Alonzo Fyfe made a great point about political positioning that I think also applies to the two party system. If you want to actually get anything done, you have to conjure up enough political backing to make it happen; it doesn't matter how right you are if nobody listens to you. You have to take the best set of positions that will still get you 51% of the vote. As a voter, you have to choose the compromise position that's more acceptable to you; voting third party leaves more power with whichever side you agree with slightly less.
Fyfe's really insightful point, I thought, was that it's incumbent upon us as citizens to create a political reality in which politicians can take the positions we all know are correct/moral/logical/win karma on/. This isn't something you do at the ballot box; it takes real work to make a substantial number of people think. The Ron Paul movement does a great job of that, but notice that he's still a registered republican.
Well if they did that there would be classes with mostly whites and classes with mostly blacks. Actually, that's what we have now, which is part of the reason for the education gap. If we were able to separate by natural academic potential, we would have a much better mix. Minority students, on average, perform worse than their white counterparts, because their educational opportunities are worse, on average.
There's no demonstrated link between race and talent. Right now, separating the kids who are excelling would largely mean white kids, but that's because they got a better education to start off with, not some NS notion of genetic superiority.
People dispute the first point because it leads to the conclusion that we need to funnel more money to schools where the minorities are, and nobody wants to pay for that. You get around the problem by ignoring who's at the schools and improving the worst performers... which are mostly in poorer areas... which are mostly filled with minorities. But this more expansive strategy doesn't screw over the poor white man, who's legitimately angry about affirmative action programs that leave him hanging. (no pun intended)
In theory, the low quality work and uneducated workers still produce "good enough" results (your phones work), and the companies cut expenses.
Unfortunately, most of the time it really IS cheaper to get the job done right the first time - the costs of correcting your mistakes are hidden as "repairs," which don't go on the balance sheets for at least a couple of quarters. Since CEOs are under enormous pressure to keep the stock price rising on a day to day basis, they're willing to accept the shittier service and long term costs as a trade-off for nominal short-term profits.
They get away with it because most people don't complain when their phones cut out, as long as it's only once in a while, so the costs actually end up staying down.
I think Corporatism fits much better; thanks for filling in the right word. I'd still argue that the original reference to fascism was a little misplaced, as it referred to one specific characteristic using the umbrella term for the whole phenomenon. You could call someone who wants to eliminate personal freedoms Bushian, and you wouldn't be wrong, but Orwellian is more specific and therefore, to me, more correct.
Fascism is an authoritarian, dictatorial system of government, which while it might control industry by mandate, is not usually associated with government-owned industry. The stronger association with the term fascism is using nationalism and xenophobia to achieve popularity - see here for more details. (Yeah, I had to go there.)
Government 'entwined with' corporations sounds more like socialism, although you could also argue that given big corporations' lobbying power, it looks like US democracy.
But you're right, "neo-libertarian" made almost no sense there.
I think you're partly right - there will likely not be a workable system.
Unfortunately, there will very likely be a system that partly works. Massive amounts of data will be collected, but processing will not be intelligent enough to translate this into real results in crime-fighting. Any data mining will result in many more false positives than actual results and waste government agents' time, which could otherwise be spent actually tracking down criminals (or terrorists.) Meanwhile, no thought will be given to privacy issues, resulting in tons of priviledged information being easily available to all the wrong people.
In a nice worst-case scenario, security failures could allow outsiders to change the govenment's record of the past.
At the point where we need to drill for oil at a loss, building a new drilling infrastructure isn't significantly cheaper, even short term, than building a new energy transport infrastructure (like hydrogen, or better batteries). The problem is that the more oil we drill, the harder it is to get to the remaining oil.
The real danger is that as easily accessible oil runs out, we will not have the good sense to invest enough of that energy in sustainable infrastructure. Energy itself is not scarse, but the means to convert it from sunlight into anything useful have to be developed and manufactured. The irony is that we need oil energy to build its replacement, but as long as oil remains cheap and plentiful, there's no economic incentive to make that switch. The government keeps prices artificially low; it's great politically, but doesn't help the future outlook.
It's a problem because everything we do (pretty much) is powered by oil, which is finite. Pick a date in the future when it will run out; it doesn't really matter, though using rough numbers for current reserves and assuming constant consumption (it's actually exponentially increasing), you come out to about 40 years. At that point, unless something has changed, our lifestyle stops working. I'd say that that pretty much sucks.
A little energy in the fertilizer, a little from sunlight, and bingo, food.
Fertilizer... comes from oil, the source of both the energy to create it and the hydrogen in the nitrate produced. You could generate hydrogen from fusion through electrolysis of water, but the energy involved is vastly greater.. and we don't have fusion yet. The figure for processed (read: cheap, mass market, inorganic) foods is roughly 10 calories of oil energy input per calorie of food produced. That means that at the moment, we're pretty much eating oil.
For further reading on eating oil and the earth's finite capacity to produce biomass (the correct term is "primary production," I'd forgotten), check out this article.
"Supporting infrastructure ready to use wind and solar energy," i.e. the power grid. Solar and wind energy are generally collected as electricity. Oil is also burned to produce electricity. The market economy ensures that where this oil goes doesn't really make a difference; the oil is just added into the market, and the whole transaction still nets an energy loss.
Also note that the infrastructure we have for extracting oil mostly runs on energy from... oil.
The problem with using economics as a justification is that we're not working with a completely free market, and there are many externalities that are just not figured into the system - what is the 'cost to society' of releasing ten tons of small particles into the atmosphere? It is certainly nonzero, and is not reflected in the cost of running a factory.
If you subsidize oil enough, you can make it profitable to drill in the US.. but when it takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than you get from the product, there's no real reason to drill. Until our economic policy accurately reflects thermodynamics, arguments based on 'cost' really don't hold water.
That said, it still represents a huge energy loss to mine for anything on the moon...
Any study of sustainability really has to be based on thermodynamics. In the case of population, the most obvious limit is the amount of food that the planet can produce, given the finite amount of solar energy we get. This is a fixed amount. There is no way to increase it. This is the first law of thermodynamics, in action.
(I don't have figures with me at the moment so I'm going to be abstract. I'm sorry.)
At the moment, humans use a certain amount of the planet's food capacity, while other species and systems use the rest. Technology can not increase the total amount of food available (thermodynamics), it can only increase the amount of that energy that is available for human use. GMOs are a great example of this - they allow us to turn more of the solar energy gathered by a plant into a human-usable product; they are not increasing the amount of food available. Everything we take comes from somewhere else; the earth is a closed system.
Already this leaves us with serious questions. How large a portion of the earth's food energy can we reliably make available to ourselves? Is it moral for us to continually increase our share of this energy, at the expense of biodiversity?
On top of the thermodynamics, there are political difficulties in even distribution of resources (read: we in the wealthy first world don't want to share.) The parent post protests that popluation control by force is not politically possible, but in a way we already are forcibly controling the population, when we have the capability to combat and control the rampant disease and starvation in the third world, and are just not doing it. Failing to act when we have the ability is tantamount to causing the problem ourselves, but somehow allowing people to starve and die of malnutrition (or malaria, cholera, polio, smallpox, AIDS..) is easier for people to stomache than any outright form of mass murder. "What's wrong with these poor people, why do they have so many kids?" Nobody agrees with this policy, but there just isn't enough political energy to make it change.
We have to work within the constraints of our own planet's systems. Unless we get into this mindset, anything we do 'off-world' in the name of progress will actually dig us deeper into our hole, because it allows us to become more reliant on routines that are not sustainable and not reversible. Anyone who thinks we are not digging a hole has his/her head buried in a hole.
The page loses user-friendly points, because I couldn't find a way to add menus I removed. There doesn't seem to be any function to do this.
Also note that www.start.com/1/ and www.start.com/2/ include different prototype versions, all a little different, though www.start.com/3/ is the most advanced looking.
Word on the streets is Microsoft is planning an innovative news filtering application that will bring content from multiple sources into one easy-to-read page. Microsoft also has alleged plans for an innovative desktop search application that will allow users fast and easy access to content on their own machines.
Both features due early in 2009. No word yet on whether these features will be supported for non-microsoft browsers.
Like all DRM, this really only affects the user who doesn't know his copy is pirated. On machines with pirated Windows I install 2000 instead of XP, since it's older and needs less frequent updating. If I do need an update, I can download it from somewhere else.
This will absolutely fail to affect users like me who know we're installing illegally, but doing it on a small scale. There are too many easy work-arounds for any approach to target this group.. but that's not MS's intent here. They're really trying to go after people who mass produce illegal copies, by recruiting the poor sap who buys a copy he thinks is legal. This is not an attempted attack on the guy who got a burned CD from a friend.
Does anyone have statistics on how much of that "pirated 22%" is from petty hackers, and how much is large-scale piracy?
(Sidenote: the "discounted prices" mentioned are the standard OEM prices on Newegg - hardly a substantial discount.)
MIT has a team working on a system called Blue Spec, which translates a form of C code into a chip design. It's a multi-stage process - first the C is compiled into Verilog code and translated into an FPGA-based design. The cool part is that their optomizer then cycles through this design and iteratively adds improvements. A design in which they let this cycle run for about 5 days (when printed to silicone) ran only 1.5 times slower than a comparable Intel chip. For a computer-generated design, this is an amazing number.
Wouldn't it be cool to give a program like this an extra dimension to work with? Disregarding "all the things that go wrong," if you built a single core across a few layers, rather than just slapping on a layer of memory and linking it up, I'd imagine that the possibilities for optimizations are greater by orders of mangnitude. Chip designers can only handle so much chip compexity maually, but a computer could just iterate through until it had an optimal design. A program that could do that would take a lot longer to run, but the end product could be pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I learned about the Blue Spec project from one of its engineers, on a bus. I am not affiliated with it in any way, nor can I guarantee personally that any information here is 100% accurate.
I disagree; I think advertizers will love this feature. Not only do you get immediate feedback on whether your ad was effective, but you get to send targeted email to users who've already expressed interest. I delete tons and tons of spam every day.. but that's because I'm not in the market for blue pills and free PPV. If I could be guaranteed that only messages I'd asked for showed up in my inbox, I'd pay a lot more attention to them.
I think for some people there might be a learning curve on a product like this - "Hey, this is cool, I'll opt in for this, and this, and this..." - but eventually, people will learn to use it only when they're really interested. The 'send me an email' format also enables users to respond on their own time. Actually, I suppose it even provides another interest check for the company - how many users who responded to the ad responded to the email?
Remember, too, that targeted advertizing has made boat-loads of money for certain other companies we hear a lot about.
Slashdot Mirror
Alonzo Fyfe made a great point about political positioning that I think also applies to the two party system. If you want to actually get anything done, you have to conjure up enough political backing to make it happen; it doesn't matter how right you are if nobody listens to you. You have to take the best set of positions that will still get you 51% of the vote. As a voter, you have to choose the compromise position that's more acceptable to you; voting third party leaves more power with whichever side you agree with slightly less.
/. This isn't something you do at the ballot box; it takes real work to make a substantial number of people think. The Ron Paul movement does a great job of that, but notice that he's still a registered republican.
Fyfe's really insightful point, I thought, was that it's incumbent upon us as citizens to create a political reality in which politicians can take the positions we all know are correct/moral/logical/win karma on
There's no demonstrated link between race and talent. Right now, separating the kids who are excelling would largely mean white kids, but that's because they got a better education to start off with, not some NS notion of genetic superiority.
People dispute the first point because it leads to the conclusion that we need to funnel more money to schools where the minorities are, and nobody wants to pay for that. You get around the problem by ignoring who's at the schools and improving the worst performers... which are mostly in poorer areas... which are mostly filled with minorities. But this more expansive strategy doesn't screw over the poor white man, who's legitimately angry about affirmative action programs that leave him hanging. (no pun intended)
In theory, the low quality work and uneducated workers still produce "good enough" results (your phones work), and the companies cut expenses.
Unfortunately, most of the time it really IS cheaper to get the job done right the first time - the costs of correcting your mistakes are hidden as "repairs," which don't go on the balance sheets for at least a couple of quarters. Since CEOs are under enormous pressure to keep the stock price rising on a day to day basis, they're willing to accept the shittier service and long term costs as a trade-off for nominal short-term profits.
They get away with it because most people don't complain when their phones cut out, as long as it's only once in a while, so the costs actually end up staying down.
I think Corporatism fits much better; thanks for filling in the right word. I'd still argue that the original reference to fascism was a little misplaced, as it referred to one specific characteristic using the umbrella term for the whole phenomenon. You could call someone who wants to eliminate personal freedoms Bushian, and you wouldn't be wrong, but Orwellian is more specific and therefore, to me, more correct.
Fascism is an authoritarian, dictatorial system of government, which while it might control industry by mandate, is not usually associated with government-owned industry. The stronger association with the term fascism is using nationalism and xenophobia to achieve popularity - see here for more details. (Yeah, I had to go there.)
Government 'entwined with' corporations sounds more like socialism, although you could also argue that given big corporations' lobbying power, it looks like US democracy.
But you're right, "neo-libertarian" made almost no sense there.
.. that data mining doesn't work.
I think you're partly right - there will likely not be a workable system.
Unfortunately, there will very likely be a system that partly works. Massive amounts of data will be collected, but processing will not be intelligent enough to translate this into real results in crime-fighting. Any data mining will result in many more false positives than actual results and waste government agents' time, which could otherwise be spent actually tracking down criminals (or terrorists.) Meanwhile, no thought will be given to privacy issues, resulting in tons of priviledged information being easily available to all the wrong people.
In a nice worst-case scenario, security failures could allow outsiders to change the govenment's record of the past.
I really do wish your remark were fully correct.
You mean every time there's a major update? "Your computer will be restarted in 5:00" infuriates me.
Shaking things up in the news today?
At the point where we need to drill for oil at a loss, building a new drilling infrastructure isn't significantly cheaper, even short term, than building a new energy transport infrastructure (like hydrogen, or better batteries). The problem is that the more oil we drill, the harder it is to get to the remaining oil.
The real danger is that as easily accessible oil runs out, we will not have the good sense to invest enough of that energy in sustainable infrastructure. Energy itself is not scarse, but the means to convert it from sunlight into anything useful have to be developed and manufactured. The irony is that we need oil energy to build its replacement, but as long as oil remains cheap and plentiful, there's no economic incentive to make that switch. The government keeps prices artificially low; it's great politically, but doesn't help the future outlook.
It's a problem because everything we do (pretty much) is powered by oil, which is finite. Pick a date in the future when it will run out; it doesn't really matter, though using rough numbers for current reserves and assuming constant consumption (it's actually exponentially increasing), you come out to about 40 years. At that point, unless something has changed, our lifestyle stops working. I'd say that that pretty much sucks.
A little energy in the fertilizer, a little from sunlight, and bingo, food.
Fertilizer... comes from oil, the source of both the energy to create it and the hydrogen in the nitrate produced. You could generate hydrogen from fusion through electrolysis of water, but the energy involved is vastly greater.. and we don't have fusion yet. The figure for processed (read: cheap, mass market, inorganic) foods is roughly 10 calories of oil energy input per calorie of food produced. That means that at the moment, we're pretty much eating oil.
For further reading on eating oil and the earth's finite capacity to produce biomass (the correct term is "primary production," I'd forgotten), check out this article.
"Supporting infrastructure ready to use wind and solar energy," i.e. the power grid. Solar and wind energy are generally collected as electricity. Oil is also burned to produce electricity. The market economy ensures that where this oil goes doesn't really make a difference; the oil is just added into the market, and the whole transaction still nets an energy loss.
Also note that the infrastructure we have for extracting oil mostly runs on energy from... oil.
The problem with using economics as a justification is that we're not working with a completely free market, and there are many externalities that are just not figured into the system - what is the 'cost to society' of releasing ten tons of small particles into the atmosphere? It is certainly nonzero, and is not reflected in the cost of running a factory.
If you subsidize oil enough, you can make it profitable to drill in the US.. but when it takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than you get from the product, there's no real reason to drill. Until our economic policy accurately reflects thermodynamics, arguments based on 'cost' really don't hold water.
That said, it still represents a huge energy loss to mine for anything on the moon...
Any study of sustainability really has to be based on thermodynamics. In the case of population, the most obvious limit is the amount of food that the planet can produce, given the finite amount of solar energy we get. This is a fixed amount. There is no way to increase it. This is the first law of thermodynamics, in action.
(I don't have figures with me at the moment so I'm going to be abstract. I'm sorry.)
At the moment, humans use a certain amount of the planet's food capacity, while other species and systems use the rest. Technology can not increase the total amount of food available (thermodynamics), it can only increase the amount of that energy that is available for human use. GMOs are a great example of this - they allow us to turn more of the solar energy gathered by a plant into a human-usable product; they are not increasing the amount of food available. Everything we take comes from somewhere else; the earth is a closed system.
Already this leaves us with serious questions. How large a portion of the earth's food energy can we reliably make available to ourselves? Is it moral for us to continually increase our share of this energy, at the expense of biodiversity?
On top of the thermodynamics, there are political difficulties in even distribution of resources (read: we in the wealthy first world don't want to share.) The parent post protests that popluation control by force is not politically possible, but in a way we already are forcibly controling the population, when we have the capability to combat and control the rampant disease and starvation in the third world, and are just not doing it. Failing to act when we have the ability is tantamount to causing the problem ourselves, but somehow allowing people to starve and die of malnutrition (or malaria, cholera, polio, smallpox, AIDS..) is easier for people to stomache than any outright form of mass murder. "What's wrong with these poor people, why do they have so many kids?" Nobody agrees with this policy, but there just isn't enough political energy to make it change.
We have to work within the constraints of our own planet's systems. Unless we get into this mindset, anything we do 'off-world' in the name of progress will actually dig us deeper into our hole, because it allows us to become more reliant on routines that are not sustainable and not reversible. Anyone who thinks we are not digging a hole has his/her head buried in a hole.
The page loses user-friendly points, because I couldn't find a way to add menus I removed. There doesn't seem to be any function to do this.
Also note that www.start.com/1/ and www.start.com/2/ include different prototype versions, all a little different, though www.start.com/3/ is the most advanced looking.
Word on the streets is Microsoft is planning an innovative news filtering application that will bring content from multiple sources into one easy-to-read page. Microsoft also has alleged plans for an innovative desktop search application that will allow users fast and easy access to content on their own machines.
Both features due early in 2009. No word yet on whether these features will be supported for non-microsoft browsers.
Like all DRM, this really only affects the user who doesn't know his copy is pirated. On machines with pirated Windows I install 2000 instead of XP, since it's older and needs less frequent updating. If I do need an update, I can download it from somewhere else.
This will absolutely fail to affect users like me who know we're installing illegally, but doing it on a small scale. There are too many easy work-arounds for any approach to target this group.. but that's not MS's intent here. They're really trying to go after people who mass produce illegal copies, by recruiting the poor sap who buys a copy he thinks is legal. This is not an attempted attack on the guy who got a burned CD from a friend.
Does anyone have statistics on how much of that "pirated 22%" is from petty hackers, and how much is large-scale piracy?
(Sidenote: the "discounted prices" mentioned are the standard OEM prices on Newegg - hardly a substantial discount.)
Half-way on topic:
MIT has a team working on a system called Blue Spec, which translates a form of C code into a chip design. It's a multi-stage process - first the C is compiled into Verilog code and translated into an FPGA-based design. The cool part is that their optomizer then cycles through this design and iteratively adds improvements. A design in which they let this cycle run for about 5 days (when printed to silicone) ran only 1.5 times slower than a comparable Intel chip. For a computer-generated design, this is an amazing number.
Wouldn't it be cool to give a program like this an extra dimension to work with? Disregarding "all the things that go wrong," if you built a single core across a few layers, rather than just slapping on a layer of memory and linking it up, I'd imagine that the possibilities for optimizations are greater by orders of mangnitude. Chip designers can only handle so much chip compexity maually, but a computer could just iterate through until it had an optimal design. A program that could do that would take a lot longer to run, but the end product could be pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I learned about the Blue Spec project from one of its engineers, on a bus. I am not affiliated with it in any way, nor can I guarantee personally that any information here is 100% accurate.
I disagree; I think advertizers will love this feature. Not only do you get immediate feedback on whether your ad was effective, but you get to send targeted email to users who've already expressed interest. I delete tons and tons of spam every day.. but that's because I'm not in the market for blue pills and free PPV. If I could be guaranteed that only messages I'd asked for showed up in my inbox, I'd pay a lot more attention to them.
I think for some people there might be a learning curve on a product like this - "Hey, this is cool, I'll opt in for this, and this, and this..." - but eventually, people will learn to use it only when they're really interested. The 'send me an email' format also enables users to respond on their own time. Actually, I suppose it even provides another interest check for the company - how many users who responded to the ad responded to the email?
Remember, too, that targeted advertizing has made boat-loads of money for certain other companies we hear a lot about.