The person who wants to leave earth then, is equivalent to a hen who wants to leave the yard and live on a desolate rock in the middle of the ocean, and pretends that's better.
A "hen" isn't capable of building a new city on that desolate rock, complete with gardens & living areas. Your so-called analogy is even worse than the one you were criticising.
Only an idiot thinks that consigning their children to die of old age in a tin can in the darkness and vacuum of interstellar space is glorious and that their descendents will thank them for granting them a life of boredom, scarcity and fear.
You've got a really limited imagination, don't you? Do you really think that a mass space expansion is going to involve tiny little colonies on the scale of the current Space Station? There are a lot of people right now who live their entire lives within one city on the ground - their lives wouldn't be much different if they were living in a Los Angeles metro area (+ surrounding farmland)-sized space station, and there's nothing that says you can't have regular shuttle flights between the Earth & other space-stations/colonies
Even if we never figure out how to leave the solar system, it's not in our (Earth-based biological life forms) best interests to sit around waiting for an asteroid or comet to wipe out all life on the planet.
There's a _lot_ of building material out there in the solar system, especially if you figure out how to use the material from the Oort Cloud (outside of the planetary part of the system, but still within gravitational area of the Sun). Once we have a solid presence in space, instead of having to use the Earth as a base, then there are all kinds of things that are possible.
Why don't they spend the $30Million cleaning up the areas of DC and Baltimore that the the police are afraid to go into.
Because they're not willing to hire & train all the people that they would need to have a properly-functioning infrastructure, just like their reasoning for not hiring enough teachers for a properly-functioning educational system ("they" being the people in charge of handing out the govt money).
Among the problems that they see:
Hiring & training enough people takes lots of money, no matter how much "fat" you cut from the system. We don't have any leaders who are willing or capable of convincing the populace that keeping these systems going are worth the taxes they would have to pay.
All those jobs tend to be lower-to-middle-class economic jobs, which means that the money won't be flowing directly to the rich folks that the politicians tend to pander to.
In the end, you end up with a perpetually-starved set of systems which function just enough for some people to defend them, but which nobody is really happy about. Of course, everybody blames the performance of the people in the system, and completely ignore (or in some cases deny) that a system starved of resources isn't going to function very well.
The same people responsible for hating to pay for education & public-safety seem to be quite happy giving up tax-money to build prisons though. My cynicism has grown to the point where I've pretty much ceased to have any empathy for what crimes happen to upper-middle-class & richer folks, unless they're someone who I might know personally.
I believe that if you read my responses carefully, you will see that I am not disagreeing with you re: taking care of the existing planet.
It is certainly possible, however, that humans can pursue more than one goal at a time. It is not necessary to ignore the possibility of expanding into space just because we are trying to improve our treatment of the planet.
As I mentioned, we could be taking _perfect_ care of the planet & have all our efforts be for naught if a big-enough asteroid wipes out everything down to the cockroach level.
Granted, we should at least make sure that we have _something_ to save before we make big plans to spread throughout the solar system, but it is in our own (and the rest of the life forms on Earth)'s interest that we eventually end up living on more than one planet.
In the extreme long-term, it would be even better to live on more than one solar system (so that we don't get wiped out by a passing star), but since we don't really have any remotely-possible technical way of doing that right now, I'd settle for just colonizing any area of the Solar System that could be made habitable.
Even if we were taking perfect care of the planet, it's in the best long-term interests of our species that we become a spacefaring race. We've got some pretty solid historical evidence that Earth has suffered occasional events which wiped out all dominant life forms on the planet. It doesn't make much sense to "keep all our eggs in one basket" so-to-speak if we have the ability to protect ourselves (and whatever other species we want to preserve).
The eye has around a hundred million nerve inputs, so the per frame resolution can't be higher than that.
Not necessarily a good assumption: since retinal neurons don't fire synchronized at a "frame rate", and the brain processes their signals in parallel often using algorithms depending on adjacent spatial & temporal signals, it's really difficult to compare the "effective frame/resolution" of human vision.
Don't have a cite, but I vaguely remember reading that while each individual large business has much more of an economic effect than any individual small business, the sum total of all economic effect generated by all small businesses is significantly more than the sum total of all economic effect generated by all "large" businesses (subject to your definitions of small & large, of course).
A society could do a lot worse than have economic policies which favored small businesses, and to ignore the desires of large businesses. You'd tend to end up with a highly-competitive & agile marketplace, but where no individual actor (aside from the government of course) is likely to be big enough to cause significant damage to the society even if they wanted to.
Dunno, in my experience your statements apply more to the righties than anyone else - the lefties have too many "touchie-feelie" people that keep their so-called message watered-down.
That being said, *I* simply hate partisan asshats, whether left/right, religious/anti-religious, clown/non-clown - if I were in a situation where I had to make a decision to save such a person's life, it would be a non-trivial decision for me.
My vague understanding of Marxism was that he (Marx) assumed that the revolutionaries would _have_ to pass through a totalitarianist phase (in order to take the power away from the previous governmental system), and were then supposed to transition to the "real" communist system.
From a historical perspective, all of the large-scale Communist revolutions seem to keep getting stuck in that "transitional" totalitarianism phase.
The slightly-more cynical might conclude that the so-called "revolutionaries" never had any intent of getting through the transition, and were just using the message of Marxism as propaganda.
The Democrats are about to treat environmentalism like a religion
The Democrats aren't cohesive enough to use _any_ issue like the Republicans do with religion - since part of their unofficial platform is "open-mindedness", they don't really have the disciplinary infrastructure to force everyone in the party to toe the party line.
About the only issue most of them have been able to agree on is that Bush & Co. is bad for the country and should be removed as quickly as possible (pretty much common sense for anyone paying attention at this point), which makes it easy for the Republicans to say that the Democrats look like they have "no plan for the future".
If the patent system was reformed properly, it would be easier to make decisions about what is 'good' and what is 'bad'.
Part of my pet "patent system" proposal is to limit the total # of "valid" patents to some small number N, which will force there to be some kind of competitive process to determine the best patents (as well as make it easier to search the valid patent database, and limit the effect that patents can have on the general process of innovation).
The competitive process I had in mind was an auction, where anybody can submit ideas for a patent, and anyone else can bid to secure a patent "slot" for one of those applications. Patents slots becomes available as they are freed up due to expiration, prior art or obviousness. The winning bid would be paid to the person who submitted the patent idea.
Advantages:
forcing the bidder to perform due diligence on each patent that they are bidding on, to make sure that its value won't get knocked down by a competitor using prior art or obviousness
doesn't need to depend on a patent examiner system this way
the "little" guy can exercise his/her innovation by submitting ideas to the patent auction for little or no cost, and with the potential for a _big_ payoff if the auction yields big bids
because of the "wanna win the lottery effect", you'll get a whole stream of ideas (both good & bad) that didn't quite meet the standards of the bidders, but then become public-domain
society (and the auction winners) win since the people who win the auctions are much more likely to have the resources to fully distribute the benefits of those patent ideas to the market
I know it seems silly these days, but farm subsidizing farms is really about maintaining American farms in case if there were say... World War III or a blockade with the Soviets over running all our 3rd world food producers we'd still have the infrastructure to feed ourselves (nevermind the nuclear fallout)
If you're going to try and subsidize farming, it seems like it would make more sense to make it part of the welfare system: subsidize the purchase of local fresh produce by the poor. Not only would this keep demand for farmers' products higher, it would provide a "bubble-up" source of wealth distribution (versus the trickle-down model), and it would make getting healthier food a more attractive alternative for the poor.
Of course, the trickle-down proponents would probably just prefer giving large handouts to huge corporate farms.
I would have to say that every software company is based around Intellectual property.
Nah, there are plenty of individuals & software companies whose business models are not dependent on IP laws. Think of development-of-software as a service.
Between national security, censorship & intellectual property, the politics of big business have been making it difficult to reach Nerd Nirvana (being able to mess around with whatever technically-sexy stuff that makes you drool). It's quite natural to criticise the people who you think are responsible for getting in the way of your work & fun.
I propose a constitutional amendment specifying a max # of words for all legislation that is valid at any given period of time (kind of like the max # of words limits in a homework assignment). After applying a new piece of legislation, if the total # of words doesn't fit under the limit, then the new piece of legislation is rejected.
If the # is small enough, it should 1) give the legislators some reason to use more precise wording, 2) they'll only be able to cover the "basics" of running a society, 3) it will be a lot simpler for normal people to search & understand the legal code, and the 4) legislators will be forced to decide how they want to affect existing law every time they propose a new one.
You'll have to include agency regulations under the total word limit, however, otherwise the legislators will just push all the excess verbiage down into the agency rulebooks.
(This is somewhat a joke, but now that I've thought about it, as a solution it has some attractive qualities...)
Damn, I spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to find all those "Discoveries" in the DreamCast version of Skies of Arcadia. I've still got my DC roaming around here somewhere (and the Skies of Arcadia) - I wonder if they still work?
It encourages your kid to figure out ways to lie to you without getting caught.
Everytime they are successful (and assuming that they are lucky enough to avoid any of the dire circumstances that you might have warned them about), it will confirm to them that parents are over-controlling morons who need to be bypassed at every opportunity to "have fun".
They will continue to push the envelope of what they can get away with until at some point they will get in over their head, and will not trust you (the over-controlling, untrusting moron parent) enough to come to you for help.
I think the U.S. Civil War had a lot of those experiences, but you're probably correct when talking about facing an external enemy. (Is it a surprise that the citizens of the U.S. are their own worst enemies?)
Add in that the U.S. public doesn't seem to have much respect for their elders and/or history, it's probably accurate to say that (aside from the people who have seen down-and-dirty military action), the U.S. public has no concept of what war is really like (and probably has some very distorted notions about it from Hollywood).
BTW, I count myself among the uninformed U.S. public, although I've got a vivid enough imagination so that I'm damn sure I want to _stay_ ignorant of such an existence.
Actually, given how things turned out in Iraq, that'll be the response of just about _any_ country in the world that gets invaded by a much more powerful country - the "official" government will surrender immediately, then the occupying force will spend the next five years or so hunting for insurgents and trying to figure out what the form of the next IED is going to be.
Actually, it might be interesting if you can make some tattoo ink containing a bunch of nano-magnet particles (coated with something so that the body won't reject it) & use it to tattoo the magnets right into the skin of your hands & fingers. (Probably painful, but not as bad as doing the surgery - and you can get the tattoo in some kind of neat pattern!).
Not sure how something like that would work in the MRI environment - all the nano-magnets might get ripped out & end up looking some like an Ebola attack...
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A "hen" isn't capable of building a new city on that desolate rock, complete with gardens & living areas. Your so-called analogy is even worse than the one you were criticising.
You've got a really limited imagination, don't you? Do you really think that a mass space expansion is going to involve tiny little colonies on the scale of the current Space Station? There are a lot of people right now who live their entire lives within one city on the ground - their lives wouldn't be much different if they were living in a Los Angeles metro area (+ surrounding farmland)-sized space station, and there's nothing that says you can't have regular shuttle flights between the Earth & other space-stations/colonies
Even if we never figure out how to leave the solar system, it's not in our (Earth-based biological life forms) best interests to sit around waiting for an asteroid or comet to wipe out all life on the planet.
There's a _lot_ of building material out there in the solar system, especially if you figure out how to use the material from the Oort Cloud (outside of the planetary part of the system, but still within gravitational area of the Sun). Once we have a solid presence in space, instead of having to use the Earth as a base, then there are all kinds of things that are possible.
Because they're not willing to hire & train all the people that they would need to have a properly-functioning infrastructure, just like their reasoning for not hiring enough teachers for a properly-functioning educational system ("they" being the people in charge of handing out the govt money).
Among the problems that they see:
In the end, you end up with a perpetually-starved set of systems which function just enough for some people to defend them, but which nobody is really happy about. Of course, everybody blames the performance of the people in the system, and completely ignore (or in some cases deny) that a system starved of resources isn't going to function very well.
The same people responsible for hating to pay for education & public-safety seem to be quite happy giving up tax-money to build prisons though. My cynicism has grown to the point where I've pretty much ceased to have any empathy for what crimes happen to upper-middle-class & richer folks, unless they're someone who I might know personally.
Just the children?
With the current debt levels, try extending that for a couple of generations at least...
I believe that if you read my responses carefully, you will see that I am not disagreeing with you re: taking care of the existing planet.
It is certainly possible, however, that humans can pursue more than one goal at a time. It is not necessary to ignore the possibility of expanding into space just because we are trying to improve our treatment of the planet.
As I mentioned, we could be taking _perfect_ care of the planet & have all our efforts be for naught if a big-enough asteroid wipes out everything down to the cockroach level.
Granted, we should at least make sure that we have _something_ to save before we make big plans to spread throughout the solar system, but it is in our own (and the rest of the life forms on Earth)'s interest that we eventually end up living on more than one planet.
In the extreme long-term, it would be even better to live on more than one solar system (so that we don't get wiped out by a passing star), but since we don't really have any remotely-possible technical way of doing that right now, I'd settle for just colonizing any area of the Solar System that could be made habitable.
Even if we were taking perfect care of the planet, it's in the best long-term interests of our species that we become a spacefaring race. We've got some pretty solid historical evidence that Earth has suffered occasional events which wiped out all dominant life forms on the planet. It doesn't make much sense to "keep all our eggs in one basket" so-to-speak if we have the ability to protect ourselves (and whatever other species we want to preserve).
Not necessarily a good assumption: since retinal neurons don't fire synchronized at a "frame rate", and the brain processes their signals in parallel often using algorithms depending on adjacent spatial & temporal signals, it's really difficult to compare the "effective frame/resolution" of human vision.
Don't have a cite, but I vaguely remember reading that while each individual large business has much more of an economic effect than any individual small business, the sum total of all economic effect generated by all small businesses is significantly more than the sum total of all economic effect generated by all "large" businesses (subject to your definitions of small & large, of course).
A society could do a lot worse than have economic policies which favored small businesses, and to ignore the desires of large businesses. You'd tend to end up with a highly-competitive & agile marketplace, but where no individual actor (aside from the government of course) is likely to be big enough to cause significant damage to the society even if they wanted to.
Like I said, in my experience it's usually the righties who go "fucking berserk" when you say you don't agree with one of their pet ideologies.
True, I've met a few lefties with similar attitudes about their ideologies - and I was just as pissed off at them - but it's usually righties.
Dunno, in my experience your statements apply more to the righties than anyone else - the lefties have too many "touchie-feelie" people that keep their so-called message watered-down.
That being said, *I* simply hate partisan asshats, whether left/right, religious/anti-religious, clown/non-clown - if I were in a situation where I had to make a decision to save such a person's life, it would be a non-trivial decision for me.
My vague understanding of Marxism was that he (Marx) assumed that the revolutionaries would _have_ to pass through a totalitarianist phase (in order to take the power away from the previous governmental system), and were then supposed to transition to the "real" communist system.
From a historical perspective, all of the large-scale Communist revolutions seem to keep getting stuck in that "transitional" totalitarianism phase.
The slightly-more cynical might conclude that the so-called "revolutionaries" never had any intent of getting through the transition, and were just using the message of Marxism as propaganda.
The Democrats aren't cohesive enough to use _any_ issue like the Republicans do with religion - since part of their unofficial platform is "open-mindedness", they don't really have the disciplinary infrastructure to force everyone in the party to toe the party line.
About the only issue most of them have been able to agree on is that Bush & Co. is bad for the country and should be removed as quickly as possible (pretty much common sense for anyone paying attention at this point), which makes it easy for the Republicans to say that the Democrats look like they have "no plan for the future".
Part of my pet "patent system" proposal is to limit the total # of "valid" patents to some small number N, which will force there to be some kind of competitive process to determine the best patents (as well as make it easier to search the valid patent database, and limit the effect that patents can have on the general process of innovation).
The competitive process I had in mind was an auction, where anybody can submit ideas for a patent, and anyone else can bid to secure a patent "slot" for one of those applications. Patents slots becomes available as they are freed up due to expiration, prior art or obviousness. The winning bid would be paid to the person who submitted the patent idea.
Advantages:
If you're going to try and subsidize farming, it seems like it would make more sense to make it part of the welfare system: subsidize the purchase of local fresh produce by the poor. Not only would this keep demand for farmers' products higher, it would provide a "bubble-up" source of wealth distribution (versus the trickle-down model), and it would make getting healthier food a more attractive alternative for the poor.
Of course, the trickle-down proponents would probably just prefer giving large handouts to huge corporate farms.
Nah, there are plenty of individuals & software companies whose business models are not dependent on IP laws. Think of development-of-software as a service.
It's fairly obvious you don't understand basic logic, or are deliberately obscuring the issue.
Just because some things are true in a book doesn't make all of the things that book says true.
The flip side is also true: just because some things in a book can't be proven, doesn't mean everything in that document is false.
These two principles do not contradict each other. I'll leave it to you to figure out how this applies to interpreting the contents of the Bible.
Between national security, censorship & intellectual property, the politics of big business have been making it difficult to reach Nerd Nirvana (being able to mess around with whatever technically-sexy stuff that makes you drool). It's quite natural to criticise the people who you think are responsible for getting in the way of your work & fun.
What does intellectual property have to do with capitalism?
It's more of a socialist experiment than anything having to do with capitalism.
I propose a constitutional amendment specifying a max # of words for all legislation that is valid at any given period of time (kind of like the max # of words limits in a homework assignment). After applying a new piece of legislation, if the total # of words doesn't fit under the limit, then the new piece of legislation is rejected.
If the # is small enough, it should 1) give the legislators some reason to use more precise wording, 2) they'll only be able to cover the "basics" of running a society, 3) it will be a lot simpler for normal people to search & understand the legal code, and the 4) legislators will be forced to decide how they want to affect existing law every time they propose a new one.
You'll have to include agency regulations under the total word limit, however, otherwise the legislators will just push all the excess verbiage down into the agency rulebooks.
(This is somewhat a joke, but now that I've thought about it, as a solution it has some attractive qualities...)
Damn, I spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to find all those "Discoveries" in the DreamCast version of Skies of Arcadia. I've still got my DC roaming around here somewhere (and the Skies of Arcadia) - I wonder if they still work?
Ah yes, proof-by-anecdote. Always a sound basis for formulating good, solid social policy based on personal ideology.
It encourages your kid to figure out ways to lie to you without getting caught.
Everytime they are successful (and assuming that they are lucky enough to avoid any of the dire circumstances that you might have warned them about), it will confirm to them that parents are over-controlling morons who need to be bypassed at every opportunity to "have fun".
They will continue to push the envelope of what they can get away with until at some point they will get in over their head, and will not trust you (the over-controlling, untrusting moron parent) enough to come to you for help.
I think the U.S. Civil War had a lot of those experiences, but you're probably correct when talking about facing an external enemy. (Is it a surprise that the citizens of the U.S. are their own worst enemies?)
Add in that the U.S. public doesn't seem to have much respect for their elders and/or history, it's probably accurate to say that (aside from the people who have seen down-and-dirty military action), the U.S. public has no concept of what war is really like (and probably has some very distorted notions about it from Hollywood).
BTW, I count myself among the uninformed U.S. public, although I've got a vivid enough imagination so that I'm damn sure I want to _stay_ ignorant of such an existence.
Actually, given how things turned out in Iraq, that'll be the response of just about _any_ country in the world that gets invaded by a much more powerful country - the "official" government will surrender immediately, then the occupying force will spend the next five years or so hunting for insurgents and trying to figure out what the form of the next IED is going to be.
Actually, it might be interesting if you can make some tattoo ink containing a bunch of nano-magnet particles (coated with something so that the body won't reject it) & use it to tattoo the magnets right into the skin of your hands & fingers. (Probably painful, but not as bad as doing the surgery - and you can get the tattoo in some kind of neat pattern!).
Not sure how something like that would work in the MRI environment - all the nano-magnets might get ripped out & end up looking some like an Ebola attack...