Yes, the government will have to set the price, so it won't be a truly free market. But seeing as leaving it to the market to actually set the price means oil is obscenely cheap and it's use continues, until costs in other parts of the economy hit damaging levels (ie. how much do you want to spend on house insurance, flood remediation, and rising food costs, etc.) I did say "artificial scarcity".
The fact is that CO2 emissions are trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere, the oceans and the surface of the planet. If you have some alternative solution, explain how it will solve this problem without creating an extremely intrusive regulatory regime, which everyone is going to hate a helluva lot more than simply setting a price on CO2 emissions.
Anybody buying up land in low-lying coastal areas is an idiot. Unless you plan on building dikes, breaks, coastal marsh systems and the like, which is going to cost you shit-tons of money, I think it's pretty ill-advised. Shockingly enough, coastline protection is one of those things governments are in the best position to do, but of course, government is evil.
For the same reason part of the country pays to bring water to cities in a desert, or pays to have people live in Tornado Alley.
I'm fascinated by this notion that some have that societies should be fundamentally sociopathic... unless of course it's your own backyard, and then suddenly no amount of public funds is too much.
The whole point of carbon taxes is to set a price for CO2 emissions, with the baseline assumption that the market will produce solutions based on creating a sort of "artificial scarcity". If you're a free market advocate, carbon taxes are the way to go, because they are far easier to administer than regulatory regimes, carbon credits, and other regulation-style structures. Upping the price of carbon means alternatives become more attractive, and isn't that the name of the game?
Unless, of course, you don't believe in free markets.
I had forgotten about that one. Yes, that was a very good movie, and a very well done dystopia film that kept much of the darker aspects in check until the final half hour.
That was the point Clarke was getting at, and it's an integral part of the plot. When the early hominids encounter the first monolith, its very presence is god-like, and that is reiterated with the encounter of the second monolith on the moon, the stargate orbiting Jupiter, and the final monolith as Bowman is dying. Probably the only really "out there" concept is the wormhole, but even the harder SF is forced to invoke some sort of FTL to make galaxy-hopping possible.
There were categorizations made for different kinds of SciFi decades ago. Everything from hard boiled hard SF like Hal Clement to science-fantasy like the Gor series. SF has always been very broad, and so in that respect yes Star Wars is SF.
Oh yes, and The Martian too. I really think it's probably the best hard sci fi film ever made (maybe the only real hard sci fi film made). While it's a modern film, there's something about it that is just so Golden Age Hal Clement-style SF, populated with scientists and technicians, where the heroes are people with brains and know-how.
But mainly they're starving because the regime redirects so much of the economic output, including agriculture, to its military. And the US and South Korea have intervened before to save NK lives by sending in food, and often enough one of the reasons for increased NK belligerency has been because they need to bolster their own economy, and use threats and low-level hostility to convince everyone to come back to the table. This is an old game, and one that has worked out rather well for the regime, though obviously not for the citizens of NK.
Hardly everyone. In the early years, the USSR offered NK a huge amount of technical assistance, not to mention making sure it was well-armed. China also made everyone understand during the Korean War that it also viewed the continued existence of NK as a major aim of the PRC, and since those days China has taken over the position of primary ally. Yes, it's getting more tense these days, and perhaps the day is coming when Pyongyang will become sufficiently troublesome that even Beijing walks away, but I think that day is a long ways off.
If Assad had the same ability to flatten his neighbors' biggest cities as Kim jong-un did, I suspect there wouldn't have been a missile strike. The fact is that any attempt to remove the regime is going to mean millions of South Korean lives are threatened, not to mention untold amounts of infrastructure.
At the end of the day, the best even China can hope for is containment, to give the regime enough slaps on the wrist to get it to play nice. This is an old game now, China and the US have been playing "good cop, bad cop" for decades now.
Exactly. A military decapitation seems highly improbable. Actually getting at Kim Jong-un with a missile strike is probably as likely as getting at President Trump or Putin with a missile strike. In other words, it's close enough to impossible to not be worth it. That leaves assassination, and judging by the effectiveness with which Kim Jong-un has liquidated anyone in the regime even remotely capable of taking him out (irrespective of familial relations to himself, to boot), I'd say getting an assassin close to him is likely about as probable as taking him out militarily. In reality, so poor is the outside world's intelligence on NK that we can't even be sure of the makeup of the inner circle. NK remains one of the most opaque jurisdictions in the world, and is a master of befuddling its enemies.
The only real hope I see is a sort of Praetorian revolt, but if the two elder Kims were able to prevent anyone from taking them out, I think Kim Jong-un is probably just as safe. I'm wagering the period when Kim Jong-un was under his father's tutelage was a period where the elder Kim made out lists of all the people Kim Jong-un needed to be good to to cement his hold on power, and when those people needed to be liquidated.
The problem being they have had nearly seventy years to dig that artillery in, and you don't think they haven't counted on aerial bombardment or missile strikes? Whatever happens, Seoul is smashed to smithereens, and the lives of 10 million people in one of the most important cities in the world are put at extreme risk. Even if you manage to take out the artillery in short order, Seoul is still in ruins, and who knows what else the regime has; likely chemical weapons, and maybe they can even get one of their nukes off the ground.
If the intent of intervening in NK is to prevent a lot of death, it strikes me that a military intervention to topple or weaken the regime will accomplish exactly that; lots of death.
The whole "Kim Jong Un is crazy" is, I suspect, exactly the kind of meme that the regime loves the rest of the world to believe. But I agree with you, NK's rulers are ultimately rational actors. Depraved, murderous, maybe even psychopathic, but certainly rational. There's no intent to invade, and the Kim Dynasty has known since the Korean War that the US will not countenance an invasion of South Korea, and that China and Russia (more China these days, of course) will not facilitate in any way renewed war with South Korea.
The entire purpose of the vast conventional arsenal pointed at Seoul, and of the development of nuclear weapons, is to assure the regime's survival. The only way those weapons ever actually get used is if the regime feels itself under threat, or if it is in outright collapse.
While the idea of NK having a significant nuclear arsenal doesn't bode well, the regime does not appear to be a suicidal one, and if it ever did actually use a nuclear weapon on South Korea, Japan or the US, China would, if it didn't directly intervene itself, at the very least stand back and let the US do what needed to be done. NK, like every nuclear state, has but one purpose for such weapons, to guarantee territorial integrity and regime survival.
Even without nukes, NK has an absolutely massive conventional arsenal pointed at Seoul. If there is an actual out and out breakout of hostilities, Seoul will likely be flattened in very short order. In essence, Pyongyang is holding Seoul hostage, and it is that, apart from even nuclear weapons, that has everyone generally pussyfooting around NK.
There's no one that believes this is a regime that will politely crawl into a corner and die. This isn't East Germany or even the USSR. This is a country that is effectively a monarchy, maybe even bordering on Caesaro-Papism. The crimes the Kim dynasty have committed means that if the regime should fall, I doubt there is any country on the planet, even somewhat friendly regimes like Iran or China, who would take Kim Jong Un and his closest advisers and relatives in. In effect, NK is the perfect example of the cornered animal, and if he is forcefully removed, I guarantee the Korean Peninsula will light up like a Christmas tree.
That's why military intervention really is absurd, and little more than chest thumping. Any attempt at blast the Kims out of power would lead to millions of deaths in South Korea, would severely impact one of the most important global economic zones in the world, and would leave a critical part of the global economic infrastructure in ruins. If he could, there's no doubt Kim Jong Un would strike out at Japan if he knew he was done, and while there are debates as to how much damage could be done, Japan still remains at least a somewhat viable target.
And I think even indirect means, like getting China to agree to basically shut down all trade with NK, and isolating the country completely would end the same way. First of all, to do it effectively, you would also need a naval blockade, and well, that's just going to lead to the war I was talking about above.
In the end there probably isn't a solution to NK. One would like to think that eventually someone within the regime would go after Kim Jong Un, but he's already liquidated most of the people who represented any threat or even curb to his absolute rule, and I suspect anyone else who even thought about taking him out has been convinced by watching his own uncle frog-marched out of a meeting and then blown up with anti-aircraft guns. People call the younger Kim crazy, I'm looking at a level of Stalinesque brutality whose main purpose isn't even to get rid of troublesome senior officials, but to broadcast the message to everyone inside and outside North Korea that he is in absolute control and no one is going to be getting rid of him.
Mine was a Trs-80 MC10 with 4k RAM and a 16k expansion pack. It had a 6803 CPU. A bit of a piece of crap, but I would spend entire days coding in its variant of MS BASIC or mucking around in assembly with this assembler program I typed in by hand from a Rainbow magazine.
Let's see him coordinate his campaign without the Internet. Like it or not, over the last 25 years the Internet has basically transformed the industrialized world, and is already making an incredible amount of headway in the developing world. I'll wager in another 25 years, we'll view this kind of moronic statement with the same general derision as someone around 1910 mocking people who want electricity generally available.
In other words, this guy is a fucking moron, a simpering halfwit who probably does get elected because he's in a district that just knee jerk votes for the guy wearing the right team jersey.
I'm not so sure. COBOL was, and still is used heavily in a helluva of mission critical applications, particular in major financial systems. If there's a modern day equivalent to COBOL, it's Java, not Javascript. While Javascript is certainly going to be around for a while, if it is supplanted, I think it will be more like Flash.
Javascript is a horrible piece of shit, as a language and as a library set. It's dominance exists because of a bit of a historical accident. Everyone knows it is an utter garbage language, which is why so much effort is put into languages like Go, as a means to achieve reasonable web functionality without having to put up with that steaming pile of shit.
That's the great irony of Russia trying to buy itself a US President. The only way Trump is going to be able to hang on now is becoming even more anti-Russian than his recent predecessors. He has to prove to clearly very skeptical Congress that he's not Putin's man. Putin would probably have been in a better place if Clinton had won. She was very much "status quo", but now they have a man whose real and/or imagined ties to Russia may soon threaten his very presidency, so that whether he stands or falls, the US will inevitably become even more hard line.
I think Trump is an incompetent halfwit, and even I think warning the Russians was essential. Just about every Syrian-controlled airbase and military facility has Russian forces present. If the US had simply launched an unannounced attack, there would have been Russian fatalities and while one may dicker as to whether the Russians would consider that an act of war, at the very least it would greatly escalated matters and it's those sorts of "inadvertent" attacks on Russian forces that could lead to direct conflict between US and Russian troops. It's why the US hasn't directly intervened over the Ukraine civil war as well. If you have US and Russian forces in the same area uncoordinated, even where they may not be in technically in mutually hostile positions, it could go to shit very very fast.
If the accounts were true, Trump was given multiple options, but it was recommended to send in a symbolic strike, rather than an out-and-out "blow 'em up real good" attack. If you feel, as I do, that the intelligence Trump was given that the gas attack was airborne and thus could only come from Syrian forces, then I think this is exactly what you do. You call up your Russian contacts, tell them "What Assad requires a response, but we're giving you time to get any of your soldiers out of the line of fire" before just blasting away. Yes, it's possible that Assad could have got some materials out of there, though I wonder if there was enough time to actually much in the way of actual chemical weapons, but that wasn't the important part anyways.
What I think people are missing here is that while Russia and the US have spent much of the last 70 years as enemies and competitors, particularly since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there has long been backchannel communications, to make sure that whatever actions Washington or Moscow are taking don't suddenly plunge the two countries into even a technical state of war.
What Trump supporters should be really pissed about is the fact that, despite all the declarations of America First and how he was going to keep US forces out of foreign wars, Trump seems to be evolving quickly into a rather typical US president. His style is quirky, but the Tomahawk attack demonstrated an Administration that in some ways more resembles Bill Clinton's foreign policy than anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
It suggests a link. It will take further study to determine whether there is actual causation or whether other factors may be involved.
It's almost like you don't know how science works.
Roads are built, right aways and easements are put in place for utilities, police and fire services, and other public services exist.
Yes, the government will have to set the price, so it won't be a truly free market. But seeing as leaving it to the market to actually set the price means oil is obscenely cheap and it's use continues, until costs in other parts of the economy hit damaging levels (ie. how much do you want to spend on house insurance, flood remediation, and rising food costs, etc.) I did say "artificial scarcity".
The fact is that CO2 emissions are trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere, the oceans and the surface of the planet. If you have some alternative solution, explain how it will solve this problem without creating an extremely intrusive regulatory regime, which everyone is going to hate a helluva lot more than simply setting a price on CO2 emissions.
Anybody buying up land in low-lying coastal areas is an idiot. Unless you plan on building dikes, breaks, coastal marsh systems and the like, which is going to cost you shit-tons of money, I think it's pretty ill-advised. Shockingly enough, coastline protection is one of those things governments are in the best position to do, but of course, government is evil.
For the same reason part of the country pays to bring water to cities in a desert, or pays to have people live in Tornado Alley.
I'm fascinated by this notion that some have that societies should be fundamentally sociopathic... unless of course it's your own backyard, and then suddenly no amount of public funds is too much.
The whole point of carbon taxes is to set a price for CO2 emissions, with the baseline assumption that the market will produce solutions based on creating a sort of "artificial scarcity". If you're a free market advocate, carbon taxes are the way to go, because they are far easier to administer than regulatory regimes, carbon credits, and other regulation-style structures. Upping the price of carbon means alternatives become more attractive, and isn't that the name of the game?
Unless, of course, you don't believe in free markets.
So is telepathy, and you'll find that all over SF
I had forgotten about that one. Yes, that was a very good movie, and a very well done dystopia film that kept much of the darker aspects in check until the final half hour.
That was the point Clarke was getting at, and it's an integral part of the plot. When the early hominids encounter the first monolith, its very presence is god-like, and that is reiterated with the encounter of the second monolith on the moon, the stargate orbiting Jupiter, and the final monolith as Bowman is dying. Probably the only really "out there" concept is the wormhole, but even the harder SF is forced to invoke some sort of FTL to make galaxy-hopping possible.
There were categorizations made for different kinds of SciFi decades ago. Everything from hard boiled hard SF like Hal Clement to science-fantasy like the Gor series. SF has always been very broad, and so in that respect yes Star Wars is SF.
Oh yes, and The Martian too. I really think it's probably the best hard sci fi film ever made (maybe the only real hard sci fi film made). While it's a modern film, there's something about it that is just so Golden Age Hal Clement-style SF, populated with scientists and technicians, where the heroes are people with brains and know-how.
In no particular order:
The Empire Strikes Back
2001: A Space Odyssey
Alien
Aliens
The Day The Earth Stood Still
The Wrath of Khan
Bladerunner
Pitch Black
But mainly they're starving because the regime redirects so much of the economic output, including agriculture, to its military. And the US and South Korea have intervened before to save NK lives by sending in food, and often enough one of the reasons for increased NK belligerency has been because they need to bolster their own economy, and use threats and low-level hostility to convince everyone to come back to the table. This is an old game, and one that has worked out rather well for the regime, though obviously not for the citizens of NK.
Hardly everyone. In the early years, the USSR offered NK a huge amount of technical assistance, not to mention making sure it was well-armed. China also made everyone understand during the Korean War that it also viewed the continued existence of NK as a major aim of the PRC, and since those days China has taken over the position of primary ally. Yes, it's getting more tense these days, and perhaps the day is coming when Pyongyang will become sufficiently troublesome that even Beijing walks away, but I think that day is a long ways off.
If Assad had the same ability to flatten his neighbors' biggest cities as Kim jong-un did, I suspect there wouldn't have been a missile strike. The fact is that any attempt to remove the regime is going to mean millions of South Korean lives are threatened, not to mention untold amounts of infrastructure.
At the end of the day, the best even China can hope for is containment, to give the regime enough slaps on the wrist to get it to play nice. This is an old game now, China and the US have been playing "good cop, bad cop" for decades now.
Exactly. A military decapitation seems highly improbable. Actually getting at Kim Jong-un with a missile strike is probably as likely as getting at President Trump or Putin with a missile strike. In other words, it's close enough to impossible to not be worth it. That leaves assassination, and judging by the effectiveness with which Kim Jong-un has liquidated anyone in the regime even remotely capable of taking him out (irrespective of familial relations to himself, to boot), I'd say getting an assassin close to him is likely about as probable as taking him out militarily. In reality, so poor is the outside world's intelligence on NK that we can't even be sure of the makeup of the inner circle. NK remains one of the most opaque jurisdictions in the world, and is a master of befuddling its enemies.
The only real hope I see is a sort of Praetorian revolt, but if the two elder Kims were able to prevent anyone from taking them out, I think Kim Jong-un is probably just as safe. I'm wagering the period when Kim Jong-un was under his father's tutelage was a period where the elder Kim made out lists of all the people Kim Jong-un needed to be good to to cement his hold on power, and when those people needed to be liquidated.
The problem being they have had nearly seventy years to dig that artillery in, and you don't think they haven't counted on aerial bombardment or missile strikes? Whatever happens, Seoul is smashed to smithereens, and the lives of 10 million people in one of the most important cities in the world are put at extreme risk. Even if you manage to take out the artillery in short order, Seoul is still in ruins, and who knows what else the regime has; likely chemical weapons, and maybe they can even get one of their nukes off the ground.
If the intent of intervening in NK is to prevent a lot of death, it strikes me that a military intervention to topple or weaken the regime will accomplish exactly that; lots of death.
The whole "Kim Jong Un is crazy" is, I suspect, exactly the kind of meme that the regime loves the rest of the world to believe. But I agree with you, NK's rulers are ultimately rational actors. Depraved, murderous, maybe even psychopathic, but certainly rational. There's no intent to invade, and the Kim Dynasty has known since the Korean War that the US will not countenance an invasion of South Korea, and that China and Russia (more China these days, of course) will not facilitate in any way renewed war with South Korea.
The entire purpose of the vast conventional arsenal pointed at Seoul, and of the development of nuclear weapons, is to assure the regime's survival. The only way those weapons ever actually get used is if the regime feels itself under threat, or if it is in outright collapse.
While the idea of NK having a significant nuclear arsenal doesn't bode well, the regime does not appear to be a suicidal one, and if it ever did actually use a nuclear weapon on South Korea, Japan or the US, China would, if it didn't directly intervene itself, at the very least stand back and let the US do what needed to be done. NK, like every nuclear state, has but one purpose for such weapons, to guarantee territorial integrity and regime survival.
Even without nukes, NK has an absolutely massive conventional arsenal pointed at Seoul. If there is an actual out and out breakout of hostilities, Seoul will likely be flattened in very short order. In essence, Pyongyang is holding Seoul hostage, and it is that, apart from even nuclear weapons, that has everyone generally pussyfooting around NK.
There's no one that believes this is a regime that will politely crawl into a corner and die. This isn't East Germany or even the USSR. This is a country that is effectively a monarchy, maybe even bordering on Caesaro-Papism. The crimes the Kim dynasty have committed means that if the regime should fall, I doubt there is any country on the planet, even somewhat friendly regimes like Iran or China, who would take Kim Jong Un and his closest advisers and relatives in. In effect, NK is the perfect example of the cornered animal, and if he is forcefully removed, I guarantee the Korean Peninsula will light up like a Christmas tree.
That's why military intervention really is absurd, and little more than chest thumping. Any attempt at blast the Kims out of power would lead to millions of deaths in South Korea, would severely impact one of the most important global economic zones in the world, and would leave a critical part of the global economic infrastructure in ruins. If he could, there's no doubt Kim Jong Un would strike out at Japan if he knew he was done, and while there are debates as to how much damage could be done, Japan still remains at least a somewhat viable target.
And I think even indirect means, like getting China to agree to basically shut down all trade with NK, and isolating the country completely would end the same way. First of all, to do it effectively, you would also need a naval blockade, and well, that's just going to lead to the war I was talking about above.
In the end there probably isn't a solution to NK. One would like to think that eventually someone within the regime would go after Kim Jong Un, but he's already liquidated most of the people who represented any threat or even curb to his absolute rule, and I suspect anyone else who even thought about taking him out has been convinced by watching his own uncle frog-marched out of a meeting and then blown up with anti-aircraft guns. People call the younger Kim crazy, I'm looking at a level of Stalinesque brutality whose main purpose isn't even to get rid of troublesome senior officials, but to broadcast the message to everyone inside and outside North Korea that he is in absolute control and no one is going to be getting rid of him.
Mine was a Trs-80 MC10 with 4k RAM and a 16k expansion pack. It had a 6803 CPU. A bit of a piece of crap, but I would spend entire days coding in its variant of MS BASIC or mucking around in assembly with this assembler program I typed in by hand from a Rainbow magazine.
Let's see him coordinate his campaign without the Internet. Like it or not, over the last 25 years the Internet has basically transformed the industrialized world, and is already making an incredible amount of headway in the developing world. I'll wager in another 25 years, we'll view this kind of moronic statement with the same general derision as someone around 1910 mocking people who want electricity generally available.
In other words, this guy is a fucking moron, a simpering halfwit who probably does get elected because he's in a district that just knee jerk votes for the guy wearing the right team jersey.
I'm not so sure. COBOL was, and still is used heavily in a helluva of mission critical applications, particular in major financial systems. If there's a modern day equivalent to COBOL, it's Java, not Javascript. While Javascript is certainly going to be around for a while, if it is supplanted, I think it will be more like Flash.
Javascript is a horrible piece of shit, as a language and as a library set. It's dominance exists because of a bit of a historical accident. Everyone knows it is an utter garbage language, which is why so much effort is put into languages like Go, as a means to achieve reasonable web functionality without having to put up with that steaming pile of shit.
That's the great irony of Russia trying to buy itself a US President. The only way Trump is going to be able to hang on now is becoming even more anti-Russian than his recent predecessors. He has to prove to clearly very skeptical Congress that he's not Putin's man. Putin would probably have been in a better place if Clinton had won. She was very much "status quo", but now they have a man whose real and/or imagined ties to Russia may soon threaten his very presidency, so that whether he stands or falls, the US will inevitably become even more hard line.
I think Trump is an incompetent halfwit, and even I think warning the Russians was essential. Just about every Syrian-controlled airbase and military facility has Russian forces present. If the US had simply launched an unannounced attack, there would have been Russian fatalities and while one may dicker as to whether the Russians would consider that an act of war, at the very least it would greatly escalated matters and it's those sorts of "inadvertent" attacks on Russian forces that could lead to direct conflict between US and Russian troops. It's why the US hasn't directly intervened over the Ukraine civil war as well. If you have US and Russian forces in the same area uncoordinated, even where they may not be in technically in mutually hostile positions, it could go to shit very very fast.
If the accounts were true, Trump was given multiple options, but it was recommended to send in a symbolic strike, rather than an out-and-out "blow 'em up real good" attack. If you feel, as I do, that the intelligence Trump was given that the gas attack was airborne and thus could only come from Syrian forces, then I think this is exactly what you do. You call up your Russian contacts, tell them "What Assad requires a response, but we're giving you time to get any of your soldiers out of the line of fire" before just blasting away. Yes, it's possible that Assad could have got some materials out of there, though I wonder if there was enough time to actually much in the way of actual chemical weapons, but that wasn't the important part anyways.
What I think people are missing here is that while Russia and the US have spent much of the last 70 years as enemies and competitors, particularly since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there has long been backchannel communications, to make sure that whatever actions Washington or Moscow are taking don't suddenly plunge the two countries into even a technical state of war.
What Trump supporters should be really pissed about is the fact that, despite all the declarations of America First and how he was going to keep US forces out of foreign wars, Trump seems to be evolving quickly into a rather typical US president. His style is quirky, but the Tomahawk attack demonstrated an Administration that in some ways more resembles Bill Clinton's foreign policy than anyone else.