While I understand what you're trying to say, you're missing the GP's point. Let's say the price of oil is 3 dollars per gallon. As we deplete our resources (which we are certainly doing at an alarming rate) the price of oil will not remain at 3 dollars per gallon until there is no more oil. So there will be no "shock", at least not economically speaking. As oil becomes more expensive to discover, well, and refine, its price will naturally go up, because scarcity generally forces prices to climb. So going forward, the price of oil is going to increase, and increase, and increase.
This doesn't happen overnight, but it doesn't happen really slowly, either. People don't have an unlimited supply of money. People drive SUVs and otherwise have lifestyles that center around wanton waste primarily because they can afford to do so. It's sad to say, but for most people, the desire to be green doesn't fit into their calculations. We can bitch and moan about the death of altruism all day, but when we check back into reality, people are basically selfish and not particularly concerned about the common good (see, for example, the tragedy of the commons).
Luckily for you, and for humans in general, in this particular case, economics is working in our favour, surprisingly. Because as the price of oil increases -- and it will increase -- people will naturally substitute away from gas-guzzling machinery and inefficient oil-based energy solutions. Right now, oil is the cheapest alternative, but with prices continuing to increase, this ceases to be the case. This is already starting to happen in some places -- for example, solar power is increasingly being used by vineyards in California's Napa Valley (see the latest edition of the Economist) because vineyards get a lot of sun and use very little energy during the summer months -- thus the vineyards can sell their excess power back to the energy companies when prices are high, and buy it back from them later in the fall, when prices are low (vineyards consume most of their power during the harvest). They aren't doing this because "they love the environment" and they're not doing it because "the government said you must", they're doing it because it's profitable. That's why most people do things, unfortunately.
But I guess the GP's point, maybe, is that being green is increasingly going to be necessary because oil prices are on the rise. Here's something for you to ponder: we will never run out of oil. Can you believe I just said that? Do you know why? Because eventually, what oil is left in the ground will simply be too expensive to bother extracting. If oil costs 500 dollars a barrel, demand will be nearly zilch -- at 500 dollars a barrel, there are already lots of other energy production methods that are much, much cheaper -- heck, producing hydrocarbons in a lab using nuclear power is cheaper at that price. So why would anyone even think of trying to take it out of the ground? The answer is, they won't.
Hybrid vehicles have been all the rage lately in California (which is where I live), and let me tell you, it's not because we're all a bunch of tree-hugging hippies. It's not because we love being green, although that might be what we say at parties. It's because at 3 dollars a gallon, with our insane average commute time, it makes good fiscal sense to avoid the SUV. That's what it comes down to. In France, gasoline costs nearly 4 times as much as it does in the US, so is it at all surprising that the average French person is much less likely to be wasteful? Why do you think little fuel-efficient Renauds and Peugeots are so popular there? It's not altruism, buddy, it's economics.
And the price of oil is going to keep going up. Some people like their SUVs enough that even at 3 bucks a gallon they're willing to bear the burden. But will they be willing to do that at 4 bucks a gallon? 5? 8? It's going to happen, so they'd better start thinking about it.
Regarding typing Chinese, I think it is partially what you're used to, as MS Window's default input methods all suck for me, and Apple's seem even worse. I use either SCIM or fcitx, what do you use?
SCIM's simple pinyin method is quite good. Of course, if you use traditional characters or aren't a Mandarin speaker or both, this might not be ideal. If you type Wubi, as I do, fcitx is a better option, and its pinyin mode is pretty usable, although not as good as SCIM's.
I agree of course. And good point on the receipt terminology, I'll avoid that word from now on. Regarding the misrepresentation of money saved, I think your off-the-cuff calculations makes certain assumptions that I didn't. The money saved came from not having to print the ballot and the explanatory ballot information in 5 or 6 different languages for each voter. That's more than just one sheet per person; in my county, my ballot information booklet was very thick.
As for who decides what's displayable on the ballot machines, well, that decision has luckily already been made in my county at least: we're provided with a thick book that contains the actual text of all the measures and propositions, along with a summary of each, an explanation of what a yay vote means and what a nay vote means, and a small pro blurb with a con response to said blurb, along with a con blurb and a pro response to that blurb. I think having that information automatically available from the machines would already be very useful, and no extra difficult decision-making is required to include it.
I just voted and my district was using voting machines that did just what you said: let you choose, review, correct, and at the end printed out a "receipt" for you to inspect. According to the election volunteer, 3% of districts will have their votes manually audited regardless, and more if there are any recounts demanded.
Personally, I'm not sure I like the idea of having a computer count the votes, but it occurs to me that having a computer do the actual printing of the paper that does get counted is not a bad idea. One, it discourages mistakes, by allowing a person to review his or her votes before actually printing. Two, it allows for easy internationalisation of the voting process: I live in a very diverse area (in Silicon Valley) and having ballots in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Bahasa (I think) is required by the state. By using a computer to do the actual vote-marking, we save a lot of money in printing costs -- there's no need to produce tons of ballots in different languages to cover anticipated need. My county apparently saved a million USD in this election on printing costs alone.
Consider also that computers are good at crossreferencing (think hyperlinks) and so with a computer-based system it would be theoretically possible to have all sorts of election-related media available on-site at the touch of a button. At the moment, we have a handbook that contains the texts of the various propositions and some of the candidates' statements, along with other aids. Unfortunately, there are (and will continue to be) a lot of people who don't really know much about the issues when they go to the polls. Having information easily accessible while they vote would probably increase voter awareness of issues.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think vote printing machines are a bad idea per se, just vote counting machines.
You're an idiot. Spelling genius as "genious" is a long-standing tradition in the hacker community. It is meant to be ironic (because the spelling is wrong, and appears faux-British) and call into question whether or not the person or thing being lauded is in fact "genius" or not.
For example uses, consider "<insert bad idea here>! GENIOUS!" is meant to suggest that the person who is apparently suggesting the bad idea does not, in fact, think it is genius.
A year or two ago I would have agreed with you, but look at what we've done in the last few years. Secret prisons in Syria. Torture. How many Iraqis did he kill during his reign? We're at least indirectly responsible for over a hundred thousand to date, and that's still climbing -- at this rate, even if we haven't matched him yet, we certainly will. And if we "cut and run", as we're almost certain to eventually do, there will be civil war in Iraq, and an untold more will die as a result of our actions.
Saddam was not a good person -- but we are not doing well in the eyes of the world anymore, either. While the GP may have engaged in some hyperbole when he suggested that we've already sunk to his level, your categorical refutation of his point is based on faith, not evidence. The freedom-loving we're-better-than-the-USSR USA we enjoyed under Reagan is being eroded away. In its place we've got something far less pure. It's sickening.
We may not engage in the same brutality as Saddam in our methodology, but we are killing Iraqis just as surely as he did. We are, in a very real sense, sinking to his level.
And I agree with what some others have said -- by killing him in a kangaroo court, we are conveniently making sure that if there is ever a stable and democratic Iraq, no Iraqi version of the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission will ever be able to wrest from Saddam the answer to the question of exactly how much we had to do with his ascension to power.
I think it's fairly clear that we don't want any clear answers to that question.
While it's true that Bill Gates is ridiculously, fantastically rich, the amount of money he has to spend doesn't even compare to the trillions of US dollars the Chinese government owns in T-bills and bonds. Hu Jin Tao could, if he were stupid and selfish enough (which he isn't, thankfully) simply dip into that reserve to buy his wife shoes.
Luckily, the Chinese are nationalist to a fault and, despite the widespread corruption at the more local levels, they on the whole recognise that doing stuff like that is bad for China. They don't want to be seen as a banana republic. They style themselves as the world's future superpower, equal to the United States, and they want to see that dream come true. While Americans like to call China a totalitarian dictatorship, it is in fact a one-party state, with reasonably good rule of law by developing nation standards. If Hu or any other big muckity-muck in the CCP played it quick and fast with China's future, he'd be crucified. It pains me to always have to say this, but Mao and his personality cult have been out of the picture since 1976. That was 30 years ago. Things have changed.
Incidentally, respecting other people's intellectual property would not be a good deal for China right now (just as respecting European and Russian intellectual property was not a good deal for the developing United States) and I see no reason whatsoever that they should enforce "piracy" laws for any sum. It's not in their best interest. Once they start producing large amounts of intellectual property -- a sector of China's economy that is slowly but surely revving up, especially in the entertainment industry -- you will see a sudden commitment to IP enforcement, just as was the case with the United States. But not until then.
What about the WTO, you ask? Well, what about it? We play it quick and fast with WTO regulations too -- Canadian lumber, steel embargoes, and other protectionist policies that are technically not in alignment with the WTO's member state agreements are par for the course with us, and most other nations, too. Having the WTO is a step in the right direction but ultimately international bodies like the WTO and the UN only have the power their members give them. To assume that another nation with much more to lose would blindly comply with rules that aren't in its best interest is folly.
As for the US bill of rights, while the freedom-loving side of me empathises with your idealism, realpolitik, as usual, intervenes. China's stated goal at the moment is stability and development. In living memory China was a chaotic and dangerous place -- it's not like that anymore, and everyone (including the little people) are keen to keep it that way. If you think the average middle-American "please take my 4th amendment rights away, I'm afraid of terrorists and drug dealers" attitude is sickeningly short-sighted, you're in for an even bigger shock when you talk to most Chinese people. The truth is, they, for the most part, don't want freedom. They think the government is doing a good job (and it is, too). For the most part, the fact that freedom of speech isn't guaranteed to them (technically it is, but there's a loophole in the PRC constitution) isn't something they lament about, because while the freedom isn't de jure, de facto they can say most anything they want and they do. When you start saying that there should be more freedom, they feel like you're taking away the ability of the government to do something about the bad guys (does this line of reasoning sound familiar?) and they're basically opposed to it.
I've been told by many people that it's a good thing that Xinhua, the official newspaper of China, is censored. "From a security and stability perspective, it's important that the people, especially those that are unsatisfied, feel that the government is on the right track, that things are stable, and that we will prosper. We don't want another revolution."
For what it's worth, my girlfriend's father was there (in 1989, he's Chinese) with his friend, who was killed. While evacuated peacefully would be a rather blatant lie, he also said that most people killed (not all, but most, his words) were killed after they left the square. My girlfriend's dad cynically said that was a better way to handle the situation, because witnesses were fewer and the death toll harder to estimate.
But the truth is that what really happened in Tiananmen square is generally not important to people who want to bash the PRC. Let's face it, no developed nation has clean hands and most have been responsible for brutal shit. That doesn't make it right, but while Japan goes on pretending that the rape of Nanking didn't happen, while the US goes on pretending that the Native Americans weren't systematically exterminated, while Taiwan for forty years pretended that 2-28 never happened, we all sit here wagging our fingers at those darn communists and their shenanigans. It's cold war era propaganda, plain and simple.
Of course I would be happier than anyone if they owed up to it a little bit, and maybe even appologized for doing it and paid reparations, but then I'm not holding my breath. After all, the US enjoyed massive economic benefit as a result of the institution of slavery, and it has never paid reparations to those it affected negatively (hey, isn't freeing them enough?) Given that the US is, thankfully, still better than the PRC when it comes to people's rights, it seems unrealistic to hold the PRC to higher standards than we ourselves adhere to.
(Incidentally, regarding the slavery thing, I've heard people say things like, "Well, those blacks are better off as Americans than they would have been if they were still in Africa", which while manifestly true is hardly any consolation to the generations of people who died in bondage and their offspring that now, as a result of slavery and then the apartheid-like conditions imposed on them for the 100 years after they were emancipated, remain economically destitute when compared to other groups, particularly whites. I've also heard people say, "The Civil War was the bloodiest war the US has ever fought, and we fought to free the slaves, so we've paid our dues." It's disgusting how people ignore history, isn't it? We didn't fight the civil war to free the slaves, we fought it to keep the South from seceeding. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the states that had seceeded -- Kentucky, for example, was allowed to keep its slaves until the passing of the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1865. The real reasonn we emancipated the slaves in the south were two: one, to encourage slaves in the south to rebel (because they knew that if the CSA succeeded in secession they would remain in bondage, but if the Union prevailed they would be free) and two, and perhaps most importantly, to prevent the European powers from recognising the CSA and thus paving the way for European support. I thought I'd just add this information in this post for the hell of it.)
You're looking at this in the short term. The increased machine-parsability of XHTML means that programs can handle it more efficiently: that means that not only are browsers faster, more efficient and less error prone when parsing well-formed XHTML, but it also means that really good standards compliant web authoring tools are easier to write.
HTML was designed to be written with a text-editor, but XHTML/CSS was not really designed to be written by hand, it was designed with machines in mind.
Until a good XHTML/CSS authoring suite is available, professional IT people might be able to corner the market on writing XHTML. But in the long term, good and consistant standards compliance in browsers means that anyone will be able to write XHTML using a nice point and click GUI program, much in same way that anyone can write a word document with MS word, but very few people can write one with just a text editor. The difference is, because XHTML is an open standard and MSDOC is not, there can be lots of competing programs that all produce XHTML compatibly, and lots of competing browsers that all display it compatibly.
Of course in reality, the main reason that XHTML hasn't already taken over and become ubiquitous is because IE6 does not support it -- serving XHTML to IE with its proper mimetype, application/xhtml+xml, causes IE to bring up a download file dialogue, instead of properly displaying the XHTML. So the only alternative is to serve it as text/html, which causes IE to use its SGML parser to parse the XHTML -- possible because XML is essentially a subset of SGML -- thus completely negating all the useful features of XML.
While XHTML may be harder to write by hand than HTML, all the features that make it useful, like SVG and MathML, are nearly impossible to write by hand -- they already have generators (there are lots of tools that convert industry-standard LaTeX markup for math equations into MathML, for example, and lots of graphics programs that produce SVG). It should be clear that XHTML and friends were not designed to be written by hand.
If IE, still the most dominant browser, properly supported XHTML (not a difficult thing!), and if it also supported some of the technologies that make XHTML really useful, I think we'd see XHTML take off in a big way. But it doesn't, so we don't.
XHTML will make production of good-quality, standards compliant web pages easier for laypersons, not more difficult. As it should be.
The big difference with modern democracies is that there are limits on what the government can do. Specifically, the US Treasury cannot print money, and they cannot make the Fed (who can) do anything of the sort. This means that all the money the government spends, voters eventually have to pay back in taxes. This greatly decreases the incentive to "get money out of the government treasury."
Which is one of the reasons that so many Americans are always harping on increasing the government's fiscal responsibility. Runaway spending like the kind we're experiencing now has happened before, and will likely happen again -- but in the long term people will feel the sting of the recession that inevitably follows. Because all that debt we sell to the Chinese and the Japanese isn't paper money, it's money we will have to repay -- defaulting on a T-bill payment would destroy confidence in the US dollar and our assets would plummet.
I think enough people know this that your doomsday scenario isn't really workable.
I'm not a Bush supporter by any means, but I think playing what if with the Al Gore scenario is counter-productive. The whole 9/11 thing changed everything with Bush, largely because the American public demanded that something be done. Of course in hindsight, doing nothing other than rebuilding and going on with life probably would have been the best solution, but instead we rose to the bait and gave Al-Qaeda enormous worldwide credibility.
The thing to realise is that if Bush hadn't declared the so-called "War on Terror" in the months following September 11th, he probably would have been drawn and quartered by the American public. The same is true for Gore, I'm sure. Gore might have handled it in a less corrupt way, and he probably wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, and so things probably would have been better, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's very difficult to predict how a President -- any President -- would react to something like September 11th.
Remember what Bush was like before 9/11? The guy spent less time in office than anyone else had, he was largely considered to be a harmless if ineffectual president, and people were already saying that he was certain to be a one-termer. Things didn't play out that way though...
I lived there for 4 years, speak fluent Mandarin, and just got back to the states last month. If you were travelling, and you don't speak Chinese, it's entirely possible that you were charged more.
As for internet cafes near tourist attractions, they will of course be far more expensive -- but again, it's because of tourists.
My Thinkpad X40 (which runs Debian) has a long battery life and runs very cool (it also doesn't generally make any noise at all.) My ex-girlfriend's Mac did run really, really hot, although if you were wearing pants it wasn't so scalding that you couldn't put it on your lap.
Of course, my Thinkpad also wasn't cheap. It's not like we're talking about a Dell here.
Another thing: legally, internet cafes are supposed to require and record ID numbers from all persons that use their facilities (that's Shenfenzheng number for locals, passport number for foreigners). Of course, economic pressures mean that the vast majority of internet cafes don't do this -- despite there being a law, apparently, that Chinese nationals and resident foreigners always have ID on their persons, the vast majority of Chinese people don't bother as the law is completely unenforcable -- too large a population with too few policemen. So requiring that clients have ID to use the computers effectively means turing away a lot of people, which the privately owned internet cafes aren't eager to do, as their margins are narrow enough as it is what with cutthroat competition and all.
In practice, this means that unless the government is having a "crack down", you don't need ID to use the computers. But the fact that ID is required sort of throws your security argument out the window.
Crack downs, incidentally, are always pretty temporary (a week or maybe two is typical, perhaps once every 6 or 8 months) because they're extremely unpopular. Most Chinese will not start carrying ID just to use computers. The result is that, unless the government wants to forego tax revenue from a thriving industry, they will never keep the crackdown going for too long, as the internet cafes wouldn't survive a long-term decrease in revenue. It's the same with pirated DVDs and VCDs -- they have a crackdown for a month, the stores hide their pirated material for the period, and then the crackdown "ends" and everything goes back to normal.
China may not be a democracy, but with its population, you can't use force to get the people to do what you want, you have to convince them that it's in their best interest. Propaganda, in other words. So they run TV programs talking about how people are using internet cafes to commit computer crimes (real ones, like vandalizing web pages or cracking corporate systems) and that the unwillingness of internet cafe owners to check for ID is making matters worse, etc. It doesn't really fool anyone, as far as I can tell.
I hate to say it, but, in the four years I lived in China, not counting customs-related ID checks, I was asked for ID less frequently than I was in the US in the first two weeks after coming home. In China, I can own and operate a cellphone without ever presenting ID or having a credit or background check, I can buy alcohol without some twit asking for my ID, and the times when I have been asked for ID, "I don't have it on me" has been a perfectly acceptable answer. I keep hearing that China is totalitarian and that the US is the land of the free.
Sometimes, it really doesn't feel like it. But at least I'm free to choose between two leaders I don't like here.
I seriously doubt they would do anything of the sort, that's a very un-Chinese solution. The Chinese may punish people for things we westerners think don't deserve punishment, but I very much doubt that they would punish someone they thought or knew was innocent of the crime. In Chinese culture, embarassing someone is a special no-no, and they would feel very bad about the collateral damage from a policy like the one you describe.
Also, for the record, "Chang" is not a Chinese surname. I've never understood why so many Westerners latch on to this particular word.
Even in Beijing, more than 3 yuan/per minute is uncommon and 2 yuan per minute is more standard, with 1 yuan per minute common on the outskirts of town (I used to live near Wen Quan in northern Hai Dian district, and it was dirt cheap out there.)
Maybe the grandparent is going to one of those internet cafes designed for tourists? Typically those have English, Korean or Japanese Windows installed on their machines, depending on the demographic they're marketing to. That might drive up the price a bit.
Names are by no means unique identifiers in China -- there are only a hundred or so family names in common use and the characters used in people's names are often recycled. With the population of China being as large as it is, even if you use your real name there could easily be 50 people in your area who have exactly the same name.
Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?
The partial pressure of CO2 is higher on Mars than it is on Earth. Most of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, in a terribly stable and inert diatomic configuration. Nitrogen is necessary for us on Earth only because it acts as a "buffer gas", and in places where different "atmospheric" pressure causes nitrogen to be soluble in the bloodstream (undersea installations and such), we use other gases for the same purpose (like Helium, Neon, or Argon).
It seems reasonable to expect that if they were robust enough, certain single celled organisms could survive on the surface of Mars. I'm reasonably sure that we could genetically engineer certain Earth-evolved extremophiles to survive there, as Mars isn't really tremendously harsh relative to the other non-Earth planets in the solar system; imagine Antarctica after having been nuked a few million times and without enough air to breathe and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like.
A lichen with strong resistance to radioactivity and suitably depressed freezing point might be able to (slowly) grow on the rocks of Mars. The main issue is lower light level, not lack of CO2.
Of course, it's an open question as to whether we could survive there. The long term effects of 0.37g are not known. In particular, whether a child would develop normally in reduced gravity is an open question. Questions of colonization and terraforming are jumping the gun.
It's also worth noting that while the high arctic and Antarctica share some similarities to Mars, they are vastly more hospitable to life because they are not constantly being bombarded by high energy cosmic rays, and they have a breathable atmosphere, a less extreme variation in temperature, and the same gravity as the rest of Earth. And yet, despite there being huge swaths of land in these "hospitable" areas that are virtually uninhabited, no one is colonizing them. Why not? Because no one wants to live in a place like Antarctica.
Yes, I know there are treaties in place that restrict use of Antarctica's resources, but these have not been in real force for very long and there are many non-signatory nations that reserve the right to set up permanent installations on the continent as they see fit. And yet, with the exception of a few tiny research outposts, no one does.
Even Northern Canada, which shares none of the political problems associated with the "ownerless" Antarctic, has almost no inhabitants. Yet with modern technology, life would be positively easy there compared to Mars.
There are reasons to pursue off-world colonization, the most important being ensuring the survival of the species. But it's not like we're out of space here on Earth yet, and there is nowhere on Earth that rivals Mars in inhospitablity.
Sure, some geeks probably think, "I would go", but would you really? Would you even move to Antarctica? (I'm aware there are some Slashdotters who work there.)
First you'd get put into a tin can with a few other people and you'd spend 6 to 9 claustrophobic months in interplanetary space. All research into this sort of situation (the Russians have done a lot) shows that no matter how nice the people are, after a certain period in those conditions they end up hating each other. This is even assuming that the degenerate effects of long-term microgravity can be surmounted.
Then you get to Mars, which is freezing cold most of the time, dim, dusty, and without a productive atmosphere. You spend the rest of your life living in another (maybe slightly larger) tin can, with the same few people that by now you already hate. Worse, you can't ever escape them. You can't go on a walk. You can't actually live on the surface without aid, and most feasible colony designs have been underground or in canyons to offer protection from cosmic rays.
So you're probably living underground, like a mole, on a freezing, probably lifeless or at least nearly-lifeless rock millions of miles away from everyone else wit
I wasn't able to easily find historical US GNP data on the web, but here is a table of historical GDP values for the United States, which is closely related to GNP. In inflation adjusted 2002 dollars, our GDP in 2005 was just over 11 trillion. In 1984, it was 5.8 trillion dollars, or roughly half of our GDP in 2005. Similary, in 1962 it was 2.7 trillion, roughly a quarter of our GDP in 2005. These figures are all in 2002 dollars and account for inflationary differences. In 1940, it was only about a trillion 2002 dollars, or a tenth of our output in 2005. In 1915, around 500 billion, or a twentieth. You get the idea. Someone made a nice graph from this data for Wikipedia.
Your response sounded skeptical. The parent obviously looked at the data while he authored his post. Of course, all of this could very well be misleading. The GDP is the best measure of economic performance we have, but it has a number of known flaws. It also fails to take economic shock into account -- but what the parent says is true on the face of it: if some catastrophe halved our economic output, we would be reduced to 1984 levels. Many of us lived through 1984. It wasn't bad.
So what's the problem with this logic? Let's look at the data. In 1929, the US's GDP was 865 billion dollars. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, it had fallen to 635 billion (you can see the blip on the Wikipedia graph linked above.) During the great depression, roughly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed, people were starving and life is generally held to have been the hardest it has ever been in this country. And yet, in 1922 the GDP was 628 billion, even lower than the GDP of 1933 -- does this mean that in 1922, 1 in 4 people were unemployed, people were starving, and that quality of life was the same as in 1933? Of course not.
Between 1929 and 1933, in just 4 years, the GDP of the United States fell 26.6 percent and we barely recovered. Had it not been for the massive government spending required by World War II, who knows how we would have fared. Now just imagine for a moment that some catastrophe happened and the GDP of the United States fell 50% overnight to 1984 levels. Could we expect the same quality of life as 1984? No more than people in 1933 experienced the same quality of life as they had in 1922. And we're looking at a proportional decrease far greater and in far shorter a time than the 1929 to 1933 decrease.
I thought the grandparent's figures were interesting, but I have to say, I'm also a bit skeptical about how meaningful they are.
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While I understand what you're trying to say, you're missing the GP's point. Let's say the price of oil is 3 dollars per gallon. As we deplete our resources (which we are certainly doing at an alarming rate) the price of oil will not remain at 3 dollars per gallon until there is no more oil. So there will be no "shock", at least not economically speaking. As oil becomes more expensive to discover, well, and refine, its price will naturally go up, because scarcity generally forces prices to climb. So going forward, the price of oil is going to increase, and increase, and increase.
This doesn't happen overnight, but it doesn't happen really slowly, either. People don't have an unlimited supply of money. People drive SUVs and otherwise have lifestyles that center around wanton waste primarily because they can afford to do so. It's sad to say, but for most people, the desire to be green doesn't fit into their calculations. We can bitch and moan about the death of altruism all day, but when we check back into reality, people are basically selfish and not particularly concerned about the common good (see, for example, the tragedy of the commons).
Luckily for you, and for humans in general, in this particular case, economics is working in our favour, surprisingly. Because as the price of oil increases -- and it will increase -- people will naturally substitute away from gas-guzzling machinery and inefficient oil-based energy solutions. Right now, oil is the cheapest alternative, but with prices continuing to increase, this ceases to be the case. This is already starting to happen in some places -- for example, solar power is increasingly being used by vineyards in California's Napa Valley (see the latest edition of the Economist) because vineyards get a lot of sun and use very little energy during the summer months -- thus the vineyards can sell their excess power back to the energy companies when prices are high, and buy it back from them later in the fall, when prices are low (vineyards consume most of their power during the harvest). They aren't doing this because "they love the environment" and they're not doing it because "the government said you must", they're doing it because it's profitable. That's why most people do things, unfortunately.
But I guess the GP's point, maybe, is that being green is increasingly going to be necessary because oil prices are on the rise. Here's something for you to ponder: we will never run out of oil. Can you believe I just said that? Do you know why? Because eventually, what oil is left in the ground will simply be too expensive to bother extracting. If oil costs 500 dollars a barrel, demand will be nearly zilch -- at 500 dollars a barrel, there are already lots of other energy production methods that are much, much cheaper -- heck, producing hydrocarbons in a lab using nuclear power is cheaper at that price. So why would anyone even think of trying to take it out of the ground? The answer is, they won't.
Hybrid vehicles have been all the rage lately in California (which is where I live), and let me tell you, it's not because we're all a bunch of tree-hugging hippies. It's not because we love being green, although that might be what we say at parties. It's because at 3 dollars a gallon, with our insane average commute time, it makes good fiscal sense to avoid the SUV. That's what it comes down to. In France, gasoline costs nearly 4 times as much as it does in the US, so is it at all surprising that the average French person is much less likely to be wasteful? Why do you think little fuel-efficient Renauds and Peugeots are so popular there? It's not altruism, buddy, it's economics.
And the price of oil is going to keep going up. Some people like their SUVs enough that even at 3 bucks a gallon they're willing to bear the burden. But will they be willing to do that at 4 bucks a gallon? 5? 8? It's going to happen, so they'd better start thinking about it.
As for your quip about rowing your boat down to
Regarding typing Chinese, I think it is partially what you're used to, as MS Window's default input methods all suck for me, and Apple's seem even worse. I use either SCIM or fcitx, what do you use?
SCIM's simple pinyin method is quite good. Of course, if you use traditional characters or aren't a Mandarin speaker or both, this might not be ideal. If you type Wubi, as I do, fcitx is a better option, and its pinyin mode is pretty usable, although not as good as SCIM's.
I agree of course. And good point on the receipt terminology, I'll avoid that word from now on. Regarding the misrepresentation of money saved, I think your off-the-cuff calculations makes certain assumptions that I didn't. The money saved came from not having to print the ballot and the explanatory ballot information in 5 or 6 different languages for each voter. That's more than just one sheet per person; in my county, my ballot information booklet was very thick.
As for who decides what's displayable on the ballot machines, well, that decision has luckily already been made in my county at least: we're provided with a thick book that contains the actual text of all the measures and propositions, along with a summary of each, an explanation of what a yay vote means and what a nay vote means, and a small pro blurb with a con response to said blurb, along with a con blurb and a pro response to that blurb. I think having that information automatically available from the machines would already be very useful, and no extra difficult decision-making is required to include it.
Otherwise I completely agree with you.
I just voted and my district was using voting machines that did just what you said: let you choose, review, correct, and at the end printed out a "receipt" for you to inspect. According to the election volunteer, 3% of districts will have their votes manually audited regardless, and more if there are any recounts demanded.
Personally, I'm not sure I like the idea of having a computer count the votes, but it occurs to me that having a computer do the actual printing of the paper that does get counted is not a bad idea. One, it discourages mistakes, by allowing a person to review his or her votes before actually printing. Two, it allows for easy internationalisation of the voting process: I live in a very diverse area (in Silicon Valley) and having ballots in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Bahasa (I think) is required by the state. By using a computer to do the actual vote-marking, we save a lot of money in printing costs -- there's no need to produce tons of ballots in different languages to cover anticipated need. My county apparently saved a million USD in this election on printing costs alone.
Consider also that computers are good at crossreferencing (think hyperlinks) and so with a computer-based system it would be theoretically possible to have all sorts of election-related media available on-site at the touch of a button. At the moment, we have a handbook that contains the texts of the various propositions and some of the candidates' statements, along with other aids. Unfortunately, there are (and will continue to be) a lot of people who don't really know much about the issues when they go to the polls. Having information easily accessible while they vote would probably increase voter awareness of issues.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think vote printing machines are a bad idea per se, just vote counting machines.
You're an idiot. Spelling genius as "genious" is a long-standing tradition in the hacker community. It is meant to be ironic (because the spelling is wrong, and appears faux-British) and call into question whether or not the person or thing being lauded is in fact "genius" or not.
For example uses, consider "<insert bad idea here>! GENIOUS!" is meant to suggest that the person who is apparently suggesting the bad idea does not, in fact, think it is genius.
This stuff is hard to get, I know.
A year or two ago I would have agreed with you, but look at what we've done in the last few years. Secret prisons in Syria. Torture. How many Iraqis did he kill during his reign? We're at least indirectly responsible for over a hundred thousand to date, and that's still climbing -- at this rate, even if we haven't matched him yet, we certainly will. And if we "cut and run", as we're almost certain to eventually do, there will be civil war in Iraq, and an untold more will die as a result of our actions.
Saddam was not a good person -- but we are not doing well in the eyes of the world anymore, either. While the GP may have engaged in some hyperbole when he suggested that we've already sunk to his level, your categorical refutation of his point is based on faith, not evidence. The freedom-loving we're-better-than-the-USSR USA we enjoyed under Reagan is being eroded away. In its place we've got something far less pure. It's sickening.
We may not engage in the same brutality as Saddam in our methodology, but we are killing Iraqis just as surely as he did. We are, in a very real sense, sinking to his level.
And I agree with what some others have said -- by killing him in a kangaroo court, we are conveniently making sure that if there is ever a stable and democratic Iraq, no Iraqi version of the South African Truth and Reconciliation commission will ever be able to wrest from Saddam the answer to the question of exactly how much we had to do with his ascension to power.
I think it's fairly clear that we don't want any clear answers to that question.
This isn't the first time the US has thought they knew better than the French when it came to military matters.
Let's not forget Vietnam, and how wonderfully that went for us.
While it's true that Bill Gates is ridiculously, fantastically rich, the amount of money he has to spend doesn't even compare to the trillions of US dollars the Chinese government owns in T-bills and bonds. Hu Jin Tao could, if he were stupid and selfish enough (which he isn't, thankfully) simply dip into that reserve to buy his wife shoes.
Luckily, the Chinese are nationalist to a fault and, despite the widespread corruption at the more local levels, they on the whole recognise that doing stuff like that is bad for China. They don't want to be seen as a banana republic. They style themselves as the world's future superpower, equal to the United States, and they want to see that dream come true. While Americans like to call China a totalitarian dictatorship, it is in fact a one-party state, with reasonably good rule of law by developing nation standards. If Hu or any other big muckity-muck in the CCP played it quick and fast with China's future, he'd be crucified. It pains me to always have to say this, but Mao and his personality cult have been out of the picture since 1976. That was 30 years ago. Things have changed.
Incidentally, respecting other people's intellectual property would not be a good deal for China right now (just as respecting European and Russian intellectual property was not a good deal for the developing United States) and I see no reason whatsoever that they should enforce "piracy" laws for any sum. It's not in their best interest. Once they start producing large amounts of intellectual property -- a sector of China's economy that is slowly but surely revving up, especially in the entertainment industry -- you will see a sudden commitment to IP enforcement, just as was the case with the United States. But not until then.
What about the WTO, you ask? Well, what about it? We play it quick and fast with WTO regulations too -- Canadian lumber, steel embargoes, and other protectionist policies that are technically not in alignment with the WTO's member state agreements are par for the course with us, and most other nations, too. Having the WTO is a step in the right direction but ultimately international bodies like the WTO and the UN only have the power their members give them. To assume that another nation with much more to lose would blindly comply with rules that aren't in its best interest is folly.
As for the US bill of rights, while the freedom-loving side of me empathises with your idealism, realpolitik, as usual, intervenes. China's stated goal at the moment is stability and development. In living memory China was a chaotic and dangerous place -- it's not like that anymore, and everyone (including the little people) are keen to keep it that way. If you think the average middle-American "please take my 4th amendment rights away, I'm afraid of terrorists and drug dealers" attitude is sickeningly short-sighted, you're in for an even bigger shock when you talk to most Chinese people. The truth is, they, for the most part, don't want freedom. They think the government is doing a good job (and it is, too). For the most part, the fact that freedom of speech isn't guaranteed to them (technically it is, but there's a loophole in the PRC constitution) isn't something they lament about, because while the freedom isn't de jure, de facto they can say most anything they want and they do. When you start saying that there should be more freedom, they feel like you're taking away the ability of the government to do something about the bad guys (does this line of reasoning sound familiar?) and they're basically opposed to it.
I've been told by many people that it's a good thing that Xinhua, the official newspaper of China, is censored. "From a security and stability perspective, it's important that the people, especially those that are unsatisfied, feel that the government is on the right track, that things are stable, and that we will prosper. We don't want another revolution."
You know, the American revolution t
For reference, and in case you haven't yet, see this post elsewhere in the thread that shows how to get 1.5 tab functionality in 2.0.
... uhh... Iceweasel.
I'm still using 1.5 (I'm on Debian) but I'm looking forward to the new Firefox
For what it's worth, my girlfriend's father was there (in 1989, he's Chinese) with his friend, who was killed. While evacuated peacefully would be a rather blatant lie, he also said that most people killed (not all, but most, his words) were killed after they left the square. My girlfriend's dad cynically said that was a better way to handle the situation, because witnesses were fewer and the death toll harder to estimate.
But the truth is that what really happened in Tiananmen square is generally not important to people who want to bash the PRC. Let's face it, no developed nation has clean hands and most have been responsible for brutal shit. That doesn't make it right, but while Japan goes on pretending that the rape of Nanking didn't happen, while the US goes on pretending that the Native Americans weren't systematically exterminated, while Taiwan for forty years pretended that 2-28 never happened, we all sit here wagging our fingers at those darn communists and their shenanigans. It's cold war era propaganda, plain and simple.
Of course I would be happier than anyone if they owed up to it a little bit, and maybe even appologized for doing it and paid reparations, but then I'm not holding my breath. After all, the US enjoyed massive economic benefit as a result of the institution of slavery, and it has never paid reparations to those it affected negatively (hey, isn't freeing them enough?) Given that the US is, thankfully, still better than the PRC when it comes to people's rights, it seems unrealistic to hold the PRC to higher standards than we ourselves adhere to.
(Incidentally, regarding the slavery thing, I've heard people say things like, "Well, those blacks are better off as Americans than they would have been if they were still in Africa", which while manifestly true is hardly any consolation to the generations of people who died in bondage and their offspring that now, as a result of slavery and then the apartheid-like conditions imposed on them for the 100 years after they were emancipated, remain economically destitute when compared to other groups, particularly whites. I've also heard people say, "The Civil War was the bloodiest war the US has ever fought, and we fought to free the slaves, so we've paid our dues." It's disgusting how people ignore history, isn't it? We didn't fight the civil war to free the slaves, we fought it to keep the South from seceeding. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the states that had seceeded -- Kentucky, for example, was allowed to keep its slaves until the passing of the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1865. The real reasonn we emancipated the slaves in the south were two: one, to encourage slaves in the south to rebel (because they knew that if the CSA succeeded in secession they would remain in bondage, but if the Union prevailed they would be free) and two, and perhaps most importantly, to prevent the European powers from recognising the CSA and thus paving the way for European support. I thought I'd just add this information in this post for the hell of it.)
This is insightful? Jesus...
You're looking at this in the short term. The increased machine-parsability of XHTML means that programs can handle it more efficiently: that means that not only are browsers faster, more efficient and less error prone when parsing well-formed XHTML, but it also means that really good standards compliant web authoring tools are easier to write.
HTML was designed to be written with a text-editor, but XHTML/CSS was not really designed to be written by hand, it was designed with machines in mind.
Until a good XHTML/CSS authoring suite is available, professional IT people might be able to corner the market on writing XHTML. But in the long term, good and consistant standards compliance in browsers means that anyone will be able to write XHTML using a nice point and click GUI program, much in same way that anyone can write a word document with MS word, but very few people can write one with just a text editor. The difference is, because XHTML is an open standard and MSDOC is not, there can be lots of competing programs that all produce XHTML compatibly, and lots of competing browsers that all display it compatibly.
Of course in reality, the main reason that XHTML hasn't already taken over and become ubiquitous is because IE6 does not support it -- serving XHTML to IE with its proper mimetype, application/xhtml+xml, causes IE to bring up a download file dialogue, instead of properly displaying the XHTML. So the only alternative is to serve it as text/html, which causes IE to use its SGML parser to parse the XHTML -- possible because XML is essentially a subset of SGML -- thus completely negating all the useful features of XML.
While XHTML may be harder to write by hand than HTML, all the features that make it useful, like SVG and MathML, are nearly impossible to write by hand -- they already have generators (there are lots of tools that convert industry-standard LaTeX markup for math equations into MathML, for example, and lots of graphics programs that produce SVG). It should be clear that XHTML and friends were not designed to be written by hand.
If IE, still the most dominant browser, properly supported XHTML (not a difficult thing!), and if it also supported some of the technologies that make XHTML really useful, I think we'd see XHTML take off in a big way. But it doesn't, so we don't.
XHTML will make production of good-quality, standards compliant web pages easier for laypersons, not more difficult. As it should be.
The big difference with modern democracies is that there are limits on what the government can do. Specifically, the US Treasury cannot print money, and they cannot make the Fed (who can) do anything of the sort. This means that all the money the government spends, voters eventually have to pay back in taxes. This greatly decreases the incentive to "get money out of the government treasury."
Which is one of the reasons that so many Americans are always harping on increasing the government's fiscal responsibility. Runaway spending like the kind we're experiencing now has happened before, and will likely happen again -- but in the long term people will feel the sting of the recession that inevitably follows. Because all that debt we sell to the Chinese and the Japanese isn't paper money, it's money we will have to repay -- defaulting on a T-bill payment would destroy confidence in the US dollar and our assets would plummet.
I think enough people know this that your doomsday scenario isn't really workable.
I'm not a Bush supporter by any means, but I think playing what if with the Al Gore scenario is counter-productive. The whole 9/11 thing changed everything with Bush, largely because the American public demanded that something be done. Of course in hindsight, doing nothing other than rebuilding and going on with life probably would have been the best solution, but instead we rose to the bait and gave Al-Qaeda enormous worldwide credibility.
The thing to realise is that if Bush hadn't declared the so-called "War on Terror" in the months following September 11th, he probably would have been drawn and quartered by the American public. The same is true for Gore, I'm sure. Gore might have handled it in a less corrupt way, and he probably wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, and so things probably would have been better, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's very difficult to predict how a President -- any President -- would react to something like September 11th.
Remember what Bush was like before 9/11? The guy spent less time in office than anyone else had, he was largely considered to be a harmless if ineffectual president, and people were already saying that he was certain to be a one-termer. Things didn't play out that way though...
I agree with your assessment 100%. :)
I lived there for 4 years, speak fluent Mandarin, and just got back to the states last month. If you were travelling, and you don't speak Chinese, it's entirely possible that you were charged more.
As for internet cafes near tourist attractions, they will of course be far more expensive -- but again, it's because of tourists.
Wow, Mac fanboys are tooouuuchy... No wonder professional trolls choose the Mac community.
My Thinkpad X40 (which runs Debian) has a long battery life and runs very cool (it also doesn't generally make any noise at all.) My ex-girlfriend's Mac did run really, really hot, although if you were wearing pants it wasn't so scalding that you couldn't put it on your lap.
Of course, my Thinkpad also wasn't cheap. It's not like we're talking about a Dell here.
Another thing: legally, internet cafes are supposed to require and record ID numbers from all persons that use their facilities (that's Shenfenzheng number for locals, passport number for foreigners). Of course, economic pressures mean that the vast majority of internet cafes don't do this -- despite there being a law, apparently, that Chinese nationals and resident foreigners always have ID on their persons, the vast majority of Chinese people don't bother as the law is completely unenforcable -- too large a population with too few policemen. So requiring that clients have ID to use the computers effectively means turing away a lot of people, which the privately owned internet cafes aren't eager to do, as their margins are narrow enough as it is what with cutthroat competition and all.
In practice, this means that unless the government is having a "crack down", you don't need ID to use the computers. But the fact that ID is required sort of throws your security argument out the window.
Crack downs, incidentally, are always pretty temporary (a week or maybe two is typical, perhaps once every 6 or 8 months) because they're extremely unpopular. Most Chinese will not start carrying ID just to use computers. The result is that, unless the government wants to forego tax revenue from a thriving industry, they will never keep the crackdown going for too long, as the internet cafes wouldn't survive a long-term decrease in revenue. It's the same with pirated DVDs and VCDs -- they have a crackdown for a month, the stores hide their pirated material for the period, and then the crackdown "ends" and everything goes back to normal.
China may not be a democracy, but with its population, you can't use force to get the people to do what you want, you have to convince them that it's in their best interest. Propaganda, in other words. So they run TV programs talking about how people are using internet cafes to commit computer crimes (real ones, like vandalizing web pages or cracking corporate systems) and that the unwillingness of internet cafe owners to check for ID is making matters worse, etc. It doesn't really fool anyone, as far as I can tell.
I hate to say it, but, in the four years I lived in China, not counting customs-related ID checks, I was asked for ID less frequently than I was in the US in the first two weeks after coming home. In China, I can own and operate a cellphone without ever presenting ID or having a credit or background check, I can buy alcohol without some twit asking for my ID, and the times when I have been asked for ID, "I don't have it on me" has been a perfectly acceptable answer. I keep hearing that China is totalitarian and that the US is the land of the free.
Sometimes, it really doesn't feel like it. But at least I'm free to choose between two leaders I don't like here.
I seriously doubt they would do anything of the sort, that's a very un-Chinese solution. The Chinese may punish people for things we westerners think don't deserve punishment, but I very much doubt that they would punish someone they thought or knew was innocent of the crime. In Chinese culture, embarassing someone is a special no-no, and they would feel very bad about the collateral damage from a policy like the one you describe.
Also, for the record, "Chang" is not a Chinese surname. I've never understood why so many Westerners latch on to this particular word.
Even in Beijing, more than 3 yuan/per minute is uncommon and 2 yuan per minute is more standard, with 1 yuan per minute common on the outskirts of town (I used to live near Wen Quan in northern Hai Dian district, and it was dirt cheap out there.)
Maybe the grandparent is going to one of those internet cafes designed for tourists? Typically those have English, Korean or Japanese Windows installed on their machines, depending on the demographic they're marketing to. That might drive up the price a bit.
Names are by no means unique identifiers in China -- there are only a hundred or so family names in common use and the characters used in people's names are often recycled. With the population of China being as large as it is, even if you use your real name there could easily be 50 people in your area who have exactly the same name.
Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?
The partial pressure of CO2 is higher on Mars than it is on Earth. Most of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, in a terribly stable and inert diatomic configuration. Nitrogen is necessary for us on Earth only because it acts as a "buffer gas", and in places where different "atmospheric" pressure causes nitrogen to be soluble in the bloodstream (undersea installations and such), we use other gases for the same purpose (like Helium, Neon, or Argon).
It seems reasonable to expect that if they were robust enough, certain single celled organisms could survive on the surface of Mars. I'm reasonably sure that we could genetically engineer certain Earth-evolved extremophiles to survive there, as Mars isn't really tremendously harsh relative to the other non-Earth planets in the solar system; imagine Antarctica after having been nuked a few million times and without enough air to breathe and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like.
A lichen with strong resistance to radioactivity and suitably depressed freezing point might be able to (slowly) grow on the rocks of Mars. The main issue is lower light level, not lack of CO2.
Of course, it's an open question as to whether we could survive there. The long term effects of 0.37g are not known. In particular, whether a child would develop normally in reduced gravity is an open question. Questions of colonization and terraforming are jumping the gun.
It's also worth noting that while the high arctic and Antarctica share some similarities to Mars, they are vastly more hospitable to life because they are not constantly being bombarded by high energy cosmic rays, and they have a breathable atmosphere, a less extreme variation in temperature, and the same gravity as the rest of Earth. And yet, despite there being huge swaths of land in these "hospitable" areas that are virtually uninhabited, no one is colonizing them. Why not? Because no one wants to live in a place like Antarctica.
Yes, I know there are treaties in place that restrict use of Antarctica's resources, but these have not been in real force for very long and there are many non-signatory nations that reserve the right to set up permanent installations on the continent as they see fit. And yet, with the exception of a few tiny research outposts, no one does.
Even Northern Canada, which shares none of the political problems associated with the "ownerless" Antarctic, has almost no inhabitants. Yet with modern technology, life would be positively easy there compared to Mars.
There are reasons to pursue off-world colonization, the most important being ensuring the survival of the species. But it's not like we're out of space here on Earth yet, and there is nowhere on Earth that rivals Mars in inhospitablity.
Sure, some geeks probably think, "I would go", but would you really? Would you even move to Antarctica? (I'm aware there are some Slashdotters who work there.)
First you'd get put into a tin can with a few other people and you'd spend 6 to 9 claustrophobic months in interplanetary space. All research into this sort of situation (the Russians have done a lot) shows that no matter how nice the people are, after a certain period in those conditions they end up hating each other. This is even assuming that the degenerate effects of long-term microgravity can be surmounted.
Then you get to Mars, which is freezing cold most of the time, dim, dusty, and without a productive atmosphere. You spend the rest of your life living in another (maybe slightly larger) tin can, with the same few people that by now you already hate. Worse, you can't ever escape them. You can't go on a walk. You can't actually live on the surface without aid, and most feasible colony designs have been underground or in canyons to offer protection from cosmic rays.
So you're probably living underground, like a mole, on a freezing, probably lifeless or at least nearly-lifeless rock millions of miles away from everyone else wit
I guess you gain some by writing "loose", too. How about virii? Man, I never get tired of that.
I wasn't able to easily find historical US GNP data on the web, but here is a table of historical GDP values for the United States, which is closely related to GNP. In inflation adjusted 2002 dollars, our GDP in 2005 was just over 11 trillion. In 1984, it was 5.8 trillion dollars, or roughly half of our GDP in 2005. Similary, in 1962 it was 2.7 trillion, roughly a quarter of our GDP in 2005. These figures are all in 2002 dollars and account for inflationary differences. In 1940, it was only about a trillion 2002 dollars, or a tenth of our output in 2005. In 1915, around 500 billion, or a twentieth. You get the idea. Someone made a nice graph from this data for Wikipedia.
Your response sounded skeptical. The parent obviously looked at the data while he authored his post. Of course, all of this could very well be misleading. The GDP is the best measure of economic performance we have, but it has a number of known flaws. It also fails to take economic shock into account -- but what the parent says is true on the face of it: if some catastrophe halved our economic output, we would be reduced to 1984 levels. Many of us lived through 1984. It wasn't bad.
So what's the problem with this logic? Let's look at the data. In 1929, the US's GDP was 865 billion dollars. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, it had fallen to 635 billion (you can see the blip on the Wikipedia graph linked above.) During the great depression, roughly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed, people were starving and life is generally held to have been the hardest it has ever been in this country. And yet, in 1922 the GDP was 628 billion, even lower than the GDP of 1933 -- does this mean that in 1922, 1 in 4 people were unemployed, people were starving, and that quality of life was the same as in 1933? Of course not.
Between 1929 and 1933, in just 4 years, the GDP of the United States fell 26.6 percent and we barely recovered. Had it not been for the massive government spending required by World War II, who knows how we would have fared. Now just imagine for a moment that some catastrophe happened and the GDP of the United States fell 50% overnight to 1984 levels. Could we expect the same quality of life as 1984? No more than people in 1933 experienced the same quality of life as they had in 1922. And we're looking at a proportional decrease far greater and in far shorter a time than the 1929 to 1933 decrease.
I thought the grandparent's figures were interesting, but I have to say, I'm also a bit skeptical about how meaningful they are.