People like Judge Faith Hochberg ignore the obvious fact that Silicon Valley would not exist without the Midwestern middle class WASPs. As Tom Wolfe documents in his Forbes article: Robert Noyce and His Congregation,[August 25, 1997] virtually all of the essential inventions upon which Silicon Valley was founded were created by the much-derided, non-"vibrant", "white-bread", "middle class" of "fly-over country".
Last month I asked the aging Bob Johnsonâ"former CTO of Burroughs Corporation when it was a leading mainframe company in Minneapolis where he developed the magnetic ink you see on the bottom of your checksâ"what he thought caused the loss of the Midwestern high tech leadership to the coasts, and he said it was the financial dominance of the coasts.
That squares with what I observed while at Control Data Corporation/Cray Research, Inc.
The reason Bill Norris and Seymour Cray were able to start CDC thence Cray Research was because they violated SEC regs and went around selling stock at PTA meetings, making a lot of middle class people retire very comfortably. My late father bought some Cray stock early on which helped greatly with his retirement.
When I was at CDC in Arden Hills, MN attempting to deploy the mass market version of the PLATO network with Internet-like capabilities (the system that Ray Ozzie (Bill Gates' replacement at Microsoft) cut his teeth on) in 1980 the primary resistance was from a middle management that, due to the financial press' hostility toward Norris's vision of a society disintermediated by computer networking, small high-tech farms and locally produced and consumed essentialsâ"had itself grown hostile to Norris.
My proposed solution is simple to state but will perhaps require a war to institute:
Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets, assessed at their in-place liquidation value, at the risk free interest rate (which according to modern portfolio theory is the short-term US Treasury rate) so as to extract all economic rents from the private sector, and then, to prevent public sector rent-seeking in pork-barrel politics, disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens, as the beneficiaries of the land-trust called the United States.
That will not only stop the vicious centralization of power in the private and public sectors, but it will clarify the role of immigrationâ"it is a dilution of the benefits intended for the Posterity of the Founders of the land trust called The United States of America.
'NASA's plans to launch new manned missions to the International Space Station three years after the space shuttle retires in 2010 aren't panning out.'
'Officials at the space agency said Monday that they will still hold to their word that the Constellation program--a mission of the newly developed Ares 1 rocket and Orion crew capsule to the ISS--will happen by March 2015, five years after the space shuttle program shuts down. But a previous goal of an early launch in 2013 has now been moved to 2014 because of budget constraints. NASA officials are also leaving wiggle room there.'
The best way to invoke creative capitalism is to remove the subsidy of property rights inherent in any civilization that taxes economic activity rather than property rights.
You just assess assets at their in place liquidation value and then tax net assets at the short-term treasury rate. (Ideally, you get rid of public choice rent seeking by distributing the revenue to the citizens in a dividend, rather than making them politic for a slice of government pork.)
Gates won't promote this because this would fix the bug in civilization that made him the world's richest man, and he can't admit even to himself that his wealth wasn't fairly earned.
Well, the poor Navajo Nation has lost its internet access, eh? Sounds like a step forward for human rights! Everyone knows that nationlism is the cause of genocide...
Because while growing a substantial amount of pot is legal in Mendocino and Sonoma County under state law, it's highly illegal under federal law and would be grounds for a federal raid
Doesn't the 10th Amendment prohibit such federal laws?
I've never seen a UFO, ghosts, nor even heard voices in my head -- except for one time 14 years ago:
After a stint doing politics, testifying before Congress, and successfully getting a law put on the books (PL101-611) forcing NASA to procure launch services from the private sector, I had gotten interested in the tax system as a source of market failures in high technology investment and, as a consequence, was researching some fringe ideas related to the income tax. So I ordered the two volume book "The Law That Never Was" by Bill Benson via mail. Literallyl, the very I sat down to read the book, I heard, quietly but quite distinctly a female voice say just the 3 words: "It's too late."
It was quite an experience, unique in my life.
When I mentioned it to a friend who was somewhat well connected politically, he said that he had heard of microwave devices that could project sounds into people's heads, and that this seemed like a good candidate for such a use.
I don't know, but it sure was spooky -- and keep in mind it was a one time event some time ago.
I had done work for secret government projects in secured facilities with electromagnetic shielding but it was always with the understanding that there were ways of gathering data both passively and actively from within such facilities via microwaves as well as other frequencies. It really never occurred to me there might be some further purposes to such shielding. Now I'm not so sure.
You have to wonder how many of the neocons are literally hearing "the voice of God"...
If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions, memoizations, tablings and/or materialized views similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded hence time-optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
It may turn out that due the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, the growth of reward may need ultimatelyto go exponential but the principle remains true.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Following common usage, the framers of the Second Amendment used the phrase "bear arms" to refer to possession of weapons for military use... The best evidence for the Second Amendment meaning of "bear arms" is in the original draft of the Amendment proposed in the First Congress by James Madison: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
In... the conscientious objector provision, Madison clearly used the phrase "bearing arms" to refer solely to the possession of weapons for military use...
Madison's use of the phrase "bear arms" to refer to military activities is echoed in other contemporary usages... Records of debates in the Continental and U.S. Congresses between 1774 and 1821 [include] 30 uses of the phrase "bear arms" or "bearing arms" (other than in discussing the proposed Second Amendment); in every single one of these uses, the phrase has an unambiguously military meaning...
Peter Turney (whose programs have achieved human level performance on the SAT verbal analogy test) and I have been discussing an experimental test of Ockham's Razor in AI. This is a question that is both fundamentally important and experimentally tractable.
I recommend you read our discussion of an experiment to test Ockham's Razor (and related theories such as MDL, algorithmic probability...).
I had queried: Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
To which "entropy" responds:
The evolution of life doesn't care about optimizations for growth. Evolution does not seek to form a more perfect creature. Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
First, when talking about algae, "growth" is "reproduction". Second, when I said "opportunity to evolve optimizations" I'm speaking about the reproductive opportunities of algae. In pioneering species those opportunities are primarily at the unpopulated frontier rather than at the area populated by algae grazers (where toxins may have evolved in an evolutionary arms race).
Now you may be claiming that the "toxins" did not evolve in an arms race against algae grazers -- that they are merely pollution, but if that is the case it seems there is an awful lot of food begging to be eaten by the first algae grazer to become tolerant of the pollution. And remember, algae -- hence their blooms -- have been around a very very long time. No need to postulate an intelligent designer here.
Finally the turbidity argument is specious: If you have the elements of life, turbidity is no barrier to it given evolutionary time.
No, something else is going on here.
The best I've heard from the peanut gallery so far is that much of the oxygen is produced near the surface and simply ends up going into the atmosphere (sometimes almost immediately as bubbles) and the rest is consumed on a daily basis by the algae itself, when the algae are in a different -- oxygen consuming -- phase of their metabolism.
I don't know if this is true but it sounds reasonable, unlike your argument.
I've seen many references to "the cause" of oceanic "dead zones" being nutrients (mainly agricultural run-off of chemically active nitrogen) but this seems paradoxical:
Yes I know the story: nutrients create algae blooms which then die and decay thereby robbing the ocean of oxygen.
What I'm referring to as a seeming "paradox" is not only the fact that the base of the food chain is dramatically expanded by nutrients -- but that the organisms making up this foundation produce _oxygen_ from photosynthesis supporting algae grazers with both food _and_ oxygen.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Virtually all of the articles I've read on hypoxic waters and dead zones fail to address this paradox. I've only read one paper that mentioned even an _hypothesis_ of how algae grazers fail to flourish -- referring to algae species that protect themselves with toxins. But this doesn't ring true: Why would the most pioneering of algae species be the most protective of themselves when there is so much opportunity to evolve optimizations for growth rather than defense against grazers?
Of course! It is no more valid for a private entity to commit fraud or default on contract than it is for the government to impose "anti-discrimination" policies on private entities. In the former, it is incumbent on the government to disband the private entity, and in the latter it is incumbent on the private entities so violated to disband the government.
It is the _job_ of insurance companies to predict risk and adjust rates accordingly. If there is some social policy that says "to each according to his needs" then the government should find some way to achieve this other than imposing irrational laws on private industry.
Personally, as someone who has to carry the private burden of others who have genetic maladays, its great to have something like this to take advantage of, but it as a citizen, I cannot support the policy of "nondiscrimination" imposed on private parties in any way shape or form. I will avail myself of the advantages of this policy as long as the government is ridiculous enough to impose such requirements on private parties but I will not support any candidate who supports policies like this and I will speak out against them whenever I have the opportunity, as I do here now.
A libertarian world would reach an equilibrium where there were a number of human ecologies occupying land held in trust for the posterity of the founders of the respective ecologies. Within each such land trust a way of life compatible with its ecology would be pursued. They would tend to be exclusive of other ways of life due to interdependencies within the ecology. And while they will have varying degrees of population exchange with other human ecologies, all will be partially inbred to varying degrees -- coevolving, over the span of generations, genetic as well as cultural adaptations. In more traditional terms, these land trusts are known as 'nations' -- natives of a human ecology deriving a way of life from the nature of their land's ecology. Many of these human ecologies would have property rights upheld within them to varying degrees, just as extended families will tend to have varying degrees of reciprocal vs kin altruism governing their family's affairs -- varying degrees of debt/bankruptcy forgiveness, etc.
The reason libertarianism reaches this equilibrium, of land trusts that control entry of others to their land, is the same reason anyone controls entry of others to their land: To prevent damage -- in this case damage to the human ecology and possibly the natural ecology of the land trust. A shallow libertarian answer to such ecological concerns is reliance on Tort law to remediate ecological damage resulting from open borders. This is inadequate, not just because "an ounce of prevention", "a stitch in time", etc., but because the jury in a tort case is required to not only understand the plantiff's causal hypothesis of damage to his ecology, but to agree with it. Ecological interactions are highly complex and teasing apart causation is very difficult, frequently requiring experimental controls. If it were easy, then central planning of a "scientific state" would work much better than it does. No -- we are mere humans left adrift in a mysterious world with our own views on how the world operates at the level of human ecologies -- on how cause and effect are related. We may even see the same ecological correlations but then we are all subject not only to the fact that correlation doesn't imply causation, but to what statisticians call "the ecological fallacy" which prevents us from drawing strong inferences merely from observing ecological correlations -- assuming we can even gather the data.
This is why Federalism must allow voluntary internal controls on migration: the very limits on human knowledge in the face of nature demand that our laboratory of the States -- of human ecologies -- of nations -- have borders protecting the integrity of experimental controls while maintaining the fundamental ethical requirement that experimentation on human subjects must be by mutual consent.
Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 10:28 AM in
There is something of a trade off between defense/enforcement spending and spending on relocation. For example, if your jurisdiction makes it easy for people to move to another, more compatible, jurisdiction, then the motives for force and fraud are reduced.
Seasteads are a great way to protect human rights because they protect the most fundamental human right, the one from which all others are derived: The right to vote with your feet.
If all you do is ensure that anyone can leave any time they want, then you have only one remaining ingredient to support this most fundamental human right:
Somewhere to go.
With the current, very limited, number of territories world-wide, the choices available to refugees is limited not only by the number of territories that would welcome them, but by the absolute number of territories.
Increase the baseline number of territories and freedom reigns.
The problem with current conceptions of "human rights" is they are enumerated in some sort of unstructured laundry list which results in the entire edifice crumbling under stress. Its tragic because the more you "feel" various things are "rights" -- the more "rights" you put on your wishful-thinking-list, the more "righteous" you sound to the intellectually handicapped. This creates a terrible situation for humanity -- where facades of "human rights" displace the need for territory -- the need for carrying capacity -- that forms the real foundation of life hence humanity hence their rights.
I've written up some thoughts on the nuances of a more rationally architected system supporting human rights in Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology that allows jurisdictions to become as "tyrannical" as they want over their territory, so long as they let people leave at will and support the creation of carrying capacity for the formation of volulntary association.
Seasteading is an important potential in this direction.
Unfortunately, Google's Patri Friedman, while far better than most, is indulging in more of the sloppy thinking that endangers human rights when he says things like "You can change your government without having to leave your house" or implies the assumption that seasteading jurisdictions will not exclude immigrants at their whim. We live in a physical universe with ecologies that operate in space. Attempting to deny spatial structure because you find it inconvenient or even "oppressive" is simply fantasy.
I have family members who are oppressed by this heinous cult of crypto-Nazis so let me tell you what's really going on here:
Its obvious from reading the fucking article that the Mormons are marketing themselves by creating this faux "controversy" over their "censorship" of this "hideous secret" of theirs -- a "secret" which basically extols 1950s middle class Christian morality. This, they know, will appeal to a large number of the readers of their "secret" document who are closet conservatives. These closet conservatives would, of course, never admit in a million years that they want to return to the values of the 1950s -- that dark American Nightmare -- and so they pretend to be "outraged" at this "oppressive cult" as they pass the links around to each other providing more converts than a BYU graduating class going on their two year missions.
Don't fall for it guys!
Stop sending around this "news" about the "censorship" of the Mormon Nazi-boyz. You have been pwn3d!
PL 101-611, the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, has required NASA to do this for the last 18 years.
Tragically there was an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that would have been followed through to space industrialization had the launch service industry enjoyed the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:
* (c) Private enterprise; access; competition
In order to facilitate this development and to provide for the widest possible participation by private enterprise, United States participation in the global system shall be in the form of a private corporation, subject to appropriate governmental regulation. It is the intent of Congress that all authorized users shall have nondiscriminatory access to the system; that maximum competition be maintained in the provision of equipment and services utilized by the system; that the corporation created under this chapter be so organized and operated as to maintain and strengthen competition in the provision of communications services to the public; and that the activities of the corporation created under this chapter and of the persons or companies participating in the ownership of the corporation shall be consistent with the Federal antitrust laws.
The fact that the global economic paradigm didn't follow the Club of Rome model exactly doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the very real urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
If you think of anything nice to say about some group or other then the government should throw your ass in prison to be gang-raped until you are nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Last month I asked the aging Bob Johnsonâ"former CTO of Burroughs Corporation when it was a leading mainframe company in Minneapolis where he developed the magnetic ink you see on the bottom of your checksâ"what he thought caused the loss of the Midwestern high tech leadership to the coasts, and he said it was the financial dominance of the coasts.
That squares with what I observed while at Control Data Corporation/Cray Research, Inc.
The reason Bill Norris and Seymour Cray were able to start CDC thence Cray Research was because they violated SEC regs and went around selling stock at PTA meetings, making a lot of middle class people retire very comfortably. My late father bought some Cray stock early on which helped greatly with his retirement.
When I was at CDC in Arden Hills, MN attempting to deploy the mass market version of the PLATO network with Internet-like capabilities (the system that Ray Ozzie (Bill Gates' replacement at Microsoft) cut his teeth on) in 1980 the primary resistance was from a middle management that, due to the financial press' hostility toward Norris's vision of a society disintermediated by computer networking, small high-tech farms and locally produced and consumed essentialsâ"had itself grown hostile to Norris.
My proposed solution is simple to state but will perhaps require a war to institute:
Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets, assessed at their in-place liquidation value, at the risk free interest rate (which according to modern portfolio theory is the short-term US Treasury rate) so as to extract all economic rents from the private sector, and then, to prevent public sector rent-seeking in pork-barrel politics, disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens, as the beneficiaries of the land-trust called the United States.
That will not only stop the vicious centralization of power in the private and public sectors, but it will clarify the role of immigrationâ"it is a dilution of the benefits intended for the Posterity of the Founders of the land trust called The United States of America.
'Officials at the space agency said Monday that they will still hold to their word that the Constellation program--a mission of the newly developed Ares 1 rocket and Orion crew capsule to the ISS--will happen by March 2015, five years after the space shuttle program shuts down. But a previous goal of an early launch in 2013 has now been moved to 2014 because of budget constraints. NASA officials are also leaving wiggle room there.'
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10015009-76.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Hard to believe those culturally insensitive crackers managed to go from zero to the Moon in eight years using 1960s technology...
You just assess assets at their in place liquidation value and then tax net assets at the short-term treasury rate. (Ideally, you get rid of public choice rent seeking by distributing the revenue to the citizens in a dividend, rather than making them politic for a slice of government pork.)
Gates won't promote this because this would fix the bug in civilization that made him the world's richest man, and he can't admit even to himself that his wealth wasn't fairly earned.
Well, the poor Navajo Nation has lost its internet access, eh? Sounds like a step forward for human rights! Everyone knows that nationlism is the cause of genocide...
Doesn't the 10th Amendment prohibit such federal laws?
After a stint doing politics, testifying before Congress, and successfully getting a law put on the books (PL101-611) forcing NASA to procure launch services from the private sector, I had gotten interested in the tax system as a source of market failures in high technology investment and, as a consequence, was researching some fringe ideas related to the income tax. So I ordered the two volume book "The Law That Never Was" by Bill Benson via mail. Literallyl, the very I sat down to read the book, I heard, quietly but quite distinctly a female voice say just the 3 words: "It's too late."
It was quite an experience, unique in my life.
When I mentioned it to a friend who was somewhat well connected politically, he said that he had heard of microwave devices that could project sounds into people's heads, and that this seemed like a good candidate for such a use.
I don't know, but it sure was spooky -- and keep in mind it was a one time event some time ago. I had done work for secret government projects in secured facilities with electromagnetic shielding but it was always with the understanding that there were ways of gathering data both passively and actively from within such facilities via microwaves as well as other frequencies. It really never occurred to me there might be some further purposes to such shielding. Now I'm not so sure. You have to wonder how many of the neocons are literally hearing "the voice of God"...
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions, memoizations, tablings and/or materialized views similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded hence time-optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
It may turn out that due the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, the growth of reward may need ultimatelyto go exponential but the principle remains true.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
At what point does centralizing and/or delegating operational authority over so much of our lives become a dangerous practice of its own?
At the point when people of questionable character are attracted to power so much that they might engage in questionable behavior to grab it.
Source: The Second Amendment Foundation
Peter Turney (whose programs have achieved human level performance on the SAT verbal analogy test) and I have been discussing an experimental test of Ockham's Razor in AI. This is a question that is both fundamentally important and experimentally tractable.
I recommend you read our discussion of an experiment to test Ockham's Razor (and related theories such as MDL, algorithmic probability...).
Clearly, the really important question to stockholders is whether gays write more flamboyant code.
I had queried: Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
To which "entropy" responds:
The evolution of life doesn't care about optimizations for growth. Evolution does not seek to form a more perfect creature. Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
First, when talking about algae, "growth" is "reproduction". Second, when I said "opportunity to evolve optimizations" I'm speaking about the reproductive opportunities of algae. In pioneering species those opportunities are primarily at the unpopulated frontier rather than at the area populated by algae grazers (where toxins may have evolved in an evolutionary arms race).
Now you may be claiming that the "toxins" did not evolve in an arms race against algae grazers -- that they are merely pollution, but if that is the case it seems there is an awful lot of food begging to be eaten by the first algae grazer to become tolerant of the pollution. And remember, algae -- hence their blooms -- have been around a very very long time. No need to postulate an intelligent designer here.
Finally the turbidity argument is specious: If you have the elements of life, turbidity is no barrier to it given evolutionary time.
No, something else is going on here.
The best I've heard from the peanut gallery so far is that much of the oxygen is produced near the surface and simply ends up going into the atmosphere (sometimes almost immediately as bubbles) and the rest is consumed on a daily basis by the algae itself, when the algae are in a different -- oxygen consuming -- phase of their metabolism.
I don't know if this is true but it sounds reasonable, unlike your argument.
I've seen many references to "the cause" of oceanic "dead zones" being nutrients (mainly agricultural run-off of chemically active nitrogen) but this seems paradoxical:
Yes I know the story: nutrients create algae blooms which then die and decay thereby robbing the ocean of oxygen.
What I'm referring to as a seeming "paradox" is not only the fact that the base of the food chain is dramatically expanded by nutrients --
but that the organisms making up this foundation produce _oxygen_ from photosynthesis supporting algae grazers with both food _and_ oxygen.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Virtually all of the articles I've read on hypoxic waters and dead zones fail to address this paradox. I've only read one paper that
mentioned even an _hypothesis_ of how algae grazers fail to flourish -- referring to algae species that protect themselves with toxins.
But this doesn't ring true: Why would the most pioneering of algae species be the most protective of themselves when there is so much
opportunity to evolve optimizations for growth rather than defense against grazers?
Your link points to Rider's thesis. Where is the argument showing it is invalid?
Did you just summarize Rider's thesis?
Of course! It is no more valid for a private entity to commit fraud or default on contract than it is for the government to impose "anti-discrimination" policies on private entities. In the former, it is incumbent on the government to disband the private entity, and in the latter it is incumbent on the private entities so violated to disband the government.
It is the _job_ of insurance companies to predict risk and adjust rates accordingly. If there is some social policy that says "to each according to his needs" then the government should find some way to achieve this other than imposing irrational laws on private industry.
Personally, as someone who has to carry the private burden of others who have genetic maladays, its great to have something like this to take advantage of, but it as a citizen, I cannot support the policy of "nondiscrimination" imposed on private parties in any way shape or form. I will avail myself of the advantages of this policy as long as the government is ridiculous enough to impose such requirements on private parties but I will not support any candidate who supports policies like this and I will speak out against them whenever I have the opportunity, as I do here now.
Maybe they'll put /. on the list now:
Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology
A libertarian world would reach an equilibrium where there were a number of human ecologies occupying land held in trust for the posterity of the founders of the respective ecologies. Within each such land trust a way of life compatible with its ecology would be pursued. They would tend to be exclusive of other ways of life due to interdependencies within the ecology. And while they will have varying degrees of population exchange with other human ecologies, all will be partially inbred to varying degrees -- coevolving, over the span of generations, genetic as well as cultural adaptations. In more traditional terms, these land trusts are known as 'nations' -- natives of a human ecology deriving a way of life from the nature of their land's ecology. Many of these human ecologies would have property rights upheld within them to varying degrees, just as extended families will tend to have varying degrees of reciprocal vs kin altruism governing their family's affairs -- varying degrees of debt/bankruptcy forgiveness, etc.
The reason libertarianism reaches this equilibrium, of land trusts that control entry of others to their land, is the same reason anyone controls entry of others to their land: To prevent damage -- in this case damage to the human ecology and possibly the natural ecology of the land trust. A shallow libertarian answer to such ecological concerns is reliance on Tort law to remediate ecological damage resulting from open borders. This is inadequate, not just because "an ounce of prevention", "a stitch in time", etc., but because the jury in a tort case is required to not only understand the plantiff's causal hypothesis of damage to his ecology, but to agree with it. Ecological interactions are highly complex and teasing apart causation is very difficult, frequently requiring experimental controls. If it were easy, then central planning of a "scientific state" would work much better than it does. No -- we are mere humans left adrift in a mysterious world with our own views on how the world operates at the level of human ecologies -- on how cause and effect are related. We may even see the same ecological correlations but then we are all subject not only to the fact that correlation doesn't imply causation, but to what statisticians call "the ecological fallacy" which prevents us from drawing strong inferences merely from observing ecological correlations -- assuming we can even gather the data.
This is why Federalism must allow voluntary internal controls on migration: the very limits on human knowledge in the face of nature demand that our laboratory of the States -- of human ecologies -- of nations -- have borders protecting the integrity of experimental controls while maintaining the fundamental ethical requirement that experimentation on human subjects must be by mutual consent.
Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 10:28 AM in
There is something of a trade off between defense/enforcement spending and spending on relocation. For example, if your jurisdiction makes it easy for people to move to another, more compatible, jurisdiction, then the motives for force and fraud are reduced.
If all you do is ensure that anyone can leave any time they want, then you have only one remaining ingredient to support this most fundamental human right:
Somewhere to go.
With the current, very limited, number of territories world-wide, the choices available to refugees is limited not only by the number of territories that would welcome them, but by the absolute number of territories.
Increase the baseline number of territories and freedom reigns.
The problem with current conceptions of "human rights" is they are enumerated in some sort of unstructured laundry list which results in the entire edifice crumbling under stress. Its tragic because the more you "feel" various things are "rights" -- the more "rights" you put on your wishful-thinking-list, the more "righteous" you sound to the intellectually handicapped. This creates a terrible situation for humanity -- where facades of "human rights" displace the need for territory -- the need for carrying capacity -- that forms the real foundation of life hence humanity hence their rights.
I've written up some thoughts on the nuances of a more rationally architected system supporting human rights in Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology that allows jurisdictions to become as "tyrannical" as they want over their territory, so long as they let people leave at will and support the creation of carrying capacity for the formation of volulntary association.
Seasteading is an important potential in this direction.
Unfortunately, Google's Patri Friedman, while far better than most, is indulging in more of the sloppy thinking that endangers human rights when he says things like "You can change your government without having to leave your house" or implies the assumption that seasteading jurisdictions will not exclude immigrants at their whim. We live in a physical universe with ecologies that operate in space. Attempting to deny spatial structure because you find it inconvenient or even "oppressive" is simply fantasy.
19? Outrageous! Child protective services should be called in to deprogram these boys.
Its obvious from reading the fucking article that the Mormons are marketing themselves by creating this faux "controversy" over their "censorship" of this "hideous secret" of theirs -- a "secret" which basically extols 1950s middle class Christian morality. This, they know, will appeal to a large number of the readers of their "secret" document who are closet conservatives. These closet conservatives would, of course, never admit in a million years that they want to return to the values of the 1950s -- that dark American Nightmare -- and so they pretend to be "outraged" at this "oppressive cult" as they pass the links around to each other providing more converts than a BYU graduating class going on their two year missions.
Don't fall for it guys!
Stop sending around this "news" about the "censorship" of the Mormon Nazi-boyz. You have been pwn3d!
Tragically there was an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that would have been followed through to space industrialization had the launch service industry enjoyed the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:
It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years, that similar legislation got passed for launch services.
The fact that the global economic paradigm didn't follow the Club of Rome model exactly doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the very real urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
If you think of anything nice to say about some group or other then the government should throw your ass in prison to be gang-raped until you are nice.
Totally agree, dude. Its a mystery how stupid inbred 'mercunz ever got by before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.