virulent.
Fanaticism is a memetic disease. If you have lots of angry young people, you get outbreaks, just like with flu. And sooner or later one of these outbreaks mutates into a form that can cause an epidemic, or perhaps even a pandemic. In the 30's, we got fascism which eventually mutated into nazism; in the middle of the century we got small outbreaks of red terrorism, but thankfully general prosperity made the population too resistant for transmission to continue except in much-diluted form; and right now we're seeing an epidemic which is parasiting on Islam. Islam itself isn't the problem, it simply provides a new outer form - like robes for a ringwraith - for the same force that was behind Hitler and has now returned for round n+1. But the heart of this darkness is the same as it has always been.
The question is: what to do about all this? Is this some kind of inevitable function of human biology or merely an artifact from our cultural past? Would it be possible to rid the world of suhc maladjusted memes once and for all, or perhaps develop memes that work as antidotes - for example, surely knowing all this helps notice when someone's trying to pull the trick on you? As noted above, greater general prosperity would help a lot, but is not foolproof, is already being worked on, and perhaps most importantly, current iteration of the fanaticism pandemic seems to be evolving to get around it - bin Laden came from a very privileged background, and many people who have lived their entire lives in the West have gone to join Isis.
Except they didn't. Kings of old didn't give a shit about what happened to their countries after they died. Why would they had? They were divinely appointed to their office, so whatever happened as a result of said appointment wasn't really their problem. Peasant's starving because the king sold all of nation's wheat to fund a war waged for his ego? God's will.
And of course this is still the case with the modern aristocrats. Shut down the only factory in a city and kicked all the workers to the roadside? No problem, the Invisible Hand will sort the worthy from the undeserving. A homeless guy asks for money? Hell no, he's suffering penance for his sins - if he had some marketable skills or connections he'd be sleeping in a mansion. Roads crumbling from lack of repair? Invisible Hand must be getting ready to release a flying car. The planet getting warmer? No worries, the Invisible Hand will surely save such devoted servants! And figure out some way to kick that homeless man some more in the process for being economically worthless.
There comes a point of no return, when the damage already inflicted makes it impossible to rise funds to stop more from occurring. The question is, can this pathological secularized religion be removed from power before the damn cult dooms the entire country, and possibly whole West?
No. The fault lies with voters who want both low taxes for themselves and a high developmental level for their country. Infrastructure, whether social or physical, is expensive; if you don't pay it with taxes you'll end up paying in some other way, such as through ever-growing debt and its consequences, whatever those will eventually turn out to be.
Theft is a word with a single meaning which various business interests like to use in cases which don't involve it to set up an appeal to emotion. Such attempts should be resisted, not excused.
Losers need to be made look bad at every opportunity, otherwise the winners might start wondering just what kind of society lets such things happen to innocent people. I mean, they might even suggest government should help pull them up from the ditch, and that's blashphemy against the Invisible Hand and the Church of Free Market.
Don't take it personally, it's not really Anonymous Coward speaking, but the voices - internalized memetic structures - in their head fighting for survival and territory.
Men having to do women's work is pretty funny, yes. But at least even this poor bastard doesn't have enough experience to be good at it. So he just fell into the metaphorical open sewer manhole rather than having to actually live in one.
Here in Finland we have a long tradition of military farces. It's because we live right next to (Soviet) Russia, so Finnish military is pretty bloody obviously vital for the country's continued existence, and valued accordingly. So why does such a society tolerate - and even support - subversions of it? Because they aren't subversions. Those military farces are actually subverting the scenario they show - that military is full of incompetent buffoons - by presenting it as ridiculous.
The "ballkicks as comedy" scenario is sexists, and propaganda besides, just armored in such a way as to give plausable deniability and deflect criticism. They're like a joke where the punchline is that a Jew doesn't want to eat Christian babies, or a black man doesn't want to rape white women, or a US cop lets that black man live: not funny, unless you have specific prejudices, which in turn get reinforced by watching their inverse being represented as the world being out of whack.
None of this is (necessarily) intentional on the writer's part. They're simply writing what the cultural "programs" they have acquired from their surroundings suggest. And programs that suggest actions that spread themselves become endemic, which is usually a good thing since it allows humans to predict each other's actions, but can also be a huge problem when one such program happens to be akin to a malevolent virus, like sexism and racism are. Not much can be done about them but to produce and release counter-memes which hopefully block the spread of such viruses but will of course also have other effects on their own, at least on the current developmental level of psychology.
Either your conclusions follow from your data with reasonable certainty, or they don't. A lack of female researcher might limit the scope of your conclusions - that is, you're missing something you could had reasonably concluded from the data - but it cannot invalidate an otherwise valid conclusion, unless your entire study was fatally flawed from the start, in which case adding one wouldn't help either.
How about the obvious: he's too lazy to analyze the conclusions of the paper based on evidence presented and just wants to rubber-stamp it?
The key difference between psychology and economics is that there's money in getting psychology correct (because it'll help you sell crap), while there's money in "proving" whatever economical hypothesis benefits the current elite.
Liars study psychology and practice economics.
It doesn't really matter. Some other excuse for why the rich getting richer and the poor poorer is really in the best interests of those poor will take its place. And people will eat it right up, since it also excuses their dreams of getting rich themselves and lording it over the rest, who don't deserve it. And it doesn't help that Cold War mixed economics with nationalism to the point where people actually developed religious attachments to particular economical positions.
After all, phrenology might be in the dustbin of history, but the cause it served - dividing people into winners and losers so the former might be kept too busy oppressing the latter to start thinking for themselves rather than just doing what they're told - is still alive, as it has been for most of recorded history. It's like a memetic parasite living on noosphere and feeding on humanity generation after generation. Our future depends on killing it before advancing technology makes even losers able to destroy the world.
And if I did, I'd be taking out the predations of some punch-happy psycho on innocent people because I was too scared to confront the real culprit. That might make me a fine citizen for such bastions of greatness as North Korea or East Germany, but in the West, it just makes me a collaborator - a traitor to myself, my country, and humanity.
It's one thing to be a coward, it's another to internalize a lie and start actively serving it. At that point you've basically joined a cult, and all your perceptions get twisted by being filtered through its dogma; and because of such induced insanity, joining a cult sometimes ends very, very badly. As we have seen numerous times in the recent past.
First implies the second. It can hardly get easier than installing drivers for everything under the Sun and letting unused ones lie waiting for their device to be connected.
Right, so how does software use this hardware? Either directly (we tried that; it was a bad idea), through proprietary interfaces (Glide, CUDA) or through standard interfaces (OpenGL, OpenCL). The last is best for end users but requires actively promoting these standard interfaces. So packaging their common bits into the OS makes perfect sense.
The basic failing of your argument is that you want an OS that doesn't make any tradeoffs at all, one that's perfectly tailorable to every possible use case. But in the real world, you make programs for specific use cases, and an OS is ultimately just a program. It too is designed with the needs of some small group of archetypical users in mind; the bigger and more varied this group, the less customized it is to anyone in particular.
TL;DR If every bit is precious to you, you'll just have to make your own custom OS with a hex editor.
But the thing is, an efficient department might not be in the manager's best interests. How do you show constant improvement if everything is already at 100%? Either push people beyond 100% - and accept that this will lead to everyone who can leaving and the rest spending all their time and effort looking busy and covering their ass - or make pointless changes to make yourself seem good.
It's easy to be a good manager, but almost impossible to be a good and ambitious one. First requires letting people do their jobs in peace, the second making changes. So if the boss cares about their career, whatever they're leading will usually be a complete mess, because they'll tinker with it to show off their skillz to their higher-ups, consequences be damned.
It's amazing your average corporation gets anything at all done, considering all the internal strife and associated disorganized chaos.
Not having to worry about my Steam downloads interfering my family's streaming video and still leaving enough room for comfortable web browsing and a torrent or two? All the while a computer is making a cloud backup?
Excess resources is what allows for growth, you know.
A city upgrading to Gbps service makes countryside seem backwards in comparison, increasing the chances that local public services win their legal battle against entrenched private interests and are allowed to increase speeds.
Watching from the outside, it sure seems so. I wonder why, though? It couldn't possibly be because the country refused to give up racism when offered the carrot of a dream, so now it gets the stick of fire and brimstone, now could it?
Humanity seems utterly unable to learn tgat injustices are weaknesses that lead to destruction yet the universe seems just as unable to stop hammering the lesson home. Unmovable object of human stubborn evil meets the unstoppable force of obvious consequences. We haven't met any aliens because they're addicted to, mesmerized by and terrified of the epic farce that's human history. Assuming they're even alive anymore - not helping when able inserts them right back into the same pattern, after all, most likely by opening old scars.
We should really make ethics a branch of national defence, since most problems and threats originate from someone racking up bad karma in the name of short-term benefit.
Nobody is willing to bail out Greece, either. What's being done in eurozone is transferring risk from private investors to taxpayers. Who, for some odd reason, seem to be turning against EU and its "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" economic ideology.
"Genius sells and idiot buys", like Helsingin Sanomat once said about modern art.
What ever made you think it's different? Not nature; leave a nest unguarded and some other critter claims it. "Property" is a social construct. If it becomes a tool for tyranny - if a few hoard everything and claim "property" as an excuse to enslave the rest - then it's on its way to the wastebasket of history.
Not that property is likely to last anyway. If 3D printers and other microproduction fulfils its promise, they'll finish what the industrial revolution started. Then what would be the point of hoarding, when you can instantiate any physical object you need, and let it be dissolved/recycled again when you no longer do?
Stop believing in imaginary entities such as Disney, thus leaving all their "property" free for taking. For that matter, stop believing in imaginary chains of ownership altogether; if someone's not personally using some resource, it doesn't belong to him, no matter any paper says.
Capitalism is just a secularized religion. It's gods, and the divinely ordained order they live in, are no more immune to final sanction than any others that have guided civilizations in ages past. Invisible Hand either gets its shit together or smashes into the Ragnarock of reality, just like Historical Inevitability did in the USSR. Past accomplishments don't excuse continued lousy performance forever, for men or their gods.
I'm not confusing anything, I'm simply focusing on corporations specifically.
Without corporate veil you aren't going to get microprocessors, since those cost billions to develop and set up manufacturing for. You aren't going to get medicine either, for the same reason. Modern society can't function without Big Business, and Big Business can't exist without corporate veil. Problem isn't corporations in themselves, it's the social expectations and legal judgements guiding those corporations.
It's the "profit is all that matters" creed that has to go. But that's not going to be an easy battle, since Cold War left West with a religious attachment to an extreme form of capitalism. That secular religion needs to be either reformed or replaced. But of course the first hurdle is precisely that most people don't really consider it a religion - a social construct - but objective reality, thus effectively blinding them to any alternative.
Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?