It was self defense. The papers and badges are bullshit. He was running from kidnappers with guns.
That's pretty much my thought of it. Assange was fleeing from State-sponsored kidnappers acting on behalf of the corrupt US Oligarchy. I would even be OK with it if Assange had used deadly force in the course of fleeing from his criminal abductors.
It is quite funny to see Russians become the "bad guy" again. After 30 years of not hearing a peep from Russia, some news agencies suddenly reported Russians took over our election and got Trump elected. Arabic country or even China would make more sense, but Russia? It's like a corny movie or video game plot.
"Red Donkey Dawn"
[rimshot]
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Remember to tip the veal and try the waitresses!
Mueller should know a lot about the Russians. After all, he's on their payroll.
On top of that, there are the revelations from the Strzok-Page emails (and the curiously-selective and conveniently-missing Strzok-Page emails surrounding certain critical dates) that compromises Mueller and the entire "Russian collusion" investigation, and the very legitimacy of the FBI and DoJ. This is big, bigger than Watergate in it's breadth, scope, and implications for the nation going forward.
They may have just went a bridge too far with this. People I talk to who normally never talk politics or about these sorts of government shenanigans have started spontaneously expressing anger and disgust with the FBI. Obama could be called to testify under oath in a Federal court if some of this stuff goes to trial. That should be interesting, to say the least.
The bottom line is that if you want Facebook (or anything, for that matter) to go away, please, for the love of God, do not regulate it like we have regulated tobacco.
You might want to reconsider that statement.
Tobacco use has been on a steady decline in the United States since the regulation of the tobacco industry was imposed.
True, but I still think he's right. The decline in smoking, in my experience as a former smoker, is far more the result of public education about the dangers of smoking as opposed to any laws or regulations on tobacco/cigarettes, combined with the rise of actually-effective aids to quitting like vaping.
As far as "regulating FB like cigarette companies", just no. First of all, this is backdoor regulation of speech, second, as has been pointed out in other posts and as history has shown us how such worked out in other areas, the regulations would end up protecting FB, et al, from competition and put fences around their market while not really doing much to address the problems they were created to address. However, TPTB would have a whole new set of levers to pull to shape & control public discourse.
I do not understand why he quit at all. If you are against something a committee is doing, why in the heck would you give up power by leaving the committee?
If the politician in question is actually in favor of a committee's actions but those making up his political base are not, then leaving the committee will provide political cover while not acting to oppose the committee.
Don't know if that's the case here, but there it is.
Every country with an intelligence agency is running espionage campaigns against every other country. That's what intelligence agencies do, and have done since the beginning of time.
Claiming the Russians got Trump elected is a cover for the clear corruption of the Clintons and the DNC. It's designed to keep you on the plantation, not convince Trump voters to vote Democrat.
The reason that all this Russian corruption (and a metric shit-ton of other government corruption/criminality) hardly ever results in anyone going to prison, Agencies/Departments/Bureaus/etc purged, is that *both sides are dirty as hell*. Both sides have taken money from and worked with Russians (and other foreign governments) for their own and their Party's/ideology's gain, and against the interests of the American people.
The DoJ, FBI, IRS, NSA, and likely more TLAs are corrupt and compromised. They have been reduced to political tools.
To those in power in both major Parties in the US, we are all cattle which they sell off to the highest bidders, nothing more. The "issues" are simply to keep people angry and distracted from realizing what those in power are actually doing to them, like a magician with sleight-of-hand....always watch the other hand, not the one they want you to watch.
I don't think that regulatory, legal or taxation landscape has changed much.
Compared to what, though? If you're just talking about the last 10 years or so, you're looking at it wrong. These sorts of things happen over decades. Almost the entire landscape in every area has changed radically since the 1990's, never mind the '70s or '60s. Bill Gates has been quoted as saying he could not start Microsoft today, and I believe Woz, and possibly Jobs also, made similar observations.
Government regulations grow at an almost exponential rate. They can't even tell you how many Federal Agencies, Departments, Bureaus, etc etc etc that even exist FFS, and most of them produce regulations with the force of Federal law!
I feel like I need to point out that there are people beyond Trump-supporters that acknowledge and condemn the corruption and collusion that happened within the DNC. Nice try, troll.
Oh, just hold on. I think it might get *way* more entertaining!
Investigation of FCC public comments on NN: -- Millions of taxpayer dollars.
Results of investigation clearly showing massive comment fraud from Russian sources...all pro-NN -- Priceless!
If that happens, the sound of the door being slammed shut on that investigation by the DNC will have seismometers hopping around the world!
"Chronicle is graduating out of Alphabet's X moonshot group and is now a standalone company under the Alphabet umbrella, just like Google," TechCrunch reports.
And so Umbrella Corp. was born in the year 2018, dooming humanity as we know it.
for a few months traffic shaping at scale requires hardware and they need to purchase and install it you'll pay for the hardware by upgrading your internet to the pornhub package afterwards
Strange that that never happened in all the years up to 2015 when NN went into effect.
Let me guess, Trump* will make it happen because Trump! amirite?
Strat
* No I did not vote for Trump, I dislike the man and disagree with some of his policies and stances, I believe he has few real core beliefs and principles, but I'm not irrational in my distaste or points of opposition.
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
Where/when the REAL innovation took place was when Woz, Jobs, and Gates were working out of garages.
Small businesses and startups are where real innovation occurred most of the time in the past. The problem is a Jobs, Gates, or Woz could not do the same today. A large reason why much "innovation" happens in megacorps today is that there are so many regulatory/legal/financial/taxation barriers in place that a random guy in a garage stands almost no chance even with a radically innovative idea with large potential. The lower rungs of the "ladder" have been sawed off by existing businesses using government taxation, legislation, and regulation to keep raising the barriers to entry for potential future competition.
Without serious competition, stagnation becomes inevitable.
On the other hand Japan is very successful, the world's third largest economy. It's still normal to employ people out of school until retirement there, and they tend to employ what the west would consider an excess of staff but which they consider assets.
In fact, companies that treat workers the way many western companies do, especially US companies in at-will states, are called "black companies" in Japan. They are regarded as basically scams, get-rich-quick schemes for their owners that you would avoid working for.
That all works for the Japanese because they are Japanese with a Japanese culture and society which are radically different than most other Western nations. It's the same sort of disconnect when comparing socialist Norwegian nation's economies, healthcare systems, etc, to the US. Totally different societies and cultures. Apples & oranges.
It's nonsensical to think that people would seek alternatives to the cheaper method that they're already using.
What the real concerns over vaping by the politicians are, are a loss of tax/licensing revenue from lost tobacco product sales, loss of government control over an aspect of people's lives, and the loss of those sweet, sweet, tobacco and healthcare industry political donations.
The point of these sorts of "studies" and "reports" is to spread FUD around vaping in the public's mind and to try to bring public opinion around such that enacting bans or heavy regulation on vaping won't lose the politicians too much in public support.
The government stands to lose money and control, the healthcare industry has all the profit from treating smoking-related diseases at risk, and of course the tobacco companies themselves stand to lose huge amounts. None of those people actually care about smokers having an effective way of quitting tobacco and avoiding the negative health effects nor do they have any financial/political motives to do so. Just the opposite in fact, if you follow the money.
Well, actually educating the populace, especially in 'critical thinking' skills so they may do an effective job of parsing "news" for themselves, is right out, as neither side wants that!
That kind of reckless action could bring about the end of FB and Twitter, et al, as well as put the vast majority of elected officials out of office and destroy both major US political parties. Oh, the humanity!
...to not know that Democrats not only aren't left, they're hard-core right wingers frequently more extreme than the GOP?
It all depends on the perspective of the observer. To probably the vast majority in the EU, both US political Partys are far-Right. The Democrats in the US tried to move the Overton Window too far, too fast, and the result was a backlash that got us Trump (I would have preferred Cruz or maybe Paul).
"Right" and "Left" are rather meaningless terms from the perspective of the regular citizen. One can picture it as a diagram using a pair of horizontal parallel lines resembling train tracks, with one "rail" representing the Right and the other the "Left", with Anarchy at one end of the scale and Total Tyranny at the other.
How authoritarian any system may be is a much more practical metric from the individulal's perspective. Collectivist forms like Socialism, Communism, and Fascism all share the common trait of a strong centralized command and control design which, by their very nature, must be more authoritarian.
If you dig into the details of the current California budget and look at the cash flows for roads, schools, medical care, and a couple of other things, what you find is a huge amount of money transferred from the coastal areas that would be in one new state to the rural areas that would be in the other. This is not unusual; it happens in a lot of states. (I used to do that kind of study professionally.)
Split the way it's drawn, the rural need for subsidies would remain largely unchanged, but the burden to provide the money would fall solely on the few cities (San Jose, San Diego) and their suburbs that got stuck in the rural state. Given a choice after they see a draft budget, San Jose and San Diego are going to scream about being included in the rural state.
It may not be as bad as it looks at first glance. One big factor is that a lot of money being spent in the rural areas are for things the rural areas never wanted but were forced to accept, along with the money spent to detect violations and enforce them and bureaucracy to manage it all. L.A. for instance enforces (often quite selectively) habitation/housing/property standards and regulations meant for urban/suburban areas many miles out into the desert.
That's just a single example. It's not like conservatives are going to want as much from government as the progressives in the coastal regions.
That's a lot of money going to those rural areas that would end while making the lives of those in those areas easier.
There's another factor also, and that's a change in how much wealth those rural areas produce. Having less regulation and taxation which increase opportunity costs would attract new investment and allow for more entrepreneurship to occur.
I'm not saying that it would be smooth sailing or that there would not be serious problems especially in the short term, but there are also exciting possibilities as well.
These things always have multidimensional results and consequences on many levels, some good and some bad.
Would it work out on balance good or bad? Honestly, hell if I know. Nobody else knows either, if they're being honest.
The people who would have the strongest motivation to make the right choices are those it directly affects, so I believe they should be recognized as having the strongest voice in making that choice, but with the checks and balances that our system is built around.
Nobody wants some wild-eyed extremists flooding into someplace and declaring their own State, but the US has changed in almost 250 years and is changing, and more rapidly than ever. It only makes sense to use the mechanisms in place to help address some of those changes where needed.
The outrage and apoplexy about the Damore situation is on the left? Seriously?
Yes, I remember all the calls for Damore to be fired and all the angry screeds from conservative groups and others on the Right and the REEEE!! that echoed across all the conservative/Right-leaning blogs, social media, networks, etc...Oh, wait...
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
The level of outrage generated by Damore's memo is not just about Google and their hiring practices, the memo pokes huge holes in the group/identity politics used by the Left. That's why the outrage is so out of proportion and shrill to the point of apoplexy on the Left and why they want Damore pilloried.
Anyone who talks about "Judeo-Christian morals" should be given a stack of history books and then flogged every hour until they've read them all.
I've read stacks of history books, that's why I know and understand that the West and the US in particular base most of their values around Judeo-Christian morals and values.
As far as my understanding goes, the primary problem using large scale solar isn't power output (you'd just use more panels), but transport costs. More panels means a larger spacecraft, while a relatively smaller reactor can be made to fit.
It's not so much a matter of the space something takes up, it's the mass.
They are developing machines that "extrude" for lack of a more descriptive term, structural beams, conduit, etc etc. With computer modeling and design we can also design surprisingly complex structures to fold like super-origami into incredibly small relative sizes. A quick search brings up some pretty amazing stuff.
We'd want to fabricate as much of what we take to Mars in Earth or Moon orbit or one of the orbital trojan points, and use as much lunar or asteroid materials as possible to avoid the costs of lifting it out of Earth's gravity well.
Asteroid miner, twenty-forty-niner!
There's another possibility on the horizon as well. The so-called "Singularity" where human and machine merge. We may eventually end up being able to explore space and colonize other world without living in putrid sacks of protoplasm (thanks Ren & Stimpy!) at all. One would not travel *in* a ship, one would *be* the ship!
Seriously, the really dangerous stuff won't last centuries.
But creating fears through propaganda and misinformation among the populace of the possibility of thousands of years of hard radiation where only a few sickly mutant things ooze about is much more effective at motivating blocs of votes to back certain political/ideological agendas which may not even actually have any direct interest in green agendas other than as a political tool to further their own agendas.
Someone should ask them; 'Do you even periodic table, Bro?"
Probably even worse in your eyes; I'm a pragmatic small-"L" libertarian and am rather 'constructionist' in my view of the US Constitution.
Simply that the country is controlled by Christians who are anti-science.
And I would dispute both that the US is controlled by Christians in this day and age, and that they are "anti-science" on the whole. Unless of course you mean that believing in a supreme being is itself anti-science, but that is an entirely different discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
It was self defense. The papers and badges are bullshit. He was running from kidnappers with guns.
That's pretty much my thought of it. Assange was fleeing from State-sponsored kidnappers acting on behalf of the corrupt US Oligarchy. I would even be OK with it if Assange had used deadly force in the course of fleeing from his criminal abductors.
Strat
It is quite funny to see Russians become the "bad guy" again. After 30 years of not hearing a peep from Russia, some news agencies suddenly reported Russians took over our election and got Trump elected. Arabic country or even China would make more sense, but Russia? It's like a corny movie or video game plot.
"Red Donkey Dawn"
[rimshot]
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Remember to tip the veal and try the waitresses!
Strat
Mueller should know a lot about the Russians. After all, he's on their payroll.
On top of that, there are the revelations from the Strzok-Page emails (and the curiously-selective and conveniently-missing Strzok-Page emails surrounding certain critical dates) that compromises Mueller and the entire "Russian collusion" investigation, and the very legitimacy of the FBI and DoJ. This is big, bigger than Watergate in it's breadth, scope, and implications for the nation going forward.
They may have just went a bridge too far with this. People I talk to who normally never talk politics or about these sorts of government shenanigans have started spontaneously expressing anger and disgust with the FBI. Obama could be called to testify under oath in a Federal court if some of this stuff goes to trial. That should be interesting, to say the least.
Strat
True, but I still think he's right. The decline in smoking, in my experience as a former smoker, is far more the result of public education about the dangers of smoking as opposed to any laws or regulations on tobacco/cigarettes, combined with the rise of actually-effective aids to quitting like vaping.
As far as "regulating FB like cigarette companies", just no. First of all, this is backdoor regulation of speech, second, as has been pointed out in other posts and as history has shown us how such worked out in other areas, the regulations would end up protecting FB, et al, from competition and put fences around their market while not really doing much to address the problems they were created to address. However, TPTB would have a whole new set of levers to pull to shape & control public discourse.
Strat
I do not understand why he quit at all. If you are against something a committee is doing, why in the heck would you give up power by leaving the committee?
If the politician in question is actually in favor of a committee's actions but those making up his political base are not, then leaving the committee will provide political cover while not acting to oppose the committee.
Don't know if that's the case here, but there it is.
Strat
Every country with an intelligence agency is running espionage campaigns against every other country. That's what intelligence agencies do, and have done since the beginning of time.
Claiming the Russians got Trump elected is a cover for the clear corruption of the Clintons and the DNC. It's designed to keep you on the plantation, not convince Trump voters to vote Democrat.
The reason that all this Russian corruption (and a metric shit-ton of other government corruption/criminality) hardly ever results in anyone going to prison, Agencies/Departments/Bureaus/etc purged, is that *both sides are dirty as hell*. Both sides have taken money from and worked with Russians (and other foreign governments) for their own and their Party's/ideology's gain, and against the interests of the American people.
The DoJ, FBI, IRS, NSA, and likely more TLAs are corrupt and compromised. They have been reduced to political tools.
To those in power in both major Parties in the US, we are all cattle which they sell off to the highest bidders, nothing more. The "issues" are simply to keep people angry and distracted from realizing what those in power are actually doing to them, like a magician with sleight-of-hand....always watch the other hand, not the one they want you to watch.
Strat
I don't think that regulatory, legal or taxation landscape has changed much.
Compared to what, though? If you're just talking about the last 10 years or so, you're looking at it wrong. These sorts of things happen over decades. Almost the entire landscape in every area has changed radically since the 1990's, never mind the '70s or '60s. Bill Gates has been quoted as saying he could not start Microsoft today, and I believe Woz, and possibly Jobs also, made similar observations.
Government regulations grow at an almost exponential rate. They can't even tell you how many Federal Agencies, Departments, Bureaus, etc etc etc that even exist FFS, and most of them produce regulations with the force of Federal law!
Strat
I feel like I need to point out that there are people beyond Trump-supporters that acknowledge and condemn the corruption and collusion that happened within the DNC. Nice try, troll.
Oh, just hold on. I think it might get *way* more entertaining!
Investigation of FCC public comments on NN: -- Millions of taxpayer dollars.
Results of investigation clearly showing massive comment fraud from Russian sources...all pro-NN -- Priceless!
If that happens, the sound of the door being slammed shut on that investigation by the DNC will have seismometers hopping around the world!
Strat
"Chronicle is graduating out of Alphabet's X moonshot group and is now a standalone company under the Alphabet umbrella, just like Google," TechCrunch reports.
And so Umbrella Corp. was born in the year 2018, dooming humanity as we know it.
Strat
Yeap, [wired.com] totally [venturebeat.com] didn't [cnet.com] happen. [consumerist.com] ISPs [slate.com] never [arstechnica.com] blocked [wired.com] or [thetyee.ca] throttled [wired.com] anything. [freepress.net]
But, guess what?
All those things ended quickly without requiring NN, and especially not requiring ISPs be placed under Title-II.
It's almost like NN is a solution in search of a problem, or simply an excuse to place ISPs under Title-II.
Or both.
Strat
And there are also plenty of us that call bullshit on the very idea of "corruption and collusion" within the DNC.
Yes, you are what we call "the accused" and sit at the table with the defense lawyers while hiding behind your 5th.Amendment rights.
Right, Lois?
Strat
for a few months
traffic shaping at scale requires hardware and they need to purchase and install it
you'll pay for the hardware by upgrading your internet to the pornhub package afterwards
Strange that that never happened in all the years up to 2015 when NN went into effect.
Let me guess, Trump* will make it happen because Trump! amirite?
Strat
* No I did not vote for Trump, I dislike the man and disagree with some of his policies and stances, I believe he has few real core beliefs and principles, but I'm not irrational in my distaste or points of opposition.
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
Where/when the REAL innovation took place was when Woz, Jobs, and Gates were working out of garages.
Small businesses and startups are where real innovation occurred most of the time in the past. The problem is a Jobs, Gates, or Woz could not do the same today. A large reason why much "innovation" happens in megacorps today is that there are so many regulatory/legal/financial/taxation barriers in place that a random guy in a garage stands almost no chance even with a radically innovative idea with large potential. The lower rungs of the "ladder" have been sawed off by existing businesses using government taxation, legislation, and regulation to keep raising the barriers to entry for potential future competition.
Without serious competition, stagnation becomes inevitable.
Strat
On the other hand Japan is very successful, the world's third largest economy. It's still normal to employ people out of school until retirement there, and they tend to employ what the west would consider an excess of staff but which they consider assets.
In fact, companies that treat workers the way many western companies do, especially US companies in at-will states, are called "black companies" in Japan. They are regarded as basically scams, get-rich-quick schemes for their owners that you would avoid working for.
That all works for the Japanese because they are Japanese with a Japanese culture and society which are radically different than most other Western nations. It's the same sort of disconnect when comparing socialist Norwegian nation's economies, healthcare systems, etc, to the US. Totally different societies and cultures. Apples & oranges.
Strat
It's nonsensical to think that people would seek alternatives to the cheaper method that they're already using.
What the real concerns over vaping by the politicians are, are a loss of tax/licensing revenue from lost tobacco product sales, loss of government control over an aspect of people's lives, and the loss of those sweet, sweet, tobacco and healthcare industry political donations.
The point of these sorts of "studies" and "reports" is to spread FUD around vaping in the public's mind and to try to bring public opinion around such that enacting bans or heavy regulation on vaping won't lose the politicians too much in public support.
The government stands to lose money and control, the healthcare industry has all the profit from treating smoking-related diseases at risk, and of course the tobacco companies themselves stand to lose huge amounts. None of those people actually care about smokers having an effective way of quitting tobacco and avoiding the negative health effects nor do they have any financial/political motives to do so. Just the opposite in fact, if you follow the money.
Strat
"There's only one thing to fix about "fake news""
The readers.
Well, actually educating the populace, especially in 'critical thinking' skills so they may do an effective job of parsing "news" for themselves, is right out, as neither side wants that!
That kind of reckless action could bring about the end of FB and Twitter, et al, as well as put the vast majority of elected officials out of office and destroy both major US political parties. Oh, the humanity!
Strat
...to not know that Democrats not only aren't left, they're hard-core right wingers frequently more extreme than the GOP?
It all depends on the perspective of the observer. To probably the vast majority in the EU, both US political Partys are far-Right. The Democrats in the US tried to move the Overton Window too far, too fast, and the result was a backlash that got us Trump (I would have preferred Cruz or maybe Paul).
"Right" and "Left" are rather meaningless terms from the perspective of the regular citizen. One can picture it as a diagram using a pair of horizontal parallel lines resembling train tracks, with one "rail" representing the Right and the other the "Left", with Anarchy at one end of the scale and Total Tyranny at the other.
How authoritarian any system may be is a much more practical metric from the individulal's perspective. Collectivist forms like Socialism, Communism, and Fascism all share the common trait of a strong centralized command and control design which, by their very nature, must be more authoritarian.
Strat
If you dig into the details of the current California budget and look at the cash flows for roads, schools, medical care, and a couple of other things, what you find is a huge amount of money transferred from the coastal areas that would be in one new state to the rural areas that would be in the other. This is not unusual; it happens in a lot of states. (I used to do that kind of study professionally.)
Split the way it's drawn, the rural need for subsidies would remain largely unchanged, but the burden to provide the money would fall solely on the few cities (San Jose, San Diego) and their suburbs that got stuck in the rural state. Given a choice after they see a draft budget, San Jose and San Diego are going to scream about being included in the rural state.
It may not be as bad as it looks at first glance. One big factor is that a lot of money being spent in the rural areas are for things the rural areas never wanted but were forced to accept, along with the money spent to detect violations and enforce them and bureaucracy to manage it all. L.A. for instance enforces (often quite selectively) habitation/housing/property standards and regulations meant for urban/suburban areas many miles out into the desert.
That's just a single example. It's not like conservatives are going to want as much from government as the progressives in the coastal regions.
That's a lot of money going to those rural areas that would end while making the lives of those in those areas easier.
There's another factor also, and that's a change in how much wealth those rural areas produce. Having less regulation and taxation which increase opportunity costs would attract new investment and allow for more entrepreneurship to occur.
I'm not saying that it would be smooth sailing or that there would not be serious problems especially in the short term, but there are also exciting possibilities as well.
These things always have multidimensional results and consequences on many levels, some good and some bad.
Would it work out on balance good or bad? Honestly, hell if I know. Nobody else knows either, if they're being honest.
The people who would have the strongest motivation to make the right choices are those it directly affects, so I believe they should be recognized as having the strongest voice in making that choice, but with the checks and balances that our system is built around.
Nobody wants some wild-eyed extremists flooding into someplace and declaring their own State, but the US has changed in almost 250 years and is changing, and more rapidly than ever. It only makes sense to use the mechanisms in place to help address some of those changes where needed.
Strat
FTFFY YW HTH
HAND
Strat
The outrage and apoplexy about the Damore situation is on the left? Seriously?
Yes, I remember all the calls for Damore to be fired and all the angry screeds from conservative groups and others on the Right and the REEEE!! that echoed across all the conservative/Right-leaning blogs, social media, networks, etc...Oh, wait...
Strat
Of course it was political. How stupid do they think we are?
The level of outrage generated by Damore's memo is not just about Google and their hiring practices, the memo pokes huge holes in the group/identity politics used by the Left. That's why the outrage is so out of proportion and shrill to the point of apoplexy on the Left and why they want Damore pilloried.
Strat
Anyone who talks about "Judeo-Christian morals" should be given a stack of history books and then flogged every hour until they've read them all.
I've read stacks of history books, that's why I know and understand that the West and the US in particular base most of their values around Judeo-Christian morals and values.
You should try reading one sometime.
Strat
As far as my understanding goes, the primary problem using large scale solar isn't power output (you'd just use more panels), but transport costs. More panels means a larger spacecraft, while a relatively smaller reactor can be made to fit.
It's not so much a matter of the space something takes up, it's the mass.
They are developing machines that "extrude" for lack of a more descriptive term, structural beams, conduit, etc etc. With computer modeling and design we can also design surprisingly complex structures to fold like super-origami into incredibly small relative sizes. A quick search brings up some pretty amazing stuff.
We'd want to fabricate as much of what we take to Mars in Earth or Moon orbit or one of the orbital trojan points, and use as much lunar or asteroid materials as possible to avoid the costs of lifting it out of Earth's gravity well.
Asteroid miner, twenty-forty-niner!
There's another possibility on the horizon as well. The so-called "Singularity" where human and machine merge. We may eventually end up being able to explore space and colonize other world without
living in putrid sacks of protoplasm (thanks Ren & Stimpy!) at all. One would not travel *in* a ship, one would *be* the ship!
Strat
Seriously, the really dangerous stuff won't last centuries.
But creating fears through propaganda and misinformation among the populace of the possibility of thousands of years of hard radiation where only a few sickly mutant things ooze about is much more effective at motivating blocs of votes to back certain political/ideological agendas which may not even actually have any direct interest in green agendas other than as a political tool to further their own agendas.
Someone should ask them; 'Do you even periodic table, Bro?"
Strat
Your signature suggests you are a conservative. I
Probably even worse in your eyes; I'm a pragmatic small-"L" libertarian and am rather 'constructionist' in my view of the US Constitution.
Simply that the country is controlled by Christians who are anti-science.
And I would dispute both that the US is controlled by Christians in this day and age, and that they are "anti-science" on the whole. Unless of course you mean that believing in a supreme being is itself anti-science, but that is an entirely different discussion.
Strat