Have they ever put out a viable plan to reach Mars? Why are we re-printing this crap?
Because Space Suicide Pact! It's News!
Seriously, I would like to go to Mars myself, but only as a tourist. I've seen pictures of the place and know what the environment is supposed to be like. Its like living in red Death Valley, only without the cheery warmth. With extra radiation.
Did I mention, it's red *every where*?
So, yeah, not where I want to strand myself for the remainder of my brief existence.
In the sense that a virtual reality that you can enter and exit any time you like is not going to be the same, I agree. Indeed, having to actually live with the experience, as opposed to temporarily subjecting yourself to it is the real issue.
That said, anything that allows non-schizophrenic people to experience the same sort of inputs will be useful towards understanding.
Gitmo isn't a secret prison. That's not where they send the people who they really want to keep hidden. The real point of Gitmo is storage of people who they don't want to give a civilian trial to, not secret incarceration.
Those secret prisoners that we have are likely located in places where the media and general population aren't talking about.
The usual problem with Security or Operations doing their job right... having no failures makes evaluating the effectiveness of the controls a much more complex concept.
AQ hasn't had a big attack inside the US in the last few years. Why?
Is it:
a) because they are internally disorganized aside from any external cause b) the invasion of Afghanistan disordered them c) easy sources of money dried up once banks and muslim charities started coming under hard scrutiny d) more and/or better visa checks or no-fly lists prevented intrusions e) the NSA and other intel is watching much more closely and using their powers to identify threats f) something entirely different
Or some or all of the above?
I think it is safe to say that the US government has had at least a little something to do with avoiding another attack, but what data can we collect and what methodology do we use to assess that?
It comes down to risk assessment. What vectors for attack are most likely, what is their impact, and how can they be controlled?
On one hand, the risk to individuals is very small from terrorism. Assuming a population who internalizes just how unlikely a terrorist attack is, then you may be able to just simply go back to pre-2001 security levels with some minor modifications. Is a one in a million chance worth a real degradation of privacy? I'd say no.
The problem is that humans have poor risk assessment skills. We often focus on what is possible, rather than what is probable. That's why you'll have people scared shitless of being messily killed by a random bomb, while they drive into work everyday on crowded freeways where a fatal accident is much, much more likely than any attack. And they talk on their cellphone without a care, thus adding to their risk of death or dismemberment.
The media is also a problem, because they play on the novelty of terrorism to get eyes on their sites, and by providing insight into the effects of terrorism, without hammering home how unlikely it is to affect you, they actually make international terrorism effective. I'd argue that if you want to severely decrease the effectiveness of international terrorism, you just implement censorship on the media, preventing them from reporting on low probability events like terrorism (or school shootings for that matter). While I am not against a free press, we need to accept that it is a vector of attack which doesn't always help us.
Is the NSA overreaching, or are they the only reason that we're safe? I don't actually know, and I don't know that most people have any real way of knowing because there's no data and it is hard to interpret. So, instead, we whipsaw back and forth based on our emotions and the level of inconvenience that it exposes us to at any one time.
There is a potentially important difference. Although admittedly, it is mostly a matter of definitions between the two fictional concepts.
"Sufficiently advanced science" would work according to certain principles firmly rooted in natural laws and logic and would presumably be accessible to humans (and any other sentient based on those laws) at a sufficient technological level.
"Magic", such as that produced by deities presumed to be outside the Universe, may be empowered by forces that humans or other denizens of this universe, have no control over nor any access to.
If Asgardians are merely super-powered denizens of the normal Universe, but still fully subordinate to all its physical laws, then yes, their power might be copied eventually.
If they are the local projections of beings from outside the Universe or of beings who span multiple universes, then they may be able to affect the Universe in a way that cannot be duplicated by those of us who are completely of this universe. In that case, full control of the universe from the inside still doesn't necessarily grant the same powers as an Asgardian.
In that case, you could redefine "magic" as "power inaccessible to humanity", and suggest that there might be some way to incorporate that into human knowledge, but since there is no direct path for humans to "uplift" themselves to that level, "magic" would simply be power that is only accessible to humans via an intermediary who exists in a sufficient reality to do so. That sounds a lot like our normal concept of deities, miracles, and praying for intercession.
Western European law from medieval times all the way to the Napoleonic code has been based, in part, on Roman law concepts based on the Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. Since Western Europe isn't exactly made up of third world countries, I'd take issue with your assertion.
Both Roman civil law and English common law have their strengths and weaknesses, but both are systems that have been used successfully for centuries which suggests that they are hardly a root cause of civilization decay.
Bitcoin is not really completely anonymous, but it is portable, and criminals need to move millions of dollars around. With bank regulators in the West being more on top of laundering, criminals want to send their money to countries that are still soft on laundering. To do that, cash is extremely inconvenient. Bitcoin, as long as it is a feasible store of wealth which can be exchanged for currency, is perfect for moving millions out of the US to somewhere where the criminals can cash in.
And so what if a trail has some drug deals on it? Every dollar bill in the US over a certain age has probably been passed in a drug deal at one point or another....
Exactly. Just like if you were to form your own personal army in the US and use it to invade Mexico, since you totally don't represent the US, you'd allowed to do that. Also, no one would ever think that the US government has any responsibility, nor any legal right to stop you from engaging in a private act of war.
Oh wait....
Invading the sovereign airspace of another country that clearly does not want you is in no way legal, and could be interpreted as an act of espionage at the very least. It doesn't matter if it is a private endeavor. Even if private enterprises like that were legal to execute, that doesn't prevent the North Koreans from interpreting it as a stunt that had the backing of the US government and presenting that as a cause for more misbehavior.
I entirely agree with you, especially if the US is going to do what it did before. Which is to say, we started a fight, but we ran when it took too long to finish and didn't finish the job. Or we didn't even really have a plan to finish the job to begin with and then just started exploring exit strategies.
Either way, enter ISIS.
Could we apply force to end ISIS and not make the job worse? It is probably possible to do, but I don't get the idea that we're being anything but reactive. If all we do is react to ISIS, then yes, they are pulling our strings.
I do think the US could have a military role to play, but we need a plan and we need the people at home to understand why this is important. Simply being outraged by some killings isn't going to sustain the sort of commitment we need to make this work.
Lasers have over the horizon issues as they can't use ballistic trajectories. You aren't going to take out another ship at 100 miles with a laser, even aside from the thermal blooming issues which would start sapping the energy of the beam at that range in atmosphere.
Lasers work better against ballistic missiles or airplanes because they are much farther above the horizon and can be targeted without worrying about the curvature of the Earth. Even then, they are still more of a defensive weapon under those conditions.
For long range naval gunfire, it's going to be something like a rail gun that would fire projectiles that can follow a curved ballistic path. That or we just use more advanced missiles.
That said, at ranges that you might get small attack craft, a laser might be useful for ship-to-ship, but so would a.50 cal. and it's probably a lot easier to mount a bunch of those than a directed energy weapon at today's tech level.
"The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced/ri/; 1744–1814). In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party."
Democratic-Republican. While, yes, the party being spoken of is different than either of today's parties, I find the naming to be meaningful. It's not the Democrats or the Republicans or the Federalists or the Whigs who are responsible for it. It's all of them.
One party blaming situations on gerrymandering is like pissing into the wind. Yes, they can't win elections because the other party gerrymandered. Of course, they both have done it when they had the power to do it, and will do it themselves again when the power comes back to them.
Nevertheless, things do change in the US, just like everywhere else, but that only really happens when you actually give people a choice of what they can vote for, as opposed to two sides of the same coin, only with one or two hot-button items to make it seem like they are different.
Except that this isn't the 1990s anymore. You can get supplies from all sorts of online distributors and Walmart (of course). There is still competition. Better competition, in fact. We just have the perception that there is this thing called an "Office Supply Store" and that owning all of those means that office supplies are now under a monopoly. The reality is that a specialized brick and mortar supply store like that is a concept that is no longer the most cost effective means of getting office supplies. They are a breed that needs to consolidate significantly in order to comfortably inhabit a smaller, much more specialized niche than it used to.
I'm not sure that the reason that women live longer is specifically due to their hormones (or lack of male hormones). There are still considerably different social expectations between the sexes in terms of risk taking and aggression even putting aside natural inclinations. That alone might account for the difference.
Not to mention that women suffer from a drop in estrogen production at menopause, so they likely have a deficiency of that hormone when they are old enough for it to make a difference.
It may be a lifetime of a demeanor influenced by high levels of estrogen that is responsible for living longer, but I don't think that testosterone is necessarily contraindicated, especially since men start to produce less of that, as well, as they get older. It may simply be learning to control the aggression or other effects of that hormone in practice.
Today's allies can be tomorrow's enemies. You most definitely spy on them, you just don't go sabotaging them.
Yes, there is the problem of collusion like Five Eyes. So... you write a law requiring that a) all spies on our soil need to be apprehended if they are found and b) that we are not permitted to use material from foreign intelligence against internal parties unless there is a specific, clear, and present danger or during wartime. It can't be used for fishing expeditions and all employees of the agencies have a duty to report such use to an independent agency.
Sure, they could break the law and use it to build cases against people, but what else can you do? If it is illegal to *not* report it, then someone like a Snowden is clearly a whistleblower and not a traitor.
What you can't do is assume that your friends are sacrosanct from intelligence activities. I believe we've fought wars in the past against all our current friends, and have been friends with some of our current enemies.
Considering that we have a lot less of even the "throwaway" from Sumeria, a "shopping list" would have told us a certain amount about their actual eating habits and customs, as well as what hair products they used to get those fabulous hairstyles.
It's (relatively) easy to find great literature or buildings or monuments from ancient times, they are built to last or adopted by other cultures and passed down. What is hard is finding stuff that really gives insight into how people actually lived. It would be worth more than Turing's notes only because the Sumerian equivalent of Turning's notes, kept to fill in a hole for someone's hut, have not come to light in 5000 years of history since then and probably would have disappeared in just a couple decades after it was put to that use.
I'm okay with what the cops do in these cases, as long as they have a consistent policy about how they deal with these issues.
What happened is that the cops check anything that someone else complains about, and if it looks like a duct taped pipe bomb, they treat it as such. If it was McDonald's trash or something, no one would have reported it, but that's on society in general, not the cops. Cops want to go home at night without being killed or maimed, so if someone says that there is something that looks like a bomb on a bridge, and it's feasible as a bomb, then I see nothing wrong with treating it like a bomb.
What happened here is someone left something on public infrastructure and this is merely the most hilarious thing that could have happened to it.
Okay. Idiocracy is a movie. A funny one, with something valid to say, but a movie. If the world got to the point where it even resembled that, civilization would have already completely collapsed or it would be subsisting on automation that the previous generations built. In either case, you have bigger problems than some radioactive waste leaking a little in Nevada.
Much of Nevada is a marginal place for humans to live to begin with. If there was a catastrophe that eliminated a lot of people, those people wouldn't go living in Nevada near the nuclear waste site. They'd move to the places it was easier to live. Just like before the Black Death in Europe, the development of marginal lands only continued profitably (or at all) while there was high population, and thus demand. Kill off a third of the population, and they stopped developing marginal areas and depopulated them.
The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site. This isn't like Chernobyl or Fukushima where fire and explosions are spreading the material. We're talking more about material leaching into groundwater and things like that. A terrible thing to happen, to be sure, but not exactly a problem if no one is living there.
Compare this to your Roundup example, and it is apples and oranges. Herbicidal treatments will be applied to locations where weeds need to be killed for food production. That is a much more serious threat compared to some nuclear waste stored in casks under a salt dome in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, we spent more money. However, understand that the anti-nuclear message causing the anti-power issue was a tactic, not the end goal. The end goal was simply unrest in the West which would affect the West's ability to compete with the Soviet bloc in nuclear armaments. So our money pointed back at them would not have directly counteracted against their propaganda that turned into anti-nuclear NIMBY protests because we used different tactics.
No one in the USSR would have cared if we sent an anti-nuclear message to them, because they controlled their population to the extent that there would be no actual protest. The West is vulnerable to that because we have the freedom to accept NIMBY-ism. The only people who had the ability to say "not in my backyard" in the USSR would have been the Party leaders, and they were likely already covered.
So, we didn't encourage them to not use nuclear power, because it would not have had the effect we wanted. Our propaganda was to show the people of the USSR that we were prosperous and non-threatening, while being able to defend ourselves if needed. The best way to do that was free information, blue jeans and rock and roll, not countering anti-nuclear propaganda.
Do you truly believe that the Democrats are not supported by their own set of heavy hitters? They're all rich, and they're all on the side of the rich.
The Democrats are frequently able to outspend the Republicans. Do you really believe this is due to more grannies spending 100 bucks individually? Please.
The Democratic Party is simply supported by different industries and different interests with different rich people. They have slightly better spin for "progressives" because they're better at the bread and circuses.
Both parties are rotten to the core. The Democrats are no more able to convince me that they are for the little guy or the "middle class" than I actually believe the Republicans are for the Moral Majority.
They all work for lobbyists. Period. Some of that is our fault, but that fault is also a flaw in large democracies. You can control people by feeding them certain information that reinforces their existing views. The interests deliver the voting blocs, the rich fund the interests and the campaigns, and the voters do what they are expected to do. And this is 100% legitimate democracy. No actual corruption required.
This is because the government is large, and getting larger. As it assumes more and more responsibility, it becomes more and more remote from the voter.
Literally, the existence of successful lobbyists shows starkly how the government should be. Those interests succeed because they work on the model that the government *should* work on. They are specialized, they know their specific subject matter, and they know what laws they want passed. The only problem is that they are bought and paid for businesses, trusts and rich donors, they are not a responsible body. Instead of directly legislating, they have to now work to subvert the process of the existing legislature to get things done.
Break up the government, elect people specifically based on the subjects that they have experience with and shrink the size of the electorate that each representative is responsible for. Turn special interests into groups that are representative, not of money, but of votes. After all, that's all they really do now anyway, only for hire.
Democracy is a tactic to legitimize governments, its not a path to a "correct" answer. That's why it can ignore science and math to come to its answers. You want something to be done about global warming? Sure you may need to involve the government, but not for everything. Don't ask for the government to subsidize your pet interest, subsidize your interest yourself and demand that your special interest use its money for something other than buying politicians.
Legwork worked in the 1940s because the criminals were on the same level. Your mobsters were generally within reach because to remain in control, they had to remain in communication range, which was usually in person.
Today, criminals can sit in Afghanistan and manage loose groupings of local networks very effectively. Drug cartels operate from Mexico. Criminals have the same capabilities that states had in the 1940s. Did we expect legwork to break codes? There is always legwork involved, but we were using SIGINT to get good information even then.
And bear in mind that we used to have the option of the wiretap, even in the days of Capone. Useless now with encrypted communications.
I don't think any other country is unduly concerned about us not opening up bids on a project like AF1. It's one or two planes. The symbolic value of the plane is significant, and honestly, isn't really what is beggaring the country.
No foreign corporation is going to seriously complain that they didn't get to build the one plane for the head of state for another country over a local builder.
The symbolic requirement isn't good enough to force the rest of the government to buy all Boeing, but unless the 747-8 was a complete pile of shit or twice the price of the comparable Airbus model, that one plane is not really a big deal.
"Because America" is a legitimate requirement for a Presidential aircraft. The President and what he uses is a powerful statement about the strength of US industry. That's why Queen Elizabeth II has a Bentley, and the French President is driven around in a Peugeot or a Citroën.
It is legitimate for politicians to have political reasoning behind the selection of their conveyances. I'd be surprised that they'd even consider Airbus for AF1, even if it was cheaper or slightly better.
Yeah, except that doesn't work well for a service. If they have people abusing it, they fire them, and/or prosecute them. And that is what needs discussion.
Its more like if an adult got some DWIs and they took their license away. Yeah, they can't be trusted with a car, but they still need to get to work because it isn't a matter of not getting their allowance money, they need to do their job to support their family and even their job place will suffer if they can't work.
In that case, the solution is public transit, or taxis, or someone driving them. Or in lesser cases, they still let you drive with an interlock device.
You really can't just say the law enforcement can't do something like this and take it away for awhile. Otherwise, you can't enforce laws and regulations. And when that happens, people get hurt, physically and financially. They either need it or not. If they need it, they can abuse it just as well later as they can now. We need a real solution other than taking it away.
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Have they ever put out a viable plan to reach Mars? Why are we re-printing this crap?
Because Space Suicide Pact! It's News!
Seriously, I would like to go to Mars myself, but only as a tourist. I've seen pictures of the place and know what the environment is supposed to be like. Its like living in red Death Valley, only without the cheery warmth. With extra radiation.
Did I mention, it's red *every where*?
So, yeah, not where I want to strand myself for the remainder of my brief existence.
In the sense that a virtual reality that you can enter and exit any time you like is not going to be the same, I agree. Indeed, having to actually live with the experience, as opposed to temporarily subjecting yourself to it is the real issue.
That said, anything that allows non-schizophrenic people to experience the same sort of inputs will be useful towards understanding.
Gitmo isn't a secret prison. That's not where they send the people who they really want to keep hidden. The real point of Gitmo is storage of people who they don't want to give a civilian trial to, not secret incarceration.
Those secret prisoners that we have are likely located in places where the media and general population aren't talking about.
The usual problem with Security or Operations doing their job right... having no failures makes evaluating the effectiveness of the controls a much more complex concept.
AQ hasn't had a big attack inside the US in the last few years. Why?
Is it:
a) because they are internally disorganized aside from any external cause
b) the invasion of Afghanistan disordered them
c) easy sources of money dried up once banks and muslim charities started coming under hard scrutiny
d) more and/or better visa checks or no-fly lists prevented intrusions
e) the NSA and other intel is watching much more closely and using their powers to identify threats
f) something entirely different
Or some or all of the above?
I think it is safe to say that the US government has had at least a little something to do with avoiding another attack, but what data can we collect and what methodology do we use to assess that?
It comes down to risk assessment. What vectors for attack are most likely, what is their impact, and how can they be controlled?
On one hand, the risk to individuals is very small from terrorism. Assuming a population who internalizes just how unlikely a terrorist attack is, then you may be able to just simply go back to pre-2001 security levels with some minor modifications. Is a one in a million chance worth a real degradation of privacy? I'd say no.
The problem is that humans have poor risk assessment skills. We often focus on what is possible, rather than what is probable. That's why you'll have people scared shitless of being messily killed by a random bomb, while they drive into work everyday on crowded freeways where a fatal accident is much, much more likely than any attack. And they talk on their cellphone without a care, thus adding to their risk of death or dismemberment.
The media is also a problem, because they play on the novelty of terrorism to get eyes on their sites, and by providing insight into the effects of terrorism, without hammering home how unlikely it is to affect you, they actually make international terrorism effective. I'd argue that if you want to severely decrease the effectiveness of international terrorism, you just implement censorship on the media, preventing them from reporting on low probability events like terrorism (or school shootings for that matter). While I am not against a free press, we need to accept that it is a vector of attack which doesn't always help us.
Is the NSA overreaching, or are they the only reason that we're safe? I don't actually know, and I don't know that most people have any real way of knowing because there's no data and it is hard to interpret. So, instead, we whipsaw back and forth based on our emotions and the level of inconvenience that it exposes us to at any one time.
There is a potentially important difference. Although admittedly, it is mostly a matter of definitions between the two fictional concepts.
"Sufficiently advanced science" would work according to certain principles firmly rooted in natural laws and logic and would presumably be accessible to humans (and any other sentient based on those laws) at a sufficient technological level.
"Magic", such as that produced by deities presumed to be outside the Universe, may be empowered by forces that humans or other denizens of this universe, have no control over nor any access to.
If Asgardians are merely super-powered denizens of the normal Universe, but still fully subordinate to all its physical laws, then yes, their power might be copied eventually.
If they are the local projections of beings from outside the Universe or of beings who span multiple universes, then they may be able to affect the Universe in a way that cannot be duplicated by those of us who are completely of this universe. In that case, full control of the universe from the inside still doesn't necessarily grant the same powers as an Asgardian.
In that case, you could redefine "magic" as "power inaccessible to humanity", and suggest that there might be some way to incorporate that into human knowledge, but since there is no direct path for humans to "uplift" themselves to that level, "magic" would simply be power that is only accessible to humans via an intermediary who exists in a sufficient reality to do so. That sounds a lot like our normal concept of deities, miracles, and praying for intercession.
Western European law from medieval times all the way to the Napoleonic code has been based, in part, on Roman law concepts based on the Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. Since Western Europe isn't exactly made up of third world countries, I'd take issue with your assertion.
Both Roman civil law and English common law have their strengths and weaknesses, but both are systems that have been used successfully for centuries which suggests that they are hardly a root cause of civilization decay.
Bitcoin is not really completely anonymous, but it is portable, and criminals need to move millions of dollars around. With bank regulators in the West being more on top of laundering, criminals want to send their money to countries that are still soft on laundering. To do that, cash is extremely inconvenient. Bitcoin, as long as it is a feasible store of wealth which can be exchanged for currency, is perfect for moving millions out of the US to somewhere where the criminals can cash in.
And so what if a trail has some drug deals on it? Every dollar bill in the US over a certain age has probably been passed in a drug deal at one point or another....
Exactly. Just like if you were to form your own personal army in the US and use it to invade Mexico, since you totally don't represent the US, you'd allowed to do that. Also, no one would ever think that the US government has any responsibility, nor any legal right to stop you from engaging in a private act of war.
Oh wait....
Invading the sovereign airspace of another country that clearly does not want you is in no way legal, and could be interpreted as an act of espionage at the very least. It doesn't matter if it is a private endeavor. Even if private enterprises like that were legal to execute, that doesn't prevent the North Koreans from interpreting it as a stunt that had the backing of the US government and presenting that as a cause for more misbehavior.
I entirely agree with you, especially if the US is going to do what it did before. Which is to say, we started a fight, but we ran when it took too long to finish and didn't finish the job. Or we didn't even really have a plan to finish the job to begin with and then just started exploring exit strategies.
Either way, enter ISIS.
Could we apply force to end ISIS and not make the job worse? It is probably possible to do, but I don't get the idea that we're being anything but reactive. If all we do is react to ISIS, then yes, they are pulling our strings.
I do think the US could have a military role to play, but we need a plan and we need the people at home to understand why this is important. Simply being outraged by some killings isn't going to sustain the sort of commitment we need to make this work.
Lasers have over the horizon issues as they can't use ballistic trajectories. You aren't going to take out another ship at 100 miles with a laser, even aside from the thermal blooming issues which would start sapping the energy of the beam at that range in atmosphere.
Lasers work better against ballistic missiles or airplanes because they are much farther above the horizon and can be targeted without worrying about the curvature of the Earth. Even then, they are still more of a defensive weapon under those conditions.
For long range naval gunfire, it's going to be something like a rail gun that would fire projectiles that can follow a curved ballistic path. That or we just use more advanced missiles.
That said, at ranges that you might get small attack craft, a laser might be useful for ship-to-ship, but so would a .50 cal. and it's probably a lot easier to mount a bunch of those than a directed energy weapon at today's tech level.
Let me settle this once and for all.
"The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced /ri/; 1744–1814). In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party."
Democratic-Republican. While, yes, the party being spoken of is different than either of today's parties, I find the naming to be meaningful. It's not the Democrats or the Republicans or the Federalists or the Whigs who are responsible for it. It's all of them.
One party blaming situations on gerrymandering is like pissing into the wind. Yes, they can't win elections because the other party gerrymandered. Of course, they both have done it when they had the power to do it, and will do it themselves again when the power comes back to them.
Nevertheless, things do change in the US, just like everywhere else, but that only really happens when you actually give people a choice of what they can vote for, as opposed to two sides of the same coin, only with one or two hot-button items to make it seem like they are different.
Except that this isn't the 1990s anymore. You can get supplies from all sorts of online distributors and Walmart (of course). There is still competition. Better competition, in fact. We just have the perception that there is this thing called an "Office Supply Store" and that owning all of those means that office supplies are now under a monopoly. The reality is that a specialized brick and mortar supply store like that is a concept that is no longer the most cost effective means of getting office supplies. They are a breed that needs to consolidate significantly in order to comfortably inhabit a smaller, much more specialized niche than it used to.
I'm not sure that the reason that women live longer is specifically due to their hormones (or lack of male hormones). There are still considerably different social expectations between the sexes in terms of risk taking and aggression even putting aside natural inclinations. That alone might account for the difference.
Not to mention that women suffer from a drop in estrogen production at menopause, so they likely have a deficiency of that hormone when they are old enough for it to make a difference.
It may be a lifetime of a demeanor influenced by high levels of estrogen that is responsible for living longer, but I don't think that testosterone is necessarily contraindicated, especially since men start to produce less of that, as well, as they get older. It may simply be learning to control the aggression or other effects of that hormone in practice.
Today's allies can be tomorrow's enemies. You most definitely spy on them, you just don't go sabotaging them.
Yes, there is the problem of collusion like Five Eyes. So... you write a law requiring that a) all spies on our soil need to be apprehended if they are found and b) that we are not permitted to use material from foreign intelligence against internal parties unless there is a specific, clear, and present danger or during wartime. It can't be used for fishing expeditions and all employees of the agencies have a duty to report such use to an independent agency.
Sure, they could break the law and use it to build cases against people, but what else can you do? If it is illegal to *not* report it, then someone like a Snowden is clearly a whistleblower and not a traitor.
What you can't do is assume that your friends are sacrosanct from intelligence activities. I believe we've fought wars in the past against all our current friends, and have been friends with some of our current enemies.
Considering that we have a lot less of even the "throwaway" from Sumeria, a "shopping list" would have told us a certain amount about their actual eating habits and customs, as well as what hair products they used to get those fabulous hairstyles.
It's (relatively) easy to find great literature or buildings or monuments from ancient times, they are built to last or adopted by other cultures and passed down. What is hard is finding stuff that really gives insight into how people actually lived. It would be worth more than Turing's notes only because the Sumerian equivalent of Turning's notes, kept to fill in a hole for someone's hut, have not come to light in 5000 years of history since then and probably would have disappeared in just a couple decades after it was put to that use.
I'm okay with what the cops do in these cases, as long as they have a consistent policy about how they deal with these issues.
What happened is that the cops check anything that someone else complains about, and if it looks like a duct taped pipe bomb, they treat it as such. If it was McDonald's trash or something, no one would have reported it, but that's on society in general, not the cops. Cops want to go home at night without being killed or maimed, so if someone says that there is something that looks like a bomb on a bridge, and it's feasible as a bomb, then I see nothing wrong with treating it like a bomb.
What happened here is someone left something on public infrastructure and this is merely the most hilarious thing that could have happened to it.
You mean the atmosphere before the new atmosphere of fear?
That would be the old atmosphere of fear. You remember it, right? The Cold War? Mutually Assured Destruction?
I'm sorry, but the new atmosphere of fear is fuckall compared to the existential threat of imminent nuclear annihilation.
Okay. Idiocracy is a movie. A funny one, with something valid to say, but a movie. If the world got to the point where it even resembled that, civilization would have already completely collapsed or it would be subsisting on automation that the previous generations built. In either case, you have bigger problems than some radioactive waste leaking a little in Nevada.
Much of Nevada is a marginal place for humans to live to begin with. If there was a catastrophe that eliminated a lot of people, those people wouldn't go living in Nevada near the nuclear waste site. They'd move to the places it was easier to live. Just like before the Black Death in Europe, the development of marginal lands only continued profitably (or at all) while there was high population, and thus demand. Kill off a third of the population, and they stopped developing marginal areas and depopulated them.
The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site. This isn't like Chernobyl or Fukushima where fire and explosions are spreading the material. We're talking more about material leaching into groundwater and things like that. A terrible thing to happen, to be sure, but not exactly a problem if no one is living there.
Compare this to your Roundup example, and it is apples and oranges. Herbicidal treatments will be applied to locations where weeds need to be killed for food production. That is a much more serious threat compared to some nuclear waste stored in casks under a salt dome in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, we spent more money. However, understand that the anti-nuclear message causing the anti-power issue was a tactic, not the end goal. The end goal was simply unrest in the West which would affect the West's ability to compete with the Soviet bloc in nuclear armaments. So our money pointed back at them would not have directly counteracted against their propaganda that turned into anti-nuclear NIMBY protests because we used different tactics.
No one in the USSR would have cared if we sent an anti-nuclear message to them, because they controlled their population to the extent that there would be no actual protest. The West is vulnerable to that because we have the freedom to accept NIMBY-ism. The only people who had the ability to say "not in my backyard" in the USSR would have been the Party leaders, and they were likely already covered.
So, we didn't encourage them to not use nuclear power, because it would not have had the effect we wanted. Our propaganda was to show the people of the USSR that we were prosperous and non-threatening, while being able to defend ourselves if needed. The best way to do that was free information, blue jeans and rock and roll, not countering anti-nuclear propaganda.
Do you truly believe that the Democrats are not supported by their own set of heavy hitters? They're all rich, and they're all on the side of the rich.
The Democrats are frequently able to outspend the Republicans. Do you really believe this is due to more grannies spending 100 bucks individually? Please.
The Democratic Party is simply supported by different industries and different interests with different rich people. They have slightly better spin for "progressives" because they're better at the bread and circuses.
Both parties are rotten to the core. The Democrats are no more able to convince me that they are for the little guy or the "middle class" than I actually believe the Republicans are for the Moral Majority.
They all work for lobbyists. Period. Some of that is our fault, but that fault is also a flaw in large democracies. You can control people by feeding them certain information that reinforces their existing views. The interests deliver the voting blocs, the rich fund the interests and the campaigns, and the voters do what they are expected to do. And this is 100% legitimate democracy. No actual corruption required.
This is because the government is large, and getting larger. As it assumes more and more responsibility, it becomes more and more remote from the voter.
Literally, the existence of successful lobbyists shows starkly how the government should be. Those interests succeed because they work on the model that the government *should* work on. They are specialized, they know their specific subject matter, and they know what laws they want passed. The only problem is that they are bought and paid for businesses, trusts and rich donors, they are not a responsible body. Instead of directly legislating, they have to now work to subvert the process of the existing legislature to get things done.
Break up the government, elect people specifically based on the subjects that they have experience with and shrink the size of the electorate that each representative is responsible for. Turn special interests into groups that are representative, not of money, but of votes. After all, that's all they really do now anyway, only for hire.
Democracy is a tactic to legitimize governments, its not a path to a "correct" answer. That's why it can ignore science and math to come to its answers. You want something to be done about global warming? Sure you may need to involve the government, but not for everything. Don't ask for the government to subsidize your pet interest, subsidize your interest yourself and demand that your special interest use its money for something other than buying politicians.
Ness didn't have to hack Capone's PC.
Legwork worked in the 1940s because the criminals were on the same level. Your mobsters were generally within reach because to remain in control, they had to remain in communication range, which was usually in person.
Today, criminals can sit in Afghanistan and manage loose groupings of local networks very effectively. Drug cartels operate from Mexico. Criminals have the same capabilities that states had in the 1940s. Did we expect legwork to break codes? There is always legwork involved, but we were using SIGINT to get good information even then.
And bear in mind that we used to have the option of the wiretap, even in the days of Capone. Useless now with encrypted communications.
I don't think any other country is unduly concerned about us not opening up bids on a project like AF1. It's one or two planes. The symbolic value of the plane is significant, and honestly, isn't really what is beggaring the country.
No foreign corporation is going to seriously complain that they didn't get to build the one plane for the head of state for another country over a local builder.
The symbolic requirement isn't good enough to force the rest of the government to buy all Boeing, but unless the 747-8 was a complete pile of shit or twice the price of the comparable Airbus model, that one plane is not really a big deal.
How about "underground"?
"Because America" is a legitimate requirement for a Presidential aircraft. The President and what he uses is a powerful statement about the strength of US industry. That's why Queen Elizabeth II has a Bentley, and the French President is driven around in a Peugeot or a Citroën.
It is legitimate for politicians to have political reasoning behind the selection of their conveyances. I'd be surprised that they'd even consider Airbus for AF1, even if it was cheaper or slightly better.
Yeah, except that doesn't work well for a service. If they have people abusing it, they fire them, and/or prosecute them. And that is what needs discussion.
Its more like if an adult got some DWIs and they took their license away. Yeah, they can't be trusted with a car, but they still need to get to work because it isn't a matter of not getting their allowance money, they need to do their job to support their family and even their job place will suffer if they can't work.
In that case, the solution is public transit, or taxis, or someone driving them. Or in lesser cases, they still let you drive with an interlock device.
You really can't just say the law enforcement can't do something like this and take it away for awhile. Otherwise, you can't enforce laws and regulations. And when that happens, people get hurt, physically and financially. They either need it or not. If they need it, they can abuse it just as well later as they can now. We need a real solution other than taking it away.