There is this little thing called "life". I know, its going out of style what with cyborgs taking over the world any day now or something, but in the meantime we have these inconvenient biological chauvinists who feel they are entitled to "life" including things like, oh, I don't know, a viable family where "viable" includes replacement reproduction that they can afford. Replacement reproduction now costs so much (including an education to keep the next generation in the disappearing "middle" class) that there is emerging an elite in the upper east side of Manhattan who flaunt their wealth by having almost as many children as did the parents of the Boomers.
Disgusting, I know, that people who build the foundations of technological civilization might feel entitled to replace themselves in the next generation -- but there you have it.
I'd create a State of Nature to preserve the pre-civil culture of northern Europeans -- not just to "save the world" but because that's the enrivonment I want:
1) Buy up large tracts of undeveloped land in nations, in exchange for low land value taxation, that agreed to let people, on those lands, live by the 7 points of agreements between individuals outlined in the aforelinked blog post on "The State of Nature". 2) Permit any indigenous peoples to remain so long as they agreed to those points, excluding everyone else but invitees of the people in those nature preserves. This includes financing a nature preserve patrols (drones, etc.) to prevent encroachment. 3) Set up a cloning foundation to clone people who have been taken out of the gene pool by the current dysgenic culture -- particularly highly intelligent and attractive females that got conned into giving up childbearing for a "career". 4) Set up a foundation for emergency relocation of population when a host nation violates their agreement to permit autonomy. 5) Invite people I like personally to the nature preserve in which I want to live. 6) Invite other lonely billionaires to live in other nature preserves so they could enjoy the natural healthy relationships with beautiful intelligent women. 7) Do what I can to help Bezos, Musk, et al to reduce civilization's ecological footprint on the biosphere -- preferably by space migration. This involves all manner of technology.
DanielRavenNest writes: "It takes 2-3 years for the tug to do the return to cislunar space (near the Moon's orbit)."
That sounds like a round trip is going to be 4-6 years plus the dwell times at the ends (which may not be significant in low-hanging-fruit scenarios).
What is the rate of interest you're using for the amortization? What does the tug cost up front? What is the price charged for the hydrocarbons and oxygen produced? What price elasticity of demand are you using?
Lewis's interview doesn't touch on the primary economic killer of asteroidal resource retrieval:
The time value of capital.
The equipment you need to do all this is a capital investment. You start paying interest (at a high rate due to risk) on that capital the moment you start constructing it. But more importantly, the amount of time it takes to get to the asteroids and back builds up interest payments that raise the quality of ore required to break even. There is some speculation that the quality of ore in some asteroids is high enough to overcome this objection but I've never seen anyone sit down and lay out the business case in a straight forward manner that didn't come to the conclusion that it is capital service that kills asteroid mining of high value metals.
This just in from the DNC's inner sanctum email traffic on what they really mean by "a path to citizenship":
"We've just approved a new plank in Hillary's platform: Pile illegals up in a stadium, drop a nuke on them and pray for them to reincarnate as children of US citizens!"
All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company.
One may ask what it is legitimate for a government to insure and that is a good question but if one posits "capitalism" and does not start with property rights, what does the government insure and what is the basis for underwriting hence charging insurance premiums?
The insurance premium one pays on a property right is going to be actuarially calculated based on multiple factors, one of which is the value of the property. This is the case with _all_ property insurance. That ends up looking a lot like a flat tax on the liquidation value of net assets.
Anyone who has been in a casino can hear all kinds of noise and it is all of people winning. You never hear the noise of people losing. That's only one lie of Silicon Valley and, indeed, of global pseudo-capitalism.
pseudo-capitalism: capitalism in which the cost of protecting property rights is paid for by taxing economic activity rather than the property rights themselves.
Which is the bigger lie? That pseudo-capitalism is capitalism or that all that noise you hear is an accurate statistical sample of the odds of hitting the jackpot?
wonder how Tsirpas will sell this to his constituents who just voted a firm "NO" to a deal without restructuring.
Shhhh...
The All New Slashdot IMF Editorial Policy is to leave questions like that answered in the subtext of the original post: The People Don't Matter and If You Think They Do You're a 'Populist' which is just shy of being an 'Extremist'.
The combination of freedom of speech and of the press combined with the _very_ strong language of the 2nd amendment nullifies any law against publishing instructions on building firearms.
This does not mean that the US Government will not only pass but enforce such laws. The US Government hasn't been lawful for a long time.
The guys that kept their jobs during the DotCon collapse were those that had "community organizers" that helped them negotiate big cuts in salary and finding shared housing in the area to cut living expenses.
In practice what this means: Try to hook into the H-1b ethnic network somehow. Perhaps the best way to survive a collapse in employment is to get a tan, change your legal name to the moral equivalent of Sanjay Gupta and contact one of the many immigration law firms in the valley that aid and abet H-1b immigration fraud with a sob story about how you're going to be sent back "home" (don't tell them "home" is Champaign Urbana Illinois) if you can't find a job -- and that you'll be willing to take a big pay cut and live in a beehive to stay in "America". Do it with the appropriate accent. They'll hook you up with a "community organizer".
Seriously, WTF is an article about energy vectors doing on/. without even a hint of how these guys achieved radical breakthrough advances in energy efficiency for both hydrogen-from-water and CO2-from-air?
If non-technical guys like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn played in "The Internship" at ages 46 and 45 respectively can get jobs at Google, what's wrong with the rest of these no-talent old farts? This smells like envy, if you ask this faithful movie-goer.
That's why those who object to your social theory don't need to be consulted for their consent prior to your experiment being run on them. Indeed, if they strenuously object (say, because an aspect of your social theory is that "sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening" in your prison system), their extremism is a clear and present danger to the stability of society and it is only reasonable to preemptively treat their psychological disorder, with or without their consent.
The primary barrier to entry to the upper classes is the debt people carry. Virtually no one in the middle class has positive net assets -- particularly during the crucial early years of family formation and child rearing.
The primary function of government is protection of property rights. Early anarcho-capitalist Lysander Spooner described all legitimate government as a mutual property insurance company. Guys like Gates, and now Zuckerberg, should be taxed on their net assets, not on their actions (ie: not on income, capital gains, sales, value added, inheritance, etc...) as that is the closest thing to a property insurance premium.
Are we now to revisit the apartheid era with the emphasis on PART as the white supremacists in South Africa (you KNOW they're still there) start harvesting organs from hapless African men in order to retain the sexual fidelity of their Jungle Fevered wives without beating them (the way you just KNOW they beat their children and even dogs)?
Both describe civilization as a eusocial superorganism -- with Gorham being more pessimistic than Wilson as to the potential for containing its ecological conquest of sexual species.
Its ironic that in the 80s I was living in La Jolla, which was an epicenter of the neural net revival at UCSD, had taken neural net courses from Robert Hecht-Nielsen and by 1990 had prototyped the highest performance neural network image processing system (as Neural Engines Corporation) -- but I then later worked with Charlie for almost 15 years before discovering he had had played such a key role in the revival of neural nets. Even more ironic is that, circa 2005, I came up with the idea for the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge -- based on Hutter's entirely different, top down mathematics approach to AI -- and Shane Legg, founder of Deep Mind, which is largely identified with deep learning neural nets, actuality studied under Hutter and achieved Deep Mind's famous ability to learn to play video games using Hutter's approach but everyone thinks that capability is uniquely attributable to deep neural net learning alone.
Virtually all sexual species exhibit aggression. The problem is war, not mere aggression. And this problem goes beyond mere conflict between human groups. E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" describes how group selection dominates the environment and, in the case of human eusocial organization, degrades biodiversity.
The price of civilization is eusocial organization and the price of eusocial organization is war.
One way of addressing this failing is to turn civilization outward, away from the biosphere, toward "war" on lifeless rock in space -- converting it to life -- leaving the biosphere free of human eusocial organization.
Right. There is a long history of dimensions as after-thought/addon to languages going back to the PLATO system's TUTOR programming language circa 1972. Russell's Relation Arithmetic starts with relational structure and defines equivalence classes of structure as numbers in the arithmetic of relations. Its an entirely different, and correct, approach.
"I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar with mathematical logic find great difficulty in understanding what is meant by 'structure', and, owing to this difficulty, are apt to go astray in attempting to understand the empirical world. For this reason, if for no other, I am sorry that the theory of relation-arithmetic has been largely unnoticed."
-- " My Philosophical Development" by Bertrand Russell
An example of going astray in attempting to understand the empirical world is when people attempt to combine incommensurable quantities in their calculations, not understanding the structure of the relations between the quantities.
Ordinarily, programming languages treat units, as I/O formats for dimensions, as an afterthought -- independent of type checking. However, what if we saw numbers themselves as embodying relational structure, as intended by Russell, thereby unifying the notion of "type checking" with the notion of "number"? Might then the power of dimensional analysis be brought to bear, in a mathematically rigorous way, on the relatively ad hoc notions of "type", hence problematic areas such as the object relational impedance mismatch?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the first massive multiplayer dungeon game to employ random algorithm "room" generation was the Mines of Moria on the PLATO system circa 1975-78.
There is this little thing called "life". I know, its going out of style what with cyborgs taking over the world any day now or something, but in the meantime we have these inconvenient biological chauvinists who feel they are entitled to "life" including things like, oh, I don't know, a viable family where "viable" includes replacement reproduction that they can afford. Replacement reproduction now costs so much (including an education to keep the next generation in the disappearing "middle" class) that there is emerging an elite in the upper east side of Manhattan who flaunt their wealth by having almost as many children as did the parents of the Boomers.
Disgusting, I know, that people who build the foundations of technological civilization might feel entitled to replace themselves in the next generation -- but there you have it.
I'd create a State of Nature to preserve the pre-civil culture of northern Europeans -- not just to "save the world" but because that's the enrivonment I want:
1) Buy up large tracts of undeveloped land in nations, in exchange for low land value taxation, that agreed to let people, on those lands, live by the 7 points of agreements between individuals outlined in the aforelinked blog post on "The State of Nature".
2) Permit any indigenous peoples to remain so long as they agreed to those points, excluding everyone else but invitees of the people in those nature preserves. This includes financing a nature preserve patrols (drones, etc.) to prevent encroachment.
3) Set up a cloning foundation to clone people who have been taken out of the gene pool by the current dysgenic culture -- particularly highly intelligent and attractive females that got conned into giving up childbearing for a "career".
4) Set up a foundation for emergency relocation of population when a host nation violates their agreement to permit autonomy.
5) Invite people I like personally to the nature preserve in which I want to live.
6) Invite other lonely billionaires to live in other nature preserves so they could enjoy the natural healthy relationships with beautiful intelligent women.
7) Do what I can to help Bezos, Musk, et al to reduce civilization's ecological footprint on the biosphere -- preferably by space migration. This involves all manner of technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I guess the main difference is the morons who did this 100 year plan aren't controlling a government.
DanielRavenNest writes: "It takes 2-3 years for the tug to do the return to cislunar space (near the Moon's orbit)."
That sounds like a round trip is going to be 4-6 years plus the dwell times at the ends (which may not be significant in low-hanging-fruit scenarios).
What is the rate of interest you're using for the amortization? What does the tug cost up front? What is the price charged for the hydrocarbons and oxygen produced? What price elasticity of demand are you using?
PS: Thanks for not being "not even wrong".
Lewis's interview doesn't touch on the primary economic killer of asteroidal resource retrieval:
The time value of capital.
The equipment you need to do all this is a capital investment. You start paying interest (at a high rate due to risk) on that capital the moment you start constructing it. But more importantly, the amount of time it takes to get to the asteroids and back builds up interest payments that raise the quality of ore required to break even. There is some speculation that the quality of ore in some asteroids is high enough to overcome this objection but I've never seen anyone sit down and lay out the business case in a straight forward manner that didn't come to the conclusion that it is capital service that kills asteroid mining of high value metals.
This just in from the DNC's inner sanctum email traffic on what they really mean by "a path to citizenship":
"We've just approved a new plank in Hillary's platform: Pile illegals up in a stadium, drop a nuke on them and pray for them to reincarnate as children of US citizens!"
All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company.
One may ask what it is legitimate for a government to insure and that is a good question but if one posits "capitalism" and does not start with property rights, what does the government insure and what is the basis for underwriting hence charging insurance premiums?
The insurance premium one pays on a property right is going to be actuarially calculated based on multiple factors, one of which is the value of the property. This is the case with _all_ property insurance. That ends up looking a lot like a flat tax on the liquidation value of net assets.
Anyone who has been in a casino can hear all kinds of noise and it is all of people winning. You never hear the noise of people losing. That's only one lie of Silicon Valley and, indeed, of global pseudo-capitalism.
pseudo-capitalism: capitalism in which the cost of protecting property rights is paid for by taxing economic activity rather than the property rights themselves.
Which is the bigger lie? That pseudo-capitalism is capitalism or that all that noise you hear is an accurate statistical sample of the odds of hitting the jackpot?
l2718 asks:
Shhhh...
The All New Slashdot IMF Editorial Policy is to leave questions like that answered in the subtext of the original post: The People Don't Matter and If You Think They Do You're a 'Populist' which is just shy of being an 'Extremist'.
The combination of freedom of speech and of the press combined with the _very_ strong language of the 2nd amendment nullifies any law against publishing instructions on building firearms.
This does not mean that the US Government will not only pass but enforce such laws. The US Government hasn't been lawful for a long time.
The guys that kept their jobs during the DotCon collapse were those that had "community organizers" that helped them negotiate big cuts in salary and finding shared housing in the area to cut living expenses.
In practice what this means: Try to hook into the H-1b ethnic network somehow. Perhaps the best way to survive a collapse in employment is to get a tan, change your legal name to the moral equivalent of Sanjay Gupta and contact one of the many immigration law firms in the valley that aid and abet H-1b immigration fraud with a sob story about how you're going to be sent back "home" (don't tell them "home" is Champaign Urbana Illinois) if you can't find a job -- and that you'll be willing to take a big pay cut and live in a beehive to stay in "America". Do it with the appropriate accent. They'll hook you up with a "community organizer".
Guess who?
And the endorsements keep coming in...
Seriously, WTF is an article about energy vectors doing on /. without even a hint of how these guys achieved radical breakthrough advances in energy efficiency for both hydrogen-from-water and CO2-from-air?
If non-technical guys like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn played in "The Internship" at ages 46 and 45 respectively can get jobs at Google, what's wrong with the rest of these no-talent old farts? This smells like envy, if you ask this faithful movie-goer.
If your favorite social theory is being tested on the masses, when things good, it is because of your social theory and when things go bad they are going as good as they could have gone in all possible worlds.
That's why those who object to your social theory don't need to be consulted for their consent prior to your experiment being run on them. Indeed, if they strenuously object (say, because an aspect of your social theory is that "sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening" in your prison system), their extremism is a clear and present danger to the stability of society and it is only reasonable to preemptively treat their psychological disorder, with or without their consent.
The primary barrier to entry to the upper classes is the debt people carry. Virtually no one in the middle class has positive net assets -- particularly during the crucial early years of family formation and child rearing.
The primary function of government is protection of property rights. Early anarcho-capitalist Lysander Spooner described all legitimate government as a mutual property insurance company. Guys like Gates, and now Zuckerberg, should be taxed on their net assets, not on their actions (ie: not on income, capital gains, sales, value added, inheritance, etc...) as that is the closest thing to a property insurance premium.
Are we now to revisit the apartheid era with the emphasis on PART as the white supremacists in South Africa (you KNOW they're still there) start harvesting organs from hapless African men in order to retain the sexual fidelity of their Jungle Fevered wives without beating them (the way you just KNOW they beat their children and even dogs)?
From the description of "The Devourer," it sounds like Cixin could relate to "The Pagan Bible" by Melvin Gorham and "The Social Conquest of Earth" by E. O. Wilson.
Both describe civilization as a eusocial superorganism -- with Gorham being more pessimistic than Wilson as to the potential for containing its ecological conquest of sexual species.
Its "System Development Foundation" not "System Development Corporation" and Charlie's full name is Charles Sinclair Smith. He's semi-retired now and living the next county over from me in southeast Iowa where we've been collaborating on a couple of projects -- one of which is to photosynthesize all of the CO2 effluent from US fossil fuel power plants (as Charlie got his start co-founding the Energy Information Administration of the DoE under Carter).
Its ironic that in the 80s I was living in La Jolla, which was an epicenter of the neural net revival at UCSD, had taken neural net courses from Robert Hecht-Nielsen and by 1990 had prototyped the highest performance neural network image processing system (as Neural Engines Corporation) -- but I then later worked with Charlie for almost 15 years before discovering he had had played such a key role in the revival of neural nets. Even more ironic is that, circa 2005, I came up with the idea for the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge -- based on Hutter's entirely different, top down mathematics approach to AI -- and Shane Legg, founder of Deep Mind, which is largely identified with deep learning neural nets, actuality studied under Hutter and achieved Deep Mind's famous ability to learn to play video games using Hutter's approach but everyone thinks that capability is uniquely attributable to deep neural net learning alone.
Virtually all sexual species exhibit aggression. The problem is war, not mere aggression. And this problem goes beyond mere conflict between human groups. E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" describes how group selection dominates the environment and, in the case of human eusocial organization, degrades biodiversity.
The price of civilization is eusocial organization and the price of eusocial organization is war.
One way of addressing this failing is to turn civilization outward, away from the biosphere, toward "war" on lifeless rock in space -- converting it to life -- leaving the biosphere free of human eusocial organization.
Is there a place for humans in the biosphere?
Yes, but only if individual sovereignty is ruthlessly enforced.
I thought you head would be bigga.
Right. There is a long history of dimensions as after-thought/addon to languages going back to the PLATO system's TUTOR programming language circa 1972. Russell's Relation Arithmetic starts with relational structure and defines equivalence classes of structure as numbers in the arithmetic of relations. Its an entirely different, and correct, approach.
The penultimate paper of "Bit-string Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy" discusses an attempted revival of "Relation Arithmetic" with which Russell and Whitehead had planned to cap off their Principia Mathematica in its final volume.
Of Relation Arithmetic, Russel said:
-- " My Philosophical Development" by Bertrand Russell
An example of going astray in attempting to understand the empirical world is when people attempt to combine incommensurable quantities in their calculations, not understanding the structure of the relations between the quantities.
Ordinarily, programming languages treat units, as I/O formats for dimensions, as an afterthought -- independent of type checking. However, what if we saw numbers themselves as embodying relational structure, as intended by Russell, thereby unifying the notion of "type checking" with the notion of "number"? Might then the power of dimensional analysis be brought to bear, in a mathematically rigorous way, on the relatively ad hoc notions of "type", hence problematic areas such as the object relational impedance mismatch?