First this, by me: Those rights arise from the "corporate person" employing a fleet of lobbyists and lawyers who know how to grease palms, exploit loopholes and drag out legal liabilities for eons. That's one ridiculously powerful person.
Then this, by you: For example, perhaps religions could try to get legal person status for various spiritual entities.
Holy cow, not just a ridiculously powerful corporate person, but an omnipotent person, no less!:)
JavaScript, surely the Rodney Dangerfield of scripting languages.
I don't get no respect, you know, the other day I told a friend that I wanted to try out the online dating scene, and he set me up to use Outlook Express on Usenet!
And people tell me that corporations don't have special rights.......
Those rights arise from the "corporate person" employing a fleet of lobbyists and lawyers who know how to grease palms, exploit loopholes and drag out legal liabilities for eons. That's one ridiculously powerful person.
Special rights indeed... let's suppose I'm a physical person with the resources that a corporate person has, and I just find it too much of an effort and hassle to seek out a trash can every time I finish off a can of soda. Well, I'm going to lobby, influence and bribe the proper authorities (congressmen and courts especially) to make littering legal. Sound ridiculous? That's exactly how the corporate climate functions.
The slippery slope began the moment a judge (in the 1860's or 70's, I believe) ruled on the side of the corporation being a "person", an exploit that arose from the misuse of a piece of legislation designed (horribly, it seems) to protect the rights of the black man in the United States after slavery had been abolished. Again, fleets of lawyers exploiting loopholes.
Imagine giving special rights to caucasians to litter in the street all they want, but if an african, asian, hispanic or middle-eastern person gets caught trying to pull it off, they get penalized. If a corporation is a "person", we are living the equivalent of special rights for a minority, and we (physical persons) are all being discriminated against.
To make matters worse, I'm under the impression that only certain corporations get the special treatment, as many mom-and-pop businesses are structured as corporations - remember that corporate status prevents personal assets from being seized in case of business woes such as bankrupcy. A few transnational rotten apples have spoiled the basket for the vast majority of well-intentioned endeavours. However, the abuses of the transnationals are such that we seem to be past the critical point in several crucial aspects for the economy, society and even the species as a whole. Many informed and concerned individuals are fed up and itching for change, even if just to err on the side of caution.
Intriguingly, there were elections last May in Northern California, and the people of Humboldt County voted by a margin of about 60%-40% to abolish the status of "person" to corporations. Maybe little will come of this, but maybe other counties around the nation will put up similar propositions to its' voters, there will be a confrontation, and a decision makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. Maybe it's happened before, but this is not the sort of shit that makes the nightly news, even though it may be one of the crucial issues of our times. Also, I wouldn't hold my breath with the current Supreme Court under Baby Bush. Nor under a democrat president either, to be honest.
Does anybody knows if the Humboldt County experiment has been attempted before? And secondly, even though it can be considered a landslide election, how come 40% of the population, even in liberal Humboldt, would vote to keep the legal status of corporations as "people"? To stay one step ahead of the implicit joke here: what were they smoking?
But wouldn't the the combined total mass of the universe cause an overall curvature?
That's just it. One of the great cosmological endeavours is the search of the so-called missing mass which, if it exists, will cause the universe to remain closed. In other words, will the universe stop expanding one day and reverse direction until the opposite of a Big Bang occurs (a Big Crunch)?
Then, weird things implied themselves in observations and in the blackboard: inflation, the Hubble Constant, dark energy. The evidence seems to point out that there isn't enough mass to keep the universe closed, even taking the dark varieties of matter (MACHOs and/or WIMPs) into account, so the universe will keep on expanding forever, a flat (or open) universe is what we have.
Interesting that you use Mexico as a comparison example to Russia. According to Wikipedia:
Population-wise, Mexico has 107,000,000 (ranked 11th), Russia has 142,800,000 (ranked 8th). As for GDP in millions of USD, Mexico generates 768,437 (ranked 13th), while Russia generates 763,247 (ranked 14th). When we list the Per Capita GDP, both countries plummet down the list, Mexico with 7,298 (ranked 53rd), Russia with 5,349 (ranked 61th). Both are more or less within the same range, with Mexico at a slight advantage, as you say.
Another crucial similarity: both countries' oil industries are state-controlled. According to production levels in 2002 figures, Mexico exports 1,715,000 barrels of crude a day (ranked 7th), while Russia exports 3,940,000 barrels a day (ranked 2nd and twice as much as Mexico).
As a sidenote, Mexico produces 3,371,000 barrels a day, so roughly half is for internal consumption, and I don't have the Russian figures at hand. Also, considering the dimensions of Russia, it seems like a given that transportation costs for either crude or refined are way higher, although I would suppose that this additional cost is reflected at gas pumps all over Europe.
Returning to the topic, it seems that Mexico generates a more balanced portion of its' GDP from other industries (tourism, agriculture, commerce and manufacturing) than Russia. Both countries have a massive underground economy stemming from illegal activities, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to say here.
Finally, to state a difference, many of Mexico's social and economic woes arise from its' ongoing demographic explosion, while it seems that Russia's population is shrinking, so the nature of both beasts are peculiarly different. However, comparisons are a healthy exercise sometimes, and in this one your point quickly becomes evident: Russia looks like an extremely vulnerable horse with one wobbly leg and three stumps.
Back in the early nineties, there was a right-wing-ideals convention in my college in Guadalajara, Mexico, endorsed by the dean, with a New Youth type of theme attached to it. Huge colorfull silkscreen banners hung all over the place a month in advance, there were full-page newspaper ads in colour, etc. One out of every three banners sported a picture of Solzhenitsyn, while quoted text warmly "applauded the convention, hoping this type of convention would spread all over Latin America, signed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn".
The conferences turned out to be a laughable affair, real dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist rubbish, focusing on the unpardonable sins of women's rights, gay rights, and so on. They even went so far as to have a couple of talks focusing on the evidence that rock 'n' roll is satanic. These were the only talks that were jam-packed, although not enough to compensate for the weak turnout during the remainder of the convention. Deemed a financial bust, the convention was not even attempted the following year.
My point is that I'll always have those humongous banners of Solzhenitsyn tatooed in my mind, backing up the agenda of right-wing nutjobs. Maybe Solzhenitsyn was duped into throwing his weight behind this fiasco, without fully knowing what it was. Also, the fact that this college was rabidly anti-communist could have made him turn a blind eye to other shenanigans, as in the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But my image of the man remains tarnished until proven otherwise.
BTW, Solzhenitsyn wasn't even there, except in silkscreens looming like a smiling Big Brother.
There are two groups within his administration: the siloviki and the St. Petersburg group. Neither are socialist in orientation. I am inclined to agree with you. Who needs dogma to justify power when you have already attained and consolidated power without it?
When oil and gas prices level off or fall (even temporarily so), so too will Russia's economic house of cards. One reason for the USSR collapse of the late eighties was its' hemorraghing money via an arms race effectively designed to bankrupt it. Are military expenditures still on the same level? I would think not by a long shot. Add to this the fact that there are much fewer satellite states for the Kremlin to subsidize, and Russia may be on better footing than you imply, unless the generated capital is being stashed or funneled elsewhere.
If no new money is being invested in infrastructure, or even in the money-go-round in general except within the great urban areas, from the poverty outside of Moscow and St Petesburg you describe, I would think that there's a huge amount of capital gone AWOL.
Actually, no, the video was not made popular by YouTube or blogs at all. In the "macaca" case, the same old big media outlets made it news, and then people shared it on the web after the fact. This is Web 1.0.
From the Salon article:
The campaign did not put the video on YouTube, the file-sharing service, until the Post had taken the bait, publishing a short story online. It was a relatively slow news week, in the dead heat of August vacation season, and the political press, backed by hundreds of bloggers, went wild. The macaca frenzy was born.
It wasn't even on printed paper until after YouTube and the bloggers.
Sort of brings back fond memories of Spin Magazine's pick for Album Of The Year in 2000, I quote: "It's Your Hard Drive, Stupid". Number 2? Radiohead's "Kid A".
To be fair, the abstract concept of a community could have been fascinating if Time had scratched deeper. As an example, at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conferences in February of this year, Al Gore did his 'slideshow' a couple of months before "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, and when he mentioned how his company would facilitate the release of all the film's audio and video so that "the kids can remix it any way they like", he drew a spontaneous and wild cheer from the audience, as the idea is a thrilling one.
Now, when we consider 95% of what's actually out there, yeah, it's Lamefest 2006, but don't tell that to the MPAA and the RIAA. Time's choice is bringing them to their knees, and they've even got senator Ted Stevens to eloquently make their case for them.
And let's not forget two great dark horse candidates for Person Of The Year, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who went from 'cult' to 'massive' thanks to the community passing along the zeitgeist. Remember how Colbert went viral in May with the White House Correspondent's Dinner, as he timed his lines NOT to Bush or the people in the audience, but at us, or as Time would put it, you.
Salon made a much more interesting pick.
Definitely food for thought. Sidarth is a perfect example of a butterfly's effect: flapping its' wings in Dickenson County, creating a statewide blizzard in Virginia and changing the nation's political landscape. And did he do it for publicity? No. He did it by happenstance, as a volunteer citizen engaged in the political process of his community. Nationwide, there were thousands of volunteers that deserve equal credit with Sidarth, who just happened to be a lightning rod with a camcorder. Speaking of lightning rods, it seems to me that picking Sidarth is like picking Mark Foley's underage page.
So, thinking about it as I go along here, my choice for Person Of The Year, fine-tuning Time's choice: Political and journalistic bloggers, particularly the liberal ones, this time around. The Allen, Foley and Ted Haggard incidents were kept alive by the Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Wonkette and the like, long after the mainstream media had moved on to Tom and Katie's scientology wedding, the Jon Bennet Ramsey false confession, etc. If you wanted a clear-cut example of the power of the new journalism, the 2006 elections were it.
Which brings me to Non-Person Of The Year, for years running: The mainstream media (including Time Magazine, of course), whose most flagrant act of cowardice and disservice this year was completely blacking out news reports from the insurgent attack on Camp Falcon (or Forward Base Falcon) in Baghdad on October 10, an event that has disappeared from even Google News, although it's still there on Google Video, see for yourself, so that if you thought you lived under the umbrella of a free press, think again.
I would like to fuse Time's choice along with mine like this: See the bloggers who changed the political landscape? It could be you.
Common sense is a rare and precious commodity, especially in young boys.
You ain't kidding there, jimbo, but I wouldn't just emphasize young boys, how about twentysomethings? Years ago, an acquaintance had a kick-ass crossbow with pulleys and stuff, and on three separate ocassions that I knew of, he and his friends formed a circle while the guy shot an arrow straight into the sky. That thing was so powerful that the arrow disappeared from view for about a minute, then a buzzing sound grew louder and louder until the damn thing inserted itself several inches into the ground. Talk about stupid.
Once I intercepted these guys at a ranch when they were out night-hunting on a Saturday. I'm not a hunting man myself, so I got there late with a couple of friends, we popped open some beers and waited while staring at the Milky Way and getting a little philosophical. When the hunting expedition returned, my jaw dropped open in disbelief: a compact pickup truck sped towards us, bumping and lurching in the bad dirt road. Three guys were sitting in the front while three guys were standing in the back and leaning forward into the truck's roof. All of them had rifles, except the center guy inside the cabin. The driver had one hand on the steering wheel and another on his rifle, which was resting on the rear-view mirror! Guns were pointing in four or five different directions. Beer was flowing freely, while a seventh guy was seated on the icebox in the back of the truck, stoned out of his mind and finishing off a full joint all by himself, while holding his upright rifle between his knees. It was un-fucking-believable. Finally, a bizarre little twist - one of the guys was on vacation from studying to become a catholic priest!!! However, I must admit that the grilled rabbit was quite excellent, and next morning three of the guys woke up early, grabbed some fishing poles, walked down a canyon leading to the ocean, and returned with fish for breakfast. Call them what you may, but they knew how to get food and cook a great meal.
When you look at devices like this, the precision construction of the pyramids, the alignment of Stonehenge, and some of the Aztec and Mayan engineering in North America, it's pretty clear that the "primitive" people weren't as primitive as we might think.
Of course. When thinking only of western culture, for example, it's important to remember that over 80% of the ancient world's (hand-written) knowledge was destroyed, irrevocably lost forever, when a crazed mob burned down the great Library Of Alexandria.
Or how about when the conquistadores destroyed all the written mayan documents they could get their filthy, pious hands on?
It wasn't idle talk when Mark Twain said that the single most important invention in history has been the printing press with moveable type. The pundits might say that you couldn't have the printing press without the alphabet first, obviously, but when Guttenberg cranked out the first edition of his little bibles, critical mass was achieved, which is what I think Mr Clemens meant to say: all bets were off.
It is conceivable that the student could have been so shaken, fearful, and angry he literally could not stand up, that he would prefer to just sit there and try to recover.
Damn right. These cops have been tasered in a controlled environment, like their gym or something like that. They knew they were going to get tasered that day, I'd even bet most of them were even been pumped up about it, like some sort of hazing ritual among ex-jocks, egging each other on.
However, what happens when you're just a kid in the UCLA library, thinking about heading towards Noodle Planet in an hour or so, right after you finish homework or whatever, then suddenly find yourself in an extremely nerve-wracking situation that gets you tasered while being yelled menacing orders? The emotional reaction has to be of both astonishment and a sense of being profoundly violated, compounded with the knowledge of having commited no crime.
Tasers may extremely useful in many situations, much better than guns, but this is bullshit, and it happens more often than it's documented and acknowledged. It seems that some cops don't bother to always remember that they're out there To Protect And Serve. In their minds, they're in a war zone and the ultimate objective is to "watch my buddy's back - acquire target and release discharge!" And what a war zone, the UCLA library!
The video was the sickest thing I've witnessed recently, unless you count watching parts of the movie "Saw".
So check this one out: you're a middle aged lady driving in your SUV, anxious, angry and maybe a bit reckless about getting home late and missing Wheel Of Fortune, when suddenly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptRZLfw2_NI
Is this enough reason to get tasered in the middle of the street? Also, notice how this idiot cop doesn't tell her she's under arrest. He just YELLS at her to get out of the car, then fires. Is that the best this puny little mind can do? Rephrasing the question in another direction: what would an english constable do under the same circumstance, taser her? Fat fucking chance, mate!
What we're looking at is sub-par social rejects in black uniform and wearing a shiny little badge. Off the force with a dishonorable discharge, at least, for these idiots.
Right on. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? Drop everything, stand up straight, give a military salute and march on out? When ordinary students... no, make that citizens, have to instantaneously react and obey like corporals at the drop of a police hat, y'all are heading straight into a police state.
Incidents like this become even more disturbing when you think that police officers are also prone to PTSD and itchy trigger fingers, and a considerable percentage of Iraq veterans with much worse cases of either/both will probably find their way into some sort of police force after their tour (or tours) of duty.
your assumptions seem to indicate that time travel equipment is cheap.
You correctly pointed out a weakness in my writing skills. Let me be clearer about what I was trying to say:
1. It's not time travel equipment, it's a temporal communications network, where we could only hear a monologue from the future and are unable to respond. We have to take their word for it, and cannot ask questions back, let alone get answers. 2. I'm not referring to a future geek in his/her basement making malevolent mischief, I'm talking about a Livermoore-caliber facility designed to hack the temporal communications network.
I'm no Area 51 believer, and this is not about little gray men with big eyes, it's about what could lie ahead: the individual or some institution, be it Chevron or a chinese politburo.
I could argue that every new technology needs discussion, but the example of the internet destroys this argument: it surfaced, it caught like wildfire, the rigid powers that be found themselves a step or two behind. I hope it always remains this way. But think of The People's Republic Of China, their ability to censor something as vast as the internet within their own borders, while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google go out of their way to comply. The same side of a contemporary coin is corporate interest. Many people hear globalization and say "Yeah, cool", while not realizing that what they're thinking of is McDonalization and news blackouts, such as "Baby kidnapped in North Carolina is rescued in Virginia" is trumpeted all over the place, while the attack on Forward Camp Falcon is virtually ignored.
So the dialogue that bounces between my ears is this: What is the present? What future awaits us? Can we trust either/both? Both Area 51 and Studio 54 are ridiculous and dismissed in this argument.
What I'm trying to say is this: yes, there should be no taboos (yes, we have no bananas), but if we ever develop the technology to receive morse code from the future, the concepts of transparency (institution) and privacy (individual) may both go out the window!
How could you trust the message being from you? Current encryption might be broken in the future, and someone could pretend to be you, telling you to kill off people.
Bullseye. Having chewed on it a bit, I replied to my own post and hit upon the very point that you mention. All in all, a fascinating exercise.
Holy cow, the ice is getting thinner as I go along here.
Aw, what the hell, let 'er rip:
The moment we (present) invent it, they (future) will already have it, so we might be in for a barrage of information the moment we go online.
But who's to say what their agenda will be? They might be military or corporate totalitarians in disguise, leading us right into their paws. By what evidence can we trust what they tell us? Or why would we assume that it's in their best interest to warn us to change course, which might lead to their eventual non-existence?
Referring to my previous post, where I mention keeping the dialogue open to different points in the future. Could we possibly detect if time hackers are intercepting and blocking the lines, then transmiting us misinformation? Before believing in a utopian future, we must proyect past and present trends to generally visualize a future, and by these standards, how can we trust potential power-hungry bastards ten generations down the line? The future will have its' own agenda, and it might be completely opposed to our own. We might not be welcome in their future.
Here's another: what if the Karl Rove of 2005 could have a conversation with the Karl Rove of November 2006? After all, those in power will be among the first to gain access to the technology. Or maybe a Pentagon general in charge of the project will find a way to make himself into an emperor for life. Temptations will be humongous.
Now, working under the assumption that the future is relatively benevolent, somebody will have to make incredibly harsh decisions. In order to save a billion lives a hundred years down the line, who's willing to make a decision that permits the destruction of cities or nations? The death of ten or a hundred million people in the current generation? It's more than likely that the invention of a temporal communications network may diminish the worth of the individual, who becomes an abstraction that serves the species, or something more petty: an ism.
An example on a smaller scale that might hit home: What if the message we get from 2056 is: UNPLUG THE INTERNET! NOW!
However, how does this effect course of events? Send a signal out as Katrina is forming, split, receive morse "levies break, many deaths, evacuate city" so we evacuate the city and butress the levies... but then there aren't many deaths and the levies don't break...
Ah yes, the ol' 'Kill Hitler's mother' paradox. However, with the morse code scenario you describe, we will effectively break off the standard timeline, so to speak, and create a new, parallel one, then another, and another, in geometrical fashion I suppose, ever accelerating in the creation of the 'new branches' of our choosing. All will still exist, separated and never to meet again.
Which brings up an interesting question: how many times can you altruistically 'plan ahead' before population growth in itself causes a catastrophe? The answer might be to keep communications going a week into the future, but also ten, a hundred and a thousand years in advance, to regard consequences of current actions, then choose an equilibrium path.
Holy cow, the ice is getting thinner as I go along here.
In Mexico, this technique is known as a goal, as in soccer. It's a part of the lexicon, and whenever somebody slips one by on-air, it's cause for for a bit of ball-busting towards whoever did it. So there is a self-conscious effort to try to avoid it, even if by accident, as in "...well yeah, the other day I was in the office here at the station drinking a Coke OOOOPS!" Cue laughter and somebody in the studio underlining the goal on-air.
It goes so far as to include local businesses, as in "Well, last night my wife and I went to X restaurant, yeah, I know, that was a goal..." A typical response would be "Are you on the payroll?" or "Did you eat there for free?"
So more typically, it goes something like this: "Well, last night my wife and I went to a restaurant, I won't say which one, gotta avoid the goal..." Businesses are usually mentioned only where they belong, which is during commercial breaks.
Sorry I can't cite the source, but I remember reading years ago how Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) was found to have certain shielding properties against radiation. It may be bull, but then again it may not, maybe some sort of hybrid material integrating PVC could be a 'lightweight' and less toxic solution to the problem.
Ah, yet another item in my to-do internet research list. (sigh)
Or rather, a reconstruction of the conversations Greg Bear had with Gregory Benford and David Bryn (the three Killer B's), while sorting out the corner Isaac Asimov painted himself into with the latter Foundation books, specifically Foundation And Earth.
I picture these three guys getting together over dinner and drinks, every week for months, just shooting ideas back and forth, mapping out the panoramic scenario of their grand finale trilogy for the Foundation saga.
Bear's contribution to the trilogy, Foundation And Chaos, gripped me by the throat on the very first chapter, where an undercover robot named Lodovic Trema is travelling on an Imperial astrophysical survey vessel in the galactic backwaters. Suddenly, the spaceship is violently knocked out of hyperspace by the gamma ray shock front of a mischarted supernova explosion (remember, the Empire is crumbling, incompetence runs high). While the spaceship drifts helplessly, Lodovic realizes that the crew has received a lethal dosage of radiation, as well as sensing something had snapped in his own positronic brain: he had been liberated from the laws of robotics.
I won't get into further detail, but it's a great read, one of the better Foundation installments.
Slashdot Mirror
First this, by me:
:)
Those rights arise from the "corporate person" employing a fleet of lobbyists and lawyers who know how to grease palms, exploit loopholes and drag out legal liabilities for eons. That's one ridiculously powerful person.
Then this, by you:
For example, perhaps religions could try to get legal person status for various spiritual entities.
Holy cow, not just a ridiculously powerful corporate person, but an omnipotent person, no less!
Cheers.
JavaScript, surely the Rodney Dangerfield of scripting languages.
I don't get no respect, you know, the other day I told a friend that I wanted to try out the online dating scene, and he set me up to use Outlook Express on Usenet!
And people tell me that corporations don't have special rights.......
Those rights arise from the "corporate person" employing a fleet of lobbyists and lawyers who know how to grease palms, exploit loopholes and drag out legal liabilities for eons. That's one ridiculously powerful person.
Special rights indeed... let's suppose I'm a physical person with the resources that a corporate person has, and I just find it too much of an effort and hassle to seek out a trash can every time I finish off a can of soda. Well, I'm going to lobby, influence and bribe the proper authorities (congressmen and courts especially) to make littering legal. Sound ridiculous? That's exactly how the corporate climate functions.
The slippery slope began the moment a judge (in the 1860's or 70's, I believe) ruled on the side of the corporation being a "person", an exploit that arose from the misuse of a piece of legislation designed (horribly, it seems) to protect the rights of the black man in the United States after slavery had been abolished. Again, fleets of lawyers exploiting loopholes.
Imagine giving special rights to caucasians to litter in the street all they want, but if an african, asian, hispanic or middle-eastern person gets caught trying to pull it off, they get penalized. If a corporation is a "person", we are living the equivalent of special rights for a minority, and we (physical persons) are all being discriminated against.
To make matters worse, I'm under the impression that only certain corporations get the special treatment, as many mom-and-pop businesses are structured as corporations - remember that corporate status prevents personal assets from being seized in case of business woes such as bankrupcy. A few transnational rotten apples have spoiled the basket for the vast majority of well-intentioned endeavours. However, the abuses of the transnationals are such that we seem to be past the critical point in several crucial aspects for the economy, society and even the species as a whole. Many informed and concerned individuals are fed up and itching for change, even if just to err on the side of caution.
Intriguingly, there were elections last May in Northern California, and the people of Humboldt County voted by a margin of about 60%-40% to abolish the status of "person" to corporations. Maybe little will come of this, but maybe other counties around the nation will put up similar propositions to its' voters, there will be a confrontation, and a decision makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. Maybe it's happened before, but this is not the sort of shit that makes the nightly news, even though it may be one of the crucial issues of our times. Also, I wouldn't hold my breath with the current Supreme Court under Baby Bush. Nor under a democrat president either, to be honest.
Does anybody knows if the Humboldt County experiment has been attempted before? And secondly, even though it can be considered a landslide election, how come 40% of the population, even in liberal Humboldt, would vote to keep the legal status of corporations as "people"? To stay one step ahead of the implicit joke here: what were they smoking?
But wouldn't the the combined total mass of the universe cause an overall curvature?
That's just it. One of the great cosmological endeavours is the search of the so-called missing mass which, if it exists, will cause the universe to remain closed. In other words, will the universe stop expanding one day and reverse direction until the opposite of a Big Bang occurs (a Big Crunch)?
Then, weird things implied themselves in observations and in the blackboard: inflation, the Hubble Constant, dark energy. The evidence seems to point out that there isn't enough mass to keep the universe closed, even taking the dark varieties of matter (MACHOs and/or WIMPs) into account, so the universe will keep on expanding forever, a flat (or open) universe is what we have.
Interesting that you use Mexico as a comparison example to Russia. According to Wikipedia:
Population-wise, Mexico has 107,000,000 (ranked 11th), Russia has 142,800,000 (ranked 8th).
As for GDP in millions of USD, Mexico generates 768,437 (ranked 13th), while Russia generates 763,247 (ranked 14th).
When we list the Per Capita GDP, both countries plummet down the list, Mexico with 7,298 (ranked 53rd), Russia with 5,349 (ranked 61th).
Both are more or less within the same range, with Mexico at a slight advantage, as you say.
Another crucial similarity: both countries' oil industries are state-controlled.
According to production levels in 2002 figures, Mexico exports 1,715,000 barrels of crude a day (ranked 7th), while Russia exports 3,940,000 barrels a day (ranked 2nd and twice as much as Mexico).
As a sidenote, Mexico produces 3,371,000 barrels a day, so roughly half is for internal consumption, and I don't have the Russian figures at hand. Also, considering the dimensions of Russia, it seems like a given that transportation costs for either crude or refined are way higher, although I would suppose that this additional cost is reflected at gas pumps all over Europe.
Returning to the topic, it seems that Mexico generates a more balanced portion of its' GDP from other industries (tourism, agriculture, commerce and manufacturing) than Russia. Both countries have a massive underground economy stemming from illegal activities, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to say here.
Finally, to state a difference, many of Mexico's social and economic woes arise from its' ongoing demographic explosion, while it seems that Russia's population is shrinking, so the nature of both beasts are peculiarly different.
However, comparisons are a healthy exercise sometimes, and in this one your point quickly becomes evident: Russia looks like an extremely vulnerable horse with one wobbly leg and three stumps.
Yeah, well, In Soviet Russia, John Galt is you!
Back in the early nineties, there was a right-wing-ideals convention in my college in Guadalajara, Mexico, endorsed by the dean, with a New Youth type of theme attached to it. Huge colorfull silkscreen banners hung all over the place a month in advance, there were full-page newspaper ads in colour, etc. One out of every three banners sported a picture of Solzhenitsyn, while quoted text warmly "applauded the convention, hoping this type of convention would spread all over Latin America, signed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn".
The conferences turned out to be a laughable affair, real dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist rubbish, focusing on the unpardonable sins of women's rights, gay rights, and so on. They even went so far as to have a couple of talks focusing on the evidence that rock 'n' roll is satanic. These were the only talks that were jam-packed, although not enough to compensate for the weak turnout during the remainder of the convention. Deemed a financial bust, the convention was not even attempted the following year.
My point is that I'll always have those humongous banners of Solzhenitsyn tatooed in my mind, backing up the agenda of right-wing nutjobs. Maybe Solzhenitsyn was duped into throwing his weight behind this fiasco, without fully knowing what it was. Also, the fact that this college was rabidly anti-communist could have made him turn a blind eye to other shenanigans, as in the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But my image of the man remains tarnished until proven otherwise.
BTW, Solzhenitsyn wasn't even there, except in silkscreens looming like a smiling Big Brother.
There are two groups within his administration: the siloviki and the St. Petersburg group. Neither are socialist in orientation.
I am inclined to agree with you. Who needs dogma to justify power when you have already attained and consolidated power without it?
When oil and gas prices level off or fall (even temporarily so), so too will Russia's economic house of cards.
One reason for the USSR collapse of the late eighties was its' hemorraghing money via an arms race effectively designed to bankrupt it. Are military expenditures still on the same level? I would think not by a long shot. Add to this the fact that there are much fewer satellite states for the Kremlin to subsidize, and Russia may be on better footing than you imply, unless the generated capital is being stashed or funneled elsewhere.
If no new money is being invested in infrastructure, or even in the money-go-round in general except within the great urban areas, from the poverty outside of Moscow and St Petesburg you describe, I would think that there's a huge amount of capital gone AWOL.
From the Salon article:
It wasn't even on printed paper until after YouTube and the bloggers.
Apparently they had a hard time choosing Einstein in 99 over Hitler for Man of the Century.
Niels Bohr, baby, yeah!
...how lame Time was picking this...
Sort of brings back fond memories of Spin Magazine's pick for Album Of The Year in 2000, I quote: "It's Your Hard Drive, Stupid".
Number 2? Radiohead's "Kid A".
To be fair, the abstract concept of a community could have been fascinating if Time had scratched deeper. As an example, at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conferences in February of this year, Al Gore did his 'slideshow' a couple of months before "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, and when he mentioned how his company would facilitate the release of all the film's audio and video so that "the kids can remix it any way they like", he drew a spontaneous and wild cheer from the audience, as the idea is a thrilling one.
Now, when we consider 95% of what's actually out there, yeah, it's Lamefest 2006, but don't tell that to the MPAA and the RIAA. Time's choice is bringing them to their knees, and they've even got senator Ted Stevens to eloquently make their case for them.
And let's not forget two great dark horse candidates for Person Of The Year, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who went from 'cult' to 'massive' thanks to the community passing along the zeitgeist. Remember how Colbert went viral in May with the White House Correspondent's Dinner, as he timed his lines NOT to Bush or the people in the audience, but at us, or as Time would put it, you.
Salon made a much more interesting pick.
Definitely food for thought. Sidarth is a perfect example of a butterfly's effect: flapping its' wings in Dickenson County, creating a statewide blizzard in Virginia and changing the nation's political landscape. And did he do it for publicity? No. He did it by happenstance, as a volunteer citizen engaged in the political process of his community. Nationwide, there were thousands of volunteers that deserve equal credit with Sidarth, who just happened to be a lightning rod with a camcorder. Speaking of lightning rods, it seems to me that picking Sidarth is like picking Mark Foley's underage page.
So, thinking about it as I go along here, my choice for Person Of The Year, fine-tuning Time's choice: Political and journalistic bloggers, particularly the liberal ones, this time around. The Allen, Foley and Ted Haggard incidents were kept alive by the Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Wonkette and the like, long after the mainstream media had moved on to Tom and Katie's scientology wedding, the Jon Bennet Ramsey false confession, etc. If you wanted a clear-cut example of the power of the new journalism, the 2006 elections were it.
Which brings me to Non-Person Of The Year, for years running: The mainstream media (including Time Magazine, of course), whose most flagrant act of cowardice and disservice this year was completely blacking out news reports from the insurgent attack on Camp Falcon (or Forward Base Falcon) in Baghdad on October 10, an event that has disappeared from even Google News, although it's still there on Google Video, see for yourself, so that if you thought you lived under the umbrella of a free press, think again.
I would like to fuse Time's choice along with mine like this: See the bloggers who changed the political landscape? It could be you.
Common sense is a rare and precious commodity, especially in young boys.
You ain't kidding there, jimbo, but I wouldn't just emphasize young boys, how about twentysomethings? Years ago, an acquaintance had a kick-ass crossbow with pulleys and stuff, and on three separate ocassions that I knew of, he and his friends formed a circle while the guy shot an arrow straight into the sky. That thing was so powerful that the arrow disappeared from view for about a minute, then a buzzing sound grew louder and louder until the damn thing inserted itself several inches into the ground. Talk about stupid.
Once I intercepted these guys at a ranch when they were out night-hunting on a Saturday. I'm not a hunting man myself, so I got there late with a couple of friends, we popped open some beers and waited while staring at the Milky Way and getting a little philosophical. When the hunting expedition returned, my jaw dropped open in disbelief: a compact pickup truck sped towards us, bumping and lurching in the bad dirt road. Three guys were sitting in the front while three guys were standing in the back and leaning forward into the truck's roof. All of them had rifles, except the center guy inside the cabin. The driver had one hand on the steering wheel and another on his rifle, which was resting on the rear-view mirror! Guns were pointing in four or five different directions.
Beer was flowing freely, while a seventh guy was seated on the icebox in the back of the truck, stoned out of his mind and finishing off a full joint all by himself, while holding his upright rifle between his knees. It was un-fucking-believable. Finally, a bizarre little twist - one of the guys was on vacation from studying to become a catholic priest!!!
However, I must admit that the grilled rabbit was quite excellent, and next morning three of the guys woke up early, grabbed some fishing poles, walked down a canyon leading to the ocean, and returned with fish for breakfast. Call them what you may, but they knew how to get food and cook a great meal.
Invisible Pedestrian Costume??? LOL!!!
Who cooked that one up and where can I get it?
I know a couple of brats that deserve a kewl Christmas gift.
Seriously now, wasn't that just an SNL sketch?
I'd love to know what an isotope smells like!
Burnt firecracker?
When you look at devices like this, the precision construction of the pyramids, the alignment of Stonehenge, and some of the Aztec and Mayan engineering in North America, it's pretty clear that the "primitive" people weren't as primitive as we might think.
Of course. When thinking only of western culture, for example, it's important to remember that over 80% of the ancient world's (hand-written) knowledge was destroyed, irrevocably lost forever, when a crazed mob burned down the great Library Of Alexandria.
Or how about when the conquistadores destroyed all the written mayan documents they could get their filthy, pious hands on?
It wasn't idle talk when Mark Twain said that the single most important invention in history has been the printing press with moveable type. The pundits might say that you couldn't have the printing press without the alphabet first, obviously, but when Guttenberg cranked out the first edition of his little bibles, critical mass was achieved, which is what I think Mr Clemens meant to say: all bets were off.
It is conceivable that the student could have been so shaken, fearful, and angry he literally could not stand up, that he would prefer to just sit there and try to recover.
Damn right. These cops have been tasered in a controlled environment, like their gym or something like that. They knew they were going to get tasered that day, I'd even bet most of them were even been pumped up about it, like some sort of hazing ritual among ex-jocks, egging each other on.
However, what happens when you're just a kid in the UCLA library, thinking about heading towards Noodle Planet in an hour or so, right after you finish homework or whatever, then suddenly find yourself in an extremely nerve-wracking situation that gets you tasered while being yelled menacing orders? The emotional reaction has to be of both astonishment and a sense of being profoundly violated, compounded with the knowledge of having commited no crime.
Tasers may extremely useful in many situations, much better than guns, but this is bullshit, and it happens more often than it's documented and acknowledged. It seems that some cops don't bother to always remember that they're out there To Protect And Serve. In their minds, they're in a war zone and the ultimate objective is to "watch my buddy's back - acquire target and release discharge!" And what a war zone, the UCLA library!
The video was the sickest thing I've witnessed recently, unless you count watching parts of the movie "Saw".
So check this one out: you're a middle aged lady driving in your SUV, anxious, angry and maybe a bit reckless about getting home late and missing Wheel Of Fortune, when suddenly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptRZLfw2_NI
Is this enough reason to get tasered in the middle of the street? Also, notice how this idiot cop doesn't tell her she's under arrest. He just YELLS at her to get out of the car, then fires. Is that the best this puny little mind can do? Rephrasing the question in another direction: what would an english constable do under the same circumstance, taser her? Fat fucking chance, mate!
What we're looking at is sub-par social rejects in black uniform and wearing a shiny little badge. Off the force with a dishonorable discharge, at least, for these idiots.
Right on. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? Drop everything, stand up straight, give a military salute and march on out? When ordinary students... no, make that citizens, have to instantaneously react and obey like corporals at the drop of a police hat, y'all are heading straight into a police state.
Incidents like this become even more disturbing when you think that police officers are also prone to PTSD and itchy trigger fingers, and a considerable percentage of Iraq veterans with much worse cases of either/both will probably find their way into some sort of police force after their tour (or tours) of duty.
your assumptions seem to indicate that time travel equipment is cheap.
You correctly pointed out a weakness in my writing skills. Let me be clearer about what I was trying to say:
1. It's not time travel equipment, it's a temporal communications network, where we could only hear a monologue from the future and are unable to respond. We have to take their word for it, and cannot ask questions back, let alone get answers.
2. I'm not referring to a future geek in his/her basement making malevolent mischief, I'm talking about a Livermoore-caliber facility designed to hack the temporal communications network.
I'm no Area 51 believer, and this is not about little gray men with big eyes, it's about what could lie ahead: the individual or some institution, be it Chevron or a chinese politburo.
I could argue that every new technology needs discussion, but the example of the internet destroys this argument: it surfaced, it caught like wildfire, the rigid powers that be found themselves a step or two behind. I hope it always remains this way. But think of The People's Republic Of China, their ability to censor something as vast as the internet within their own borders, while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google go out of their way to comply.
The same side of a contemporary coin is corporate interest. Many people hear globalization and say "Yeah, cool", while not realizing that what they're thinking of is McDonalization and news blackouts, such as "Baby kidnapped in North Carolina is rescued in Virginia" is trumpeted all over the place, while the attack on Forward Camp Falcon is virtually ignored.
So the dialogue that bounces between my ears is this: What is the present? What future awaits us? Can we trust either/both? Both Area 51 and Studio 54 are ridiculous and dismissed in this argument.
What I'm trying to say is this: yes, there should be no taboos (yes, we have no bananas), but if we ever develop the technology to receive morse code from the future, the concepts of transparency (institution) and privacy (individual) may both go out the window!
How could you trust the message being from you? Current encryption might be broken in the future, and someone could pretend to be you, telling you to kill off people.
Bullseye. Having chewed on it a bit, I replied to my own post and hit upon the very point that you mention. All in all, a fascinating exercise.
Holy cow, the ice is getting thinner as I go along here.
Aw, what the hell, let 'er rip:
The moment we (present) invent it, they (future) will already have it, so we might be in for a barrage of information the moment we go online.
But who's to say what their agenda will be? They might be military or corporate totalitarians in disguise, leading us right into their paws. By what evidence can we trust what they tell us? Or why would we assume that it's in their best interest to warn us to change course, which might lead to their eventual non-existence?
Referring to my previous post, where I mention keeping the dialogue open to different points in the future. Could we possibly detect if time hackers are intercepting and blocking the lines, then transmiting us misinformation? Before believing in a utopian future, we must proyect past and present trends to generally visualize a future, and by these standards, how can we trust potential power-hungry bastards ten generations down the line? The future will have its' own agenda, and it might be completely opposed to our own. We might not be welcome in their future.
Here's another: what if the Karl Rove of 2005 could have a conversation with the Karl Rove of November 2006? After all, those in power will be among the first to gain access to the technology. Or maybe a Pentagon general in charge of the project will find a way to make himself into an emperor for life. Temptations will be humongous.
Now, working under the assumption that the future is relatively benevolent, somebody will have to make incredibly harsh decisions. In order to save a billion lives a hundred years down the line, who's willing to make a decision that permits the destruction of cities or nations? The death of ten or a hundred million people in the current generation? It's more than likely that the invention of a temporal communications network may diminish the worth of the individual, who becomes an abstraction that serves the species, or something more petty: an ism.
An example on a smaller scale that might hit home: What if the message we get from 2056 is: UNPLUG THE INTERNET! NOW!
Man, this is getting weirder and weirder.
However, how does this effect course of events? Send a signal out as Katrina is forming, split, receive morse "levies break, many deaths, evacuate city" so we evacuate the city and butress the levies... but then there aren't many deaths and the levies don't break...
Ah yes, the ol' 'Kill Hitler's mother' paradox. However, with the morse code scenario you describe, we will effectively break off the standard timeline, so to speak, and create a new, parallel one, then another, and another, in geometrical fashion I suppose, ever accelerating in the creation of the 'new branches' of our choosing. All will still exist, separated and never to meet again.
Which brings up an interesting question: how many times can you altruistically 'plan ahead' before population growth in itself causes a catastrophe? The answer might be to keep communications going a week into the future, but also ten, a hundred and a thousand years in advance, to regard consequences of current actions, then choose an equilibrium path.
Holy cow, the ice is getting thinner as I go along here.
A young rocket scientist named Wright
once travelled much faster than light.
He set out one day, in a relative way
and arrived on the previous night.
In Mexico, this technique is known as a goal, as in soccer. It's a part of the lexicon, and whenever somebody slips one by on-air, it's cause for for a bit of ball-busting towards whoever did it. So there is a self-conscious effort to try to avoid it, even if by accident, as in "...well yeah, the other day I was in the office here at the station drinking a Coke OOOOPS!" Cue laughter and somebody in the studio underlining the goal on-air.
It goes so far as to include local businesses, as in "Well, last night my wife and I went to X restaurant, yeah, I know, that was a goal..." A typical response would be "Are you on the payroll?" or "Did you eat there for free?"
So more typically, it goes something like this: "Well, last night my wife and I went to a restaurant, I won't say which one, gotta avoid the goal..." Businesses are usually mentioned only where they belong, which is during commercial breaks.
Sorry I can't cite the source, but I remember reading years ago how Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) was found to have certain shielding properties against radiation. It may be bull, but then again it may not, maybe some sort of hybrid material integrating PVC could be a 'lightweight' and less toxic solution to the problem.
Ah, yet another item in my to-do internet research list. (sigh)
Or rather, a reconstruction of the conversations Greg Bear had with Gregory Benford and David Bryn (the three Killer B's), while sorting out the corner Isaac Asimov painted himself into with the latter Foundation books, specifically Foundation And Earth.
I picture these three guys getting together over dinner and drinks, every week for months, just shooting ideas back and forth, mapping out the panoramic scenario of their grand finale trilogy for the Foundation saga.
Bear's contribution to the trilogy, Foundation And Chaos, gripped me by the throat on the very first chapter, where an undercover robot named Lodovic Trema is travelling on an Imperial astrophysical survey vessel in the galactic backwaters. Suddenly, the spaceship is violently knocked out of hyperspace by the gamma ray shock front of a mischarted supernova explosion (remember, the Empire is crumbling, incompetence runs high). While the spaceship drifts helplessly, Lodovic realizes that the crew has received a lethal dosage of radiation, as well as sensing something had snapped in his own positronic brain: he had been liberated from the laws of robotics.
I won't get into further detail, but it's a great read, one of the better Foundation installments.