There was a clearance of the yeoman farmers (sometimes called family farmers) off the lands subsequent to WW II -- cramming people into metro areas.
This resulted from the capture of the US policy making apparatus by an urban elite that fundamentally could not create wealth -- but it could liquidate the foundation of US wealth and capture the residual wealth.
The result is a wealthy parasite class and the destruction of the United States, not only as a dream, but the very people of the US are being replaced by others.
Yes, I know the catechism is updated in response to new challenges, and will be so long as there are coeds genetically distant from their professors. The theocracy's updates are becoming less and less plausible and the underlying motive more and more obvious.
Pretty soon it will be unnecessary for guys like me to respond to crap like:
These are real differences, but do not really rise to the level of different races as that word is used about other animals...There still is virtually as much genetic variation within those categories as between them.
As regards the "more variation within, rather than between groups" argument,
Kaessman et al. (Science 286, 1159-1162, 1999) note that there is more genetic
variation between some subspecies of Chimpanzee than between some Chimp subspecies
compared to Bonobo chimps, a separate species. Thus, this "argument" is worthless,
and one can find, in nonhuman animals, more variation within a species than
between species, without abrogating the idea of species and species differences.
That there can be more individual variation than racial variation also does
not invalidate race.
The 99.9% = we are all the same argument suffers from the following
According to some studies, for example Sibley and Ahlquist (J. Hum.
Evol. 20, 2-15, 1984), humans differ from chimps by 1.9%, bonobos by 1.8%,
gorillas by 2.4%., and orangutans by 3.6%. Thus, the human racial difference
is a full 5.3% of the human/chimp differential, 5.6% of the human/bonobo,
4.2% of the human/gorilla, and 2.8% of the human/ orangutan. In addition,
data from Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" book can be interpretated
in making the human/chimp similarity as high as 99.1%, a mere 0.9% difference,
which would make human racial variation more than 10% of this (11.1%).
According to Prof. Hrdy in her book, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers,
Infants, and Natural Selection, the current evidence suggests that the
human/chimp difference in cognitive skills is the result in differences
in only about 50 genes (out of tens of thousands), with differences in
regulatory genes being important. Again, the relevance to human racial
differences should be obvious.
A post by A. Hu in the "Upstream" site discussion makes the follwing
point. Microsatellite genetic analysis of dog breeds (Zajc et al., Mamm.
Genome 8, 182-185, 1997) points to a difference between Greyhounds, German
Shepherds, and Labrador Retreivers having an index in the 0.028-0.054
range. This compares to a similar study in humans (Kimmel et al., Genetic
143, 549-555, 1996) which shows that Japanese and Chinese have an index
of difference of 0.029. Also stated in the post is that larger racial
differences are in the range of 0.087 - 0.363. Therefore, genetic differences
between dog breeds, which result in large phenotypic consequences, are
about equal to intra-racial ethnic differences, and smaller than human
inter-racial differences.
"Race is a social construct" -- well ok, it can be categorized via a laboratory test with 99.7% accuracy. And human biodiversity is simply a matter of a disappearingly small percentage of genes -- well ok maybe 10 times that amount and well, ok, ok, a significant fraction of the difference between humans and other great apes. And all of this "error" is biased toward the "genes don't matter" camp during the peak of boomer fertility when de facto polygyny (misnamed "serial monogamy" by the same academic authorities who biased things toward the "genes don't matter" catechism). The rational mind must wonder if there might have been some sort of genetic program at work in the primitive parts of the brains of these academic authorities, making certain ideas psychologically appealing -- ideas that would get young, nubile, impressionable, idealistic, coeds to avoid thinking too deeply about the consequences of their mate choices, as well as the consequences of technologically amplified immigration.
starting in 2008.'" If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040.
Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
Through the miracle of arithmetic we see can extrapolate this trend to see that commercial fusion power was available in 1920 when it was undoubtedly captured by a Henry Ford and with assistance from proto-Nazis, kept it secret from the rest of the world in a Peruvian cave where they run their UFO base to this day.
With Y being the years from now the geniuses predict commercial fusion energy and X being the year of the prediction:
So we see that commercial fusion power was available about the time spherical electrostatic confinement was first conceived of by Irving Langmuir, Katherine B. Blodgett: Physics Review, 23, pp49-59, 1924; "Currents limited by space charge between concentric spheres", which was the last time there was any leak about the existence of commercial fusion power once Henry Ford and the proto-Nazis impounded the technology.
I was, of course, referring to peer reviewed scientific publication rather than simple mention in discussions on the Internet, when I said there had been no citation of Rider's work in its 10 years of publication.
Experimentally test the model used by Todd Harrison Rider in his PhD thesis which Rider claims proves that inertial electrostatic fusion is not feasible due to the supposedly inevitable tendency of such systems to head toward a Maxwellian distribution so strongly that restoring forces require more energy than can be produced from the aneutronic fusion reactions.
The contractors you are talking about don't get paid for mission success. Service providers do -- often including purchasing insurance for mission failure. Airlines do this and they handle many deaths per year -- a lot more than a few joy-stick jockies.
You might not see the difference but it is so fundamental to risk management that your joke about Lockmart's "risk management" falls flat due to ignorance of the very principle.
The Launch Services Purchase Act was intended to prevent this kind of development. I should know since I was intimately involved in the drafting and passage of that act. The intent was to get NASA out of the launch services business and by implication they should not be doing design of launch service since to do so usurps the role of the private sector in risk management. Designing an entire launch vehicle is such a large part of designing a launch service that it simply isn't reasonable to allow NASA to do so.
Bussards reactor simply makes most collisions occur at the center of the reactor. Any rebounding ions that did not fuse have a velocity direction out of the center (there is no other direction to go)
Critiquing your critique of Rider's critique:
The center is a point, so your argument is valid only if all collisions are perfectly centered -- which they are not. Remember these are systems where the particles transit through the center a huge number of times. Only a little error per cycle can result in a mess.
Now, critiquing my critique of your critique of Rider's critique:
However, a version of your critique could be valid if there were some sort of centering or focusing force that got rid of tangential velocity components faster than they were created by off-center interactions -- without, of course, losing the associated tangential energy faster than it can be created from fusion reactions.
The thing I find most interesting here is the seeming total nonexistence of citations -- not just by Bussard -- but by anyone -- of Rider's thesis.
Obviously Turkey's government, owning so much of the world's boron, could do worse than to provide a safe haven for investment in Bussard's system.
Basically just make all investments in and profits from Bussard's system tax free for any companies operating in Turkey. Then if Bussard's backers are successful, and the price of boron goes up to its equilibrium level of $1000/oz, it will have effectively found the Philosopher's Stone.
If you RTFS (S=submission) you'll see the first couple million and first year are devoted precisely to the milestone of rebuilding the demonstrator.
Now think for a moment -- you're a potential investor with $200M to risk but you don't want to throw your money away. Do you just put up a couple of million to see the thing reproducibly validate the favorable scaling laws without intending to put the rest of the $200M up or without having a pretty good idea that _someone_ is going to bring the system to full scale? Why do you risk your $2M for recreating the demonstrator if not to realize the profit from the full scale system?
The Wright Brother's Bike Shop approach is wonderful if you haven't centralized wealth to the point that the modern equivalent of a Wright Brother's Bike Shop is out of the reach of the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers.
Making a few guys like Brin and Page obscenely wealthy isn't the right way create the kind of society that gave rise to mass production of cars, air flight, the transistor, etc.
Its funny you should attack an idea of Bussard's, the interstellar ramjet, that he himself dismissed as unworkable prior to it being adopted by the scifi community.
Something I continually run across in business process reengineering failures -- the Great Leap Forward Into the Abyss.
In every case when I have the ear of the business process reengineering gurus with their petri nets covering virtually entire floors of office walls -- I suggest that what they first attempt is simply scanning the paper (that people are shoving around) into CDs (that people are shoving around) and viewing at their workstations (this should include recordable phone calls of course).
Then, once people are comfortable with that digitization process, occasionally -- just for a day or so -- pretend that the digitizers are broken so the organization is forced to go back to shoving paper around just to make sure the "paper trail" is still there and that the backup system works. The next step is obvious: move the scanned images around around on a network rather than moving the CDs around and occasionally pretend the network is broke so the organization is forced to go back to shoving CDs around. You keep incrementally abstracting your process making sure each step is positive return on investment without putting the whole system at risk.
During all this you take statistics on the flow and cost of various things to get an idea of the _real_ business process -- how critical various backup systems are and how much you can afford various kinds of redundancy where.
You really can get positive ROI this way but few want to do it for some weird reason.
After witnessing enough of this nonsense (it pervades the public and private sectors and is now going multinational with NGOs) I decided to drop out and just go to the root of the problem -- stupidity -- by promoting the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge since that looks more likely to create the level of intelligence required to stop stupid people from taking over business process reengineering pork and only to drag entire processes into chaos and disaster with them as they leap into the abyss.
In the case of a land value tax (as opposed to a more general asset tax), these should make reference only to the land value of the home site and job site -- not the total asset value.
Bezos bought some land and used various aliases to do so. So what? Did he defraud anyone?
The real problem is more profound:
Government protects property rights, that would not exist in the absence of government, as its primary function. Productive people (measured by income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc) are tired of being taxed to subsidize said protection, as well they should be. The largest single property right so protected is centralized ownership of land.
Bezos could really stomp on all this belly-aching about his so-called "land grab" by simply getting the government of Texas to stop taxing things other than increases in land value that occur subsequent to the adoption of the new tax system. In other words, the assessment of state, county and local tax could be reduced to a very simple, easy to enforde, flat rate, single-tax:
The 8800 looks like the first GPU that really enters the realm of the old fashioned supercomputing architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray that I cut my teeth on in the mid 1970s.
I can't wait to get my hands on their "C" compiler.
The freedom of association is paramount. This means the right to exit to find other associations, as well as block entry to others with whom one does not wish to associate, is paramount. All other conceptions of human rights can be derived from such freedom of association.
The only time blocking exit is acceptable is when someone has violated freedom of association in some way -- has gained entry under false pretenses or has acted as agent of a foreign association within your association -- in which case they are a supremacist aggressor and can be deprived of their very life. The historic acceptability of meeting out death for treason or espionage establishes such a clear standard.
The definition of "due process" is the real question here: What are acceptable inter-association definitions of "due process" to determine guilt or innocence of such espionage?
When Social "science" becomes a science it might be possible to talk about web "science" as a cross discipline. Unfortunately, social science isn't a science.
Matt Mahoney reports that Alexander Ratushnyak already has a new program, paq8hp6.exe which appears to improve on paq8hp5 by the 1% threshold required for another payout -- given it survives the 30 day comment period.
Since you have to choose at least one representation from which you derive your knowledge English text is a pretty good place to start. Wikipedia consists of more than English text of course and that means those representations will need to be compressed too.
The result of this is pretty much what you need for epistemology, software and legal disciplines: Optimal language models telling you precisely how language maps to knowledge.
There was some debate about using the multilingual versions of Wikipedia but those projects are less important than just getting natural language -- any natural language -- to be modeled well enough to construct natural language UI's with some reasonable level of rigor that your mother could use (assuming she can read English).
Experiments with human predictors show an information rate of between 1.1 and 1.6 bits per character, depending on the experimental setup; the PPM compression algorithm can achieve a compression ratio of 1.5 bits per character.
The range for Shannon's experiments are actually between.6 and 1.3 bit per character.
The beauty of this sort of error in Wikipedia is it demonstrates just how even erroneous human knowledge can result in greater human knowledge if it is compressed:
Imagine, if you will, a perfectly compressed Wikipedia (despite the fact that an optimum compression is not generally computable). This perfectly compressed Wikipedia would generally "hang together" with a great many pieces cross-checking coherently with other pieces and hence be represented with common (compressed) codes. But then, some pieces would stand out as not cross-checking. They would not "hang together" with other pieces and would require specific codes to represent them. To a Sherlock Holmes kind of mind -- the mind of a scientist -- the mind of a ruthless epistemologist -- these codes would represent "suspects" of the crime of lies or error. The idea that compressors like PPM are just as able to compress text as humans (given enough time) would not hang together -- it would not be predicted from the more general body of human knowledge and would therefore become suspect due to its relative incompressibility.
Rather than undo the lesson of decades of failure of government chosen launch technologies, NASA should buy moon rocks, measurements, and the like from the private sector.
This would be the market support for the development of a lunar mission capability without risk to the taxpayer.
Slashdot Mirror
This resulted from the capture of the US policy making apparatus by an urban elite that fundamentally could not create wealth -- but it could liquidate the foundation of US wealth and capture the residual wealth.
The result is a wealthy parasite class and the destruction of the United States, not only as a dream, but the very people of the US are being replaced by others.
Pretty soon it will be unnecessary for guys like me to respond to crap like:
With hard data like:
"Race is a social construct" -- well ok, it can be categorized via a laboratory test with 99.7% accuracy. And human biodiversity is simply a matter of a disappearingly small percentage of genes -- well ok maybe 10 times that amount and well, ok, ok, a significant fraction of the difference between humans and other great apes. And all of this "error" is biased toward the "genes don't matter" camp during the peak of boomer fertility when de facto polygyny (misnamed "serial monogamy" by the same academic authorities who biased things toward the "genes don't matter" catechism). The rational mind must wonder if there might have been some sort of genetic program at work in the primitive parts of the brains of these academic authorities, making certain ideas psychologically appealing -- ideas that would get young, nubile, impressionable, idealistic, coeds to avoid thinking too deeply about the consequences of their mate choices, as well as the consequences of technologically amplified immigration.
Through the miracle of arithmetic we see can extrapolate this trend to see that commercial fusion power was available in 1920 when it was undoubtedly captured by a Henry Ford and with assistance from proto-Nazis, kept it secret from the rest of the world in a Peruvian cave where they run their UFO base to this day.
With Y being the years from now the geniuses predict commercial fusion energy and X being the year of the prediction:
deltaY=((2040-2008)-20)=12
deltaX=(2008-1975)=33
slope=12/33=0.363636
Y=20+slope*(X-1975)
X-1975=(Y-20)/slope
X=(Y-20)/slope+1975
Setting Y=0
X=(0-20)/0.363636+1975
X=1920
So we see that commercial fusion power was available about the time spherical electrostatic confinement was first conceived of by Irving Langmuir, Katherine B. Blodgett: Physics Review, 23, pp49-59, 1924; "Currents limited by space charge between concentric spheres", which was the last time there was any leak about the existence of commercial fusion power once Henry Ford and the proto-Nazis impounded the technology.
I was, of course, referring to peer reviewed scientific publication rather than simple mention in discussions on the Internet, when I said there had been no citation of Rider's work in its 10 years of publication.
This was discussed a bit in the prior /. article about IEC.
If he does, let's hope he publishes since there appear to be no citations of Rider's thesis a decade after it was published.
The contractors you are talking about don't get paid for mission success. Service providers do -- often including purchasing insurance for mission failure. Airlines do this and they handle many deaths per year -- a lot more than a few joy-stick jockies.
You might not see the difference but it is so fundamental to risk management that your joke about Lockmart's "risk management" falls flat due to ignorance of the very principle.
The Launch Services Purchase Act was intended to prevent this kind of development. I should know since I was intimately involved in the drafting and passage of that act. The intent was to get NASA out of the launch services business and by implication they should not be doing design of launch service since to do so usurps the role of the private sector in risk management. Designing an entire launch vehicle is such a large part of designing a launch service that it simply isn't reasonable to allow NASA to do so.
Critiquing your critique of Rider's critique:
The center is a point, so your argument is valid only if all collisions are perfectly centered -- which they are not. Remember these are systems where the particles transit through the center a huge number of times. Only a little error per cycle can result in a mess.
Now, critiquing my critique of your critique of Rider's critique:
However, a version of your critique could be valid if there were some sort of centering or focusing force that got rid of tangential velocity components faster than they were created by off-center interactions -- without, of course, losing the associated tangential energy faster than it can be created from fusion reactions.
The thing I find most interesting here is the seeming total nonexistence of citations -- not just by Bussard -- but by anyone -- of Rider's thesis.
That's most interesting. What makes it even more interesting is that it was being written the same year Bussard was told to put his work under wraps by the Navy, and it was published the same year that Bussard sent a letter to Congress basically blowing the whistle on the Tokamak program.
Obviously Turkey's government, owning so much of the world's boron, could do worse than to provide a safe haven for investment in Bussard's system. Basically just make all investments in and profits from Bussard's system tax free for any companies operating in Turkey. Then if Bussard's backers are successful, and the price of boron goes up to its equilibrium level of $1000/oz, it will have effectively found the Philosopher's Stone.
Now think for a moment -- you're a potential investor with $200M to risk but you don't want to throw your money away. Do you just put up a couple of million to see the thing reproducibly validate the favorable scaling laws without intending to put the rest of the $200M up or without having a pretty good idea that _someone_ is going to bring the system to full scale? Why do you risk your $2M for recreating the demonstrator if not to realize the profit from the full scale system?
The Wright Brother's Bike Shop approach is wonderful if you haven't centralized wealth to the point that the modern equivalent of a Wright Brother's Bike Shop is out of the reach of the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers. Making a few guys like Brin and Page obscenely wealthy isn't the right way create the kind of society that gave rise to mass production of cars, air flight, the transistor, etc.
Its funny you should attack an idea of Bussard's, the interstellar ramjet, that he himself dismissed as unworkable prior to it being adopted by the scifi community.
In every case when I have the ear of the business process reengineering gurus with their petri nets covering virtually entire floors of office walls -- I suggest that what they first attempt is simply scanning the paper (that people are shoving around) into CDs (that people are shoving around) and viewing at their workstations (this should include recordable phone calls of course).
Then, once people are comfortable with that digitization process, occasionally -- just for a day or so -- pretend that the digitizers are broken so the organization is forced to go back to shoving paper around just to make sure the "paper trail" is still there and that the backup system works. The next step is obvious: move the scanned images around around on a network rather than moving the CDs around and occasionally pretend the network is broke so the organization is forced to go back to shoving CDs around. You keep incrementally abstracting your process making sure each step is positive return on investment without putting the whole system at risk.
During all this you take statistics on the flow and cost of various things to get an idea of the _real_ business process -- how critical various backup systems are and how much you can afford various kinds of redundancy where.
You really can get positive ROI this way but few want to do it for some weird reason.
After witnessing enough of this nonsense (it pervades the public and private sectors and is now going multinational with NGOs) I decided to drop out and just go to the root of the problem -- stupidity -- by promoting the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge since that looks more likely to create the level of intelligence required to stop stupid people from taking over business process reengineering pork and only to drag entire processes into chaos and disaster with them as they leap into the abyss.
The real problem is more profound:
Government protects property rights, that would not exist in the absence of government, as its primary function. Productive people (measured by income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc) are tired of being taxed to subsidize said protection, as well they should be. The largest single property right so protected is centralized ownership of land.
Bezos could really stomp on all this belly-aching about his so-called "land grab" by simply getting the government of Texas to stop taxing things other than increases in land value that occur subsequent to the adoption of the new tax system. In other words, the assessment of state, county and local tax could be reduced to a very simple, easy to enforde, flat rate, single-tax:
LandValue = PropertyValue - InsurableValueo n - HomesteadExemption@TaxTime
TaxableLandValue = LandValue@TaxTime - LandValue@TimeOfLastPurchasePriorToSystemConversi
HomesteadExemption = MedianPriceOfAHome + MedianCapitalizationForASubsistenceJob
The 8800 looks like the first GPU that really enters the realm of the old fashioned supercomputing architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray that I cut my teeth on in the mid 1970s. I can't wait to get my hands on their "C" compiler.
The only time blocking exit is acceptable is when someone has violated freedom of association in some way -- has gained entry under false pretenses or has acted as agent of a foreign association within your association -- in which case they are a supremacist aggressor and can be deprived of their very life. The historic acceptability of meeting out death for treason or espionage establishes such a clear standard.
The definition of "due process" is the real question here: What are acceptable inter-association definitions of "due process" to determine guilt or innocence of such espionage?
Maybe Sir Tim could read E. O. Wilson's "Consilience" for a start so he can get a grip.
Matt Mahoney reports that Alexander Ratushnyak already has a new program, paq8hp6.exe which appears to improve on paq8hp5 by the 1% threshold required for another payout -- given it survives the 30 day comment period.
The result of this is pretty much what you need for epistemology, software and legal disciplines: Optimal language models telling you precisely how language maps to knowledge.
There was some debate about using the multilingual versions of Wikipedia but those projects are less important than just getting natural language -- any natural language -- to be modeled well enough to construct natural language UI's with some reasonable level of rigor that your mother could use (assuming she can read English).
How much money do you think NASA is going to spend "returning to the Moon"?
These are rational questions posed to an irrational person of course -- so consider them rheotorical.
This error even caught Dr. Dobbs compression expert, Mark Nelson so I guess it isn't too surprising it caught the Wikipedia folks.
The beauty of this sort of error in Wikipedia is it demonstrates just how even erroneous human knowledge can result in greater human knowledge if it is compressed:
Imagine, if you will, a perfectly compressed Wikipedia (despite the fact that an optimum compression is not generally computable). This perfectly compressed Wikipedia would generally "hang together" with a great many pieces cross-checking coherently with other pieces and hence be represented with common (compressed) codes. But then, some pieces would stand out as not cross-checking. They would not "hang together" with other pieces and would require specific codes to represent them. To a Sherlock Holmes kind of mind -- the mind of a scientist -- the mind of a ruthless epistemologist -- these codes would represent "suspects" of the crime of lies or error. The idea that compressors like PPM are just as able to compress text as humans (given enough time) would not hang together -- it would not be predicted from the more general body of human knowledge and would therefore become suspect due to its relative incompressibility.
This would be the market support for the development of a lunar mission capability without risk to the taxpayer.