How did that theory work out for banking? Markets do not exist until someone creates them by force, because humans are not by default as simplistic creatures as economics demands
Biodome wasn't good science, if I can remember correctly. Beneath a very reasonable idea (trying to create a self-contained artificial biosphere that can support humans) there was a lot of hippie crap thrown in; things about trying to replicate every different ecosystem found on earth, and having rock pools and stuff. Thing is, the whole grow-plants-to-let-the-humans-breathe idea was well explored by the Soviets decades earlier - rather than piss around creating a Zen garden they just used boring old algae beds. And they, AFAIK, didn't need an injection of oxygen half way through the experiment.
I *clearly* meant that we are not *just* animals. You can't use such simplistic population models on humans - even humans you consider inferior by virtue of their ethnicity.
Good call. The energy price spike in 2007-2008 caused a global food crisis; modern agriculture provides food as a function of how much energy is put into each unit area of land, so there is much more at stake than whether you can have incandescent light bulbs and leave your TV on standby.
Even if low-energy agriculture could somehow feed the world, that isn't our only problem. China and India have shrugged off imperialism, modernised their economies, and thats 2.5 billion people demanding western-level lifestyles and we don't have the political clout (nor the moral right) to say no to them. With our current energy sources, the planet simply can't handle it though.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods). A better world is a higher energy one.
Wow. Thats one scientific quip there. Not one star in the sky is toroidal, but not one star in the sky can be kept in a building in the south of France...
For the third time. Resource availability isn't the sole determinant of fertility rate (seeing as how rich countries with more resources per capita also have lower fertility rates). Humans are not just animals that breed to fill a niche, even the human beings with different colour skin from you. You are a fucking stupid racist, and are mouthing a horridly unscientific position.
"Supply and demand" is a tenuous bit of pop economics that you can't blindly apply to any situation you feel could do with a bit of market fundamentalism applied to it. The idea that human population growth is governed by it is utter horseshit. Rich countries have more resources per capita than countries in Africa, but they have lower fertility rates. That blows your little hypothesis out of the water straight away.
Misapplying pop economics. Ignoring real life fertility rates. Treating people of other races as if they were animals mindlessly breeding to fill an ecological niche. You've committed the three most common logical fallacies, and the three most disgusting ones, in this debate.
Restating the failed predictions of Malthus doesn't deserve to be modded 'insightful'. The fact is, fertility rates are determined by social factors (generally, higher gender equality leads to sustainable fertility rates) - if, as you so unthinkingly suggest, rates are determined simply by the availability of resources, then a family who is five times wealthier should have five times as many children (obviously wrong) and the UK should have 3 times the fertility rate of Equitorial Guinea (again, obviously wrong; the rate is much higher in the latter). Just because the years of the green revolution and after saw continued population growth, does not mean it caused population growth.
Basically, you are working from the assumption that an organism will breed as much as it can until its population is checked by famine. This does (sometimes) work for animals - but human beings are not animals. Your suggesting they will act as them (and, lets cut to the chase, you are only suggesting that human beings of certain ethnic groups act like animals...) is unscientific.
You are commit an 'ad hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy, and throwing in a nice bit of racism as well. Insightful my arse.
Agreed. Every joker who builds a farnsworth fusor in his basement thinks he is going to be producing commercial power some time next year, and when they make a noise about this, and idiots with money buy into their promises of more for less, it can take funding from genuine research. When you are doing something that is inherently slow, costly, and prone to overruns, you've constantly got some bullshit artist nipping at your heels claiming they can do the same for less money, in less time, with big fucking bells and whistles on.
I'm involved in a cubesat project, and we recently had to explain why we were spending 100k on a launch when some random jokers on the internet with new-age mysticism and off-the-shelf amateur rocket motors claimed to be able to do the same for 10k "some time next year".
OK, you are obviously just trolling, the meat of your argument is already refuted by what I said or doesn't stand on its own, but I will pick up on this one bit:
If it's so obvious, then you'll have no trouble finding examples where legitimate criticism of a corporation has cost someone their job and made it difficult for them to find another, or where my government (or any other in the first world) has actively threatened the lives of public critics, will you?
Completely ignoring my request that you google before pissily demanding evidence of the bloody obvious, here is what you in your apparent abject ignorance of world events have missed:
Now, before you go off an an intellectually dishonest dismissal of my evidence, refer to what I actually claimed in the first place, not what you think I claimed when it was filtered through your idiot brain.
You are a moron with pretensions of intelligence. You've seen smart people and are trying to imitate them in a cargo-cult kind of manner.
It's hard to argue with such a complete lack of perspective. Identity theft destroys lives.
You are the one lacking perspective. People have their lives ENDED by the excesses I am talking about.
That is a curious claim to make at the end of a lengthy argument about how our leaders perpetrated obvious war crimes and yet walked away without suffering any serious penalty.
I propose an alternative theory: when leaders go to war without a clear mandate and popular support, we put them up against a wall and shoot them once for each innocent who dies in that war.
My turn for a little idealism here; I don't particularly want to live in a society that practices summary executions in that manner. Anonymity > Death squads.
The fact that we haven't got sensible oversight within governments at the moment doesn't mean we can't have it, it just means we have to forcibly evict those who hold power at the moment (by which I don't just mean the current administrations, I mean the in-crowd of major political parties and corporate sponsors who can buy all the ad time they need so that at least one of them gets elected).
That dangerously ignores the question of what you do the day after you replace a government by force. You are advocating a method of change, without regard for the nature of the change you want, but using a method that often leads to negative changes in practice.
That's a lot of bold claims to make without the slightest attempt to back them up with any real evidence whatsoever.
Those are only bold claims to a person who has spend years living under a rock, seriously. You may think that that demanding evidence makes you some kind of critical thinker, but that only works if you can be bothered to google things for yourself first.
Again, if these really are true, then anonymity is not the answer. Draconian penalties for those who commit heinous offences are the answer.
Which just gives you a draconian legal system which will ultimately serve those in power.
No, you're not. You're speaking as someone who has seen a relatively dark period of human history in recent years and given up. Grow a spine and help fix the problem, please.
You first.
The fact you are posting on/. suggests that you yourself haven't "grown a spine" and done what you are suggesting (taken arms against your government). All I am advocating is that you should be able to make such a suggestion, no matter how badly thought out, without receiving a knock at the door.
Americans, I feel, have too much faith in their constitution. Bear in mind that, thanks to your allegedly freedom-enhancing revolution, the institution of slavery was extended 20 years further than it went on in the rest of the British empire...
That's your opinion, and of course you're entitled to it. Still, I'd bet that you have never been on the wrong side of these "nuisances" to the point where they seriously screw up your life for months at a time. Not everyone is so lucky. Been there, done that, consoled the friends, been the guy who called the police.
Yes, they are just nuisances. They are manageable threats (they don't generally bother experienced users much) and they are no where near the scale of problem caused by a society where you cannot have anonymity.
There are much better solutions to those things than hiding behind anonymity: for a start, they include enforcing a healthy degree of responsibility and oversight within government, punishing harshly those who would harass others for their own benefit, and setting and openly enforcing (in both directions) a sensible legal framework for the relationships between producers and consumers.
Thats some pretty funny shit there.
'Healthy responsibility and oversight within government' are a fantasy. The US and UK governments conspired to lie in order to start an aggressive war in Iraq which killed hundred of thousands, perhaps as many as a million people. Everyone knows this, neither of the leaders in question faced any kind of consequence, either through the structures of government or at the ballot box. Both left office at a time of their choosing to become elder statesmen (rather than, say, convicted war criminals). The institutions that are allegedly supposed to check abuses of power simply do not work, and I am skeptical they will ever or have ever consistently worked. What does work is the powerless being able to criticize and poke and mock under the blanket of anonymity.
Part of the concern I have with on-line anonymity is that in the cases where it has legitimate merits—and I don't for an instant dispute that anonymity can be a force for good under some circumstances—it tends to be more of a sticking plaster that treats symptoms rather than a fix for the underlying causes of problems. As I've noted before, if you need to rely on on-line anonymity to fight against a government so corrupt that the people cannot openly challenge it, then there are much more important rights than on-line anonymity to protect, and the time for the use of words alone has probably passed.
If you criticize Scientology without anonymity, they follow you around and make your life hell. If you criticize the government without anonymity, they put your families life in danger out of spite, or harass you so much you kill yourself. If you criticize a corporation you lose your job and find it kind of hard to find another one.
All this happens in democratic countries.
For threats below the level of corrupt government, any good legal system should protect the right of its citizens to speak openly and honestly on matters of importance without fear of reprisal, just as it should balance such rights with the protection of innocents from defamation and invasion of privacy. In short, anonymity shouldn't be necessary, and where it seems to be, I believe the benefits are often illusory.
Then why don't they? Your are speaking from the position of 18th century liberal idealism about how a society works. I am speaking from 21st century pragmatism.
Meanwhile, the basic downside of anonymity remains: if freedom comes with responsibility, then how do you hold someone accountable for their actions if you can't identify them? The combined cost of the acts I listed at the start of this post, both to society in general and to effective use of the Internet in particular, is not trivial, and that's before you even get into less tangible damage as evidenced by the GIFT [penny-arcade.com].
If freedom comes with responsibility, the question you are failing to address is 'who decides what is and is
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things. The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
Let them be threatened. They deserve to live in fear.
So, a single incident in one NHS trust, reported by the Torygraph - and you damn the whole NHS for it? Ridiculous. This whole 'death panels' thing is absurd and blown out of proportion.
1. Because a private health insurance company would NEVER do a thing like that...
2. AFAIK, what you describe hasn't actually happened. The closest thing I can find in the news is this:
http://tinyurl.com/yjmn6s5
Which is a far cry from what you were claiming. Sounds to me like you were just mindlessly parroting anti-NHS propaganda. So why don't you just crawl back under whichever stone you came from?
The idea of negative and positive liberty is not universally accepted, and in fact contains very deep flaws.
Firstly, negative liberty requires enforcement, and that enforcement is not free. Everyone pays taxes for a policeman to protect their property, but clearly the millionaire with his mansions gets more out of that arrangement than the minimum wage stiff living in a rented flat. So what appears to be a negative liberty is in fact identical to a positive one. You can do this for literally any 'negative' liberty.
If you want a more detailed look at the failure of 'negative liberty' to live up to its ideals, I can recommend 'The Trap', a series of three documentary films by Adam Curtis. Seeing as AFAIK it has never been released on DVD, you can torrent it with a clear conscience.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps its because there is no more tangible wealth to make. What if a mass shift towards rent-seeking business models could have concealed peak oil?
You are guessing, without evidence, that an individual was at fault and not a predatory royalty collection group? Guesswork fail.
Didn't the KGB used to have planning targets for how many people they should arrest? Same shit, different arsehole...
How did that theory work out for banking? Markets do not exist until someone creates them by force, because humans are not by default as simplistic creatures as economics demands
No *true* Scotsman would enforce copyrights...
Indeed. Anyone else reminded of the Prole woman that Winston Smith watches singing out the window in 1984?
Yeah, because what a group of forcibly confined men really need to help them get along is to throw some totty into the middle of them.
Biodome wasn't good science, if I can remember correctly. Beneath a very reasonable idea (trying to create a self-contained artificial biosphere that can support humans) there was a lot of hippie crap thrown in; things about trying to replicate every different ecosystem found on earth, and having rock pools and stuff. Thing is, the whole grow-plants-to-let-the-humans-breathe idea was well explored by the Soviets decades earlier - rather than piss around creating a Zen garden they just used boring old algae beds. And they, AFAIK, didn't need an injection of oxygen half way through the experiment.
Retard. Millions of socialists have been Christians.
I *clearly* meant that we are not *just* animals. You can't use such simplistic population models on humans - even humans you consider inferior by virtue of their ethnicity.
Good call. The energy price spike in 2007-2008 caused a global food crisis; modern agriculture provides food as a function of how much energy is put into each unit area of land, so there is much more at stake than whether you can have incandescent light bulbs and leave your TV on standby.
Even if low-energy agriculture could somehow feed the world, that isn't our only problem. China and India have shrugged off imperialism, modernised their economies, and thats 2.5 billion people demanding western-level lifestyles and we don't have the political clout (nor the moral right) to say no to them. With our current energy sources, the planet simply can't handle it though.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods). A better world is a higher energy one.
Wow. Thats one scientific quip there. Not one star in the sky is toroidal, but not one star in the sky can be kept in a building in the south of France...
For the third time. Resource availability isn't the sole determinant of fertility rate (seeing as how rich countries with more resources per capita also have lower fertility rates). Humans are not just animals that breed to fill a niche, even the human beings with different colour skin from you. You are a fucking stupid racist, and are mouthing a horridly unscientific position.
Stop. Just stop.
"Supply and demand" is a tenuous bit of pop economics that you can't blindly apply to any situation you feel could do with a bit of market fundamentalism applied to it. The idea that human population growth is governed by it is utter horseshit. Rich countries have more resources per capita than countries in Africa, but they have lower fertility rates. That blows your little hypothesis out of the water straight away.
Misapplying pop economics. Ignoring real life fertility rates. Treating people of other races as if they were animals mindlessly breeding to fill an ecological niche. You've committed the three most common logical fallacies, and the three most disgusting ones, in this debate.
Restating the failed predictions of Malthus doesn't deserve to be modded 'insightful'. The fact is, fertility rates are determined by social factors (generally, higher gender equality leads to sustainable fertility rates) - if, as you so unthinkingly suggest, rates are determined simply by the availability of resources, then a family who is five times wealthier should have five times as many children (obviously wrong) and the UK should have 3 times the fertility rate of Equitorial Guinea (again, obviously wrong; the rate is much higher in the latter). Just because the years of the green revolution and after saw continued population growth, does not mean it caused population growth.
Basically, you are working from the assumption that an organism will breed as much as it can until its population is checked by famine. This does (sometimes) work for animals - but human beings are not animals. Your suggesting they will act as them (and, lets cut to the chase, you are only suggesting that human beings of certain ethnic groups act like animals...) is unscientific.
You are commit an 'ad hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy, and throwing in a nice bit of racism as well. Insightful my arse.
Agreed. Every joker who builds a farnsworth fusor in his basement thinks he is going to be producing commercial power some time next year, and when they make a noise about this, and idiots with money buy into their promises of more for less, it can take funding from genuine research. When you are doing something that is inherently slow, costly, and prone to overruns, you've constantly got some bullshit artist nipping at your heels claiming they can do the same for less money, in less time, with big fucking bells and whistles on.
I'm involved in a cubesat project, and we recently had to explain why we were spending 100k on a launch when some random jokers on the internet with new-age mysticism and off-the-shelf amateur rocket motors claimed to be able to do the same for 10k "some time next year".
OK, you are obviously just trolling, the meat of your argument is already refuted by what I said or doesn't stand on its own, but I will pick up on this one bit:
Completely ignoring my request that you google before pissily demanding evidence of the bloody obvious, here is what you in your apparent abject ignorance of world events have missed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_%28weapons_expert%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wilson_%28reporter%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sweeney_%28journalist%29
Now, before you go off an an intellectually dishonest dismissal of my evidence, refer to what I actually claimed in the first place, not what you think I claimed when it was filtered through your idiot brain.
You are a moron with pretensions of intelligence. You've seen smart people and are trying to imitate them in a cargo-cult kind of manner.
You are the one lacking perspective. People have their lives ENDED by the excesses I am talking about.
My turn for a little idealism here; I don't particularly want to live in a society that practices summary executions in that manner. Anonymity > Death squads.
That dangerously ignores the question of what you do the day after you replace a government by force. You are advocating a method of change, without regard for the nature of the change you want, but using a method that often leads to negative changes in practice.
Those are only bold claims to a person who has spend years living under a rock, seriously. You may think that that demanding evidence makes you some kind of critical thinker, but that only works if you can be bothered to google things for yourself first.
Which just gives you a draconian legal system which will ultimately serve those in power.
You first.
The fact you are posting on /. suggests that you yourself haven't "grown a spine" and done what you are suggesting (taken arms against your government). All I am advocating is that you should be able to make such a suggestion, no matter how badly thought out, without receiving a knock at the door.
Americans, I feel, have too much faith in their constitution. Bear in mind that, thanks to your allegedly freedom-enhancing revolution, the institution of slavery was extended 20 years further than it went on in the rest of the British empire...
I'll take a fuckwad any day of the week over a government bureaucrat, a libel lawyer, or a Scientology operative.
People need to be able to draw a line between 'annoying and foul mouthed' and 'vicious and tyrannical'
Yes, they are just nuisances. They are manageable threats (they don't generally bother experienced users much) and they are no where near the scale of problem caused by a society where you cannot have anonymity.
Thats some pretty funny shit there.
'Healthy responsibility and oversight within government' are a fantasy. The US and UK governments conspired to lie in order to start an aggressive war in Iraq which killed hundred of thousands, perhaps as many as a million people. Everyone knows this, neither of the leaders in question faced any kind of consequence, either through the structures of government or at the ballot box. Both left office at a time of their choosing to become elder statesmen (rather than, say, convicted war criminals). The institutions that are allegedly supposed to check abuses of power simply do not work, and I am skeptical they will ever or have ever consistently worked. What does work is the powerless being able to criticize and poke and mock under the blanket of anonymity.
If you criticize Scientology without anonymity, they follow you around and make your life hell. If you criticize the government without anonymity, they put your families life in danger out of spite, or harass you so much you kill yourself. If you criticize a corporation you lose your job and find it kind of hard to find another one.
All this happens in democratic countries.
Then why don't they? Your are speaking from the position of 18th century liberal idealism about how a society works. I am speaking from 21st century pragmatism.
If freedom comes with responsibility, the question you are failing to address is 'who decides what is and is
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things. The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
Let them be threatened. They deserve to live in fear.
So, a single incident in one NHS trust, reported by the Torygraph - and you damn the whole NHS for it? Ridiculous. This whole 'death panels' thing is absurd and blown out of proportion.
1. Because a private health insurance company would NEVER do a thing like that...
2. AFAIK, what you describe hasn't actually happened. The closest thing I can find in the news is this:
http://tinyurl.com/yjmn6s5
Which is a far cry from what you were claiming. Sounds to me like you were just mindlessly parroting anti-NHS propaganda. So why don't you just crawl back under whichever stone you came from?
The idea of negative and positive liberty is not universally accepted, and in fact contains very deep flaws.
Firstly, negative liberty requires enforcement, and that enforcement is not free. Everyone pays taxes for a policeman to protect their property, but clearly the millionaire with his mansions gets more out of that arrangement than the minimum wage stiff living in a rented flat. So what appears to be a negative liberty is in fact identical to a positive one. You can do this for literally any 'negative' liberty.
If you want a more detailed look at the failure of 'negative liberty' to live up to its ideals, I can recommend 'The Trap', a series of three documentary films by Adam Curtis. Seeing as AFAIK it has never been released on DVD, you can torrent it with a clear conscience.