If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources
If we figure out how to curb over-population and only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations
We will need to have people living 'normal' lifespans, unless we figure out how to dodge the who reproduction via sperm and eggs thing
The economics of the situation would probably lead to a self-selected wealthy group occupying the long-life slots and the rest of us toiling away as normal with our lifespans slightly adjusted from what we expect today in order to fill the breeders slot
It would probably make things easier all around if the breeders did not suspect that they could enjoy a long and healthy life
One thing that could potentially change this entire equation would be extending the range in which humans can live, whether it be orbital habitats, terraformed planets or cozy lintel asteroids. A that point ti would be really handy to have extremely long-lived humans taking the not quite as fast as light trips to our nearest stellar neighbors
You are starting with a relatively small number of people, probably better to think of it as a percentage
In the short term: "A number of the 64 inhabitants of Rongelap experienced immediate radiation sickness including vomiting, skin damage and hair loss. By the time they were evacuated from the area two days after the detonation of Castle Bravo, some of the islanders had received 175 rads (See Chart 2) from gamma radiation and 160 rads from I-131" http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-t...
In the long term: "We estimate that the nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands will cause about 500 additional cancer cases among Marshallese exposed during the years 1946-1958, about a 9% increase over the number of cancers expected in the absence of exposure to regional fallout." http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Mar...
So, you are probably saying, wow, just over 500 people affected, pretty small number if you consider Bhopal and Chernobyl But if you consider that the population of the islands was 10,000 at the time, then that is 5% of their population, which is significant
There is also the persistent presence of isotopes that raise the expectation of cancer for all people to 9% over people not from the Marshall islands
They certainly have a legitimate beef with the government, whether they can leverage that to change global policy is another thing.
We would probably not be having this conversation if 5% of the general population had been exposed to isotopes that had caused cancer I suppose that it is a matter of perspective
The government had access to metadata records stored on telco systems without a warrant as a result of Smith v Maryland that was heard by the Supreme Court in 1979 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The systems put in place after the Patriot Act moved that data directly into government systems for direct analysis Removing the automated transfer and placing the data into the control of the telcos as a complete reversal Calling it an equal or worse provision is being blind to the history of PEN register use between telcos and the government
To be honest, if we had a right winger in office in 2008 we would have seem the entire system handed over to the private sector instead of the attempts to improve the structure of government to serve the middle class such as the stimulus and the ACA. There would have been a continuation of deregulation and laws to protect the sovereignty of the corporation against the results of their actions
I remember an interview with Carter when he talked about the briefings that he received after being elected President There were mounds and mounds of the inertia of the ship of state, most of which he could do nothing to change It aged Carter immensely and we have seen the effect that it has had on Obama as well The best that we as voters can hope for it to put decent hard working people into the position to deal with the BS that they would inevitably face I see little sign that Rand would be that person and plenty of evidence that GW was not
I think that the problem with the option that you identify is that they will not allow it to happen. It is a form of brinksmanship to have the 'let it go away' option seem so horrible that they can trap you between it and the relatively reasonable option, which they are not going to pass
All that we know about the 'let it go away' option is that on GW Bush's watch it allowed some assholes to fly some planes into high value real estate full of people despite the fact that more than a couple of TLA's had them on their radar at one point or another
Everybody seems to have forgotten what a kick in the balls that was and how we FAILED to identify the failures at the POTUS level to listen to briefings and step up security in the months prior to the attacks as a root cause.
Instead we said, 'give them emergency powers all of the time', with the subtext of 'because our elected leaders cannot handle it themselves'
So, back to the let it go away option
I think that Obama is competent enough to handle the daily briefings and, put in GW Bush's position in 2001, probably could have made the call to step up security to a emergency level. But that is just speculation
I also think that Obama is cautious enough to want all of the tools at his disposal to prevent anything similar from happening on his watch. Given that he has already agreed to the terms of the House bill so stop the government collection and storage of data, I do not understand the reluctance of the gop controlled Senate to do that same, unless they want to use it as another tool in the 2016 elections
You did read the summary of the article... "Obama criticized the Senate for not acting on that legislation, saying they have necessitated a renewal of the Patriot Act provisions."
It is the failure of the gop controlled Senate to pass the new rules form the House that has kept the Patriot Act in place
The first time that I was pressed into being a project manager was at a subsidiary of a new telecom company. We inherited some basic rules 1. Whoever called the meeting had to prepare the info for the meeting and send it out to the participants at least a day early 2. The meeting could be no longer than thirty minutes 3. Whoever called the meeting would prepare a summary and send it out to all participants with a list of action items before the end of the day
The unwritten rule was that if you started wasting people's time they would stop coming to your meetings This put the power into the hands of the people doing the work and made the PM a servant to getting work done That is how is should be, I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to apply the 'unwritten rule' and walk out on some PM that was just sucking all of the intelligence out of the room and keeping people from working
Not really, some of the analysis following the Challenger disaster at NASA concluded that the use of Powerpoint limited the ability to put enough relevant information on the screen to allow analysts to make the necessary connections to identify risks. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
In a similar study performed by the Army, the conclusion was that all of the necessary detail that would have been included in a whitepaper was trimmed away for the 5-bulletpoints that they could put on the screen, to quote the article:“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
The summary of all of these articles is that Powerpoint has a limit to how much information it can place on a slide, this is largely a function of screen resolution and visible font size
This limit is resolution results in 'high level' 10,000 display of topics that does not adequately represent the subject matter The result is that people give presentations at a high level and then send out the powerpoint as the notes for the presentation, when in fact any real detailed information would be either omitted or glossed over at that high level
What we really need is to demand improvements to Powerpoint, like 1. displaying at legible resolution on a 6ft high by 30 ft wide screen (remember those old blackboards from college Calculus class, that is the level of information density that we need) 2. Providing linking and drill down like would would expect to see on an executive dashboard. Sure, start at the summary level, but allow the speaker to drill down to the details at any point in the diagram. Also, make this all print out as the 'notes' with footnotes and references to the linked information 3. Train the presenters to not be satisfied working at the outline level
I guess that we should not simply blame Powerpoint for making us stupid, when we are stupid for relying on it as it is
If you think that a choice between Dems, who have shown themselves to be centrist, fiscally responsible and more likely to support the working class than not, and the gop, which has become a raft of radical nutjobs who want to waste the country's money on foreign wars while reducing taxes on the wealthy effectively bleeding the middle class to death... is the lesser of two evils, then you are just plain silly
Keep in mind, who put the right wingers on the Supreme Court which upheld corporate money as 'free speech' - The GOP Who put us into two foreign wars with no long range plan resulting in trillions in debt and thousands of dead Americans - The GOP Who left our guard down while ignoring repeated warnings and allowing the 9/11 attacks on their watch - The GOP Who deregulated markets and created a boom/bust scenario resulting in the largest recession in 80 years - the GOP Who reduced taxes on the wealthy resulting in deficits and long term problems like a rotting infrastructure - the GOP
And just to balance the scale, who recovered from the last two Bush-driven recessions - The Dems
If you think that is the choice between two evils, then you are drinking the gop cool-aid and need to wake the fuck up
Trading papers, I will see yours and offer: "This paper also suggests that the Gini Index of economic inequality may also have a significant correlation with terrorist risk. The results overall imply that exclusion from the economy can be a motivator for terrorism just as exclusion from politics can be, regardless of the overall wealth of a country." http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/...
I will even go on to say that it is the political control over the economy (whether the military control of Egypt or Pakistan, or the royal control of Saudi nations) that reduces the economic opportunities of the lower and middle classes, as well as the political ambitions of the upper classes, which encourages them to join groups like ISIS or AQ
"and unsurprisingly, a lot of terrorists aren't devoutly religious"
I think that it may be a similar phenomenon to Born Again Christians in America, where people are deeply indoctrinated when they are young, put aside their beliefs for lives of debauchery in their young adult years, then fall back to their original beliefs (or influence of religious leaders who represent those beliefs) in later years or when facing some emotional hardship
I agree on both flavors, and I suggest that they are rooted in the same cause, which is an attempt to prevent internal revolution due to lack of opportunity
Even bin laden was relegated to some son-of-the-boss position if he had toed the line, so he traded that away for leading his own quasi-government
By design, this was outside the borders of his birth and in no way threatened the people who actually limited his ambitions at home
Hey, I would argue that Atta, and many of the well educated 'forefathers' of this movement were facing their own glass ceilings, and would never reach the levels of social success in their own countries (as compared to what they could expect in the western countries they were educated in) due to the members of the royal families that got all of the sweet positions
One solution to their problem would be to mount an internal revolution
To prevent this they were intentionally radicalized by royally-supported Wahhabis to direct their angry energies outwards against the same western influences that had educated them to expect more than their current lot in life
Slashdot Mirror
If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources
If we figure out how to curb over-population and only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations
We will need to have people living 'normal' lifespans, unless we figure out how to dodge the who reproduction via sperm and eggs thing
The economics of the situation would probably lead to a self-selected wealthy group occupying the long-life slots and the rest of us toiling away as normal with our lifespans slightly adjusted from what we expect today in order to fill the breeders slot
It would probably make things easier all around if the breeders did not suspect that they could enjoy a long and healthy life
One thing that could potentially change this entire equation would be extending the range in which humans can live, whether it be orbital habitats, terraformed planets or cozy lintel asteroids. A that point ti would be really handy to have extremely long-lived humans taking the not quite as fast as light trips to our nearest stellar neighbors
But then, I tend to be an optimist
They use killed anthrax to test detectors that can 'sniff' it out
Reminds me of the opening scene of 'The Stand' when everybody is panicking behind locked doors and one guy makes a run for it with his family
Just in this version, nobody is panicking and the vehicle making a run for it is the Fedex van
Yes, but it gets unnerving when it is the 0.001% vs the 99.999%
You are starting with a relatively small number of people, probably better to think of it as a percentage
In the short term:
"A number of the 64 inhabitants of Rongelap experienced immediate radiation sickness including vomiting, skin damage and hair loss. By the time they were evacuated from the area two days after the detonation of Castle Bravo, some of the islanders had received 175 rads (See Chart 2) from gamma radiation and 160 rads from I-131"
http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-t...
In the long term:
"We estimate that the nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands will cause about 500 additional cancer cases among Marshallese exposed during the years 1946-1958, about a 9% increase over the number of cancers expected in the absence of exposure to regional fallout."
http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Mar...
So, you are probably saying, wow, just over 500 people affected, pretty small number if you consider Bhopal and Chernobyl
But if you consider that the population of the islands was 10,000 at the time, then that is 5% of their population, which is significant
There is also the persistent presence of isotopes that raise the expectation of cancer for all people to 9% over people not from the Marshall islands
They certainly have a legitimate beef with the government, whether they can leverage that to change global policy is another thing.
We would probably not be having this conversation if 5% of the general population had been exposed to isotopes that had caused cancer
I suppose that it is a matter of perspective
" those that drove and continue to drive our economy head first into the ground"
WTF? Is that the new gop line that totally forgets about the recession beginning during GW Bush's presidency and the recovery under Obama's?
You are a different universe than the rest of us buddy, time to wake up to reality
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/0...
I think that you are confused
The government had access to metadata records stored on telco systems without a warrant as a result of Smith v Maryland that was heard by the Supreme Court in 1979
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The systems put in place after the Patriot Act moved that data directly into government systems for direct analysis
Removing the automated transfer and placing the data into the control of the telcos as a complete reversal
Calling it an equal or worse provision is being blind to the history of PEN register use between telcos and the government
Wow, an AC calling me names and spouting bullshit with zero citation
why do I find this hard to believe?
To be honest, if we had a right winger in office in 2008 we would have seem the entire system handed over to the private sector instead of the attempts to improve the structure of government to serve the middle class such as the stimulus and the ACA. There would have been a continuation of deregulation and laws to protect the sovereignty of the corporation against the results of their actions
I remember an interview with Carter when he talked about the briefings that he received after being elected President
There were mounds and mounds of the inertia of the ship of state, most of which he could do nothing to change
It aged Carter immensely and we have seen the effect that it has had on Obama as well
The best that we as voters can hope for it to put decent hard working people into the position to deal with the BS that they would inevitably face
I see little sign that Rand would be that person and plenty of evidence that GW was not
I think that the problem with the option that you identify is that they will not allow it to happen.
It is a form of brinksmanship to have the 'let it go away' option seem so horrible that they can trap you between it and the relatively reasonable option, which they are not going to pass
All that we know about the 'let it go away' option is that on GW Bush's watch it allowed some assholes to fly some planes into high value real estate full of people despite the fact that more than a couple of TLA's had them on their radar at one point or another
Everybody seems to have forgotten what a kick in the balls that was and how we FAILED to identify the failures at the POTUS level to listen to briefings and step up security in the months prior to the attacks as a root cause.
Instead we said, 'give them emergency powers all of the time', with the subtext of 'because our elected leaders cannot handle it themselves'
So, back to the let it go away option
I think that Obama is competent enough to handle the daily briefings and, put in GW Bush's position in 2001, probably could have made the call to step up security to a emergency level. But that is just speculation
I also think that Obama is cautious enough to want all of the tools at his disposal to prevent anything similar from happening on his watch. Given that he has already agreed to the terms of the House bill so stop the government collection and storage of data, I do not understand the reluctance of the gop controlled Senate to do that same, unless they want to use it as another tool in the 2016 elections
You did read the summary of the article...
"Obama criticized the Senate for not acting on that legislation, saying they have necessitated a renewal of the Patriot Act provisions."
It is the failure of the gop controlled Senate to pass the new rules form the House that has kept the Patriot Act in place
It was a sales pitch for velcro shoes
The first time that I was pressed into being a project manager was at a subsidiary of a new telecom company.
We inherited some basic rules
1. Whoever called the meeting had to prepare the info for the meeting and send it out to the participants at least a day early
2. The meeting could be no longer than thirty minutes
3. Whoever called the meeting would prepare a summary and send it out to all participants with a list of action items before the end of the day
The unwritten rule was that if you started wasting people's time they would stop coming to your meetings
This put the power into the hands of the people doing the work and made the PM a servant to getting work done
That is how is should be, I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to apply the 'unwritten rule' and walk out on some PM that was just sucking all of the intelligence out of the room and keeping people from working
Perfect demonstration of the appropriate use of Powerpoint, to pitch an idea at a high level
Nothing about this provides weight for its use as a tool for in depth analysis or presentation of information for such analysis
Not really, some of the analysis following the Challenger disaster at NASA concluded that the use of Powerpoint limited the ability to put enough relevant information on the screen to allow analysts to make the necessary connections to identify risks.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
In a similar study performed by the Army, the conclusion was that all of the necessary detail that would have been included in a whitepaper was trimmed away for the 5-bulletpoints that they could put on the screen, to quote the article:“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
Don't just put me down, provide a logical counter argument
Banning things does us no favor, but getting the message out does
http://www.amazon.com/How-Powe...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
http://www.unc.edu/~healdric/P...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
The summary of all of these articles is that Powerpoint has a limit to how much information it can place on a slide, this is largely a function of screen resolution and visible font size
This limit is resolution results in 'high level' 10,000 display of topics that does not adequately represent the subject matter
The result is that people give presentations at a high level and then send out the powerpoint as the notes for the presentation, when in fact any real detailed information would be either omitted or glossed over at that high level
What we really need is to demand improvements to Powerpoint, like
1. displaying at legible resolution on a 6ft high by 30 ft wide screen (remember those old blackboards from college Calculus class, that is the level of information density that we need)
2. Providing linking and drill down like would would expect to see on an executive dashboard. Sure, start at the summary level, but allow the speaker to drill down to the details at any point in the diagram. Also, make this all print out as the 'notes' with footnotes and references to the linked information
3. Train the presenters to not be satisfied working at the outline level
I guess that we should not simply blame Powerpoint for making us stupid, when we are stupid for relying on it as it is
If you think that a choice between Dems, who have shown themselves to be centrist, fiscally responsible and more likely to support the working class than not, and the gop, which has become a raft of radical nutjobs who want to waste the country's money on foreign wars while reducing taxes on the wealthy effectively bleeding the middle class to death... is the lesser of two evils, then you are just plain silly
Keep in mind, who put the right wingers on the Supreme Court which upheld corporate money as 'free speech' - The GOP
Who put us into two foreign wars with no long range plan resulting in trillions in debt and thousands of dead Americans - The GOP
Who left our guard down while ignoring repeated warnings and allowing the 9/11 attacks on their watch - The GOP
Who deregulated markets and created a boom/bust scenario resulting in the largest recession in 80 years - the GOP
Who reduced taxes on the wealthy resulting in deficits and long term problems like a rotting infrastructure - the GOP
And just to balance the scale, who recovered from the last two Bush-driven recessions - The Dems
If you think that is the choice between two evils, then you are drinking the gop cool-aid and need to wake the fuck up
C-level, it's all the rage
Because we live in a simple world of right and wrong where everything is in black and white...
Trading papers, I will see yours and offer:
"This paper also suggests that the Gini Index of economic inequality may also have a significant correlation with terrorist risk. The results overall imply that exclusion from the economy can be a motivator for terrorism just as exclusion from politics can be, regardless of the overall wealth of a country."
http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/...
I will even go on to say that it is the political control over the economy (whether the military control of Egypt or Pakistan, or the royal control of Saudi nations) that reduces the economic opportunities of the lower and middle classes, as well as the political ambitions of the upper classes, which encourages them to join groups like ISIS or AQ
"and unsurprisingly, a lot of terrorists aren't devoutly religious"
I think that it may be a similar phenomenon to Born Again Christians in America, where people are deeply indoctrinated when they are young, put aside their beliefs for lives of debauchery in their young adult years, then fall back to their original beliefs (or influence of religious leaders who represent those beliefs) in later years or when facing some emotional hardship
I agree on both flavors, and I suggest that they are rooted in the same cause, which is an attempt to prevent internal revolution due to lack of opportunity
Even bin laden was relegated to some son-of-the-boss position if he had toed the line, so he traded that away for leading his own quasi-government
By design, this was outside the borders of his birth and in no way threatened the people who actually limited his ambitions at home
Hey,
I would argue that Atta, and many of the well educated 'forefathers' of this movement were facing their own glass ceilings, and would never reach the levels of social success in their own countries (as compared to what they could expect in the western countries they were educated in) due to the members of the royal families that got all of the sweet positions
One solution to their problem would be to mount an internal revolution
To prevent this they were intentionally radicalized by royally-supported Wahhabis to direct their angry energies outwards against the same western influences that had educated them to expect more than their current lot in life
At least that is my speculation