If the infrastructure is there (and the car's engineering allows it), you might just be able to swap battery packs at "battery" stations, just like you fill up with gas at gas stations.
That could be as fast or faster than fueling up a vehicle with gas, plus (again assuming the infrastructure is there) the battery packs can be regularly maintained/reconditioned/recycled by the "battery" station franchises, and you won't have to worry about paying $3000 every few years to completely replace all the batteries in your electric car.
If you can also still charge up at home overnight, then you could get the best of both worlds.
Of course, this kind of solution won't be practical if they can't bring the weight of the typical battery packs below the equivalent of hundreds of pounds of lead-acid batteries:P
It's still a much larger investment than the incremental costs of solar & wind power, plus still results in hard-to-store radioactive building materials.
It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to "use up" nuclear material to the state where it is reasonably harmless to life. By comparison, increasing renewable energy generation can be done in a fairly incremental fashion (and can be moved & removed in a fairly incremental fashion as well).
Also, "nuclear waste" doesn't just include the nuclear fuel. It also includes everything which comes in contact with that nuclear fuel & all of ways that it is processed (like the containers used to store/transport the fuel, the reactor walls, the control rod mechanisms, etc). Almost all that material can't be safely used once it has become contaminated, the stuff that it is contaminated with can't be easily extracted for use as fuel, and it is all still hazardous to life.
I'm not saying that nuclear isn't theoretically a great source of energy, but you're seriously downplaying some of its disadvantages.
No, blackjack is one of the few play-against-the-house card games allowed in the gaming industry where if you can calculate probabilities with sufficient accuracy, you can beat the house in the long term. That's the whole point of the strategy of "counting cards".
Of course, if the house figures out that you are able to count cards well enough to beat them in the long-term, they usually block you from playing (so in a "won't let you play if I can't win" sense, the house eventually always wins).
See the Wikipedia entry for the excruciating detail on card counting.
Probability has very much to do with potential strategies.
A more limited form of this is blackjack - although a machine doesn't know exactly what cards are going to come up, and doesn't know exactly what cards its opponents has, by using probabilities over the long-term, it can still beat the house.
Also, as cards in the deck are used up & the machine learns more about what cards have been used, it can make more precise calculations about what cards other people have or what might be coming up in the draw, and adjust its strategies accordingly.
This is stuff that the pros do all the time in their heads, and which the pros use to decide THEIR strategies, except that a machine will be able to calculate those probabilities perfectly, without getting tired and without making any mistakes. If a pro could do that, it would give him/her a pretty decent advantage - assuming that they had a large repertoire of strategies that they could use to capitalize on their knowledge.
Which brings us back to the main weakness of the machine - the machine will only have the repertoire that was programmed into it by its creators (or that it can figure out by heuristics/exhaustive search), and if it is mindless about applying those techniques, or only has a very limited set of techniques available to it, then a pro who figures out its patterns can take advantage of that (just like in chess).
It would also be very difficult for a machine to make judgements about its opponent's mental state (unless the eggheads make some sort of breakthrough on categorizing mental states through facial recognition).
Neither of these weaknesses have anything to do with perfect probability calculations being very useful, however.
What gives you the idea that "mathematically optimum" only dealt with the cards that the computer can see?
Given enough computing power, a machine will always be able to calculate the exact probability of every possible hand that its opponent might have, now & into the near future, without being fooled by stuff like bluffs or feints. (It's also possible that it might be able to detecting cheating like slipping an extra card into play when a result occurs which it has calculated to be "impossible".)
If the pros are going to beat a sufficiently powerful machine, they'll basically have to do what chess players going against machines often do: take advantage of both the predictableness of the machine's algorithms, plus the machine's weaknesses at forecasting the moves of its opponents. While the machine might be able to calculate exact probabilities for every possible move into the near future, its longer-term decision-making abilities are only going to be as good as the expert knowledge that its programmers are able to build into its heuristics.
The guys who are good enough to plan strategies that extend beyond the machine's "perfect knowledge horizon" are going to be the ones who can beat it regularly. The guys who can plan only a step or two ahead will be able to depend only on luck.
All of those places are harder to tap than our existing fields. You're missing the point of Peak Oil. Peak Oil doesn't say oil will disappear magically off the face of the Earth. It says that it will eventually become economically infeasible to use it as our primary energy source, because it will keep on getting harder & more expensive to get the next source of it.
The question is whether that increasing expense will rise so rapidly that the global economy can't transition fast enough to an alternative energy infrastructure. If that happens, civilization as we know it is going to be f*cked for quite a while.
I'm pretty sure that an employee who used such a puerile insult either really doesn't want to work for the company any more (and wants to get fired instead of quitting for unemployment benefit reasons), or knows of a good reason why they can abuse a company executive like that & still get away with it (perhaps they know the company considers their happiness to be more important than that of the CIO's authority). (This assumes that the employee is acting rationally, of course.)
Few presidents get hated as he was. Reagan isn't liked by some, but he isn't hated. Carter was bashed for being a pushover in foreign policy and weak in economics and a poor politician, but people didn't hate him. Even Bush II, for all his faults, is bashed constantly, but I don't see the level of hate against him that was directed toward the Clinton administration. My coworkers still are unable to call them Bill and Hilary Clinton.
My experience is completely different, and supports my contention that Clinton was only hated by a partisan subset of the population. Most of the people I know thought that he was a decent President who screwed up personally, and that he was taken down by a rabid Republican attack machine.
The fact that your coworkers hate Clinton so much would be more of an indication to me of their partisanship, rather than any real evidence of a large-scale "hate" toward Clinton. Then again, I live on the West Coast, so this partisanship might be one of those symptoms of geographic political differences.
Oh yes, let's blame the Democrats. They are in a situation which is unwinnable.
I'm really tired of that argument. The Republicans rammed their agenda down the Democrats' throats when the Republicans had a small majority. Given how hated the Republican Party is right now, the Democrats could easily crush Republican resistance if they did pulled all the parliamentary dirty tricks that the Republicans were famous for, if the Democrats did their PR right and IF THEY HAD THE COURAGE, but they keep rolling over EVERY G*D*MN time the neo-con attack machine barks.
The Democrats are completely in charge of setting the Congressional agenda. They don't have to propose anything they don't want to, and there's nothing the Republicans can do about that. They could shut Republicans out of making any sort of legislation at all, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. The Democrats could refuse to allocate any money at all for Republican pet projects, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. They can make the Republicans do song-and-dance routines on the Senate floor to keep a filibuster going, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. The Democrats could do public investigations on all of the most-corrupt neo-con leader finances, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about it. But the Democrats KEEP ROLLING OVER.
The Democratic leadership MOST DEFINITELY bears a huge responsibility for continuing the status quo, as does people like you who keep making excuses for them.
Also, the Democrats have to vote for more war spending because if they don't they are sacrificing our military, and that doesn't go over well with any voter, whether you're blue state or red state.
You do remember how the Vietnam War was ended, right? Congress refused to allocate any more funding for it - and suddenly, it was over.
We can either end it now, bring everyone home, and try to use what resources we have left to lick our wounds & repair our crumbling infrastructure, or we can wait until we have NO RESOURCES left, and then they'll have to come home anyway, back to a collapsing economy where it's hard to find a job, and we're hated by the world even more then we are now - especially if we attack Iran!
The _only_ reason Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld haven't been perp-walked by now is because the Democratic leadership doesn't have the courage to do what is necessary to crush the neo-con leadership & restore the Rule of Law to this country.
Bush I was medicore enough to get beat by Clinton, arguably one of the most hated presidents of recent years (Clinton being hated, not Bush I).
Uh...Clinton was only hated by a certain segment of the Republican partisans (who happened to be really noisy & eventually influential in Congress). Most Democrats & many independents thought, aside from his personal screwups, he was a competent President.
It has been only lately (with NAFTA blowback and his behavior during Hillary's campaign) where progressives have started taking potshots at Bill's legacy (whereas before it was just the occasional lament of "why couldn't he keep it in his pants?!").
On the plus side for Bush I, at least HE knew when to cut off military action.
The only inherent powers granted by the Constitution that the President has are as the Commander in Chief, granting reprieves & pardons, to make treaties (with consent of the Senate) & to appoint officials (with consent of the Senate). Any other powers have to be specifically granted by Congress through legislation.
Based on the all the stories about lousy CEOs flying around, it hardly seems like you need much experience at all to be a CEO who can drive a business into the ground & come out with a nice golden parachute - you just need to know the right people & be able to scam the stockholders/board into believing you long enough to sign the contract. I'll assume you're talking about begin a _competent_ CEO, which probably does require a fair bit of experience to be able to claim that title.
Even given a lot of experience, why does that give a CEO the right to claim all the credit for turning around a company or improving its performance? It's not like the CEO did any of the actual field work to implement his/her decisions - all of his directions were implemented by real people. If it weren't for those real people, the CEO's directions would be worthless, no matter how experienced or talented the CEO was. But, for some reason, the CEO somehow manages to get most of the credit (and compensation) for improving a company's performance, while the people doing the actual work which resulted in the company's performance improving are lucky if they don't get laid off during the usual "restructuring".
Executive compensation is really screwed up nowadays, if you're trying to apply some objective criteria of "fairness" to how each person provides value to the overall organization. The guys who decide on executive compensation are MUCH too cozy with those executives, and don't really have a good way of judging the relative value of those executives compared to the rest of the company, so they end up comparing against what executives at OTHER companies are being compensated (and thereby contribute to the ever-inflating value of executive compensation packages). There's also a natural human tendency to assign a lot of value to the high profile people (like celebrities), whether those people actually deserve that respect or not. This adds to a executive's "perceived" value, but can't really be justified using an objective criteria.
That's true of _every_ professional job though - to be competent, you've got to have a lot of schooling, experience (and hopefully some natural intelligence). Many CEOs might work hard, but they're certainly not working 100x as hard as other hard workers in the company.
I'm still taking exception with your assumption that it is entirely up to the CEO whether a company can be turned around, or whether the company's future is entirely dependent on the decisions of that CEO. That completely ignores all the contributions of all of the people who are implementing the CEO's decisions, and makes it seem like the CEO was singlehandedly responsible for "turning the company around" or "leading the company to excellence".
In reality, the CEO is just one of many people who are responsible for improving a company's performance, but because of a CEO's close relationship with the shareholders & executive compensation boards, there is a strong psychological tendency for those bodies to give the CEO most of the credit (and therefore most of the compensation).
That's a common piece of propaganda as to why CEOs (and other executives) get paid so much (setting aside the obviously idiotic golden-parachutes-after-running-a-company-into-the-ground scenarios), but the executives are hardly doing all of the work themselves.
Just as it is hard for the employees to be productive without having some kind of vision directing them, a visionary executive is pretty damn worthless unless he/she has people who can competently implement that vision.
In many cases, the employees are taking MUCH more of a risk than any of the executives - when the company is doing badly, a lot of employees usually find themselves without jobs, and are left to figure out how they are going to take care of their families. There aren't too many executives that are going to find themselves living out of their cars even if they royally screw over a multi-million revenue company.
The so-called risk & value that even well-respected CEOs provide to their company is often wildly overstated, and is more of a function of the "buddy-buddy" relationship they have with the people who set their compensation, rather than an objective look at the relative value they are providing to the company, and the personal risk they are taking.
There's only one person in this thread who is looking like an idiot, and I'm feeling like Einstein compared to you. I'd suggest you follow your own advice, although I suspect your tiny little mind has already reached its full growth and can only look forward to deterioration from this point. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have far to go until bottom, so you probably won't miss it much.
1) people who think they deserve special laws so they can extort more money out of people than they would otherwise be able to get in a normal "free" market, vs.
2) people who think they should be able to use their own physical private property that they've bought & paid for without third party restrictions being forced on them.
Who exactly is being "greedier"? Since when do people "deserve" to be paid a lot of money just because they did a lot of hard work?
That's probably a good use for one of those zombie networks (at least for wiretapping e-mail, IM chat type of traffic, entering text into web site boxes). The type of person who ends up getting their machine zombified is probably also the sort of person who thinks they don't care about their traffic being snooped.
I sincerely doubt that a judge would be able to force you to do something blatantly against the law, like to kill someone, publish vital national security secrets, or stuff like that. They aren't dictators; they have only the power that the laws give them, even in their own courtroom.
That probably depends on whether the court's decision is legal or not. Although some judges certainly act like it is otherwise, they DO usually have limits on their power. (Of course, different countries will have different limits.)
Your description is more detailed than my memory; it seems like I've remembered more the "revolutionary vanguard" part for my Phase 2 than what I thought was the Marxist version, possibly because the description of most of the communist revolutions that I've read about seem to fit your description of that model than the Marxist one.
You're placing too much emphasis on the word "government".
You should be a little more abstract and fear "large organizations", which would include governments AND companies. (There are, of course, other forms of organization, but governments & companies are the only ones I can think of which become large enough to become a serious problem to societal health.)
Any organization that grows large enough, whether it be government or company, is more likely to become both corrupt & have the resources to crush opposition.
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If the infrastructure is there (and the car's engineering allows it), you might just be able to swap battery packs at "battery" stations, just like you fill up with gas at gas stations.
That could be as fast or faster than fueling up a vehicle with gas, plus (again assuming the infrastructure is there) the battery packs can be regularly maintained/reconditioned/recycled by the "battery" station franchises, and you won't have to worry about paying $3000 every few years to completely replace all the batteries in your electric car.
If you can also still charge up at home overnight, then you could get the best of both worlds.
Of course, this kind of solution won't be practical if they can't bring the weight of the typical battery packs below the equivalent of hundreds of pounds of lead-acid batteries :P
It's still a much larger investment than the incremental costs of solar & wind power, plus still results in hard-to-store radioactive building materials.
It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to "use up" nuclear material to the state where it is reasonably harmless to life. By comparison, increasing renewable energy generation can be done in a fairly incremental fashion (and can be moved & removed in a fairly incremental fashion as well).
Also, "nuclear waste" doesn't just include the nuclear fuel. It also includes everything which comes in contact with that nuclear fuel & all of ways that it is processed (like the containers used to store/transport the fuel, the reactor walls, the control rod mechanisms, etc). Almost all that material can't be safely used once it has become contaminated, the stuff that it is contaminated with can't be easily extracted for use as fuel, and it is all still hazardous to life.
I'm not saying that nuclear isn't theoretically a great source of energy, but you're seriously downplaying some of its disadvantages.
No, blackjack is one of the few play-against-the-house card games allowed in the gaming industry where if you can calculate probabilities with sufficient accuracy, you can beat the house in the long term. That's the whole point of the strategy of "counting cards".
Of course, if the house figures out that you are able to count cards well enough to beat them in the long-term, they usually block you from playing (so in a "won't let you play if I can't win" sense, the house eventually always wins).
See the Wikipedia entry for the excruciating detail on card counting.
Probability has very much to do with potential strategies.
A more limited form of this is blackjack - although a machine doesn't know exactly what cards are going to come up, and doesn't know exactly what cards its opponents has, by using probabilities over the long-term, it can still beat the house.
Also, as cards in the deck are used up & the machine learns more about what cards have been used, it can make more precise calculations about what cards other people have or what might be coming up in the draw, and adjust its strategies accordingly.
This is stuff that the pros do all the time in their heads, and which the pros use to decide THEIR strategies, except that a machine will be able to calculate those probabilities perfectly, without getting tired and without making any mistakes. If a pro could do that, it would give him/her a pretty decent advantage - assuming that they had a large repertoire of strategies that they could use to capitalize on their knowledge.
Which brings us back to the main weakness of the machine - the machine will only have the repertoire that was programmed into it by its creators (or that it can figure out by heuristics/exhaustive search), and if it is mindless about applying those techniques, or only has a very limited set of techniques available to it, then a pro who figures out its patterns can take advantage of that (just like in chess).
It would also be very difficult for a machine to make judgements about its opponent's mental state (unless the eggheads make some sort of breakthrough on categorizing mental states through facial recognition).
Neither of these weaknesses have anything to do with perfect probability calculations being very useful, however.
What gives you the idea that "mathematically optimum" only dealt with the cards that the computer can see?
Given enough computing power, a machine will always be able to calculate the exact probability of every possible hand that its opponent might have, now & into the near future, without being fooled by stuff like bluffs or feints. (It's also possible that it might be able to detecting cheating like slipping an extra card into play when a result occurs which it has calculated to be "impossible".)
If the pros are going to beat a sufficiently powerful machine, they'll basically have to do what chess players going against machines often do: take advantage of both the predictableness of the machine's algorithms, plus the machine's weaknesses at forecasting the moves of its opponents. While the machine might be able to calculate exact probabilities for every possible move into the near future, its longer-term decision-making abilities are only going to be as good as the expert knowledge that its programmers are able to build into its heuristics.
The guys who are good enough to plan strategies that extend beyond the machine's "perfect knowledge horizon" are going to be the ones who can beat it regularly. The guys who can plan only a step or two ahead will be able to depend only on luck.
All of those places are harder to tap than our existing fields. You're missing the point of Peak Oil. Peak Oil doesn't say oil will disappear magically off the face of the Earth. It says that it will eventually become economically infeasible to use it as our primary energy source, because it will keep on getting harder & more expensive to get the next source of it.
The question is whether that increasing expense will rise so rapidly that the global economy can't transition fast enough to an alternative energy infrastructure. If that happens, civilization as we know it is going to be f*cked for quite a while.
I'm pretty sure that an employee who used such a puerile insult either really doesn't want to work for the company any more (and wants to get fired instead of quitting for unemployment benefit reasons), or knows of a good reason why they can abuse a company executive like that & still get away with it (perhaps they know the company considers their happiness to be more important than that of the CIO's authority). (This assumes that the employee is acting rationally, of course.)
*followed by company collapsing as Coder was only person maintaining ancient mission-critical app...*
My experience is completely different, and supports my contention that Clinton was only hated by a partisan subset of the population. Most of the people I know thought that he was a decent President who screwed up personally, and that he was taken down by a rabid Republican attack machine.
The fact that your coworkers hate Clinton so much would be more of an indication to me of their partisanship, rather than any real evidence of a large-scale "hate" toward Clinton. Then again, I live on the West Coast, so this partisanship might be one of those symptoms of geographic political differences.
I'm really tired of that argument. The Republicans rammed their agenda down the Democrats' throats when the Republicans had a small majority. Given how hated the Republican Party is right now, the Democrats could easily crush Republican resistance if they did pulled all the parliamentary dirty tricks that the Republicans were famous for, if the Democrats did their PR right and IF THEY HAD THE COURAGE, but they keep rolling over EVERY G*D*MN time the neo-con attack machine barks.
The Democrats are completely in charge of setting the Congressional agenda. They don't have to propose anything they don't want to, and there's nothing the Republicans can do about that. They could shut Republicans out of making any sort of legislation at all, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. The Democrats could refuse to allocate any money at all for Republican pet projects, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. They can make the Republicans do song-and-dance routines on the Senate floor to keep a filibuster going, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about that. The Democrats could do public investigations on all of the most-corrupt neo-con leader finances, and there's nothing the Republicans could do about it. But the Democrats KEEP ROLLING OVER.
The Democratic leadership MOST DEFINITELY bears a huge responsibility for continuing the status quo, as does people like you who keep making excuses for them.
You do remember how the Vietnam War was ended, right? Congress refused to allocate any more funding for it - and suddenly, it was over.
We can either end it now, bring everyone home, and try to use what resources we have left to lick our wounds & repair our crumbling infrastructure, or we can wait until we have NO RESOURCES left, and then they'll have to come home anyway, back to a collapsing economy where it's hard to find a job, and we're hated by the world even more then we are now - especially if we attack Iran!
The _only_ reason Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld haven't been perp-walked by now is because the Democratic leadership doesn't have the courage to do what is necessary to crush the neo-con leadership & restore the Rule of Law to this country.
Uh...Clinton was only hated by a certain segment of the Republican partisans (who happened to be really noisy & eventually influential in Congress). Most Democrats & many independents thought, aside from his personal screwups, he was a competent President.
It has been only lately (with NAFTA blowback and his behavior during Hillary's campaign) where progressives have started taking potshots at Bill's legacy (whereas before it was just the occasional lament of "why couldn't he keep it in his pants?!").
On the plus side for Bush I, at least HE knew when to cut off military action.
The only inherent powers granted by the Constitution that the President has are as the Commander in Chief, granting reprieves & pardons, to make treaties (with consent of the Senate) & to appoint officials (with consent of the Senate). Any other powers have to be specifically granted by Congress through legislation.
Who needs a firecracker? How about an inflated balloon & a needle?
Based on the all the stories about lousy CEOs flying around, it hardly seems like you need much experience at all to be a CEO who can drive a business into the ground & come out with a nice golden parachute - you just need to know the right people & be able to scam the stockholders/board into believing you long enough to sign the contract. I'll assume you're talking about begin a _competent_ CEO, which probably does require a fair bit of experience to be able to claim that title.
Even given a lot of experience, why does that give a CEO the right to claim all the credit for turning around a company or improving its performance? It's not like the CEO did any of the actual field work to implement his/her decisions - all of his directions were implemented by real people. If it weren't for those real people, the CEO's directions would be worthless, no matter how experienced or talented the CEO was. But, for some reason, the CEO somehow manages to get most of the credit (and compensation) for improving a company's performance, while the people doing the actual work which resulted in the company's performance improving are lucky if they don't get laid off during the usual "restructuring".
Executive compensation is really screwed up nowadays, if you're trying to apply some objective criteria of "fairness" to how each person provides value to the overall organization. The guys who decide on executive compensation are MUCH too cozy with those executives, and don't really have a good way of judging the relative value of those executives compared to the rest of the company, so they end up comparing against what executives at OTHER companies are being compensated (and thereby contribute to the ever-inflating value of executive compensation packages). There's also a natural human tendency to assign a lot of value to the high profile people (like celebrities), whether those people actually deserve that respect or not. This adds to a executive's "perceived" value, but can't really be justified using an objective criteria.
That's true of _every_ professional job though - to be competent, you've got to have a lot of schooling, experience (and hopefully some natural intelligence). Many CEOs might work hard, but they're certainly not working 100x as hard as other hard workers in the company.
I'm still taking exception with your assumption that it is entirely up to the CEO whether a company can be turned around, or whether the company's future is entirely dependent on the decisions of that CEO. That completely ignores all the contributions of all of the people who are implementing the CEO's decisions, and makes it seem like the CEO was singlehandedly responsible for "turning the company around" or "leading the company to excellence".
In reality, the CEO is just one of many people who are responsible for improving a company's performance, but because of a CEO's close relationship with the shareholders & executive compensation boards, there is a strong psychological tendency for those bodies to give the CEO most of the credit (and therefore most of the compensation).
That's a common piece of propaganda as to why CEOs (and other executives) get paid so much (setting aside the obviously idiotic golden-parachutes-after-running-a-company-into-the-ground scenarios), but the executives are hardly doing all of the work themselves.
Just as it is hard for the employees to be productive without having some kind of vision directing them, a visionary executive is pretty damn worthless unless he/she has people who can competently implement that vision.
In many cases, the employees are taking MUCH more of a risk than any of the executives - when the company is doing badly, a lot of employees usually find themselves without jobs, and are left to figure out how they are going to take care of their families. There aren't too many executives that are going to find themselves living out of their cars even if they royally screw over a multi-million revenue company.
The so-called risk & value that even well-respected CEOs provide to their company is often wildly overstated, and is more of a function of the "buddy-buddy" relationship they have with the people who set their compensation, rather than an objective look at the relative value they are providing to the company, and the personal risk they are taking.
There's only one person in this thread who is looking like an idiot, and I'm feeling like Einstein compared to you. I'd suggest you follow your own advice, although I suspect your tiny little mind has already reached its full growth and can only look forward to deterioration from this point. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have far to go until bottom, so you probably won't miss it much.
Let's see:
1) people who think they deserve special laws so they can extort more money out of people than they would otherwise be able to get in a normal "free" market, vs.
2) people who think they should be able to use their own physical private property that they've bought & paid for without third party restrictions being forced on them.
Who exactly is being "greedier"? Since when do people "deserve" to be paid a lot of money just because they did a lot of hard work?
That's probably a good use for one of those zombie networks (at least for wiretapping e-mail, IM chat type of traffic, entering text into web site boxes). The type of person who ends up getting their machine zombified is probably also the sort of person who thinks they don't care about their traffic being snooped.
I sincerely doubt that a judge would be able to force you to do something blatantly against the law, like to kill someone, publish vital national security secrets, or stuff like that. They aren't dictators; they have only the power that the laws give them, even in their own courtroom.
That probably depends on whether the court's decision is legal or not. Although some judges certainly act like it is otherwise, they DO usually have limits on their power. (Of course, different countries will have different limits.)
Your description is more detailed than my memory; it seems like I've remembered more the "revolutionary vanguard" part for my Phase 2 than what I thought was the Marxist version, possibly because the description of most of the communist revolutions that I've read about seem to fit your description of that model than the Marxist one.
You're placing too much emphasis on the word "government".
You should be a little more abstract and fear "large organizations", which would include governments AND companies. (There are, of course, other forms of organization, but governments & companies are the only ones I can think of which become large enough to become a serious problem to societal health.)
Any organization that grows large enough, whether it be government or company, is more likely to become both corrupt & have the resources to crush opposition.
Maybe balanced with anti-bullshit legislation.