Down's Syndrome, even with gene therapy wouldn't be easy to fix, since you're not changing a gene, you actually have to change the number of chromosomes.
There are clearly beneficial things that gene therapy can do. You could probably do some beneficial things for the human genome by doing plain old selective breeding.
The problem is when you push that through by not addressing the moral or ethical questions head-on, but simply pushing a new morality and waiting for opposition to die off.
Sort of like the old arguments against usury. Yes, our current world is, in part, based on the ability to be lent money with the ability for people to get interest. This increases the number of people willing to lend money and improves the economy.
Of course, we also see that it allows for a corrosive effect on poorer people who, instead of getting help from the community, are pushed into loans as the solution to their problems. Not to mention those people who push poorer people to buy more than they can pay for by getting loans with high rates.
Are loans a good thing? Debatable, but certainly have some positives. Can they destroy lives and have a corrosive influence on whole groups of people? Very much so. And yet we consider the old morality against "usury" to be quaint.
That's what I call the progressive fallacy, though. Clearly, it will be better to do this because in the future it will be different, and everything is always better in the future. Because future.
If you have a moral problem with something, the best way to deal with is simply define new morality and wait for everyone to die or get sidelined who is in favor of the status quo. I mean, isn't that what progressive basically means? We have moved on from something to something else, and because we have "progressed", it is now better. I feel great, and I have a new iPhone, and gene therapy cured the cystic fibrosis that allowed my cousin to live to the age of 25 so he could then become a drug addict, beat his girlfriend, and steal money from his parents from their social security payments.
And if you don't think it is better, it's child abuse. Just like those people who actually dare let their children leave their sight and do things on their own. Thank goodness someone is there to call the cops on those assholes and make sure they end up in a nice safe foster home.
That tends to suggest, however, that Apple cares that you lose your device. They don't.
Oh sure, they don't want your device to be brittle or stop working in high humidity or other moist ambient conditions, because people will not get enough use out of the devices to make them worth buying again. But that's not the same thing as them giving a crap if you are clumsy and drop it in a fountain or toilet somewhere.
The small amount of water resistance that removing that jack would add would not add much, if anything to the value of that phone. They probably made a ordered list of improvements to the phone, and someone mentioned water resistance somewhere close to the bottom. You can imagine that they swapped the place on that list for "water resistance" with "shareholder value" when they went to press with the marketing material.
Apple has always been that way. Steve Jobs always wanted to make things into appliances that you didn't dig into the internals of from the beginning. Partly from aesthetics, partly out of making it feel magical, and partly because it makes people need to replace that stuff with new Apple products. Replacing your battery would never have made it into an iPhone. Ever. Not while Steve Jobs was alive, and probably not while Tim Cook is CEO either.
If you know what you are getting with an Apple device, you will never be surprised. I personally have no issue with their philosophy, with the understanding that if I don't want to spend the cash on their stuff, I need to go get an Android phone.
Of course, I note that all of my iPhones other than my first, have been provided by the place I work. So, I am not trying to suggest that the Apple way of buying things all the time is a great idea. I might have an Android phone now if my iPhone was not provided. Although I should point out, I do have other Android devices, and they have some big, if somewhat different, problems too.
Yes. Water resistance for an iPhone is a ridiculous reason to remove the headphone jack. It's complete and total bullshit.
I can buy the idea that they might want to make it thinner, even though I don't personally give a shit if it gets any thinner, and might be worried if it gets too thin.
It probably does improve cost, at least a little.
But the two reasons that they are really doing it are:
1. They believe it is "the future". I think they may be sincere in this, even though as always, the definition of "progressive" seems to be whatever people want it to be because it is a completely subjective concept. 2. They can make more money on Apple accessories by removing a standard connector. And of course, having the Beats deal only makes this more of a thing they might want to do.
For profit universities tended to promise placement.
However, public and private non-profits were not founded with job placement in mind. They were founded where there was a need to train originally theologians, clerics, doctors, and some lawyers, in that order. You got your training, but no guarantees. And if you couldn't pay for college, you either got a scholarship or you didn't go.
Providing loans and more school access was important as we needed to fill more white collar jobs, but now there are so many colleges that your college degree is almost obligatory and means nothing after a certain point. I pretty don't give a shit where the people I hire went to college except for some very top schools where I knew they needed something to actually get admitted. In fact, I don't even care if they went to college at all, unless they have a job requiring theoretical experience that they could not get without classroom instruction.
I do think if we really want to actually get more coders out there (a goal I am actually somewhat dubious about, I admit), you don't push them through CS programs in college, you increase community college programs and create professional apprenticeships for on the job training. That means that you learn while being paid, instead of being forced to mortgage your future while you learn.
Going to college to learn a what should be a trade is basically just like going to college to spend vast sums of money so you can have leisure time to act like an entitled scion of a rich family while the government pays for some of it and you're presented the bill for the rest, like a few weeks in Vegas where you had a little *too* much fun.
Right. Gun assisted suicide is probably the method of choice when they are available, but the real cause of suicide is suicidal tendencies. There are still quite a few relatively easy ways to kill yourself, even without a gun.
I don't disagree with that. I think my point is merely that it is possible for the cops to prevent crime, but as you say, they're also there to prevent the criminals from being targeted and having the country turn into a vendetta riven hellhole where justice is defined by who has the most friends and family with weaponry.
And no, it's not the same argument as the white man's burden. The White Man's Burden was the implication that the imperialists had to rule the brown people for their own good. I think it could be possible for such a thing to happen, but only by complete conquest and subjugation and cultural assimilation, like the Romans did. And I think we're beyond that now. We've decided that cultural erasure is an atrocity, so now they have to improve their own culture and until that happens, we need to keep things going for the rest of the world.
So, I don't think we're making those people any better by being there, I just think we're keeping their bullshit from causing a global conflagration while they work it out. It hurts us if Iran gets the upper hand and closes the Straits of Hormuz. It doesn't help us much at all if the Arab States decide to fight a war with Iran over it. No matter who wins that war, we lose because the Middle East becomes a war zone and whoever wins becomes a stronger fundamentalist state with all the oil. And the oil stops while they fight it out.
Ultimately, the real exit strategy is get off of Middle East oil, and THEN pull out. Anyone who says different has no idea what happens without someone keeping the oil flowing. Even if we wanted to cede that duty to the Chinese, and we do NOT want to do that, they couldn't do it yet anyway.
Being in these places with military force ultimately helps us by maintaining open commerce. If you think you have seen war, you haven't seen anything until you start having to deal with resource shortages and a bunch of tin pot mullahs holding you by the balls because you pulled out and let them have their playground.
Stepping back is not an option. We've seen what happens when we try a unilateral pull back because of some election pledge. Starting the Iraq war was a bad idea, pulling out too soon was just as bad a decision.
Supporting the Syrians against their asshole leader was a bad idea, failing to then back that up by fully arming and going boots down in Syria was a worse one.
Just because you realize the first was bad, doesn't mean that doing the opposite is automatically better. Having the West "pull back" now will have the same effect unless it is carefully planned and not simply because you don't like that we caused some wars. We can't undo those wars by leaving, and we still need the world to provide us commerce and resources.
The police, especially those involved in community policing like "beat cops" and even your average highway patrolman, does prevent crime. If you were inclined to mug an old lady for her purse and you knew Officer Friendly was just around the block, you'd probably be deterred.
But yes, the police cannot stop all crime, and cannot often walk beats any more with population growth and funding issues.
It isn't enough to end crime, but it *is* sufficient to prevent crime from happening with impunity. As soon as impunity rises, society is in real danger.
So, no, the cops can't really stop one person or even ten from being raped or murdered, but they do prevent it from becoming all-out warfare. Losing the cops at current urban population densities would be an apocalyptic disaster for those areas.
I'd like to say that toning down endless warfare would be nice, but I think we have the dangerous idea that we are in a post-violence world.
This may be the future, but it isn't the Star Trek future. Being an example to others is honestly not yet at the point where it will lead to a cascading effect and end violence.
What happens when the US ceases to patrol off the Horn of Africa without the Somali's having their people prosperous and their country stable? Very simply, more piracy, because the Somalis are still poor and fighting each other.
What happens when the US leaves the Gulf while the Arab States and Iran have not sworn off violent fundamentalist ideologies? Escalation and threats to the current production of a great deal of the world's supply of energy and no moderating force, because no one else is interested in ignoring sectarian goals for peace and unity.
Yes, our mission in those areas acts as an irritant in some ways, and certainly bad decisions in that area can cause dangerous moments, but this is not yet a situation where picking up and unilaterally swearing off war or international military missions is going to have the effect you have hoped for. Places like Iran and the Arab States and India and Pakistan, and other areas need to treat each other like Canada, Europe and the US treat each other to get to the point where stepping away will result in anything but war and serious instability.
Actually obtaining democracy peace to the point where most of the West have gotten today, as imperfect as it is, took centuries of brutal warfare and bloody revolutions, and that is AFTER most of those Western countries had agreed that representative and government and the rule of international law was a good idea. The US had to pretty much fight a brutal Civil War and years of tensions with Europe to get there, and Western Europe itself didn't clean up its act until WWII. The rest of the world has a long way to go on that front and while it would be nice to say that they just have to adopt our institutions, we have already seen what happens when an uneducated population, unused to peace and democratic institutions is forced to turn into a democracy. It becomes a "Democratic Republic" which works exactly like a dictatorship or oligarchy.
Although I agree with the notion that they're both probably unattainable goals in reality, they don't necessarily reflect two polar opposites where the middle of the two actually is better.
The way this looks to me, we keep coming down to which large organization we want to control things. Some people want it to be the government, some people think corporations are better.
I admit in their "pure forms", both communism and the free market are supposed to dissolve into individual freedom, but no one who has ever tried either one of those has even attempted to make that concept a reality. The reason for this is simple. Someone is always trying to gain advantage by forming an organization to gain control of resources. The capitalists do it in the name of "efficiency" and the communists and other revolutionaries do it in favor of "guiding the population" and more practically, "protecting from counter-revolutionary forces".
Admittedly, there is a certain efficiency in forming an organization, and if you could force the organization to complete a single goal, and then release the resources and dividends instead of self-perpetuating, it could be worth it. But this never happens. The end of the Party and the dissolution of the State into the Worker's Paradise was never going to happen due to self-interest and limited resources. If everyone had as much energy and resources as they could want, this wouldn't be a problem, but that's never going to happen.
Maybe Tim Cook should hook up w/ Kim Jong Un and see if they can build their next factory in Pyongyang? Since his main enemy is South Korea based Samsung, the Korean standoff can get replicated in the mobile world as well
He would, except for those pesky sanctions that would cause him to be thrown in jail if he tried.
North Korea could potentially be a rather good place to find cheap labor.
Problem is... it may eventually be cheaper to buy and operate robots than to actually try and train up North Koreans. Considering their current situation, they're mostly uneducated technically, although if Apple needs a ballistic missile built, they may be a little more up to the task.
Experience in subs IS useful, but your normal SSN or SSBN is very populated, and significantly better supplied than any Mars-bound ship is going to be.
And if worst comes to worst, you can at least sometimes surface a sub that is in real trouble.
More to the point, it is significantly more expensive to run this test in an actual submarine that it would be to have it in a building in Hawaii.
Folks, when we're closer to the technical hurdles being figured out, we probably will have the Antarctic training and/or sub training that everyone thinks will be better. Until then, we can still get information out of something like this which will make even these more strenuous Earthbound tests more efficient.
Ballistic missile subs maintain their entire deployments underwater and make zero port calls since the point of them is for them to hide, frequently under pack ice, for that entire period of time. If they come up for air, or make any sort of port call, they can be found and tracked more easily by those who would want to put a torpedo up their ass before they could launch their missiles. They're not going to come up even to periscope depth very often, if at all, and then only for a short period of time for very specific reasons such as missile drills or maybe some sort of venting, and I am not certain that they even need to vent anything on a deployment.
Of course, the accommodations are relatively spacious (compared to a spaceship) and there are a lot of people on board, but you still need some testing to be able to qualify for such a crew.
Actually, I think being on a patrol in an SSBN would probably be decent practice for this, although I doubt that would be allowed to happen for obvious reasons.
A suicide mission may get volunteers, and it may scientifically "succeed" but will not be accepted by the general public.
It would start as an exciting adventure and end as a death watch. I'd rather let the Chinese get there "first" than have the US do that. I'd rather be the country that got people there and back again than the be ones who produced Mars' first corpses on purpose.
This was a psychological and operations test, so talking about the conditions of space actually misses the point.
The reality is that they aren't going to have to care about the gravity or the ionizing radiation. If they notice any radiation on their trip, it will either be dealt with by an operational task they could practice on Earth, or they will have sustained damage and be in serious danger.... and hopefully have an operations checklist to deal with the problem.
As for being in Hawaii, it's certainly not Mars, but again, conditions are irrelevant. They're not testing whether actual Mars procedures work, they're testing whether humans can deal with a regimented task load using certain roughly known requirements (like wearing space suits), and having twenty minute comms delays.
To go to Mars, there is a certain level of tech required, and a certain type of person required. Both need to be tested, and eventually the tech and people need to be tested in increasingly real conditions, and together, but by setting aside the requirements for complete fidelity to conditions, you can do the "people" research in parallel with the tech. Waiting until we have the tech to do the people testing is an inefficiently serial approach that does not need to be taken until a certain point.
It may well be that someone walking out a door on Earth might come down to someone walking out an airlock in space. Or someone getting murdered in space.
The door on Earth allows the pressure to be relieved prematurely, but be aware that if we can't sustain a mission on Earth where there is no danger, how are we going to sustain one in a craft that has to get to Mars?
Sure, they may not be able to escape, but the strain could seriously degrade their efficiency to the point where the mission fails. And I would not rule out psychotic episodes.
Obviously, this will not show all of the strains of being isolated in a cramped spacecraft with the same people or allow the enforced commitment of being a million miles away surrounded by hard vacuum, but I think if they do add some actual expedition prospects to the test at some point and then said, "you're not going to Mars if you fail out of this test," you'd need to drag them kicking and screaming out of the test enclosure even if they were injured. That's still not the same as being on the spacecraft, but those who are selected for the trip will also be those who will do anything to succeed when they are on their way.
The Chinese are working on a Moon landing right now, where they don't need to run the year long test yet.
And why rush it? The Americans doing the test first means that they can get all of the information they need that much more easily when it comes time for them to actually go to Mars.
While it is too bad for them that the Chinese never had the chance to land on the Moon first, the bright side is that since China hasn't done anything first, they're under no pressure except internal expectations about getting the job done in any particular way. They don't lose face by being second to have some space achievement because there's no Space Race going on anymore and they are already going to be second or third no matter what they do. At least until they get to the point where they can take Mars seriously.
And I almost hope they ramp up their Mars program, because I think the US needs a kick in the ass to get itself to Mars. My hope is that we've done some good work to get us ahead if it came down to it, but that lead will evaporate VERY quickly if we sit on our ass too long.
You have a point, although there would be a weight limit on board, which means that a non-reproducing method of scrubbing could only be used until it ran out. With plants, your goal is to bring something small that can use local resources to reproduce and grow its population into a system that could replace the synthetic scrubbing material when it ran out.
Of course, for that to work, they need to find some way to make actual fertile soil from what is on Mars, because the amount of usable soil itself is a big limiting factor for plant growth, even in a facility or under a dome. And that will be hard, because what goes for dirt on Mars right now is a rather nasty material that will not lend itself well to becoming a component of fertile soil.
You need everyone's cooperation at some level. There is simply no way to prevent attacks unless you have everyone on the same page.
Yes, you might be able to track the HR assistant who sent the data and fire them, but too late for the company. You at least need to train them to the point that they,
a) Know the minimum that they have to do in order to protect their data, b) Know that they can be fired for failing to protect that data.
You would not believe the number of people who make these sorts of mistakes and are *not* fired. The reason is simple. No one trained them to recognize attacks, and no one told them that they had to protect that data or be fired. Unless they are in disposable positions, their manager rightly points out that they're valuable members of the HR/Finance/Sales team, and that if their CEO writes them an email ordering them to give something up, they're going to follow orders.
A great deal of InfoSec breaches are all social engineering that happen to use email or something to convey the attack. There is no purely technical solution for that.
Yes. You can employ all the latest technical tricks and safeguards and the HR assistant is still going to send a list of all of your social security numbers to a "hacker" due to a badly formatted email that purports to be from the CEO. The number of times that outside parties simply pretend to be someone else and demand sensitive data to be sent to them, and it *works* is absurdly high. This is because people aren't trained and more to the point, have not been told that security is not their responsibility nor their manager's.
I agree that the Information Security group (NOT the IT department, unless you're too small for an IS group) should be crafting policy and training, and they should accept feedback about their efforts from the other groups, but ultimately they should not be overruled on InfoSec rules by the other departments unless there is executive sign off *in writing* to exceptions.
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Down's Syndrome, even with gene therapy wouldn't be easy to fix, since you're not changing a gene, you actually have to change the number of chromosomes.
There are clearly beneficial things that gene therapy can do. You could probably do some beneficial things for the human genome by doing plain old selective breeding.
The problem is when you push that through by not addressing the moral or ethical questions head-on, but simply pushing a new morality and waiting for opposition to die off.
Sort of like the old arguments against usury. Yes, our current world is, in part, based on the ability to be lent money with the ability for people to get interest. This increases the number of people willing to lend money and improves the economy.
Of course, we also see that it allows for a corrosive effect on poorer people who, instead of getting help from the community, are pushed into loans as the solution to their problems. Not to mention those people who push poorer people to buy more than they can pay for by getting loans with high rates.
Are loans a good thing? Debatable, but certainly have some positives. Can they destroy lives and have a corrosive influence on whole groups of people? Very much so. And yet we consider the old morality against "usury" to be quaint.
That's what I call the progressive fallacy, though. Clearly, it will be better to do this because in the future it will be different, and everything is always better in the future. Because future.
If you have a moral problem with something, the best way to deal with is simply define new morality and wait for everyone to die or get sidelined who is in favor of the status quo. I mean, isn't that what progressive basically means? We have moved on from something to something else, and because we have "progressed", it is now better. I feel great, and I have a new iPhone, and gene therapy cured the cystic fibrosis that allowed my cousin to live to the age of 25 so he could then become a drug addict, beat his girlfriend, and steal money from his parents from their social security payments.
And if you don't think it is better, it's child abuse. Just like those people who actually dare let their children leave their sight and do things on their own. Thank goodness someone is there to call the cops on those assholes and make sure they end up in a nice safe foster home.
So, what is Apple trying to achieve?
Having something better to say that sounds better than, "driving sales of new official Apple and Beats branded products and accessories".
That tends to suggest, however, that Apple cares that you lose your device. They don't.
Oh sure, they don't want your device to be brittle or stop working in high humidity or other moist ambient conditions, because people will not get enough use out of the devices to make them worth buying again. But that's not the same thing as them giving a crap if you are clumsy and drop it in a fountain or toilet somewhere.
The small amount of water resistance that removing that jack would add would not add much, if anything to the value of that phone. They probably made a ordered list of improvements to the phone, and someone mentioned water resistance somewhere close to the bottom. You can imagine that they swapped the place on that list for "water resistance" with "shareholder value" when they went to press with the marketing material.
Apple has always been that way. Steve Jobs always wanted to make things into appliances that you didn't dig into the internals of from the beginning. Partly from aesthetics, partly out of making it feel magical, and partly because it makes people need to replace that stuff with new Apple products. Replacing your battery would never have made it into an iPhone. Ever. Not while Steve Jobs was alive, and probably not while Tim Cook is CEO either.
If you know what you are getting with an Apple device, you will never be surprised. I personally have no issue with their philosophy, with the understanding that if I don't want to spend the cash on their stuff, I need to go get an Android phone.
Of course, I note that all of my iPhones other than my first, have been provided by the place I work. So, I am not trying to suggest that the Apple way of buying things all the time is a great idea. I might have an Android phone now if my iPhone was not provided. Although I should point out, I do have other Android devices, and they have some big, if somewhat different, problems too.
Yes. Water resistance for an iPhone is a ridiculous reason to remove the headphone jack. It's complete and total bullshit.
I can buy the idea that they might want to make it thinner, even though I don't personally give a shit if it gets any thinner, and might be worried if it gets too thin.
It probably does improve cost, at least a little.
But the two reasons that they are really doing it are:
1. They believe it is "the future". I think they may be sincere in this, even though as always, the definition of "progressive" seems to be whatever people want it to be because it is a completely subjective concept.
2. They can make more money on Apple accessories by removing a standard connector. And of course, having the Beats deal only makes this more of a thing they might want to do.
For profit universities tended to promise placement.
However, public and private non-profits were not founded with job placement in mind. They were founded where there was a need to train originally theologians, clerics, doctors, and some lawyers, in that order. You got your training, but no guarantees. And if you couldn't pay for college, you either got a scholarship or you didn't go.
Providing loans and more school access was important as we needed to fill more white collar jobs, but now there are so many colleges that your college degree is almost obligatory and means nothing after a certain point. I pretty don't give a shit where the people I hire went to college except for some very top schools where I knew they needed something to actually get admitted. In fact, I don't even care if they went to college at all, unless they have a job requiring theoretical experience that they could not get without classroom instruction.
I do think if we really want to actually get more coders out there (a goal I am actually somewhat dubious about, I admit), you don't push them through CS programs in college, you increase community college programs and create professional apprenticeships for on the job training. That means that you learn while being paid, instead of being forced to mortgage your future while you learn.
Going to college to learn a what should be a trade is basically just like going to college to spend vast sums of money so you can have leisure time to act like an entitled scion of a rich family while the government pays for some of it and you're presented the bill for the rest, like a few weeks in Vegas where you had a little *too* much fun.
Right. Gun assisted suicide is probably the method of choice when they are available, but the real cause of suicide is suicidal tendencies. There are still quite a few relatively easy ways to kill yourself, even without a gun.
I don't disagree with that. I think my point is merely that it is possible for the cops to prevent crime, but as you say, they're also there to prevent the criminals from being targeted and having the country turn into a vendetta riven hellhole where justice is defined by who has the most friends and family with weaponry.
It is about our stability. And everyone else's.
And no, it's not the same argument as the white man's burden. The White Man's Burden was the implication that the imperialists had to rule the brown people for their own good. I think it could be possible for such a thing to happen, but only by complete conquest and subjugation and cultural assimilation, like the Romans did. And I think we're beyond that now. We've decided that cultural erasure is an atrocity, so now they have to improve their own culture and until that happens, we need to keep things going for the rest of the world.
So, I don't think we're making those people any better by being there, I just think we're keeping their bullshit from causing a global conflagration while they work it out. It hurts us if Iran gets the upper hand and closes the Straits of Hormuz. It doesn't help us much at all if the Arab States decide to fight a war with Iran over it. No matter who wins that war, we lose because the Middle East becomes a war zone and whoever wins becomes a stronger fundamentalist state with all the oil. And the oil stops while they fight it out.
Ultimately, the real exit strategy is get off of Middle East oil, and THEN pull out. Anyone who says different has no idea what happens without someone keeping the oil flowing. Even if we wanted to cede that duty to the Chinese, and we do NOT want to do that, they couldn't do it yet anyway.
Being in these places with military force ultimately helps us by maintaining open commerce. If you think you have seen war, you haven't seen anything until you start having to deal with resource shortages and a bunch of tin pot mullahs holding you by the balls because you pulled out and let them have their playground.
Stepping back is not an option. We've seen what happens when we try a unilateral pull back because of some election pledge. Starting the Iraq war was a bad idea, pulling out too soon was just as bad a decision.
Supporting the Syrians against their asshole leader was a bad idea, failing to then back that up by fully arming and going boots down in Syria was a worse one.
Just because you realize the first was bad, doesn't mean that doing the opposite is automatically better. Having the West "pull back" now will have the same effect unless it is carefully planned and not simply because you don't like that we caused some wars. We can't undo those wars by leaving, and we still need the world to provide us commerce and resources.
The police, especially those involved in community policing like "beat cops" and even your average highway patrolman, does prevent crime. If you were inclined to mug an old lady for her purse and you knew Officer Friendly was just around the block, you'd probably be deterred.
But yes, the police cannot stop all crime, and cannot often walk beats any more with population growth and funding issues.
It isn't enough to end crime, but it *is* sufficient to prevent crime from happening with impunity. As soon as impunity rises, society is in real danger.
So, no, the cops can't really stop one person or even ten from being raped or murdered, but they do prevent it from becoming all-out warfare. Losing the cops at current urban population densities would be an apocalyptic disaster for those areas.
I'd like to say that toning down endless warfare would be nice, but I think we have the dangerous idea that we are in a post-violence world.
This may be the future, but it isn't the Star Trek future. Being an example to others is honestly not yet at the point where it will lead to a cascading effect and end violence.
What happens when the US ceases to patrol off the Horn of Africa without the Somali's having their people prosperous and their country stable? Very simply, more piracy, because the Somalis are still poor and fighting each other.
What happens when the US leaves the Gulf while the Arab States and Iran have not sworn off violent fundamentalist ideologies? Escalation and threats to the current production of a great deal of the world's supply of energy and no moderating force, because no one else is interested in ignoring sectarian goals for peace and unity.
Yes, our mission in those areas acts as an irritant in some ways, and certainly bad decisions in that area can cause dangerous moments, but this is not yet a situation where picking up and unilaterally swearing off war or international military missions is going to have the effect you have hoped for. Places like Iran and the Arab States and India and Pakistan, and other areas need to treat each other like Canada, Europe and the US treat each other to get to the point where stepping away will result in anything but war and serious instability.
Actually obtaining democracy peace to the point where most of the West have gotten today, as imperfect as it is, took centuries of brutal warfare and bloody revolutions, and that is AFTER most of those Western countries had agreed that representative and government and the rule of international law was a good idea. The US had to pretty much fight a brutal Civil War and years of tensions with Europe to get there, and Western Europe itself didn't clean up its act until WWII. The rest of the world has a long way to go on that front and while it would be nice to say that they just have to adopt our institutions, we have already seen what happens when an uneducated population, unused to peace and democratic institutions is forced to turn into a democracy. It becomes a "Democratic Republic" which works exactly like a dictatorship or oligarchy.
Some re-assembly required.
Although I agree with the notion that they're both probably unattainable goals in reality, they don't necessarily reflect two polar opposites where the middle of the two actually is better.
The way this looks to me, we keep coming down to which large organization we want to control things. Some people want it to be the government, some people think corporations are better.
I admit in their "pure forms", both communism and the free market are supposed to dissolve into individual freedom, but no one who has ever tried either one of those has even attempted to make that concept a reality. The reason for this is simple. Someone is always trying to gain advantage by forming an organization to gain control of resources. The capitalists do it in the name of "efficiency" and the communists and other revolutionaries do it in favor of "guiding the population" and more practically, "protecting from counter-revolutionary forces".
Admittedly, there is a certain efficiency in forming an organization, and if you could force the organization to complete a single goal, and then release the resources and dividends instead of self-perpetuating, it could be worth it. But this never happens. The end of the Party and the dissolution of the State into the Worker's Paradise was never going to happen due to self-interest and limited resources. If everyone had as much energy and resources as they could want, this wouldn't be a problem, but that's never going to happen.
Maybe Tim Cook should hook up w/ Kim Jong Un and see if they can build their next factory in Pyongyang? Since his main enemy is South Korea based Samsung, the Korean standoff can get replicated in the mobile world as well
He would, except for those pesky sanctions that would cause him to be thrown in jail if he tried.
North Korea could potentially be a rather good place to find cheap labor.
Problem is... it may eventually be cheaper to buy and operate robots than to actually try and train up North Koreans. Considering their current situation, they're mostly uneducated technically, although if Apple needs a ballistic missile built, they may be a little more up to the task.
Experience in subs IS useful, but your normal SSN or SSBN is very populated, and significantly better supplied than any Mars-bound ship is going to be.
And if worst comes to worst, you can at least sometimes surface a sub that is in real trouble.
More to the point, it is significantly more expensive to run this test in an actual submarine that it would be to have it in a building in Hawaii.
Folks, when we're closer to the technical hurdles being figured out, we probably will have the Antarctic training and/or sub training that everyone thinks will be better. Until then, we can still get information out of something like this which will make even these more strenuous Earthbound tests more efficient.
Let's not be needlessly cruel here. They're only going to Mars, not deploying to Iraq.
Ballistic missile subs maintain their entire deployments underwater and make zero port calls since the point of them is for them to hide, frequently under pack ice, for that entire period of time. If they come up for air, or make any sort of port call, they can be found and tracked more easily by those who would want to put a torpedo up their ass before they could launch their missiles. They're not going to come up even to periscope depth very often, if at all, and then only for a short period of time for very specific reasons such as missile drills or maybe some sort of venting, and I am not certain that they even need to vent anything on a deployment.
Of course, the accommodations are relatively spacious (compared to a spaceship) and there are a lot of people on board, but you still need some testing to be able to qualify for such a crew.
Actually, I think being on a patrol in an SSBN would probably be decent practice for this, although I doubt that would be allowed to happen for obvious reasons.
A suicide mission may get volunteers, and it may scientifically "succeed" but will not be accepted by the general public.
It would start as an exciting adventure and end as a death watch. I'd rather let the Chinese get there "first" than have the US do that. I'd rather be the country that got people there and back again than the be ones who produced Mars' first corpses on purpose.
This was a psychological and operations test, so talking about the conditions of space actually misses the point.
The reality is that they aren't going to have to care about the gravity or the ionizing radiation. If they notice any radiation on their trip, it will either be dealt with by an operational task they could practice on Earth, or they will have sustained damage and be in serious danger.... and hopefully have an operations checklist to deal with the problem.
As for being in Hawaii, it's certainly not Mars, but again, conditions are irrelevant. They're not testing whether actual Mars procedures work, they're testing whether humans can deal with a regimented task load using certain roughly known requirements (like wearing space suits), and having twenty minute comms delays.
To go to Mars, there is a certain level of tech required, and a certain type of person required. Both need to be tested, and eventually the tech and people need to be tested in increasingly real conditions, and together, but by setting aside the requirements for complete fidelity to conditions, you can do the "people" research in parallel with the tech. Waiting until we have the tech to do the people testing is an inefficiently serial approach that does not need to be taken until a certain point.
It may well be that someone walking out a door on Earth might come down to someone walking out an airlock in space. Or someone getting murdered in space.
The door on Earth allows the pressure to be relieved prematurely, but be aware that if we can't sustain a mission on Earth where there is no danger, how are we going to sustain one in a craft that has to get to Mars?
Sure, they may not be able to escape, but the strain could seriously degrade their efficiency to the point where the mission fails. And I would not rule out psychotic episodes.
Obviously, this will not show all of the strains of being isolated in a cramped spacecraft with the same people or allow the enforced commitment of being a million miles away surrounded by hard vacuum, but I think if they do add some actual expedition prospects to the test at some point and then said, "you're not going to Mars if you fail out of this test," you'd need to drag them kicking and screaming out of the test enclosure even if they were injured. That's still not the same as being on the spacecraft, but those who are selected for the trip will also be those who will do anything to succeed when they are on their way.
The Chinese are working on a Moon landing right now, where they don't need to run the year long test yet.
And why rush it? The Americans doing the test first means that they can get all of the information they need that much more easily when it comes time for them to actually go to Mars.
While it is too bad for them that the Chinese never had the chance to land on the Moon first, the bright side is that since China hasn't done anything first, they're under no pressure except internal expectations about getting the job done in any particular way. They don't lose face by being second to have some space achievement because there's no Space Race going on anymore and they are already going to be second or third no matter what they do. At least until they get to the point where they can take Mars seriously.
And I almost hope they ramp up their Mars program, because I think the US needs a kick in the ass to get itself to Mars. My hope is that we've done some good work to get us ahead if it came down to it, but that lead will evaporate VERY quickly if we sit on our ass too long.
You have a point, although there would be a weight limit on board, which means that a non-reproducing method of scrubbing could only be used until it ran out. With plants, your goal is to bring something small that can use local resources to reproduce and grow its population into a system that could replace the synthetic scrubbing material when it ran out.
Of course, for that to work, they need to find some way to make actual fertile soil from what is on Mars, because the amount of usable soil itself is a big limiting factor for plant growth, even in a facility or under a dome. And that will be hard, because what goes for dirt on Mars right now is a rather nasty material that will not lend itself well to becoming a component of fertile soil.
You need everyone's cooperation at some level. There is simply no way to prevent attacks unless you have everyone on the same page.
Yes, you might be able to track the HR assistant who sent the data and fire them, but too late for the company. You at least need to train them to the point that they,
a) Know the minimum that they have to do in order to protect their data,
b) Know that they can be fired for failing to protect that data.
You would not believe the number of people who make these sorts of mistakes and are *not* fired. The reason is simple. No one trained them to recognize attacks, and no one told them that they had to protect that data or be fired. Unless they are in disposable positions, their manager rightly points out that they're valuable members of the HR/Finance/Sales team, and that if their CEO writes them an email ordering them to give something up, they're going to follow orders.
A great deal of InfoSec breaches are all social engineering that happen to use email or something to convey the attack. There is no purely technical solution for that.
Yes. You can employ all the latest technical tricks and safeguards and the HR assistant is still going to send a list of all of your social security numbers to a "hacker" due to a badly formatted email that purports to be from the CEO. The number of times that outside parties simply pretend to be someone else and demand sensitive data to be sent to them, and it *works* is absurdly high. This is because people aren't trained and more to the point, have not been told that security is not their responsibility nor their manager's.
I agree that the Information Security group (NOT the IT department, unless you're too small for an IS group) should be crafting policy and training, and they should accept feedback about their efforts from the other groups, but ultimately they should not be overruled on InfoSec rules by the other departments unless there is executive sign off *in writing* to exceptions.