Gee, it sure is nice to see that bloggers are taking the courageous stance of looking out for political correctness. I mean mainstream media just doesn't do a good enough job of that.
Face it, the blogging community is, like the government, media and academia, a bunch of narcissistic wankers.
If you're going to process megatons of lunar regolith to extract small amounts of a fusion fuel that can't even be burned yet, why not just build space solar power satellites?
In the meantime you can set up fusion prize awards to incentivize development of the technologies necessary to burn He3 if you find it is economic.
I am fighting with our government to allow H1B visas cap to be raised. I was in at the White House talking to the chief of staff to get the H1B visa cap raised. We already half way through the fiscal year, capped out on the number of really bright Israelis and Indians.
It has been downhill for Sun as well as the entire computer industry.
Oh, yes, McNealy and the rest of the computer industry execs did succeed in corrupting Congress with hundreds of millions of political contributions, but they also succeeded in destroying the computer industry and betraying their own stockholders.
What we have now is a jobs program called "Java" for hoards of "programmers" who are a consequence of the political movements in India to dismantle the caste system via their equivalent of affirmative action. After all, you can't give a significant fraction of 1 billion people academic degrees in computer science without giving them "jobs" matching their "skills". So we get lots and lots of Java oozing from organizational structures that do increasingly look like something out of the middle east -- be it a Bazaar or a religious cult.
I'm just wondering whether Sun's executives will be assassinated by international terrorists or by their own stockholders?
I predict the winner will use a rail gun on the moon.
Good point. The criteria should probably include a repeat rate and number of repetitions -- sort of like the X-Prize's repeat rate -- to eliminate systems that aren't durable. Rail-guns are notoriously self-destructive.
This will likely be decades before a space elevator is placed on the Earth
If not longer.
probably centuries before one is on the Moon.
RTFA
A single launch with an existing commercial vehicle using existing off-the-shelf fiber could put the tether for a lunar elevator at the Lagrange point.
Probably not. No space transportation system we can imagine (although that might be a significant qualifier) could keep up with the number of babies being born.
This is ironic since O'Neill himself described just such a transportation system and projected depopulation of Earth to require an infrastructure not much larger than that supporting the commercial airlines.
The U. S. Constitution -- the first place patents of invention were guaranteed a prominent place in the foundation of a republican form of government -- says this of patents in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
If the founders, many inventors themselves, saw the way inventors routinely assign their rights to others they would be appalled. This is not to be blamed on the inventors but on a system that removes from inventors the resources necessary for them to defend themselves against acquisitors. This is largely the result of the tax system that rewards acquisition while punishing productivity.
A better system founded on eminent domain rights could be legislated and might work somethnig like the following proposal:
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.
Under current (1992) asset distribution and government debt the NAT would generate between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in revenue, thus totally displacing other forms of taxation.
Perhaps if you explained your 'programming gets passed down through clans' thesis, I might bother to address it. It is not prima facie, so I will treat it like I treat the ravings of any other lunatic.
Wired magazine carried the "ravings of a lunatic" named Bryna Siegel who claimed that autism results from assortive mating between people who are predisposed to be "geeks" -- and offered her up as authoritative. Maybe you should call up the public health department and recommend the lot of those guys to the local sanitorium. It seems less plausible that assortive mating has increased at the rates presupposed to support the recent increases in autism given the high degree of immigration over the same time period -- particularly among programming professionals.
Moreover, there was another way of interpreting what I was saying, which is closer to my meaning:
A more important metric than cost of living is cost of reproduction. If you measure only cost of living you can end up genociding certain demographies through differential impact of public policies on reproduction. Ignoring these unintended consequences is malign neglect on the part of demographies within the same body politic that benefit from said policies.
For example, if a libelous communication takes
place, corporate lawyers for the plaintiff will bring suit against the
carrier rather than the individual responsible for the communication.
The rationalizations for this clearly unreasonable and contrived
position are quite numerous. Without a common carrier status, the
carrier will be treading on virgin ground legally and thus be
unprotected by precedent. Indeed, the stakes are high enough that the
competitor could easily afford to fabricate an event ideal for the
purposes of such a suit. This means the first legal precedent could
be in favor of holding the carrier responsible for the communications
transmitted over its network, thus forcing (or giving an excuse for)
the carrier to inspect, edit and censor all communications except,
perhaps, simple person-to-person or "electronic mail". This, in turn,
would put editorial control right back in the hands of the feudalists.
Potential carriers' own lawyers are already hard at work worrying
everyone about such a suit. They would like to win the battle against
diversity before it begins. This is unlikely because videotex is
still driven by technology and therefore by pioneers.
The question then becomes: How do we best protect against such
"legal" tactics? The answer seems to be an early emphasis on secure
identification of the source of communications so that there can be no
question as to the individual responsible. This would preempt an
attempt to hold the carrier liable. Anonymous communications, like
Delphi conferencing, could even be supported as long as some
individual would be willing to attach his/her name to the
communication before distributing it. This would be similar, legally,
to a "letters to the editor" column where a writer remains anonymous.
Another measure could be to require that only individuals of legal age
be allowed to author publishable communications. Yet another measure
could be to require anyone who wishes to write and publish information
on the network to put in writing, in an agreement separate from the
standard customer agreement, that they are liable for any and all
communications originating under their name on the network. This
would preempt the "stolen password" excuse for holding the carrier
liable.
Well, something like this is now happening in Finland.
Finally, I have not libelled you. You libel yourself when you post such rubbish. I merely mock you for my entertainment and the entertainment of others.
You have repeatedly represented mischaracterizations of my statements as fact. Later you are claiming that some of these mischaracterizations are merely a "mock". That won't wash. I'm sure people like you believe that speech or acts against groups of people, as opposed to individuals, are worthy of extra punishment as "hate". Yet you refuse to identify yourself as an individual.
Ukranians didn't have some asshole like Disraeli come through and give away the crown jewels in the form of enforced education in the English language.
There are lots of cultures that weren't Christian outside of northern and western Europe and yes they were a lot further along the road toward mass warfare earlier for obvious reasons. Religions from that region still dominate us. The pre-Christian cultural adaptations to mass warfare in northern and western Europe were primarily a response to these other cultures rooted in the middle east hence the Mediterranean -- the Roman Empire being the most conspicuous.
As for Kuwaiti and Kurdish leaders being unable to take out Saddam with fair contest between individuals -- of course Saddam invoked single combat when it suited him and abjured it when it didn't. You didn't think I was imply Saddam Hussein was genuinely acting as though he were a pre-Christian northern European as opposed to simply manipulating that mythlogy for political purposes did you?
And you still haven't addressed the fundamental statement -- which still stands -- as to the way clan structures in India enable their programmers to reproduce without anywhere near the costs imposed on US programmers -- even rural US programmers. Every one of the evils of "the bad old days" should be equally applicable to India if your view of clan structures were true across the board. They aren't. There are conditions under which they can be made workable and conditions underwhich they are unworkable.
Among the first things the priests do when they Christianize a region is convince the "leaders" such as you describe, to replace single combat (or any non-verbal fair contest between individuals) as the last resort in dispute processing with some sort of mob rule. That's how the leaders, who apparently rule by "divine right" or some nonsense can get away with the behavior you describe. Otherwise they would have their heads handed to them in very short order.
While this is supposed to minimize bloodshed as the last resort in dispute processing, what it actually does is result in, first, bloodfeud and then mass warfare.
Sadam Hussien, for example, challenged George Bush to a duel before Bush committed US troops to Iraq.
Bush of course didn't even have to decline.
I'm sure you, an anymous coward, approve of Bush's course of action, resulting in 100,000 Iraqi deaths and 1000 US deaths for mendacious objectives, regardless of what you will now claim with equal mendacity. I mean after all -- you can say anything and get away with it no matter what you have said elsewhere or will say in the future.
The origin of the United States is in the lowland clearances of Scotland which has just been repeated in the heartland of America over the last century -- primarily the last half of the last century.
What we have now, rather than a yeoman class, are effectively serfs. The difference between India and the US is that they figured out how to keep most of their serfs within extended families due to the fact that the Hindu religion is a lot less hostile to the blood bonds of clan structures than is Christianity. Christianity has essentially focused on destroying clan identity for the benefit of urban elites for the last 2 thousand years, and when it reached Scotland it set off a profound reaction. The Scotch-Irish cleared from their ancestral lands came flooding into the New World to escape their disposession by clan leaders who had been made to so identify with urban elites, that they despised their rural kin.
Sound familiar?
It should, its happening again.
The result is a monetization of social bonds, requiring people to pay for what once they got from their extended families.
There is no way rural America can compete with India on a cost basis until this fundamental betrayal of the European peoples has been redressed.
I'll tell you what's inefficient: Producing food in the countryside and shipping it to urban areas. Solar energy drives us all. The utilities you're talking about have all been solved in a low-impact low-capitalization way that is a lot easier to deal with. It doesn't cost lots of money to run a composting toilet and they're workable. Roads are necessary but they're already there. Railroad tracks are decreasingly necessary. Powerlines are necessary if you don't have local production. Phone lines? What decade are you living in? Fiber opitcs? Ever hear of WiFi?
If you can invent things like the first air plane, first computer, first super computer and first private reusable manned suborbital rocket outside of cities, what's to stop you from inventing things like flexible manufacturing but people's hypnosis with Oz?
I'll admit the cities served a useful function at one time, but the key things they did are now replacable with technology just as technology is making them high risk locales.
Instead of looking at the dot-CON bubble as the exemplar of technical innovation, you should look at the Wright Brother's bike shop, the first computer (the ABC) built at an agricultural school in a small town in Iowa, the first supercomputer built by Seymour Cray on his farm with 25 assistants, only one of which had a PhD (a junior level programmer) and the desert workshop of Burt Rutan that built SpaceshipOne.
The fact of the matter is that sexual abuse is contageous -- and the hysterical attitudes of many people toward sexual sadism in prison is in the mode of the abused becoming the abuser. You can't live in a society like the US is, particularly if you are a white-collar, white-bread, non-gang affiliated male, and experience the government in a way that isn't abusive. Eventually you either identify with the abuser, and become a jingoistic government lacky, or you decide that just about any means are justified against just about anyone or anything identified with the government's power.
The first empirical study of the issue, sparked by reports that Philadephia pretrial detainees were being raped even in vans on the way to court, was conducted in 1968 by a local district attorney. After interviewing thousands of inmates and hundreds of correctional officers, as well as examining institutional records, he found that sexual assaults were "epidemic" in the Philadelphia system. "[V]irtually every slightly-built young man committed by the court is sexually approached within a day or two after his admission to prison," the author said. "Many of these young men are repeatedly raped by gangs of prisoners."(380) In all, he found that slightly over 3 percent of inmates--an estimated 2,000 men --had been sexually assaulted during the twenty-six-month period examined. Although he was careful to exclude instances of consensual homosexual contact from his findings, he also acknowledged that some instances of apparently consensual sex might in fact have a coercive basis, due to the "fear-charged atmosphere" of the penal system.
The evidence is that once an inmate is "punked out" or "turned out", he is repeatedly victimized.
So, the only additional parameter you need to do the arithmetic is the size of the US prison population, which has been exploding over the last decade or so and is over 2 million. Indeed, the US now imprisons more of its population than any other developed country and it is in fact imprisoning more of its citizens than second-world and third world Islmic countries.
It is reasonable to expect that with the explosion of ethnic gang activity in the inner cities, and the general attitude of victimization-as-justification is encouraged among inner city ethnics, that the rate at which ethnic prison gangs sexually attack others, particularly whites, in prisons has substantially increased since the advent of the civil rights era when the above study was initiated. (This is not to disparage the legitimate complaints of minorities -- merely to point out the pathological prison mindset with respect to the civil rights era.)
So let's take 3 percent as a reasonable minimum and 10 percent as a reasonable maximum for PunkRate.
With an incarcerated population of more than 2 million we have a maximum Punks figure of 200,000.
Since punks are increasingly viewed as economic commodities, as are slaves, and the operation of gangs in prisons is frequently involved in economic activities, it is reasonable to place a fairly high number on the "work load" of a given punk. Most pimps demand multiple sexual acts of their employees during a day and we should expect similar rates in prison of punks and their "owners". It's hard to say what a reasonable minimum is here but a reasonable maximum is somewhere around one coerced sex act per day, and we can even round it down if you think that's a ridiculous work load in a prison gang pimping operation -- so we have a reasonable RapesPerPunk of around 300.
So we then have a maximum Rate of 300*200,000 or 60 million.
Substitute your own assumptions and come up with your own estimates, but the numbers are so incredibly high that it hardly makes sense to see Abu Ghraib as anything but a symptom of the domestic problem in the US.
Do you really think the events at Abu Ghraib would have occurred if US governments hadn't become addicted to racist sexual sadism as a means of extorting compliance out of US citizens?
Yes of course this goes beyond the US or its penal system. That's why sexual sadism was standard practice at Abu Ghraib.
But if people don't see how much the governments of the US depend on sexual sadism to maintain compliance from their populace the Abu Ghraib immages may mislead them into believing that the locus of the problem is the US military or foreign policy.
Pathological US behavior around the world is merely a symptom of the sexually sadistic way US governments compell compliance US citizens.
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of acts of racist sexual sadism in US prisons every year and you don't see expose pictures of those on any search engine anywhere.
The sexual sadism of Abu Ghraib is insignificant by comparison and may even be seen as a symptom of the US penal system's standards.
Google is merely trying to keep things in perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, the blogging community is, like the government, media and academia, a bunch of narcissistic wankers.
In the meantime you can set up fusion prize awards to incentivize development of the technologies necessary to burn He3 if you find it is economic.
Oh, yes, McNealy and the rest of the computer industry execs did succeed in corrupting Congress with hundreds of millions of political contributions, but they also succeeded in destroying the computer industry and betraying their own stockholders.
What we have now is a jobs program called "Java" for hoards of "programmers" who are a consequence of the political movements in India to dismantle the caste system via their equivalent of affirmative action. After all, you can't give a significant fraction of 1 billion people academic degrees in computer science without giving them "jobs" matching their "skills". So we get lots and lots of Java oozing from organizational structures that do increasingly look like something out of the middle east -- be it a Bazaar or a religious cult.
I'm just wondering whether Sun's executives will be assassinated by international terrorists or by their own stockholders?
Good point. The criteria should probably include a repeat rate and number of repetitions -- sort of like the X-Prize's repeat rate -- to eliminate systems that aren't durable. Rail-guns are notoriously self-destructive.
This will likely be decades before a space elevator is placed on the Earth
If not longer.
probably centuries before one is on the Moon.
RTFA
A single launch with an existing commercial vehicle using existing off-the-shelf fiber could put the tether for a lunar elevator at the Lagrange point.
You can buy, off the shelf, tens of thousands of miles of fiber that does this job.
The scale of the lunar elevator can be much smaller.
It is vastly less vulnerable to terrorism or other mishap.
This really could solve the Earth's energy problems and lead to a dramatic reduction in ecological pressures.
This is a great idea.
I'm surprised and a bit ashamed that I haven't heard about it before.
It should be the next big space prize after America's Space Prize.
$100M for the first kg of lunar material moved, without rocket propulsion, to a Lagrange point.
An effect of O'Neill's proposal is the creation of space settlements which could house thousands of times the land area of the Earth from asteroidal materials alone. The creator of the space-settlement FAQ, Mike Combs, says in that FAQ to the question "Is space settlement a solution to the overpopulation problem?":
This is ironic since O'Neill himself described just such a transportation system and projected depopulation of Earth to require an infrastructure not much larger than that supporting the commercial airlines.A better system founded on eminent domain rights could be legislated and might work somethnig like the following proposal:
Wired magazine carried the "ravings of a lunatic" named Bryna Siegel who claimed that autism results from assortive mating between people who are predisposed to be "geeks" -- and offered her up as authoritative. Maybe you should call up the public health department and recommend the lot of those guys to the local sanitorium. It seems less plausible that assortive mating has increased at the rates presupposed to support the recent increases in autism given the high degree of immigration over the same time period -- particularly among programming professionals.
Moreover, there was another way of interpreting what I was saying, which is closer to my meaning:
A more important metric than cost of living is cost of reproduction. If you measure only cost of living you can end up genociding certain demographies through differential impact of public policies on reproduction. Ignoring these unintended consequences is malign neglect on the part of demographies within the same body politic that benefit from said policies.
Correlation doesn't imply causation!!!!!
I mean what if a third factor caused both the hurricanes and strawberry Pop Tart sales to increase 7-fold????
Somebody was going to blurt that bromide out at that statement, so it may as well be me.
You have repeatedly represented mischaracterizations of my statements as fact. Later you are claiming that some of these mischaracterizations are merely a "mock". That won't wash. I'm sure people like you believe that speech or acts against groups of people, as opposed to individuals, are worthy of extra punishment as "hate". Yet you refuse to identify yourself as an individual.
Ukranians didn't have some asshole like Disraeli come through and give away the crown jewels in the form of enforced education in the English language.
Look, anonymous coward, if you think your insult-laden "arguments" can stand up to scrutiny the why don't you stand behind them?
Come out the closet with you libelous characterizations of my statements. Identify yourself.
As for Kuwaiti and Kurdish leaders being unable to take out Saddam with fair contest between individuals -- of course Saddam invoked single combat when it suited him and abjured it when it didn't. You didn't think I was imply Saddam Hussein was genuinely acting as though he were a pre-Christian northern European as opposed to simply manipulating that mythlogy for political purposes did you?
And you still haven't addressed the fundamental statement -- which still stands -- as to the way clan structures in India enable their programmers to reproduce without anywhere near the costs imposed on US programmers -- even rural US programmers. Every one of the evils of "the bad old days" should be equally applicable to India if your view of clan structures were true across the board. They aren't. There are conditions under which they can be made workable and conditions underwhich they are unworkable.
While this is supposed to minimize bloodshed as the last resort in dispute processing, what it actually does is result in, first, bloodfeud and then mass warfare.
Sadam Hussien, for example, challenged George Bush to a duel before Bush committed US troops to Iraq.
Bush of course didn't even have to decline.
I'm sure you, an anymous coward, approve of Bush's course of action, resulting in 100,000 Iraqi deaths and 1000 US deaths for mendacious objectives, regardless of what you will now claim with equal mendacity. I mean after all -- you can say anything and get away with it no matter what you have said elsewhere or will say in the future.
These are the bad old days.
What we have now, rather than a yeoman class, are effectively serfs. The difference between India and the US is that they figured out how to keep most of their serfs within extended families due to the fact that the Hindu religion is a lot less hostile to the blood bonds of clan structures than is Christianity. Christianity has essentially focused on destroying clan identity for the benefit of urban elites for the last 2 thousand years, and when it reached Scotland it set off a profound reaction. The Scotch-Irish cleared from their ancestral lands came flooding into the New World to escape their disposession by clan leaders who had been made to so identify with urban elites, that they despised their rural kin.
Sound familiar?
It should, its happening again.
The result is a monetization of social bonds, requiring people to pay for what once they got from their extended families.
There is no way rural America can compete with India on a cost basis until this fundamental betrayal of the European peoples has been redressed.
Dry cleaners? OK, you got me there.
I'll admit the cities served a useful function at one time, but the key things they did are now replacable with technology just as technology is making them high risk locales.
Instead of looking at the dot-CON bubble as the exemplar of technical innovation, you should look at the Wright Brother's bike shop, the first computer (the ABC) built at an agricultural school in a small town in Iowa, the first supercomputer built by Seymour Cray on his farm with 25 assistants, only one of which had a PhD (a junior level programmer) and the desert workshop of Burt Rutan that built SpaceshipOne.
The fact of the matter is that sexual abuse is contageous -- and the hysterical attitudes of many people toward sexual sadism in prison is in the mode of the abused becoming the abuser. You can't live in a society like the US is, particularly if you are a white-collar, white-bread, non-gang affiliated male, and experience the government in a way that isn't abusive. Eventually you either identify with the abuser, and become a jingoistic government lacky, or you decide that just about any means are justified against just about anyone or anything identified with the government's power.
So, the only additional parameter you need to do the arithmetic is the size of the US prison population, which has been exploding over the last decade or so and is over 2 million. Indeed, the US now imprisons more of its population than any other developed country and it is in fact imprisoning more of its citizens than second-world and third world Islmic countries.
The formulas:
Rate = Punks * RapesPerPunk Punks = Prisoners * PunkRate
Can be used to estimate.
It is reasonable to expect that with the explosion of ethnic gang activity in the inner cities, and the general attitude of victimization-as-justification is encouraged among inner city ethnics, that the rate at which ethnic prison gangs sexually attack others, particularly whites, in prisons has substantially increased since the advent of the civil rights era when the above study was initiated. (This is not to disparage the legitimate complaints of minorities -- merely to point out the pathological prison mindset with respect to the civil rights era.)
So let's take 3 percent as a reasonable minimum and 10 percent as a reasonable maximum for PunkRate.
With an incarcerated population of more than 2 million we have a maximum Punks figure of 200,000.
Since punks are increasingly viewed as economic commodities, as are slaves, and the operation of gangs in prisons is frequently involved in economic activities, it is reasonable to place a fairly high number on the "work load" of a given punk. Most pimps demand multiple sexual acts of their employees during a day and we should expect similar rates in prison of punks and their "owners". It's hard to say what a reasonable minimum is here but a reasonable maximum is somewhere around one coerced sex act per day, and we can even round it down if you think that's a ridiculous work load in a prison gang pimping operation -- so we have a reasonable RapesPerPunk of around 300.
So we then have a maximum Rate of 300*200,000 or 60 million.
Substitute your own assumptions and come up with your own estimates, but the numbers are so incredibly high that it hardly makes sense to see Abu Ghraib as anything but a symptom of the domestic problem in the US.
Do you really think the events at Abu Ghraib would have occurred if US governments hadn't become addicted to racist sexual sadism as a means of extorting compliance out of US citizens?
But if people don't see how much the governments of the US depend on sexual sadism to maintain compliance from their populace the Abu Ghraib immages may mislead them into believing that the locus of the problem is the US military or foreign policy.
Pathological US behavior around the world is merely a symptom of the sexually sadistic way US governments compell compliance US citizens.
The sexual sadism of Abu Ghraib is insignificant by comparison and may even be seen as a symptom of the US penal system's standards.
Google is merely trying to keep things in perspective.