I think the idea is that you build a gravity variation map slowly using a satellite. Then you download that map into your ICBM which uses it to navigate.
Yosemite - clearly an attempt to disguise the famous Nazi expression 'Yo, Semite!'
El Capitan - another attempt to disguise the Nazi SS rank SS-Hauptsturmführer by translating it into Spanish, the language spoken by Franco
I could go on.
And look at their stores. It's a bunch of white people, stylishly dressed in mostly in black designer clothes. You know who else was mostly white people dressed stylishly in black designer clothes? The fucking SS, that's who.
And they had a cult of personality around a charismatic leader who was a complete bastard. And after that leader died it all started to fall apart.
A lot of the time a device that's gone through multiple updates will be crappier than one which had the OS from the start. Presumably a device that's had multiple updates has a higher entropy in some way that's not entirely clear.
Certainly my Samsung Galaxy Android phones need a firmware reset every year or so or they become slow, run hot and crash regularly. Maybe it's the same with iOS devices too. Then again, one of the things iOS users bragged about was that their devices didn't need this sort of mollycoddling and a two year old device was just as snappy as a new one. Perhaps that's changed. Or perhaps it was never really true in the first place.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn't see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don't mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is - well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That's half the country.
And I don't have a single one of those people in my social circle. It's not because I'm deliberately avoiding them; I'm pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn't ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
Suicidal tenancies suck. They don't pay the rent and the poor landlord has to clean up after them. And by the end of the contract they'd be good and ripe too!
Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions
By Dr. Robert R. Brownlee
June 2002
Sometime in 1956 Dr. Alvin Graves, Division Leader of the Test Division at Los Alamos told me that we were going to have to test underground in order to reduce fallout as much as possible. He asked me to see what I could learn about it by making what calculations I could.
The temperatures and pressures generated by a nuclear explosion are such that there was considerable doubt that any underground test buried at a "reasonable" depth could be contained.
In 1956 we were severely limited in computing capabilities-compared to nowadays they were laughable, and miniscule, and arguably nonexistent. I had the equations of state of four materials. They were air and water, aluminum and uranium. As it happens, there is a lot of aluminum in NTS soil, so I called that "earth". I called that of uranium "fire", and the others were air and water, so with earth, air, fire and water, how could I fail?
In attempting to mock up the earth, I had some information about NTS soil densities and water content. I used a cylindrical pipe filled with air of several densities, depending upon the possible use of vacuums. I was allowed considerable freedom to choose other parameters as I wished. For example, what might the efficacy of plugs of various masses be, and where might they be placed for optimum results. I worked regularly with Bill Ogle, the deputy division leader, and we decided to have a first test in an "empty" pipe (cables were present), open at the top. Then we would do a test with a cap, and then do tests with plugs, the first one used to be in the middle of the hole, and the second one at the bottom. Thus we hoped to learn from test to test, acquiring data and information incrementally. Incidentally, the Pascal B test, and those immediately following, had a 4-foot diameter pipe. The cap welded to the top of Pascal B was four inches thick, so was of appreciable mass from a "man-handling" point of view.
The first test of our "series" was Pascal A, with results as documented.
For Pascal B, my calculations were designed to calculate the time and specifics of the shock wave as it reached the cap. I used yields both expected and exaggerated in my calculations, but significant ones. When I described my results to Bill Ogle, the conversation went something like this.
Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?" RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds." Ogle: "And what happens?" RRB: "The shock reflects back down the hole, but the pressures and temperatures are such that the welded cap is bound to come off the hole." Ogle: "How fast does it go?" RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection." Ogle: "How fast did it go?" RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space." Ogle: And how fast is it going?"
This last question was more of a shout. Bill liked to have a direct answer to each one of his questions.
RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth."
Bill was quite delighted with the answer, for he had never before heard a velocity given in terms of the escape velocity from the earth! There was much laughter, and the legend was now born, for Bill loved to report to anybody who cared to listen about Brownlee's units of velocity. He says the cap would escape the earth. (But of course we did not believe that would ever happen.)
The next obvious decision was made. We'll put a high-speed movie camera looking at the cap, and see if we can measure the departure velocity.
In the event, the cap appeared above the hole in one frame only, so there was no direct velocity measurement. A lower limit c
I've always liked Freedom House and often linked to this map as evidence that the countries the US protected ended up more free than the ones the Commies managed to overrun.
Of course when I did that the US left would say that Freedom House was 'a right wing site'.
Now it seems Freedom House - who are doggedly anti Russia/China and pro US - have released a report which fits the 'Russians influenced the election' narrative and it seems that Freedom House are suddenly a trusted source.
AMP started off as way to make pages load faster on mobile. I suspect it will end up with everyone hosting their content on Google servers and showing only Google approved ads. Everyone Google approves of politically that is. Anyone they don't approve of will get their content de-monetized or banned from both Google servers and Google search results. Just like Google did with Youtube videos after it bought the company.
It's like how Microsoft went from helpful supplier of operating systems which could run on dirt cheap hardware to an abusive monopoly as soon as it got enough power to do it.
Mind you it took ages for viable alternatives to Microsoft's OS and office suite to develop. I suspect viable alternatives to Google and Youtube will arrive much more quickly.
Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.
Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways - the breaking-up of families, for instance - the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.
It seems like you have an irrational faith that intelligent aliens would be benign and rational, whereas I've come up with plenty of examples of human civilisations that could master science and technology but weren't benign or rational. As Orwell puts it 'in our mystical way we[people living in a liberal democracy] feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse'.
It's like I always suspected of Sagan - he was an atheist and his faith that hyper advanced aliens would be benign and would come to save us had given him something to believe in which was the Christian omniscient, omnipotent and benign God in all but name. Well I suppose aliens aren't omnipresent either, otherwise they'd have come to technorapture us already.
Of course as a real atheist I suppose I'm much more comfortable with the notion that aliens, no matter how advanced, are just animals like us. They fought their way to the top of the evolutionary tree on their planet by being smarter and probably more ruthless than the competition - humans may well have wiped out their hominid competitors like Neanderthals. And just like us they may produce rational individuals who can work in STEM or accounting. but as a society they're prey to all sorts of irrational notions like the glory of empire, personality cults or the need to spread the One True Faith at the point of a sword. Or a laser pistol.
And people in STEM are just as prey to irrational ideas outside work as anyone else in my experience. They mode switch from thinking rationally at work to thinking irrationally about everything outside.
Look at Wernher von Braun building the predecessors to US space launch rockets at Peenemunde with slave labour whipped into action by SS guards. Or Albert Speer who was similarly rational at economics but equally culpable in turning a blind eye to slavery and genocide by the regime he was trying desperately to save.
Now I'm sure you'll say 'well the Nazis lost'. They did, but there's no physical law that says nasty regimes must lose. As Orwell pointed out, every regime was nasty for most of hum
Yeah, but phones don't last forever. I'd have upgraded from my S5 by now if it wasn't for the fact that more modern Samsung phones are increasingly crippled.
I can't be the only one in that situation.
As yzf750 put it here, someone needs to launch the Kickstarter and build the phone.
No comrade! I am American from good family. My grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War and my father was top Silovik. Would you like to borrow my thumb drive?
You're assuming the aliens are rational and think the way we do. The Masters are completely alien and their real motives are ambiguous, the Martians in Mars Attacks are just dicks. And the Visitors are space Nazis who like the eat intelligent life they've subjugated.
And, like I say, there are plenty of examples of human civilisations going on a conquering spree of their less advanced neighbours for reasons that weren't really rational from the perspective of the whole civilisation.
E.g. the British Empire was a net drain on national resources. On the other hand the people who ended up doing the conquering made a fortune out of it, and the invented a justification of national glory and bringing civilisation to the barbarians to keep the people back home supportive.
Same with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of South America. The people doing it were doing it to get rich. And they invented a spurious justification of bringing the world of God to the natives to keep the state subsidies flowing.
Looked at at the national level it didn't make any sense. And in fact Adam Smith argued the UK should give up Empire because it was a net drain on UK resources.
The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expense, without being likely to bring any profit; for the effects of the monopoly of the colony trade, it has been shown, are, to the great body of the people, mere loss instead of profit. It is surely now time that our rulers should either realise this golden dream, in which they have been indulging themselves, perhaps, as well as the people; or, that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to awaken the people. If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up. If any of thee provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.
No one listened and it all carried on for a century or more before collapsing because the UK couldn't afford it. I.e. he was right.
Or look at (presumably) your country, the US. Invading Iraq and then was wholly irrational in retrospect. It cost a fortune and didn't produce the stable democracy promised or even any good loot. In fact it destabilised the whole region and enabled Islamist forces like ISIS to take over. It also cost a lot of money.
If human foreign policy is largely irrational and has been for most of recorded history, why should alien foreign policy be any different?
Real courage at this point would be bucking the trend and selling a phone with all the features people want but which are being removed - removable battery, SD card, headphone jack, fingerprint scanner on the front. And stock Android. Instead it seems like all the manufacturers seem to be competing as to who can remove the most things people want while at the same time introducing things like higher display resolutions when the 1080p on a three year old phone is already fine and more pixels usually means less battery life, thinner handsets, face recognition replacing fingerprints or scanners on the back, Bixby buttons and glass front and back that no one wants.
Meanwhile of course after each release we find that they 'didn't sell as many as they hoped' and that the follow up would be 'radically different'. Which usually means more useful features being lost.
The natives were basically stone age. They didn't have the wheel, iron or even bronze weapons.
The Conquistadors were thousands of years more advanced - they had wheels, iron, firearms, and ships that could sail around the world.
It's not impossible that humans would be make interstellar journeys in a couple of thousand years. In fact they could do it much sooner if they needed to - something like a Super Orion could used as a generation ship now if we needed to get a breeding population of humans off Earth quickly to avoid some sort of disaster.
I'm guessing if we found stone age aliens on the planet we were evacuating to, they'd fare about as well as the Native Americans did if they tried to stop the humans setting up a colony.
So, yeah, Rome was pretty successful. But that success had hard limits. I don't see how such limits would not also be in place when talking about intergalactic civilization.
Rome had to control contiguous territory and keep it pacified, something which was made hard by the fact that most of the population were slaves who wanted to see the whole system burn.
There's no reason why you couldn't have a 'plague of locusts' type civilisation like in Independence Day that arrives, strips a planet bare and then moves on. The Visitors in the original version of V were like this - in the novelisation some of the fifth columnists mention that they personally got medals for peaceful contact with civilisations that the Visitors later completely eradicated.
Or look at the Masters in the Tripods trilogy. In a straight up fight with human technology they would lose so they used brain control to conquer Earth and attach Caps to humans. The Capped humans had their technology regressed to medieval levels. The Masters' long term plan was to xenoform the atmosphere to something they could breath and exterminate most or all life in the process.
With the Independence Day aliens being a plague of locusts was just the way things worked - a bit like if you asked a human why they think it's OK to kill animals and eat meat. The Visitors used to be peaceful explorers but a more militant totalitarian faction took over and demand conquest. The Masters were almost completely alien so it's hard to know what their motives were - perhaps they thought they were doing humans a favour by stopping war and turning the whole planet into a bucolic Constable painting, or they feared humans as a potential future threat and decided to strike first.
Before talking about this stuff it would seem to me to be a good idea to find out how governments get money. Either they raise taxes or they borrow. And when they borrow they do it by selling bonds on the open market. The interest rate they need to promise depends on how risky their debt is seen as. Part of that is how much it is as a percentage of GDP.
The 'banksters' as you put it are people who buy Treasury Bills on an open market. If they stop buying it's not like you can find them all and threaten them.
You have a sovereign debt crisis and threatening individual people to make them buy T bills would make it worse
For healthy governments, borrowing costs are actually low in the "bust" phrase of the "boom and bust" economic cycle because spooked investors move money from the private sector to the perceived safety of the government.
Investors assume that the government's legal power of taxation on the entire economy gives them a better chance of honoring their debt than private entities.
However, when government debt becomes too high - some suggest debt levels equal to 90 to 100 percent of GDP - international investors/lenders may no longer believe the country's tax base can support debt repayment. As a result, the debts of these governments fall in value and their yields (borrowing cost) go up.
Rising yields is a self-reinforcing cycle that makes high debt levels even less sustainable. It also raises the borrowing cost for the entire private sector.
Falling government bond yields deal a detrimental blow to the financial sector. Caruana said it severely erodes the worth of banks' assets because most banks have a large holding of domestic sovereign bonds.
It also weakens the government's implicit guarantee on big banks, which makes it more expensive for banks to raise funds.
Both developments limit banks' ability to lend to the private sector, which hurts the real economy.
In summary, when investors doubt the debt repayment ability of governments and government debt turns from risk-free to credit instruments, "the consequences are likely to be severe," said Caruana.
Indeed, while economies free from sovereign debt problems have generally enjoyed economic growth in 2010 after the global downturn in 2009, Greece's real GDP plunged 4.5 percent in 2010, turning in a worse performance than its 2.0 percent contraction in 2009.
For countries stuck in unfortunate sovereign debt situations, Caruana said they need to "earn back their reputation as practically risk-free borrowers" by credible and tangible fiscal consolidation and structural reforms.
The only way to persuade people to buy your bonds again is to my drastic cuts in public spending to convince people that you're going to reduce your debt to gdp ratio to sustainable levels. Meanwhile your real GDP contracts sharply. It's very hard to get out of this.
Right now the US has a debt to GDP ratio of about $18.96 trillion, or about 104% of GDP. If Bernie's single payer for all were implemented then debt would rise to about $51 trillion of over 200% of GDP. If that caused a sovereign debt crisis T bill auctions would fail and the US government would need to offer higher interest rates. Of course raising the interest rate makes the fiscal situation worse and your credit rating worse.
Or it could default. Even Greece didn't do that because that's even worse than a sovereign debt crisis. You need to call the IMF with emergency loans, and the IMF will demand restructuring - i.e. even sharper cuts than you have in a sovereign debt crisis.
Basically look at most South American countries. Most of them elected politicians who made unrealistic spending promises. They raised taxes, borrowed so much that they had a sovereign debt crisis or default or printed money and created hyperinflation.
South America is poorer than the US mostly because most South American governments have followed Bernienomics most of the time since independence.
Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
Which is basically a bit of equivocation - technological prowess and being civilised aren't the same thing. As Orwell observed
The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
I.e. technological advancement doesn't necessarily make a society less barbaric - the Nazis and Commies used then modern technology to exterminate groups their leaders had decided to scapegoat and invade neighbouring countries in order to incorporate them into their horrid system.
And of course Rome was technologically or at least logistically advanced but would seem far from civilised if you were one of the 'barbarian' tribes in conquered.
The Conquistadors were much more technologically advanced than the indigenous population of the Americas but they were far from benign.
The aliens in 'Mars Attacks' aren't benign and Kessler ends up with a nasty fate. In fact the aliens are actually 'alien' in the original sense of the word - what they do seems highly malicious but it's very hard from a human point of view why they went to so much trouble to do it. Just like from an indigenous American point of view it would be hard to see why Cortes was willing to travel and unimaginable distance to collect gold and force people to follow Catholicism a religion they'd probably be completely unable to understand.
I.e. the notion that technological advancement makes a civilisation benign or rational is naive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the idea is that you build a gravity variation map slowly using a satellite. Then you download that map into your ICBM which uses it to navigate.
Apple are closet Nazis too.
Look at their OS names
Yosemite - clearly an attempt to disguise the famous Nazi expression 'Yo, Semite!'
El Capitan - another attempt to disguise the Nazi SS rank SS-Hauptsturmführer by translating it into Spanish, the language spoken by Franco
I could go on.
And look at their stores. It's a bunch of white people, stylishly dressed in mostly in black designer clothes. You know who else was mostly white people dressed stylishly in black designer clothes? The fucking SS, that's who.
And they had a cult of personality around a charismatic leader who was a complete bastard. And after that leader died it all started to fall apart.
A lot of the time a device that's gone through multiple updates will be crappier than one which had the OS from the start. Presumably a device that's had multiple updates has a higher entropy in some way that's not entirely clear.
Certainly my Samsung Galaxy Android phones need a firmware reset every year or so or they become slow, run hot and crash regularly. Maybe it's the same with iOS devices too. Then again, one of the things iOS users bragged about was that their devices didn't need this sort of mollycoddling and a two year old device was just as snappy as a new one. Perhaps that's changed. Or perhaps it was never really true in the first place.
I don't live in some kind of bubble. It doesn't pass the smell test
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014...
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn't see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don't mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is - well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That's half the country.
And I don't have a single one of those people in my social circle. It's not because I'm deliberately avoiding them; I'm pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn't ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
Tovarishch, all this talk of Russian interference is absurd.
Does this tea taste like polonium to you?
Doesn't surprise me. Nor does getting called a Russian Nazi shill for pointing it out.
Suicidal tenancies suck. They don't pay the rent and the poor landlord has to clean up after them. And by the end of the contract they'd be good and ripe too!
So they flew a linear aerospike on an SR-71? Interesting.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/d...
http://nuclearweaponarchive.or...
Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions
By Dr. Robert R. Brownlee
June 2002
Sometime in 1956 Dr. Alvin Graves, Division Leader of the Test Division at Los Alamos told me that we were going to have to test underground in order to reduce fallout as much as possible. He asked me to see what I could learn about it by making what calculations I could.
The temperatures and pressures generated by a nuclear explosion are such that there was considerable doubt that any underground test buried at a "reasonable" depth could be contained.
In 1956 we were severely limited in computing capabilities-compared to nowadays they were laughable, and miniscule, and arguably nonexistent. I had the equations of state of four materials. They were air and water, aluminum and uranium. As it happens, there is a lot of aluminum in NTS soil, so I called that "earth". I called that of uranium "fire", and the others were air and water, so with earth, air, fire and water, how could I fail?
In attempting to mock up the earth, I had some information about NTS soil densities and water content. I used a cylindrical pipe filled with air of several densities, depending upon the possible use of vacuums. I was allowed considerable freedom to choose other parameters as I wished. For example, what might the efficacy of plugs of various masses be, and where might they be placed for optimum results. I worked regularly with Bill Ogle, the deputy division leader, and we decided to have a first test in an "empty" pipe (cables were present), open at the top. Then we would do a test with a cap, and then do tests with plugs, the first one used to be in the middle of the hole, and the second one at the bottom. Thus we hoped to learn from test to test, acquiring data and information incrementally. Incidentally, the Pascal B test, and those immediately following, had a 4-foot diameter pipe. The cap welded to the top of Pascal B was four inches thick, so was of appreciable mass from a "man-handling" point of view.
The first test of our "series" was Pascal A, with results as documented.
For Pascal B, my calculations were designed to calculate the time and specifics of the shock wave as it reached the cap. I used yields both expected and exaggerated in my calculations, but significant ones. When I described my results to Bill Ogle, the conversation went something like this.
Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?"
RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds."
Ogle: "And what happens?"
RRB: "The shock reflects back down the hole, but the pressures and temperatures are such that the welded cap is bound to come off the hole."
Ogle: "How fast does it go?"
RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection."
Ogle: "How fast did it go?"
RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space."
Ogle: And how fast is it going?"
This last question was more of a shout. Bill liked to have a direct answer to each one of his questions.
RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth."
Bill was quite delighted with the answer, for he had never before heard a velocity given in terms of the escape velocity from the earth! There was much laughter, and the legend was now born, for Bill loved to report to anybody who cared to listen about Brownlee's units of velocity. He says the cap would escape the earth. (But of course we did not believe that would ever happen.)
The next obvious decision was made. We'll put a high-speed movie camera looking at the cap, and see if we can measure the departure velocity.
In the event, the cap appeared above the hole in one frame only, so there was no direct velocity measurement. A lower limit c
Didn't ICBMs use variations in gravity? Or at least they're rumoured to - I don't think anyone would confirm something like that.
https://books.google.com/books...
So everyone who criticises Google is a Russian agent? Are they all Nazis too?
I've always liked Freedom House and often linked to this map as evidence that the countries the US protected ended up more free than the ones the Commies managed to overrun.
https://freedomhouse.org/repor...
Of course when I did that the US left would say that Freedom House was 'a right wing site'.
Now it seems Freedom House - who are doggedly anti Russia/China and pro US - have released a report which fits the 'Russians influenced the election' narrative and it seems that Freedom House are suddenly a trusted source.
Amazing.
AMP started off as way to make pages load faster on mobile. I suspect it will end up with everyone hosting their content on Google servers and showing only Google approved ads. Everyone Google approves of politically that is. Anyone they don't approve of will get their content de-monetized or banned from both Google servers and Google search results. Just like Google did with Youtube videos after it bought the company.
It's like how Microsoft went from helpful supplier of operating systems which could run on dirt cheap hardware to an abusive monopoly as soon as it got enough power to do it.
Mind you it took ages for viable alternatives to Microsoft's OS and office suite to develop. I suspect viable alternatives to Google and Youtube will arrive much more quickly.
Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.
Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'
http://orwell.ru/library/essay...
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways - the breaking-up of families, for instance - the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.
It seems like you have an irrational faith that intelligent aliens would be benign and rational, whereas I've come up with plenty of examples of human civilisations that could master science and technology but weren't benign or rational. As Orwell puts it 'in our mystical way we[people living in a liberal democracy] feel that a regime founded on slavery must collapse'.
It's like I always suspected of Sagan - he was an atheist and his faith that hyper advanced aliens would be benign and would come to save us had given him something to believe in which was the Christian omniscient, omnipotent and benign God in all but name. Well I suppose aliens aren't omnipresent either, otherwise they'd have come to technorapture us already.
Of course as a real atheist I suppose I'm much more comfortable with the notion that aliens, no matter how advanced, are just animals like us. They fought their way to the top of the evolutionary tree on their planet by being smarter and probably more ruthless than the competition - humans may well have wiped out their hominid competitors like Neanderthals. And just like us they may produce rational individuals who can work in STEM or accounting. but as a society they're prey to all sorts of irrational notions like the glory of empire, personality cults or the need to spread the One True Faith at the point of a sword. Or a laser pistol.
And people in STEM are just as prey to irrational ideas outside work as anyone else in my experience. They mode switch from thinking rationally at work to thinking irrationally about everything outside.
Look at Wernher von Braun building the predecessors to US space launch rockets at Peenemunde with slave labour whipped into action by SS guards. Or Albert Speer who was similarly rational at economics but equally culpable in turning a blind eye to slavery and genocide by the regime he was trying desperately to save.
Now I'm sure you'll say 'well the Nazis lost'. They did, but there's no physical law that says nasty regimes must lose. As Orwell pointed out, every regime was nasty for most of hum
Yeah, but phones don't last forever. I'd have upgraded from my S5 by now if it wasn't for the fact that more modern Samsung phones are increasingly crippled.
I can't be the only one in that situation.
As yzf750 put it here, someone needs to launch the Kickstarter and build the phone.
No comrade! I am American from good family. My grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War and my father was top Silovik. Would you like to borrow my thumb drive?
... mock the NSA guy for this?
E.g. the Kaspersky guys could say "Look out! Here comes Typhoid Mary!" whenever they saw him. That shit would never get old.
You're assuming the aliens are rational and think the way we do. The Masters are completely alien and their real motives are ambiguous, the Martians in Mars Attacks are just dicks. And the Visitors are space Nazis who like the eat intelligent life they've subjugated.
And, like I say, there are plenty of examples of human civilisations going on a conquering spree of their less advanced neighbours for reasons that weren't really rational from the perspective of the whole civilisation.
E.g. the British Empire was a net drain on national resources. On the other hand the people who ended up doing the conquering made a fortune out of it, and the invented a justification of national glory and bringing civilisation to the barbarians to keep the people back home supportive.
Same with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of South America. The people doing it were doing it to get rich. And they invented a spurious justification of bringing the world of God to the natives to keep the state subsidies flowing.
Looked at at the national level it didn't make any sense. And in fact Adam Smith argued the UK should give up Empire because it was a net drain on UK resources.
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/docu...
The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expense, without being likely to bring any profit; for the effects of the monopoly of the colony trade, it has been shown, are, to the great body of the people, mere loss instead of profit. It is surely now time that our rulers should either realise this golden dream, in which they have been indulging themselves, perhaps, as well as the people; or, that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to awaken the people. If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up. If any of thee provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.
No one listened and it all carried on for a century or more before collapsing because the UK couldn't afford it. I.e. he was right.
Or look at (presumably) your country, the US. Invading Iraq and then was wholly irrational in retrospect. It cost a fortune and didn't produce the stable democracy promised or even any good loot. In fact it destabilised the whole region and enabled Islamist forces like ISIS to take over. It also cost a lot of money.
If human foreign policy is largely irrational and has been for most of recorded history, why should alien foreign policy be any different?
Real courage at this point would be bucking the trend and selling a phone with all the features people want but which are being removed - removable battery, SD card, headphone jack, fingerprint scanner on the front. And stock Android. Instead it seems like all the manufacturers seem to be competing as to who can remove the most things people want while at the same time introducing things like higher display resolutions when the 1080p on a three year old phone is already fine and more pixels usually means less battery life, thinner handsets, face recognition replacing fingerprints or scanners on the back, Bixby buttons and glass front and back that no one wants.
Meanwhile of course after each release we find that they 'didn't sell as many as they hoped' and that the follow up would be 'radically different'. Which usually means more useful features being lost.
You can see Samsung's sales falling off. E.g.
First month sales for the S4 - 10 million
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
First month sales for the S5 - 11 million
Five million S8 and S8+s in the first month
http://www.zdnet.com/article/s...
I.e. things are not going well for Samsung.
The natives were basically stone age. They didn't have the wheel, iron or even bronze weapons.
The Conquistadors were thousands of years more advanced - they had wheels, iron, firearms, and ships that could sail around the world.
It's not impossible that humans would be make interstellar journeys in a couple of thousand years. In fact they could do it much sooner if they needed to - something like a Super Orion could used as a generation ship now if we needed to get a breeding population of humans off Earth quickly to avoid some sort of disaster.
I'm guessing if we found stone age aliens on the planet we were evacuating to, they'd fare about as well as the Native Americans did if they tried to stop the humans setting up a colony.
So, yeah, Rome was pretty successful. But that success had hard limits. I don't see how such limits would not also be in place when talking about intergalactic civilization.
Rome had to control contiguous territory and keep it pacified, something which was made hard by the fact that most of the population were slaves who wanted to see the whole system burn.
There's no reason why you couldn't have a 'plague of locusts' type civilisation like in Independence Day that arrives, strips a planet bare and then moves on. The Visitors in the original version of V were like this - in the novelisation some of the fifth columnists mention that they personally got medals for peaceful contact with civilisations that the Visitors later completely eradicated.
Or look at the Masters in the Tripods trilogy. In a straight up fight with human technology they would lose so they used brain control to conquer Earth and attach Caps to humans. The Capped humans had their technology regressed to medieval levels. The Masters' long term plan was to xenoform the atmosphere to something they could breath and exterminate most or all life in the process.
With the Independence Day aliens being a plague of locusts was just the way things worked - a bit like if you asked a human why they think it's OK to kill animals and eat meat. The Visitors used to be peaceful explorers but a more militant totalitarian faction took over and demand conquest. The Masters were almost completely alien so it's hard to know what their motives were - perhaps they thought they were doing humans a favour by stopping war and turning the whole planet into a bucolic Constable painting, or they feared humans as a potential future threat and decided to strike first.
Before talking about this stuff it would seem to me to be a good idea to find out how governments get money. Either they raise taxes or they borrow. And when they borrow they do it by selling bonds on the open market. The interest rate they need to promise depends on how risky their debt is seen as. Part of that is how much it is as a percentage of GDP.
The 'banksters' as you put it are people who buy Treasury Bills on an open market. If they stop buying it's not like you can find them all and threaten them.
You have a sovereign debt crisis and threatening individual people to make them buy T bills would make it worse
http://www.ibtimes.com/what-so...
For healthy governments, borrowing costs are actually low in the "bust" phrase of the "boom and bust" economic cycle because spooked investors move money from the private sector to the perceived safety of the government.
Investors assume that the government's legal power of taxation on the entire economy gives them a better chance of honoring their debt than private entities.
However, when government debt becomes too high - some suggest debt levels equal to 90 to 100 percent of GDP - international investors/lenders may no longer believe the country's tax base can support debt repayment. As a result, the debts of these governments fall in value and their yields (borrowing cost) go up.
Rising yields is a self-reinforcing cycle that makes high debt levels even less sustainable. It also raises the borrowing cost for the entire private sector.
Falling government bond yields deal a detrimental blow to the financial sector. Caruana said it severely erodes the worth of banks' assets because most banks have a large holding of domestic sovereign bonds.
It also weakens the government's implicit guarantee on big banks, which makes it more expensive for banks to raise funds.
Both developments limit banks' ability to lend to the private sector, which hurts the real economy.
In summary, when investors doubt the debt repayment ability of governments and government debt turns from risk-free to credit instruments, "the consequences are likely to be severe," said Caruana.
Indeed, while economies free from sovereign debt problems have generally enjoyed economic growth in 2010 after the global downturn in 2009, Greece's real GDP plunged 4.5 percent in 2010, turning in a worse performance than its 2.0 percent contraction in 2009.
For countries stuck in unfortunate sovereign debt situations, Caruana said they need to "earn back their reputation as practically risk-free borrowers" by credible and tangible fiscal consolidation and structural reforms.
The only way to persuade people to buy your bonds again is to my drastic cuts in public spending to convince people that you're going to reduce your debt to gdp ratio to sustainable levels. Meanwhile your real GDP contracts sharply. It's very hard to get out of this.
Right now the US has a debt to GDP ratio of about $18.96 trillion, or about 104% of GDP. If Bernie's single payer for all were implemented then debt would rise to about $51 trillion of over 200% of GDP. If that caused a sovereign debt crisis T bill auctions would fail and the US government would need to offer higher interest rates. Of course raising the interest rate makes the fiscal situation worse and your credit rating worse.
Or it could default. Even Greece didn't do that because that's even worse than a sovereign debt crisis. You need to call the IMF with emergency loans, and the IMF will demand restructuring - i.e. even sharper cuts than you have in a sovereign debt crisis.
Basically look at most South American countries. Most of them elected politicians who made unrealistic spending promises. They raised taxes, borrowed so much that they had a sovereign debt crisis or default or printed money and created hyperinflation.
South America is poorer than the US mostly because most South American governments have followed Bernienomics most of the time since independence.
I bet the driver of the car used Facebook
I've just written a long explanation of why I don't agree with Spencer's politics
It's the Carl Sagan "all sufficiently advanced civilisations must also be benign" view.
Oddly enough Mars Attacks lampoons this very effectively. E.g.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
Which is basically a bit of equivocation - technological prowess and being civilised aren't the same thing. As Orwell observed
http://orwell.ru/library/revie...
The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
I.e. technological advancement doesn't necessarily make a society less barbaric - the Nazis and Commies used then modern technology to exterminate groups their leaders had decided to scapegoat and invade neighbouring countries in order to incorporate them into their horrid system.
And of course Rome was technologically or at least logistically advanced but would seem far from civilised if you were one of the 'barbarian' tribes in conquered.
The Conquistadors were much more technologically advanced than the indigenous population of the Americas but they were far from benign.
The aliens in 'Mars Attacks' aren't benign and Kessler ends up with a nasty fate. In fact the aliens are actually 'alien' in the original sense of the word - what they do seems highly malicious but it's very hard from a human point of view why they went to so much trouble to do it. Just like from an indigenous American point of view it would be hard to see why Cortes was willing to travel and unimaginable distance to collect gold and force people to follow Catholicism a religion they'd probably be completely unable to understand.
I.e. the notion that technological advancement makes a civilisation benign or rational is naive.