Libertarians are those wackos who are so far to the left that they fall of the map. Or so far to the right. It's hard to tell. They have this nutty notion that if they want to smoke dope in their gay polyamorous collective while shooting guns and drinking unpasturized milk during their worship of the sun-god - well, they should be left alone to their own devices.
No, those are neo-pagans. Libertarians are those wackos who claim that having to label pasteurized and unpasteurized milk as such is government oppression. It's a cult too, but it replaces orgies with whining about taxes. Should the two groups overlap, they're those creeps who launch into a rant about robbery whenever someone suggests they should pay their share of the rent and other expenses.
Kind of a "if you aren't free to make stupid choices, then you have no freedom" sort of ideal.
You are free to make stupid choices. You aren't free to enjoy all the fruits of civilization yet refuse to pull your weight when it comes time to maintain them. Whether libertarians do so because they're simply using their ideology as an excuse to be selfish twats, or because they honestly don't comprehend that roads, public order, property law etc. are not the natural state of things but require constant effort to maintain, I don't know; but whatever the reason is, the one thing that stays consistent from libertarian to libertarian is claiming that paying taxes is equivalent to being robbed.
I find it interesting how some people will completely ignore legitimate complaints and good ideas merely because there's a slight, even imaginary whiff of some ideology they happen to disagree with.
Not "some people", but almost everyone in the US, does so. If it's not Libertarianism (Fascism) it's Socialism (Stalinism). And Obama, as we all know, is an Atheist Muslim Nazi Communist with a fake birth certificate, and the Antichrist besides, working to dismantle the US for the sake of Hydra in their cover as United Nations.
The problem is, this bullshit has been repeated so much that even the people who made up these absurd lies are starting to believe them, so your political process is outright delusional at every level. That the results are less than stellar should be a surprise to no one. But of course that just makes everyone dig deeper into their fantasy world of choice.
Oh well, at least it results in some hilarious political propaganda.
If, on the other hand, every state's Air National Guard had the option of spending their portion of their military budget as they saw fit (to give an example), at least there would be multiple customers potentially for this airplane and be assured that they could sell at least a few of them.
And the end result would be a logistical nightmare. Fighter planes aren't self-contained, they require an infrastructure to maintain, refuel and rearm them. Aircraft carriers - and even military bases - have limited space available for personnel and supplies, so it very quickly devolves into total chaos. And of course this is assuming that individual states even attempt to provide meaningful military contribution, rather than using their portion as a handout to their local corporations and hoping the other states will pick up the slack.
Free market is an economic optimization algorithm, nothing less, nothing more. One has to enforce constraints ("credible defence", "100% employment at living wage", etc) to get results that satisfy them.
That and the fact that the government collects that money by force, while the corporation has to give you enough value to make you voluntarily trade money for their product.
Government needs to give you enough bang for your buck to get re-elected. Also, countries compete with one another, and less effective ones disappear into history. But that doesn't fit Libertarian narrative, so it gets ignored.
Then again, no description of government fits Libertarian narrative, because it requires an organization that's simultaneously an ultra-effective oppressor and utterly incompetent at any task.
Slightly different incentive structure there.
Just as you'd expect from organizations pursuing different goals.
The goal of a company executive is to stay in power and make money while they're at it. The goal of a goverment is the success of their country.
If you want to criticize government, do so honestly. Comparing the goals of an organization to those of an individual in another organization is transparently deceptive, and won't convince anyone.
As to slavery, thievery, murder all of those concepts are government concepts first and foremost and in a free market economy people don't need governments to deal with any of it, private courts and private security is enough to deal with aberrations.
So you'd be happy to let your grievances be settled by a judge who's being paid by your opponent? And any resulting decisions enforced by private enforcers who are likewise in their payroll?
Or did you simply figure you'll only go to court against people poorer than you?
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
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The geek imagination rarely extends beyond fan fiction.
This is true of all people. Even original characters are simply embodiments of pre-existing archetypes. A truly new character or story would be incomprehensible, since you couldn't relate to it.
That said, while Sturgeon's Law is in effect for fan fiction as well, so is it's reverse: good fan fiction is good literature, and has an added advantage of being able to draw from pre-existing mythos, often with considerable re-interpretation. And of course Cthulhu mythos shows its tentacled head everywhere.
The geek tends to forget
You know, arguments based on pretending a huge group of people are really a single person rarely make sense.
The geek tends to forget that patents and copyrights are meant to be an incentive to create something of your own, something new and something better. It's telling, I think, that the only two video game themed movies that are arguably worth a damn, Tron and Wreak-It-Ralph, both came from Disney.
What should it tell us, exactly speaking? That once you've filmed - or re-filmed - all the stories other people came up with, you can afford to try something else? Especially since Disney can always keep on milking Mickey Mouse, which is the whole reason eternal copyright exists in the first place.
I've got 16GB of RAM, there's no point to waste but there's nothing to be gained by hiding in a 1GB corner. If it makes life easier for developers to pull in a 10MB library than write a 100kB function, do it.
Especially since linking to a 10MB library isn't going to pull it all in, it's going to demand-load only the parts you need, and into shared memory at that. So multiple applications using the standard 10MB library is likely to actually end up consuming less memory than each developer making their own routine in hand-optimized assembler. It might even be faster, since it's more likely to be in a cache.
All of which leads to the fact that messing with low-level details is usually not worth it, so most programmers aren't really familiar with them, so they're unlikely to get any benefits even when significant ones might theoretically be had.
Of course that's in geological timescales so it does not matter.
Astronomical, actually. It takes millions of years for continental drift to change the face of the Earth, while Sun requires a hundred times that much to change significantly.
As for oil we have been using it for over a century by now and it seems we haven't ran out of it yet.
The price of oil has risen a lot recently, and there's talk and even practical attempts to tap unconventional sources, which are far more expensive to extract than conventional oil wells. From basic laws of economics we can conclude that this means the conventional sources are running out, or at least unable to increase production to keep up with demand.
He sees a lot of egotism at work, too, but he says if you're setting out to change the world, you're probably going to need a big ego to do it.
I wonder if big ego is a reason or an unfortunate side effect. After all, what you absolutely do need to change the world is the ability to keep going in the face of hardship, which is just another way of saying you need to be able to ignore negative feedback - and that'll make it harder to fix any personality flaws you have, too.
You could imagine a Dyson sphere that is vastly larger than a solar system -- like, a hundred AU across, or so--that would radiate waste heat in millimeter wave, or even something vastly larger than that that would radiate in microwave.
Except that according to Wikipedia the cosmic microwave background peaks at around a millimeter, so the super-sized Dyson sphere would absorb more than it radiates. Also, we need to remember that a diameter 50 AU Dyson sphere won't get any more energy than a 2 AU one, it'll simply get it in a more dispersed - and thus less useful - form.
He submitted a picture of the Dalai Lama with the text 'His Holiness the Dalai Lama,' but the Austrian post office refused to produce these stamps. Stampnews and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (autotranslation) reported that this had been due to pressure from the Chinese embassy in Vienna.
And this is why we should refuse to do any business with dictatorships. Not only do we help fund the oppression of the Chinese by their government, but that oppression also spreads like a disease and infects our countries as well. And all for the sake of corporate profits, yet even those who reap them ultimately risk reaping Chinese-style political trials and subsequent executions as well.
You want risk free? Lock yourself in a padded room and make sure to eat nothing but what you get through a feeding tube to make sure you don't choke.
LASIK is an option. Wearing glasses or contacts is another option. Both come with drawbacks - such as risks - and benefits. A rational decision is based on balancing these against each other. Having the option for corrective surgery be risk-free would be very much preferable, since it would increase its expected utility and thus make it the best option in more cases, as well as increasing the total expected utility of the entire situation.
I wonder what is giving birth to posts like yours. Is it some weird cultural meme, or are increasing numbers of Slashdotters simply hitting middle-age crises and overcompensating?
They didn't live in peace, all humans fight and they are no different.
Gypsies? I can't recall any wars with Gypsies-vs-someone else.
In any case, most human beings never fight seriously in their lives. Nations do, but even that's getting less frequent as the overall world system gets more organized. So it could very well be that the age of wars was just a historical anomaly that's on its way out through natural selection - after all, resources spent on an army are resources that can't be spent on scientific research or infrastructure, and as Putin is currently learning, empire building is a venue of high risks and questionable gains.
Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out future is all sunshine and rainbow-farting unicorns because fascist militant dystopias simply can't compete against decadent liberal bleeding-heart hippie democracies on raw efficiency?
Storing energy as heat when you have plans to use it as anything other than heat does not work
Unless it's in the form of heat in the first place. In that case it makes perfect sense to put a heat battery between the source (Sun) and converter (steam turbine).
If you want to store a lot of electrical energy, currently the best way to do it is maglev flywheels in evacuated containers. They have extremely low loss, they are relatively simple and inexpensive to construct using well-known construction methods, and they have in fact amazingly high efficiency during power transfer.
They'll also release all their stored energy near-instantly in the case of mechanical failure. Even if you get advance warning, you can't bring them offline without first draining the energy. And that means you can't bring them anywhere near consumers, since they're basically bombs waiting to go off at the slightest provocation.
While the cost of solar PV is expected to continue to fall, the cost of solar thermal is not. It is basically just a bunch of pipes and mirrors, so there really isn't much to improve.
Actually, there's a lot of room for improvement. For example, as manufacturing methods improve, there's the possibility of using microstructures rather than large parabolic mirrors to concentrate light, in effect building thermal panels.
Solar thermal has the advantage that the hot molten salt can be stored, and used to generate steam at night, thus providing round-the-clock baseload power. But this is not a practical benefit, since the price of electricity almost everywhere is highest during the day when the sun is shining.
Except that producing reliable baseload power is exactly the problem that's keeping renewables at bay. As long as they can't do that, they'll have little effect beyond unstabilizing the power grid.
When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories are during those summer vacations! Why the heck should we take that away from our future generations?
Indoctrination. Society is getting more hierarchical as income gap increases and economic and political power is incrasingly unbound by law. Tyranny is fundamentally incompatible with happy, healthy, confident people, it requires broken shells. And not giving you a large chunk of unsupervised time is an essential part of producing those, since as the days pass the stress might fade to the point where you engage in self-reflection. And that's something a society of masters and servants really can't afford.
A sick system can't let people step outside, least they look back and notice the sickness.
It doesn't matter if you follow them by taking a vacation or by studying subject B, you're going to forget subject A anyway as soon as the exams are done.
If you don't come out as a result of your education better able to compete with your fellow man, then that education failed you.
Competition is zero-sum: if you give every competitor the same advantage, it benefits none of them. That's why thinking public education in terms of competitiveness is kinda pointless, so it should have other priorities. What those might be is the question.
This is all ignoring the fact that the way things are going, if you work for a living you've already lost in life, and things will only continue to get worse as wealth flows to the top. So it might be best to just teach kids how to be happy with bare subsistence living, since that's their most likely fate anyway. So schools should focus on Lucid Dreaming 101 and Advanced Daydreaming.
That teaching degrees are bullshit is fully demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of college professors who've never taken a day of courses meant to create teachers.
No, because it's a completely different matter to teach an adult who wants to learn and force-feed information to a child who knows full well it's mostly irrelevant filler that'll never make any difference in his life whatsoever. And that's assuming the subject is relatively free of obvious propaganda, like mathematics.
It's not about who is dispensable or not, companies do not exist to hire people, they exist to make products / provide services that allow the owners to make money, that's the purpose of a company.
People start companies to institutionalize some set of goals, typically including making money. Society supports this, for example by acknowledging the existence of a company as a legal entity, because of the side effects, such as employment. Other tie-in groups have their own reasons to either support or oppose a company, which will naturally affect its ability to meet its goals. So yes, companies absolutely exist to employ people, and should expect to face official and unofficial penalties if they ignore that duty.
One might even argue that the entire concept of "business" is the art of giving other people opportunities to further their goals by furthering yours.
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all, and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
Success is always due to genius leadership, while failure is always someone else's fault, eh? Or more generally: profits are private but losses are public.
The problem in the US and elsewhere is that we let companies grow to the point where their failure would cause a cascade failure in economy, hence they are "too big to fail" and thus outside the normal regulation systems of capitalism. Also, even if a company does go down in flames, the leadership sails away with their golden parachutes, to direct other companies to their doom, and it's only the powerless rank and file who suffer due to no fault of their own.
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Putting the implied mass murder and ironclad tyranny aside for a moment, it's impossible to live in perpetual balance with nature, since nature is not static. Nor did low world population prevent Smallpox or the Black Death from appearing; indeed, diseases like Ebola typically emerge in regions that are less developed and thus "closer to nature", according to this kind of hippy bullshit.
Be not a cancer on the earth â" Leave room for nature â" Leave room for nature.
And that's another thing. We, like every dominant species before us, are part of nature. Yes, our emergence is causing a massive upheaval, where some species lose and some win big time, but that's just business as usual. This whole "humanity is cancer" meme is simply arrogant drivel.
There is, however, one difference between us and the previous dominant species: since we're capable of sapient thought, with us in charge life has a chance to survive the looming specter of Sun's death.
Slashdot Mirror
No, those are neo-pagans. Libertarians are those wackos who claim that having to label pasteurized and unpasteurized milk as such is government oppression. It's a cult too, but it replaces orgies with whining about taxes. Should the two groups overlap, they're those creeps who launch into a rant about robbery whenever someone suggests they should pay their share of the rent and other expenses.
You are free to make stupid choices. You aren't free to enjoy all the fruits of civilization yet refuse to pull your weight when it comes time to maintain them. Whether libertarians do so because they're simply using their ideology as an excuse to be selfish twats, or because they honestly don't comprehend that roads, public order, property law etc. are not the natural state of things but require constant effort to maintain, I don't know; but whatever the reason is, the one thing that stays consistent from libertarian to libertarian is claiming that paying taxes is equivalent to being robbed.
Not "some people", but almost everyone in the US, does so. If it's not Libertarianism (Fascism) it's Socialism (Stalinism). And Obama, as we all know, is an Atheist Muslim Nazi Communist with a fake birth certificate, and the Antichrist besides, working to dismantle the US for the sake of Hydra in their cover as United Nations.
The problem is, this bullshit has been repeated so much that even the people who made up these absurd lies are starting to believe them, so your political process is outright delusional at every level. That the results are less than stellar should be a surprise to no one. But of course that just makes everyone dig deeper into their fantasy world of choice.
Oh well, at least it results in some hilarious political propaganda.
And the end result would be a logistical nightmare. Fighter planes aren't self-contained, they require an infrastructure to maintain, refuel and rearm them. Aircraft carriers - and even military bases - have limited space available for personnel and supplies, so it very quickly devolves into total chaos. And of course this is assuming that individual states even attempt to provide meaningful military contribution, rather than using their portion as a handout to their local corporations and hoping the other states will pick up the slack.
Free market is an economic optimization algorithm, nothing less, nothing more. One has to enforce constraints ("credible defence", "100% employment at living wage", etc) to get results that satisfy them.
Government needs to give you enough bang for your buck to get re-elected. Also, countries compete with one another, and less effective ones disappear into history. But that doesn't fit Libertarian narrative, so it gets ignored.
Then again, no description of government fits Libertarian narrative, because it requires an organization that's simultaneously an ultra-effective oppressor and utterly incompetent at any task.
Just as you'd expect from organizations pursuing different goals.
The goal of a company executive is to stay in power and make money while they're at it. The goal of a goverment is the success of their country.
If you want to criticize government, do so honestly. Comparing the goals of an organization to those of an individual in another organization is transparently deceptive, and won't convince anyone.
So you'd be happy to let your grievances be settled by a judge who's being paid by your opponent? And any resulting decisions enforced by private enforcers who are likewise in their payroll?
Or did you simply figure you'll only go to court against people poorer than you?
This is true of all people. Even original characters are simply embodiments of pre-existing archetypes. A truly new character or story would be incomprehensible, since you couldn't relate to it.
That said, while Sturgeon's Law is in effect for fan fiction as well, so is it's reverse: good fan fiction is good literature, and has an added advantage of being able to draw from pre-existing mythos, often with considerable re-interpretation. And of course Cthulhu mythos shows its tentacled head everywhere.
You know, arguments based on pretending a huge group of people are really a single person rarely make sense.
What should it tell us, exactly speaking? That once you've filmed - or re-filmed - all the stories other people came up with, you can afford to try something else? Especially since Disney can always keep on milking Mickey Mouse, which is the whole reason eternal copyright exists in the first place.
Or do you simply work for them?
Because it's already infinite.
Many (most?) AAA games use C++ to build a specialized runtime and the actual game logic is implemented with scripts running on it.
Especially since linking to a 10MB library isn't going to pull it all in, it's going to demand-load only the parts you need, and into shared memory at that. So multiple applications using the standard 10MB library is likely to actually end up consuming less memory than each developer making their own routine in hand-optimized assembler. It might even be faster, since it's more likely to be in a cache.
All of which leads to the fact that messing with low-level details is usually not worth it, so most programmers aren't really familiar with them, so they're unlikely to get any benefits even when significant ones might theoretically be had.
Astronomical, actually. It takes millions of years for continental drift to change the face of the Earth, while Sun requires a hundred times that much to change significantly.
The price of oil has risen a lot recently, and there's talk and even practical attempts to tap unconventional sources, which are far more expensive to extract than conventional oil wells. From basic laws of economics we can conclude that this means the conventional sources are running out, or at least unable to increase production to keep up with demand.
I wonder if big ego is a reason or an unfortunate side effect. After all, what you absolutely do need to change the world is the ability to keep going in the face of hardship, which is just another way of saying you need to be able to ignore negative feedback - and that'll make it harder to fix any personality flaws you have, too.
Have you actually kept statistics to back that assertion, or is it just a gut feeling ?-)
Except that according to Wikipedia the cosmic microwave background peaks at around a millimeter, so the super-sized Dyson sphere would absorb more than it radiates. Also, we need to remember that a diameter 50 AU Dyson sphere won't get any more energy than a 2 AU one, it'll simply get it in a more dispersed - and thus less useful - form.
And this is why we should refuse to do any business with dictatorships. Not only do we help fund the oppression of the Chinese by their government, but that oppression also spreads like a disease and infects our countries as well. And all for the sake of corporate profits, yet even those who reap them ultimately risk reaping Chinese-style political trials and subsequent executions as well.
LASIK is an option. Wearing glasses or contacts is another option. Both come with drawbacks - such as risks - and benefits. A rational decision is based on balancing these against each other. Having the option for corrective surgery be risk-free would be very much preferable, since it would increase its expected utility and thus make it the best option in more cases, as well as increasing the total expected utility of the entire situation.
I wonder what is giving birth to posts like yours. Is it some weird cultural meme, or are increasing numbers of Slashdotters simply hitting middle-age crises and overcompensating?
Gypsies? I can't recall any wars with Gypsies-vs-someone else.
In any case, most human beings never fight seriously in their lives. Nations do, but even that's getting less frequent as the overall world system gets more organized. So it could very well be that the age of wars was just a historical anomaly that's on its way out through natural selection - after all, resources spent on an army are resources that can't be spent on scientific research or infrastructure, and as Putin is currently learning, empire building is a venue of high risks and questionable gains.
Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out future is all sunshine and rainbow-farting unicorns because fascist militant dystopias simply can't compete against decadent liberal bleeding-heart hippie democracies on raw efficiency?
Unless it's in the form of heat in the first place. In that case it makes perfect sense to put a heat battery between the source (Sun) and converter (steam turbine).
They'll also release all their stored energy near-instantly in the case of mechanical failure. Even if you get advance warning, you can't bring them offline without first draining the energy. And that means you can't bring them anywhere near consumers, since they're basically bombs waiting to go off at the slightest provocation.
Actually, there's a lot of room for improvement. For example, as manufacturing methods improve, there's the possibility of using microstructures rather than large parabolic mirrors to concentrate light, in effect building thermal panels.
Except that producing reliable baseload power is exactly the problem that's keeping renewables at bay. As long as they can't do that, they'll have little effect beyond unstabilizing the power grid.
Indoctrination. Society is getting more hierarchical as income gap increases and economic and political power is incrasingly unbound by law. Tyranny is fundamentally incompatible with happy, healthy, confident people, it requires broken shells. And not giving you a large chunk of unsupervised time is an essential part of producing those, since as the days pass the stress might fade to the point where you engage in self-reflection. And that's something a society of masters and servants really can't afford.
A sick system can't let people step outside, least they look back and notice the sickness.
It doesn't matter if you follow them by taking a vacation or by studying subject B, you're going to forget subject A anyway as soon as the exams are done.
Competition is zero-sum: if you give every competitor the same advantage, it benefits none of them. That's why thinking public education in terms of competitiveness is kinda pointless, so it should have other priorities. What those might be is the question.
This is all ignoring the fact that the way things are going, if you work for a living you've already lost in life, and things will only continue to get worse as wealth flows to the top. So it might be best to just teach kids how to be happy with bare subsistence living, since that's their most likely fate anyway. So schools should focus on Lucid Dreaming 101 and Advanced Daydreaming.
No, because it's a completely different matter to teach an adult who wants to learn and force-feed information to a child who knows full well it's mostly irrelevant filler that'll never make any difference in his life whatsoever. And that's assuming the subject is relatively free of obvious propaganda, like mathematics.
People start companies to institutionalize some set of goals, typically including making money. Society supports this, for example by acknowledging the existence of a company as a legal entity, because of the side effects, such as employment. Other tie-in groups have their own reasons to either support or oppose a company, which will naturally affect its ability to meet its goals. So yes, companies absolutely exist to employ people, and should expect to face official and unofficial penalties if they ignore that duty.
One might even argue that the entire concept of "business" is the art of giving other people opportunities to further their goals by furthering yours.
Success is always due to genius leadership, while failure is always someone else's fault, eh? Or more generally: profits are private but losses are public.
The problem in the US and elsewhere is that we let companies grow to the point where their failure would cause a cascade failure in economy, hence they are "too big to fail" and thus outside the normal regulation systems of capitalism. Also, even if a company does go down in flames, the leadership sails away with their golden parachutes, to direct other companies to their doom, and it's only the powerless rank and file who suffer due to no fault of their own.
Putting the implied mass murder and ironclad tyranny aside for a moment, it's impossible to live in perpetual balance with nature, since nature is not static. Nor did low world population prevent Smallpox or the Black Death from appearing; indeed, diseases like Ebola typically emerge in regions that are less developed and thus "closer to nature", according to this kind of hippy bullshit.
And that's another thing. We, like every dominant species before us, are part of nature. Yes, our emergence is causing a massive upheaval, where some species lose and some win big time, but that's just business as usual. This whole "humanity is cancer" meme is simply arrogant drivel.
There is, however, one difference between us and the previous dominant species: since we're capable of sapient thought, with us in charge life has a chance to survive the looming specter of Sun's death.
I was under the impression that US prisons do employ prison labour.