That Milton is considered a great author - while being quite an unpleasant chore to read for nearly everyone - shows the problem with the critics who appoint themselves arbiters of high culture. They keep their positions by claiming to revere works that no one wants to read, thus making the job seem like real work and distinguishing their "taste" from that of everyone else. The cost is having to at least pretend to have read some pretty awful stuff and to be friends with some pretty dreadful people, the payoff - well, it beats working for a living, and as a side benefit one can sneer at the real artists.
I generally agree with the GP post's suggestions, aside from Ian Banks (many people like him, but he seems a bit flat to me.) Your suggestions also seem a bit flat to me, with the exception of Vernor Vinge, who I can't recommend highly enough.
On Gene Wolfe: "Award-winning science fiction author Michael Swanwick has said: 'Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it.'" Similar statements are also made by many others, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Neil Gaiman. A good book to start is Shadow and Claw.
Jack Vance is Gene Wolfe's favorite writer, and Tales of the Dying Earth is his favorite book by Vance. (Vance has a near-religious following. Sets of his collected works (the 44 volume "Vance Integral Edition" of 2005) have more than doubled in price. - $3,500 and up.)
These two have written far better books than any mainstream modern author. It is no exaggeration to rate them with Tolkien, Melville, or Poe.
Not even. Patents are just an expensive license to sue, and actually suing costs millions. Patents may somewhat improve the prospects for finding a venture capitalist to fuck you, but they are rarely enforceable even in the US, even with gobs of cash, especially if they are a fundamental advance or a mere improvement on existing methods (which pretty much covers all potentially profitable patents).
So? The big international businesses are already based here, and totally ripping us off. If we change the rules, they will have no alternative to repatriate their real profits and pay the full tax. The importers too can be made to pay in tariffs the difference between their slave-labor, no-safety, no-benefits, ultra-polluting China prices and what it would cost them to produce in the US. (Plus penalties.) Not that that will happen, considering the endemic corruption in both countries. This is the only policy that could pull the US back from the brink of destruction, and then only if the war profiteering contractors' receipts are cut back to 2000 levels or below. But it's not going to happen. The US is headed for the shit-pile of self-destructive empires.
Correct. What the Brits did to Iceland was an act of war. I encourage Iceland to take every low-risk opportunity to retaliate, including to have all the Brits who conspired listed with Interpol.
You're about the 50th person to mention HIPAA. It doesn't mandate what any of you think it does. It is only about patient information, and has absolutely nothing to say about staff schedules. Even if it did, the SSL set up on the schedule server would be good enough to comply unless the implementation were outrageously faullty, and even then the odds of a suit would be essentially zero.
Also, everyone mentioning HIPAA seems to be engaging in the IT equivalent of security theater. HIPAA does not effectively protect patient information from any government, police or insurance company. Read that last sentence again! No patient information is secure if it is on a network, and it isn't even legally secure - no matter where it is - if a government agency wants to know, or if you want your insurance to pay for treatment. (And if you pay out of your own pocket you get a much, much higher price than the insurance pays, and insurance companies will be able to see your records anyway with only slight difficulty.)
It seems to me that there is an equivalent to Godwin's law for the "Dunning-Kruger" effect. 1. As a discussion of any contentious topic goes on, the odds of the Dunning-Kruger effect being cited approach 1. 2. The person first mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect will be the person to which the Dunning-Kruger effect most applies.
It seems to me that this type of situation arises all the time. IT should be providing virtual servers on their hardware for such demands, and a migration path from the user-administrated initiatives to IT administered production services as the application becomes relied upon more for critical functions.
Right on! Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services, (not "the goat with a thousand young", more like "the ass with a thousand cracks") seems to have posted along with all of his/its clones in this thread. If they won't do what is requested, they must be bypassed or fired. They don't seem to understand that they aren't meant to have any power to delay or prevent use of computers and networks for whatever the real producers say they want to do. Advise, fine. Try to get broad support for more integrated solutions, fine. But if they don't provide requested services immediately, if they carve out fiefdoms and try to throw their weight around, pretending to be "administrators" and "owners" they need to be replaced. Their value somewhere between janitor and mechanic, they should not put on airs.
Bravo! Most of the people commenting are bitter little men, support drones and grey cogs with delusions of competence who have obviously never worked with systems that interface with the real world.
Good points. The comments left here by others reinforce my dim view of the typical hospital IT morlock as making the BOfH look like Albert Schweitzer. I have had some contact with hospital politics and networks (particularly medical records systems, VISTA, and laboratory automation) and they make the software and policies in the baby Bells' core networks seem positively open and modern. Give thanks to god that all they want is a logon account - many would insist on being the only ones with root access, would delay the project until a few thousand pages of policies were developed and approved (i.e. never), would simultaneously insist on hardware ownership and that it not come from their budget, might insist on using some character-based abomination from the 70s that comes with their vendor's horrific multi-million dollar per year package license.... cross the arrogance of a surgeon, the hidebound idiocy of an HR drone, and the unreasonable bureaucratic malevolence of an IRS auditor, and you have the typical hospital IT manager. Count yourself lucky, give them a logon and congratulate yourself on the pissing contest you have avoided.
I agree with you, local production can handle building these things - some things will have to be imported, of course - engines, fasteners, chips, tires, hydraulic tubing, paint,.... many things... but the frame, sheet metal, some machining, the integration, and finishing can all be done locally, and these will likely account for a large part of the end value. More importantly, these machines are designed to be fixed locally and cheaply, and provide capabilities that aren't currently available. (Commercial machines are much larger and more expensive, out of the reach of the vast majority of small farmers anywhere.)
Having such a general-capability local industry should act as a seed which grows and increases its capabilities, with a profit motive to undertake more specialized tasks for which imports are expensive. The open-source nature of the designs allows tinkering, and selling the machines with improved design, thus allowing local producers to differentiate their offerings and potentially sell not only to users in various markets but also to other producers who don't want to work out the bugs of the improved product's manufacturing themselves. The quality of manufacturing will also differentiate different producers, even on a standard design.
The people making negative comments here really need to go look at the designs and see the videos and pictures of the several machines which have already been prototyped. This is not vaporware, nor are these machines things that some do-gooder thinks the third world needs but wouldn't actually use himself - the lead man on this project tried to make a go of farming, but fixing his tractor nearly bankrupted him. He's still young enough to keep going for 30-50 years, he's smart (fusion physics PhD), and he's attracting many competent people to work in the full range of different disciplines needed as well as hundreds of donors each month.
This is a hugely important project with a high likelihood of success.
The truth is farming takes energy, distributing food takes transportation and nothing is better at storing energy than hydrocarbons. We can't just throw up our hands and say the world needs to go back to scratching in the dirt with a stick and harvesting with a sickle without effectively mandating the deaths of billions.
One of the 50 machines that the project is building is a 50kW wind turbine. Modular high-temperature solar troughs are proposed, too, along with steam generators. Another machine is a proven super-long life nickel-iron storage battery. When the research is in and the process really works, they might add equipment for converting solar-thermal to fuels, or cellulosic ethanol production, but in the meantime IC engines running petroleum are the only practical alternative to starvation. Also, the equipment being made is often far more energy efficient - take a look at the micro tractor, for instance.
On monoculture and soil health: Their proposed 3-foot swath combine harvester will encourage small fields with a variety of different plants, narrow terracing for erosion prevention (further enabled by the earth-moving equipment) and local grain production. While they have built a rototiller that isn't good for the soil, a spading machine that has low-impact on the soil is in the works. Their seeder is designed to handle all sizes of seeds from clover to potatoes, further enabling multiculture and crop rotation.
"...did you really have what it takes to bother with Harvard?" The question is, is it really worth bothering with a school that can't even manage to write grammatical sentences, let alone coherent questions for its entrance exam? If the teaching is of the same quality, and I doubt it was even that high, then another school would be a better choice. Harvard has always been ridiculously overrated, but it did serve to sweep in social climbers. Gentlemen preferred Yale or Princeton.
If you want an education, avoid university, instead read important books on important subjects. Think about what they mean. Blog about them and their applications. Edit Wikipedia. Argue in cafes and online, make videos presenting your rhetorical skills and post them on YouTube. Self-directed reading of a thousand pages a week and writing of ten or fifteen is a far better education than any regular institution can provide - the latter is really administering aversive conditioning against thought and knowledge. But don't expect anybody to care about actual education. It has no advantages whatsoever in America, quite the reverse.
School is not about education, but about getting your ticket punched, proving a willingness to submit to bureaucracy and jump through hoops. Today's top universities don't care what you know when you enter or when you leave, so long as you pass 120 credit hours in the arbitrarily prescribed categories and pay them for every credit (no transfer or AP credits allowed for most of the first-rank schools). Things used to be different. The 1869 Harvard exam allowed entering as a sophomore. Around 1900 they would allow qualified students to enter several years early. Harvard actually educated back then - in the 1920s the average IQ of Harvard students was about 115-120, (even less in today's terms), so the results were because of good teaching rather than perfect raw material, whereas today the teaching is often not as good as a community college while the student body is mostly valedictorians with near-perfect test scores. If you want an education, one can still be obtained at Harvard, albeit mostly in the science of repeating the professor's preconceptions back in a flattering way. Education is not the point of such schools today, though - they are purely pre-employment screening.
Well, your overall point that China is unlikely to invade any of its neighbors anytime soon seems correct to me, but the clueless and propaganda-stuffed way you chose to "support" your point also seems quite representative of the Chinese people.
The Japanese are "rebel Chinese nationals that fled to Japan, subverted the indigenous people...", but then: "the Chinese populated Taiwan ". Uh huh. Nobody lived in Taiwan before then? Except the natives, of course, and they don't count. Also, "subverted" isn't the same word as "subjugated". And Korea isn't China, even if nominally Han, and it contributed more to Japan's ruling class in the 5th-8th centuries than China (not that the Japanese like to admit it).
"Tibet tried to take over China, China fought back and over the next thousand years, China won out in the struggle and put down the occasional rebels." Simply breathtaking. Did you even read your link? It doesn't support that sweeping elision of history.
"Most of Asia can trace their post-Jesus roots to Chinese ancestry." Most of Asia is former Soviet states, who are not mostly notably Chinese-looking. Unless you want to claim that the Huns, Mongols, Turkmen/Uighur, and Scythian/Celt/Tocharian-related peoples are really Chinese (by which you mean Han, unless it suits propaganda) since all of them at least used to live within the bloated modern borders of China? Or maybe you're referring to just east Asians? The whole idea that the Han are somehow the real Chinese and all other east Asians are derived from them is... appallingly racist, malignantly nationalist, absurdly jingoistic and utterly ahistorical. Conflating the various ancient empires of various peoples covering shifting scraps of today's China (styled dynasties, but really separate institutions) and retroactively calling them all Chinese is silly, even if most scholars play along. The idea that every piece of land that some ancient emperor (who quite likely wasn't Han) claimed, no matter how tenuously, is part of modern China is also silly. What isn't silly is what the Han Chinese have done to the Tibetans over the past.few decades. Or their own culture, for that matter, an ugly legacy of Mao that lingers even when the famines, man-made disasters and most of the worst of the mass murders and reign of terror are over (give or take a few tens of thousands cut up for parts in the last decade).
The NYT supports power and the status quo. (See David Brooks or Thomas Friedman for sickening examples.) The NYT never calls what Bush did torture, but have no trouble using the term when the same things are done by other countries.
Anyway, suppressing dissent openly isn't the point of the psy-ops in the corporate media - better to give the illusion of a vigorous free market of ideas. Managing dissent is the method of choice, keeping dissent diffuse and ineffective, monitored yet unreported, constantly cultivating emotional fatigue with some new transient outrage while, of course, never connecting the dots on the long-term design of curtailing of personal freedoms and the implementation of an authoritarian surveillance state.
Why do you think there are so few stories that become news each day? Why are even the most trivial ones reported in synchrony? Why is there no investigative reporting, no sharp questioning at press conferences, no examination of the shady things that media owning corporations do? It didn't just happen - a community of powerful tacit interests made the media what it long has been. Everything you read or see in the major media outlets is there for a reason, to control your opinions and your behavior for power and profit, especially the bits that are dressed up to look like dissent - it's all made to manipulate your opinion. Insofar as dissent is effective or independent, principled or reasoned, it isn't ever accurately reported. The American people are owned, their thoughts dictated to nearly the same degree as those in China.
If the people in any place believe they are free and their opinions are their own, they will never rebel, they'll just keep working for their owners and watching TV. That's why the first step of any large-scale change must be to subvert people's belief in and reliance on mass media (and those pseudo-alternative sources which serve the same masters.) This can be done by: first, never consume mainstream media, instead take it apart, figure out what they are pushing, why, and what psychological tactics they are using to sell it.
second, find alternative sources and be just as critical
third, don't accept the list of topics that has been in the mainstream news as worthy of conversation; scoff and use the same marginalizing tactics that the professional talking heads use, but against their agenda. If done well, this makes groupthink seem socially risky to those with whom you are talking.
fourth, bring up important topics in conversation that are not on the mainstream agenda, preferably ones that are not well known controversies ("conspiracies", etc.), not because they may not be true and important, but because it is more effective to shape unformed areas of thought rather than mount a frontal attack on well-inculcated prejudices. Have an agenda for how the topic and the way you present it should shape your listeners outlook and opinions (eg, towards insight into hidden truths, or away from trust of media and authorities, etc.), adopt an attitude of confidence that your listener is a smart person like yourself, who will naturally be of the same mind, and make your conversation advance the agenda. Use the gambits and tactics gleaned from your critical watching and reading, and don't assume that truth and goodness can look out for themselves nor that people believe things because of rational arguments. Rhetorical and psychological techniques are indispensable to counteracting media's manipulation - nothing less powerful will be effective.
fifth, note what works and use it in ways that reach more people- articles, blog posts, videos, public gatherings and so forth. Try to get others to not only be critical of media, but to train others to be critical.
The crucial factor in adoption of a currency is whether the government accepts the currency to pay taxes. Other large sectors of the economy could achieve nearly the same effect: landlords, utilities, banks, insurance, or energy - but there are usually no more than four layers of government for any given district, so the impact of one of those layers accepting a currency is greater than the adoption of the currency by any one provider in a market with many competing players. The experiment in Wörgl, in which the depression-era mayor of an Austrian town issued a stamp-script (negative-interest) currency which was good for paying taxes illustrates this:
On July 31, 1932 the town administrator purchased the first lot of Bills from the Welfare Committee for a total face value of 1,800 Schillings and used it to pay wages. These first wages paid out were returned to the community on almost the same day as tax payments. By the third day it was thought that the Bills had been counterfeited because the 1000 Schillings issued had already accounted for 5,100 Schillings in unpaid taxes. Michael Unterguggenberger knew better, the velocity of money had increased and his Worgl money was working.
The initial stimulus was far less than the economic activity from paying taxes. This was compounded by the backlog of unpaid public and private bills.
The other crucial factor was the way that the currency was negative interest - stamps had to be bought and affixed periodically to keep a note valid. This discouraged hoarding and increased the velocity of money as people wanted to avoid paying for stamps themselves by instead paying the money to sellers and creditors. This negative interest also made the net present value (NPV) of sustainable but low-return long-term investments greater than holding cash. An investment that merely returned the invested principal after 20-years could still be a good investment compared to paying for the stamps needed to hold cash, whereas in conventional positive interest-bearing currencies the NPV of such an investment would be less than 55% of what was invested, even at 3% annual interest.
That's an excellent idea, and not just for the original money-producers. Charging a periodic amount to keep currency... current has several beneficial effects: the velocity of money increases, trade increases, long-term investment increases. Look up "demurrage", "Wörgl", "Silvio Gessel", "stamp script" and "negative-interest currency" for more on why.
Liberty Dollars' face values were always substantially higher than the current market price of silver. The face values (and sale prices) on the silver coins went from $10 to $20 to $50 per troy ounce. Given the nice designs, pure silver and fine minting I don't think the markup was unreasonable. Old, non-numismatic bulk US coins were a much better buy in terms of silver content/USD, though, and had less risk.
The Liberty Dollar coins in silver, gold, platinum and copper were prominently marked "USA" "Liberty" and "Trust in God", "Dollars" and "$", so the feds do have a case, albeit not a good one since they had been consulted ahead of time and allowed the business to go on for over 10 years. Silver and gold certificates somewhat similar to US notes were also circulated, but were likely too different in design and color to be confused.
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That Milton is considered a great author - while being quite an unpleasant chore to read for nearly everyone - shows the problem with the critics who appoint themselves arbiters of high culture. They keep their positions by claiming to revere works that no one wants to read, thus making the job seem like real work and distinguishing their "taste" from that of everyone else. The cost is having to at least pretend to have read some pretty awful stuff and to be friends with some pretty dreadful people, the payoff - well, it beats working for a living, and as a side benefit one can sneer at the real artists.
I generally agree with the GP post's suggestions, aside from Ian Banks (many people like him, but he seems a bit flat to me.) Your suggestions also seem a bit flat to me, with the exception of Vernor Vinge, who I can't recommend highly enough.
Other greats who should be mentioned: Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance
On Gene Wolfe: "Award-winning science fiction author Michael Swanwick has said: 'Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it.'" Similar statements are also made by many others, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Neil Gaiman. A good book to start is Shadow and Claw.
Jack Vance is Gene Wolfe's favorite writer, and Tales of the Dying Earth is his favorite book by Vance. (Vance has a near-religious following. Sets of his collected works (the 44 volume "Vance Integral Edition" of 2005) have more than doubled in price. - $3,500 and up.)
These two have written far better books than any mainstream modern author. It is no exaggeration to rate them with Tolkien, Melville, or Poe.
"You can expect to enforce them locally"
Not even. Patents are just an expensive license to sue, and actually suing costs millions. Patents may somewhat improve the prospects for finding a venture capitalist to fuck you, but they are rarely enforceable even in the US, even with gobs of cash, especially if they are a fundamental advance or a mere improvement on existing methods (which pretty much covers all potentially profitable patents).
Margaret's Hope white tea makes the average Darjeeling taste like Lipton.
Which should also be a warning to the Christians and the Jews trying to enforce the dictates of their own hateful dogmatic claptrap, BTW.
They started to believe too much in their idiotic religion.
So? The big international businesses are already based here, and totally ripping us off. If we change the rules, they will have no alternative to repatriate their real profits and pay the full tax. The importers too can be made to pay in tariffs the difference between their slave-labor, no-safety, no-benefits, ultra-polluting China prices and what it would cost them to produce in the US. (Plus penalties.) Not that that will happen, considering the endemic corruption in both countries. This is the only policy that could pull the US back from the brink of destruction, and then only if the war profiteering contractors' receipts are cut back to 2000 levels or below. But it's not going to happen. The US is headed for the shit-pile of self-destructive empires.
Correct. What the Brits did to Iceland was an act of war. I encourage Iceland to take every low-risk opportunity to retaliate, including to have all the Brits who conspired listed with Interpol.
You're about the 50th person to mention HIPAA. It doesn't mandate what any of you think it does. It is only about patient information, and has absolutely nothing to say about staff schedules. Even if it did, the SSL set up on the schedule server would be good enough to comply unless the implementation were outrageously faullty, and even then the odds of a suit would be essentially zero.
Also, everyone mentioning HIPAA seems to be engaging in the IT equivalent of security theater. HIPAA does not effectively protect patient information from any government, police or insurance company. Read that last sentence again! No patient information is secure if it is on a network, and it isn't even legally secure - no matter where it is - if a government agency wants to know, or if you want your insurance to pay for treatment. (And if you pay out of your own pocket you get a much, much higher price than the insurance pays, and insurance companies will be able to see your records anyway with only slight difficulty.)
It seems to me that there is an equivalent to Godwin's law for the "Dunning-Kruger" effect.
1. As a discussion of any contentious topic goes on, the odds of the Dunning-Kruger effect being cited approach 1.
2. The person first mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect will be the person to which the Dunning-Kruger effect most applies.
It seems to me that this type of situation arises all the time. IT should be providing virtual servers on their hardware for such demands, and a migration path from the user-administrated initiatives to IT administered production services as the application becomes relied upon more for critical functions.
Schedules change. Updates are the most important information.
I like the way you think.
Right on! Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services, (not "the goat with a thousand young", more like "the ass with a thousand cracks") seems to have posted along with all of his/its clones in this thread. If they won't do what is requested, they must be bypassed or fired. They don't seem to understand that they aren't meant to have any power to delay or prevent use of computers and networks for whatever the real producers say they want to do. Advise, fine. Try to get broad support for more integrated solutions, fine. But if they don't provide requested services immediately, if they carve out fiefdoms and try to throw their weight around, pretending to be "administrators" and "owners" they need to be replaced. Their value somewhere between janitor and mechanic, they should not put on airs.
Bravo! Most of the people commenting are bitter little men, support drones and grey cogs with delusions of competence who have obviously never worked with systems that interface with the real world.
Good points. The comments left here by others reinforce my dim view of the typical hospital IT morlock as making the BOfH look like Albert Schweitzer. I have had some contact with hospital politics and networks (particularly medical records systems, VISTA, and laboratory automation) and they make the software and policies in the baby Bells' core networks seem positively open and modern. Give thanks to god that all they want is a logon account - many would insist on being the only ones with root access, would delay the project until a few thousand pages of policies were developed and approved (i.e. never), would simultaneously insist on hardware ownership and that it not come from their budget, might insist on using some character-based abomination from the 70s that comes with their vendor's horrific multi-million dollar per year package license.... cross the arrogance of a surgeon, the hidebound idiocy of an HR drone, and the unreasonable bureaucratic malevolence of an IRS auditor, and you have the typical hospital IT manager. Count yourself lucky, give them a logon and congratulate yourself on the pissing contest you have avoided.
I agree with you, local production can handle building these things - some things will have to be imported, of course - engines, fasteners, chips, tires, hydraulic tubing, paint,.... many things... but the frame, sheet metal, some machining, the integration, and finishing can all be done locally, and these will likely account for a large part of the end value. More importantly, these machines are designed to be fixed locally and cheaply, and provide capabilities that aren't currently available. (Commercial machines are much larger and more expensive, out of the reach of the vast majority of small farmers anywhere.)
Having such a general-capability local industry should act as a seed which grows and increases its capabilities, with a profit motive to undertake more specialized tasks for which imports are expensive. The open-source nature of the designs allows tinkering, and selling the machines with improved design, thus allowing local producers to differentiate their offerings and potentially sell not only to users in various markets but also to other producers who don't want to work out the bugs of the improved product's manufacturing themselves. The quality of manufacturing will also differentiate different producers, even on a standard design.
The people making negative comments here really need to go look at the designs and see the videos and pictures of the several machines which have already been prototyped. This is not vaporware, nor are these machines things that some do-gooder thinks the third world needs but wouldn't actually use himself - the lead man on this project tried to make a go of farming, but fixing his tractor nearly bankrupted him. He's still young enough to keep going for 30-50 years, he's smart (fusion physics PhD), and he's attracting many competent people to work in the full range of different disciplines needed as well as hundreds of donors each month.
This is a hugely important project with a high likelihood of success.
The truth is farming takes energy, distributing food takes transportation and nothing is better at storing energy than hydrocarbons. We can't just throw up our hands and say the world needs to go back to scratching in the dirt with a stick and harvesting with a sickle without effectively mandating the deaths of billions.
One of the 50 machines that the project is building is a 50kW wind turbine. Modular high-temperature solar troughs are proposed, too, along with steam generators. Another machine is a proven super-long life nickel-iron storage battery. When the research is in and the process really works, they might add equipment for converting solar-thermal to fuels, or cellulosic ethanol production, but in the meantime IC engines running petroleum are the only practical alternative to starvation. Also, the equipment being made is often far more energy efficient - take a look at the micro tractor, for instance.
On monoculture and soil health:
Their proposed 3-foot swath combine harvester will encourage small fields with a variety of different plants, narrow terracing for erosion prevention (further enabled by the earth-moving equipment) and local grain production. While they have built a rototiller that isn't good for the soil, a spading machine that has low-impact on the soil is in the works. Their seeder is designed to handle all sizes of seeds from clover to potatoes, further enabling multiculture and crop rotation.
"...did you really have what it takes to bother with Harvard?" The question is, is it really worth bothering with a school that can't even manage to write grammatical sentences, let alone coherent questions for its entrance exam? If the teaching is of the same quality, and I doubt it was even that high, then another school would be a better choice. Harvard has always been ridiculously overrated, but it did serve to sweep in social climbers. Gentlemen preferred Yale or Princeton.
If you want an education, avoid university, instead read important books on important subjects. Think about what they mean. Blog about them and their applications. Edit Wikipedia. Argue in cafes and online, make videos presenting your rhetorical skills and post them on YouTube. Self-directed reading of a thousand pages a week and writing of ten or fifteen is a far better education than any regular institution can provide - the latter is really administering aversive conditioning against thought and knowledge. But don't expect anybody to care about actual education. It has no advantages whatsoever in America, quite the reverse.
School is not about education, but about getting your ticket punched, proving a willingness to submit to bureaucracy and jump through hoops. Today's top universities don't care what you know when you enter or when you leave, so long as you pass 120 credit hours in the arbitrarily prescribed categories and pay them for every credit (no transfer or AP credits allowed for most of the first-rank schools). Things used to be different. The 1869 Harvard exam allowed entering as a sophomore. Around 1900 they would allow qualified students to enter several years early. Harvard actually educated back then - in the 1920s the average IQ of Harvard students was about 115-120, (even less in today's terms), so the results were because of good teaching rather than perfect raw material, whereas today the teaching is often not as good as a community college while the student body is mostly valedictorians with near-perfect test scores. If you want an education, one can still be obtained at Harvard, albeit mostly in the science of repeating the professor's preconceptions back in a flattering way. Education is not the point of such schools today, though - they are purely pre-employment screening.
Well, your overall point that China is unlikely to invade any of its neighbors anytime soon seems correct to me, but the clueless and propaganda-stuffed way you chose to "support" your point also seems quite representative of the Chinese people.
The Japanese are "rebel Chinese nationals that fled to Japan, subverted the indigenous people...", but then: "the Chinese populated Taiwan ". Uh huh. Nobody lived in Taiwan before then? Except the natives, of course, and they don't count. Also, "subverted" isn't the same word as "subjugated". And Korea isn't China, even if nominally Han, and it contributed more to Japan's ruling class in the 5th-8th centuries than China (not that the Japanese like to admit it).
"Tibet tried to take over China, China fought back and over the next thousand years, China won out in the struggle and put down the occasional rebels." Simply breathtaking. Did you even read your link? It doesn't support that sweeping elision of history.
"Most of Asia can trace their post-Jesus roots to Chinese ancestry." Most of Asia is former Soviet states, who are not mostly notably Chinese-looking. Unless you want to claim that the Huns, Mongols, Turkmen/Uighur, and Scythian/Celt/Tocharian-related peoples are really Chinese (by which you mean Han, unless it suits propaganda) since all of them at least used to live within the bloated modern borders of China? Or maybe you're referring to just east Asians? The whole idea that the Han are somehow the real Chinese and all other east Asians are derived from them is... appallingly racist, malignantly nationalist, absurdly jingoistic and utterly ahistorical. Conflating the various ancient empires of various peoples covering shifting scraps of today's China (styled dynasties, but really separate institutions) and retroactively calling them all Chinese is silly, even if most scholars play along. The idea that every piece of land that some ancient emperor (who quite likely wasn't Han) claimed, no matter how tenuously, is part of modern China is also silly. What isn't silly is what the Han Chinese have done to the Tibetans over the past .few decades. Or their own culture, for that matter, an ugly legacy of Mao that lingers even when the famines, man-made disasters and most of the worst of the mass murders and reign of terror are over (give or take a few tens of thousands cut up for parts in the last decade).
The NYT supports power and the status quo. (See David Brooks or Thomas Friedman for sickening examples.) The NYT never calls what Bush did torture, but have no trouble using the term when the same things are done by other countries.
Anyway, suppressing dissent openly isn't the point of the psy-ops in the corporate media - better to give the illusion of a vigorous free market of ideas. Managing dissent is the method of choice, keeping dissent diffuse and ineffective, monitored yet unreported, constantly cultivating emotional fatigue with some new transient outrage while, of course, never connecting the dots on the long-term design of curtailing of personal freedoms and the implementation of an authoritarian surveillance state.
Why do you think there are so few stories that become news each day? Why are even the most trivial ones reported in synchrony? Why is there no investigative reporting, no sharp questioning at press conferences, no examination of the shady things that media owning corporations do? It didn't just happen - a community of powerful tacit interests made the media what it long has been. Everything you read or see in the major media outlets is there for a reason, to control your opinions and your behavior for power and profit, especially the bits that are dressed up to look like dissent - it's all made to manipulate your opinion. Insofar as dissent is effective or independent, principled or reasoned, it isn't ever accurately reported. The American people are owned, their thoughts dictated to nearly the same degree as those in China.
If the people in any place believe they are free and their opinions are their own, they will never rebel, they'll just keep working for their owners and watching TV. That's why the first step of any large-scale change must be to subvert people's belief in and reliance on mass media (and those pseudo-alternative sources which serve the same masters.) This can be done by:
first, never consume mainstream media, instead take it apart, figure out what they are pushing, why, and what psychological tactics they are using to sell it.
second, find alternative sources and be just as critical
third, don't accept the list of topics that has been in the mainstream news as worthy of conversation; scoff and use the same marginalizing tactics that the professional talking heads use, but against their agenda. If done well, this makes groupthink seem socially risky to those with whom you are talking.
fourth, bring up important topics in conversation that are not on the mainstream agenda, preferably ones that are not well known controversies ("conspiracies", etc.), not because they may not be true and important, but because it is more effective to shape unformed areas of thought rather than mount a frontal attack on well-inculcated prejudices. Have an agenda for how the topic and the way you present it should shape your listeners outlook and opinions (eg, towards insight into hidden truths, or away from trust of media and authorities, etc.), adopt an attitude of confidence that your listener is a smart person like yourself, who will naturally be of the same mind, and make your conversation advance the agenda. Use the gambits and tactics gleaned from your critical watching and reading, and don't assume that truth and goodness can look out for themselves nor that people believe things because of rational arguments. Rhetorical and psychological techniques are indispensable to counteracting media's manipulation - nothing less powerful will be effective.
fifth, note what works and use it in ways that reach more people- articles, blog posts, videos, public gatherings and so forth. Try to get others to not only be critical of media, but to train others to be critical.
The crucial factor in adoption of a currency is whether the government accepts the currency to pay taxes. Other large sectors of the economy could achieve nearly the same effect: landlords, utilities, banks, insurance, or energy - but there are usually no more than four layers of government for any given district, so the impact of one of those layers accepting a currency is greater than the adoption of the currency by any one provider in a market with many competing players. The experiment in Wörgl, in which the depression-era mayor of an Austrian town issued a stamp-script (negative-interest) currency which was good for paying taxes illustrates this:
(From:An Experiment in Worgl
The initial stimulus was far less than the economic activity from paying taxes. This was compounded by the backlog of unpaid public and private bills.
The other crucial factor was the way that the currency was negative interest - stamps had to be bought and affixed periodically to keep a note valid. This discouraged hoarding and increased the velocity of money as people wanted to avoid paying for stamps themselves by instead paying the money to sellers and creditors. This negative interest also made the net present value (NPV) of sustainable but low-return long-term investments greater than holding cash. An investment that merely returned the invested principal after 20-years could still be a good investment compared to paying for the stamps needed to hold cash, whereas in conventional positive interest-bearing currencies the NPV of such an investment would be less than 55% of what was invested, even at 3% annual interest.
That's an excellent idea, and not just for the original money-producers. Charging a periodic amount to keep currency... current has several beneficial effects: the velocity of money increases, trade increases, long-term investment increases. Look up "demurrage", "Wörgl", "Silvio Gessel", "stamp script" and "negative-interest currency" for more on why.
Here's a good introduction : An Experiment in Wörgl
Liberty Dollars' face values were always substantially higher than the current market price of silver. The face values (and sale prices) on the silver coins went from $10 to $20 to $50 per troy ounce. Given the nice designs, pure silver and fine minting I don't think the markup was unreasonable. Old, non-numismatic bulk US coins were a much better buy in terms of silver content/USD, though, and had less risk.
The Liberty Dollar coins in silver, gold, platinum and copper were prominently marked "USA" "Liberty" and "Trust in God", "Dollars" and "$", so the feds do have a case, albeit not a good one since they had been consulted ahead of time and allowed the business to go on for over 10 years. Silver and gold certificates somewhat similar to US notes were also circulated, but were likely too different in design and color to be confused.