Orbital space habitats can have huge land areas per person and they can thereby support ecosystems engineered to the natural predelictions of their humans.
Cities just can't do that. They're too dense with humans to support sustainable ecosystems.
There are some zoos that are more humane than others and the more humane ones tend to have bigger habitats for their animals.
The other thing orbital space habitats buy you, aside from a place for technological civilization outside Earth's natural habitats, is time for humans to learn enough about themselves to humanely evolve themselves to a different mode of life entirely. Cramming humans into cities with our current ignorance of human biodiversity and nature is hubris. Worse, those who are most in a position to influence public policy are most adapted to urban environments and therefore are in a position of public trust and authority while they have an interest in cramming the more rural-adapted folks into environments where those folks are at a competitive disadvantage.
His emphasis on urbanization as the way to control population is not only inhumane but ultimately ineffective.
It is inhumane because, except for a few notable exceptions, people are not well adapted to urban environments. The reason their fertility falls is similar to the reason the fertility of zoo animals falls. They are in an unnatural environment.
It is ineffective because:
Those exceptional cultures/genes that are adapted to the urban environment will, at a human ecology level, just eat the populations that can't adapt to urban environments and then go on exponentiating. He likes pointing out that "even" Mormon fertility is dropping but doesn't bother pointing out that other groups are reproducing at way above replacement levels within the urban setting. He knows better than to claim there is no human biodiversity at work in the cosmopolitan environments. His comments on invasive species demonstrates he sees how ecological panmixia destroys diversity by promoting unsustainable ecologies. Human ecologies are no different.
The most sociopathic urban cultures which Brand's "savvy" environmentalism is sadistically exponentiating will continue the destruction of the countryside and general environment because:
They will still need the photosynthetic basis for their food chain.
The food will have to be transported to the cities, requiring more transportation cost for each food calorie consumed.
Those cultures hey will lack the ability create new sources of food since they'll be purely political animals capable of manipulating and effectively eating other human groups but without the connection to the land of the humans they have digested.
His reliance on nuclear energy as the solution to the greenhouse emission problem betrays exactly the sort of lack of creativity just described.
Natural
ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive
agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the
atmosphere in the process.
Agriculture need not be land intensive. In fact, it can be
removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively
minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On
about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert,
California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using
relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield
of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids
of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue
green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic
food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5
years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or
"nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to
make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet
is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an
extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is
an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own
acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin
at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the
tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as
the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key
nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team
tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate
(available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting)
over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from
"crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond
green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of
50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the
ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up
the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton
grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they
terminated the ferti
Actually the data sources are hyperlinked from the scatterplot.
The method is so basic that I'm confident that anyone who set out to do a by-state demographic analysis would come up with the same or very similar results.
This isn't playing with numbers. It is quite basic statistical analysis -- so basic in fact that there really isn't any excuse for it not to have been replicated many times over already by people funded to research autism.
The problem I'm talking about is an immediate one: people don't want to go into careers where their basic needs are not being met. It is a taboo to talk about reproduction as a basic biological need, which is why people are so prone to hysteria about this, but it isn't nearly as taboo as talking about the influence of social policy on the gene pool -- which takes generations even if you have a genocidal maniac running the eugenics program. You guys who conflate the simple assumption that people want to try to have families, with the hysteria-inducing visions of goose-stepping eugenics doctors simply clouds the issue so people don't face up to what is being done to the economy now.
Autism is a mysterious epidemic that could provide a good test for this sort of tool.
I've done some modeling of the autism epidemic at the state level and found that the most promising explanation is some interaction between recent immigrants from India and people of Finnish ancestry.
This doesn't mean close down the Indian restaurants tommorrow, but what it does mean is that some research money should be allocated to find out if this correlation holds at the county spatiotemporal level.
My theory simply relies on the fact that people want to have decent lives
as:
My theory simply relies on the fact that women want to have decent lives
?
My guess: For the same reason men in female-saturated professions would misread such a sentence as referring specifically to men.
Now, it is true that many people don't want to have children -- but it is far from unreasonable to impute a desire for domestic bliss for the vast majority of people for the simple reason that the vast majority of your ancestors liked having children for if they didn't you would simply not exist.
The fact that you want a career and no children isn't what demonstrates your self-centeredness -- it is your peculiar way of distorting the words of others that does it.
Well it is actually worse than just wage lowering via immigration -- even when wages were high it was the risk adjusted net present value of their income stream combined with the male-saturation of their industrial areas (ie: silicon valley as opposed to, say, some well-paid programmer working in a Wall Street firm where he could probably find a huge assortment of females after hours).
The difference caused by the immigration has largely been demotion from below-reproductive-wage to bare-survival-wage for most programmers. The transition from reproduction-wage to below-reproduction-wage probably due to immigration probably occured in the few female saturated environments where a few programmers work.
Although, never having worked in one of those environments I can easily imagine that there is some sort of social hierarchy in place that favors hiring gay males to program the computers there -- just as there is a bias toward gay males in a lot of the urban professions in and around say NYC and Washington, D.C.
The theory that my theory relies on the list you concocted is the only jack-ass theory around here.
My theory simply relies on the fact that people want to have decent lives -- you know -- the comforts of a home, mate and children with some decent security. These things are systemically denied engineers largely through ghettoization.
For the exact opposite, I suggest you take some time and visit New York City or Washington D.C. to see female-saturated ghettos in service of the guys who are the _real_ problems. And yes they know how to attract women -- and dump them due to "downsizing" just as they did with the bulk of boomer females when that demography hit middle age.
I was trying to speak from the perspective of people who might otherwise identify with guys like Gilder, Forbes etc. They don't see the CEO of Enron as the most problematic members of society -- some silicon valley "nerd" who goes into prison on a pot charge, gets punked out, infected with AIDS and becomes obsessed with indetectably corrupt the transaction logs of TRW's computers -- _he's_ the problem to them.
A number of the respondants have attacked my statements by stating things like "you just can't get laid" or some such.
Although this isn't really a legitimate way of attacking my statements, it is important to note that among my peers I've probably had the greatest number of highly attractive girlfriends/sex partners of any of them. Now I'll be attacked as an egomaniac or something but the point is to clarify much of the psychology of the current argument and debunk an appealing fallacy.
Indeed, it is probably my relative advantage here that has allowed me to not censor my own observations as possibly being simply the result of my own bitterness. I see the men I matured with -- good men both personally and professionally -- and dislike intensely what the corporate and governmental "alphas" did to them.
I'm not saying I didn't have my share of problems with women -- just about anyone these days does. I'm just saying the argument against my statements is very weak even as ad hominem arguments go.
When I speak of male-saturated ghettos I'm speaking of entire regions such as Silicon Valley -- not just individual companies.
Moreover, factory work _has_ been increasingly sent overseas and construction work _is_ increasingly being given over to "guest" workers -- albiet many who are here illegally. Indeed, at the same time the Congress voted an amnesty down for illegal aliens, the senate voted almost unanimously a dramatic increase in h-2b visas. Those are seasonal workers -- largely construction.
Something that's been bothering me a lot throughout my career as a computer programmer is the attitude of the "leading luminaries" to the fundamentals of life for programmers (and engineers in general but most intensely for programmers) -- most specifically reproduction. People like to joke a lot about "nerds getting a date" but when you compare what Western society did to the reproductive rates of its engineers, particularly since the advent of the microprocessor, to the reproductive supports provided Asian engineers -- especially Indian engineers -- you can easily see why engineering is being exported to Asia.
A critical exemplar of these of those "leading luminaries" is someone with whose work most digerati are undoubtedly familiar:
George Gilder
What I see as George Gilder's primary failure is his inability to connect his work on "Men and Marriage" (aka "Sexual Suicide") with work regarding the high tech industry. The major result of this failure is his lack of credibility regarding outsourcing and guest worker visas for high technology.
Basically it boils down to this:
During Gilder's watch, what has been the cost of reproduction of a young American engineer vs the cost of reproduction of a young engineer from India?
My experience, working side-by-side with young H-1b visa employees during the latter part of the 1990s was that there is virtually no comparison:
While both a young engineering from India and a young engineer from the US must focus on his studies, career -- living like a virtual monk -- while working in the male-saturated ghettos that surround the engineering profession, only the Indian engineer has a social support network and the social status, frequently called "sexism" in the US (including arranged marriages), that provides him with a wife of similar background (crucial to reproduction in a larger sense) and the security to raise children within a marriage to such a wife.
Something Gilder should have done was figure out what a comparable marriage and family would actually cost a young US engineer.
Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.
The strategy of encouraging women to go into programming makes sense from a few angles:
1) Corporations tend to discard programmers as they age. This means a woman, about the time her biological clock is kicking in, can exit to a second career as mother. This fits with lowering the cost of reproduction for programmers. Indeed, many Japanese companies have had a policy for sometime of encouraging young women, rather than young men, to enter software careers precisely because they are open about their "agism" in hiring programmers and saw this "second career as mother" as an honorable way of dealing with their employees who were programmers.
2) Since engineering is a male-saturated profession, it females entering the profession will have a lot less difficult time meeting a viable marriage partner of comparable background than will males entering such a male-ghetto.
3) Although many men "go gay" during stays in prison, and many may be cajoled into doing so during their stays in the male-saturated ghettos of western engineering, it really isn't a good way to run technological civilization to base either your penal system or your technology creation on "turning out" your most problematic _or_ your most valuable members.
4) Universities are increasingly female. Indeed, the University of Illinois, origin of the a lot of the key technologies going into computing, networking, the Internet and the web specifically, has gone from a male-saturated engineering school when I was working there to a much more female environment. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that young men simply are dropping out of society at a much greater rate but whatever the cause the fact
Extending the principle of true cost pricing to maintaining the social construct of property rights, one can see that the taxation of anything but property rights themselves is an inappropriate basis for government as the only fundmental job of government, outside of defending life and limb, is protection of property rights. While one can make an argument for taxing right to life and limb as well it is more difficult due to the determination that slavery, and hence ownership of human capital, is not consistent with the social construct of property rights.
It's ironic that the only asset the Feds charge a protection fee for is patent maintanence. If there were one asset that should be exempt from such protection fees it is inventor-owned/assigned patents since by putting capital in the hands of the inventors themselves you are far more likely to create the sort of society that can sustain other sorts of ownership rights.
What we do instead is subsidize the protection of property rights of acquisitors -- with the dire consequences now observable in the technology creation field.
Since including gays in your organization is so wonderful for profits and all, they got calls from their stockholders complaining that by enforcing nondiscrimination policies on other companies, Microsoft was weakening its own competitive advantage.
"Microsoft strongly believes that an inclusive work environment and a diverse employee base have been critical elements of our corporate culture, not only making Microsoft a great place to work, but also enabling us to better understand our customers and create better products," said Ben Waldman, vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Devices Division. The first openly gay executive at the company, Waldman accepted the award on behalf of Microsoft at ceremonies in Hollywood on Dec. 8.
So if I'm reading this correctly, they are lobbying to make other companies stop discriminating against gays because Microsoft believe that including gays is beneficial to their business.
Doesn't this strike anyone else as being rather inconsistent with Microsoft's past behavior?
I mean why would they want to enforce a competitive advantage on their competitors when they typically are so anti-competitive?
The point is that by pushing features to install packages you expose things that can't be installed as indicators of kernel design flaws.
I was just suggesting Greenblatt pick some dependency management system into which to push features he finds superfluous to the kernel and then ask real hard questions about why the kernel can't support some drivers being installed from such a dependency manager -- why they must be compiled into the kernel.
Moving more functionality outside the kernel by fixing the kernel's architecture is what I was talking about in Distributions vs Kernel Design. I just think the pedagogy here is to get people to see apt-get as a way of off-loading the kernel. This exposes the kernel's architectural problems to people who otherwise won't understand the real issues. If you can't install it with apt-get and have it running -- then you either need to create a apt package or you need to fix the kernel architecture.
If Greenblatt wants a leaner kernel, where "kernel" means all the drivers distributed with some distribution he's concerned about, then he needs to refocus his attention on removing everything from the kernel except the components that are necessary to support something like apt-get, with full dependency tracking. This would be a boon to the industry since by standardizing on an installer, it would become possible to have a variety of Linux distributions parameterized simply based on the packages they apt-get by default. Note: apt-get supports specifying CD's as sources rather than websites so you can still distribute a set of CDs for a given distro -- you just use a standard format for your distro's CDs.
This doesn't handle the problem of needing to rebuild the kernel to include some "drivers" but what it does do is make clear the fact that there are some _real_ problems with the kernel that need to be fixed (ie: those "features" that require a rebuild of the kernel to support additional drivers) and unconfuses the issue of distributions vs kernel design.
Map shows first migratory routes taken by humans, based on surveys of different types of the male Y chromosome. "Adam" represents the common ancestor from which all Y chromosomes descended
Research based on DNA testing of 100,000 people from indigenous populations around the world
Source: The Genographic Project
So it is obvious they are publishing a map based on the data they claim they "will" gather. From the first paragraph of the article:
The Genographic Project will collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to help piece together a picture of how the Earth was colonised.
Doesn't this bother anyone else?
Usually, when you set out to do research you have alternative hypotheses that you test the same way as the hypothesis you hold dear to your heart -- this is the scientist's way of tricking himself into not lying to himself.
It's called strong inference. They should use it before the lose it.
As for your conversion to a "single tax on net assets..." I don't think you get it -- How can you call taxation "theft" in one sentence and in the next, call for a tax of any kind?
Simple, the closest thing current political structures can allow to a straight-forward anarcho-capitalist system of reinsurance networks is a net asset tax since it approximates an insurance premium for the protection of property rights.
That's contradiction. And I'm sure you know what Alice Rosenbaum had to say about what to do when you reach a contradiction.;)
Oh you mean a contradiction like yours?
I would happily shed the majority of my government "protections"All I really ask are for the protection of my individual [property] rights.
That is precisely the protection for which you must pay.
Apportionment is an absurdity in our Constitution leading to a result that nobody debated, nobody intended and nobody wants.
The 16th Amendment, rather than fixing this bug in the Constitution, exacerbated it by locking in an very pathological tax as the only direct tax exempt from apportionment: the income tax.
The original reason for the apportionment was to approximate a tax on net assets under the Articles of Confederation! During the early stages of the country the distribution of asset value was very much dependent on the presence of population to turn natural resource, primarily land, to productivity. Rather than trying to track everyone down and assess their property values, the States were essentially taxed on their populations.
So if the Congress wants, it can go back to the simple system of directly taxing just States.
Alternatively it can even go to a more rational system of just charging reinsurance fees to the States for the cost of underwriting defense of property rights and let the States, as regulators of premiums within their own jurisdictions, figure out how to tax assets appropriately.
It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the Constitution, to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected.
But in practice, every person who has ever referred to himself as an "objectivist" has sought first to unburden himself of taxation despite the fact that he receives fundamental protections of his property rights. What he should do rather is seek first to unburden himself of government protection and it will become apparent then to all of ethical character that taxation is theft.
Better yet, he should support conversion to a single tax on net assets at a rate equal to the national debt (since government debt vehicles are the "welfare safety net" for capital) with an exemption for subsistence assets (since the populus is effectively held on retainer as mercenaries for defense of property rights and should be paid mercenary wages for said retainer) as a clarifying step.
Alice Rosenbaum merely represents the other side of the coin to communism's central planning. Rosenbaum represents centralized wealth. The coin itself represents centralization and crushing the life out of young families and small business.
If you must tax, rather than charge insurance premiums (government should merely be the reinsurer of last resort), then tax net assets, not income, sales or capital gains.
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels
typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to
the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating
other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property
should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be
approximated by the median price of housing an individual added
to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together,
these exemptions add up to between $50,000 and $100,000.
Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the
lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to
children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium
between government debt levels, current tax rates and private
wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright
balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Cities just can't do that. They're too dense with humans to support sustainable ecosystems.
There are some zoos that are more humane than others and the more humane ones tend to have bigger habitats for their animals.
The other thing orbital space habitats buy you, aside from a place for technological civilization outside Earth's natural habitats, is time for humans to learn enough about themselves to humanely evolve themselves to a different mode of life entirely. Cramming humans into cities with our current ignorance of human biodiversity and nature is hubris. Worse, those who are most in a position to influence public policy are most adapted to urban environments and therefore are in a position of public trust and authority while they have an interest in cramming the more rural-adapted folks into environments where those folks are at a competitive disadvantage.
His reliance on nuclear energy as the solution to the greenhouse emission problem betrays exactly the sort of lack of creativity just described. Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
Agriculture need not be land intensive. In fact, it can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the ferti
The method is so basic that I'm confident that anyone who set out to do a by-state demographic analysis would come up with the same or very similar results.
This isn't playing with numbers. It is quite basic statistical analysis -- so basic in fact that there really isn't any excuse for it not to have been replicated many times over already by people funded to research autism.
The problem I'm talking about is an immediate one: people don't want to go into careers where their basic needs are not being met. It is a taboo to talk about reproduction as a basic biological need, which is why people are so prone to hysteria about this, but it isn't nearly as taboo as talking about the influence of social policy on the gene pool -- which takes generations even if you have a genocidal maniac running the eugenics program. You guys who conflate the simple assumption that people want to try to have families, with the hysteria-inducing visions of goose-stepping eugenics doctors simply clouds the issue so people don't face up to what is being done to the economy now.
I've done some modeling of the autism epidemic at the state level and found that the most promising explanation is some interaction between recent immigrants from India and people of Finnish ancestry.
When you look at the scatter plot it is quite graphic with a correlation of 60% at 49 degrees of freedom for a very high statistical significance (p Indeed, you can take hundreds of biologically relevant variables, including vaccination rates and mercury pollution (which are hypothesized to be possible causes of the autism epidemic) and combine them any way you like and you still can't find a better explanation than that something is being imported from India to which genotypes indigenous to Finland are particularly susceptible.
This doesn't mean close down the Indian restaurants tommorrow, but what it does mean is that some research money should be allocated to find out if this correlation holds at the county spatiotemporal level.
My guess: For the same reason men in female-saturated professions would misread such a sentence as referring specifically to men.
Now, it is true that many people don't want to have children -- but it is far from unreasonable to impute a desire for domestic bliss for the vast majority of people for the simple reason that the vast majority of your ancestors liked having children for if they didn't you would simply not exist.
The fact that you want a career and no children isn't what demonstrates your self-centeredness -- it is your peculiar way of distorting the words of others that does it.
The difference caused by the immigration has largely been demotion from below-reproductive-wage to bare-survival-wage for most programmers. The transition from reproduction-wage to below-reproduction-wage probably due to immigration probably occured in the few female saturated environments where a few programmers work.
Although, never having worked in one of those environments I can easily imagine that there is some sort of social hierarchy in place that favors hiring gay males to program the computers there -- just as there is a bias toward gay males in a lot of the urban professions in and around say NYC and Washington, D.C.
My theory simply relies on the fact that people want to have decent lives -- you know -- the comforts of a home, mate and children with some decent security. These things are systemically denied engineers largely through ghettoization.
For the exact opposite, I suggest you take some time and visit New York City or Washington D.C. to see female-saturated ghettos in service of the guys who are the _real_ problems. And yes they know how to attract women -- and dump them due to "downsizing" just as they did with the bulk of boomer females when that demography hit middle age.
I was trying to speak from the perspective of people who might otherwise identify with guys like Gilder, Forbes etc. They don't see the CEO of Enron as the most problematic members of society -- some silicon valley "nerd" who goes into prison on a pot charge, gets punked out, infected with AIDS and becomes obsessed with indetectably corrupt the transaction logs of TRW's computers -- _he's_ the problem to them.
Although this isn't really a legitimate way of attacking my statements, it is important to note that among my peers I've probably had the greatest number of highly attractive girlfriends/sex partners of any of them. Now I'll be attacked as an egomaniac or something but the point is to clarify much of the psychology of the current argument and debunk an appealing fallacy.
Indeed, it is probably my relative advantage here that has allowed me to not censor my own observations as possibly being simply the result of my own bitterness. I see the men I matured with -- good men both personally and professionally -- and dislike intensely what the corporate and governmental "alphas" did to them.
I'm not saying I didn't have my share of problems with women -- just about anyone these days does. I'm just saying the argument against my statements is very weak even as ad hominem arguments go.
Moreover, factory work _has_ been increasingly sent overseas and construction work _is_ increasingly being given over to "guest" workers -- albiet many who are here illegally. Indeed, at the same time the Congress voted an amnesty down for illegal aliens, the senate voted almost unanimously a dramatic increase in h-2b visas. Those are seasonal workers -- largely construction.
Something that's been bothering me a lot throughout my career as a computer programmer is the attitude of the "leading luminaries" to the fundamentals of life for programmers (and engineers in general but most intensely for programmers) -- most specifically reproduction. People like to joke a lot about "nerds getting a date" but when you compare what Western society did to the reproductive rates of its engineers, particularly since the advent of the microprocessor, to the reproductive supports provided Asian engineers -- especially Indian engineers -- you can easily see why engineering is being exported to Asia.
A critical exemplar of these of those "leading luminaries" is someone with whose work most digerati are undoubtedly familiar:
George Gilder
What I see as George Gilder's primary failure is his inability to connect his work on "Men and Marriage" (aka "Sexual Suicide") with work regarding the high tech industry. The major result of this failure is his lack of credibility regarding outsourcing and guest worker visas for high technology.
Basically it boils down to this:
During Gilder's watch, what has been the cost of reproduction of a young American engineer vs the cost of reproduction of a young engineer from India?
My experience, working side-by-side with young H-1b visa employees during the latter part of the 1990s was that there is virtually no comparison:
While both a young engineering from India and a young engineer from the US must focus on his studies, career -- living like a virtual monk -- while working in the male-saturated ghettos that surround the engineering profession, only the Indian engineer has a social support network and the social status, frequently called "sexism" in the US (including arranged marriages), that provides him with a wife of similar background (crucial to reproduction in a larger sense) and the security to raise children within a marriage to such a wife.
Something Gilder should have done was figure out what a comparable marriage and family would actually cost a young US engineer.
Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.
The strategy of encouraging women to go into programming makes sense from a few angles:
1) Corporations tend to discard programmers as they age. This means a woman, about the time her biological clock is kicking in, can exit to a second career as mother. This fits with lowering the cost of reproduction for programmers. Indeed, many Japanese companies have had a policy for sometime of encouraging young women, rather than young men, to enter software careers precisely because they are open about their "agism" in hiring programmers and saw this "second career as mother" as an honorable way of dealing with their employees who were programmers.
2) Since engineering is a male-saturated profession, it females entering the profession will have a lot less difficult time meeting a viable marriage partner of comparable background than will males entering such a male-ghetto.
3) Although many men "go gay" during stays in prison, and many may be cajoled into doing so during their stays in the male-saturated ghettos of western engineering, it really isn't a good way to run technological civilization to base either your penal system or your technology creation on "turning out" your most problematic _or_ your most valuable members.
4) Universities are increasingly female. Indeed, the University of Illinois, origin of the a lot of the key technologies going into computing, networking, the Internet and the web specifically, has gone from a male-saturated engineering school when I was working there to a much more female environment. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that young men simply are dropping out of society at a much greater rate but whatever the cause the fact
It's ironic that the only asset the Feds charge a protection fee for is patent maintanence. If there were one asset that should be exempt from such protection fees it is inventor-owned/assigned patents since by putting capital in the hands of the inventors themselves you are far more likely to create the sort of society that can sustain other sorts of ownership rights.
What we do instead is subsidize the protection of property rights of acquisitors -- with the dire consequences now observable in the technology creation field.
Right? Doesn't that follow from your logic?
Oh, you mean the proof that gayness is caused by a virus?
Doesn't this strike anyone else as being rather inconsistent with Microsoft's past behavior?
I mean why would they want to enforce a competitive advantage on their competitors when they typically are so anti-competitive?
The point is that by pushing features to install packages you expose things that can't be installed as indicators of kernel design flaws.
I was just suggesting Greenblatt pick some dependency management system into which to push features he finds superfluous to the kernel and then ask real hard questions about why the kernel can't support some drivers being installed from such a dependency manager -- why they must be compiled into the kernel.
Moving more functionality outside the kernel by fixing the kernel's architecture is what I was talking about in Distributions vs Kernel Design. I just think the pedagogy here is to get people to see apt-get as a way of off-loading the kernel. This exposes the kernel's architectural problems to people who otherwise won't understand the real issues. If you can't install it with apt-get and have it running -- then you either need to create a apt package or you need to fix the kernel architecture.
This doesn't handle the problem of needing to rebuild the kernel to include some "drivers" but what it does do is make clear the fact that there are some _real_ problems with the kernel that need to be fixed (ie: those "features" that require a rebuild of the kernel to support additional drivers) and unconfuses the issue of distributions vs kernel design.
The Earth Impact Effects Calculator lets you calculate the destructive effect of various asteroid impacts.
Doesn't this bother anyone else?
Usually, when you set out to do research you have alternative hypotheses that you test the same way as the hypothesis you hold dear to your heart -- this is the scientist's way of tricking himself into not lying to himself.
It's called strong inference. They should use it before the lose it.
Simple, the closest thing current political structures can allow to a straight-forward anarcho-capitalist system of reinsurance networks is a net asset tax since it approximates an insurance premium for the protection of property rights.
That's contradiction. And I'm sure you know what Alice Rosenbaum had to say about what to do when you reach a contradiction. ;)
Oh you mean a contradiction like yours?
I would happily shed the majority of my government "protections"All I really ask are for the protection of my individual [property] rights.
That is precisely the protection for which you must pay.
The original reason for the apportionment was to approximate a tax on net assets under the Articles of Confederation! During the early stages of the country the distribution of asset value was very much dependent on the presence of population to turn natural resource, primarily land, to productivity. Rather than trying to track everyone down and assess their property values, the States were essentially taxed on their populations.
So if the Congress wants, it can go back to the simple system of directly taxing just States.
Alternatively it can even go to a more rational system of just charging reinsurance fees to the States for the cost of underwriting defense of property rights and let the States, as regulators of premiums within their own jurisdictions, figure out how to tax assets appropriately.
Better yet, he should support conversion to a single tax on net assets at a rate equal to the national debt (since government debt vehicles are the "welfare safety net" for capital) with an exemption for subsistence assets (since the populus is effectively held on retainer as mercenaries for defense of property rights and should be paid mercenary wages for said retainer) as a clarifying step.
Alice Rosenbaum merely represents the other side of the coin to communism's central planning. Rosenbaum represents centralized wealth. The coin itself represents centralization and crushing the life out of young families and small business.
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be approximated by the median price of housing an individual added to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together, these exemptions add up to between $50,000 and $100,000. Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium between government debt levels, current tax rates and private wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.