If you think a state government would not go further than a federal government would, you are deluding yourself.
A state gov't has checks on its power. If you live in a state that is going from bad to worse (like, oh, I don't know, New Jersey), you can vote for a better solution without your vote being diluted by the hundreds of millions of people outside of your state. And if things become intolerable, despite your best efforts? You can leave. Contrast this with the current top-heavy American empire that imposes its laws all over the globe, creating a world where the only real escape can be found at the north/south poles and in some third-world countries.
It's no secret that "states rights" used to be an excuse for slavery, and later, racial segregation.
If you're referring to the "cause" of the American civil war, slavery was on its way out already. Wage slavery is much more profitable and is still around today. As for your point in general, even though states rights' has been used as an excuse by some bigoted people, it's not like it has no actual merits. Read basically anything Thomas Jefferson has written to see what I'm on about.
Our environmental problem consists of two real problems and many false ones. The real problems: (a) overpopulation and (b) reckless industrial growth. The fake problems: inefficient lightbulbs, unrecycled condoms, non-hybrid cars, non-"green" cleaners, etc.
Oh my god, deserves +6 insightful. This guy should be the head of the EPA.
Wow! That's more info than I could ask for. I just checked and my 2007 pc has sleeve bearing fans - no wonder it is so loud now. I'm confused about your assessment of ASRock - you say they OC their motherboards by default? What does that mean, exactly?
Also, do you have a website or anything set up for your pc building business? I may want to refer friends/acquaintances to you if they want a pc built and I'm too busy/lazy to do it for them.
Yes and no. The NSA's activities in foreign signals intelligence is something every modern military does, and is legal under the constitution. However, the NSA's domestic spying (weren't they caught tapping directly into internet backbones in 2007?) is a violation of the 4th amendment and is more like something secret police would do. Ron Paul is one of the few people who holds this position.
"Small government" doesn't just refer to the government's budget, number of employees, percentage of GNP, etc. It also defines a sharp limit to a government's involvement with private aspects of citizen's lives. I have read some compelling arguments for increasing or maintaining the size of gov't social programs (sometimes big gov't can be good), but I've never agreed with people who think domestic spying is good (that kind of big gov't is always bad).
I am a small gov't Republican from Iowa (I might be registered as a Democrat if Russ Feingold were from my state... and still up for election). I voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primaries. Yes, most "small government Republicans" these days are complete phonies and do indeed love big government, but not this guy.
From the above link (emphasis added): The central tenet of Paul's political philosophy is that "the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else."
There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.
How do you tell which parts are built to last? Most reviews I see on Newegg, Anandtech, etc. focus on initial quality, performance, and price:performance, not durability.
I built a gaming PC in early 2007 with mid-range parts, like a motherboard with solid caps, and nothing has failed so far (using it now). But beyond that, I'd have no idea how to build a durable computer. What's your secret?
Even for scripted series, your local library might not have a particular title.
That sometimes happens, but inter-library loan is free and just adds a few days' delay. Really the worst case I've encountered was where my library had the item in circulation but had a long waiting list. This happened when I wanted to check out Avatar a few days after the DVD release. With ten copies in circulation, there was a waiting list of about 100 patrons, each entitled to check it out for a week. I know my city has a public library that has an especially large and well-kept circulation for a city of 50,000 or fewer people, so maybe I'm lucky.
But daily political commentary and sporting events generally don't come out on DVD because they'd be outdated by the time they did.
I get all my daily political commentary from Slashdot. It's funny because it's true. If I cared about sports, I would be raising hell with my cableco to get ESPN on an a la carte basis (even though my parents' old cableco frequently ran ads explaining why a la carte cable is impossible because of the hideous "package" system media companies use, where they mangle their worst channels in with their best).
It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.
An excellent point. I would like to add that it is even cheaper to just wait for the show to come out on DVD. And then check it out from the local library.
On the one hand, it requires discipline and patience. On the other hand... it's just TV. I'm not rich, so I'm probably showing some kind of ironic poor-man's snobbery here, but even my favorite TV shows (Futurama, House, Mad Men, The Wire, Top Gear UK, Cowboy Bebop) still enrich my life less than a good novel/comic book/six-pack of beer. And even a terrible novel stimulates the imagination more than TV, with its effortless entertainment value, something that is only really valuable to me if I'm dead tired or staying home from work sick or something.
Paying for any TV show is just not a good deal for me. Or maybe I just don't know good television - feel free to suggest a good show I haven't heard of. But hearing about millions of subscribers leaving cable and satellite TV makes me smile. Cable/sat companies have offered little to nothing of value beyond their infrastructure for years. Enough of this 19th-century rent-seeking. I'm lukewarm about TV, and I understand that puts me in the minority, but I'm sure we can all think of things more deserving of our money.
Not if. When. Fossil fuels are great but not unlimited. What's reasonable is to smooth over the transition period by planning to be a little uncomfortable instead of being a lot uncomfortable. But uncomfortable humanity shall be.
I agree. I should have qualified my previous statement more - fossil fuels will indeed run out (practically speaking), but I believe that the concomitant price increases will be a fairly steady process, meaning that market forces alone will build the necessary nuclear/solar/geothermal plants in time to prevent an electricity price crisis. As far as I can tell, when the price of gas jumps overnight it's due to speculation, not supply/demand. With frakking and tar sand extraction, we're getting really clever at extracting fossil fuels. Natural gas in particular is at an astonishingly low price today (in North America) because of finds in the US and Canada made available by frakking. It's so cheap today that the kWh cost from a natural gas power plant compares favorably to a coal plant! A lot of gas companies are running a serious risk of going bankrupt, too.
So when I consider your idea of planning, I see a lot of guaranteed downsides to it with only one potential upside. We can't perfectly anticipate our future energy needs. The grants and subsidies necessary to get utility/construction companies building these things will bring crony capitalism. And once the things are built, we're faced with the reality that many alternative sources are uneconomical today - what do we do with a power plant that nobody wants? Leave it sitting unused for a few years? It's usually very expensive to leave industrial equipment idle. It's the reason that factories have three work shifts and operate 24/7. And by the time we do finally need the power, we'll be switching on power plants based on old - likely less efficient - designs. We would be taking on all of these problems (and probably more I can't think of) just to smooth out a spike in future electricity prices that I don't feel is necessarily inevitable. Or even likely, given the way things are going.
If you disagree with my analysis, please tell me why. I'm not an expert on this topic. Oh, one more thing - how much would a gallon of gasoline cost if it were synthesized from, say, agricultural waste, like corn husks, and combined with the electricity of a nuclear plant? Generating gasoline from nuclear is pretty stupid, but it might provide a stopgap solution if we are faced with high oil prices and infrastructure that we haven't EOL'd.
When fossil fuel prices skyrocket, then solar panels become a profitable and reasonable alternative... (solar, wind, nuclear)
If fossil fuels become expensive, we'll need to fall back on alternative power sources that are currently out of vogue either because:
a. The source relies on specific, rare geology (hydroelectic; old-fashioned geothermal).
b. The source is much more expensive than fossil fuels in most cases (solar at high/medium-high latitudes).
c. The source is captial-intensive and is a regulatory and political nightmare, as it has been using a non-standard design for each new reactor for decades. Oops, I think I just gave this one away.
You can see why none of these are as good as fossil fuels. If we become forced onto these power sources, we'll all just get a lot poorer, as we'll be paying a lot more to fuel our homes and appliances. That will certainly be a profitable situation for solar companies, but I wouldn't call it "reasonable".
Eventually we'll hit the 1:1 on EROI (energy return on investment) and we'll really be out of oil, despite the fact that there's still more in the ground than the cumulative total ever extracted at that point.
Yes, the EROI is important if you are using fossil fuels to acquire fossil fuels. But what if you are using drilling machinery powered by an alternative power source, like nuclear fission? Known reserves of uranium are staggering. We would not run out of it for a long time even if we were using it to get stupidly hard-to-reach oil. There are a number of good reasons we will soon get off fossil fuels, but measures like these could help make the transition nearly painless. Considering that many people depend on fossil-fuel-burning machines to travel, eat, and not freeze to death, I think that's a good thing.
Also, a small fraction of our current oil consumption goes towards non-fuels like plastics and chemicals that are important to industrial society. Once oil becomes too expensive to use for fuel, I imagine the price will continue to increase, but at a very slow pace, given that demand will have fallen by something like 90-90%.
In the past I have been less than perfect about paying for the PC games I play, mostly because $50 and even $60 games seem overpriced for what they are. But I would definitely pay a reasonable price (
Does anyone have any suggestions or links to a sort of "Gamespot of Indie Games"? I don't even know where to start.
Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?
We are not even close to giving public school students all the freedom they want. If we were, public schools would resemble the Sudbury Valley School more than the minimum-security jails they are now. If you are worried that K-12 children in public schools have TOO MUCH freedom, then you should probably be sure you're sitting down before I tell you about the Sudbury Valley School.
A few quick stats:
- ~200 students, 9 faculty.
- No academic requirements. No grade-years. No grade-scoring. Students are not even required to learn to read or add/subtract.
- No classes or curriculum.
- Students choose what they want to learn and in what order. All students freely interact with all other students and faculty.
- No armed guards (police). No non-teaching faculty.
- No penalty for showing up late or leaving before closing time. No need for "a good reason" to not show up at all.
Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? The results may surprise you:
- Between 65-80% of Sudbury alumni go on to graduate from college.
- In 30 years of operation, Sudbury has never once seen a child who did not learn to read of his/her own free will.
If it was enough time for books being carted on horsedrawn wagons to a largely illiterate population to make money, it's enough time for your shit song and dumb assed movie to make money.
I don't think that 18th century Americans were largely illiterate. Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet (published in 1776) sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000 people - that's 1 copy for every 5 people. Of those 3,000,000 people, 1 in 5 were slaves and 1 in 2 were indentured servants. Oh sure, a lot of people probably bought several copies of it and performed the colonial equivalent of sticking it under strangers' windshield wipers. But still, I think that a national ratio of 1:5 for a non-religious printed publication is impressive, especially if hardly anybody could have even read it at the time.
What would be the equivalent of Common Sense today? 61.6 million copies of something for 308 million Americans? Is there a single book, newspaper article, political manifesto, or any other publication that comes close to that today? Sure, there's probably a TV show or movie or something that almost everybody today has seen, but I'm more interested in comparing the overall interest in reading between 1776 and 2012 (especially when the reading requires the commitment of paying to read a print publication rather than checking Google News three times a day for the cost of electricity). The most widely-read publication of today, as far as I can tell, is AARP Magazine, with a circulation of 22.4 million in 2011, roughly 1/3 what Common Sense achieved over 200 years ago. Except I don't think that really counts. AARP is a periodical and it has had 50+ years to get to where it is now.
People seem to hit a psychological limit around 75. The posted speeds on most of the highways west of Denver are usually 70-75 and funnily enough most of the traffic moves along slower than that.
It's a shame. I've been driving very aggressively for four years, going well over the limit a lot of the time, and I've never hit anybod. Or really come close to hitting anybody, unless you count all the doofuses in Suburban Assault Vehicles turning in front of me on snowy days... jackasses. To me, driving is like a real fun game with potentially lethal consequences. If I don't push myself to drive as hard as I can, I get bored and find it harder to notice everything happening on the road (like looking carefully for a 4-way stop sign mostly hidden by a low-hanging tree branch). Or worse, I get bored and start playing with the radio.
On the 65mph-limited interstates here, people seem to get nervous around 70. I usually cruise at 75 if it's busy. I've cruised at 100 and that's about when I start to get nervous. But I know my car's tires can handle the speed and I make sure I'm not endangering anyone else (no cars in sight, passengers consent to speed).
If they did find a way to alter people to no longer be receptive to THC and other similar substances, and also completely allergic to nicotine then we would have something that could let us get rid of all smokers. Let it be distributed through a virus like the flu virus and we can be pretty sure to get rid of all potheads and smokers.
I hate liberty, too! As long as we've got distribution methods for viruses set up, let's distribute another one that makes everyone's penises fall off. We can combine it with a program to store everyone's sperm in sperm banks. Then, if a couple wants to procreate, they can withdraw sperm and fertilize with artificial insemination.
The lack of penises would really clamp down on vile, pleasure-seeking sex that no one has a right to practice (last I checked it wasn't in the bill of rights). And there would be fewer rapes, too! Anyone who opposes this idea is addicted to sex, a rapist, or probably both.
Over population is definitely something that we need to be concerned with. But in practice that problem tends to take care of itself when the population gets adequate, food, education and support in old age. Few people genuinely want to have more than 3 kids, the number is small enough that if a few people choose to have more it's probably not even worth worrying about.
This. I would like to add some data here to back this up. Word birth rates are falling in developed an developing countries. It's not "Children of Men" by any means, but I feel it makes concerns about over-population moot.
http://www.independent.org/images/events/crichton/image016.jpg
Notice the vertical line drawn at the release of The Population Bomb, an archetypal book about overpopulation.
Offtopic (or maybe it's not; I heard the word "sustainability" in the article's title, and that's a word on the EPA's bingo sheet), but I just had a thought. If we accept as given that man-made C02 will lead to runaway heating scenarios in the future, then why does it seem that our *only idea* to fight this is to scrap the massive capital cots of our carbon economy with something "green" (that, and less noticeable measures, like banning CFCs). If our 20-odd years of climate research study doesn't have enough of a complete view of the Earth's climate to be able to come up with some less painful, less expensive, and more elegant way of avoid possible climate change disaster cases than gutting our way of industrial life, I have trouble believing they really understand the climate to any useful degree. I thought scientists were supposed to be about individual pursuits, ingenuity and and building on/discrediting your colleagues, especially when one's colleagues (not necessary climate scientists) spend a disturbing about of time polling each other to find how many "believers" and "deniers" there are.
You are seeking personal liberty by dismantling the social structures that limit the ability of the extremely wealthy from taking your liberty for profit... The government needs to be BETTER, not larger or smaller.... I agree with many libertarian ideals, but the agenda should not be to dismantle the government.
I feel that's a glib description of what Libertarians and libertarian-leaning people have in mind. Don't attack labels or even people - attack specific ideas. You say you agree with many libertarian ideals, so we probably have more in common than we know.
Going back to the "robber-baron" topic discussed by you and the AC... today's "robber-baron" is the multinational conglomerate corporation. PepsiCo... Apple... WalMart... Berkshire Hathaway... basically any Fortune megacorp. Which system of government do you feel would be easier for the megacorps to influence at the cost of the American people's liberty? A single government entity with jurisdiction over all the land, or 50 smaller entities concerned only with their own land? A corporation that wants to engage in regulatory capture wants a government with a pyramid-shaped corporate structure to match its own. Forcing a national corporation to comply with a different set of regulations for every state in which it operates places a huge tax on it that it cannot simply lobby away. Okay, so maybe it can, but the lobbying would be about 50 times more complicated, and it would likely still have to fragment its supply chain and business offices to comply with state-by-state differences with respect to things like banned materials. Decentralized government favors smaller, localized corporations more effectively and permanently than any decree from some bureaucrat's office in DC. I think this is approximately how many people arrive independently at the conclusion that smaller, locally-limited government leads to better overall government with near certainty.
You mentioned that we don't need more or less regulation, just *better* regulation, and I agree with you, but how do we achieve better regulation with a strong centralized government? Be ensuring that "only the right people" are placed in charge of the inevitably massive social machinery? And what do you do when a malicious person eventually gets control of the levers of power? Raise a stir among the 300+ million people who have the authority to reign him/her in? What are the chances that the electorate will even find out about it amidst the million-and-one other things the monolithic government is doing? Our federal government long ago exceeded any kind of human scale, it is not managed by people as originally intended but by institutions like the Aspen Institute, massive corporations, and its own bureaucracies. To take one example, there is no one human being who knows the entire US Tax Code. Does raising money for a government really need to be *that* complicated? Rule by institutions is poisonous to personal liberty; it shifts control of decision-making away from individuals and towards conference rooms full of career politicians and K Street lobbyists who all used to be drinking buddies at Yale and Harvard.
Today, a national government (and a matching national corporate culture nuking and paving regional tastes and values... "I'm lovin' it") has us thinking of ourselves as "Americans" concerned with national matters, and not just "Iowans" or "Californians" concerned with our own matters. Evolution takes place faster in small populations. With centralization, we are all but surrendering ourselves to an indefinite status quo of homogeneity. With a strong centralized government, if you're in the 49% minority on an issue that's important to you, your *only option* is to get hundreds of millions of like-minded people behind you. Good luck. Sure, you can always move to another country, but world superpowers have a way of imposing their laws on other countries. With a decentralized governm
I doubt you could find a single piece of government spending that the entire tax base supports. So just because you object to how your money is spent doesn't mean you should have any control over it - if you did, it would be impossible for government to exist at all.
It would be impossible for a top-heavy centralized federal government run by a professional managerial class to exist, no doubt. But what about a decentralized government with a bias for decision-making in the other direction? One that lets the individual decide for himself... if not the individual then his town, if not the town then the county, if not the county then the state, etc.
Being forced to live in a pluralistic society sucks. Decentralization of decision-making is the best antidote I can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think a state government would not go further than a federal government would, you are deluding yourself.
A state gov't has checks on its power. If you live in a state that is going from bad to worse (like, oh, I don't know, New Jersey), you can vote for a better solution without your vote being diluted by the hundreds of millions of people outside of your state. And if things become intolerable, despite your best efforts? You can leave. Contrast this with the current top-heavy American empire that imposes its laws all over the globe, creating a world where the only real escape can be found at the north/south poles and in some third-world countries.
It's no secret that "states rights" used to be an excuse for slavery, and later, racial segregation.
If you're referring to the "cause" of the American civil war, slavery was on its way out already. Wage slavery is much more profitable and is still around today. As for your point in general, even though states rights' has been used as an excuse by some bigoted people, it's not like it has no actual merits. Read basically anything Thomas Jefferson has written to see what I'm on about.
Our environmental problem consists of two real problems and many false ones. The real problems: (a) overpopulation and (b) reckless industrial growth. The fake problems: inefficient lightbulbs, unrecycled condoms, non-hybrid cars, non-"green" cleaners, etc.
Oh my god, deserves +6 insightful. This guy should be the head of the EPA.
Wow! That's more info than I could ask for. I just checked and my 2007 pc has sleeve bearing fans - no wonder it is so loud now. I'm confused about your assessment of ASRock - you say they OC their motherboards by default? What does that mean, exactly?
Also, do you have a website or anything set up for your pc building business? I may want to refer friends/acquaintances to you if they want a pc built and I'm too busy/lazy to do it for them.
Yes and no. The NSA's activities in foreign signals intelligence is something every modern military does, and is legal under the constitution. However, the NSA's domestic spying (weren't they caught tapping directly into internet backbones in 2007?) is a violation of the 4th amendment and is more like something secret police would do. Ron Paul is one of the few people who holds this position.
"Small government" doesn't just refer to the government's budget, number of employees, percentage of GNP, etc. It also defines a sharp limit to a government's involvement with private aspects of citizen's lives. I have read some compelling arguments for increasing or maintaining the size of gov't social programs (sometimes big gov't can be good), but I've never agreed with people who think domestic spying is good (that kind of big gov't is always bad).
I am a small gov't Republican from Iowa (I might be registered as a Democrat if Russ Feingold were from my state... and still up for election). I voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primaries. Yes, most "small government Republicans" these days are complete phonies and do indeed love big government, but not this guy.
If you doubt me, then read up on his political positions sometime.
From the above link (emphasis added): The central tenet of Paul's political philosophy is that "the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else."
There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.
How do you tell which parts are built to last? Most reviews I see on Newegg, Anandtech, etc. focus on initial quality, performance, and price:performance, not durability.
I built a gaming PC in early 2007 with mid-range parts, like a motherboard with solid caps, and nothing has failed so far (using it now). But beyond that, I'd have no idea how to build a durable computer. What's your secret?
Even for scripted series, your local library might not have a particular title.
That sometimes happens, but inter-library loan is free and just adds a few days' delay. Really the worst case I've encountered was where my library had the item in circulation but had a long waiting list. This happened when I wanted to check out Avatar a few days after the DVD release. With ten copies in circulation, there was a waiting list of about 100 patrons, each entitled to check it out for a week. I know my city has a public library that has an especially large and well-kept circulation for a city of 50,000 or fewer people, so maybe I'm lucky.
But daily political commentary and sporting events generally don't come out on DVD because they'd be outdated by the time they did.
I get all my daily political commentary from Slashdot. It's funny because it's true. If I cared about sports, I would be raising hell with my cableco to get ESPN on an a la carte basis (even though my parents' old cableco frequently ran ads explaining why a la carte cable is impossible because of the hideous "package" system media companies use, where they mangle their worst channels in with their best).
It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.
An excellent point. I would like to add that it is even cheaper to just wait for the show to come out on DVD. And then check it out from the local library.
On the one hand, it requires discipline and patience. On the other hand... it's just TV. I'm not rich, so I'm probably showing some kind of ironic poor-man's snobbery here, but even my favorite TV shows (Futurama, House, Mad Men, The Wire, Top Gear UK, Cowboy Bebop) still enrich my life less than a good novel/comic book/six-pack of beer. And even a terrible novel stimulates the imagination more than TV, with its effortless entertainment value, something that is only really valuable to me if I'm dead tired or staying home from work sick or something.
Paying for any TV show is just not a good deal for me. Or maybe I just don't know good television - feel free to suggest a good show I haven't heard of. But hearing about millions of subscribers leaving cable and satellite TV makes me smile. Cable/sat companies have offered little to nothing of value beyond their infrastructure for years. Enough of this 19th-century rent-seeking. I'm lukewarm about TV, and I understand that puts me in the minority, but I'm sure we can all think of things more deserving of our money.
Not if. When. Fossil fuels are great but not unlimited. What's reasonable is to smooth over the transition period by planning to be a little uncomfortable instead of being a lot uncomfortable. But uncomfortable humanity shall be.
I agree. I should have qualified my previous statement more - fossil fuels will indeed run out (practically speaking), but I believe that the concomitant price increases will be a fairly steady process, meaning that market forces alone will build the necessary nuclear/solar/geothermal plants in time to prevent an electricity price crisis. As far as I can tell, when the price of gas jumps overnight it's due to speculation, not supply/demand. With frakking and tar sand extraction, we're getting really clever at extracting fossil fuels. Natural gas in particular is at an astonishingly low price today (in North America) because of finds in the US and Canada made available by frakking. It's so cheap today that the kWh cost from a natural gas power plant compares favorably to a coal plant! A lot of gas companies are running a serious risk of going bankrupt, too.
So when I consider your idea of planning, I see a lot of guaranteed downsides to it with only one potential upside. We can't perfectly anticipate our future energy needs. The grants and subsidies necessary to get utility/construction companies building these things will bring crony capitalism. And once the things are built, we're faced with the reality that many alternative sources are uneconomical today - what do we do with a power plant that nobody wants? Leave it sitting unused for a few years? It's usually very expensive to leave industrial equipment idle. It's the reason that factories have three work shifts and operate 24/7. And by the time we do finally need the power, we'll be switching on power plants based on old - likely less efficient - designs. We would be taking on all of these problems (and probably more I can't think of) just to smooth out a spike in future electricity prices that I don't feel is necessarily inevitable. Or even likely, given the way things are going.
If you disagree with my analysis, please tell me why. I'm not an expert on this topic. Oh, one more thing - how much would a gallon of gasoline cost if it were synthesized from, say, agricultural waste, like corn husks, and combined with the electricity of a nuclear plant? Generating gasoline from nuclear is pretty stupid, but it might provide a stopgap solution if we are faced with high oil prices and infrastructure that we haven't EOL'd.
When fossil fuel prices skyrocket, then solar panels become a profitable and reasonable alternative ... (solar, wind, nuclear)
If fossil fuels become expensive, we'll need to fall back on alternative power sources that are currently out of vogue either because:
a. The source relies on specific, rare geology (hydroelectic; old-fashioned geothermal).
b. The source is much more expensive than fossil fuels in most cases (solar at high/medium-high latitudes).
c. The source is captial-intensive and is a regulatory and political nightmare, as it has been using a non-standard design for each new reactor for decades. Oops, I think I just gave this one away.
You can see why none of these are as good as fossil fuels. If we become forced onto these power sources, we'll all just get a lot poorer, as we'll be paying a lot more to fuel our homes and appliances. That will certainly be a profitable situation for solar companies, but I wouldn't call it "reasonable".
Generally speaking, if I'm talking about a movie with a friend, and I hear him say that he hasn't seen it, I say, "let's watch it, right now."
Will you be my friend?
Whoops. Demand will have fallen by 90-95%.
Eventually we'll hit the 1:1 on EROI (energy return on investment) and we'll really be out of oil, despite the fact that there's still more in the ground than the cumulative total ever extracted at that point.
Yes, the EROI is important if you are using fossil fuels to acquire fossil fuels. But what if you are using drilling machinery powered by an alternative power source, like nuclear fission? Known reserves of uranium are staggering. We would not run out of it for a long time even if we were using it to get stupidly hard-to-reach oil. There are a number of good reasons we will soon get off fossil fuels, but measures like these could help make the transition nearly painless. Considering that many people depend on fossil-fuel-burning machines to travel, eat, and not freeze to death, I think that's a good thing.
Also, a small fraction of our current oil consumption goes towards non-fuels like plastics and chemicals that are important to industrial society. Once oil becomes too expensive to use for fuel, I imagine the price will continue to increase, but at a very slow pace, given that demand will have fallen by something like 90-90%.
In the past I have been less than perfect about paying for the PC games I play, mostly because $50 and even $60 games seem overpriced for what they are. But I would definitely pay a reasonable price (
Does anyone have any suggestions or links to a sort of "Gamespot of Indie Games"? I don't even know where to start.
Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?
We are not even close to giving public school students all the freedom they want. If we were, public schools would resemble the Sudbury Valley School more than the minimum-security jails they are now. If you are worried that K-12 children in public schools have TOO MUCH freedom, then you should probably be sure you're sitting down before I tell you about the Sudbury Valley School.
A few quick stats:
- ~200 students, 9 faculty.
- No academic requirements. No grade-years. No grade-scoring. Students are not even required to learn to read or add/subtract.
- No classes or curriculum.
- Students choose what they want to learn and in what order. All students freely interact with all other students and faculty.
- No armed guards (police). No non-teaching faculty.
- No penalty for showing up late or leaving before closing time. No need for "a good reason" to not show up at all.
Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? The results may surprise you:
- Between 65-80% of Sudbury alumni go on to graduate from college.
- In 30 years of operation, Sudbury has never once seen a child who did not learn to read of his/her own free will.
Sources:
Wikipedia
Excerpt From An Excellent Book
Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it.
Quoted for truth.
If it was enough time for books being carted on horsedrawn wagons to a largely illiterate population to make money, it's enough time for your shit song and dumb assed movie to make money.
I don't think that 18th century Americans were largely illiterate. Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet (published in 1776) sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000 people - that's 1 copy for every 5 people. Of those 3,000,000 people, 1 in 5 were slaves and 1 in 2 were indentured servants. Oh sure, a lot of people probably bought several copies of it and performed the colonial equivalent of sticking it under strangers' windshield wipers. But still, I think that a national ratio of 1:5 for a non-religious printed publication is impressive, especially if hardly anybody could have even read it at the time.
What would be the equivalent of Common Sense today? 61.6 million copies of something for 308 million Americans? Is there a single book, newspaper article, political manifesto, or any other publication that comes close to that today? Sure, there's probably a TV show or movie or something that almost everybody today has seen, but I'm more interested in comparing the overall interest in reading between 1776 and 2012 (especially when the reading requires the commitment of paying to read a print publication rather than checking Google News three times a day for the cost of electricity). The most widely-read publication of today, as far as I can tell, is AARP Magazine, with a circulation of 22.4 million in 2011, roughly 1/3 what Common Sense achieved over 200 years ago. Except I don't think that really counts. AARP is a periodical and it has had 50+ years to get to where it is now.
People seem to hit a psychological limit around 75. The posted speeds on most of the highways west of Denver are usually 70-75 and funnily enough most of the traffic moves along slower than that.
It's a shame. I've been driving very aggressively for four years, going well over the limit a lot of the time, and I've never hit anybod. Or really come close to hitting anybody, unless you count all the doofuses in Suburban Assault Vehicles turning in front of me on snowy days... jackasses. To me, driving is like a real fun game with potentially lethal consequences. If I don't push myself to drive as hard as I can, I get bored and find it harder to notice everything happening on the road (like looking carefully for a 4-way stop sign mostly hidden by a low-hanging tree branch). Or worse, I get bored and start playing with the radio.
On the 65mph-limited interstates here, people seem to get nervous around 70. I usually cruise at 75 if it's busy. I've cruised at 100 and that's about when I start to get nervous. But I know my car's tires can handle the speed and I make sure I'm not endangering anyone else (no cars in sight, passengers consent to speed).
Top Gear used lies to tell the truth.
Tesla used the truth to tell lies.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
Hopefully this leads to people being able to have their DNA modified so that we no longer have to deal with mental diseases like Alzheimer's.
And once a precedent has been set, it's just 20 precious years until GATTACA.
If they did find a way to alter people to no longer be receptive to THC and other similar substances, and also completely allergic to nicotine then we would have something that could let us get rid of all smokers. Let it be distributed through a virus like the flu virus and we can be pretty sure to get rid of all potheads and smokers.
I hate liberty, too! As long as we've got distribution methods for viruses set up, let's distribute another one that makes everyone's penises fall off. We can combine it with a program to store everyone's sperm in sperm banks. Then, if a couple wants to procreate, they can withdraw sperm and fertilize with artificial insemination.
The lack of penises would really clamp down on vile, pleasure-seeking sex that no one has a right to practice (last I checked it wasn't in the bill of rights). And there would be fewer rapes, too! Anyone who opposes this idea is addicted to sex, a rapist, or probably both.
Over population is definitely something that we need to be concerned with. But in practice that problem tends to take care of itself when the population gets adequate, food, education and support in old age. Few people genuinely want to have more than 3 kids, the number is small enough that if a few people choose to have more it's probably not even worth worrying about.
This. I would like to add some data here to back this up. Word birth rates are falling in developed an developing countries. It's not "Children of Men" by any means, but I feel it makes concerns about over-population moot. http://www.independent.org/images/events/crichton/image016.jpg Notice the vertical line drawn at the release of The Population Bomb, an archetypal book about overpopulation.
Offtopic (or maybe it's not; I heard the word "sustainability" in the article's title, and that's a word on the EPA's bingo sheet), but I just had a thought. If we accept as given that man-made C02 will lead to runaway heating scenarios in the future, then why does it seem that our *only idea* to fight this is to scrap the massive capital cots of our carbon economy with something "green" (that, and less noticeable measures, like banning CFCs). If our 20-odd years of climate research study doesn't have enough of a complete view of the Earth's climate to be able to come up with some less painful, less expensive, and more elegant way of avoid possible climate change disaster cases than gutting our way of industrial life, I have trouble believing they really understand the climate to any useful degree. I thought scientists were supposed to be about individual pursuits, ingenuity and and building on/discrediting your colleagues, especially when one's colleagues (not necessary climate scientists) spend a disturbing about of time polling each other to find how many "believers" and "deniers" there are.
climate change denial
I take issue with that, sir! I firmly believe the Earth's climate has never changed. Ever.
You are seeking personal liberty by dismantling the social structures that limit the ability of the extremely wealthy from taking your liberty for profit ... The government needs to be BETTER, not larger or smaller. ... I agree with many libertarian ideals, but the agenda should not be to dismantle the government.
I feel that's a glib description of what Libertarians and libertarian-leaning people have in mind. Don't attack labels or even people - attack specific ideas. You say you agree with many libertarian ideals, so we probably have more in common than we know.
Going back to the "robber-baron" topic discussed by you and the AC... today's "robber-baron" is the multinational conglomerate corporation. PepsiCo... Apple... WalMart... Berkshire Hathaway... basically any Fortune megacorp. Which system of government do you feel would be easier for the megacorps to influence at the cost of the American people's liberty? A single government entity with jurisdiction over all the land, or 50 smaller entities concerned only with their own land? A corporation that wants to engage in regulatory capture wants a government with a pyramid-shaped corporate structure to match its own. Forcing a national corporation to comply with a different set of regulations for every state in which it operates places a huge tax on it that it cannot simply lobby away. Okay, so maybe it can, but the lobbying would be about 50 times more complicated, and it would likely still have to fragment its supply chain and business offices to comply with state-by-state differences with respect to things like banned materials. Decentralized government favors smaller, localized corporations more effectively and permanently than any decree from some bureaucrat's office in DC. I think this is approximately how many people arrive independently at the conclusion that smaller, locally-limited government leads to better overall government with near certainty.
You mentioned that we don't need more or less regulation, just *better* regulation, and I agree with you, but how do we achieve better regulation with a strong centralized government? Be ensuring that "only the right people" are placed in charge of the inevitably massive social machinery? And what do you do when a malicious person eventually gets control of the levers of power? Raise a stir among the 300+ million people who have the authority to reign him/her in? What are the chances that the electorate will even find out about it amidst the million-and-one other things the monolithic government is doing? Our federal government long ago exceeded any kind of human scale, it is not managed by people as originally intended but by institutions like the Aspen Institute, massive corporations, and its own bureaucracies. To take one example, there is no one human being who knows the entire US Tax Code. Does raising money for a government really need to be *that* complicated? Rule by institutions is poisonous to personal liberty; it shifts control of decision-making away from individuals and towards conference rooms full of career politicians and K Street lobbyists who all used to be drinking buddies at Yale and Harvard.
Today, a national government (and a matching national corporate culture nuking and paving regional tastes and values... "I'm lovin' it") has us thinking of ourselves as "Americans" concerned with national matters, and not just "Iowans" or "Californians" concerned with our own matters. Evolution takes place faster in small populations. With centralization, we are all but surrendering ourselves to an indefinite status quo of homogeneity. With a strong centralized government, if you're in the 49% minority on an issue that's important to you, your *only option* is to get hundreds of millions of like-minded people behind you. Good luck. Sure, you can always move to another country, but world superpowers have a way of imposing their laws on other countries. With a decentralized governm
I doubt you could find a single piece of government spending that the entire tax base supports. So just because you object to how your money is spent doesn't mean you should have any control over it - if you did, it would be impossible for government to exist at all.
It would be impossible for a top-heavy centralized federal government run by a professional managerial class to exist, no doubt. But what about a decentralized government with a bias for decision-making in the other direction? One that lets the individual decide for himself... if not the individual then his town, if not the town then the county, if not the county then the state, etc.
Being forced to live in a pluralistic society sucks. Decentralization of decision-making is the best antidote I can think of.