Caller: Hello, Dr. X, this is Dr. Y from [insert watchdog group name]. How are you today?
Callee: Uh, ok.
Caller: We're doing a survey. Your paper "[insert name of paper]" is cited in a NYT Best Seller that justifies taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies. Do you oppose taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies or not?
Callee: (Thinking to himself: "This guy is obviously nuts but then half of academia is nuts and they can cut off mine as well as all my future government grants for looking at them crosseyeed.") Why, NO! I absolutely oppose the use of my work to in any way shape or form to justify taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies! Where is the bastard that so abused my inherently anti-racist work so I can consider suing him!?!?"
So what? Everyone knows that race is a social construct so there can't be any genetic correlations with race of social significance independent of racism's social construction.
Therefore, the racial disparities that appear in society are the result of the White Man keepin' us down! The Heterosexual White Man that is.
Absolutely. I have to work all the time and I fear for my children becoming less than fully indoctrinated as any deviation in thought may result in a loss of employability and social acceptance.
Not ultimately, but proximately, it is. For instance, the guys at the Hackers Conference ceased bringing their fragmentary Usenet archives because DejaNews had everything online and then -- poof -- only for Google to pick it up again and then go, "Duh!" We'll see how long it takes for complete archive to be fully indexed. I'm sure it will happen eventually. Meanwhile...
Google has already mastered the art of Orwell's "memory hole". Just look at how Google manages to forget everything they know about search engines when it comes to their Usenet archives. Selectively applied, this is far more effective than anything so brute as Orwell's memory hole.
Oh I should add that once you are in this regime, the term "hire" may be somewhat different than it is in other circumstances. I mean a more straight-forward means of dealing with cheating is to punish cheating with a degree of severity that matches the potential harm inflicted by having cheaters with their fingers on The Big Red Button -- so the circumstances of the "employment" may involve such any aspects of such punishment as are practically applicable. Military justice isn't burdened with your usual Civil Libertarian constraints.,
If you have people that are even remotely tempted to cheat that have their fingers on The Big Red Button, you have a serious threat to civilization.
Having an incentive to cheat is a great way to elicit this potential. The proper national security response is not to remove the incentive to cheat but to increase the detection sensitivity and then hire the guys who cheated to compete with others who cheated to design test regimes that are more likely to elicit cheating while also being more sensitive to detecting cheating.
Necessity and Incentives Opening the Space Frontier Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space by James Bowery, Chairman Coalition for Science and Commerce July 31, 1991
Mr. Chairman and Distinguished Members of the Subcommittee:
I am James Bowery, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to address the subcommittee on the critical and historic topic of commercial incentives to open the space frontier.
The Coalition for Science and Commerce is a grassroots network of citizen activists supporting greater public funding for diversified scientific research and greater private funding for proprietary technology and services. We believe these are mutually reinforcing policies which have been violated to the detriment of civilization. We believe in the constitutional provision of patents of invention and that the principles of free enterprise pertain to intellectual property. We therefore see technology development as a private sector responsibility. We also recognize that scientific knowledge is our common heritage and is therefore a proper function of government. We oppose government programs that remove procurement authority from scientists, supposedly in service of them. Rather we support the inclusion, on a per-grant basis, of all funding needed to purchase the use of needed goods and services, thereby creating a scientist-driven market for commercial high technology and services. We also oppose government subsidy of technology development. Rather we support legislation and policies that motivate the intelligent investment of private risk capital in the creation of commercially viable intellectual property.
In 1990, after a 3 year effort with Congressman Ron Packard (CA) and a bipartisan team of Congressional leaders, we succeeded in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, a law which requires NASA to procure launch services in a commercially reasonable manner from the private sector. The lobbying effort for this legislation came totally from taxpaying citizens acting in their home districts without a direct financial stake -- the kind of political intended by our country's founders, but now rarely seen in America.
We ask citizens who work with us for the most valuable thing they can contribute: The voluntary and targeted investment of time, energy and resources in specific issues and positions which they support as taxpaying citizens of the United States. There is no collective action, no slush-fund and no bureaucracy within the Coalition: Only citizens encouraging each other to make the necessary sacrifices to participate in the political process, which is their birthright and duty as Americans. We are working to give interested taxpayers a voice that can be heard above the din of lobbyists who seek ever increasing government funding for their clients.
Introduction
Americans need a frontier, not a program.
Incentives open frontiers, not plans.
If this Subcommittee hears no other message through the barrage of studies, projections and policy recommendations, it must hear this message. A reformed space policy focused on opening the space frontier through commercial incentives will make all the difference to our future as a world, a nation and as individuals.
Americans Need a Frontier
When Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, we won the "space race" against the Soviets and entered two decades of diminished expectations.
The Apollo program elicited something deep within Americans. Something almost primal. Apollo was President Kennedy's "New Frontier." But when Americans found it was terminated as nothing more than a Cold War contest, we felt betrayed in ways we are still unable to articulate -- betrayed right down to our pioneering souls. The result is that Americans will never again truly believe in government space programs and plans.
Without a frontier, for the past two decades, Americans have operated under the inevitable conclusion that land, raw
No libertarians believe that tort law protects people from negative externalities. Don't waste your energy going after weak arguments that your opponent isn't making.
While I was VP for Public Affairs at E'Prime Aerospace, we evaluated various sites for establishing a space port to launch our MX-derived rockets. It turned out that the presence of a military air strip at Ascension Island allowed a military jet transport large enough to deliver entire launch vehicles. Of course, the MX system was solid fueled so we didn't have to transport cryogenics long distances, but it would be feasible to set up a LOX facility on the island. There is a particular coastal cliff that is ideal for a launch pad.
A 15 year plan exists in rough outline. . Yes, it is extreme but then if the climate crisis worsens to the degree predicted by some, and action is delayed as it appears it will be, there will be very little time to geoengineer remediation.
By investing Sun Corporation in making Java the standard programming language of computer science courses in India at the same time that the H-1b program expanded to take over the Fortune 500, Vinod Khosla managed to set the software industry back more than a decade.
Its self-indulgent to design an upward incompatible programming language (and, no, Perl 6 is hardly alone in this as others have pointed out about Python3, etc.) without looking for your keys some distance from the lamp post.
Look up Carbocrete's properties. While its true it does require some sand, in addition to the CaCO3 and carbon fiber, it requires much less sand than ordinary concrete and no rocks. Moreover, sand is ubiquitous on the ocean floor. A refinement of the calculation would substitute sand dredging for some of the CaCO3 energy use as well as including the energy for the carbon fiber.
The primary cost of building a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine is a huge hollow structure called the "arena" that contains the low pressure created by the vortex. The low pressure is relieved through compact, high speed turbines at the base of the arena. Since the turbines are compact they don't have to be costly and since they are high speed they don't have to be numerous.
What good is a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine?
It can generate its own building material from the ocean and atmosphere -- so if you can print them rapidly you can have rapid doubling time exponential growth in clean baseload electric production that within a decade dwarfs all energy use by civilization.
Oh, and it also provides tropical atoll seasteads sufficient to feed and house the total population of the world.
I didn't specify what kind of "discrimination" I am subject to, but it is more than age. I reiterate, I have no complaints about being discriminated against. Indeed, I wholeheartedly support the right of any private entity to discriminate on any basis whatsoever in its associations whether personal or commercial -- and that includes the right of those who discriminate against me even when I perceive their discrimination to be "unfair".
What I oppose is a system of government that taxes anything but property rights to pay for its primary service: the protection of liquid value of property rights (including collective property such as national territory) beyond those an individual would defend in nature (ie: his homestead including tools of his trade as well as any other capital assets such as land).
Floating atoll remediation of civilization's environmental footprint would, in addition to permanently rewilding agricultural lands and containing all urban population effluent (including CO2, CH4, N2O and CFC emissions) for 10 billion people at higher than US standard of living, sequester on the order of a teratonne of CO2 from the oceans and atmosphere.
The Seasteading Institute is being left behind by AT Design Office under contract to the Chinese construction firm CCCC, as they proceed with the pilot project to build a 10 square km floating city. What the Seasteading Institute has going for them is their association with Breakout Labs via Peter Thiel, as it supports fluid dynamics research for of the Atmospheric Vortex Engine. Although the AVE would be advantageous even with advanced nuclear technology, any radical reduction (less than 1 cent/kWh) in electric cost -- with or without the AVE -- will suffice to enable the rest of the floating atoll remediation. This is one of a few things that Marshall Savage didn't have the technical chops to address -- the other major things being photobioreactor technology and the notion of atolls unifying beachfront real estate demand with wave break for fragile (hence economic) PBRs.
At this point, it appears to be an entirely feasible economic proposition given the requisite lowering of cost for pollution free electric generation.
If the AVE experiments currently underway attest its economy, the Seasteading Institute can take the floating atoll proposal, package it up the way Mashall Savage should have, and present it to the Chinese. They'll bite.
Speaking as a 60 year old with a killer resume who has been programming for below minimum wage for the last 14 years, largely because of discrimination:
All discrimination should be legal in a truly free market. Unfair discrimination results in a competitive disadvantage that a free market will punish in exact proportion to the degree the discrimination is unfair.
However, we don't have a free market. We have a market that subsidizes wealth. The information technology sector -- in particular -- suffers from the free protection of network effect wealth such as that which built Bill Gates' operating system (hence tightly integrated applications) fortune and which is building Zuckerberg's. Network effect wealth is essentially wealth that accrues to the biggest regardless of whether they're the best or not.
There are those who claim this all evens out in the end due to the higher taxes paid on income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc.
Wrong.
The key to understanding the difference is in comparing the liquidation value of the wealth as opposed to the net present value of the projected profit stream. The liquidation value represents NPV of the projected profit stream adjusted for risk as perceived by risk averse financial institutions, such as pension funds, investment banks (that aren't socializing their risk), etc. On the other hand, that same profit stream, as perceived by gifted technologists and business leaders might be substantially higher because they understand best how to manage the inherent risks.
Where the network effect is the dominant factor in valuing an asset (as it was with MS-DOS the moment IBM started distributing it as the default OS on their 4.77MHz 8088 PC -- or as it is with Facebook as soon as the social status of Harvard was seen as driving the its growth to dominance over prior entrants such as MySpace) there is less difference between the risk averse valuation and the valuation placed on the asset by the "gifted". If, rather than taxing the profit stream, capital gains, value added, sales, etc. the liquidation value were the tax base for civilization, guys like Gates and Zuckerberg would be taxed out of their stranglehold _very_ rapidly, and more competition could enter the field.
Now, would that mean guys like me get to work for above minimum wage?
Slashdot Mirror
*RING* *RING*
Callee: Hello?
Caller: Hello, Dr. X, this is Dr. Y from [insert watchdog group name]. How are you today?
Callee: Uh, ok.
Caller: We're doing a survey. Your paper "[insert name of paper]" is cited in a NYT Best Seller that justifies taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies. Do you oppose taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies or not?
Callee: (Thinking to himself: "This guy is obviously nuts but then half of academia is nuts and they can cut off mine as well as all my future government grants for looking at them crosseyeed.") Why, NO! I absolutely oppose the use of my work to in any way shape or form to justify taking babies of some races and putting them into blenders for smoothies! Where is the bastard that so abused my inherently anti-racist work so I can consider suing him!?!?"
Caller: Thank you Dr. X. That will be all.
So what? Everyone knows that race is a social construct so there can't be any genetic correlations with race of social significance independent of racism's social construction.
Therefore, the racial disparities that appear in society are the result of the White Man keepin' us down! The Heterosexual White Man that is.
Open the borders!
Absolutely. I have to work all the time and I fear for my children becoming less than fully indoctrinated as any deviation in thought may result in a loss of employability and social acceptance.
Not ultimately, but proximately, it is. For instance, the guys at the Hackers Conference ceased bringing their fragmentary Usenet archives because DejaNews had everything online and then -- poof -- only for Google to pick it up again and then go, "Duh!" We'll see how long it takes for complete archive to be fully indexed. I'm sure it will happen eventually. Meanwhile...
Google has already mastered the art of Orwell's "memory hole". Just look at how Google manages to forget everything they know about search engines when it comes to their Usenet archives. Selectively applied, this is far more effective than anything so brute as Orwell's memory hole.
Oh I should add that once you are in this regime, the term "hire" may be somewhat different than it is in other circumstances. I mean a more straight-forward means of dealing with cheating is to punish cheating with a degree of severity that matches the potential harm inflicted by having cheaters with their fingers on The Big Red Button -- so the circumstances of the "employment" may involve such any aspects of such punishment as are practically applicable. Military justice isn't burdened with your usual Civil Libertarian constraints.,
If you have people that are even remotely tempted to cheat that have their fingers on The Big Red Button, you have a serious threat to civilization.
Having an incentive to cheat is a great way to elicit this potential. The proper national security response is not to remove the incentive to cheat but to increase the detection sensitivity and then hire the guys who cheated to compete with others who cheated to design test regimes that are more likely to elicit cheating while also being more sensitive to detecting cheating.
Necessity and Incentives Opening the Space Frontier
Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space
by James Bowery, Chairman
Coalition for Science and Commerce
July 31, 1991
Mr. Chairman and Distinguished Members of the Subcommittee:
I am James Bowery, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to address the subcommittee on the critical and historic topic of commercial incentives to open the space frontier.
The Coalition for Science and Commerce is a grassroots network of citizen activists supporting greater public funding for diversified scientific research and greater private funding for proprietary technology and services. We believe these are mutually reinforcing policies which have been violated to the detriment of civilization. We believe in the constitutional provision of patents of invention and that the principles of free enterprise pertain to intellectual property. We therefore see technology development as a private sector responsibility. We also recognize that scientific knowledge is our common heritage and is therefore a proper function of government. We oppose government programs that remove procurement authority from scientists, supposedly in service of them. Rather we support the inclusion, on a per-grant basis, of all funding needed to purchase the use of needed goods and services, thereby creating a scientist-driven market for commercial high technology and services. We also oppose government subsidy of technology development. Rather we support legislation and policies that motivate the intelligent investment of private risk capital in the creation of commercially viable intellectual property.
In 1990, after a 3 year effort with Congressman Ron Packard (CA) and a bipartisan team of Congressional leaders, we succeeded in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, a law which requires NASA to procure launch services in a commercially reasonable manner from the private sector. The lobbying effort for this legislation came totally from taxpaying citizens acting in their home districts without a direct financial stake -- the kind of political intended by our country's founders, but now rarely seen in America.
We ask citizens who work with us for the most valuable thing they can contribute: The voluntary and targeted investment of time, energy and resources in specific issues and positions which they support as taxpaying citizens of the United States. There is no collective action, no slush-fund and no bureaucracy within the Coalition: Only citizens encouraging each other to make the necessary sacrifices to participate in the political process, which is their birthright and duty as Americans. We are working to give interested taxpayers a voice that can be heard above the din of lobbyists who seek ever increasing government funding for their clients.
Introduction
Americans need a frontier, not a program.
Incentives open frontiers, not plans.
If this Subcommittee hears no other message through the barrage of studies, projections and policy recommendations, it must hear this message. A reformed space policy focused on opening the space frontier through commercial incentives will make all the difference to our future as a world, a nation and as individuals.
Americans Need a Frontier
When Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, we won the "space race" against the Soviets and entered two decades of diminished expectations.
The Apollo program elicited something deep within Americans. Something almost primal. Apollo was President Kennedy's "New Frontier." But when Americans found it was terminated as nothing more than a Cold War contest, we felt betrayed in ways we are still unable to articulate -- betrayed right down to our pioneering souls. The result is that Americans will never again truly believe in government space programs and plans.
Without a frontier, for the past two decades, Americans have operated under the inevitable conclusion that land, raw
No libertarians believe that tort law protects people from negative externalities. Don't waste your energy going after weak arguments that your opponent isn't making.
While I was VP for Public Affairs at E'Prime Aerospace, we evaluated various sites for establishing a space port to launch our MX-derived rockets. It turned out that the presence of a military air strip at Ascension Island allowed a military jet transport large enough to deliver entire launch vehicles. Of course, the MX system was solid fueled so we didn't have to transport cryogenics long distances, but it would be feasible to set up a LOX facility on the island. There is a particular coastal cliff that is ideal for a launch pad.
A 15 year plan exists in rough outline. . Yes, it is extreme but then if the climate crisis worsens to the degree predicted by some, and action is delayed as it appears it will be, there will be very little time to geoengineer remediation.
Meh. Any "Nazi Nazi Nazi" troll that doesn't end with "Jews did 9/11. lol" doesn't even qualify for The Troll Special Olympics.
By investing Sun Corporation in making Java the standard programming language of computer science courses in India at the same time that the H-1b program expanded to take over the Fortune 500, Vinod Khosla managed to set the software industry back more than a decade.
If there were ever evidence that ./'s collaborative filter system has a bug; this is it. Look through the logs and reverse engineer this exploit.
Its self-indulgent to design an upward incompatible programming language (and, no, Perl 6 is hardly alone in this as others have pointed out about Python3, etc.) without looking for your keys some distance from the lamp post.
They don't say it has _all_ the properties of defect-free graphene -- so, what properties are mismatched? Just the important ones?
Look up Carbocrete's properties. While its true it does require some sand, in addition to the CaCO3 and carbon fiber, it requires much less sand than ordinary concrete and no rocks. Moreover, sand is ubiquitous on the ocean floor. A refinement of the calculation would substitute sand dredging for some of the CaCO3 energy use as well as including the energy for the carbon fiber.
The primary cost of building a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine is a huge hollow structure called the "arena" that contains the low pressure created by the vortex. The low pressure is relieved through compact, high speed turbines at the base of the arena. Since the turbines are compact they don't have to be costly and since they are high speed they don't have to be numerous.
What good is a tropical doldrum Atmospheric Vortex Engine?
It can generate its own building material from the ocean and atmosphere -- so if you can print them rapidly you can have rapid doubling time exponential growth in clean baseload electric production that within a decade dwarfs all energy use by civilization.
Oh, and it also provides tropical atoll seasteads sufficient to feed and house the total population of the world.
Seastead this.
Speaking as a die-hard Perl programmer, isn't node.js the obvious answer for those who want "a web language"?
So, let me see if I have this right:
If you don't let more Hispanics in to vote, the Hispanics already here will vote against you.
Why, exactly, should the US increase the racist vote?
... during Military Funeral Honors as Perl is Dead -- dying in the line of duty.
They've finally figured out why sleep deprivation kills you -- and its also why it makes you make stupid mistakes.
Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain
Problem is it is mainly during slow wave sleep that the cleaning crew works on the CSF, and as people age they their slow wave sleep diminishes.
I didn't specify what kind of "discrimination" I am subject to, but it is more than age. I reiterate, I have no complaints about being discriminated against. Indeed, I wholeheartedly support the right of any private entity to discriminate on any basis whatsoever in its associations whether personal or commercial -- and that includes the right of those who discriminate against me even when I perceive their discrimination to be "unfair".
What I oppose is a system of government that taxes anything but property rights to pay for its primary service: the protection of liquid value of property rights (including collective property such as national territory) beyond those an individual would defend in nature (ie: his homestead including tools of his trade as well as any other capital assets such as land).
Floating atoll remediation of civilization's environmental footprint would, in addition to permanently rewilding agricultural lands and containing all urban population effluent (including CO2, CH4, N2O and CFC emissions) for 10 billion people at higher than US standard of living, sequester on the order of a teratonne of CO2 from the oceans and atmosphere.
The Seasteading Institute is being left behind by AT Design Office under contract to the Chinese construction firm CCCC, as they proceed with the pilot project to build a 10 square km floating city. What the Seasteading Institute has going for them is their association with Breakout Labs via Peter Thiel, as it supports fluid dynamics research for of the Atmospheric Vortex Engine. Although the AVE would be advantageous even with advanced nuclear technology, any radical reduction (less than 1 cent/kWh) in electric cost -- with or without the AVE -- will suffice to enable the rest of the floating atoll remediation. This is one of a few things that Marshall Savage didn't have the technical chops to address -- the other major things being photobioreactor technology and the notion of atolls unifying beachfront real estate demand with wave break for fragile (hence economic) PBRs.
At this point, it appears to be an entirely feasible economic proposition given the requisite lowering of cost for pollution free electric generation.
If the AVE experiments currently underway attest its economy, the Seasteading Institute can take the floating atoll proposal, package it up the way Mashall Savage should have, and present it to the Chinese. They'll bite.
Speaking as a 60 year old with a killer resume who has been programming for below minimum wage for the last 14 years, largely because of discrimination:
All discrimination should be legal in a truly free market. Unfair discrimination results in a competitive disadvantage that a free market will punish in exact proportion to the degree the discrimination is unfair.
However, we don't have a free market. We have a market that subsidizes wealth. The information technology sector -- in particular -- suffers from the free protection of network effect wealth such as that which built Bill Gates' operating system (hence tightly integrated applications) fortune and which is building Zuckerberg's. Network effect wealth is essentially wealth that accrues to the biggest regardless of whether they're the best or not.
There are those who claim this all evens out in the end due to the higher taxes paid on income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc.
Wrong.
The key to understanding the difference is in comparing the liquidation value of the wealth as opposed to the net present value of the projected profit stream. The liquidation value represents NPV of the projected profit stream adjusted for risk as perceived by risk averse financial institutions, such as pension funds, investment banks (that aren't socializing their risk), etc. On the other hand, that same profit stream, as perceived by gifted technologists and business leaders might be substantially higher because they understand best how to manage the inherent risks.
Where the network effect is the dominant factor in valuing an asset (as it was with MS-DOS the moment IBM started distributing it as the default OS on their 4.77MHz 8088 PC -- or as it is with Facebook as soon as the social status of Harvard was seen as driving the its growth to dominance over prior entrants such as MySpace) there is less difference between the risk averse valuation and the valuation placed on the asset by the "gifted". If, rather than taxing the profit stream, capital gains, value added, sales, etc. the liquidation value were the tax base for civilization, guys like Gates and Zuckerberg would be taxed out of their stranglehold _very_ rapidly, and more competition could enter the field.
Now, would that mean guys like me get to work for above minimum wage?
That I leave to the fair market.