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A different cluetrain

Right now, I'm chewing over the final edits on a rather political book. And I think, as it's a near future setting, I should jot down some axioms about politics ...

  1. We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).

  2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres and if there aren't enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they're guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).

  3. Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

  4. The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization's employees.)

  5. Governments are organizations.

  6. We observe the increasing militarization of police forces and the priviliging of intelligence agencies all around the world. And in the media, a permanent drumbeat of fear, doubt and paranoia directed at "terrorists" (a paper tiger threat that kills fewer than 0.1% of the number who die in road traffic accidents).

  7. Money can buy you cooperation from people in government, even when it's not supposed to.

  8. The internet disintermediates supply chains.

  9. Political legitimacy in a democracy is a finite resource, so supplies are constrained.

  10. The purpose of democracy is to provide a formal mechanism for transfer of power without violence, when the faction in power has lost legitimacy.

  11. Our mechanisms for democratic power transfer date to the 18th century. They are inherently slower to respond to change than the internet and our contemporary news media.

  12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2).

  13. Security services are obeying the iron law of bureaucracy (4) when they metastasize, citing terrorism (6) as a justification for their expansion.

  14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

  15. The term "failed state" carries a freight of implicit baggage: failed at what, exactly? The unspoken implication is, "failed to conform to the requirements of global capital" (not democracy—see (3)) by failing to adequately facilitate (2).

  16. I submit that a real failed state is one that does not serve the best interests of its citizens (insofar as those best interests do not lead to direct conflict with other states).

  17. In future, inter-state pressure may be brought to bear on states that fail to meet the criteria in (15) even when they are not failed states by the standard of point (16). See also: Greece.

  18. As human beings, our role in this picture is as units of Labour (unless we're eye-wateringly rich, and thereby rare).

  19. So, going by (17) and (18), we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.

Have a nice century!

Afternotes:

a) Student loans are loans against an imaginary product—something that may or may not exist inside someone's head and which may or may not enable them to accumulate more capital if they are able to use it in the expected manner and it remains useful for a 20-30 year period. I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace engineering degree from 1927 ...

b) Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn't need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don't plead guilty.

c) (sethg reminded me of this): A very important piece of the puzzle is that while capital can move freely between the developed and underdeveloped world, labour cannot. So capital migrates to seek the cheapest labour, thereby reaping greater profits. Remember this next time you hear someone complaining about "immigrants coming here and taking our jobs". Or go google for "investors visa" if you can cope with a sudden attack of rage.

967 Comments

1:

Re point 2: yes, student loans are imaginary.

When I did my degrees (too many years ago) there were no student loans. But imagine this: you're a lender, so you gave 1983-me a loan to go to university and notionally qualify in a profession, and repay you from the increment in my earnings obtained by virtue of having that profession. Which would be ... pharmacy!

The whole idea of student loans rests on the assumption that someone aged 16-18 can have a clear-cut aptitude for some productive occupation that they will pursue for 20-30 years. Or that by virtue of going to the right classes a young person will magically acquire occult powers of money-attraction that they would not otherwise exhibit.

It's basically nonsense, unless you view it as a tool for social engineering intended to intimidate members of the public into shutting the fuck up and doing what they're supposed to do, on pain of financial hardship. Because you increasingly need the sheepskin in order to get a job at all, and without a job you're fresh meat for the workfare slavers. Or you can starve. Right?

2:

"rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. "

When Tiananmen happened, my brother told me "China is going to become a Democracy." I was far more skeptical. I hate to say, my skepticism seems to have borne out thus far.

3:

On 17, "In future"? It's already SOP, and has been for some decades. Cuba. Tanzania under Nyerere. Yugoslavia under Tito. And so on.

4:

On student loans, an eye-watering read is Andrew McGettigans "The Great University Gamble".

As well as the implicit locking-people-into-employment role of the loans, they don't even make sense financially.

The numbers in the book above (don't have a copy with me now) show that the expected excess that the average student will fail to pay exceeds the previous costs of a university education. That is IIRC the sums were on the order of: * Previous "free at point of delivery" Uni. : ~14,000 per student, including interest on national debt. * Total cost of student loan: ~ 85,000 over 30 yrs. * Total sum paid by average student: ~ 60-65,000. * Remainder paid by taxpayer after 30 yrs: ~20,000.

5:

Charlie, on twitter, you said

"AR15s are an 18th century answer to 18th century threats to democracy. But this is the 21st century ..."

That does suggest that there is a disruptive singularity in political and social structures in the making. Someone is going to figure this out, someone is going to implement it, and then everything is going to change, radically. Possibly this change will be even more radical than the post Westphalian world.

Our Sad Puppies friends seem to be focusing on 4th Generation warfare as the answer, but I think the answer and origin of this is as likely to be as secular as military

6:

Yep. I think I shall add a footnote to the article above, reflecting that tweet!

7:

The current student loans setup was a mess from the start, and the government were told so, but still carried it out. Now they are talking about changing the loan terms so that the threshold of repayment might be lowered or that you are liable for them for longer (IIRC the remainder gets written off after 20 years at the moment).

The USA has a university system that is now an example of how badly things can go wrong with loans; they are non-dischargeable and prices for university keep going up, although it is often hard to see why, except that the senior people in the hierarchy are generally taking more money home than before. Moreover this is quite a recent thing, within the last 15 to 20 years. Many people will comment about it all without realising that the world has changed since they were at university, and the economy has changed also. Again, in the USA and to some extent the UK, the actual income in real terms of what we might call the middle class has flatlined for 30 years, yet the aspiring middle class attending university this century are having a higher percentage of their income sucked away in student loan repayments.

You don't have to be a genius to work out that that means they can't afford to buy stuff and keep the economy ticking over. Except of course that the geniuses of finance don't notice or don't care.

8:

Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

I disagree.

Capitalism as a system is only as efficient as the market. In the absence of the checks and balances of western democracy, powerful players will capture parts of the market, eliminate competition, and the efficiency will drop to 0.

There is no capitalism in Russia. It is at present even more corrupt than USSR, and only thrived because of high oil prices.

China also exploits a single resource, their cheap labor force. They fare better than Russia because they invent their money in infrastructure, instead of storing in off-shore accounts, but that's not due to capitalism - that's just using a method that worked in many countries before.

Once they have more bridges, trains and nuclear reactors than they need, then we'll see how real is Chinese capitalism...

9:

Capitalism as a system is only as efficient as the market. In the absence of the checks and balances of western democracy, powerful players will capture parts of the market, eliminate competition, and the efficiency will drop to 0.

Kindly explain Singapore.

10:

We're living in an era of increasing automation. And it's trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).

No, it's not that clear. If I'm a plant owner and replaced all my workers with robots, and now my former workers have no money to by my products, what do I have the plant for? Also, if nobody buys my products, how do I pay taxes? In material goods? And to whom?

11:

If I'm a plant owner and replaced all my workers with robots, and now my former workers have no money to by my products, what do I have the plant for? Also, if nobody buys my products, how do I pay taxes? In material goods?

Welcome to the crisis of capitalism, comrade!

(I'm about to go swimming. Replies will be delayed for a while.)

12:

Noticing that their workers don't have enough money to buy stuff that everyone else makes would require hitherto rarely seen amounts of empathy, care or just sheer broadminded intelligence.
All sadly lacking in today's hyperfinancial capitalism. People should remember that there have been/ is Capitalism(global, 2015) and Capitalism (European 1960's), Capitalism (South American, 2nd half 20th century) and so on.

These are all somewhat different ways of having a capitalist economy, with varying levels of tax, public involvement, etc etc.

13:

Kindly explain Singapore.

Deng Xiaoping. Khrushchev. Et cetera. (Relatively) benevolent dictators can exist.

I don't think they reproduce very well thought. That would Tolkien come true. :-)

14:

Or to put it another way, why should you care as long as you are getting your salary and bonuses and your company share price is high? Someone else will sort it out, right?

Or perhaps you could point to examples where the capitalists have actually noticed and cared about such a point?
(Note that Ford does't really count; he forgot to increase the wages for decades after he started paying them what was then a rather high wage, so the relative goodness of it disappeared and they ended up with strikes and suchlike again)

15:

Or perhaps you could point to examples where the capitalists have actually noticed and cared about such a point?

I don't think the situation ever got to the point where automation can render the entire workforce obsolete.

16:

That's avoiding the question entirely. You don't need to make 100% of the population unemployable to see some deleterious effects. WE're already in a crisis of lack of wages and underemployment leading to under consumption, not specifically due this time to automation, but it gives you an idea of how things go.

17:

If I'm a plant owner and replaced all my workers with robots, and now my former workers have no money to by my products, what do I have the plant for?

Here's a metaphor.

When you go to a pot-luck dinner, you take enough food to feed yourself if what you brought was all you ate. If everybody coming to the pot-luck does that, then there will be enough for everyone.

Suppose that half the people coming to the pot-luck didn't bring any food, but instead worked to prepare the food the others brought. Then you'd need to bring enough to feed yourself and one other, right?

And if 90% of the people coming to the pot-luck prepared food instead of bringing food, then the people who brought food would each need to bring enough for 10.

But then say that it's a pot-luck where everybody brings food from the deli that's already prepared. Then you can just uninvite the people who prepare the food, and everybody at the party still gets all they want.

Does this answer your question?

18:

That's avoiding the question entirely. You don't need to make 100% of the population unemployable to see some deleterious effects.

But that's not new. Entire sectors became obsolete in the past, people lost jobs and sometimes literally starved to death. The capitalist system didn't collapse, because there were always new areas to expand into.

It will change if the world will truly become a zero-sum (or negative) game, with existing jobs being automated and no new jobs appearing.

19:

About 100 years ago, more or less, there was a school of thought that said capitalism is self-liquidating. Capital tends to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. Eventually those hands manage to purchase political power, and from that point on capitalism goes feudal.

This is one of the oldest stories in the book. The Book, of course, is Genesis, where a "market analyst" named Joseph helps a guy called Pharaoh corner the grain market, become wealthy when others are starving, and parlay that into political control of Egypt.

20:

As an American and gun owner, I'll say two things about guns. I enjoyed shooting, I liked it as a precision sport. But having said that, the only gun that I currently own is a little .22 pistol for plinking, everything else was sold off. The AR owners are delusional: guess who has more guns than they do? The government. The local and and higher levels of government have a lot more firepower than you can muster, they also have armored vehicles and tear gas/pepper spray in job lots. If they decide you're going down, you're going down and your AR and 10,000 rounds of ammo that you squirreled away to the gleeful profits of arms and ammo makers isn't going to make a bit of difference.

On the student loan issue, when I was in my late teens/early 20s, community college was about $15 a credit hour (late '70s and briefly beyond). A person making minimum wage could afford a college education. Now that college has become for-profit, as has everything else, it's become stupid expensive, and don't get me started on text books! Fortunately my wife works at an observatory that is managed by a uni, so I get six hours a semester free.

I disagree with you in one regard, Charles. Yes, your degree is dated, but the concepts and methodologies that you learned are not. You probably still know how to properly structure a program and project and file layouts and know good programming theory. Nowadays they usually teach theory as part of a programming language and people can't separate what they learned from the tool.

It's interesting how the most expensive things in life become non-dischargeable through bankruptcy. First medical bills, now student loans. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs helps Greece hide billions in debt so they can get in to the EU, and GS doesn't get a bit of blowback on what they did except for more profit.

21:

All gloomy points. I would like to suggest a couple of + ones IMO:

  • Even the big players are not secure (remember the bank system crisis in US). The change is so fast that success can turn around over night and the biggest players can bust (Noika, Enron).

  • The bureaucracy is not limited to the government, it is in corporations, everywhere where is an excess of money. That is a good thing somewhat because it does lead to redistribution of money by employing more people to turn papers/e-forms.

  • Overall people do have more and can do more. Remember time when exotic fruit was really exotic?

  • Banks do need us to keep threading water. I remember when we went to refinance the loan, bank employee told us that we won't have any problems since there are so many people defaulting their loans, they are happy that someone pays.

  • The excess of money from CS #1 does result in lower prices for average Joe, since they need to adjust it to sell it (plus the competition with excess capital that needs to be invested will try to fight for the piece of the cake).

  • US went in the somewhat right direction with Obama, sharing more wealth, towards universal healthcare etc. So, some choices are better than others.

  • Now for the bad points:

  • Overall lack of security and high turnaround ruins everything. Big and hard things are not done anymore. And everyone feels miserable because no one is secure.
  • Yup the overall message is follow the money.
    Just my thoughts, I don't pretend to understand this.

    22:

    A very important piece of the puzzle, IMHO, is that while capital can move freely between the developed and underdeveloped world, labor cannot.

    A Los Angeles millionaire can invest in a Shanghai factory, taking advantage of the cheap labor and weak regulation there, and then use the profits to buy a London condominium. But the workers in Shanghai, by and large, cannot move to Los Angeles to take advantage of the higher wages and better living conditions there.

    Thus capital can use the threat of “I’ll take my marbles and go home” to influence public policy in a way that labor can not.

    23:

    Yes, but the investment brings money to the area, gives competitive wages and builds infrastructure and some knowledge.

    24:

    An interesting thing is that wages in China have risen the last decade or two such that parts of China are now more expensive to employ people than in Mexico, where wages haven't risen at all...

    Of course a Mexican capitalist might worry about local people not being able to buy his product except that the USA is very happy to do so, so who cares that they don't pay well.

    25:

    I want to let this stew a little long (and buy the damn book as soon as possible), but it seems to me that the 18th century liberal (in the sense that they decentralized power and opportunity) institutions: democracy, capitalism, and protestantism, all ran afoul of #4 and became that which they sought to overthrow. Well, I say due to the normal tendency of any institution to become entrench, but they've also all been co-opted by the establishment they were pitted against. Now, instead of operating as agents of change, they serve the powers that be while presenting the illusion of fluidity. The democratic "transfer of power" is symbolic more than anything.

    More insidiously, these institutions support the narrative that the forces in power are there due to merit instead of birth or other accident and conversely, that those who fail had the same chances as anyone else; they just weren't good enough. The lucky few (see: "Herman Cain") who did manage to move up in the world are paraded around the same way lottery winners whose stories prove "anyone can do it."

    Bottom line: The revolutionary forces of the 18th century have been thoroughly corrupted and no longer serve the purpose for which they were (theoretically) designed. The next fifty years or so are gonna suck.

    26:
    The USA has a university system that is now an example of how badly things can go wrong with loans; they are non-dischargeable and prices for university keep going up, although it is often hard to see why, except that the senior people in the hierarchy are generally taking more money home than before.

    As to where the fees go: look around the colleges. The buildings look wonderful. We have "VPs for Student Experience". There is a push and a pull here; while 9000/yr is supposedly the maximum that can be charged, no college wishes to be seen as second-rate and so (nearly) all charge the full rate, even if they only need(ed) half that or less. Secondly they are competing "in the marketplace". Education is a wierd "product" in that you don't know what you don't know; students can't properly tell what they are not being taught. So colleges compete on appearance. Hence bright, clean new buildings. Student digs are a thing of the past; its all nice apartments.

    That explains the first half. Interest on the loans the second half. Student loans translate to about 40k per student income to the financial sector.

    27:

    A very important piece of the puzzle, IMHO, is that while capital can move freely between the developed and underdeveloped world, labor cannot.

    That's a key insight which I forgot to include in the analysis. Thanks! I'm going to add it as one of PS's.

    28:

    Student digs are a thing of the past; its all nice apartments.

    Those "nice apartments" in the student residences will be the family-occupied slums of the 2030s, inhabited by graduates who'd be bankrupt if they were allowed to default on their student debt, and who are unable to afford a "real" house.

    Imagine bringing up a child while living and paying rent on a student residence with 20-30 years' of accumulated wear and tear. Charles Dickens with added internet access!

    29:

    A few more important points that I think both tie into these and provide a failure state for the seemingly entrenched status quo (though one that is no happier for the little guys than the entrenched interests):

    1'. All modern economies are founded on a paradigm of permanent growth (indeed all theoretically well-developed economic systems capable of supporting high-tech society; "post-growth economics" is presently more a buzzword and a dream than an actual field). Lack of or even just slowed growth is seen as an economic disaster. 2'. Economic growth is necessarily correlated to energy consumption--for sure, efficiency gains can slow this, but you can't go back to that well forever; in the end, it still takes 1 kCal to raise a litre of water by a degree C). 3'. (1') is a result of (2') combined with the fact that early in the industrial age we figured out how to use eons-worth of inherited solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. 4'. The seemingly inexhaustible endowment in (3') is nearing its end. We are nowhere close to even supporting current energy needs with "alternative" energy sources, let alone feeding our appetite for growth. There are other limits we hit even if we could ramp this up fast enough to push it down the road.

    With all that, I don't have much confidence in our ability to transition to a post-growth paradigm, particularly with powers-that-be so reliant on conventional growth capitalism. The one place I am cautiously optimistic is about the second time around--imagine an industrial revolution where we don't go from wind and water-mills to discover a coal inheritance (followed quickly by oil and NG). I think it's a much slower ramp up to high-tech civilization, but it's one that forces development of economic systems that can survive on steady-state with occasional periods of linear growth. I think if you could magically look around the universe, you might find that the civilizations that last (and maybe even the ones that reach the stars, if you're the type to get super pie-in-the-sky) are not the first high-tech civilizations to develop on their worlds...

    (To see the above points in much more well-developed form with lots of graphs, I strongly recommend checking out Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog.)

    30:

    A benevolent dictatorship is not a democracy, though; nor is it a republic. In a benevolent dictatorship, the dictator is benevolent insomuch as he is willing and able to predict the wants and needs of the population and supply them, but both communication and power channels are different. (In pure democracy you could argue that the communication and power channels are unified -- with the exception of executors chosen by lottery, plebicite is both the means by which the will of the people is communicated and the way in which it becomes policy. A republic is more along the lines of a benevolent dictatorship, with many would-be dicators competing with each other to be seen as more benevolent. But, the failure states are different.)

    (You could view the chinese government structure not so much as a product of maoist thought but instead as an elevation of corporate structure to the scale of the world's largest state. Corporations have internal propaganda engines, firewalls, bureaucracy, firing practices, and varying degrees of violent power relationships between different levels of the hierarchy. Just imagine every chinese citizen as an employee of China, Inc.)

    To be really pedantic, it's evident that capitalism does not require Democracy (in its strictest definition as a government where executors are chosen by lottery and policies are voted on by some subset of the population) because capitalism and Democracy have never coexisted at scale. But, the idea that capitalism must coexist with representative government is not supported by governments that happen to be accidentally more representative than they would be by design, and a history of failures of representation coexisting peacefully with capitalism supports the idea that representation and capitalism are not necessarily bound at the hip.

    31:

    I'm unconvinced by your point 2' -- Economic growth is necessarily correlated to energy consumption.

    As I understand it, economic growth in the EEC/EU decoupled from energy consumption after the 1973 oil shock. And if you contemplate soft products (intellectual property goods, music, software, etc) it is not immediately obvious that economic growth in these sectors must correlate with increasing energy consumption.

    Your point 2' nevertheless stands pretty much inarguably for the world prior to about 1960.

    As for point 4' ... we can do post-growth: just copy Japan (demographic transition stage 4, total fertility rate around 1.3). It looks like deflation, but the economy is healthy because what's actually deflating is the population bubble: according to The Economist a couple of years ago, if Japan had a TFR of 2.1 (static population) they'd have had 4.5% compound annual growth since 1990.

    32:

    Something to get you angry, if you can stop and think- the current generation of youngster in the UK and elsewhere are the first in 250 years or so who have/ will have a lower standard of living in certain respects. IN the last 250 years or so of precipitous economic growth, the new generation have been able to look forwards to and occupy better housing, more space, better healthcare etc. Now with property prices what they are, the space available is shrinking, and superfast broadband doesn't really make up for living in a shoebox with no prospect for escape.

    33:

    I disagree, the healthcare and housing is better. Everyone has AC, better insulation on their houses, paints are better, generally better materials and drugs.

    34:

    I'm in the UK, aircon is irrelevant for most people.
    Also you didn't read it properly; is the current crop of people in their 20's going to have better housing and aircon than 15 years ago? Okay, so healthcare is better, for those who can afford it in the USA and everyone in the more civilised countries, but the housing issues in the UK are causing major problems.

    35:

    Ah, but the healthcare for younger people is going backward. Antibiotic resistance is rising, meanwhile resources go into the last 3 months of life for the elderly rather than helping younger people -- and costs are spiralling across the board to support that end-of-life care. It's not that far a jump to look 20 years ahead and find the NHS privatized, elderlies still benefiting from it (because: ring-fenced) while youngsters have to look for private coverage a la the USA pre-Obamacare.

    As for AC, I assume you're talking about air conditioning? Less than 2% of dwellings in this country have it. And "better paint" is pretty pathetic compensation for having to live in a shoe-box (and note that the average British dwelling is around 30-40% of the area of a US dwelling, because our housing market has turned into a capital investment market for sovereign wealth funds, pricing real people out of it).

    36:

    Housing issues and space are problem everywhere. I imagine that major growth will be in improving and more sophisticated healthcare. While prices for the most advanced (new) therapies are ridiculous, IMO they are bound to get lower over time. Manufacturers are not stupid, they adjust so someone can pay (you, hospital, government).

    37:

    Child mortality falls, more genetic diseases are treatable/correctable. True, elderly need more help, and they still have the money so target group.

    Ok, you'll need AC when global warming starts, in the meantime I assume you have better heating relying on gas not on dirty coal compared to old times, less house fires and better windows to keep the heat in. Young people also have an ability to contact directly a manufacturer in China (Alibaba), negotiate with a free email (just ignore the ads), self-publish and so on. All these things were much harder before but it is also much harder to earn money. Yes, it seems that other countries (or maybe mostly UK) are trying to imitate US and its bad ways of constant insecurity.

    I need to go now but I would for sure like to hear some positive examples of countries with good healthcare and happy citizens. And how they do it.

    38:

    anufacturers are not stupid, they adjust so someone can pay (you, hospital, government). Manufacturers are not stupid, they adjust so someone can pay (you, hospital, government).

    Only after customers stop paing for the things they can't afford.

    Note US arms dealers, for example.

    Nobody ever made much profit by providing things their customers need at a price they can afford, instead of things the customers want. Not until the customers actually want it.

    39:

    Actually we switched en masse from coal to gas and electricity for heating back in the 1950's and 60's, driven by clean air acts, improving tech and building of new modern public housing. Better windows came out in the 20th century; about the only real improvement that remains to be rolled out in the UK is passiv haus levels of insulation etc, which is of course expensive and not something that most people can afford.

    AS for manufacturers in China etc, hahahaha, that isn't much of an improvement in anything. Back before the UK went in for de-industrialisation you could get your local foundry/ friend who worked somewhere to bash something together for you, and you didn't need to hope that someone the other side of the planet wasn't actually a scam artist or had different ideas of what worked.

    40:

    I like to think of Das Kapital as our first artificial life form, as yet undomesticated. The purpose of Das Kapital is to increase Das Kapital, and it has no moral, ethical, economic, or political compunctions about who or what it ruins or enriches as a consequence of its increase. There is no one in charge, we're all along for the ride.

    41:

    I'd suggest you got 15 and 16 wrong.

    Let's look at Cuba and North Korea on one side. They're poorly connected to global capitalism, but no one considers them failed states.

    Now let's look at Afghanistan and Somalia. Both are intimately connected to the global marketplace. Afghanistan is a major supplier of opium and opium derivatives, while Somalia is quite a player in the international kidnapping market.

    While you might object that opium and kidnapping aren't part of global capitalism, I've got to remind you that global capitalism was founded on the trade in human trafficking (slavery, kidnapping, etc.), drugs (including sugar, caffeine, and alcohol, as well as opium), and weapons. Even if we criminalize two thirds of the ancient troika, they still move billions of dollars around the world, and they still operate on capitalist principles even if they're illegal.

    No, the problem with failed states is that they fail to conform to the legal definition of a sovereign state, where the government has a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. While I agree that the Cold War and its after-effects made a mess of the Westphalian state model, it is still a major basis for international law.

    Basically, because legal international trade requires international law, a failed state is one that can't enforce its own laws inside its own territory, and is therefore a place that is bad for lawful business. A perfectly good sovereign state can also be bad for lawful capitalism (cf: communism), but a failed state is one where any international business that goes in has to find other ways to protect itself, for national and international law won't be enforced. This tends to favor illegal businesses, as well as businesses (like the trade in weapons) that have a proven track record in profiteering from crises.

    42:

    A perfectly good sovereign state can also be bad for lawful capitalism (cf: communism),

    The USSR was quite reasonable for capitalism, once they finished shooting the revolutionaries. Not internal capitalism, of course (although state enterprises bore an eerie structural similarity to their capitalist Bizarro-world counterparts, such that when the USSR collapsed the oligarchs emerged almost overnight from among the managerial caste), but external capitalism. If you wanted raw materials and could pay hard currency, the USSR would happily sell it to you ("sell the capitalists the rope to hang themselves with" as Lenin more or less put it), and in return they bought stuff they were short of -- grain, for example.

    A real problem Capitalism has with failed Westphalian states is that the cost of doing business there is raised by the need fo guard labour (to protect your employees from kidnapping and theft). But it's by no means impossible, as witness how long it took for the instability in Libya to finally drive the western oil workers out.

    43:

    I'm going to make a few points that may appear pendatic

    1) Automation will take at least a century in the most optimistic scenario. I only bring this up because when most people discuss the effect on jobs, their scenarios move far too fast compared to what I think will be the real world. For instance, look at the speed of automation of both agriculture (still not complete 2 centuries later) and manufacturing (nowhere near finished).

    2) For the next few decades, internationalization of work will matter more than automation to the job makeup. There are still more poor people capable of doing a job than there are robots equally capable.

    3) (an example) The US buys goods from China --> China must invest the money it gets from those goods. Now they do invest in their own country, but they are a source of investment for the western financial companies. Thus, the money returns to the US, completing the circulation

    4) Wages are following prices of hard goods in equalizing between the first and third world. In other words, prices fell in the 90's, wages are falling to join them. Whether this happens via devaluation or deflation will have a profound effect on politics

    5) It's much more profitable for companies to expand the middle classes in the developing world than in the west. A 5% increase in real wages in the west won't make anywhere near as much of a profit for multinationals than a 5% increase in real wages in the rest of the world. This should ensure that stock growth continues without having to worry about wage depression in the former. Capitalism hasn't just decoupled from democracy, it's in the process of decoupling from the West (to a VERY SMALL extent).

    6) Modern data analytics allow companies to expand economic theory "to it's fullest potential". No matter how nonsensical, investors are willing to trust anything where a+b=c assuming a perfectly spherical frictionless cow.

    44:

    How so? I know that health care costs for young people are rising, but are outcomes getting worse or better? Traffic fatalities and crime levels are falling, and these were the major killers of young people (defined to be between 5 and 40) over the past 3 decades.

    45:
    state enterprises [in the USSR] bore an eerie structural similarity to their capitalist Bizarro-world counterparts

    Lenin & Co. gave the capitalist system credit—perhaps more credit than it deserved—for having figured out how to get large groups of people to work together to make steel or automobiles or other industrial goods. They figured they could put apparatchiks in the managerial slots and use the state planning infrastructure to handle investment of capital and distribution of output, without changing the internal structure of the enterprises themselves.

    46:

    Yes and no. Whether labour can move has little to do with capitalism or monetarism as such. The 17th and 18th century British-involved world was as capitalist as they come, but labour moved fairly freely. There was a saying that you could look down any mine in the world and find Cornishmen. Conversely, most Leninist governments have been as bad as the most hidebound feudal systems.

    I agree that the current monetarist governments have almost eliminated constraints on the movement of capital, and have imposed draconian ones on labour (except for skills in high demand in certain directions), but it was not always so.

    47:

    So for those commenting about more freedom of movement in the 19th century, why didn't more Indians move to the UK during that time period? Why was the freedom of movement of the time restricted to Europeans?

    48:

    I am so, so curious as to your thoughts on the economics of Gibson's The Peripheral. I think he takes a lot of these trends to their logical conclusion. Which, of course, isn't a very bright future.

    49:

    Hint: restriction on labour movement isn't purely a functional of capital -- it's a function of a particular type of capitalist process (exploiting relative imbalances of resources and labour) identified by a Mr. Marx as "imperialism".

    50:

    On health care for young people outcomes are better but the problems are changing, Obesity in the young means that type 2 diabetes id now found in teenagers. Type 1 diabetes is also a problem for teenagers. Diabetic clinics for teenagers usually have much less than 50% attendance becaue they think they are immortal. This has always happened but it seems to me to be getting worse as the young people have more freedom. I can't suggest a solution.

    51:

    Singapore's economy is dependent on foreign trade. There's no resources there to sell Russia style, and not enough food to eat without buying from abroad.

    Singapore is located along major shipping routes and near China, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so on. They take cargo off smaller ships there and put it on ships heading for farther off US or the EU.

    They're also a meeting place to meet, say, Vietnamese and Cambodian textile factory owners, and compare prices and product samples. If you're a rich white guy, hotel-like (Disneyland with the death penalty even) Singapore beats going out to Phnom Penh, and there's a branch of your bank there, and familiar food.

    They can extract rent from this, and the international capitalist system is most comfortable with them extracting this rent in a "free market" form. But they can't seize it outright without a new place becoming the market city of the Indian Ocean.

    If Singapore was larger, had the resources to sustain itself without free markets, the markets might well go away. As inefficient as Mussolini's Italy was, it wasn't completely dependent on foreign trade for food.

    Small states need free markets when dealing with the world economic status quo, that or a colonial power "protecting" them. Liechtenstein can't just seize offshore bank accounts, for example. They might seize a factory or two, but the economy flows around them as much as through them. Liberia can't seize the ships that fly its flag. Frankly these places might well be corporations themselves if we allowed such things to be sovereign.

    I don't believe liberty and free markets go hand in hand myself, but Singapore is a special case.

    52:

    Automation will take at least a century in the most optimistic scenario.

    Part of the problem is which jobs are being automated first; they tend to be jobs involving high levels of logical reasoning or quantitative skill, both of which computers do better than humans. Also, of course, brute force is typically replaced with engines.

    The result is a labor market where the vast majority of jobs can be done by anyone with little skill involved; pay is correspondingly low. Jobs either involve things that apes are inherently better than computers at (truck drivers are the most popular job around here right now) or jobs that essentially involve sucking up to the rich, where a computer just wouldn't provide the ego boost.

    53:

    The purpose of Das Kapital is to increase Das Kapital, and it has no moral, ethical, economic, or political compunctions about who or what it ruins or enriches as a consequence of its increase.

    40: Sounds more like Grundrisse to me.

    ...while 9000/yr is supposedly the maximum that can be charged, no college wishes to be seen as second-rate and so (nearly) all charge the full rate, even if they only need(ed) half that or less.

    26: try your local F.E. College. One of the ones I work in charges around UKP6k/yr for HE courses. Local employer contacts. Fairly flexible attendance modes.
    54:

    Charlie: I think you are overlooking two key factors. First, there are more "laborers" than "capitalists." A lot more. Second, thanks to the Industrial Revolution (read "guns") the great imbalance in warmaking skills that preserved feudalism is gone. Yes, one trained soldier can take out 5 untrained dudes with guns, but when the odds are more like 10 or 20 to one you start running out of soldiers.

    In short, either the concerns of labor are addressed via peaceful means or they will be addressed via non-peaceful ones.

    Now I know saying that makes me sound like a bit crazy, but even crazy people can communicate facts. And lest I sound like an American gun-nut, this really has nothing to do with guns. Syria was not noted for a well-armed civilian populace, but when it came time to shoot lead started flying.

    The real problem will be managing some of the labor issues without a bloody revolution. I think we can do it - not sure we will.

    55:

    Who said anything about soldiers?

    (The system reacts when threatened. And as I noted, as long as people think they need money to survive, money will give the system a powerful lever to cow them with.)

    56:

    "The term 'failed state' carries a freight of implicit baggage: failed at what, exactly? The unspoken implication is, 'failed to conform to the requirements of global capital'"

    Yes, "failed state" is the country-level equivalent of "terrorist"- a vague term that is applied when authorities wish to legitimize their use of force and secrecy against the recipient of the label. It works well because people are pretty hard-wired to put others into tribal categories. See also "Us/them", "citizen/terrorist", "with us/against us".

    57:

    An interesting post... and I have several comments. 1. There is an article online from Fortune yesterday, about 5 jobs that robots have already taken, and a serious percentage of other jobs are expected to be taken in the next 20 years. Back in the late seventies, there was all this talk of the "information economy", and how it was going to provide more and better, and better-paying jobs, than the assembly-line ones automation and the beginning of offshoring were wiping out.

    These days, there is no such talk, because there's no such thing.

    For well over a decade, I've been trying to get s serious conversation going about what do we do when a major - > 50% - of all the jobs other than nurses' aid and pizza delivery (oops, sorry, that's for drones) are automated?

    My thought is that it dividends are so good for the wealthy, why not for the rest of us? How about that large companies pay, as part of their taxes, voting shares of stock, and we get a negative income tax (as they have in Alaska, due to oil revenues)?

    Note that it's a separate question as to what we'd all do with our life of leisure, other than play video games and watch the tube.

  • There's a story over on Reuters, today, with the headline that "One in three Germans say capitalism to blame for poverty, hunger". But then, I've been saying for a few years now that what Americans (sorry, Canadians, I mean USans) know about socialism is what Good Germans in the late 30's knew about Jews.

    mark "now, when that woman at the little store stops sending the winning lottery numbers out away, instead of handing it to me as I politely ask her to, things will be different...."

  • 58:

    "First, there are more 'laborers' than 'capitalists.' A lot more."

    Yes, we have some experience with this in America.

    From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1854), specifically the "Poor White Trash" chapter:

    "This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.

    "Singular as it may appear, though slavery is the cause of the misery and degradation of this class, yet they are the most vehement and ferocious advocates of slavery.

    "The reason is this: They feel the scorn of the upper classes, and their only means of consolation is in having a class below them, whom they may scorn in turn . . .

    "The leaders of the community, those men who play on other men with as little care for them as a harper plays on a harp, keep this blind furious monster of the MOB, very much as an overseer keeps plantation-dogs, as creatures to be set on to any man or thing whom they may choose to have put down.

    "These leading men have used the cry of 'abolitionism ' over the mob, much as a huntsman uses the 'set on' to his dogs. Whenever they have a purpose to carry, a man to put down, they have only to raise this cry, and the monster is wide awake, ready to spring wherever they shall send him."

    Substitute "capitalism" for "slavery" and "terrorist" (or "socialist") for "abolitionism", and the situation remains the same today.

    BTW, the entire chapter is a worthwhile read. Stowe does a remarkably good job of really showing how slavery devalued the skills and labor of free (but poor) southern whites, and her analysis seems amazingly modern, even using Wonkblog-style statistical reasoning. She had some sympathy for the "poor white trash," and made an argument that is very analogous to what Charlie is saying above about what capital and automation does to labor.

    59:

    Soldiers, police, same difference. The first function of any army is to create a monopoly on legitimate use of force in the state.

    Money (and for Agent0090) race are ways to keep the labor force down. They are both subject to a hard limit - those being kept down need to buy into the system. The poor man and the "white trash" (as we say in the USA) need to believe that they can rise above their station. If and when that belief fails, goodnight Irene.

    60:

    Why is it that our lords and masters sell austerity to us by playing on the idea that it is shameful to be in debt, but somehow they neglect to mention the debts they force us into in order to get an education and a roof over our heads?

    This is a rhetorical question; I think I know why, but I would be interested in any rationale they might come up with to explain away the discrepency.

    61:

    Way off-thread: Finally — finally! — persuaded MovableType to log me in (why did no-one tell me about TenFourFox before?). Now, how do I add a profile pic?

    62:

    Re. fees, what I was told by people who have an interest in HE is that the universities all started at 9k because the funding system was so fucked up and unclear that they reckoned they had to extract the maximum from the students to start with at least because otherwise they might have a budget shortfall.

    63:

    "Yes, one trained soldier can take out 5 untrained dudes with guns, but when the odds are more like 10 or 20 to one you start running out of soldiers."

    There's a question how much warfare can be automated. Modern munitions tend to be made in mostly-automated factories for many obvious reasons. You can kill a lot of people and smash things up thoroughly without needing a big army to do it, if you don't mind considerable expense and you don't mind a lot of collateral damage.

    A government that was willing to write off a big chunk of its population, might be able to win a civilian revolt fairly easily. It becomes a question of what it needs to preserve. If you don't need to keep big chunks of the (obsolete) manufacturing base, then maybe you can write off a lot of cities.

    And if you don't have to maintain order in the short run, you can simply fail to harvest the crops, blaming it on the dissidents, and within a year or less collect as many survivors as you have use for, by offering them food.

    It might be fairly easy for an elite to maintain control, provided they don't mind being psychopathic about it. And it might be easy to get enough elites to go along if they think there's a bloodthirsty mob after them, and that few of the bottom 70% of freeloaders has much sympathy for them.

    Traditionally you needed a large population to field a large army to fight off large foreign armies. I don't know how to find out whether that's still true.

    Here's another possible approach -- if your own population looks like it's going to turn against you, get into a big war with another nation that has a similar problem, draft as big an army as you can manage and send them out to die. It's possible to interpret WWI that way without too much of a stretch, though that's certainly not the only way to look at it.

    64:

    @guthrie

    Oh yes, transitioning to a 'money follows student' funding model while carrying significant fixed costs is a bundle of laughs (not). FE Colleges in England and Wales did that in 1993. Huge 'boom and bust' adjustments. Fun times. As in union rep standing at main entrance with a faxed list of names of those being made redundant.

    There have always been non-university routes to HE (with qualifications guranteed/signed off by universities) in UK. Adult education still clings on, not sure for how long though, as local authorities can draw down national funding: i.e. activity seen as income generating rather than cost centre.

    Anyone here who wants to look at creative writing courses (as opposed to self help/self organised writer circles) might want to check out their local adult ed. Mind you, self organisation with online contact with other aspirants might be all you need.

    65:

    You don't need to look to the future to see what an authoritarian regime combined with heavy collaboration with corporate and business elites looks like. That combination characterized much of Latin America for the twentieth century, as well as East and Southeast Asian countries like South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and now China.

    But look what happened to them - they only proved stable as long as they delivered the goods on economic improvements and income growth to enough of the population (as is China's informal strategy for political pacification now). Once that no longer happened, they all came apart and democratized to varying degrees - even Singapore is more open than it used to be under Lee Kwan Yew.

    That's why I'm skeptical you'll see a sustainable combination of capitalism and authoritarianism without the combo providing major economic benefits to most of the population. The only reason it's stable today in Europe and the US is because you have a sizable part of the electorate that supports it, or at least prefers not to vote against it in elections.

    66:

    If you're thinking about how to make sure "failed states" will be liable, you might take a look at TTIP and its ilk. They will privatize essential infrastructure and services, so even the attempt to gain control over essential things like your water supply will become a fiscal crime liable to the jurisdiction of international courts.

    67:

    With respect to Point 6: I am so tired of "terrorism" as the worst thing ever; I lived through the end of the Cold War. At least half the population did. How can we listen to them repeat falsehoods this large over and over again as if they were commonplace truths? I cannot remember who raised this point on their blog (maybe Walter Jon Williams?): what bothers us is not that the government is doing stuff it has done before, but that they now longer fear being discovered doing it.

    Peter Watts has been dissecting new Canadian laws on what it means to "promote terrorism" and it is downright appalling. The he turned around and found out that 70 per cent of his fellow countryman are in favor of these laws. I suppose it would be the less cynical position to think these numbers were massaged rather to believe they accurately reflect public opinion. Building off the great Seymour Skinner: Welcome to Dick Cheney's World and to his Century.

    68:

    A lot of the problems we're experiencing currently are due, I suspect, to people getting so fascinated by playing the markets they forget their original purpose. For example, the market in real estate was originally intended to supply people (remember them?) with shelter. These days (in Australia at least) you'd be forgiven for thinking the purpose of the real estate market was to supply investors with profits. Again, the market in education was intended to supply people with education and training - not to ensure the investors in private training firms made a guaranteed profit. The grocery market was supposed to be supplying people with food and drink and farmers with an income - but these days it's warped toward supplying the investors in the grocery industry with profits. It's got to the point where if you're wanting to supply an actual good or service to ordinary humans, you're almost a novelty within the sector (and due to be snapped up by some multi-national which is focussed on providing profits to their investors).

    What's happened? Well, in a lot of cases, it's a form of regulatory capture. The capitalists and the private sector have captured the regulatory sector, and they're manipulating it to ensure their current business models remain forever profitable. Which I find somewhat cynically amusing, since I seem to remember the great sales pitch for the privatisation of public assets here in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s was all about the flexibility and adaptability of the private sector as compared to the public sector. These days, it appears their vaunted flexibility mainly consists of a strong willingness to get their friends in the legislature to alter the rules in their favour, and their friends in the judiciary to rule in their favour in any disputes.

    69:

    Thus, the money returns to the US, completing the circulation

    In fact has to complete the circle. National balance sheets require that trade deficits be offset by incoming capital. Michael Pettis has done work showing that trade deficits cause financial bubbles by flooding local economies with excess capital. Excess because the trade deficits reduce the need for local capital (for labor, materials, equipment) but the incoming capital needs to go somewhere so 'asset' bubble.

    70:

    The day HE is solely about future-profits-of-students is the day we can bend over and kiss our arts goodbye.

    71:

    The financialisation of government services... There's a simpler word for that: a rent.

    If that's a bit puzzling, apply this working definition of a rent: "the extraction of value created by others". It'll get you through the difficult questions about patents and IP: think of toll-booths being a mechanism for achieving a return on the capital that someone put up for building the road, right up until the tolls get so high as to exceed any reasonable return for the risks taken by the investors. A that point, the toll booth operators are extracting a rent from everyone using the road - and they will rub it in by closing all the other roads and railways, and blocking new construction, so that they can exact a rent that extracts and exceeds the value added to the regional economy by this useful transport link.

    And that is where I get to the point: rent-seeking is intrinsically deflationary, as it suppresses the creation of value by productive industry and services.

    The economic fact that we try not to talk about - and try very hard not to talk about, now that inequality has entered respectable conversation - is that there has been a secular shift in the deployment of capital, away from productive investments, and into rent-seeking.

    And yes, we see it in government services like new roads, which have numberplate readers and tolls - or 'ghost tolls', paid out of taxes as a rent to distant oligarchs who do not recycle the cashflow into wages and consumption...

    ...And all these government-mediated rents, which used to be value-positive services provided at a fraction of their current cost, are barely half of the rent-seeking that has displaced production in the private sector.

    For starters, can you name any sizeable 'tech' company that spends more on R&D than on purchasing patents, litigating IP, and lobbying for legislative favours that entrench monopolies?

    That is the future we are already in, of declining investment, declining productivity, deflation and decaying infrastructure.

    It remains to be seen what the 'endgame' will be.

    72:

    Here's one possible scenario for increased automation...

  • Companies increasingly make humans redundant in favor of a robotic workforce.
  • As the general population finds it harder to purchase the products, instead of becoming cheaper, companies increase prices in order to maintain profits. After all, there's a portion of the population that's getting richer through all of this.
  • Eventually the only people who can afford the products produced by the robot factories are the people who are still earning money from their capital investments in the factories.
  • Society has now been split into 2 parts. An wealthy section, who have essentially a robot army producing products for them that don't have to do any actual labor themselves. Then there's everybody else who have few jobs, cant afford to buy modern products and are surviving in a sort of separate slum style economy
  • 73:

    I am so tired of "terrorism" as the worst thing ever; I lived through the end of the Cold War. At least half the population did. How can we listen to them repeat falsehoods this large over and over again as if they were commonplace truths?

    "Terrorism" has mostly not been a big deal so far.

    But when people talk about how the big guys have to provide jobs or something for the little guys that the system doesn't need any more? And how we could get protests and even violent conflict if they don't? That's terrorism they're talking about.

    "Pretty please, can't we get politicians running for office we can vote for, who will do what we want?" Not terrorism, only silly wishful thinking.

    "They can't ignore the poorest 90% because we will get angry and violent." Terrorism. Opposed by every weapon they can bring to bear, including pre-emptive molding of public opinion.

    74:

    One nit: 1-11 are axioms, after that they're lemmas, propositions, or theorems, depending on intent. I point this out because the former seem less debatable than the latter.

    wrt note b) So is the 21st century equivalent of a gun some kind of pervasive open public surveillance? "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight and don't bring a gun to a PR fight."

    wrt note c) Example: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/12/04/247360787/our-industry-follows-poverty-success-threatens-a-t-shirt-business - which honestly I think is a good thing: it's the mechanism by which the proverbial rising tide will lift all boats. The demand for T-shirts is infinite, but the supply of super cheap labor is finite, and will, in another century or two, run out, at which point T-shirts will likely get more expensive - but the standard of living of the entire world will be significantly higher.

    75:

    I think in terms of economics, the 21st century is going to look like a bad film, the type where there is a lot of conflict and action before the protagonist triumphs over the problem in the end, but the plot falls apart when you realize that if someone had done the obvious sensible thing at the beginning none of it would have been necessary.

    It is becoming increasingly obvious that the root problem in our economic system is that the wealthy are collecting a vast surplus of capital, and because they are sucking the demand out of the Western economies, there is a lack of opportunity to invest.

    The simple, tested solution to this problem is to tax the wealthy and spend the money on the poor. This creates demand, which gives an opportunity for further investment. It worked like a charm in places like Britain and the US during the 50s and 60s.

    But this will be the last thing that will be tried. So most of this century will consist of governments desperately twisting and turning, trying to ignore the obvious.

    One of the ways a small to medium country can avoid the problem of surplus capital is to encourage its export: taxing the wealthy but leaving a loophole it the wealth is kept in a foreign currency. The constant outflow of money will cause the country's currency to fall until extra exports balance it. This shifts the lack of demand over to the foreign country. It's like the Japanese buying US bonds to keep their currency from appreciating only its done by private individuals so there are no government fingerprints on it.

    If you live in a country with a floating currency that runs a persistent trade deficit, then you are already a victim of this.

    Another way the problem of excess capital can be dealt with is by quantitative easing or printing money. The government prints money. It circulates through the economy before ending up in the pockets of the wealthy who then invest it in FFPs (faux financial products). At some point these melt down and trillions of dollars of value is lost. The government prints more money to make up for it. This is in effect taxation of the wealthy by ad hoc means and random chance.

    Theoretically speaking, in a country with a stagnant economy where the wealthy collected 50% of the GDP and saved half of it and if government spending was 25% of GDP, the government could finance itself by just printing money as long as there wasn't a run on the currency.

    It's a good thing SF writers are beginning to look at economics as economics in the 21st century is going to become increasingly Science Fictional.

    76:

    One of the ways a small to medium country can avoid the problem of surplus capital is to encourage its export: taxing the wealthy but leaving a loophole it the wealth is kept in a foreign currency. The constant outflow of money will cause the country's currency to fall until extra exports balance it. This shifts the lack of demand over to the foreign country.

    Yes, but it isn't really a solution to victimize somebody else and make it their problem. And if it's a small to medium country they'll be vulnerable to various forms of counterattack.

    ... It circulates through the economy before ending up in the po It circulates through the economy before ending up in the pockets of the wealthy who then invest it in FFPs (faux financial products). At some point these melt down and trillions of dollars of value is lost.ckets of the wealthy who then invest it in FFPs (faux financial products). At some point these melt down and trillions of dollars of value is lost.

    How much of the lost money comes from the rich, and how much of it comes from pension funds?

    There's a whole lot of value tied up in pension funds, and so if you want to get a lot of money quick, they're one of the most obvious targets. I don't know a lot about this, but I hear stories that they tend to be run by people who can get OK bonuses in a good quarter, and tend to get fired for a bad quarter or two. A whole lot of money managed by people who have no security and no incentive to plan for the long run. Find a way to defraud them that they have no plausible way to understand ahead of time, and cut them in for a share -- and she'll have fun fun fun til her daddy takes the T-bird away....

    77:

    Speaking of bureaucracy, what do you think of David Graeber's newest book on that very subject? I'm really curious to know what you think on his analysis of science fiction and fantasy in terms of pro and anti bureaucratic sentiment.

    78:

    I'd thought better of you, but you've repeated the usual USian trick of confusing Marxist-Leninist "State Capitalism" (where the government owns the means of production) with "Communism" (where the people own the means of production in common.

    79:

    Why didn't more Indians move to the UK in the 19th century? Because travel was expensive. Lots of them did, from the 17th century on, often by way of becoming sailors and then settling here. Look up the word "Lascar"!

    Younger people should note that long-distance travel before the 1960s (sic) was either for the rich, someone who was working for a multinational organisation, or for someone who was prepared to accept significant hardship. Mere middle-class people did not travel long distances just because they wanted to.

    And, to Heteromeles, Cuba is not a failed state, despite its flaws, but North Korea definitely is. I gave two other socialist examples (Yugoslavia and Tanzania) that were not, at least during the period I mentioned.

    80:

    @ 10 & 11 Charlie & Vanzetti Precisely .... now look for a solution to that nasty little dilemma. Oh, I diosagree about the trrist threat being "Manufactured" - but guvmin'ts respomses have been pathetically laughably incompetent, to the point where I'm thinking it is deliberately so... Err ....

    Clouidster @ 20: Yes - the academic TRAINING never leaves you, it becomes a habit of mind & method, assuming you can be bothered to switch it to "on. And can be very useful in a surprising variety of situations. ( I'm actually doing this, right now in two very different scenarios - though not for money, unfortunately )

    81:

    In spite of all the scare-stories & the loonies on the right of the tory party, I don't actually think the NHS is going to be really privatised, simply because, as is becoming better-known (finally) the NHS, for all its supposed "waste" is MORE EFFICENT than the alternative. From up-close-&-personal recent observation, the waste in the NHS is right at the bottom-levels, & down to a complete failure of communications. Which is management's fault ....

    82:

    Which thus defines Putin's Russia as a failed sate. Oh, wait a minute ....

    83:

    Stalin did exactly this in Ukraine & the USSR generally. 1932 & 1935-9.

    84:

    HORRIBLY true TTIP is vile. Even given the very nasty revelations regarding the racists inside UKIP base-membership, they are one of the few parties agin TTIP. The (English) so-called "greens " are too, but they are entirely off their rockers to the point of Treason) This entire argument also centres around Charlie's point #4 BUT No-one has (yet) mentioned the bureaucracy centred around the Berlaymont -as insidious & unpleasant ans any other & also deeply implicated in TTIP.

    85:

    The day HE is solely about future-profits-of-students is the day we can bend over and kiss our arts goodbye.

    That's already happening in the UK. It takes a generation for this sort of vandalism to filter through into public awareness (because artists tend to keep working in their field for a very long time indeed) but when the impact is fully felt ...

    86:

    So: a) it's going to take my head a week to chew that over, but it appreciates the meal; and b) damn I wish you hadn't mentioned guns, because now the signal to noise ratio is going to suffer because that's the paint colour on the bike shed beside the nuclear plant :(

    And for the record, I'm Irish, I own firearms, and I don't happen to agree with the US model of firearms ownership for the same reason I don't agree with giving someone the keys to a car and never teaching them to drive; not to mention I own mine for Olympic target shooting, not taking on the State!

    87:

    Creativity I believe is the most important trait of our species but my impression is that right now it is a commodity only(hyperbole) accessible for individuals with basic needs assured(even through connections or family). In the long run this imo will gave rise to a caste system, thing that I don't know if it good or bad. But everyone has a gut so I have an opinion based on what I see around.

    88:

    There are no political solutions to problems caused by political power.

    What you're seeing are the effects of some people having political power, ie. being able to impose their will on everyone else.

    The only reason you'd do that is to benefit at other people's expense. Otherwise you'd let everyone get whatever they can.

    Inequality is caused by some people having political power (or access to it) while the rest of us don't. The biggest banks get massive zero-percent interest loans (~free money) that they can use to buy productive assets.

    Imagine someone gives you a $1 billion loan that you don't have to pay interest on, and that you might never even have to pay back anyway.

    How easy would it be for you to make money with it? You could buy shitloads of land, real estate, farms, stocks and whatever, and you could use all of that to make money for yourself. People would be paying you rent, dividends and a cut of their proceeds etc. You'd be making lots and lots of money.

    Well that's exactly what happens with banks and politically connected people. The ruling class is using vast amounts of money to skim profits off of other people's productive activity, while us little folks actually have to work for every cent we get.

    Their (massive) spending pushes asset prices higher because there's increased demand, and people with vast amounts of free money aren't exactly price-sensitive. See the housing market in Singapore and HK for example. But all that freshly conjured free money entering economies also dilutes our currencies' purchasing power. So the net effect is that things get more expensive and our purchasing power decreases, while our wages stagnate.

    We can all see that inequality is a big problem, but what almost no one sees is that the root cause is political power - not filthy capitalist oppressors.

    When big banks gamble our money and lose their risky bad bets, their toxic assets get bought off of their balance sheets with money that's forcefully extracted from us. Yes. We finance their bad bets with our deposits and then we pay for their losses with our future earnings. How's that for a shit-sandwich that we wouldn't have to eat without rulers?

    We don't have a say in how our money gets used, and that's exactly why bank bailouts and countless other shitty things happen. That's all predicated on political power. Our rulers take money from us like Kings and Emperors back in the day, and they use it as they please.

    Let's say there's Person A and Person B. Both have $1000. Imagine A goes to B and demands $500 from him, claiming that he'd actually be doing B a favour. Would B believe him?

    Of course not. How would anyone possibly benefit from losing money? He wouldn't - obviously - and that's exactly why A would have to force B into giving him the money. In other words, A would have to extort B.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, that's exactly how governments operate.

    I don't want to spend any more time on this now. Discuss.

    89:

    Yes, guns are an 18th century solution to support democracy.

    Then again, democracy is an 18th century mechanism to maintain stability by distributing political power approximately proportional to military power: with the population who own firearms (originally, male landowners who mostly kept firearms and could be recruited into the militia or army.)

    That changed with the 20th century, and the political systems are just slowly adapting.

    90:

    What you're seeing are the effects of some people having political power, ie. being able to impose their will on everyone else.

    The only reason you'd do that is to benefit at other people's expense. Otherwise you'd let everyone get whatever they can.

    The only reason? No.

    Sometimes we impose political will for good purposes, because it's considerably faster, easier, and cheaper than getting a full consensus.

    For example, if we had to wait for everybody to agree to end slavery, there would be a lot of slaves today.

    And consider the police -- if you aren't enforcing laws on people who don't want to obey them, you're not a cop but something else. You can't have police without imposing the laws on people who want to break them. But what would we do without police? Each of us imposes our laws on whoever is weak enough to impose on? Well of course, most of the time things would just work out because we're mostly reasonable people who get along, but the times when it stops working are important....

    Government isn't just about taking stuff from people. When the only alternative is slavery for whoever can't defend himself well enough to take on the biggest slaver, I'd rather have some sort of limited government in place. Preferably one that only passes new laws when at least 90% of the public agrees, but a government has to get pretty bad before no government is better.

    91:

    The first big question is - when only a small percentage of people are needed as labor for the vast majority of production - how will our economy work?.

    The second big question is - how do we get from here to there?.

    92:

    Charlie wrote: Afternote (c) A very important piece of the puzzle is that while capital can move freely between the developed and underdeveloped world, labour cannot.

    Charlie, you write as if unlimited labour mobility was a long-held left wing dream being blocked by our capitalist overlords. Yet across the Anglosphere I see more immigration / more guest workers / abolish work visa requirements being promoted by the same captains of industry who want to deregulate and privatise everything, while the opposition comes mostly from the lower classes and trade unions.

    When I was somewhat active three decades ago conservationists worried about sustainable populations. For example, if another three million people want to move to Scotland, how do you house them? Knock down all the heritage housing in Edinburgh and build high-rises? Bulldoze the national parks and wildlife sanctuaries?

    We were also worried about brain draining the developing world. If good doctors, sanitation engineers, etc leave for example Sierra Leone for better paid jobs in the West, that's good for them and moderately good for the West (below), but not for Sierra Leone. (People with money don't move to Sierra Leone because it's poverty- and disease-ridden.)

    Trade unionists were worried that unlimited guest workers would be used to exert more downwards pressure on wages and working conditions, weakening trade unions and strengthening corporate influence over governments.

    OK, as I said that was 30 years ago and times have changed. And just because a libertarian millionaire is in favour of something doesn't automatically make it wrong. But I'd still like to know what the benefits are in return for backing the preferred policy of wealthy capitalists.

    93:

    The first big question is - when only a small percentage of people are needed as labor for the vast majority of production - how will our economy work?.

    There's a whole lot of work that needs to be done. We just don't have anybody who's ready to pay for it.

    Like, I know people who search along stream banks for alien invading species of plants, and pull them up. They can't hope to make a dent in the problem, but they do it anyway. If we had enough people doing it, we could eliminate some invasive species. But it can't possibly get funded. Not only is it too easy for the global economy to re-introduce every invasive species, but also most people don't see that it matters. After all, if our forests die off we can replace them with imported forests and be just as happy.

    The last time I checked, we used more calories of fossil fuels to produce a pound of wheat or rice than we got back in food calories. By some estimates the USA does better with corn, we can use 4 gallons of gasohol to produce the equivalent of 5 gallons of gasohol next year. We desperately need to grow food using less fossil fuel. But of course, modern agribusiness is cheaper because employment expense is low.

    I'm not sure which labor-intensive work is most worth doing. But there's a lot to do that we collectively need done, except we can't afford it because human labor costs too much.

    94:

    Only we've got over a million people out of work in the UK who could be doing that pulling up of invasive species, and we're already paying a good percentage of their living costs. Only a few billion more, less than tax avoiders get away with, and we'd have armies of people doing such work.

    95:

    Suggest you add 'depersonalization through scatter'.

    Where you live and where you work have long been the loci of group formation. As automation increases, there are fewer long-term jobs. With the commiditization of residences - no longer primarily a place to live but increasingly the key source/point of investment and source of future revenue - we're looking at the demise of one of the oldest means of building a community, i.e., shared lives/life stories. Group formation matters because it leads to gaining strength through numbers. As membership in/feeling of community declines, more people feel they can say 'that's not my problem'. Online communities exist - this site proves that point. However, this and other online communities are scattered around the globe whereas our 'societies' where we have any decision-making capability/voice are primarily geo-physical units. So, a key point going forward, I think, is reconciling online scatter/distribution (feeling of membership) with geo-political constraints/rules.

    And also add 'learned helplessness' which pops up here fairly often: "Give up now because no one person/individual matters/can be effective. We are all doomed!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

    Despite the above, I refuse to give up my optimism and remain confident that implementable solutions exist.

    'Professionals' are the only groups I know of that are able to act successfully across geopolitical boundaries. Maybe we need to extend this type of group franchise to other jobs/life scenarios.

    96:

    "If good doctors, sanitation engineers, etc leave for example Sierra Leone for better paid jobs in the West, that's good for them and moderately good for the West (below), but not for Sierra Leone. (People with money don't move to Sierra Leone because it's poverty- and disease-ridden.)"

    As it happens I do have a passing acquaintance with Sierra Leone (and I welcome the opportunity to talk about a country other than Ireland).

    The country has a massive brain-drain, it's true. But a lot of the Diaspora do try to come back on an at least partial basis, and make a contribution to the rebuilding of the country. As the current epidemic of Ebola Virus Disease (which is, touch wood, finally abating) proves that's still not enough (for example) to shore up a very rickety health system.

    As for non-Sierra Leoneans with money moving to the country, I once had to sit behind an English expatriate on the bus from the ferryport to the airport (you have to cross the world's third-largest natural harbour to get to the airport, if you're coming from the city: otherwise it's a 167km trip by road). This lad kept muttering "I hate this §$"!ing place, I hate this §$"!ing place, I hate this §$"!ing place" over and over under his breath. I felt like reaching out and slapping him on the back of his head.

    97:

    What you're seeing are the effects of some people having political power, ie. being able to impose their will on everyone else.

    The only reason you'd do that is to benefit at other people's expense. Otherwise you'd let everyone get whatever they can.

    That's a very popular myth among Americans: looks like you've bought into their usual patchwork quilt of exceptionalist bullshit.

    In the real world, we know that there are a bunch of different theories of government, a bunch of different forms of government, a bunch of different motivations for individuals to move into government ... and very few nations stick to just one of these. Indeed, just as human beings aren't perfectly frictionless spheres of uniform density, neither are governments.

    Nor is your theory of what governments do complete without actually asking what they spend the money they collect in taxes on. Hint: where I live, my life depends on it -- I get free medical care, a not-terribly-big pension, fire and ambulance services, police when I need them (and unfortunately sometimes when I don't), food purity regulations to prevent unscrupulous merchants or restaurants poisoning me, anti-pollution regulations to prevent my neighbours (and neighbourhood businesses) poisoning me, and so on.

    A chunk of what they spend goes straight back into the economy, driving spending, rather than draining away into virtual financial assets held by overseas banks. A chunk of what they spend goes into keeping their citizens alive and healthy. I submit that if you want to do away with "bad" government you need to identify what bits of government you want to keep -- and as with all confirmation bias, you'll find that you spend your time noticing all the stuff you want to get rid of, but once you look at everything you'll find there's a lot you want to keep.

    (Unless you really do want to move to Galt's Gulch and hire a posse of mercenaries to protect you from your neighbours. In which case I hear there's a canyon in Chile ...)

    98:
  • No, democracy was a ~500BC solution to transfer of power. (See also Athens.)

  • No, the distribution of guns and the rise of mass armies happened in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. Weirdly, the pattern of the post-1945 era is for warfare to stop being labour intensive and become capital intensive and highly automated. As we haven't even caught up with the 1789-1945 era yet, never mind the 1945-2015 era ...

  • 99:

    A chunk of what they spend goes straight back into the economy, driving spending, rather than draining away into virtual financial assets held by overseas banks. A chunk of what they spend goes into keeping their citizens alive and healthy. ISTR that reputable cashflow analysis techniques have found that each pound that the UK government spends (either directly, or through local authorities, who get about 5/6 of their income from central funds) generates another two pounds in economic activity.

    If that's even vaguely correct, could this be why "austerity" is only working for the 0.1%?

    100:

    Sometimes we impose political will for good purposes

    WE don't impose anything. Our rulers do, and it's not for purposes that are good for us.

    because it's considerably faster, easier, and cheaper than getting a full consensus.

    Suppose you've just had dinner with a few of your friends, and one of them decides you should pay for everyone. Instead of getting a full consensus, he pulls out a gun and forces you to do it because it's just so much easier and faster that way.

    Is everything alright?

    You can't have police without imposing the laws on people who want to break them.

    Sure, it's difficult to rule over people without having some kind of enforcers for your will.

    What you're not seeing here is that we basically only need two laws:

    • 1) don't aggress against others
    • 2) respect other people's property rights.

    The rest are meant to benefit some people at our expense. For example smoking weed being illegal is meant to benefit the for-profit prison system, paid for with tax money of course.

    Well of course, most of the time things would just work out because we're mostly reasonable people who get along

    I'm glad you see that. The only problem is the psychopaths among us, but fortunately most of them are happier hurting people mentally rather than physically.

    Government isn't just about taking stuff from people.

    You're right. It's also about propagandizing us into believing we're extorted for our own good, and divide & conquering us into fighting against each other. Gays in the military! Abortion! Immigrants! Evil capitalist oppressors!!

    Preferably one that only passes new laws when at least 90% of the public agrees

    That's not how being a psychopath ruler works.

    but a government has to get pretty bad before no government is better.

    So being extorted is just guaranteed to be better than not to? :p

    101:

    Our capitalist overlords are happy to promote more immigration... on their own terms. For example, the American “H-1B” visa and the UK “Tier 2 Work Permit” tie an immigrant worker to his or her employer: if you are dissatisfied with your job you can’t just quit and look for another one, but the employer can use “I can fire you and send you back where you came from“ as leverage. Again, asymmetric power, above and beyond the normal power that bosses hold over their employees.

    102:

    As we haven't even caught up with the 1789-1945 era yet, never mind the 1945-2015 era ...

    That's a very strange sentence. Who is "we", and what do you mean by "catching up"?

    103:

    Suppose you've just had dinner with a few of your friends, and I decide you should pay for everyone. Instead of getting a full consensus, I pull out a gun and forces you to do it because it's just so much easier and faster that way.

    Is everything alright? I also pull a gun, hold it to your head and say that, as punishment for trying to extort payment from $person, you should pay instead. Does your argument still seem like a good idea?

    104:
    What you're not seeing here is that we basically only need two laws: - 1) don't aggress against others - 2) respect other people's property rights.

    I’m going to resist the urge to get into a general debate over the merits of hard-core libertarianism, and just point out that you can create all sorts of mischief by careful (re)definitions of “aggress” and “property rights”. Two simple examples:

    (1) There are places in the United States where farmers living miles downstream from you have a “property right” in the rain that falls on your roof, because they are relying on that water eventually filtering down to their crops. In such states, if you try to collect rainwater in a cistern for your own use, you can be fined or prosecuted.

    (2) Under common law, if you own a parcel of land, you own all the airspace above it “up to the heavens”. When commercial air travel became A Thing, jurists had to choose between enforcing this principle strictly (which would require an airline to rent a right-of-way in every property that its planes over) or saying it didn’t really apply. To the regret of everyone who lives near a busy airport, they chose the latter.

    105:

    MODERATION NOTICE

    This is not a forum for the discussion of libertarian ideology (or other ideologies that depend on the availability of perfectly spherical humans of uniform density, for that matter).

    Nor is this a discussion for the minutiae of that quaint old-fashioned US-specific "common law" system, which doesn't apply in most parts of the world.

    Please do not make me wake up the moderator posse.

    106:

    Note: I don't believe in absolute property rights -- otherwise you end up with the bottled-water-stand-in-the-desert thought experiment, where everything just goes to shit and descends into epicycles of tail-chasing over "is it coercion if you demand $1M for a bottle of water from a guy who's dying of thirst."

    See, this is why I don't want this discussion to descend into libertarianism. It's not so much inviting derailment as organizing a train crash in a switchyard.

    107:

    Hi Charlie,

    How near is your near future setting? Because I agree with the immediate outlook being rather bleak - taking the longer view though it will be more extreme. As in a lot better or us being inexistant.

    Here is why: As much as socialism was/is a utopian idea so is capitalism. One might go so far as to suggest both are two sides of the same coin with communism/socialism (whatever rides your boat here) on the left and fascism on the other side. Your outline suggests a rather fascist expression (not that I disagree).

    Now I'm gonna steal a few lines from someone smarter than me but that alludes pretty well to the crises of capitalism on the one hand and maybe offer a different interpretation of what labor actually is. (I'm not gonna name the person, but it is easy to find out. The reason for withholding the name is to read this without prejudice. Glad to update this with links later).

    "labour’s two quite different natures: i) labour as a value-creating activity that can never be quantified in advance (and is therefore impossible to commodify), and ii) labour as a quantity (eg, numbers of hours worked) that is for sale and comes at a price. That is what distinguishes labour from other productive inputs such as electricity: its twin, contradictory, nature. A differentiation-cum-contradiction that political economics neglected to make before Marx came along and that mainstream economics is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge today.

    Both electricity and labour can be thought of as commodities. Indeed, both employers and workers struggle to commodify labour. Employers use all their ingenuity, and that of their HR management minions, to quantify, measure and homogenise labour. Meanwhile, prospective employees go through the wringer in an anxious attempt to commodify their labour power, to write and rewrite their CVs in order to portray themselves as purveyors of quantifiable labour units. And there’s the rub. If workers and employers ever succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish.

    Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value. For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as “good” or “bad”.

    If capital ever succeeds in quantifying, and subsequently fully commodifying, labour, as it is constantly trying to, it will also squeeze that indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom from within labour that allows for the generation of value."

    In my view this means your analysis may be correct but will either dead-end humanity pretty quickly or destroy itself and force its own replacement - or in other words a very different coin.

    If you look at the history of capitalism you can see that those who instituted it where neither democrats nor did they enjoy laissez-faire. The rising bourgeoisie just wanted a seat at the high table. Early capitalism didn't look like our democracies today at all. And our democracies still bear those marks - which means they were never meant to be what everybody today seems to take for granted and maybe even in the 60ies never existed for real. So maybe China is more like early England? An early capitalist quasi democracy. The differences in what the little man had to say in both places are not that big. As for laissez-faire the bourgoisie learned fairly quickly that they had to use laws to control that beast the market or be destroyed by it. If you look at history you can see that whereever markets where instituted laws to control them were never far behind - instituted by the same forces that put in the market in the first place.

    In the meantime we are just stuffing all the volatility under the carpet and wait for the big black swan. Once our governments have lost legitimacy that will not be long in comming (not that I'm looking forward to it).

    Chrisitan

    108:

    Sethg wrote around #101 Our capitalist overlords are happy to promote more immigration... on their own terms. [ munch ]

    So the trade unionists were/are right. Labour mobility is being used against the interests of employees.

    109:

    A quick note on the curious thing I noticed: "jokuvaan" is "justsomebody" in Finnish. The handle is not a proof of anything, but if you're Finnish I don't quite see the connection to the Finnish government. We do get a lot for the taxes we pay, in my opinion. If you're not Finnish, please disregard this.

    Also, about the student loans: I was lucky enough 10-20 years ago that I managed to get through my Master's studies without a loan. Here in Finland even the university studies don't cost anything by themselves, though there are other costs (student association memberships, books and other materials). There are also (too few) student apartments available, where the rent is quite cheap.

    The government supports students by giving study grants (depending on various things from about 40 euros a month to a bit over 300 euros a month), housing supplements, and a guarantee for student loans. When I studied, it was possible to survive without the loan, but I and my spouse studied subjects which made us easily employable and of course we studied during boom times.

    At least then even the loans didn't amount to that much, so most people I know who took them paid them in less than ten years after the studies. Nowadays, I don't know. The student loans seem to be at most 400 euros a month, and I think most schools don't have studies during the summer, so the students would get them for nine months every year - so 3600 euros a year.

    There are limits to those grants and loans. If you manage to graduate from a Master's level in the target time, four years, you have only a bit over 14000 in loans, and I think the interest is somehow limited. (At least it used to be.)

    So, I don't think student loans are a problem all the time at all places. I don't like the recurring idea that all the student grant should be loans, though. In my opinion the student loans should be a smaller portion of the student grants, for reasons hopefully clear to most people here.

    As said, my student experiences are at least ten years out of date, though.

    110:

    What you're seeing are the effects of some people having political power, ie. being able to impose their will on everyone else.

    The only reason you'd do that is to benefit at other people's expense. Otherwise you'd let everyone get whatever they can.

    That's a very popular myth among Americans

    No it's not, and the only thing I've "bought into" is sanity.

    In the real world, we know that there are a bunch of different theories of government

    Of course there are. Everything needs to be complicated to no end for the illusion to be maintained.

    a bunch of different motivations for individuals to move into government

    Mostly just psychopaths' craving for power and wealth.

    Indeed, just as human beings aren't perfectly frictionless spheres of uniform density, neither are governments.

    True, different governments have set up different PR-facades. They're all fundamentally the exact same though: vehicles for exploiting the masses.

    I get free medical care

    If money is free, then it has no value. So no, you don't. Someone has to pay, and eventually you run out of other people's money.

    a not-terribly-big pension, fire and ambulance services, police when I need them (and unfortunately sometimes when I don't),

    All the services you get from the government could be produced by private businesses too. After all, all of them are provided by people working in exchange for money.

    food purity regulations to prevent unscrupulous merchants or restaurants poisoning me, anti-pollution regulations to prevent my neighbours

    Regulations are only a problem when you haven't bribed politicians yet.

    you need to identify what bits of government you want to keep

    That's easy: not a goddamn shred of it.

    Oh, and:

    MODERATION NOTICE

    This is not a forum for the discussion of libertarian ideology (or other ideologies that depend on the availability of perfectly spherical humans of uniform density, for that matter).

    Nor is this a discussion for the minutiae of that quaint old-fashioned US-specific "common law" system, which doesn't apply in most parts of the world.

    Please do not make me wake up the moderator posse.

    Apparently you're shutting down the discussion. That's lame, but I get it. Cognitive dissonance hurts, so you want to cut out its source.

    111:

    Re education

    Student loans are not collateralized loans, like a mortgage. They are based on a hypothetical future revenue stream, like a business loan or a tax levy based loans. That revenue stream is the future earnings of the person being lent too. I, personally, think they are not a very good way to fund higher education, but they aren't a fundamentally unsound concept.

    Education costs to students, in the US, can really be explained by a few simple facts.

    1) State funding for university education is a lot lower per student than it was some decades ago. This explains the majority of the increase in tuition for state universities in the US.

    2) Median income has been stagnant for the last 35 years, while average income has continued to grow reasonably. If the income distribution today were the same as in 1970 median family income would be $90k instead of $50k. $40k more a year would make current tution rates and loan amounts fantastically more managable.

    3) Education is a high labor cost personal interaction business. So it has some "Baumol's cost disease". Like healthcare it should be expected to take a bigger slice of the pie as time goes one, to a degree.

    Then, way down below those three big items you'll find your more luxurious buildings, extra services, and football coach salaries. Some wasteful spending to be sure, but small potatoes.

    112:

    1) I should have written "modern democracy," as the more advanced North Atlantic states shifted from autocratic to democratic government.

    2) Yup. The convergence of the Agricultural Revolution and the early Industrial Revolution made LARGE labor-intensive armies possible. And like the earlier (expensive) period of longbow dominance, that drove shifts in power. Not immediately, but still.

    And the shift to massively capital-intensive warfare is having its own effect. Not immediately (see "asymmetrical warfare"), but still.

    113:

    RED CARD

    You do not get to ad hominem the owner of the platform. You're banned from this thread. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

    114:

    How near is your near future setting?

    Next 5-30 years.

    Both communism and capitalism are ideologies (yes, capitalism as currently practiced is intensely ideological and hegemonistic) for operating an economy in the industrial age. Both of them rely on continuing growth of the energy and resource base, and on the continuing ability of the economy to generate jobs so that workers can be drawn into the virtuous circle of labour/reward.

    Whether these doctrines continue to make any kind of sense at all in the post-industrial AI-dominated future (or the post-collapse future) is far from clear.

    So you can take my diagnosis to be of an unstable intermediate condition -- a pre-revolutionary one.

    115:

    Weirdly, the pattern of the post-1945 era is for warfare to stop being labour intensive and become capital intensive and highly automated. REALLY? Viet Cong vs USA Or for that matter Da'esh (otherwise known as ISIL) who are very personnel/labour-heavy - & vulnerable to high-tech strikes if anyone could be really bothered.... Or did I miss something?

    116:

    You missed the F-35, the F-22, and just about every big armaments procurement program in the past 50 years.

    Also, oh, little things like the invasion of Iraq.

    Modern capital-intensive warfare is shit at occupying territory and policing it -- for that you need a gendarmerie -- but if you want to punch an armoured spearhead 200 miles through territory held by a well-equipped 1950s-equivalent army in under 24 hours, or reduce a continent to radioactive glowing rubble in half an hour flat, it's just the ticket.

    117:

    This is not a forum for the discussion of libertarian ideology (or other ideologies that depend on the availability of perfectly spherical humans of uniform density, for that matter).

    I just had a thought which appealed to me. If you wanted, you could set up a form for discussion of this and/or other things you want to keep out of your usual forums, and when people bring up such things you could direct them there.

    If it didn't show up in the Recent Comments list, then it wouldn't particularly distract people from your other threads.

    I won't bother to explain why it appealed to me. If you don't like it then fine, I don't really want to suggest more things for you to do instead of write.

    118:

    YES This was the Wedgie Benn argument against the EU - that it was a "giant emnployers/capitalist ramp" (or very similar phrase) Turns out he was probably correct, oh dear.

    119:

    Why would you need revolution? The direction where minimum wage and social security benefits and taxes are all slowly increased should enable gradual transition. Also shorter work week would help but not sure how that would be mandated.

    120:

    Yes But a "gendarmerie" is NOT an Army ... Armies are only useful for occupation for brief periods, till the locals are re-organised to look ater themseleves (even if other army type unots remain in samller quantities. My father was in CivMilGov in Germany & that worked ok - but he quit before it was finished (he said) because it was obvious that by the end of '47 to mid-'48 that what became the BRD was quite capable of managing without "help"

    I note you do not address the so-called problem of Da'esh & similar groups of unpleasant miltaristic nutters, whether religious or otherwise.

    121:

    I'm pretty sure that has been suggested before, but anything that takes time and money and effort away from Charlie's central purpose, which is to write SF/ horror/ fantasy and using this place as a discussion zone of related topics, isn't a good idea. There are of course plenty of other places to bring it up.

    Anyway, liberatarian person doesn't even seem to know that Charlie isn't suffering from cognitive dissonance, he's just bored with childish comments that ignore reality.

    122:

    I note that the banned person seemed to think that (e.g.) food purity regulations could be bribed your way out of.
    WTF? Or/however/contrariwise, in a larger contect, that all "laws" are negotiable - someothing some "bankers" may have thought, esp "Fred the Shred", but they are slowly being eased out, are they not? Discuss - or maybe not?

    123:

    Er, no, the renegade Viscount Stansgate was wrong about that, as about so much else. The EU is a mixed blessing, but its employment regulations are the main thing that workers can use them to defend themselves against the employers. In THIS case, the EU's mobility laws do not allow employers to bind workers - it's the UK's and USA's ones that do.

    124:

    That would require an ideological revolution before it could happen. Because all our governing parties currently support the neoliberal consensus.

    (Revolutions don't always involve guns: sometimes they happen inside peoples' heads.)

    125:

    He(?) probably thinks big pharma is a conspiracy too.

    126:

    China as a model for the future of government is interesting. Basically, we have (say) 10% of the people who are allowed to become party members. It's a privilege bestowed upon the bright and obedient.

    The party elects the politburo and the latter appoints a temporary leader with a fixed term - no more Mao's.

    The people in turn are quite free to say whatever they like about government and the politicians in it, because it is how the party monitors popular feeling. What is stamped down on, very hard, is any attempt to actually do something instead of grumbling about it.

    The result is a party dictatorship, of sorts, where only the top 10% of the population are allowed to have a say in government, in a very structured manner.

    127:

    College graduates tend to earn more money than people who have never attended college, but the variance among graduates is very large. It seems to me, therefore, that the economically rational way to finance college is to treat it, not as a loan to the student, but as an equity investment.

    The government could establish one schedule of income-tax rates for high-school graduates, and a higher (or more steeply progressive) schedule for college alumni. The extra money collected from the alumni could then be used to subsidize the higher-education system.

    (The “income-sensitive repayment” option for student loans in the US [and UK?] is a half-step toward this system.)

    128:

    I was thinking more of the coprorate corruption & lobbying in the EU - as bad as, or possibly even worse than what goes on in Washington.

    Oh Dirk @ 126 At risk of Godwinising the conversation, the current Chinese model is somewhat similar to that of the Nazis - with big-corprations being intimately involved with the state. Provided you didn't crriticise Adolf directly, ( you are not allowed to complain about the "party" directly ) a surprising amount of disapproval was permitted of the NSDAP's behaviour - until WWII of course

    129:

    Democracy where only 10% have the vote

    There is a term for something like that. I believe it is called "aristocracy". And sooner or later China will run into the same problem every aristocracy always did -- children do not necessarily inherit their parents' qualities.

    Sure, right now in theory CCP accepts the "brightest and most obedient" of young people. But I am willing to bet that children of party members have an advantage in that particular competition, and children of highly placed party officials have even more of an advantage. After few generations, the party may still be obedient, but it will not be any brighter than population at large.

    130:
    The demand for T-shirts is infinite, but the supply of super cheap labor is finite, and will, in another century or two, run out, at which point T-shirts will likely get more expensive - but the standard of living of the entire world will be significantly higher.

    Infinite? really? I suspect that after the first few hundred thousand tonnes per capita per day, demand will drop.

    I think "infinite" in arguments is lazy arguing. It means "larger than this finite thing", basically begging the question.

    I'd like to see a proper justification for believing in "infinite" growth, even "qualitative" rather than quantitative. People claim that economic growth will go on forever, but when you ask them to explain something simpler, like what it means for a hairdresser to be 10,000 times more productive than today, with no increase in resources used, you get blank stares.

    131:

    For starters, can you name any sizeable 'tech' company that spends more on R&D than on purchasing patents, litigating IP, and lobbying for legislative favours that entrench monopolies?

    I know of two ($10 billion sized chip companies) that do exactly that; I work for one of them. We don't tend to buy patents, we tend to write them (I've led on four).

    You could also take a look at Intel's quarterly results (although it combines R&D with MG&A) but TI and Cypress also look like they have R&D as their single biggest expenditure.

    So, I believe that you are wrong in your assertion.

    132:

    On Investors Visas:

    Several years back I was planning to take a vacation to Costa Rica, and attended an informal class about traveling and living in Costa Rica. I remember the teacher telling us that if you put $50,000 into a Costa Rican bank you could live there, but couldn’t become a citizen. It’s gone up to $60,000 since for Rentista status = person of independent means. For a $200,000 investment in Costa Rica you gain residency status. For a C$400,000 investment you can become a Canadian resident. Essentially if you have the cash you can buy your way into a country and reap the benefits.

    Or you can marry a Brazilian for a permanent visa in Brazil. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to get a permanent visa.

    134:

    I saw some of the attempts in that direction with Obama. He managed to get through the health care and some tax changes. He is pushing other good things and increased minimum wage. Considering US is a beacon of capitalism, this is good. Considering US is already good 50 years behind these things that are normal in EU, this is depressing. Also usually pendulum swings to the opposite side so we'll probably have some depressing people after Obama in a couple of years.

    135:

    We observe the increasing militarization of police forces and the priviliging of intelligence agencies all around the world. And in the media, a permanent drumbeat of fear, doubt and paranoia directed at "terrorists" (a paper tiger threat that kills fewer than 0.1% of the number who die in road traffic accidents).

    I sort-of agree with some of this, but it takes a conveniently short memory to do so.

    I grew up with a parent who was a soldier, and went to a school full of soldiers' children. Several of whom had been orphaned by said terrorists. I lived in a part of the world where a group of people had chosen to use violence to pursue their political agenda. Please, do go to one of the dodgier parts of Belfast, and try insisting that Irish Republican terrorism is a paper tiger.

    I agree that PIRA only had a few hundred active terrorists at any one time, but there are several thousand graves in Northern Ireland as testament to their efforts. I agree that even prior to the mid-90s the risk of terrorism on mainland UK was vanishingly small, but I can assure you that I was most definitely involved in checking underneath vehicles, and arming sentries.

    I also agree that the risk of Islamist terrorism is vanishingly small; but... it exists. The attacks on Glasgow Airport, or 7/7, or 21/7 demonstrate that there are at least some murderous morons out there. Where I disagree is in your assertion that we're ramping up a response to it. Consider:

    • Your "increasingly militarised" Scottish police has only 275 firearms-trained officers for a population of 5 million. The only "militarisation" I've seen was possibly the replacement of the old "too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter" woollen Dixon-of-Dock-Green uniform tunics for synthetic fleeces, thermals, and jumpers; or the addition of stab vests.

    • Your "increasingly privileged" intelligence services were comparatively speaking "running riot" in the UK until the early 1980s; they are under far more scrutiny now than ever, and no larger in size. What privileges do you mean?

    • The Police Scotland counter-terrorist group is combined with the organised-crime group as part of the Specialist Crime Division - and the Security Service hasn't got a significant enough presence to rate its own HQ north of Manchester (for that matter, nor have the Intelligence Service, or GCHQ). Hardly an over-the-top response.

    • The entire staff of our three intelligence services, including all of the admin clerks, typists, and HR people is probably less than 10,000, based largely in the South of England.

    Meanwhile, IMHO the media's "drumbeat of paranoia" regarding terrorism pales into insignificance with their "drumbeat of paranoia" regarding falling house prices, rising house prices, falling economies, the risks to / incompetence of the NHS, the identity of the murderous character in a TV soap, or the ruthless plot to hamper Glasgow Rangers FC's rightful place at the top of Scottish Football (depending on that paper's politics).

    So - people don't "get" probability, and worry far more about terrorism than they should; I agree. That also applies to immigration. Unfortunately, politicians tend to react to what people actually worry about, not what they should worry about - as do the media, because that way they can sell more advertising. You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain any drumbeat, just disjointed ignorance and greed.

    136:

    Nope, I've been around the Falls Road in the early 1990s, I'm not touching that bait, it is stinky.

    Only an idiot would deny that insurgencies exist.

    ... The point I'm trying to make, though, is that in general insurgencies only get off the ground when there's a mass base of silent sympathizers who give aid and comfort to the insurgents, or when civil society has pretty much imploded and the insurgents are the only gang who can provide local stability.

    In the case of NI, Sri Lanka, or many other places, the "mass base of silent sympathizers" happens because there's a legitimate political need with mass support that has been frozen out of the political sphere and is being held at bay with guns.

    Civil rights usually have something to do with it in the first case. (Apartheid in South Africa spawned the ANC, the Nakbah spawned the PLO/Fatah/Hamas/etc, Unionist violence in NI got the IRA off their backsides in the 60s and Bloody Sunday set everything on fire, and so on.) And the cure is to start talking to the non-violent parties on the side and try to find a negotiaited settlement that deprives the men with guns of their supporting base. It worked in SA, it mostly worked in NI, it hasn't even been tried in Gaza since Rabin was assassinated.

    The second case is much tougher, and that's where the likes of the Taliban or Daesh flourish. Civil society got thoroughly trashed in Afghanistan from 1976 to 2001; as for Iraq/Syria, it speaks for itself. And they're set against the background of the systematic predation of the middle east by western powers circa 1791-1956 (or later).

    Finally, you missed some signs of police militarisation. Police Scotland may only have 275 firearms-trained officers, but non-specialist officers now routinely carry handguns in the highlands and borders. We've got a problem with the increasing inappropriate use of stop-and-search powers. The static personnel head-count of the intelligence services ignores the outsourcing of large chunks of the intel sector workload (around 80% of the intelligence agency spend in the USA is outsourced to private sector contractors) and the ability to leverage vastly more powerful computing and networking tools. All is not well, and while I don't want to suggest that the sky is falling, I think you're too optimistic.

    137:

    Charlie, I am still curious what were you trying to say in post #98:

    As we haven't even caught up with the 1789-1945 era yet, never mind the 1945-2015 era ...

    138:

    Not only won't the revolution be televised, it won't be fought with guns. Any attempt to do so will be immediately neutralized by Emergency Response Teams, backed by private and/or mercenary security forces, backed by regular army troops, backed by precision munitions, drones, and, real soon now, armed semi-autonomous and autonomous robots. Worst case, the First Capitalist Mechanized Infantry Division merely needs to seal off the urban or suburban area (in rural areas the drones will take care of them) containing the insurgents and starve them out. An armed revolution will never touch the bosses. Individual assassination will work but won't change much except to make work for private security forces.

    The one place where the financial oligarchies that run things are vulnerable to outsiders is on the Internet. The flow of money takes place there, and the storage places have to be accessible. NSA and its fellows have placed a high value on penetrating everyone's computers, but have seemingly not realized that the back doors they're building are accessible by anyone with the knowledge and skills to reverse-engineer their exploits. Stuxnet is a good example of this; I'm surprised sabotage of chemical process plants controlled by Siemens' systems isn't common now. I expect we'll very soon see state actors like China taking advantage of the hard disk exploit that NSA has proliferated, not long after non-state actors will have a field day with it.

    Granted that banks and other financial institutions will have better than average security; I don't think that will help them much if the intelligence organizations are willing to compromise everyone's security as they seem to be.

    139:

    each pound that the UK government spends ... generates another two pounds in economic activity.

    That's not possible since UK govt spending is something like 42% of GDP so if every pound they spent made 2 pounds additional activity that would equal 126% of GDP, give or take.

    You hear that 'x pounds / dollars spent brings in and additional y pounds / dollars' arguments all the time but they are suspect for any large economic entity. Total economic activity = total spending so it is very hard to spend X and generate additional Y unless your spending is attracting money that would normally stay somewhere else. So doable for local or regional economies (at the cost of other local / regional economies) but very hard on a national level and only possible on the global level if the spending is directly converting raw materials into more valuable 'stuff'.

    140:

    I'm not Charlie, but I would guess that the significance of the 1789-1945 time frame is the rise of national conscription as the model of military power, starting with the French, and ending in 1945 because nuclear weapons (and other developments since) took nation-mobilizing Total War off the power scale, into the realm of civilizational murder-suicide. One sign we still haven't caught up with the developments of 1945 is that people in the West are still designing/building aircraft on the basis of "this is what we'd need for a full scale war with China or Russia," with apparently no consideration that all the exciting pew-pew and clash of skills in the sky will likely be Overtaken by Events if we're ever so unfortunate as to have a full scale war with China or Russia.

    141:

    The government spending/GDP correlation varies probably with the absolute value. An interesting result on the last 10 years or so for the USA shows a decent linear regression with a slope at 1.3. In other words, reducing the spending by $1 reduces the GDP by $1.3. Lookup Krugman's column for the graphs.

    OG.

    142:

    Hmm, were you talking about China with that Dick? Or was it the US?

    Because the only real difference I can see is that in the US it's less than 10% that are allowed to have any effective say in government.

    Vote for Kang!

    143:

    When I retire, I expect a share of my income to come from investments—that is, from capital. Capital isn't just for the incredibly wealthy.

    144:

    This runs off the rails a bit after 13, but the essential points seem to be:

    (a) jobs will get scarce(r); (b) our societies will have the potential to be increasingly repressive; (c) small, poor countries must conform to the wishes of powerful state and nonstate financial actors.

    So far I agree. However, contra point 18, we are (at least in democracies) voters as well as units of labor.

    To the extent that automation creates an unemployable underclass of 5-15% of the population there is going to be a great deal of suffering, though not necessarily repression. As that percentages rises past 50%, society is going to become increasingly redistributive, even in the United States. Automation implies an increased surplus which can be divided and a fraction of varying size used to help those who are unemployable.

    145:

    If you make the majority of your lifetime income as wages a tax system which advantages investment income over wage income will not benefit you. It does not matter that you get some investment income, even if during some part of your life you get mostly investment income.

    If you are rich and get most of your lifetime income from investment a tax system which advantages investment income will benefit you.

    To a first approximation its a zero sum game. Lower taxes on investment = higher taxes on wages.

    Only a miniscule fraction of the population in the US or the UK will get more investment income than wage income in their lifetime. In the US (not familiar with UK retirement tax breaks) a lot of investment income for the sub-rich is already tax advantaged via retirement accounts and special exemptions for gains on houses making the investment income tax advantages that keep Romney paying 14% even less relevant.

    146:

    I'm still pretty optimistic in the long run.

    But, you know. 1% of the US population is in prison. 2.5% of voting age citizens cannot vote due to criminal convictions. 7% of African Americans are disenfranchised in that way. Something like 14% of African American males.

    147:

    In other words, reducing the spending by $1 reduces the GDP by $1.3. Lookup Krugman's column for the graphs.

    I think that says more about the current state of the economy rather than anything universal about govt spending. Nice things about Govt's. They spend, they never hoard cash even when everyone else is hoarding cash (I am looking at you Apple). And right now we need spending.

    Funny thing is, but since what we need right now is more demand, more spending, we are all better off to pay taxes than to buy a new iPhone. For every dollar the US govt collects in taxes, it spends $1.22 (deficit spending) but for every dollar Apple gets, it only spends about $0.90. Instead of taking its profit and spending it on new equipment or R&D, it is keeping a chunk of it as cash in the bank where it does no one any good (except the Apple shareholders since it increases the book value of the stock).

    No, this is not sustainable and clearly sub-optimal but it is what it is.

    148:

    I accept all these axioms.

    I'm half way through Naomi Klein's latest book, and I find the parallels similarly depressing. For some reaon she's somehow optimistic. (suprise ending? all a dream?)

    Thank you Mr. Stross for your distraction/provocation/amusement.

    149:

    Pilger is a raving idiot - he was disoriented by the US' disgraceful & disgusting behaviour over Cambodia (etc) & regards anything at all the US does as EVVVUL ... Now, I agree that 2nd Iraq was a disaster ... but, if he's talking about the re-emergence of fasicsm, or even outright nazism, it's curious that he doesn't even mention the islamists, whose programme really is nazi.

    Um.

    150:

    Martin & Charlie @ 135/136 What boithers me is that the guvmint's respomse to the very real terrorist threat ( Martin correct) is stunningly incompetent & almost seems designed to stun us into a state of paranoid fear ( Charlie correct ). How on earth did they get it so wrong? Reacent article in "Atlantic" - highlighted by the NSS, points out that "ISIS" are really, really muslims, in the same way that the Inquisition were really christians, but every single politicina is doing everything in their power to deny the facts staring them in the face. Now, are they really tht stupid? NO Are they terrified of "offending" some religious believers? YES Look at the way all politicians crawl to any & all religious leaders & allow them house-room, irrespective of their individual insanities. Why don't they fucking grow up & get a pair & tell them all to take their invisible friends elsewhere? You tll me. Gah.

    As for the regressive redistribution of monies in the "system" ... it's self-defeating in the long run, because (pace the discussion on guvmint spends 1 unit, 2 units get spent in the system) wealth increases with the money IN CIRCULATION - having the money go round increases real wealth. It is not a zero-sum game. But, (say Apple) sitting on the money-pile IS a zreo-sum game.

    Hence (you may not like this) the boy George's reversal of Thatcherite policies & investing in huge amounts (by our standards) of infrastructure - not only does it generate employment, it makes the money go round & is a huge "force" multiplier.

    151: 123 is almost exactly what I was going to say about #118, beyond a note that the DC-4 ;-) may have renounced the title, but he didn't renounce the wealth that came with it.
    152:

    The Chinese have been using this same system (bar details of organisation names and switches of rulers) since at least the Han Dynasty, say 1_000 years or so. Why do you think it will collapse for them in the immediate future since it clearly hasn't collapsed since Time Immemorial?

    153:

    Some of this is "multiple accounting for the same money". When the govt employee (assume average earnings) gets paid, the first thing that happens is that roughly 30% of earnings over £10000 are returned to the govt. When they go out for a meal, 20% of that cost is also returned to the govt in sales tax, as is 30% of their waiter's and chef's pay over £10000... All 3 of them run cars; 20% of the sticker price of those cars and about 2/3 of the pump price of fuel goes back to the government. When they get those cars maintained, 20% of that cost goes back to the government, as does 30% of the mechanic's and service receptionist's pay over £10_000... The mechanic also likes to eat out, so when they ou out for a meal...

    Point taken?

    154:

    Another factor may be "real" terrorism. Right now the usual idiots are killing ordinary people at random. The old theory used to go something like this: You blow up or kill a bunch of people and then there is an over-reaction by state security forces that kills a whole other bunch of (mostly) innocent people. The latter then come over to your camp and people increasingly fear their own government.

    The problem is, if the government reacts by only shooting the "right" people ie those directly involved in the terrorism/insurgency then the theory breaks down. In fact, it is even worse from an insurgent's POV because now ordinary people do not fear their govt and are indeed discouraged from joining the insurgency because they can see the govt shooting all the people involved with it.

    So, the new direction for terrorism is away from ordinary people as targets and much more "Charlie Hebdo". In other words, they start killing the 0.1% who make or form policy. They control what can and cannot be said in the media. They target the rich and the politicians who stand out as their prime enemies. They attack high value targets. etc.

    155:

    The term "failed state" carries a freight of implicit baggage: failed at what, exactly? The unspoken implication is, "failed to conform to the requirements of global capital"

    Lots of other people have mentioned this, but I'd like to as well. That's not at all what I think of when I hear the term "failed state". I think of countries in which there is no coherent, national authority engaged in the business of running the country. Essentially, a failed state is something that used to be a state (i.e. used to have a coherent authority from which power came), and now is not a state.

    The DPRK, for example, is not a failed state, but I could argue that they are not conforming to the requirements of global capital. Somalia is a failed state; used to have a government in charge, now doesn't.

    156:

    ARRGH! That post above (155) went massively wrong. I suspect something happened in the chain of "push reply, have to sign in, go back around". It wasn't meant to be a response to anyone; just to the original post. Maybe some kind mod can fix it :(

    [[ We can amend content, but not the 'In reply to' metadata. And once it's been replied to, we dislike removing it - mod ]]

    157:

    I said nothing about collapsing. Only that whatever advantage (if any) China gets by providing the vote only to "the brightest and the most obedient", is short-lived.

    158:

    I think the best definition of a failed state is one where the government is either non-existent or which is incapable of exerting meaningful control when it comes to enforcing laws.

    159:

    I'd have thought it was obvious.

    While conscription existed pre-1789, it was the French revolution -- and the British empire's response to it, and Napoleon's rise to hegemonic central power -- that brought the creation of the first modern-style mass conscript armies, orders of magnitude larger than previous European armies, and equipped with standardized mass-produced weapons. (Look into the history of standardization of guns, interchangeable parts, and so on. While govts. were working on it in Europe in the 18th century it really all came together in the early to mid- 19th.)

    By 1945, capital-intensive weapons (the Atom bomb is the most spectacularly obvious of these) made the mass conscript armies obsolescent. Note that obsolescence is not synonymous with obsolete -- mass conscript armies are still useful for some functions (defence of the homeland if morale/leadership is decent, occupation and repression of imperial dominions) but for the past 70-90 years the cost and complexity of weapons systems has been spiralling so that the operators need to be skilled professionals and they can individually cause vastly more destruction than an earlier age's conscripts.

    Contemplate an F-22 or a Typhoon or a Sukhoi-36 and the impact just one such aircraft would have had on the Battle of Britain, if it had a full supply chain, engineering support, and an AWACS aircraft to tell it where to go and what to shoot at. Now consider the cost: $40M or so for the Sukhoi, $200M or so for the Typhoon or the F-22, compared to £25,000 for a Spitfire (around £500,000 in today's money, correcting for inflation, or $0.7M).

    (NOTE: this is not an invitation to work through the implications of a 4th generation jet fighter with beyond-visual-range missiles magically turning up to ruin Herman Goering's day. Just pointing out that such a plane could, flying 3 sorties per day, without even bothering with afterburners or high-gee maneuvering, probably shoot down about half as many enemy aircraft as the entire RAF, at no risk to itself ... but at 200 times the cost of a contemporary fighter. Hence: capital-intensive warfare.)

    160:

    Ok; I'd still say that there must be some advantage since they're averaging about one rebellion or coup every 500 years.

    161:

    To the extent that automation creates an unemployable underclass of 5-15% of the population there is going to be a great deal of suffering, though not necessarily repression. As that percentages rises past 50%, society is going to become increasingly redistributive, even in the United States.

    The problem is, there's a threshold somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population where, if that proportion become truly disaffected and think they've got nothing to lose, you run into serious civil disorder and a pre-revolutionary situation.

    I'm pretty sure that in the [exceedingly unlikely] event that David Cameron wins the May general election in the UK outright, forms a non-coalition majority government, and goes full speed ahead with the Conservative cuts agenda, the UK (and not just Scotland!) will be in a clear pre-revolutionary crisis by 2020.

    Luckily that isn't going to happen ...

    162:

    You want to take a closer look at what Apple is doing with their "cash hoard". Hint: it's invested very interestingly (much of it in loans to suppliers with which the suppliers build factories for next-gen components which Apple then gets first use of). The RoI as I understand it exceeds anything they'd get from playing the market or letting a bank hold it, and they can leverage it for product development.

    163:

    Check out the Wikipedia entry for most war casualties. China has a lot of the top ones over the last 2000 years.

    164:

    One sign we still haven't caught up with the developments of 1945 is that people in the West are still designing/building aircraft on the basis of "this is what we'd need for a full scale war with China or Russia," with apparently no consideration that all the exciting pew-pew and clash of skills in the sky will likely be Overtaken by Events if we're ever so unfortunate as to have a full scale war with China or Russia.

    No major government wants a nuclear strike. At least none who are not trying to end the world for religious reasons.

    But if any nation has a big old fashioned armed force then they get to dictate terms to everyone else. So you get in a situation where all the major players wind up with big conventional armed forces just to keep the other folks from using theirs.

    165:

    I see your point, but a good case could be made that, short of the kill-us-all-let-God-sort-us-out WWIII scenario, capital intensive warfare just doesn't work. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, you know the drill.

    If anything, it seems to me that capital intensive warfare is driven by the realization that Americans won't tolerate a draft. The US military has been trying to solve that problem with capital, which they have in abundance, but results have been poor.

    166:

    capital intensive warfare is driven by the realization that Americans won't tolerate a draft

    Except everyone else is doing it, at least at the high end. France doesn't have a draft, the UK doesn't have a draft. Germany abolished conscription. In Germany it was seen as a nation-building exercise, not essentially militaristic (civilian service was available as a voluntary alternative) but the Army still let it go. In the UK, Thatcher wanted to bring back conscription -- her biggest opposition came from the Ministry of Defense, who talked her out of it on grounds of efficiency.

    So no, it's not just happening because "Americans won't tolerate a draft".

    Interesting tidbit: Lithuania just reintroduced conscription. But then, the Baltics currently feel extremely threatened by Russian revanchism. And Russia has a mass conscript army with capital-intensive high-tech support -- they're still running on the basis of how to win the last war, with a side-order of how to hold onto what's left of the Russian empire (clue: using boots on the ground).

    167:

    "In Greece, as elsewhere, the implementation of budget cuts, the dismantling of social welfare programs, and the deregulation of labor markets have occurred alongside a marked upgrading of the repressive capacities of the state. The more inequality climbs, the more public and private police are required."

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/greece-syriza-police-reform/

    168:

    "... each pound that the UK government spends ... generates another two pounds in economic activity."

    That's not possible since UK govt spending is something like 42% of GDP so if every pound they spent made 2 pounds additional activity that would equal 126% of GDP, give or take.

    It's true. It just doesn't mean what I'd want it to mean.

    Imagine this situation -- imagine that the British government somehow collected all the taxes they'd usually collect, but they didn't spend any money. A year later, would the money value of everything produced in Britain be considerably less than it was when they started? You know it would. But that could come two ways, maybe less would be produced, or maybe they'd keep producing and lower prices. How much of each would happen? I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows.

    It makes less sense to invest when prices are falling. You spend money making a product, and then you have to sell it cheap. Maybe you wind up with less money than you started with. If you have a big enough pile of money, you can spend a little of it and the rest is worth as much as it was before. The only risk you take is that deflation gets less.

    If government didn't tax and spend, would there be as much spending? Nobody knows. We only have one world and no control group. There's strong reason to think that government spends more than anybody else would, but it isn't directly testable.

    When government prints money, it's the same in reverse. The dollar value of everything produced goes up. How much is that from more production and how much is inflation? It isn't directly testable, we mostly have to apply theory. Different fools have different theories.

    When there's a lot of inflation then it makes sense to produce as much stuff as you can, because it will get more valuable, and in the worst case people will buy almost anything quickly to get the money out of their hands -- they will want something tangible they can barter even if it's something they don't want for themselves. Chances are production will go up, but is it really the production we want?

    It's all very complicated. Hard to say it just doesn't work. Hard to say that if we do a whole lot more of it then things will get better. We kind of need to muddle through.

    It makes a certain sense to track what resources people and corporations own, and when we see people who are not using valuable resources then take them away and give them to somebody who will be more productive. On the other hand, we need to preserve ecosystems etc and if there's an old-growth forest left somewhere I don't want it taken away and given to whoever will cut it down the quickest.

    It's complicated.

    169:

    If I'm a plant owner and replaced all my workers with robots, and now my former workers have no money to by my products, what do I have the plant for? Also, if nobody buys my products, how do I pay taxes? In material goods?

    Welcome to the crisis of capitalism, comrade!

    Since basically everybody is starting to realize this, it's a cinch that parts of government and corporate hierarchies have, too. Self interest and bureaucratic propogation requirements should logically kick in, eventually, to sidestep the slow motion train wreck. At least in a semi-rational world. Is that the universe we inhabit? History offers some encouragement, look at how the Corn Laws managed to slowly break the gentry stranglehold over British food supply in the 19th century, or how U.S. depression era programs (WPA, etc.) mitigated some of the harshest deprivation the public suffered. And while a total financial collapse in 2008 would have nicely suited some entrenched interests, the Fed intervention and TARP bailout staved off the worst outcome. Even Walmart's recent wage boost seems to imply at least a glimmering awareness dawning in the boardroom. Chicken feed, one might argue. And of course reactionary pinheads will always try to monopolize resources, but the countervailing power of government and market competitors fight it. Singapore style city-state authoritarianism won't scale up to national or global domains, not that it hasn't been tried repeatedly. The Chinese communist party, looking more and more like old style Chicago Democrats all the time, is too big, loose jointed and sloppily decentralized to enforce tight domination over internal factions with regional power bases. Look how they had to execute Bo Xilai to deal with a non- sanctioned party outgrowth. A real mess, it took forever, and it only happened because of a national change of leadership, a fairly rare event. The point being that a necessarily broad consensus among high level stakeholders defuses the growth of Singaporism beyond local scale. And if that's the case in an East Asian environment, with their Confucian heritage of group over individual, and state over society, how much harder would it be to emerge in a Western cultural background with our vaunted individualism and liberal politics.

    170:

    What would happen if all money was tagged - that is, you were able to tag it so that you could track it across geographies, types of uses/purchases, etc. indefinitely.

    Two reasons for this: 1- Finding out how various terrorist groups are able to fund their armies. 2- The corporate revenue/income tax evasion angle.

    By now, there should be a software that can do this.

    On a sad note: Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) has passed away.

    171:

    Yes it is a bit complicated, but economists have been studying it all for decades now, and I feel it necessary to point out that the austerity viewpoint has bugger all evidence for it, whereas the more neo-keynsian/ whatever you call the likes of Joseph Stiglitz actually has some for it, now we've carried out a number of experiments. (Not exactly controlled experiments mind you but we don't have that good simulation capabilities)

    Yet people in the USA keep worrying about massive increases in inflation, despite all the evidence pointing the other way.

    172:

    It's even more complicated than that... inflation happens when you create money only if the money is actually used. But when you're in a deflation it's better to keep money than to invest, so the money stays put and deflation stays.

    Which is why people like Krugman say that you can't get out of a deflation trap with monetary policies, because the money flow stops immediately at the bankers. You need fiscal policies, e.g. ensure the money ends up in the hands of people who is going to use it, also known as "the middle class" and "the poor".

    OG.

    173:

    I think that by now, those who survive in the Western military establishment have bought in to the idea of capital intensive war. But, on land (naval war being a different matter), it still doesn't seem to work, at least offensively. It's too expensive; the locals wait it out and go back to what they were doing.

    174:
    What would happen if all money was tagged - that is, you were able to tag it so that you could track it across geographies, types of uses/purchases, etc. indefinitely.

    I think it is, from what I've read they use cocaine as the marker...

    But why not abolish cash altogether? Use cards, or ... the mark of the beast? Could income tax & NI be abolished if every transaction were taxed ala VAT? Would an ability to real-time track cash movements improve the ability to manage the national economy? Oh Tobin, what am I thinking?

    Have to be a very secure system though with an unbreakable infrastructure!! Though it might make micro-transactions possible.

    175:
    or ... the mark of the beast?

    A litteral reading of the revelation of st. John the Divine suggests there is some possibility accepting the mark means you get the Beast's credit card.

    Which seeing as he's related to the Lord of this world has a large, if not infinite, credit line.

    Alas the mark of the beast seems more like a marketing logo on a more "realistic" (YMMV) reading.

    176:

    "Two reasons for this: 1- Finding out how various terrorist groups are able to fund their armies."

    ISIL are making billions by selling oil. This is not some wad of cash being handed over at the border for a truck of oil. It needs to move through the global financial system. Do you really think our intelligence agencies do not know who is buying and selling? Why do you think nothing is being done to stop it?

    177:
    Do you really think our intelligence agencies do not know who is buying and selling? Why do you think nothing is being done to stop it?

    Assuming it's not corruption, I assume they think the info will be a useful leaver at a later date with respect to unforseen circumstances...

    178:
    If I'm a plant owner and replaced all my workers with robots, and now my former workers have no money to by my products, what do I have the plant for? Also, if nobody buys my products, how do I pay taxes? In material goods?

    Welcome to the tragedy of the commons/paradox of thrift. Your advantage from paying more taxes/wages/etc. is relatively small compared to the benefits from slave labor and tax avoidance. Of course, if everyone does the same, the whole system comes unglued and you all lose out.

    Which doesn't change your immediate decision matrix. So at best you're in a multiparty prisoners' dilemma: any of the players who "cooperate" will get the thanks of the others as they knife the sucker in the ribs.

    179:

    Naah.

    Crude oil of a given grade is a fungible commodity -- one barrel of sweet light crude is pretty much substitutable for any other.

    So: tankers in Da'esh controlled territory haul oil out into somewhere like Turkey or Syria or Iraq or wherever the hell. It gets loaded onto a tanker. At sea, outside territorial waters, it is transferred to another tanker. Meanwhile some money changes hands elsewhere, via middlemen who are charging extra for their services because of the additional risk of maybe being seen to be doing business with Da'esh.

    The real action being taken against this trade is coming from the Saudi oil ministry, who are cutting the price of crude to the bone -- provoking howls of outrage from OPEC. Purely coincidentally, those who are most hurt by oil at $60/Bbl are oil exporters who are on the USA/Saudi Arabian joint Enemies List: Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and ... Da'esh.

    180:

    I had a look at the numbers for the F-22.

    Six AIM-120C missiles with a range of about 50 miles Two AIM-9 Sidewinders One 20mm M61A1 Vulcan cannon.

    I'm assuming that a Sidewinder can lock onto a piston-engined aircraft.

    Without having to close to gun range, which has a slight risk, the F-22 could destroy 8 Luftwaffe aircraft per sortie. Three sorties per day is 24 enemy aircraft total.

    In the Battle of Britain, average Luftwaffe losses were 18 aircraft per day, but that assumes operations on every day.

    So 1 F-22 could replace half the RAF.

    Current RAF operational bases cover pretty well the whole of the Battle of Britain combat area from one base, RAF Coningsby, with AWACS aircraft flying from RAF Waddington, a few miles away.

    Problem: just one aircraft, even with a 50-mile weapon range, would have problems engaging all the simultaneous Luftwaffe raids that took place.

    The Lanchester Laws don't really match air warfare, and when your one 'plane can fly easily out of reach of enemy fighters they get really badly distorted, but twice as many planes have more than twice the effect. How do you compare 1 with 350?

    (This could have been much longer: I was getting bored by the Libertarian blow-hards from across the Pond. Researching this post was a little interesting. But I am going back to Kerbal Space Program. I hear there is a Mod that gives you Spitfires in Space.)

    181:

    So 1 F-22 could replace half the RAF.

    Ignoring my own warning, taking my own bait, etc:

    I seem to recall hearing that around 1995-2000, as an exercise, students at the RAF Staff College at Cranfield worked out how many F-117As -- configured as deployed in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian war -- it would take to duplicate the economic/strategic effects of the USAAF/RAF bombing campaign against the Third Reich, from 1942-45. (And also how long.)

    Turned out it was one squadron of Nighthawks with smart bombs, six weeks, and a 50/50 risk of losing one airframe (probably to random flak, possibly to mechanical failure).

    And the F-117A was retired as obsolete six years ago.

    (Note that the F-22 and Typhoon can both supercruise at upwards of 1000 knots without engaging afterburners. The UK is approximately 800 miles, north-to-south (we can mostly ignore the pressing need to defend Cornwall from attacks from the north-east). So from a position around Newcastle, a 4Gen fighter could run north to Inverness or south to Dover in around 20 minutes -- during which time an attacking Luftwaffe force could only have moved 50-100 miles. So the only way to deal with it would be to mount multiple raids at opposite ends of the country, timed to arrive over target simultaneously -- and to expect that one or the other is going to get very badly mauled.)

    182:
    Purely coincidentally, those who are most hurt by oil at $60/Bbl are oil exporters who are on the USA/Saudi Arabian joint Enemies List: Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and ... Da'esh.

    Sure. Odd co-incidence... Did you ever see the film "Lord of War"[/.1]? Superb start & credible take on the kind of trade mechanism you 're talking about. But I find it difficult to believe that the powers that be don't know who's responsible. In a trivial and at root sense.

    If they know and they're not acting, (maybe they are with respect to the price, why not? Presumably because they think the info will be more useful later than now. A species of delayed gratification, which may be a good or bad sign, depending on how you look at it.

    [1] "Lord of War". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/

    PS. Mr. Spock is dead. And Radio 4 first announced this as "Dr. Spock", which is the kind of mistake my mother used to make back in the day. Really took me back!

    183:

    MODERATION NOTICE:

    A certain famous actor's death has been noted. Further discussion on this comment thread is discouraged. (You've got the rest of the internet for that.)

    Because this blog is so totally not the place for America is going to be allowed to go all Princess Diana on me.

    184:

    And of course, nobody thinks of bombing the oil production and storage facilities under ISIL control...

    185:

    I believe the assumption is that they will not remain under Da'esh's control indefinitely, and the cost of rebuilding them exceeds the cost of smashing Da'esh flat.

    186:

    So what did happen to Dr. Spock, who was not an actor (technically).

    Apparently he died on March 15, 1998. And, amongst other things, won an Olympic gold for rowing in 1924, speaking of which why did the death of Dianna have such a big outpouring of emotion?

    I liked the explanation posited in the Science of discworld III by Cohen, Stewart & Pratchett.

    https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KthSyQRYucgC&pg=PA292&lpg=PA292&dq=princess+diana+science+of+discworld&source=bl&ots=WIHAe60-We&sig=5KWztGJRRLzGp5Lqq6942eANNQE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dOfwVIuFLMPzavvtgGA&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=princess%20diana%20science%20of%20discworld&f=false

    for those interested. FWIW, she wasn't an authentic Royal but was the popular conception of what a Princess is/should be. I think what they say is convincing, but persionally I think she was F*cd over by her husband who didn't tell her the score before they married. Living the dream easily becomes a nightmare...

    Jesus... I'm a romantic! Pity me....

    187:

    I feel it necessary to point out that the austerity viewpoint has bugger all evidence for it, whereas the more neo-keynsian/ whatever you call the likes of Joseph Stiglitz actually has some for it, now we've carried out a number of experiments.

    I don't think there's any question that a moderate increase in circulating money results in more jobs, which is good in the short run for people who need jobs.

    But it also results in a lot of consumer crap getting marketed which is really no use to anybody, and a whole lot of money spent marketing the stuff to people whodon't know better than to buy it. In the process fortunes may be made by people who have no business making them, or more likely competition goes up to the point that nobody can make a profit for awhile until the interlopers have been driven off.

    It isn't enough to do things that look good in the short run to one component of the economy. You need to take care of the whole system. One of the things that's going on is that we are giving poor people in other nations the chance to catch up. So for awhile they get first pick of the jobs they can do, and while their standard of living rises to meet ours, our middle-class standard of living is sinking to meet theirs. What we were doing was not at all sustainable anyway.

    And of course a whole lot of people want to have security for the future, but with energy supplies so uncertain (and even climate) there isn't really any security to be had. One way or another those savings are probably going to disappear.

    188:

    Ahem: Let's also say that Charles Windsor was fucked over by his mother, who took a distinctly negative view of the woman he's now married to (now that she's safely past childbearing age) and who was his mistress for thirty years before that. Diana was a politically acceptable reproductive host for a crown prince whose real interest lay somewhere politically unacceptable (at the time).

    189:

    You wouldn't need a EF2000 Typhoon, or F-22, or a Su-35 Flanker-E.

    Just the same suite of missiles [AIM-120 or Vympel R-77] and associated radar [AN/APG-77 or Irbis E0 fitted to something like a Canberra B(I)6

    You could probably get six BVR radar AAMs under each wing.

    Good time to altitude, good loiter time once there, (something 4th Gen fast jets can't manage without IFR, which is yet more infrastructure), and virtually impossible for any other aircraft to intercept.

    About five WAH-64D Longbow Apaches could end most WW2 battles on their own, even the Battle of Britain [at night, without flying over the enemy airfields].

    Does it show that I have thought too much about this?

    190:

    Camilla P-B, unfortunately for Charles, bearing in mind the Act of Settlement and the Royal Marriages Act 1772, was a) Roman Catholic and b) married.

    191:

    Finally, you missed some signs of police militarisation. Police Scotland may only have 275 firearms-trained officers, but non-specialist officers now routinely carry handguns in the highlands and borders. We've got a problem with the increasing inappropriate use of stop-and-search powers. The static personnel head-count of the intelligence services ignores the outsourcing of large chunks of the intel sector workload (around 80% of the intelligence agency spend in the USA is outsourced to private sector contractors) and the ability to leverage vastly more powerful computing and networking tools. All is not well, and while I don't want to suggest that the sky is falling, I think you're too optimistic.

    Except that...

    Police Scotland is not giving guns to non-specialist officers. That would open them to huge liability cases; no training, no guns. The Army is the same (you should see the ticking of boxes now required to get someone on a range, with a rifle). The stramash was because the specialist officers were being given jobs that didn't require their skills (i.e. they're short enough of officers that they can't afford to have 275 of them sat around drinking tea and waiting for a gunfight), but also required those officers to carry their weapons while doing so.

    As for "increasing use of stop and search", that's explained by the Strathclyde cops subsuming the rest of Police Scotland, and a Chief Constable who assumes that everyone must do things the same way Glasgow Polis does them, no exceptions. If that means "take the guns with you", so be it. If that means "target-driven insistence on the same search tactics used to stifle knife-carrying in Glasgow", tough. Unfortunately, the Scottish Executive are doing rock-all to control him, and he's taking the "it's operational, politicians shouldn't interfere" attitude.

    Finally, while the CIA and NSA may have outsourced their gathering or their database maintenance, what evidence do you have that this is being done by GCHQ or the Intelligence Service? I haven't heard a whisper about it, anywhere, and I question whether the UK is outsourcing any of it. This is Crown Jewels stuff; I suspect the closest we get is "civilianisation", i.e. the Police or NCA hiring appropriately-vetted former cops and soldiers with the relevant skills; that's far from either privatisation or outsourcing.

    192:

    As per usual, as it gets to this stage of a thread, the thing devolves to military hardware and political navel gazing.

    However, I'd like to go back and disagree with some of Charlie's 'axioms':

    8. The internet disintermediates supply chains. Nope, it doesn't really. It 'changes' supply chains, disrupts them, give others a chance to win out and replace old chains - but the practical evidence is we still have the Amazons, Tescos, and a million and one other intermediaries between creator and consumer. If anything they've ended up more powerful. Charlie is forever saying that the intermediaries in the publishing supply change have to stay - so it's a bit weird to then say they are going to get blown away in a fit of internet.

    10. The purpose of democracy is to provide a formal mechanism for transfer of power without violence, when the faction in power has lost legitimacy. Nope, democracy is to provide the appearance of change whilst maintaining the power exactly where it was before. At least a good revolution decorates the walls with some of the old power structures, disrupts things in a practical way. One of the main problems with democracy is it's inability to deliver the extent and pace of chance that this modern world needs (eg climate change). It CAN'T deliver change outside the narrow extent of its existing parameters.

    17. In future, inter-state pressure may be brought to bear on states that fail to meet the criteria in (15) even when they are not failed states by the standard of point (16). Why on earth bother with inter-state pressure? You conform to the money or you don't have any of the money. Far more direct and effective than trying to get a politician to act. A 'failed' state only becomes one AFTER the money has gotten withdrawn - it's a consequence, not a cause.

    19. So, going by (17) and (18), we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are. Actually the reverse. The level of manpower required to deliver effects has been reducing as technology increases. At the same time the systems of society has become increasingly fragile (call it optimised if you like) with many more interconnections. Upshot is the small group can now have a massive effect. The individual has been getting more powerful over time, not less. Hence why the clamps have come down to try and control that. In the end it's a losing game, and things break apart.

    193:

    One of the main problems with democracy is it's inability to deliver the extent and pace of chance that this modern world needs (eg climate change). It CAN'T deliver change outside the narrow extent of its existing parameters

    Very true. I'm not sure what, beyond enlightened despotism, or a quasi-religious fervor, actually could deliver radical change in a modern setting.

    194:

    Okay, so you're saying that we need another Snowden-type massive leak, preferably by a forensic accountant who's absolutely boring (i.e., unblackmailable) otherwise. This person will also need to clearly communicate the money trail - graphically.

    195:

    Re: Point 16 -- I submit that a real failed state is one that does not serve the best interests of its citizens (insofar as those best interests do not lead to direct conflict with other states).

    'Best' - this needs definition.

    Whenever I see 'best', I immediately think 'ranking' ... Politicians, marketers, etc. often try to force-rank items, concepts, needs, etc. This is foolish and dangerous as most systems are complex and intertwined. Just because you can't see an immediate direct connection between A and H, does not mean that they are not connected. (See 'downstream effect'.) BTW - ranking is not considered as useful/effective as ratings in many areas of social research because of this loss of what might be very important information.

    196:

    The point I'm trying to make, though, is that in general insurgencies only get off the ground when there's a mass base of silent sympathizers who give aid and comfort to the insurgents, or when civil society has pretty much imploded and the insurgents are the only gang who can provide local stability.

    I agree with everything you're saying, there - particularly with the mechanisms for defeating said insurgencies.

    However, the current crop of insurgencies have gone transnational - and this makes it rather difficult to undercut their legitimacy or basis of support. The world's various insurgencies apparently compete for their foreign recruits; currently, Syria is the place to be for the aspiring Jihadi - Somalia is so last year...

    In Northern Ireland, the UK worked at cutting down the inherent bigotry in local society, with the Generals being quite clear that the British Army was not there to provide a solution, just to buy time. In Sri Lanka, the Tamils were defeated by sheer ruthlessness and tens of thousands of deaths. Action Directe, the Red Army Faction, and Baader-Meinhof all failed because they had no real support, and could be criminalised (and because the 1980s brought the changes that the late 1960s had been driving towards).

    The current reaction may well be driven by the lack of realistic negotiations. Why do 15-year-old girls from London (the best-integrated place in the UK, by all accounts) decide that actually, Syria is the place to go? Why do a bunch of Saudis decide to retrain as airline pilots? And lest I be accused of fixating on religious-based insanity, why do some Americans set off half-ton bombs in Oklahoma City and genuinely believe that the New World Order is a threat to them as individuals?

    Politically-driven (or even ideologically-driven but politically-supportable) insurgencies are easier to negotiate with than ideologically-driven insurgencies. Saudi Arabia has the kind of welfare state that untold billions can buy, but there are still nutters who revel in their intolerance and demand that the entire world see things their way.

    Exactly how does a European democracy attempt to mitigate the support base of fanaticism driven by nutters in Yemen or Saudi Arabia? (Remembering that "invading the Middle East" only happened after two attacks on the World Trade Centre - both the failed truck bomb and the successful airliners). For that matter, how could the UK dissuade Bostonians from supporting "the boys"?

    Are these insurgencies genuinely "bottom-up" reflections of dissatisfaction among the people, led by the vanguard of frustrated, ruthless, but consistent individuals? Or are they astroturfed, and their incitement merely a useful lever for the powerful but fearful types who want to hold on to local power by pointing elsewhere? How do you negotiate with a Pakistan that really doesn't want a successful Afghanistan on its border, or a House of Saud that can't be bought, and would prefer that its potential challengers get angry abroad rather than change things at home? Or a Syrian Government who rather appreciates that ISIS tend to delegitimise all of their opposition?

    Either way, the overspill is credibly dangerous and difficult to handle. Whatever ideas you've got, I suspect they're already being tried...

    197:

    Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

    I heard an interesting proposition on a Radio 4 programme, looking back at the Industrial Revolution, and asking why Britain leapt so far further forward in the 18th Century than (say) France and Spain. The answer was that its entrepreneurism was best encouraged by a transparent, swift, and effective legal system; and that lots of small individual enterprises demonstrated greater results than the fewer, larger, more stifling state-controlled enterprises that were the preferred approaches of France and Spain).

    That would tend to support the position that true individualist capitalism exists best in a democracy rather than in its absence; it's harder to break through the glass ceiling in a tyranny...

    198:

    ... lots of small individual enterprises demonstrated greater results than the fewer, larger, more stifling state-controlled enterprises that were the preferred approaches of France and Spain).

    That would tend to support the position that true individualist capitalism exists best in a democracy rather than in its absence....

    Doesn't that need to go in past tense?

    ... true individualist capitalism existed best in a democracy rather than in its absence....

    Isn't it now more like it was in Shakespeare's day? Like the fishes in the sea, the big ones eat the smaller....

    199:

    As per usual, as it gets to this stage of a thread, the thing devolves to military hardware and political navel gazing.

    Perhaps. Frankly, I find the current Russian output even scarier than Fox News, and that's saying something. Here's a taster - I await someone more experienced to put it into context...

    http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-02-2015/129738-0/

    If OGH is correct, we should see a rapid reduction in overblown terrorist stories, and a rapid increase in poorly-written and ill-informed hysteria from the usual media suspects... (the Daily Express couldn't even spell an RAF aircraft name correctly - "Rivot Joint" indeed :(

    200:
    Without having to close to gun range, which has a slight risk, the F-22 could destroy 8 Luftwaffe aircraft per sortie. Three sorties per day is 24 enemy aircraft total.

    Hawk Among the Sparrows. It's possible someone else remembers it.

    Anyway, that F-22 has a rather more devastating weapon against WWII aircraft than the missiles, and I don't mean the cannon. I mean overpressure.

    The F-22 can cruise supersonic, and just flying by WWII planes at Mach 1.0x is going to generate an overpressure wave that will blow their wings off. Not to mention being long gone by the time they get lined up on it. Multiple targets per pass, and they pretty much have to fly close together or the Spitfires will destroy them in detail.

    201:

    I'm not sure what, beyond enlightened despotism, or a quasi-religious fervor, actually could deliver radical change in a modern setting.

    It's possible that the inherent complexity of our current level of technology is a major barrier to change. The system has so many interdependencies that nothing much can be fixed without rebuilding everything from the ground up, and we're too dependent on the system to tear it down and rebuild.

    202:

    IMO it is a misallocation of resources to send your time traveling air force's modern fighters up against WW II German aircraft in the air. The B-52 has a higher service ceiling and speed than German interceptors. Who cares if Germans can see you on radar, or even visually, when they can't touch you? Bomb the air bases, oil refineries, steel mills, and armaments factories from high altitude. For that matter you can destroy the German and Japanese navies with nothing but a few B-52s, quite possibly without the poor sailors ever even seeing where the destruction is coming from.

    After that somewhat bloodthirsty comment, my favorite essay on World War II: Losing the War

    203:

    I believe you are correct in that assessment. However, IS may well become a real Islamic State in Sunni Iraq unless the West re-invades. The locals do not have the will to do anything about them beyond protecting their own patch of land. It would not take much on the PR front for IS to "turn moderate" and start building a real state.

    204:

    Illegal knife carrying is one of those crimes that will probably be extinct a few months after medium range terahertz scanners capable of being fitted in the back of a van become available. Park up on a main street and scan everyone for weapon-like images. Every search an arrest, every arrest a conviction.

    205:

    Just a quick note on democracy v rule of law

    Capitalism seems to do better under rule of law , democracy is an option, see Hong Kong , Singapore , 18th century Britain etc

    V Philippines , ukrain etc

    206:

    "Why do 15-year-old girls from London (the best-integrated place in the UK, by all accounts) decide that actually, Syria is the place to go? Why do a bunch of Saudis decide to retrain as airline pilots? And lest I be accused of fixating on religious-based insanity, why do some Americans set off half-ton bombs in Oklahoma City and genuinely believe that the New World Order is a threat to them as individuals?"

    I can supply an answer to that which will explain why we will see a lot more of it in future. Apparently insane views like these are not insane when the whole group believes they are the norm. When everyone you speak with knows and believes all the NWO crap it becomes the new reality. Now that the Net has replaced the news hierarchy with a flat structure of people who only solely interact with their "peers" but also only select news that reinforces those views, we will get increasingly large sections of the public intellectually ghettoizing themselves and literally living in a world of their own.

    Whether their worldview is right or wrong is very difficult to decide objectively when the only evidence available is what is on the Net and major news media cannot be trusted.

    207:

    "It's possible that the inherent complexity of our current level of technology is a major barrier to change"

    Almost correct, but replace "technology" with "legal system"

    208:

    Correction: Grandmother. Elizabeth of Glamis was not a nice person to cross & was incredibly domineering. [ She arranged for Di-th-brailess to "meet" Speaker to vegetables ] It is said that when "Phil the Greek" went on his world tour during IGY he sent a message saying, in effect: "If that cow's not out of Buck House by the time I get back, then I'm not moving back into Buck House"

    Don't blame Lizzie ....

    209:

    ONE "Astute" class destroyer, cruising in the Channel?

    210:

    They can't See the article in "Atlantic". They have declared themseleves a Caliphate - which has certain duties & responsibilities. "Going moderate" is the exact opposite of what they are standing for. Think the "Cameronians" in the Scottish religious wars - totally fanatic ultra-puritans with "god on their side"

    211:

    oops, I forgot. Martin @ 191 point #17 Wrong way round. Somalia was & is failed & there wan't any money to start with .... Ties in with Dirk's comment @ # 206 If you have a form of groupthink-insnity, you really do have a problem. And we do.

    212:

    IS probably have sufficiently good PR to appear to be anything they like. All they need to do is "create" a "moderate" faction within their org.

    213:

    Capitalism seems to do better under rule of law , democracy is an option, see Hong Kong , Singapore , 18th century Britain etc

    I guess I was too vague. I was responding to

    ... lots of small individual enterprises demonstrated greater results than the fewer, larger, more stifling state-controlled enterprises that were the preferred approaches of France and Spain).

    That would tend to support the position that true individualist capitalism exists best in ....

    an idea that many small individual enterprises was a good thing that worked better, as opposed to fewer, larger, more stifled approaches.

    So I looked around at my media-influenced view of the USA and Britain, where we have the idea that the market is dominated by a handful of giant organizations that control the government whenever they take enough interest to bother. That are perceived as mostly not creating great results except in increasing their profits at the expense of the rest of the world.

    And I wondered whether there was a way to create the sort of democracy or legal system or whatever that might result in many small individual enterprises that would have a chance to get greater results.

    It seems like it would take something other than the freedom of the sea, where the bigger eat the smaller.

    214:

    Politically unacceptable? That she's a minion of the Pope?

    A couple of thoughts:

  • That CPB wouldn't give up her faith to become Queen, says something for her. Possibly that she likes the long game, is into delayed gratification, or sees some advantage in it. Or maybe she really believes.

  • Possibly Brenda took against her for other, personal, reasons (the Tree incident and other indisgressions), and it was at root a good old family argument where the political issue was useful. Presumably Brenda has her own foibles, and isn't entirely disconnected from humanity in at least that sense, even if years of Queening doesn't help.

  • As to the upcoming election. UKIP "policies" are neither here nor there. IMO Voting for them is a percieved as a good way to "stick it to the man" both Labour & ConDem. Though I doubt they'll get in by accident.

    So Charlie, when are you founding a new political party? I mean given all this research?

    Still as I say: "Vote Cthulhu! Why settle for the lesser of two evils?".

    215:
    "Why do 15-year-old girls from London (the best-integrated place in the UK, by all accounts) decide that actually, Syria is the place to go?

    I favor the Jethro Tull/Pussy Willow explanation:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evpbalSZamw

    Occasionally, a very talented woman rises to the top. And a woman can be more implacible than a man, according to Anne Desclos. Now off to buy some onion rings & watch the Duke of Burgandy.

    216:

    "Ahem: Let's also say that Charles Windsor was fucked over by his mother, ..."

    Yes, indeed, but it's a mistake to think in terms of culprits; almost all of those who could be so called were or are themselves victims, as Greg Tingey implied. My background was similar enough (a few social notches down!) that I can recognise the syndrome from personal experience. Also, we don't know how much other people were involved (e.g. Prime Ministers).

    Apparently, the same is true of a great many convicted sex offenders and violent criminals, but the government and gutter press do their level best to ensure that research and early treatment are discouraged, or even suppressed.

    217:

    However, the current crop of insurgencies have gone transnational - and this makes it rather difficult to undercut their legitimacy or basis of support. The world's various insurgencies apparently compete for their foreign recruits; currently, Syria is the place to be for the aspiring Jihadi - Somalia is so last year...

    Yes. However, what do we mean when we talk about nations? Usually we mean states as defined by the post-Westphalian settlement: borders, internal control.

    Lest we forget, most of the troublesome current insurgencies -- the ones that have gone global -- are taking place in a part of the world that has two distinctive characteristics: they're post-colonial states, carved out of the rump of the old Ottoman empire by the western victors in the first world war, or they're post-colonial states in Africa, where the SOP for the colonial powers was to create artificial states that mixed different previous tribal/national groups so that a minority group could be used as a proxy occupying force to hold down a majority group.

    This means that what we think of as national borders are recent artificial impositions on what they think of as natural cultural/ethnic boundaries. (The nearest western analogy would be the Berlin Wall and the East German border with West Germany.) Hence the weird way that Da'esh seems to be spreading in Syria, Iraq, and other "nations" in the Levant.

    I'll grant you the essentially ideological nature of the underlying drive. All I can say for sure is that "it's complicated", and there seems to be a monumental power struggle going on in the Islamic world right now between the pragmatic many who are accommodating themselves to the collection of traits we call "modernity", and this group of intransigent, intolerant, back-to-the-7th-century people we consider to be fanatics.[*] From their point of view, they're fighting back against an aggressive, hegemonizing, totalising ideology that claims global supremacy and tramples on their deeply-held religious beliefs: the western enlightenment, of which virtually everything from Nazism through Leninism, neoliberal capitalism, and social democracy are all barely-distinguishable aspects.

    I think what we're seeing -- the unrest -- is actually symptomatic of the fact that the modernizers in the Muslim world are actually winning. They're winning slowly and quietly, and their shock troops are TV soap operas, local pop stars, and bloggers. The rest is backlash, with some unfortunate backing from people who have far more money than sense (the Islamic equivalent of the Koch Brothers -- ideological climate change denialists).

    [*] I'm bending over backwards here not to say what I think of them. Let's just say I'm not a fan of theocracy as a governing ideology.

    218:

    So Charlie, when are you founding a new political party? I mean given all this research?

    I joined the Scottish Greens. They've got some distinctive twists that differentiate them from the English Greens, notably support for the independence movement up here. They're basically an old-school social democratic party with a strong emphasis on human rights and the environment, and a bit less authoritarian/centralizing than Labour used to be (before they turned into Tory Lite).

    It's not ideal -- what would be ideal would be for this planet to be invaded and annexed by Iain M. Banks' Culture: I'd be an enthusiastic Quisling -- but it will do until something better comes along.

    219:

    However, what do we mean when we talk about nations? Usually we mean states as defined by the post-Westphalian settlement: borders, internal control.

    Yes! And 9/11 showed that the USA was unable to control its borders or maintain internal control sufficent to prevent gigantic acts of sabotage. The USA was a failed state.

    The attempts since then to repress the US public and control the borders are in fact attempts to stop being a failed state, to get enough internal control and control of borders to keep anything like 9/11 from ever happening again.

    The more powerful technology that's available, the less of it can be allowed to people who might not be completely trustworthy.

    From their point of view, they're fighting back against an aggressive, hegemonizing, totalising ideology that claims global supremacy and tramples on their deeply-held religious beliefs....

    I want to applaud you for trying to see it from their point of view even while you fundamentally disagree.

    Reading science fiction, I grew up with the idea that technology would and should continue to change the world, that we would and should develop whatever capabilities we could. I believed that this would provide needed disruption. The canal builders couldn't stay too powerful with railroads coming in, and the railroad controllers wouldn't stay too powerful with automobiles and airplanes, and so on. But now we are getting an increasing consensus that technology should be controlled and allowed to people only after the implications have been thought out. I see it from ISIS and China and the US government.

    I try to imagine what the saudi royals think about ISIS, without any inside information. On the one hand, they have similar religious beliefs and run a similar government. ideologically they might like each other. On the other hand, if ISIS becomes successful, and later there's the question who else should run saudi arabia if not the saudi royals, ISIS would be pretty much the only sunni candidate. The saudis might feel like they would be better off if there was no other candidate.

    I think what we're seeing -- the unrest -- is actually symptomatic of the fact that the modernizers in the Muslim world are actually winning.

    "Modernizers" win if people think and believe various ways but get along well enough to run a mass consumer society. Religious zealots win if they can get enough of a consensus that nobody admits to disagreeing with them.

    From my perspective it seems like the modernizers must inevitably come out ahead. But my perspective is limited. People tell stories like North Korea has that kind of control, but I never talk to any North Koreans to see for myself.

    220:

    I've got to disagree on a couple of aspects. The big problem with this view is that you're assuming that religious fundamentalism is rising up in a vacuum, that the radicals are gaining power in essentially random places created by past politics.

    This isn't quite true.

    For instance, the Syrian revolt got started after Turkey cut Syria's water supply in half (references are at https://heteromeles.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/the-syrian-water-war/), and currently Da'esh is most powerful basically downstream from the dams of the Southeastern Anatolia Project, which Turkey installed to quell the long-term insurgency in Kurdistan, which was poor, dry, and revolting (in the political sense).

    Similarly, Boko Haram seems to be most powerful in the Sahel, which was (is?) still suffering from erosion and desertification. After all, it's just south of that dust-producing engine that's fertilizing the Amazon.

    In general, the AQ and its spawn seem to do best in areas that are desertifying. Conversely, moderate Muslims are doing best where they are in better economic and ecological shape.

    The pattern isn't confined to Islam. For instance, in the 2012 election, there's an interesting overlap between the most rabid conservative areas and areas that are either in deep, protracted drought (see the blog reference above for links) or are suffering from massive industrialization of farms killing off rural communities, forcing people off their land and onto public support and into low-paying service jobs. This doesn't mean that the US is a failed state, but it does mean that there is a correlation, perhaps causation, between suffering and radicalism, and it's being cynically used by some rich people (cf: the Walmart heirs).

    If you believe James Scott's work (looking at his books Weapons of the Weak and The Art of Not Being Governed), two things jump out:

    One is the people on the bottom aren't stupid anywhere, no matter what left-wing intellectuals might think. They know they're getting screwed by the rich and powerful, but they also know that revolution is a worse option: it's likely to fail, but if it succeeds, the successor regime might be worse. Revolt is generally the last option.

    Similarly, millenarian religious movements spring up when things really get bad. There are would-be prophets everywhere at all times, but they only gain followers when things are breaking down. The classic patten of would-be messiahs is to gather groups of followers during protracted troubles, launch themselves against the powers that be, and die horribly, with their bands dissolving over the succeeding generation or two. Occasionally they change things, sometimes for the better, but normally, they do not.

    Violent revolution is typically a last resort. This doesn't mean that would-be revolutionaries don't exist at all times. However, mostly they're marginalized cranks. It takes a crisis to empower them, and that's what's going on with AQ and successors throughout its range. They seem to be most powerful where environmental crises, exacerbated by dysfunctional politics are stressing people to the breaking point. Yes, they draw in some few disaffected from the first world, but as I said, there are cranks everywhere.

    I could draw this out and point out that there are analogies here to the evolutionary origins of sex, but I'll leave that for another post if anyone is interested. Connecting sex, parasitism, and terrorism is a bit too brain warping for most people.

    221:

    You hit on a couple of interesting points there.

    1: Non-Combat Losses were significant in 1940. It's a bit tricky getting a number for them, but with several hundred aircraft flying on any operational day, some would be lost through engine failure, crashes on landing, and the like.

    The rate of these losses was similar for both sides, and historians find it hard to distinguish them from the effects of combat. Did a plane crash on landing because of a mechanical defect, combat damage, or a wounded pilot?

    2: In the 1990s the RAF put a fair bit of effort into figuring the effects of the new weapons, and how they changed strategic bombing. They had seen the laser-guided bombs working in the Kuwait War, and how the old Cold War style of ultra-low attack worked out. What had made some sort of sense over a European battlefield with huge quantities of rader-guided missiles, and with un-guided bombs, was on the way out.

    What I recall is an article in one of the RAF Yearbooks describing the modern photo interpreters and the planning for an attack. You didn't need to flatten a factory, if you could put a bomb in the right place.

    One instance of a target-type mentioned in the article can be seen on Google Earth a few hundred meters north of the A630-M1 road junction. It's one of the big switching points for the National Grid, and the USA was developing "bombs" that would cover a site like that with long carbon fibres. Massive short circuits there, and Sheffield is dead as a production centre (the way the Grid is designed there are likely a couple of alternate feeds into Sheffield, but after all the shorts it is going to be a long while before you can produce enough parts to fix it).

    So there's a big recce job finding the targets, but you can shut down a lot very easily. Compared to the Sheffield Blitz, December 1940, which killed over 600 people and damaged 70,000 houses, and didn't shut the steel industry down, you could get more effect from a couple of laser-guided weapons on a mostly deserted target.

    Finding the right target is important. The Germans only had one factory that made the batteries for U-boats, and it was never bombed. Even with WW2 technology, think of the effect one decent air-raid could have had. The RAF did attack places such as Philips in Eindhoven and the M.A.N engine factory at Augsberg.

    For bombing, while the aircraft could fly higher and faster, the actual bombing wasn't hugely better for most of the Cold War. The first LGB gave a huge increase in the hit rate, around 1970. That's when you start getting the changes.

    222:

    Hawk Among the Sparrows.

    Aha! Thank you for the title. [google]

    I've remembered the story for decades and never could remember the name or author.

    223:

    The F-22 can cruise supersonic, and just flying by WWII planes at Mach 1.0x is going to generate an overpressure wave that will blow their wings off.

    I vaguely remember a story like that where it was WWI planes. The radar mostly went right through them, the missiles couldn't lock on, etc. But the overpressure killed them easily.

    Would it still be true for WWII planes?

    If so, the modern plane would have to be very careful not to knock the wings off friendly planes by accident. There would be an intermediate zone where they get stressed just badly enough to fail after 10 or 15 mostly-misses, unless the ground crew notices the coming failure and keeps them grounded until the damaged wings etc can be replaced.

    I wonder whether defenders could come up with an effective weapon against it? I could vaguely imagine something like chaff. You make bombs that blow up enough to spread lots of little sheets of aluminum foil around, and if the jet flies through them maybe it gets some in among the fans.... You never know just where the plane will come, but it never knows where you will blow chaff either. Maybe they didn't have anything that could destroy a modern plane, but if they could just get it down for maintenance for a few weeks that would be pretty useful.

    Maybe their single best chance would be to bomb it on the ground, and the longer it spent on the ground the better.

    Of course, if there were 50 of them they could always keep one in the air to protect the others, unless they take more than 48 hours of maintenance for each hour flying. I've seen estimates that the F-14 required 50 hours maintenance per flight hour, but maybe the reality was so complicated that this sort of factoid doesn't really mean anything.

    224:

    Non-Combat Losses were significant in 1940. It's a bit tricky getting a number for them, but with several hundred aircraft flying on any operational day, some would be lost through engine failure, crashes on landing, and the like.

    A few months ago I was reading on WWII US stats and seem to remember that 1/3 of the aircraft losses for the US were non combat related.

    225:

    I vaguely remember a story like that where it was WWI planes. The radar mostly went right through them, the missiles couldn't lock on, etc. But the overpressure killed them easily.

    I think that was a story in Analog in the 70s. :)

    I've seen estimates that the F-14 required 50 hours maintenance per flight hour, but maybe the reality was so complicated that this sort of factoid doesn't really mean anything.

    A maintenance hour isn't a clock hour. 3 people working for 5 hours is 15 maintenance hours.

    226:

    But now we are getting an increasing consensus that technology should be controlled and allowed to people only after the implications have been thought out.

    The problem with this approach is that ALL technology can be used for evil. Evil as defined by the rule makers and most any one else who thinks it through. Roll this back 150 years and telephones would be outlawed. Trains. Heck the entire industrial revolution.

    227:

    Minor (?) nit-pick the western enlightenment, of which virtually everything from Nazism through Leninism, neoliberal capitalism, and social democracy are all barely-distinguishable aspects. Not so. The Nazis were a versy similar raction to the enlightenment - like Da'esh a death-cult. See also "Viva la muerte!" in the Spanish Cvil war .... Da'esh are virtually indisitinguishable from Nazis, in practical fact .... To which, of course there is, unfortunately only one answer. And, also, to quote Frodo "I wish that it need not have happened in my time."

    228:

    1. That CPB wouldn't give up her faith to become Queen, says something for her. Possibly that she likes the long game, is into delayed gratification, or sees some advantage in it. Or maybe she really believes.

    That was not really an option back then. Religion was(is?) much stickier than a "choice" of the moment. Or decade.

    229:

    I do hope they are different from the English Watermelons. I had a very depressing dialogue-of-the-deaf with a group of these ignorant, stupid & bright-eyed traitors in our local market this morning.

    If you want your country defended: DON'T vote tory If you want a good education system DON'T vote Lemocrat If you want decent workers' rights DON'T vote Labour If you care for the environment DON'T vote Green ... to which I may add another one, very reluctantly ... If you want out of the corrupt, corporate EU - don't vote UKIP.

    230:

    See also: "Glide Path" by the one & only A C Clarke

    For those few of you who have not read it, a very-thinly fictionalised account of (part of) the development of Ground Control APproach radar durin WWII ... where the losses on landings, esp in fouler weather, was really COSTING. GCA was either not developed in time to be used much, or cam on stream just after WWII. But it won a very important "battle", nonethless. The Berlin Airlift could not have worked without it.

    231:

    "I vaguely remember a story like that where it was WWI planes."

    I think that was a story in Analog in the 70s. :)

    Yes, it turns out it was "Hawk among the Sparrows" by Dean McLaughlin, published in Analog in 1969.

    232:

    I don't actually see what your second paragaph has to do with what I typed. You are just describing mass market consumerism, but seem to think it's a bad thing for some reason. To which I would agree, and I think apart from just giving every adult a thousand quid, we should also be investing in research and development.
    Worrying about the long term when there's millions out of work etc etc is a bit pointless in my book. The long term finance stuff will take care of itself, probably better than you'd think once we put the laws back how they were before the deregulation which permitted the financial crash to take place.

    "Fortunes made by people who have no place making them"? Are you being sarcastic? I'm also unsure which savings you are talking about. My aim is to get as many people as possible back to work, because oddly enough doing so is good not only for their mental and physical health, as well as communities (The ones devastated in the 1980's have taken a generation to recover) and the wider economy.

    Moreover, giving better jobs to foreigners is a bit of a red herring. More money is being creamed off by the bosses and the financial sector, without which the middle classes and others would be noticeably better off, even with other countries going through their developing phases right now.

    233:

    I agree with Greg here; the things Charlie listed are in some cases reactionary, in others easily distinguishable by anyone except a raving fundamentalist.

    234:

    A counter argument to the whole "capital vs labor" argument is that technology actually makes most of the things people actually need less intensive both from a capital and labor perspective. It's basically getting easier and cheaper to build anything to the point where no one really has much control over anything (including corporations ) and there is a ton of loose capital sloshing around in the system

    Technology and automation does not privilege capital over labor as much as make both increasingly irrelevant

    This flies in the face of one of the meta themes, that corporations / capital is becoming more powerful, I think overall it is becoming less, at least less from an economic perspective. The political power wielded by Capital is another story

    Similarly with regards to government control over their populace. Technology makes it harder for central governing bodies to exercise control. This is a doible edge sword as it benefits terrorists but also is a trend toward personal liberty. Consider that the most important organ of the economy and communication is essentially unpoliced. To put this in an 18th century context there are bandits freely roaming the highways and pirates sailing the sea lanes

    You have central authorities that are fighting back desperately with various security apparatus but with less and less success

    235:

    "But now we are getting an increasing consensus that technology should be controlled and allowed to people only after the implications have been thought out."

    Roll this back 150 years and telephones would be outlawed. Trains. Heck the entire industrial revolution.

    To me, the obvious solution would be to try to allow technology that looked like it gave an advantage to the people who get to decide whether to ban things, and try to ban anything that looks like it might give somebody else an advantage over them.

    236:

    What does it matter? Wanting to control a thing is not the same as being able to. They also want to control drugs. National governments hav zero chance to control technology it would take unified coordinates action by all of them at the same time

    237:

    I don't actually see what your second paragaph has to do with what I typed. You are just describing mass market consumerism, but seem to think it's a bad thing for some reason. To which I would agree....

    I apologize. Without actually intending to, I was sort of trolling. I took up the point of view of somebody who cared about the rich people who would be less wealthy in a booming economy. When we make less stuff but the rich get a much larger share of it, they get more. And at the same time we burn our nonrenewable fossil fuels slower, and put less stress on the ecosystem. How is it a good thing for masses of people to buy consumer junk they have no need for?

    Worrying about the long term when there's millions out of work etc etc is a bit pointless in my book.

    I would disagree if we were actually capable of predicting the long term and doing something effective about it.

    If I knew that humanity would go extinct unless we killed about a billion of us this year, then I would want to do it even if I would be among those killed. But I don't in fact know that. So I tend to agree with you -- we are so incompetent at worrying about the long term that it's probably better just not to do it. And yet, I hate to admit that.

    My aim is to get as many people as possible back to work, because oddly enough doing so is good not only for their mental and physical health, as well as communities (The ones devastated in the 1980's have taken a generation to recover) and the wider economy.

    Charlie says that automation would take those jobs even if we didn't have poor people in third world nations to take them. I agree with him.

    In general, any job that you can explain how to do, can be automated if it's worth the time spent upfront by somebody who has the skills to automate it.

    The big exception is sales. People prefer to be persuaded to buy by a real person, a real person who is a good salesman, who has studied NLP or high-pressure sales technique or whatever works.

    Apart from sales, the big exception is jobs that require careful judgement which cannot be explained. Probably we could replace those jobs by random number generators, but we don't want to admit it.

    How can we hope to create a lot of jobs that pay reasonably well, when the whole point of not automating a job is that it is done by few enough low-paid people that it is worth putting off in favor of other jobs that are mnore profitable to automate?

    238:

    Setting aside amusing intellectual games along the lines of " Could a zzxxxx Jet Fighter Thingy beat a ZZXXX Wot Not that has a turning circle of ...

    Get Over it Folks...it didn’t happen and short of stretching fantasy beyond the rational ... Lightning Bolt sends Protagonist tm back to Ancient ROME tm of choice Compete with a perfect - academic - memory of the WAY things went WAY back then. Protagonist needs to have Perfect Academic Latin and is also possessed of the argot of the actuality of language at the point of Ancient Rome’s History of choice? Does Ancient Latin really resemble the Latin of the Street of the time of, say, Augustus? I haven’t the slightest idea and...I submit...neither does anyone else!

    I have enough trouble understanding, and empathising with, the cultural mores and tropes of my Grandparents, who were born in the reign of Queen Victoria at the height of the British Empire...even simple things are something of a puzzle.

    Around about the middle of the 20th century in the UK and similar technolological states of the political kind there is a very simple line of division that, at first sight, is technolologic... I’ve just made the term up, so there! But which contains all sorts of implications and subtleties that would mystify Modern Youth.

    History that is much beyond the time of our Grandparents is mostly Fantasy beyond those "facts” that can be confirmed by at least three independent sources ...And even then you need to be cautious but looking at everyday life? So, something simple?

    Do you know how to light a coal fire? Have you Ever Lit a coal fire?

    Well before the middle of the 20th century we all knew how to do it...with knowledge that included the proper place of Newspapers in the Lighting process...such paper that wasn't used in the Lavatory that is...Ye Ancient News Papers were Multi Purpose you see.

    And...Now in the era of Central Heating and Worries about Global Warming?

    Of course WE all know how the Third World is troubled by such things...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_poverty

    But we in the UK are more concerned with the price that our energy companies charge to keep the lights...and the Plasma/LED TVs...Running than the Theory of Global warming tm.

    It suddenly occurs to me ...Has anyone ever done a survey and follow up that requires the users of High Tech Electronic Entertainment to give up ALL such entertainment for- just say? - two years in the interest of Saving the World? Such individual sacrifice to be matched by equal value by Successful Democratic State Governments?

    It’s bound to work eh? Such a small sacrifice for such a great gain?

    Damn! I haven’t solidly locked any of this into OGHs investigatory point by point research.

    Not to worry. HE is bound to forgive me, and, given his age, he will not only be able to light a coal fire but will also be familiar with the need for Modern - way back then it the Vasty depths of the middle of the last century’s - Civilisation to dispose of the Ashes from millions of such fires and just how it was done.

    Jet fighters and modern bombers? v the Pathetic Stuff THEY had way back then? ..FUN! ..Ashes and Shit? Less amusing?

    Should I press the 'Submit' button? Against all good sense? After all,OGH is bound to have thought of this stuff . 263 Comments! Oh. wot the Hell!

    239:

    The people have to sell themselves into slavery to the land owners. Food, shelter and clothing become the focal issues. This is what happened to Roman citizens after Rome fell.

    240:

    Lots of “DON’T vote” entries there in your post Greg...How’s about a few...What You should DO entries... “In My Humble Opinion” if you feel in a modest sort of mood?.

    Followed by I, Greg, am doing THIS on account of I really believe in it and it IS worth a try....Because ...?

    241:

    I'm responding because you mentioned meritocracy or merit. Its a bugaboo of mine. People possessing power, money, influence etc will simply commandeer the merit points one way or another. But, also, who gets to decide what behavior is rewarded with merit points? It seems to me, in capitalist society money is going to be fungible with any merit based currency: Merit points are just another bit coin.

    242:

    Wanting to control a thing is not the same as being able to. They also want to control drugs. National governments hav zero chance to control technology it would take unified coordinates action by all of them at the same time

    It depends. As you point out we have robust illegal supply lines for drugs, partly because lots of people are willing to pay high prices for them. I have known various people who told me they had illegal guns, but nobody who admitted to having an RPG launcher. (Rocket Propelled Grenade, not Role Playing Game.) I'm sure it's possible to get one, and a few rounds for it. You could do all the maintenance yourself. If you ever get caught using it or even having it, you will be in a whole lot of trouble. If there were hundreds of thousands of people who were willing to pay thousands of dollars a year each for RPGs, there would probably be a market. I haven't heard of it.

    Similarly there appears to be no market for modern land mine systems.

    It's possible to get trifluoroacetic acid, you just need contacts. I can't buy it myself. We accept purchase orders from government and public education entities, as well as publicly traded corporations.

    I can buy practically any electronics I want, provided its consumer electronics, and the list of things I can't get is pretty limited -- things like klystrons etc. I can get a very good magnetometer for $6000 on Mastercard or Visa, they'll ship to anybody in north america who can pay.

    It depends. In general, I find specialty chemicals much less available than specialty electronics. Meanwhile you can 3d-print pretty much anything you want in bronze or aluminum, and there are no restrictions on what you electroplate except your own skill.

    There are a lot of restrictions on what you can mass-produce, though. That one isn't even just government, anybody who is able and willing to spend more money than you can stop you with patents.

    243:

    Athens and Sparta.

    One used military advantage and the reputation of its achievements to carve out a hegemonic relationship with other city-states. Its economic basis relied on the ruthless exploitation of unfree labor. This exploitation allowed the privileged classes free time to develop skills and capacities necessary to promote its international standing, as well as the leisure to gratify the tastes of the upper class.

    Sorry, I should have said "both" instead of "one."

    Obviously, Athens and Sparta look pretty different. Most of us would prefer Athens. Most of us are educated men. A women might prefer at least the chance to be a valued citizen in Sparta, though the downside would be if you ended up a female slave in (probably) even worse circumstances than such a person would have in Athens.

    Athens has a much better reputation in modern eyes. Not sure how Sparta looked to, say the Romans. Athens also has the advantage of producing art and literature, which at this remove doubles as the best PR in the world.

    Nazi Germany--bad. Stalinist Russia--depending on who you ask, just as bad or much better. Jim Crow America--ahem. Western European Colonialism--how dare you suggest the comparison?

    A more nuanced comparison: Mediterranean or Latin American fascism: worse than the worst eras of the Soviets? Worse than American slavery? Completely incompatible with the basic post-Enlightenment concept of the modern West?

    244:

    Ah, but you're getting confused again. Re. putting people back to work, I'm talking about right now. And then when their jobs get taken away by automation, which is not a right here and now you're all going to lose your jobs, it's going to take a decade or two, we can (If we actually have reasonable politicians who listen to the likes of us) work out what to do here.

    To me it seems like you are conflating Charlie's point re. automation with the current potential deflation period after the financial excesses and thus I have trouble working out what you are saying.

    245:

    Nope, you're going to have to stop asking questions and start making statements before I can properly understand what you are saying.

    246:

    Note that efforts to reduce the size of government often include setting up new agencies. In the US, the Office of Paperwork Reduction added new forms to be filled out.

    Extreme case: The Soviet Union, whose progress toward the withering away of the State was subminimal.

    247:

    It seems to me that the demographics of most of the terrorists that are now being shown in the media are every young ... this romanticizes their movement/politics. If instead the 'real leaders' were shown - or conjectured based on financial evidence - then it's likely that such groups would become much less appealing to the youth. In other words, the terrorists have mounted a much better marketing/advertising, recruitment campaign. If the various Western government agencies monitoring the Internet could CGI the 'cool-looking', well-armed dudes with a bunch of potbellied old farts, the recruitment would probably drop off.

    248:

    "Losing the War"

    Great essay. Didn't really have time to read it but did anyway.

    249:

    Point #1 trumps after note c.

    As automation advances to the point where labor costs are trivial, there is no need to build factories overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

    No labor is cheap enough to compete with robotics.

    Hence the end of off-shoring and the return of industry to America - a process called in-shoring. However these factories which would have employed thousands in the past now only employ dozens due to advanced robotics and automation:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/

    We do still make things here, even though many people don’t believe me when I tell them that. Depending on which stats you believe, the United States is either the No. 1 or No. 2 manufacturer in the world (China may have surpassed us in the past year or two). Whatever the country’s current rank, its manufacturing output continues to grow strongly; in the past decade alone, output from American factories, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a third.

    Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines. Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking. A historical chart of U.S. manufacturing employment shows steady growth from the end of the Depression until the early 1980s, when the number of jobs drops a little. Then things stay largely flat until about 1999. After that, the numbers simply collapse. In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in total—disappeared. About as many people work in manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even though the American population is more than twice as large today.

    250:

    A better definition of failed state would be one that has finally burst out of the straight line boundaries drawn by European colonizers (Libya, Somalia, Syria, and of course Iraq).

    These political entities were inherently unstable, built on the old ploy of "divide and conquer". Imperial colonizers would deliberately draw these straight lines irregardless of geography or ethnicity to include diverse ethnic and tribal groups. Then they would take one of these groups (often the weakest) and make them the privileged group. They would be given rifles to enforce the dictates of the imperial colonizers on all the other ethnic groups at the village level. The local imperial garrison would have all the artillery, tanks and aircraft needed to crush and real rebellion.

    During the post colonial era after WWII, the same pattern of control existed. Only now, the privileged ethnic group became the ruling class of the independent colonies. The French were masters of this kind of neo-colonialism in West Africa. And since these "nations" were inherently unstable they could only be held together by brutal dictators like Assad or Saddam.

    VP Joe Biden was right, we should have split Iraq into 3 autonomous or independent states right after invading and ousting Saddam. We have to face the fact that "Iraq" simply does not exist. Neither does Syria or Libya, or most of the countries in Africa (especially Somalia).

    These states aren't failed so much as they are just reverting to there natural conditions. Instead of upholding artificial boundaries that result in bloodshed and tyranny,we should promote the dissolution of the countries along ethnic lines.

    251:

    Re. putting people back to work, I'm talking about right now. And then when their jobs get taken away by automation, which is not a right here and now you're all going to lose your jobs, it's going to take a decade or two, we can (If we actually have reasonable politicians who listen to the likes of us) work out what to do here.

    Do you imagine that the automation has not started yet?

    An automated plant needs to be near a port that accepts containers or near an airport. It needs good telecommunications. It needs to avoid civil unrest. The programmers can be in India or USA but you need somebody onsite for repair plus whatever work you haven't automated. Beyond that, it can be anywhere the taxes are low. They don't need to be located in first-world nations any more than ships need to be registered in first-world nations.

    When we lose jobs to foreign nations, some of it may be cheaper workers and some of it may be automation. Either way, the jobs are not coming back.

    If you have a company that pays employees in the USA or Britain, you might keep doing it while they bring in more money than their variable cost. If you shut them down and do something else instead, it will cost money to set up and it might not work.

    But if you have already downsized them, and now demand is up so that your unautomated company can't meet that demand with your current employees, why would you expand here? If you do it someplace else where the paperwork is simpler and cheaper and the government is less intrusive, it's likely to work better.

    We have lots of jobs at McDonalds because people like to talk to the people who push the buttons for you when you order, and people like to think that human hands packaged their food. It's possible also that McDonalds has about the right size staff -- too few and it's harder to juggle schedules so enough people are always on the job, they get more lonely, they maybe get too attached to each other, maybe too cunning about ways to embezzle or steal, etc. But if people get used to the idea, we might get fast food where your food is not touched by human hands at considerable saving. They might want a friendly security guy onsite to back up the cameras.

    We're not going to get a lot of new jobs while we wait for more automation.

    252:

    Athens has a much better reputation in modern eyes. Not sure how Sparta looked to, say the Romans.

    If a PBS (USA) documentary series a few years back on ancient Greece is to be believed, Sparta was a hellhole for anyone not in the ruling class. Sort of a binary situation. Athens was more of a sliding scale.

    253:

    In addition to "failed states" are 'stagnant states". These are states whose economies rest on a single product. Oil in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria. Cheap labor in China. Blood diamonds and minerals in much of Africa. narcotics in Mexico and other Latin American States.

    Each resource rich country suffers from some version of the "oil curse". Why develop a manufacturing base when your oil revenues let you import all the goods you want? Why educate scientists and engineers when petro dollars allow you to purchase any high tech you need? Why allow democracy when oil revenues can break the connection between taxation and representation, and can be used to bribe the people into political silence with financial largess?

    The truly blessed nations are those like Japan, whose lack of natural resources force them to develop industry, technology and education. The eventual fate of those nations suffering from the oil curse is perfectly described by a character in the movie "Syriana":

    "Twenty years ago you had the highest Gross National Product in the world, now you're tied with Albania. Your second largest export is secondhand goods, closely followed by dates which you're losing five cents a pound on... You know what the business community thinks of you? They think that a hundred years ago you were living in tents out here in the desert chopping each other's heads off and that's where you'll be in another hundred years."

    Of all the countries in the Middle East, Jordan with its growing knowledge economy, stable constitutional monarchy, relatively homogeneous Hashemite ethnicity, and lack of oil has the brightest future. Combine high tech with Israeli water management and irrigation technology (possibly evolving into economic collaboration), and Jordan could be the leading Arab state 50 years from now.

    Golda Meir used to joke that she could not believe that God had Moses wander the desert for 40 years only to find the one spot without oil. God did Israel a favor.

    254:

    Well, you can see things which I think are worth having, & which none of the political parties I also listed seem to be doing anything about. I think I might emulate Candide & (continue to) cultivate my garden.

    255:

    We do still make things here, even though many people don’t believe me when I tell them that. Depending on which stats you believe, the United States is either the No. 1 or No. 2 manufacturer in the world

    That's because most people don't by an airplane made by Boeing or an earth mover made by Caterpillar. They and other makers of "large things" are what put us on top. But there is also a lot of things like washers and dryers made here. And many "foreign" cars are at least assembled here. Which many don't understand. I think the largest BMW plant (based on number of autos) is in South Carolina.

    Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines. ... A historical chart of U.S. manufacturing employment shows ... things stay largely flat until about 1999. After that, the numbers simply collapse. In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years... About as many people work in manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even though the American population is more than twice as large today.

    When I lived in Pittsburgh in the 80s it was depressing. All kinds of people without any college or less wondering when the $20/hour jobs were coming back. The local paper ran an interesting article on the steel industry that maybe a few 100 of us read. It basically said that in the 20 years from the mid 50s to the mid 70s per capita consumption of steel in the US was down 50%. And still falling. And while net exports were still positive we were no longer supplying 1/2 of the world's steel. Which meant without productivity gains the steel industry was going to contract. A lot. No matter what slogans politicians and union leaders came out with.

    I was back there last summer. The US Steel building is now the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center building.

    256:

    The truly blessed nations are those like Japan, whose lack of natural resources force them to develop industry, technology and education. Err .... Britain? Where the pre / first & part of the second Industrial revolutions happened? Coal & Iron ... though the revolution of the 18th C was powered by (stationary) steam & was directed mainly at weaving of cotton & wool ....

    Exception proves rule? Um

    257:

    If ethnically "failed states" are going backwards, and oil cursed "stagnant states" are going nowhere, then "post states" have advance too far beyond the type of nation created by the industrial revolution and will also fall apart.

    The industrial state requires strong central government. Whether it's the suppression of Scotch and Irish independence, the French revolution, the American civil war, the unification wars of Germany and Italy, the Russian revolution - the force of the strong centralized industrial state defeated the defenders of the old decentralized agricultural society.

    Now we are seeing a new cycle of decentralization. Whether its America's Red v. Blue state divide, UK devolution, or a dozen other separatist movements in advanced countries, the old industrial nation state is falling apart.

    America, for example really has two economies: the high Tech and manufacturing economy of Blue America led by California and the resource cursed economy of red America led by Texas. Blue America emphasizes science, education industry, cultural diversity, tolerance. Red America embraces fundamentalism and creationism, climate denial gerrymandering and voter suppression, and oil:

    http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2014/11/the-missing-story-of-the-2014-election/#28114101=0

    "Democrats have consolidated their power behind the sections of the country that generate the overwhelming bulk of America’s wealth outside the energy industry. That’s only ironic if you buy into far-right propaganda, but it’s interesting none the less....Keep an eye on oil prices. Texas, which is at the core of GOP dysfunction, is a petro-state with an economy roughly as diverse and modern as Nigeria, Iran or Venezuela. It was been relatively untouched by the economic collapse because it is relatively dislocated from the US economy in general. Watch what happens if the decline in oil prices lasts more than a year."

    258:

    In addition to "failed states" are 'stagnant states". These are states whose economies rest on a single product. Oil in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria. Cheap labor in China. Blood diamonds and minerals in much of Africa. narcotics in Mexico and other Latin American States.

    China and Mexico don't belong on a list of single-product states. China also has one of the world's least stagnant economies. If you think that in 2015 China is cursed with economic stagnation and Japan is a model of economic blessings, I suspect you investigated the matter once circa 1980 and filled in subsequent data via linear extrapolation.

    259:

    Your analogy would only be correct if Britain made its wealth mostly by the export of coal, the way Russia, Iran Saudi Arabia, et al make their wealth exclusively by the export of oil.

    America and Britain had the best of both worlds, having resources and developing industry. High tech japan is so advanced simply due to its complete lack of resources. They had to develop one of the most skilled, educated and capable work forces in the world.

    260:

    VP Joe Biden was right, we should have split Iraq into 3 autonomous or independent states right after invading and ousting Saddam.

    I'm not sure we had the authority to do that. But maybe we could have worked out a ploy to arrange it anyway.

    I like the idea of starting by setting up local town councils and "counties", and tell them that they'll be autonomous until they can manage larger regions. Help them arrange local taxation to pay for their local police etc, and also fund them some. Local elections.

    Then when the local government is in place, have plebiscites for who they want to ally with to form provinces. It might be mostly along the borders of the old provinces that they'd switch from one to another, but there could be pretty big changes. Local areas that were surrounded by a province they didn't want to join could be left alone until the province persuaded them to join.

    As they got provinces sorted out with elected leaders, then they could decide which of them wanted to ally together into one or more nations. If Iraq wound up as three or four or five nations, it wouldn't be because we divided them. It would be their own preference, and not our job to make them join when they didn't want to. Or if they did want to all join together, that would be just fine too. Not our problem.

    261:

    I suspect your plan would very likely create 50 to 100 Iraqs.

    262:

    I don't think it would have created 50-100 Iraqs, but the problem with the three state solution is that a lot of the oil is in Kurdistan, Iraq's water comes in through Sunni western Iraq and Kurdistan, and eastern Shi'ites (the majority of people?) are downstream of both. Thanks to the southeastern Anatolia Project in Turkey (22 dams on all the major rivers that flow into Syria and Iraq), there's a lot less water flowing into Iraq, which is probably why Da'esh and Iraqis are fighting over who controls the reservoirs in western Iraq at the moment. AQ and its successors seem to be pretty good at exploiting the chaos caused by drought.

    So if we break this up, we don't get three peaceable countries, we get three unstable countries at each others' throats in resource wars. A federation model, a la Switzerland, might work a bit better in the short term.

    263:

    Saddam was gassing kurds because he wanted to put them down, and nobody in Iraq stopped him. They might still resent that. If they aren't willing to be in a federation with the people who were following orders to kill them, it would be hard to make that work out. But then, they don't have any friends in the region. I figure it's probably better to let them make their own decisions about who to try to ally with. It's their own heads if it doesn't work out, and they might know more about what they need than we do.

    Yes, there just plain is not enough water in the region for Israel, much less sharing it with Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Ideally we would find a place that would accept a lot of immigrants, because the local population will stabilize at what the land can support regardless whether any of them leave.

    Given that attempts to finesse the realities there into more unstable regimes (intended to coerce minorities or majorities who don't get along) will be short-term projects anyway, why bother?

    264:

    "Yes, there just plain is not enough water in the region for Israel, much less sharing it with Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq."

    Scientific advances make material sources obsolete:

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/isreal-scales-up-reverse-osmosis.html

    The Sorek plant incorporates a number of engineering improvements that make it more efficient than previous RO facilities. It is the first large desalination plant to use pressure tubes that are 16 inches in diameter rather than eight inches. The payoff is that it needs only a fourth as much piping and other hardware, slashing costs. The plant also has highly efficient pumps and energy recovery devices. “This is indeed the cheapest water from seawater desalination produced in the world,” says Raphael Semiat, a chemical engineer and desalination expert at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, in Haifa. “We don’t have to fight over water, like we did in the past.” Australia, Singapore, and several countries in the Persian Gulf are already heavy users of seawater desalination, and California is also starting to embrace the technology. Smaller-scale RO technologies that are energy-efficient and relatively cheap could also be deployed widely in regions with particularly acute water problems—even far from the sea, where brackish underground water could be tapped.

    Earlier in development are advanced membranes made of atom-thick sheets of carbon, which hold the promise of further cutting the energy needs of desalination plants.

    265:

    “This is indeed the cheapest water from seawater desalination produced in the world,” says Raphael Semiat, a chemical engineer and desalination expert at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, in Haifa. “We don’t have to fight over water, like we did in the past.”

    I'm skeptical. Israel has been claiming to have practical desalination since the days it was their cover story for their nuclear bomb project. If they didn't have to fight for water, they could stop taking the lion's share of the West Bank water and the Gaza water and the Golan water. They could afford peace. But there has been absolutely no sign that they are considering such a possibility.

    Still, maybe this time is different from all the other times. Maybe this time it isn't a lie.

    266:

    rolls eyes Right, because the Israel/Palestine conflict is only about the water.

    267:

    PS, Crap, I think the Israel/Palestine shit-storm is turning into another Strange Attractor...

    268:

    We could stay out of it, but in fairness, I think the entire Middle East has been a strange attractor since The Atrocity Archives first appeared in print.

    Shall we try North Korea instead? No wait, that's another strange attractor... Lesotho? Oh wait, there's a possible water war going on there. I guess maybe Irian Jaya, or whatever Indonesia calls it now?

    That said, I'm interested in that bit about Israel snaking water from the Golan and Palestinian areas. Got references on that? My impression had been that the Israelis were more heavily invested in desalinization than anyone in the region, and if I'm wrong, I'd like to know what's going on.

    269:

    I think that's enough about Israel and anyone else, until Charlie is awake.

    270:

    Right, because the Israel/Palestine conflict is only about the water.

    Of course it isn't only the water. But currently they cannot negotiate a real peace. Solving the water issue is not sufficient for peace, but it is necessary. And despite many claims over the years that cheap water was available, so far there has been no substitute for water from the Golan (15% of all Israel's water). The West Bank traditionally supplied about 30%, 450 mcm, but with the drought they can't take that much. Desalination is hoped to provide 500 mcm in time or even more, but it is expensive and also there are ecological issues with dumping the salt back into the sea.

    But of course there are also issues because palestinians mostly cannot afford sewage treatment, so their sewage contaminates the aquifers that are used mostly by Israel.

    Israel does not have nearly enough water, particularly with the drought which might be a climate change thing so no one knows how long it will last. Israel takes water from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza. With peace, it would be necessary to negotiate for the water which Israel now takes by force. (They have an agreement with Jordan, which does not have much water.) Agreement would be at best expensive since the others don't have nearly enough water either. Israel cannot afford peace.

    But desalination could make a big difference, although after the expense of getting the salt out, there is also the expense of pumping water uphill to every place above sea level. This is most affordable with cheap energy.

    If Israel could get cheap water and reliably permanently cheap energy, peace might be possible. Until then, it cannot be.

    271:

    I think that's enough about Israel and anyone else, until Charlie is awake.

    Sorry, I didn't see that until after I posted. I'll quit.

    272:

    The UAE and Saudi Arabia are building nuclear reactors in part to provide desalinated water and in part so they can sell more oil and gas that they currently burn to desalinate water on the world market. Other Middle-eastern countries like Egypt and Jordan are talking to Rosatom about similar nuclear plants for power and desalination.

    273:

    Any chance of re-purposing oil pipelines into desalination water lines? If yes, then the Keystone pipeline might not be such a bad idea - desalinate the rising ocean waters and move the desalinated water to land that because of global warming is getting less rainfall than usual. The repurposing is important I think because it would mean more caution, as in better, sturdier infrastructure - less chance of leaks, etc. Also, more heed paid to the science behind such a policy to avoid another Aral Sea fiasco.

    [Aral Sea:

    Soviet bureaucrats decided to implement an economic/market policy and become world leaders in cotton production by simply using the Aral Sea for irrigation. The science was ignored during the business/policy decision-making process ...

    From Wikipedia:

    "Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi) [vs. Lake Superior at 82,100 km2 (31,700 sq mi) or Lake Huron 59,600 km2 (23,000 sq mi)] the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 2007, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes – the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and one smaller lake between the North and South Aral Seas.[5] By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea; in subsequent years, occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree.[6] Satellite images taken by NASA in August 2014 have revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up.[7] The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum desert."]

    Playing God/dice with the environment/ecology should be a key part of 21st century economic/social policy. This could be direct or indirect. I think we're in general agreement that climate and food production are highly correlated ... so consider the impact of the following scenario:

    Your corporate overlords find that for certain classes of workers wages paid in food is cheaper and more attractive than coin/$. This would mean negotiations between corps for food production. We already have this 'food supplier-and-corporate client' on small scale, i.e., some large companies already have in-house fast-food joints on their premises. What I'm thinking of as the next step is actual automated on/near-premises food production. This means food production goes the same route as computers - smaller, more flexible/mobile, more widely dispersed but much more efficient/powerful and built on the premise of always being able to connect with a network. And, what could follow from this - again using the computer/PC analogy - is that as costs decline for these automated food production units, individual households might start to purchase them. Probably would go the trickle down route: foodies and gadget fanciers first, then the wanna-be's, until 10-15 years later, there's a unit in 95% of households.

    There would still be large-scale agriculture, but its product focus would shift. Such a technological innovation would probably create a market for new food products ... including GMO'd foods to address specific genetic medical conditions and/or illnesses.

    274:

    "Texas, which is at the core of GOP dysfunction, is a petro-state with an economy roughly as diverse and modern as Nigeria, Iran or Venezuela. It was been relatively untouched by the economic collapse because it is relatively dislocated from the US economy in general. Watch what happens if the decline in oil prices lasts more than a year."

    Texas is actually a very interesting case these days.

    Texas did relatively well in the recent housing triggered financial collapse in large part because it has an usually heavily regulated housing market. This is because it was the epicenter of the previous real estate crash: the Savings and Loan crisis which hit in the early 90's. It also has very high property taxes, which should discourage property bubbles some.

    Also the Texas state university systems (there are two) both have (oil funded) endowments the size of elite private universities. Both systems are in the top ten university endowments in the US (the rest are harvard, yale, etc). They aren't so ridiculously rich as those institutions, of course, because they educate vastly more students, but still they have a secure funding stream the likes of which no other system in the US has.

    So this deepest of deep red states has actually just recently done well due to unusually tight regulations and high property taxes. It also has a very much more socialized higher education system than the rest of the country.

    275:

    Really? ... Texas is consistently below average in terms of primary and secondary math & science education results.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/state-education-rankings-_n_894528.html

    http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20140325-texas-improves-school-funding-but-still-trails-most-states.ece

    Excerpt: "The new figures show, though, that Texas tops only Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Utah in per-pupil funding. It spends about $59,000 less per elementary classroom than the national average, according to the NEA, a teacher union that compiles the figures based on information from state education agencies.

    “The bottom line is that Texas is still spending less per student now than it did in 2010-11,” Clay Robison, a spokesman for the NEA-affiliated Texas State Teachers Association, said Tuesday. “That is three straight years of ranking near the bottom in the state-by-state comparisons.”"

    Meanwhile Texas spending on its prison system grew; however, there's a silver lining when the budget committee realized that it's cheaper to rehabilitate non-violent offenders than to build more prisons. (Okay - part of the budget worry/realization was that as prisoners aged, their medical costs rose ... pre Obama-care thinking. Quick comparison: Texas has half the population of the U.K. but twice the prison population.)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarceration_rate

    Excerpt: "Texas now houses more than 152,000, compared with about 134,000 inmates in California, according to recent statistics from both prison systems. Florida was a distant third, with about 100,000 inmates as of June."

    276:

    Just thought I'd add this, since it seems relevant to this discussion:

    "It is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control them." --Zbigniew Brzezinski

    Megadeath, anyone?

    277:

    Brzezinski's point being that this is a new development, made possible by technology.

    It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where a technocratic elite, no longer requiring the services of 90% or 99% of human beings, puts this principle to the reality test, is it? Indeed, the entire trajectory of technological civilization seems to be toward human obsolescence and extinction at the hands of machines, doesn't it? Isn't this where the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are taking us? For Science and Progress!

    278:

    Willing to try a thought experiment?

    Let's assume all of Charlies axioms are true to fact. Let's even assume the conclusions are true to fact.

    Given that, what is necessary to turn enough of it around that, say, the UK/US become as delightful to live in as, say, Denmark? (If you don't like Denmark, pick the polity/economy of your choice).

    There's a certain kind of attractiveness in trying to figure out how horrible things are going to be--for me, that's part of the attraction of Lovecraft. it strikes me as much more difficult, and admirable, to try to figure out how good things are going to be.

    So, what kind of black swan would have to occur? The first one that come to my mind (I'm a US citizen) would be a well-nigh total remake of the Democratic Party from the grassroots on up, along the lines modeled by Senator Elizabeth Warren. I can see a whole cascade of positive events following from that.

    Putting all of this differently, it strikes me as surprisingly short-sighted and straight-line extrapolating to think that things are going to continue to get worse. The trajectory of history is more bumpy than that, in my opinion. It may even be that as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

    279:

    We don't need any technocratic conspiracy. Every nation with a high per capita income sinks below replacement level fertility.

    280:

    But your autocrats will always need other human beings to do the thinking for them ... to keep enriching them via new insights and technologies. And there is no way to predict which human being will have that creative spark (or when) or what other humans they will need in order to thrive. No - the simplest and cheapest solution is benign leadership/government of a large pool of potential talents.

    Computers can do all sorts of stuff, but ASAIK computers do not ask questions and that's the minimum requirement for advancement.

    281:

    Lovecraft's whole point is that there is no "arc of the moral universe", or if there is, it bends toward something that is utterly incomprehensible and indifferent to us.

    Want to be truly subversive and despised (of course you do!)? Go around pointing out to progressives and leftists how deeply in thrall they still are to "arc of the universe" metaphysical delusions, inherited from Christianity and Judaism. Atheists tend to go ballistic and call you all kinds of nasty names, as if that proves anything. Try it -- it's a real hoot!

    282:

    It's worth noting that the Kurdish population overlaps the borders between Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Iraqi Kurdistan was kept within Iraq, at least on paper, for fear of an independent Kurdistan setting off a regional war. An independent Kurdistan might have effects on Turkey and Iran similar to the effects that rebel Sunni areas of Iraq had on Syria (but worse, because Turkey and Iran are far bigger and more powerful countries than Syria ever was).

    283:

    Creative spark? Is that like a divine revelation? If we're bags of atoms following known algorithms, surely we can build machines that give off more and brighter creative sparks than us? Assuming that we possess a "secret sauce" that ensures our survival is just another religious delusion. GNON (reverse acronym for "nature or nature's god") is a cruel master, and he appears not to care one whit for creative sparks or moral arcs.

    Perhaps we need an updated form of Gnosticism to reflect this understanding of reality, and our frightful position therein, lest we go mad from the revelation and flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age?

    284:

    "Want to be truly subversive and despised (of course you do!)? Go around pointing out to progressives and leftists how deeply in thrall they still are to "arc of the universe" metaphysical delusions, inherited from Christianity and Judaism. Atheists tend to go ballistic and call you all kinds of nasty names, as if that proves anything."

    I quite agree. In the absence of God, and honest and courageous atheist must completely embrace abject moral and existential nihilism. From Tom Wolfe's famous essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died": . . . Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years.

    But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"—he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations—"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non–brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

    Nietzsche's view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuro–scientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse—thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

    Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God–based moral codes. But then, in the twenty–first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."

    Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far–fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far–fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?

    A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. . . .

    But no longer. Medical science has destroyed the "Self". There is no Soul. There is no "You". Consciousness and free will are nothing but illusions. Therefore, no individual can ever hope to create personal meaning in an inherently meaningless universe, for that too would be just another illusion. If atheists were honest and brave they would squarely face this harsh reality of theirs instead of shying away from it.

    They would fully embrace abject nihilism.

    285:

    Don't know what the 'secret sauce' is but one of its ingredients is curiosity ... so far curiosity is not known to be programmed into machines.

    286:

    "But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not.""

    Except of course that you can, I do, and literally billions of other people do as well.

    little nuggets like this is why all modern philosophy is pretty useless.

    287:

    I've seen estimates that the F-14 required 50 hours maintenance per flight hour, but maybe the reality was so complicated that this sort of factoid doesn't really mean anything.

    Actually, that's on the low end of the scale. Apparently, it was nearer 60+ maintenance man-hours per flying hour. The Tornado came in at 27; The F-18 and Typhoon come in between 9 and 10.

    The result was that a squadron of F-14 based on an aircraft carrier required 450 staff (mostly maintainers); a squadron of F-18 required only 250 staff, and managed to achieve higher availability rates. At the time, they reckoned that every deployed sailor cost $100k per year; so replacing two squadrons on each of twelve carriers saved you rather a lot of cash.

    IIRC, the Canadians reckon that the manufacturing cost of a combat aircraft is about one-sixth of the whole life cost. Paying 20% more on the sticker price to get a 10% reduction in maintenance costs is still a very good deal...

    288:

    Mankind as a whole will fail despite the efforts of a few individuals.

    Besides, you have no reason to even try. To do so is to be dishonest with yourself. From someone more blunt than the eloquent Nietzsche:

    We are Atheists. We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself. While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, civility seem to exist, we know they do not. Our highly evolved brains imagine that these things have a cause or a use, and they have in the past, they’ve allowed life to continue on this planet for a short blip of time. But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it. All human achievement and plans for the future are the result of some ancient, evolved brain and accompanying chemical reactions that once served a survival purpose. Ex: I’ll marry and nurture children because my genes demand reproduction, I’ll create because creativity served a survival advantage to my ancient ape ancestors, I’ll build cities and laws because this allowed my ape grandfather time and peace to reproduce and protect his genes. My only directive is to obey my genes. Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.

    We deride the Theists for having created myths and holy books. We imagine ourselves superior. But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. We are nurturing a new religion, one where we imagine that such conventions have any basis in reality. Have they allowed life to exist? Absolutely. But who cares? Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me. Some of my Atheist friends have fooled themselves into acting like the general population. They live in suburban homes, drive Toyota Camrys, attend school plays. But underneath they know the truth. They are a bag of DNA whose only purpose is to make more of themselves. So be nice if you want. Be involved, have polite conversations, be a model citizen. Just be aware that while technically an Atheist, you are an inferior one. You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all. When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.

    I know it’s not PC to speak so bluntly about the ramifications of our beliefs, but in our discussions with Theists we sometimes tip toe around what we really know to be factual. Maybe it’s time we Atheists were a little more truthful and let the chips fall where they may. At least that’s what my genes are telling me to say.” . . . So its time for you and every atheist to grow a pair and face without flinching the nihilistic consequences of your atheism.

    289:

    As an atheist, my morals (to the extent that I have them) are simply a practical art of avoiding conflict with other humans. There's no particular need for divinity; the fact that I'm surrounded by seven billion other apes who are just smart enough to be really dangerous is plenty of reason for careful behavior.

    290:

    Remove the fear of getting caught and punished, and how would you behave?

    If someone is powerful enough to do what they want to other people (Wall Street CEO, third world dictator, etc.) without fear of consequences - should they do so?

    291:

    Let me sum up. There is no morality only Game Theory and the Will to Power. Everything else is just the window dressing of strategy and tactics. Human Rights only exist as far as they can be enforced under a particular kind of Will and Power. Altruism and "Humanity" are just the inputs of Evolutionary Psychology into the mill.

    292:

    Did I set off a little rantfest? Nice quote Daniel Duffy, who is it from? Agreed about Nietzsche -- a modern prophet, if there ever was one. And Dirk, I think arguments like that were made by Thrasymachus and others before Socrates came on the scene. But Socrates won, and philosophy has pretty much been one series of delusions after another until Nietzsche came on the scene. ;)

    Anybody here read Peter Carroll? He models religious belief as a cycle:

    Paganism -> Monotheism -> Atheism -> Nihilism -> Chaoism -> Superstition/Shamanism -> Paganism -> ...

    So post-atheist Nihilism is just a stage you go through, until you join the real avante-garde of Chaoists (people who create cults out of Star Wars, or Lovecraft or anything), or the even more radical neo-Shamans, neo-Pagans and neo-Monotheists. ;)

    293:

    Remove the fear of getting caught and punished, and how would you behave?

    Pretty much how I behave right now, actually.

    Game theory -- and iterated prisoner's dilemma -- is a remarkably powerful tool for understanding where altruism and cooperation come from in human (and other) animal societies. And there's quite a lot of evidence that "altruism" is wired into us (and other primates) at a very low level, because tit-for-tat cooperation seems to be an optimal strategy.

    One problem a lot of theists seem to have with atheists is not understanding why, in the absence of a big angry daddy-figure waiting to punish them if they stray, they don't instantly go on a rampaging orgy of murderous violence and depravity. But the real question, I think, is why would anybody do that sort of thing? Because for the most part we don't.

    Galdruxian: while I agree with Nietzsche about quite a lot of things, I think he failed to apprehend that the biological determinants of ethical behaviour predate religion.

    So, frankly, no. I disagree with you (and Daniel Duffy). We are not doomed, even though we may admit that we live in a purposeless cosmos that is oblivious to our suffering or our desires.

    294:

    And the Big Existential Problem is wiring those nice altruistic traits into a self modifying AI.

    295:

    And if Game theory showed that it would be to your advantage to harm others?

    "Murderous violence and depravity" is pretty basic to human nature, born of millennia of evolution red in tooth and claw. We are basically not a nice species.

    To quote Will Durant: "Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime."

    And

    "Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice today was once a virtue."

    Lord knows religion can beget violence. But it is also the only proven means of holding our baser instincts in check.

    296:

    So nobody wants to play (so far?), but people would rather fight the proposition? Fascinating....

    Let's try one more thought experiment, then (noting that the original quote from MLK said nothing about religion!). What if the entrance to mastery of spirituality (as distinct from religion, which is merely a fossilized hierarchy imposed on the decaying remains of a spiritual event) requires as much study and effort as, say, a Ph.D.--maybe 7 to 10 years? If that's the case (and I posit that it is) then all this posturing about atheism seems to be pretty much a display of ignorance, no?

    In this same line, my experience has been that nearly all the atheists I've been exposed to seem to be as, umm, belief-based as any religionist. The religionists are just more frank about that, usually.

    Two paraphrased quotes to close, from people I respect:

    "No one says they believe in electricity. This is because they have experience of electricity, either directly in the form of a shock, or indirectly in the form of electricity transformed, into heat, light, or mechanical motion."

    "That God you don't believe in? I too don't believe in that God."

    297:
    "That God you don't believe in? I too don't believe in that God."

    At this point I tend to ask "So care to describe the God you do believe in then?".

    298:

    Iraqi Kurdistan was kept within Iraq, at least on paper, for fear of an independent Kurdistan setting off a regional war.

    Yes, Kurds have been oppressed for being Kurds in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The Turks have a history of having to deal harshly with Kurds to keep them subservient, and if those four nations were to lose some territory along with their kurdish populations, would they be better off or worse off? Well of course they all think they would be worse off, which is why they keep having to suppress Kurds.

    And so the Americans take this peculiar stand -- we like Kurds, who after all have no other friends and so may very well be grateful to us. But for their own good they must be denied independence and must have arabs who can overrule them. This is partly because catering to our Turkish allies is more important than annoying our Iranian and Syrian enemies, and partly because if the Kurds tried to stand up to all their opporessors they would likely get genocided. So yes, it's for their own good that we deny them freedom, because they might make serious mistakes.

    I tend to think this is likely to be self-defeating. While the Kurds are hobbled to an Iraqi government, it serves their interests if Iraq is a failed state that cannot dictate to them. It does not serve US interests for Iraq to be a failed state -- I think. Others may disagree.

    Turkey would be better off to lose their Kurdish subjects even if they lose some land in the process. Unwilling Kurdish citizens are more trouble for Turkey than they're worth. On the other hand if the small Kurdish state is cautious enough to avoid a disastrous war, so much the better.

    I believe that I'm better off when governments represent their people rather than try to suppress them. I would be better off if Iraq had governments that mostly did what their voters wanted. People mostly want to avoid avoidably wars, they want prosperity as long as things stay reasonably moral, etc. The official Iraqi government has mostly failed, because it is run by and for people who think of themselves as Shias and suppresses people who think of themselves as Kurds or Sunnis. It would have been better if they had built government from the bottom up, noticing who they trusted and relied on, and stopped if they reached the point they couldn't reach agreements.

    Because that's what they did anyway, and it was slower and bloodier when they did it the hard way.

    299:

    " Lord knows religion can beget violence. But it is also the only proven means of holding our baser instincts in check. "

    In Check? ! How do you define 'Check ' ...Like This?

    "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius "

    " "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." was a phrase allegedly spoken by Papal legate and Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amalric prior to the Massacre at Béziers, a massacre in the French town of Béziers that formed the first major military action of the Albigensian Crusade. A direct translation of the Latin phrase would be "Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own." Less formal English translations have given rise to variants such as "Kill them all; let God sort them out." Other sources give the quotation as "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet."[1] "

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius

    Well that would certainly " Check " our baser instincts all right ..As would the various versions of atheism in their suppression of the Wrong Belief Systems in the Interest of Furthering the Right Kind of Political Belief.

    Apparently there must be a Limited Quantity of Belief Available at any given time and thus any Belief System that hopes to be dominant must set out to corner the market in Belief.

    Hey Ho...I'm probably reading far too much urban fantasy at the moment in order that I be diverted from over much Brooding, but, it does occur to me that there is /may be a kind of FTSE 100 in Belief with Gohds, Demi Gohds and Supernatural Entities striving to Corner ..In Improbable Geometries BEYOND SPACE AND TIME...the MARKET.

    300:

    Re Texas

    Oh, yea in plenty of ways Texas is the stereotypical red state with the results that anyone but an american 'conservative' would expect.

    Poor funding poor results for primary and secondary education (note I was talking about higher education, colleges and universities, but actually I was talking only about the two big state university systems, no idea about other state college systems they have).

    Lots of teen pregnancy and gonorrhea.

    And its an incipient nightmare of car based sprawl.

    One of the highest rates of lack of health insurance in the US.

    Basically no ability to sue doctors for malpractice, but ordinary healthcare costs.

    The imprisonment insanity... well that's pretty much national. Perhaps a bit worse in Texas than in most of the US, but all of the US is vastly worse than the rest of the wealthy world.

    301:

    NO You'll just get told that you are "framing" atheists ( like me) in your own preconcieved notions, which err.. happen to be false & therefore your so-called "argument" is a n other load of foetid dingoes kidneys. Try harder, next time ....

    302:

    Agree There are such things as "good" & "evil", but we do not need or require "gods" to define them. I'm a card-carrying atheist, but I am not a nihilist (which would be pointless (joke)) - but you try convincing a committed RC or Calviniat or devour muslim of this ... they just don;t get it.

    303:

    I must get around to re-reading this one of these days...

    " As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda "

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/As-Texas-Goes-Hijacked-American/dp/0871404079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425239996&sr=8-1&keywords=as+texas+goes

    " Not until she visited Texas, that proud state of big oil and bigger ambitions, did Gail Collins, the best-selling author and columnist for the New York Times, realize that she had missed the one place that mattered most in America's political landscape. Raised in Ohio, Collins had previously seen the American fundamental divide as a war between the Republican heartland and its two liberal coasts. But the real story, she came to see, was in Texas, where Bush, Cheney, Rove, & Perry had created a conservative political agenda that is now sweeping the country and defining our national identity. Through its vigorous support of banking deregulation, lax environmental standards, and draconian tax cuts, through its fierce championing of states rights, gun ownership, and, of course, sexual abstinence, Texas, with Governor Rick Perry's presidential ambitions, has become the bellwether of a far-reaching national movement that continues to have profound social and economic consequences for us all. Like it or not, as Texas goes, so goes the nation."

    I kept losing track as I skipped back through the text whilst muttering...No...SHE just can’t have said that can she?

    But then I am ever so English...of Scots Immigrant Ancestry on my Mother’s side of the family...so maybe I'm just incapable of understanding Texan philosophy? Life is too short!! I have enough trouble understanding Vegetarians without I am required to understand Texans!

    304:

    So this deepest of deep red states has actually just recently done well due to unusually tight regulations and high property taxes. It also has a very much more socialized higher education system than the rest of the country.

    As someone who has spent a lot of time in Texas over the last 5 years and who's wife lives there 20 days a month I've come to think of Texas as a strange place. Much of the legend and self image and politics is all about individualism and would seem to be an Ayn Rand hot spot.

    But in practice and laws Texas is much more paternalistic and socialistic than much of the US on all kinds of topics.

    305:

    NOT a new question Go back to Socrates & START AGAIN

    306:

    Spirituality and atheism are not incompatible.

    307:

    Tribes that cooperate well out compete tribes that don't. Evolution is about propagating genes not extending personal lifespan. Hence altruism is built in and is good game theory from an evolutionary perspective, and thus perpetuates itself.

    Nietzsche was extremely simplistic in his world view to the point where most of his conclusions end up being wrong. He stops being interesting for most people about half way through college. He also , funnily enough, failed to procreate and carry on his genes, one of life's little ironies for sure (-:

    There are plenty of hooks for an ethical code that don't require a big bearded guy in the sky. It may require commitment to something greater then the individual but that is not the same as believing in something supernatural

    308:

    Thank you Also those well-known (& still "on the register") christian "saints": Dominic, Cyril of Alexandria, Thomas More ... Murderers, all of them.

    As we have noted before the arrogant certitude of the religious believers, that atheists have no moral & no "guidance" is astounding.

    As for islam, well Mahmud ordered people killed, including a female who mocked him ... c.f "Charlie Hebdo" [ I froget her name - somoenone help me wit that one .... ]

    309:

    Remove the fear of getting caught and punished, and how would you behave?

    Remove the fear of gravity, and I'd jump out a lot more windows. What difference does it make?

    310:

    Remove the fear of getting caught and punished, and how would you behave?

    Pretty much how I behave right now, actually.

    Me too. And on my optimist days I feel that applies to 99% or more of the people I know. But then again I (and likely you) tend to hang with people that share our beliefs.

    So I feel that there's a lot of folks out there who don't obey that rule. And when I'm pessimistic I can put the figure at 50%. That essay mentioned above "Losing the War" was somewhat scary. In that the description of Hitler taken from note people took at his dinner parties was too much like many "successful" people I know. Ruthless and rich/powerful.

    311:

    I appreciate the question, but it's ill-formed--It's a matter of experience, not belief, just as with electricity. I don't believe in electricity, I have experience of electricity.

    But if you're interesting in the nature of the experiences I've had, are you willing to read a book or two for a meaningful conversation? If you were asking me to describe my Ph.D.-level experience in any other field of human endeavor--say the fine arts, drama, or high-energy physics--surely it would be reasonable to ask you to develop the background understanding for a meaningful conversation, no?

    312:

    There's a lot of it about...as it were.

    Once upon a time, when there were second hand bookshops in Newcastle Upon Tyne, there was a large bookshop...yes I know, it is hard to imagine it these days but it really was quite large...that had a framed print that was based upon Foxes Book of Martyrs ..NO Not the "Famous Mr Fox” ...another Fox - do try to keep up!

    Anyway, I’ll always regret not having bought it for it was wonderful in all of its Glorious Gruesomeness. Not to worry. I've been prodding about the web in your interests...just in case you need an example of non religious/political based altruism... but can’t find an exact equivalent. Oh Well...this will have to do...

    http://www.magnoliabox.com/index.cfm?event=catalogue.qsearch&searchString=foxe%27s%20%27book%20of%20martyrs%27&pageStart=1

    313:

    What if the entrance to mastery of spirituality ... requires as much study and effort as, say, a Ph.D.--maybe 7 to 10 years?

    As I have a very finite number of decades, and most of them will necessarily involve more work than study, I can't study everything for years on the off chance that it will turn out to be important. There's just as much chance that Joseon Korean poetry would really speak to me if I took ten years to learn archaic Korean, and I have hundreds of other options that are just as good, as far as I can tell.

    The burden of proof lies with those who would teach "spirituality" (whatever that is) to demonstrate that there is some benefit (whatever it may be) to the study (whatever it is).

    314:

    The result was that a squadron of F-14 based on an aircraft carrier required 450 staff (mostly maintainers); a squadron of F-18 required only 250 staff, and managed to achieve higher availability rates.

    So it would not be enough to bring one modern warplane back to WWII. You would need to also bring the maintenance crew of perhaps 50 (including specialists), their equipment, and a mountain of spare parts + munitions.

    315:

    Actually that was somewhat the point of the story along these line in Analog way back when. Plane from the future lands back in WWI near an air squadron. On the "correct" side of course. Pilot finally convinces them his "airplane" can really fly. Then he spends a few weeks filtering kerosene to get enough fuel for a quick flight. Takes off VTOL and discovers he can't do much except fly fast near other planes and let his wake tear them apart. His modern weapons don't recognize the plane of the era as possible targets. Not enough heat or metal.

    He does get back to his time. I can't remember the "details" but I think it had to do with the effects of an experimental atomic test. A fav for time travel back in the 50s and 60s.

    316:

    The result was that a squadron of F-14 based on an aircraft carrier required 450 staff (mostly maintainers); a squadron of F-18 required only 250 staff, and managed to achieve higher availability rates.

    I suspect most of that was in the swept wings.

    One thing fighter pilots tend to want is maneuver. So the swept wings let them do that at low speeds. But over the last 100 years stats seem to show the fastest to get there and engage tends to win the fight. So no more swept wings.

    317:

    Sure, we all need to prioritize. But people tend to assume that they can opine knowledgeably on spirituality, without an adequate basis of knowledge!

    So, certainly choose to study what you judge serves you best. And be aware of how that determines the scope of your informed decisions and statements.

    318:

    Yea ... I know a few folks from Texas and who've moved to Texas from the north east. The extremes are amazing! Overall, pretty schizoid as per the following definition:

    'Schizoid personality disorder (SPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, emotional coldness, and apathy. Affected individuals may simultaneously demonstrate a rich, elaborate and exclusively internal fantasy world.'

    Re: Doug ...

    There seems to be some confusion between atheism (religion) and the ability to get along with people (psychology) ... these are two different disciplines/domains. My interests/comments are generally psychology-related.

    319:

    Oh, and one more point. My experience (and what I've seen in others) is not that 10 years (5 years, 10 years, 15 yard, somewhere in there) of full time study is required. But that range of time, with a reasonable level of effort, is necessary most of the time. Perhaps a better comparison would be, oh, say, getting a black belt in a martial art....But a some level of mastery is a prerequisite.

    320:

    Since I have raised two children into their 20s I have come to be very skeptical of people who have not raised kids giving advice on how to do it. Much more so than before I got "involved".

    Similar issues. If you're going to opine on "how to" or why you really need to dig below the surface before you start making statements.

    321:

    But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. .... Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

    People don't like to make every arrangement de novo, they like to get patterns where they know what to expect.

    If you want to do special stuff, you need to fit into the patterns people already expect for it.

    So for example, Gilgamish was king of Eretz, a city between the rivers. Why was he king? Maybe it made a difference that his mother was the high priestess and he was claimed to be genetically 1/3 god. Maybe it made a difference that he was a bull of a man and by far the best wrestler in the city. The text doesn't say.

    There was a Irish custom that kings need not be sons of kills or killers of kings, but it tended to come out that way. At one time and place it was the custom that a wise man was supposed to eat beef and drink lots of beef broth, and then he had a dream that revealed the next king. If the dream did not come true he was killed and another wise man was chosen to repeat it. One time the dream said to send searchers along the road looking for a naked man holding a sling. They looked and found the king's son, naked on the road and holding a sling. He told them that while he was walking he saw some geese in the swamp and so he took his sling and went after them, but they kept on moving just out of his range. Then when he got in too deep to run or defend himself well, the geese turned into armed men who surrounded him and threatened him some. They told him he was going to be the new king if they didn't kill him. They took him back to the road and took his clothes. And he was the new king. For the rest of his life he never killed another goose.

    If you want to be king you need a good story to explain to people why you're king and they aren't, and you need to stomp on other people who act like kings in your land.

    By law, Gilgamish slept with every woman in his domain on her wedding night, and then never again. From Genesis it appears to have been the custom lots of places that kings could have large harems but must not add married women to them. Abraham and Sarah capitalized on that, as did Isaac and Rebecca.

    Kings could kill men and take their wives, as note David and Bathsheba, but there were consequences and they didn't always get away with it. The system hemmed in kings with ritual and custom and even kings who got too much out of line could be made to suffer for it.

    If you want to kill me and have children with my wife, you'd better make sure she's OK with it. If not, you'd better make sure she's chained up every night before you sleep. Also don't let her cook for you. Also check whether your other women are OK with it. If they get too bothered with you, one of them might get some other man to kill you so he can have children with her.

    I guess the bottom line is that things may not work just like the rules that somebody taught you. But it isn't all possum and red-eye gravy when you break the rules either.

    Plus, you get to choose whatever goals you want -- to the extent that your goals are not hardwired. Lots of people choose to support a bigger system that works, over getting short-term stuff by smashing it. That's as valid a choice as anything else, there's no rule that they have to choose to maximise the number of children they have. Not like it's a God-given moral imperative.

    322:

    Other folks brought religion into it; I'm not sure why.

    323:

    people tend to assume that they can opine knowledgeably on spirituality, without an adequate basis of knowledge!

    On the contrary, I find no reason to believe there is a meaningful "basis of knowledge" involved with "spirituality" (whatever that is). Your case is worse than archaic Korean poetry: I can look at an archaic Korean poem, even if I can't understand it, and experts in Korean poetry can talk about its imagery and meter, which are terms I more or less understand. I'm familiar with writing and poetry, if not this particular kind.

    Spending ten years studying spirituality would be like spending ten years studying vampire hunting. We haven't even determined whether there's anything there to study, but my guess is that there isn't.

    324:

    Spending ten years studying spirituality would be like spending ten years studying vampire hunting. We haven't even determined whether there's anything there to study, but my guess is that there isn't.

    Or perhaps more accurately (since I'm not aware of anyone actually studying vampire hunting), how about homeopathy? There are people who quite seriously spend years trying to study it, to work out the most effective treatments and the like, and they end up building a huge edifice on top of what most medical practitioners consider absolute bullshit. They too say you can't discuss their subject without years of study.

    tl;dr — when the validity of the basic axiom is the problem, insisting anyone has to accept what's dependent on that axiom before a debate can take place is bogus.

    325:

    Ah yes ... "Theology, a subject with no content."

    326:

    "Spending ten years studying spirituality would be like spending ten years studying vampire hunting. We haven't even determined whether there's anything there to study, but my guess is that there isn't."

    Quite Right! There is no such thing as Vampires! It is important to remember this!

    "Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo, "everybody knows vampires don't exist!"

    327:

    Unless, of course you mean Like THESE ??

    328:

    A group of blind people explaining why sight is impossible, otherwise they too would see.

    329:

    Technically, we're a group of blind people explaining why sight is a poorly defined, unproven conjecture.

    But if we were actually blind, and you could actually see, it probably wouldn't be too hard to demonstrate your superior understanding. So feel free.

    330:

    Perhaps not. The Tornado has swing-wings, but less than half the maintenance requirements.

    I suspect you'll find much of the remainder in the avionics and the engines; if you specify the bleeding edge in performance (as the F-14 was in its day) you get Ferrari maintenance needs, not BMW needs... Doubly so if you want it in service "right now", and don't have time to design for maintainability.

    331:

    ... how about homeopathy? There are people who quite seriously spend years trying to study it, to work out the most effective treatments and the like, and they end up building a huge edifice on top of what most medical practitioners consider absolute bullshit. They too say you can't discuss their subject without years of study.

    Or how about art criticism? There are people who, after a whole lot of study, claim they can tell the difference between good art and bad art. But I can tell just looking at art, either it looks like the things it's supposed to look like (in which case it's a very expensive substitute for photography) or it doesn't look like it (in which case it's technically not as good).

    The very idea that people can make paintings that are better than photographs, or that one photograph is artisticly better posed than another photograph, is plainly bullshit.

    Some people think they get deep meaning from art. They've been hypnotized into believing that. But it's all in their heads. There's nothing there but splashes of paint that they read random meaingings into.

    People say you can learn more by studying art, but it's obvious there's really nothing there to study, any more than astrology or homopathy or quantum mechanics. It's all bullshit. None of it means anything. Just unreal stuff people made up out of their heads.

    [\sarcasm]

    332:

    Homeopathy works on two well-established principles.

    One is the placebo effect, enhanced, in the minds of some serious believers, by the fact that doses that are diluted higher (and have the high number prominently displayed on the label) are more potent.

    The other part is that most illnesses get better on their own.

    Now I'm not going to knock either treatment, because sometimes they're the only things that work (cf curing warts). Heck, many student medical workers these days go through a "white coat ceremony" as they transition to clinical work, something that emphasizes the well-known placebo effect of wearing that white coat. Only an idiot healer doesn't use everything they have to make the patient better.

    Still, my preferred dilution of homeopathic remedies is 1X, because I prefer the (cough, cough) "least powerful" dose. For awhile that was the only obtainable form of an herbal ointment I was using on sore muscles, and I can guarantee that it worked just as well as a full-strength standard herbal prep would.

    333:

    Technically, we're a group of blind people explaining why sight is a poorly defined, unproven conjecture.

    But if we were actually blind, and you could actually see, it probably wouldn't be too hard to demonstrate your superior understanding. So feel free.

    Yes. So people who have advanced spirituality ought to be able to show us why it's valuable. Surely it helps them win on the stock market, or get girls. Maybe advanced mind powers would let them levitate stones and build pyramids. Maybe it would help them be lucky in general. Show me somebody who's done all this spirituality, and he's always driving at 90 mph and he's never had an accident and never gotten a speeding ticket, and that's evidence!

    If this stuff has value, show us how it helps you get ahead according to our own values. If you can't show us that it helps you get ahead in the world, then it's obviously bullshit that is not worth any attention except to laugh at it.

    334:

    well it seems to help them better rationalize killing one another, so there is that at least ;-)

    335:

    Perhaps not. The Tornado has swing-wings, but less than half the maintenance requirements.

    Carrier based plans in general have much higher maintenance requirements (and capital costs) due to the landing and takeoff stresses. Plus they have a different refueling system which means more costs over a common system for US land and carrier based planes. Plus the US tends to gold plate more than the rest of the world.

    The F111 was supposed to have both land and carrier based variants. When the carrier based variants costs got out of hand it was dropped. And there's a lot of speculation that the F35 carrier version will not turn out be, ah, optimal.

    336:

    Homeopathy works on two well-established principles

    There's a possible 3rd. Very diluted substances seem to be able to build up tolerances for allergy inducing agents. But that's more an intersection of events than standard homeopathic principles. Especially when the dilutions start to approach (and go past) 0 molecules of substance per dose of formulation.

    It is my very vague understanding that the French are big on Homeopathy. Is this true and if so does anyone know why?

    337:

    Different beast. I've had allergy shots, and the point is to increase the amount of allergen to try to deprogram the immune system from reacting to an allergen as if it's a pathogen.

    Conversely, homeopathy's placebo effect works on the "Big Numbers=More Powerful" effect. I'm not being cynical, because I've heard practitioners (or at least dose takers) tell me this, and get highly incensed when I tried to explain what dilution meant.

    338:

    Here's the answer to why spirituality has value.

    The first part is a grafitto apocryphally found in the restroom of a biology department in an American University:

    Someone wrote on the bathroom stall, "Oh Lord, why are we born only to suffer and die?"

    To which someone replied, "Because those who suffered and died left behind more offspring than those who did not."

    A complementary way to think of it is that the universe is playing a joke on all humans, and the enlightened have figured it out. That's why they're so cheerful.

    If this makes no sense to you, then spirituality won't make any sense to you either. But then again, I suspect that entomology won't make much sense to you either, but it makes your life better too.

    Don't worry about it.

    339:

    Except that most people who claim to be enlightened, are not cheerful at all. Some are openly hostile to the very concept of cheerfulness.

    So while graffiti part makes sense to me, I do not buy your "complementary way".

    340:

    Homeopathy works on two well-established principles.

    Here is a third: Advanced medical science does not have a very long half-life. Sometimes you're better off without it.

    I listened to statisticians who were studying therapies for heart problems. It took them about 5 years to determine that a particular operation tended to do no good on average. Some people would get dramatically better results. But the ones who were sickest tended to die right away, which brought down the average. When they carefully triaged their patients to make sure that only fairly healthy ones got treated, then it didn't help as much, but it took longer to prove that it didn't. After 5 years, when they were ready to say that the treatment was on average ineffective, there would be a newer treatment which was supposed to be better, and they would start over.

    With most things progress is slower. In 20-30 years they find that half of what they were doing before was worthless or harmful. By 1980 something like half of what they did in 1950 was considered bad. By 2010, around half of treatments from 1980.

    Homeopaths provide a control group. When they do things that are ineffective apart from placebo effect, but which are guaranteed to do no harm, we can compare how healthy their patients are on average compared to more standard treatments, and that gives an indication how much good the standard treatments do.

    If homeopathy patients had survival rates no better than the average in the 1950's, that would tell us that modern medicine has gotten a whole lot better. Unless there's something special about people who choose homeopathy. It's possible they might die faster for other reasons. They might for example have death wishes, and do various things to kill themselves including choose medicine that they know doesn't work. It's hard to get a really good control group. But homeopaths provide the best control we can get without denying service to people who want it.

    341:

    A complementary way to think of it is that the universe is playing a joke on all humans, and the enlightened have figured it out. That's why they're so cheerful.

    If spirituality gets you to be more cheerful, that sounds like a good thing. I like to be cheerful. Some people will figure that the way they feel about things must be the right way, programmed by evolution or by God or something, and anything they do to tamper with that is bad. But I doubt that. If most of our evolutionary history was hunting-and-gathering, we might not be ideally suited to living in cities and spending much of our time dealing with bureaucracies.

    So if you do something that feels better, it might possibly work better too. And even if it doesn't work better, at least it feels better which is a plus.

    When I think about it, believing in a god who gave me some sort of guarantee might provide just as much psychological advantage in today's world as it did for hunter/gatherers. I'm not sure that's spiritual enlightenment but it sounds like a useful strategy.

    342:

    Chekhov said "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

    or we can go buy G.K. Chesterton premise:

    “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

    343:
  • Again, I'm not the person who introduced the religion/spirituality thread to this discussion.

  • Your examples (stock market, 90 mph, getting girls (but what about those who want boys? Or watermelons?) might suggest a certain narrowness of scope. What if a benefit of spirituality is to help you grasp a whole new range of values, rather than to merely reinforce possibly shallower values already held?

  • Why do you assume that spiritual mastery doesn't lead to stock market success, etc. I'm not saying it's necessary; I'm saying that depending on a person's roles and goals, spiritual mastery may be sufficient for those kinds of successes. For other people, those kinds of successes may be irrelevant.

  • Your position could be seen as similar to someone who is perhaps 10 or 11 saying to a college professor, "But what use is your class in physics if it doesn't help me succeed at Pokemon?"

  • 344:

    Here's the longer version. I hope it is at least entertaining--it's certainly long.

    Once upon a time there lived an ideal community in a far-off land. Its members had no fears as we now know them. Instead of uncertainty and vacillation, they had a purposefulness and a fuller means of expressing themselves.

    Although there were none of its stresses and tensions which mankind now considers essential to its progress, their lives were richer, because other, better elements replaced these things.

    Theirs, therefore, was a slightly different mode of existence. We could almost say that our present perceptions are a crude, makeshift version of the real ones that this community possessed.

    They had real lives, not semi-lives.

    They had a leader, who discovered that their country was to become uninhabitable for a period of, shall we say, 20,000 years. He planned their escape, realizing that their descendants would be able to return home successfully, only after many trials.

    He found for them a place of refuge, an island whose features were only roughly similar to those of the original homeland.

    Because of the difference in climate and situation, the immigrants had to undergo a transformation.

    This made them more physically and mentally adapted to the new circumstances: coarse perceptions, for instance, were substituted for finer ones, as when the manual laborer becomes toughened in response to the needs of his calling.

    In order to reduce the pain which a comparison between the old and new states would bring, they were made to forget the past almost entirely.

    Only the most shadowy recollection of it remained, yet it was sufficient to be awakened when the time came.

    The system was very complicated, but well arranged. The organs by means of which the people survived on the island were also made the organs of enjoyment, physical and mental. The organs which were really constructive in the old homeland were placed in a special form of abeyance, and linked with the shadowy memory, in preparation for its eventual activation.

    Slowly and painfully the immigrants settled down, adjusting themselves to the local conditions. The resources of the island were such that, coupled with effort and a certain form of guidance, people would be able to escape to a further island on the way back to their original home. This was the first of a succession of islands upon which gradual acclimatization took place.

    The responsibility of this “evolution” was vested in those individuals who could sustain it. These were necessarily only a few, because for the mass of the people the effort of keeping both sets of knowledge in their consciousness was virtually impossible. One of them seemed to conflict with the other. Certain specialists guarded the “special science.”

    This “secret,” the method of effecting the transition, was nothing more or less than the knowledge of maritime skills and their application. The escape needed an instructor, raw materials, people, effort and understanding. Given these, people could learn to swim, and also to build ships.

    The people who were originally in charge of the escape operation made it clear to everyone that a certain preparation was necessary before anyone could learn to swim or even take part in building a ship. For a time the process continued satisfactorily.

    Then a man who had been found, for the time being, lacking in the necessary qualities rebelled against this order and managed to develop a masterly idea. He had observed that the effort to escape placed a heavy and often seemingly unwelcome burden upon the people. At the same time they were disposed to believe things which they were told about the escape operation. He realized that he could acquire power, and also revenge himself upon those who had undervalued him, as he though, by a simple exploitation of these two sets of facts.

    He would merely offer to take away the burden, by affirming that there was no burden.

    He made his announcement: “There is no need for man to integrate his mind and train it in the way which has been described to you. The human mind is already a stable and continuous, consistent thing. You have been told that you have to become a craftsman in order to build a ship. I say, not only do you not need to be a craftsman – you do not need a ship at all!

    “An islander needs only to observe a few simple rules to survive and remain integrated into society. By the exercise of common sense, born into everyone, he can attain anything upon this island, our home, the common property and heritage of all.”

    The tonguester, having gained a great deal of interest among the people, now “proved his message by saying: “If there is any reality in ships and swimming, show us ships which have made the journey, and swimmers who have come back!”

    This was a challenge to the instructors which they could not meet. It was based upon an assumption of which the bemused herd could not now see the fallacy. You see, ships never returned from the other land. Swimmers, when they did come back, had undergone a fresh adaptation which made them invisible to the crowd.

    The mob pressed for demonstrative proof.

    “Shipbuilding,” said the escapers, in an attempt to reason with the revolt, “is an art and a craft. The learning and the exercise of this lore depends upon special techniques. These together make up a total activity, which cannot be examined piecemeal, as you demand. This activity has an impalpable element, called ‘baraka,’ from which the work ‘barque’ – a ship – is derived. This word means ‘the Subtlety,’ and cannot be shown to you.”

    “Art, craft, total, baraka, nonsense!” shouted the revolutionaries.

    And so they hanged as many shipbuilding craftsmen as they could find.

    The new gospel was welcomed on all sides as one of liberation. Man had discovered that he was already mature! He felt, for the time at least, as if he had been released from responsibility.

    Most other ways of thinking were soon swamped by the simplicity and comfort of the revolutionary concept. Soon it was considered to be a basic fact, which had never been challenged by any rational person. Rational, of course, meant anyone who harmonized with the general theory itself, upon which society was now based.

    Ideas which opposed the new one were easily called irrational. Anything irrational was bad. Thereafter, even if he had doubts, the individual had to suppress them or divert them, because he must at all costs be thought rational.

    It was not very difficult to be rational. One had only to adhere to the values of society. Further, evidence of the truth of rationality abounded—providing that one did not think beyond the life of the island.

    Society had now temporarily equilibrated itself within the island, and seemed to provide a plausible completeness, if viewed by means of itself. It was based upon reason plus emotion, making both seem plausible. Cannibalism, for instance, was permitted on rational grounds. The human body was found to be edible. Edibility was a characteristic of food. Therefore the human body was food.

    In order to compensate for the shortcomings of this reasoning, a makeshift was arranged. Cannibalism was controlled, in the interests of society. Compromise was the trademark of temporary balance. Every now and again someone pointed out a new compromise, and the struggle between reason, ambition, and community produced some fresh social norm.

    Since the skills of boatbuilding had no obvious application within this society, the effort could easily be considered absurd. Boats were not needed—there was nowhere to go. The consequences of certain assumptions can be made to “prove” those assumptions. This is what is called a pseudocertainty, the substitute for real certainty. It is what we deal in every day, when we assume that we will live another day. But our islanders applied it to everything.

    The words “displeasing” and “unpleasant” were used on the island to indicate anything which conflicted with the new gospel, which was itself known as “Please.” The idea behind this was that people would now please themselves, within the general need to please the State. The State was taken to mean all the people.

    It is hardly surprising that from quite early times the very thought of leaving the island filled most people with terror. Similarly, very real fear is to be seen in long-term prisoners who are about to be released. “Outside” the place of captivity is a vague, unknown, threatening world.

    The island was not a prison. But it was a cage with invisible bars, more effective than obvious ones ever could be.

    The insular society became more and more complex, and we can look at only a few of its outstanding features. Its literature was a rich one. In addition to cultural compositions, there were numerous books which explained the values and achievements of the nation. There was also a system of allegorical fiction, which portrayed how terrible life might have been, had society not arranged itself in the present reassuring pattern.

    From time to time instructors tried to help the whole community to escape. Captains sacrificed themselves for the reestablishment of a climate in which the now concealed shipbuilders could continue their work. All these efforts were interpreted by historians and sociologists with reference to conditions on the island, without thought for any contact outside this closed society.

    Plausible explanations of almost anything were comparatively easy to produce. No principle of ethics was involved, because scholars continued to study with genuine dedication what seemed to be true. “What more can we do?” they asked, implying by the word “more” that the alternative might be an effort of quantity.

    Or they asked each other, “What else can we do?” assuming that the answer might be “else”—something different. Their real problem was that they assumed themselves able to formulate the questions, and ignored the fact that the questions were every bit as important as the answers.

    Of course the islanders had plenty of scope for thought and action within their own small domain. The variations of ideas and differences of opinion gave the impression of freedom of thought. Thought was encouraged, providing that it was not “absurd.”

    Freedom of speech was allowed. It was of little use without the development of understanding, which was not pursued.

    The work and the emphasis of the navigators had to take on different aspects in accordance with the changes in the community. This made their reality even more baffling to the students who tried to follow them from the island point of view.

    Amid all the confusion, even the capacity to remember the possibility of escape could at times become an obstacle.

    The stirring consciousness of escape potential was not very discriminating.

    More often than not the eager would-be escapers settled for any kind of substitute.

    A vague concept of navigation cannot become useful without orientation. Even the most eager potential shipbuilders had been trained to believe that they already had that orientation. They were already mature. They hated anyone who pointed out that they might need a preparation.

    Bizarre versions of swimming or shipbuilding often crowded out possibilities of real progress. Very much to blame were the advocates of pseudoswimming or allegorical ships, mere hucksters, who offered lessons to those as yet too weak to swim, or passages on ships which they could not build.

    They needs of the society had originally made necessary certain forms of efficiency and thinking which developed into what was known as science. This admirable approach, so essential in the fields where it had application, finally outran its real meaning. The approach called “scientific,” soon after the “Please” revolution, became stretched until it covered all manner of ideas.

    Eventually things which could not be brought within its bounds became known as “unscientific,” another convenient synonym for “bad.” Words were unknowingly taken prisoner and then automatically enslaved.

    In the absence of a suitable attitude, like people who, thrown upon their own resources in a waiting room, feverishly read magazines, the islanders absorbed themselves in finding substitutes for the fulfillment which was the original (and indeed the final) purpose of this community’s exile.

    Some were able to diver their attention more or less successfully into mainly emotional commitments. There were different ranges of emotion, but no adequate scale for measuring them. All emotion was considered to be “deep” or “profound”—at any rate more profound than non-emotion. Emotion, which was seen to move people to the most extreme physical and mental acts known, was automatically termed “deep.”

    The majority of people set themselves targets, or allowed others to set them for them. They might pursue one cult after another, or money, or social prominence. Some worshipped some things and felt themselves superior to all the rest. Some, by repudiating what they thought worship was, thought that they had no idols, and could therefore safely sneer at all the rest.

    As the centuries passed, the island was littered with the debris of these cults. Worse than ordinary debris, it was self-perpetuating. Well-meaning and other people combined the cults and recombined them, and they spread anew. For the amateur and intellectual, this constituted a mine of academic or “initiatory” material, giving a comforting sense of variety.

    Magnificent facilities for the indulging of limited “satisfactions” proliferated. Palaces and monuments, museums and universities, institutes of learning, theater and sports stadiums almost filled the island. The people naturally prided themselves on these endowments, many of which they considered to be linked in a general way with ultimate truth, though exactly how this was so escaped almost all of them.

    Shipbuilding was connected with some dimensions of this activity, but in a way unknown to almost everyone.

    Clandestinely the ships raised their sails, the swimmers continued to teach swimming…

    The conditions on the island did not entirely fill these dedicated people with dismay. After all, they too had originated in the very same community, and had indissoluble bonds with it, and with its destiny.

    But they very often had to preserve themselves from the attentions of their fellow citizens. Some “normal” islanders tried to save them from themselves. Others tried to kill them, for an equally sublime reason. Some even sought their help eagerly, but could not find them.

    All these reactions to the existence of the swimmers were the result of the same cause, filtered through different kinds of minds. This cause was that hardly anyone now knew what a swimmer really was, what he was doing, or where he could be found.

    As the life of the island became more and more civilized, a strange but logical industry grew up. It was devoted to ascribing doubts to the validity of the system under which the society lived. It succeeded in absorbing doubts about social values by laughing at them or satirizing them. The activity could wear a sad or happy face, but it really became a repetitious ritual. A potentially valuable industry, it was often prevented from exercising its really creative function.

    People felt that, having allowed their doubts to have temporary expression, they would in some way assuage them, exorcise them, almost propitiate them. Satire passed for meaningful allegory; allegory was accepted but not digested. Plays, books, films, poems, lampoons were the usual media for this development, though there was a strong section of it in more academic fields.

    For many islanders it seemed more emancipated, more modern or progressive, to follows this cult rather than the older ones.

    Here and there a candidate still represented himself to a swimming instructor, to make his bargain. Usually what amounted to a stereotyped conversation took place.

    “I want to learn to swim.”

    “Do you want to make a bargain about it?”

    “No. I only have to take my ton of cabbage.”

    “What cabbage?”

    “The food which I will need on the other island.”

    “There is better food there.”

    “I don’t know what you mean. I cannot be sure. I must take my cabbage.”

    “You cannot swim, for one thing, with a ton of cabbage.”

    “Then I cannot go. You call it a load. I call it my essential nutrition.”

    “Suppose, as an allegory, we say not ‘cabbage’ but ‘assumptions,’ or ‘destructive ideas’?”

    “I am going to take my cabbage to some instructor who understands my needs.”

    ~ ~ ~

    The Islanders – A Fable, from book The Sufis, by Idries Shah

    346:

    "Spirituality" ( @ 329 - 333 ish ) aka talking about BigSkyFairy .... Why is no form of BSF detectable AT ALL ... And the better our detectors get, the less BSF (i.e. none at all) di we find? All the way from massless particles, (photons) throught really difficult-to-drtrct low-mass ones (neutrinoes) all the way up & bigger & more complex & out to supergalaxy clusters millions if not "billions" of parsecs away & back to COBE ... no BSF anywhere. Logical conclusinon - it doesn't exist, game over.

    On Homeopathy, it has been properly double-blind trialled & it doesn't work - equally game over.

    347:

    Your examples (stock market, 90 mph, getting girls (but what about those who want boys? Or watermelons?) might suggest a certain narrowness of scope. What if a benefit of spirituality is to help you grasp a whole new range of values, rather than to merely reinforce possibly shallower values already held?

    Yes. And yet, how can you expect to persuade anyone this way, who does not want to be persuaded?

    "My values are better than your values. Come accept my values and then your values will be better too, and you will see that they are better and you will be pleased that you changed."

    People generally don't accept this line from communists or libertarians, why would they accept it from you?

    So maybe we should each do our own thing, and preach to the people who are open to it. We can't hope to prove much to those who aren't!

    Although possibly some might be persuaded by the argument from success. If Jimmy Buffett announced that all his riches came from studying Scientology, maybe a lot of people who wanted to get rich would study Scientology.

    So if one person wants to dedicate his life to growing the world's largest cabbage, and another to growing lots of cabbages, and a third to having lots of the most enjoyable sex he can manage, and a fourth to study of military history, maybe it's not worth arguing with them. Unless they try to keep you from your spirituality. Depending on how they do it, possibly study of military history would help you resist them....

    348:

    "If this stuff has value, show us how it helps you get ahead according to our own values. "

    The blind man speaks. If it doesn't make money or get women it's just shit.

    349:

    ""Spirituality" ( @ 329 - 333 ish ) aka talking about BigSkyFairy ...."

    Instant fail. You do not even understand the distinction between the two.

    350:

    "He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining."

    By inference, that means the twentieth century would be the most catastrophic in human history.

    Interesting fact about that quote. It's only true if you don't look too closely at it. The twentieth century wars were catastrophic beyond what Europe had experienced for a few centuries. But it was maybe the 6th worse in the past 20 centuries (I'm excluding the BC era because I don't want to have to quantify events such as the Bronze Age Collapse)

    Was this century worse for humanity than the 16th century. Let's see, in that century, you had the genocides of the Americas. I would argue this was the worst event in human history. N. America didn't recover its pre-Columbian population until the 1800's and S. America didn't recover its population until around WWII. You also had the destruction of several African and Filipino kingdoms. The perpetrators were people of faith.

    Was this century worse than the 17th century? Let's look at the continents. N. America and S. America was still very genocidal. Africa: this was the golden age of the slave trade. Asia: this was the century when the European Indian empires emerged. It's also when the Dutch began to colonize S. Africa, Java, and tried to colonize modern-day Taiwan (the Chinese finished that little endeavor). Europe experienced the Thirty Years War, which on a per capita basis was probably worse than either world war. Atheists weren't running the show then either

    Next is the thirteenth century. One word: Mongol Empire. In my opinion, the second worst event in A.D. history after the genocide of the Americas. I don't know Genghis Khan's spirituality, so I'll leave the possibility he was an atheist.

    Next is the 19th century. The completion of the genocides in the US and Canada, and expansion of the genocides in the Southern Cone and Brazil, the scramble for Africa, the genocide of Australia. Finally, let's not forget the Taiping Rebellion. It killed 20 million people, more than WWI, more than Stalin, and it probably approached Mao in death toll when you consider that the war weakened the Quing dynasty to such an extent that it collapsed in the early 20th century. I have no idea how many deaths in the following decades were due to the instability brought about by this War. Again, this was caused by people of faith. Still, this was Europe's golden age, so I can see why Nietzsche would ignore those.

    Now, I am tempted to include the 18th, 4th, and 7th centuries, but I'm not that familiar with them. However, those crimes were also done by people of faith.

    In short, a world were God reigned supreme was far more violent than one where that wasn't the case.

    351:

    On Homeopathy, it has been properly double-blind trialled & it doesn't work - equally game over.

    You are looking at it too narrowly.

    Homeopathy got its big wins in the 19th century and early 20th century when other forms of medicine tended to kill people. By prescribing medicine which was at worst harmless, homeopaths got far better survival rates.

    Modern medicine has eliminated the worst of the lethal treatments so they do much better than before. But we still need homeopaths as the control group.

    Often the result of actual use of a new treatment comes out very different from the controlled studies. Nobody knows why this is, but it's true. Possibly in the real world conditions are sometimes subtly different from in the controlled studies because other variables are not controlled. When homeopaths do as well as other treatment, that is strong evidence that the other treatment is in fact completely worthless.

    http://www.interhomeopathy.org/hydrocyanicum_acidum_and_the_purple_death_1

    Here is a typical result. An epidemic where standard treatment resulted in 25%+ mortality, but untreated cases were 15%. Homeopathic treatment gave death rates much lower. Maybe the use of aspirin in standard treatment killed a lot of people, so much so that the rest of the care was worthless.

    Much of homeopathic theory does not make sense. But medical results don't depend on theory. Lots of medical theories don't make sense. Homeopathy gives us a treatment which is guaranteed harmless, and when we learn to compare those results on a large scale with conventional results in practice, we may get valuable lessons from it.

    352:
    Instant fail. You do not even understand the distinction between the two.

    Spirituality: how you feel about the big Sky fairy?

    353:

    "Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God–based moral codes. But then, in the twenty–first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not.""

    Bull. Bull.

    The century would have to be pretty horrible to counter the fact that for the parts of the world not named Europe, Australia, or N. America it is the first Golden Era since Columbus. A pity God had to die to get us such a world. Even for those continents, formerly oppressed minorities such as the Aborigines, native Americans, Jews, Gypsies, Sami, etc. have it better in godless Europe (I don't know if I should include Jews and Gypsies, since the Holocaust did happen in this era).

    354:

    Oops. I meant the fifth and eighth centuries, not the fourth and seventh.

    355:

    Fail. How can you even pretend to have an informed opinion on the subject with a comment like that?

    356:
    Fail. How can you even pretend to have an informed opinion on the subject with a comment like that?

    A flip comment certainly, but not an entirely inaccurate one I think. How would you define spirituality then? In less that half a million words for preference?

    One of the things I've noticed over recent years is the increasing reluctance of believers to make any claims for their beliefs that are capable of verification in any sense what-so-ever. Recently Giles Frazer springs to mind as an example.

    357:

    How many AMRAAM (or Sparrow or Skyflash) your Canburra variant can carry will depend on space around the wing hardpoints rather than load; you can reckon on 3 radar AIMs per hardpoint given sufficent space, and a further 3 in the bomb bay given extensible launchers (like F-102, F-106, F-22, probably F-35). You can probably make it pretty uninterceptable by operating at 45_000 feet (it can go higher, but why bother?)

    358:

    That was originally stipulated. But as noted, this wasn't a subject for discussion here. Please drop it.

    359:

    Your understanding of aerodynamics is so wrong I don't know where to begin.

    (Hint: the F-14 has variable geometry wings. The term "swept", as in wing sweep, applies to virtually every jet-powered aircraft built since the early 1950s, and you've got the significance of wing sweep for the speed vs. lift trade-off entirely backwards.)

    360:

    192(8) Amazon mostly does 2 things:- 1) It buys from importers/manufacturers *This places them in the place in the supply chain traditionally held by wholesalers and sales reps), and sells direct to punters (and this in that held by "shops"). Any disruption that this causes is felt by wholesalers and "traditional retailers" rather than necessarily that held by manufacturers or end users. 2) It offers "shops" an aggregating service for web sales, saving them the effort of advertising their websites (for a fee). Clearly the shops feel this to be an advantage, as do the customers who can find $item "for a good price" using a 1 stop service.

    361:

    The F-22 can cruise supersonic, and just flying by WWII planes at Mach 1.0x is going to generate an overpressure wave that will blow their wings off. You'd have to get pretty close to do this, and sooner or later either you'll get too close or they'll make a lucky shot.

    They only have to get lucky once, and you have to be lucky every time.

    362:

    Lord knows religion can beget violence. But it is also the only proven means of holding our baser instincts in check.

    That's sarcasm, right? When you check history, religion is the only proven method to turn a group of regular people into a murderous mob. Especially the "my god is the only one, yours is a blasphemous idol" kind.

    363:

    OK - Spirituality for Dummies

    (a) That dealing with timeless qualities, objects or concepts often associated with Platonism. Things that are not time-bound and hence not subject to decay. Includes everything from mythological archetype abstractions to mathematics.

    (b) The direct perception of Being or reality without logical interpretation. In effect, direct apprehension of the brain states preceding conscious interpretation and filtering of sensory input.

    (c) Direct apprehension of ones own conscious being with minimal perceptual overlay.

    364:

    For the price of one F22 you can buy 10 Su35s. I think the latter could do somewhat more damage.

    366:

    Carrier based plans in general have much higher maintenance requirements (and capital costs) due to the landing and takeoff stresses. Plus they have a different refueling system which means more costs over a common system for US land and carrier based planes...And there's a lot of speculation that the F35 carrier version will not turn out be, ah, optimal.

    Errrr.... no, again.

    Firstly, if anything it's the USAF that has the "different refuelling system" - because the USN and USMC, like the rest of the world that isn't flying USAF types, uses probe-and-drogue refuelling.

    Feeble and tiny drift back to topic, but the USAF boom refuelling system was driven by the most excessive capital-intensive warfare; namely, the need to have an intercontinental manned bomber force, especially if you've got one of your bomber wings turning and burning at a fail-safe point at any given time. Think of Dr. Strangelove (the need to have a guaranteed retaliation using bombers only went away once the solid-fuel land-based ICBM and submarine-based at sea deterrents came on-line).

    Filling up a B-52 / B-58 / B-1B / B-2 is a big job to do quickly - so the USAF uses a boom system where the tanker "flies" the probe into the receiver's socket. It's a rigid system, that delivers fuel at a higher flow rate and pressure, AIUI - so if anything, it's the carrier aircraft with the simpler and more robust systems.

    As for "F-35 carrier variant non-optimal", which one and why? The USN will be flying F-35C off carriers, the USMC and RN will be flying the F-35B off carriers. If you're implying that the F-35B is hauling around few thousand pounds of lift fan instead of fuel, perhaps; but then, it doesn't have to slam into a deck at high speed every time it lands, and has a far lower training burden on its pilots. Even with a lift fan, it carries more internal fuel than just about anything else (Tornado, F-15C, Typhoon) - and handily outperforms its predecessor in RN service, the very short-legged Sea Harrier.

    367:

    So, back to your point, we had the era of mass conscription, where the biggest army won. Railroads let us pour tremendous men and resources into a small space, culminating in WWI. Blitzkrieg was an aberration on that, which let a numerically small army win for awhile. Atomic weapons made giant armies obviously obsolete but the USA and the USSR kept them anyway, not yet having the war which actually proves it.

    More recently we have had the approach of intensely capital-intensive war. This culminates with special forces -- you can have essentially an elite group of forward observers, who flit around the countryside finding enemies to bomb. You hardly need big forces on the ground to be targets if you can adequately target their forces. The air force that can back up those forward observers is even more expensive, but if it wins then who should complain?

    Mass armies are obsolete but you need one in case your neighbor invades and the USA doesn't intervene on your side. But doesn't the USA usually intervene? Usually. Kind of. But before they fight a big war they spend 6 months to a year prepositioning supplies. A major part of the expense of the war has already been spent when the supplies are prepositioned -- the replacement munitions have already been ordered and are beginning to be delivered -- it would be a logistic nightmare to decide at the last minute not to do it. The USA basicly cannot negotiate a settlement in the last months before a big war. Or they could, but they'd need the foresight to plan it ahead of time.

    The USA and Russia can destroy anything they want to destroy. The challenge is to get control of things they want to not destroy. Primarily oilfields. Maybe economies. After we destroy a mass army on another continent, what does it get us? If it's oilfields, do we get more oil than the war burned?

    We found out how to protect an oil pipeline. A single man with a small bomb can cause a whole lot of damage. But drones can patrol the pipeline and cheaply kill anybody who gets close to it.

    How can you protect a supply convoy? Anybody with a bomb and a shovel can take out one of your fuel tankers. But you can use drones to patrol the road and kill anybody who gets close to it.

    Hate to do this sort of thing for years at a time.

    The capital-intensive approach to counter-insurgency. Identify people who may be plotting against you and kill them from the air, attempting to minimise damage to people and structures you might need. Local police might do better if you could trust them, but you can't.

    How can politics catch up to this?

    And what comes next?

    368:

    For the price of one F22 you can buy 10 Su35s. I think the latter could do somewhat more damage.

    To your pocket, yes. The F-22 is generally regarded as an exceptional (i.e. peerless) air-superiority fighter. The fact that even one mock kill at RED FLAG was quite a big deal, should be taken as an indicator

    You might also want to consider the maintenance burden of 10x Sukhoi, their availability rates, and their airframe and engine lifetimes. The cost of training 10x as many pilots, and keeping them current in their skills. Remember, the West designs its combat aircraft to last a long time in peace; the Russians design them to for an (expected) short lifetime in war.

    By way of example, you apparently expect to buy 10% spare engines for your western fighter (e.g. 2.2 engines per Typhoon), but several multiples of engine sets for your MiG / Sukhoi (i.e. 6 to 10 engines per Su-35). The advantage of this is that you swap in a set of "new" engines at/just before the start of the war, in the knowledge that the aircraft is extremely unlikely to use up all x00 hours of engine life, before the war ends or the aircraft is shot down...

    369:

    "Freedom of speech was allowed. It was of little use without the development of understanding, which was not pursued." - Good quote. There's a difference between spirituality and religiosity ... Excerpt from Wikipedia ...

    "Spirituality .... an individual’s search for meaning and purpose in life. Spirituality is distinct from organized religion in that spirituality does not necessarily need a religious framework. That is, one does not necessarily need to follow certain rules, guidelines or practices to be spiritual, but an organized religion often has some combination of these in place. People who report themselves to be spiritual people may not observe any specific religious practices or traditions.[96] Studies have shown a negative relationship between spiritual well-being and depressive symptoms."

    My experience: 'spiritual' folks have no problem with my atheism; those driven by reliogisity, do. The religion discussion usually crops up when talking about family get-togethers/holidays: what do you do to celebrate and why, decor and food. Years ago we started an office 'holiday' pot luck lunch - end of project rush/deliverables. It's been a fun/non-threatening way to learn about different cultures/religions and foods that you wouldn't normally get at a typical 'ethnic' restaurant. (We also put up a world map with pins identifying where everyone is from: every continent except Antarctica.)

    370:

    What comes next is better psychology, as in: win the war before any shots are fired. I saw some media coverage to the effect recently - a Google search pulled up a story in The Independent. (Caveat: I've no idea what the editorial policy is of The Independent.)

    371:

    We're seeing quite a few attempts to define spirituality, and they really don't agree all that much. Heck, Dirk posted two without realizing that the Platonist version ((a) in his post) is traditionally opposed to the nominalist version that emphasizes brain states ((b) in his post)*. I'm getting the distinct impression that we don't have enough agreement on basic premises or even vocabulary to begin to have an intelligent conversation on this topic.

    *BTW, neuroscience comes down pretty heavily on the nominalist side of that issue.

    372:

    I do realize that. It's just that there are multiple definitions of the same word depending on context. Hardly unique in the English language. I could also add a few more.

    373:

    What comes next is better psychology, as in: win the war before any shots are fired.

    That's always been a part of it. And so wars that cost the victor more than he could possibly get from them, might still be valuable because of the nations that knuckle under without a fight. This cannot be measured without knowledge of alternate worlds, so there's no real way to do science or accounting about it.

    In the same way it makes sense to kill a few peasants so the rest will remember they are only peasants, it could make sense to destroy a few third-world nations so the others will cooperate. Or maybe not, there's no good way to test it.

    It's good to offer people a deal they can live with, as opposed to something they'd fight hopelessly against.

    And the guy who was writing in another topic about southeast asian hill people has a point. If a region already offers enough tribute that there would be some loss to disrupting that, and they have arranged things so they are hard to organize to squeeze more from them, they might escape invasion.

    I think one consequence of capital-intensive warfare is that we will burn all the oil, despite everything. We may eventually arrange to stop burning oil for any other purpose, but while it wins wars it will keep being burned until it's gone.

    374:

    Well Greg, maybe the Big Sky Fairy is like the quantum wave function: not directly detectable by any instrumentality we possess, purely metaphysical, but responsible, or so we’re told, for the state of the entire universe.

    But as others have said, there's no requirement to anthropomorphise this metaphysical thing into some old guy with a beard; we can call it "the Tao", "the Force", "Mana", "Shakti", "Baraka", "Ein Sof" or whatever. Pretty much every human culture in history has spoken of something like this outside of the hardcore modern atheist subculture, so given this empirical fact perhaps we should ask whether there is something wrong with you and your kind that you can't sense what seems so obvious to the rest of us? Are you blind man, or do you just refuse to open your eyes?

    375:

    It may interest you to know that Colonel Michael Aquino, PhD, a U.S. military intelligence officer, has written a book called "MindWar" that proposes to do just that: make physical warfare obsolete via psychological and memetic warfare.

    It may also interest you to know that Colonel Aquino is the founder of the Temple of Set, former left-hand man of Anton LaVey, and a rather nutty guy who believes that he channeled the ancient Egyptian deity Set in 1975 and is the prophet of a new Aeon of Set. But the dude is quite rational and progressive and often posts at the 600 club forum.

    I guess this is why I criticize hardcore atheists; because compared to all the religious and occult weirdos out there, they're just so boring.

    376:

    Oh, my--a cute picture of a cat. I find myself utterly refuted.

    377:

    I think this may be am expression of bias towards the side with the best story.

    Non-theistic science tells stories which some people don't get. They want things explained by some anthropormophic entity.

    Er, hold on. Does this mean that God is a furry? Were the Egyptians right? Or am I just being an evil Bastet?

    378:

    I'm certainly biased toward the side with the best story, aren't you?

    Yes, it means god is an aardvaark. Do you have a problem with that?

    379:

    Here's a very strong belief voiced by some on this blog: God doesn't exist.

    What is God? BigSkyFairy, apparently.

    Okay, a large number of Christians would agree that God is not BigSkyFairy. Does that make them atheists?

    No, because someone who believes that BigSkyFairy does not exist is emphatically not a Christian.

    So the fundamental question for the atheists who believe that BigSkyFairy does not exist is, do you have a concept of god/God or whatever that's coherent enough to test whether this concept doesn't exist? If not, then your atheism is a statement of faith unsupported by experience or data, isn't it? Isn't that the definition of a religion?

    If you want to make your atheism rational, that's fine. Rationality requires some testable hypotheses, and that starts with the definition of whatever it is you believe doesn't exist. It's also not a bad idea to find out whether your disprovable definition coincides with what other people believe exists, so that you know who is and who isn't on your side. Knocking down a straw god is easy, but it's also kind of lazy, is it not?

    Incidentally, I'm neither an atheist nor a theist, and that's why I'm stirring things up here.

    380:
    Incidentally, I'm neither an atheist nor a theist, and that's why I'm stirring things up here.

    If you are without theism, then your are an atheist.

    381:

    If you are without theism, then your are an atheist. "stir".

    And athough Aquino is quite bright, he suffers under the vice of Yesod! And the dominion of Lilith...

    382:

    "...do you have a concept of god/God or whatever that's coherent enough to test whether this concept doesn't exist? "

    Yes. Personifications of Nature and the embodiment of cultural archetypes capable of dynamically interacting with society. Got a problem with that or are we talking about some simplistic strawman (not) believed in by BillyBob the illiterate televangelist?

    383:

    This is why some of us technically regard ourselves as "igtheists", people who do not believe the word "God" is sufficiently well defined to permit a definite opinion on its existence or nonexistence. We usually go by "atheist", because it doesn't confuse people as much, and the kinds of God we regard as possible aren't the kinds of God religious people want to believe in.

    384:

    How would you distinguish such a thing from internal elements of a society interacting with each other?

    385:

    There's room for argument for this, but at least since the Lanchester Law it's been believed that fighting power is not in linear proportion to the number of units.

    Let Fighting Power F=k.xn where n ≥ 1 and x ≥ 1 and k > 0

    So if k1 is the Fighting Power of an F-22, and k2 is the Fighting Power of a Su-35, and k2 = 10.k1 then an F-22 can only equal 10 Su-35 if n = 1

    The special case of n = 1 is based, originally, on one-to-one combat, swords and spears rather than longer-ranged weapons. Since the F-22 carried only 8 missiles, 2 of them short ranged Sidewinders, while the Su-35 can carry 12 total, 4 of them short-ranged, a sequence of 10 one-to-one combats is unlikely.

    It's possible that, while ECM and RCS matter, the number of missiles is almost more important than the number of aircraft. The original Lanchester Laws are about a century old, and maybe only give a direction. Once guided missiles came on the scene, especially the fire-and-forget types, things get complicated.

    It's not plane v. plane any more, it's two missile v. plane attacks, and that poor F-22 might have 80 missiles incoming while it can only destroy a maximum of 8 of the 10 radars giving those missiles target updates.

    And at long engagement ranges the missile is running short of energy to engage a manoeuvering target, for both sides. But can you afford to fire second so as to give your missiles more terminal energy. And, at long range, even AMRAAM doesn't hit every time.

    386:
    igtheists

    Seen a TV programme about that, called Game of Thrones, IIRC... Something about the Iron Isles....And a flame haired Bitch with fire in her eyes!

    Serously though, I agree that the term "God" is not well defined. In fact I was so annoyed about this I wrote tp Theos, asking if there was any research focusing on what believers mean by "God,"not least because I conjecture what believers believe with respect to God differs considerably from that laid down by the major religions. Now answer so far...

    387:

    Actually, I do understand the difference ... But, the moment some handwaver starts talking about "spituality" you can bet your boots, they are going to introduce BSF into the conversation, fairly soon. Plese, don;t do that, it's a distraction - if spirituality does not mean a BNSF, thenm can the raiser of the s-waffle plese define theoir terms?

    Like what is "spirit"?

    388:

    Blitzkrieg was an aberration on that, which let a numerically small army win for awhile. Err. Jena? Auerstadt? Ulm? Agincourt? Pleant others.

    389:

    Your understanding of aerodynamics is so wrong I don't know where to begin. (Hint: the F-14 has variable geometry wings. The term "swept", as in wing sweep,

    Yes I got the term wrong. My bad. But my point was the ability to rotate the wings added a LOT of maintenance requirements to the plane. And weight. Which reduced range.

    390:

    Oh do come on! "Cannot be detected either directly or indirectly" But the Q-wave functions behaviour is predicted & lo & behold, the predictions turn out to be true! The Universe is TESTABLE, for results. So, where is your mystical other that you are positing? If we can "feel" it, as many religious believers claim, then why cannot any of our senses or instruments do so? And, as our instrumentation (etc) gets better, there's (less & less of the BSF 9or whatever) anywhere. As always, if you seem to be making the extraordinary claim that BSF or spritiuality or whatever exists. Please produce some evidence that will stand up in a laboratory &/or a court & preferably both. I'm waiting.

    Heteromeles @ 379 Sorry, not allowed (I think) .... The religious/spiritual are making the claims, let's see their proof. For thousands of years they have been scamming us with "Can't disprove a negative, nyaah!" well I am not buying it, & neither should anyone else.

    391:

    I just hope Colonel Aquino is less successful at his enterprise than Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (inventor of Blitzkrieg and disciple of Aleister Crowley).

    (Because? Weaponized memes might sound innocuous at first, but then again you might want to go read "Directive 51" by John Barnes ...)

    392:

    A way I like to think of it:

    Every theist (of any stripe) rejects vastly more versions of god than they accept. (It's a fundamental thread in arguments with atheists, of course: No, that nasty god you say don't believe in is not my god. My god is different.)

    Those who define themselves as atheist are only infinitesimally more atheistic than the most ardent religious person. We share almost all the same disbeliefs as you - we just add your own flavour of god to our shared roster of disbeliefs.

    393:

    Different is different. Doesn't matter which comes first. Are you saying that land based variants of the F35 will switch to the same fueling system as carrier based planes? If so I'm somewhat surprised. Of course this is a no win situation for the USAF. Have two different variants for fueling F35s or have all new tankers (if they are ever built) which can fuel plane via either method. Either choice adds costs.

    If you're implying that the F-35B is hauling around few thousand pounds of lift fan instead of fuel, perhaps; but then, it doesn't have to slam into a deck at high speed every time it lands, and has a far lower training burden on its pilots.

    I have a really hard time believing that SVTOL will become the standard way for flight operations off carriers. At least for the US. Fuel burn is just huge. SVTOL is for when it must be used.

    I just visited the Wikipedia page. It's worse than I thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II

    The SVTOL variant looses 1/3 of the fuel capacity of the USAF version for the vertical fan system. Plus this interesting statement. "Vertical takeoffs and landings are riskier due to threats such as foreign object damage." In general it seems that the SVTOL will be the if we have to option. Not SOP.

    And the carrier based variant is heavier,more costly, and more complicated than the pure USAF variant. Not nearly as much as the SVTOL variant but still.

    And the article states that the main variant will include both refueling systems. And seems to imply that it will also include a landing hook.

    What's that saying? That the entire Pentagon budget will be consumed by the single new plane delivered about 2050?

    394:

    I'll grant you the complexity of early variable-geometry systems -- the F-14, the F-111, the Su-17. But these were 1960s developments. Today we see both the B-1B and Tu-160 strategic bombers in service with this design, and the Panavia Tornado being retired after 30 years of hard use -- all of them 1970s or 1980s implementations that seem to have had considerably less maintenance problems and which were designed for long-ish range (the Tornado in particular was used by the RAF as a patrol interceptor, and with in-flight refueling sorties could last up to 6-7 hours).

    395:

    "How would you distinguish such a thing from internal elements of a society interacting with each other?"

    Sometimes it is impossible, other times it is blindingly obvious, like when the Inquisition or ISIL come for you.

    396:

    "Like what is "spirit"?"

    The unique defining essence of something at a single point in time. If you want to be really picky, enumerate the totality of an object's quantum states.

    397:

    Is that possible, even in principle?

    398:

    Probably not, with underlines how unique a spirit really is.

    399:

    I have a really hard time believing that SVTOL will become the standard way for flight operations off carriers. At least for the US. Fuel burn is just huge.

    There was this aircraft, used by the USMC, Spanish Navy, Italian Navy, and Indian Navy, and formerly used by the Royal Navy, that uses short takeoffs and vertical landings to allow it to generate high sortie rates from a small-deck carrier. It's called the Harrier, you may know it better as the AV-8...

    If you can afford the ultimate statement of capital-intensive warfare (namely, the nuclear-powered large-deck aircraft carrier), then you have the choice of CATOBAR or STOVL. It is noteworthy that the USMC have chosen the F-35B for similar reasons to the RN, even though both had the choice to buy the F-35C.

    The reason is simple. Carrier landings in a fast jet are one of the most stressful activities a pilot can perform; keeping current in carrier landings is a large part of working up a carrier air wing, to the extent that at any one time, at least one of the USN's twelve-ish carriers is driving around in circles allowing baby pilots to learn their basic "landing without crashing" skills.

    If you've only got one or two carriers in your Navy, this is an expensive option. The Royal Navy briefly considered it, and then went back to STOVL because of the whole-life cost implications; namely, your pilots can concentrate on the flying and fighting side of their training, rather than the landing. By way of example, several RAF pilots performed their very first carrier landing as they arrived on their way to the Falklands War. The choice of the F-35B means that the UK can have a single fleet of aircraft that can operate both at sea and ashore, and be able to surge its resources from one to the other if necessary.

    Note that if you use the "ski-jump" on your carrier, you can launch aircraft at a higher rate than if you have to strap them onto a catapult. While the fuel burn of landing vertically may be large for a short period, you don't need to keep as large a reserve of fuel as you do for a conventional carrier landing - because you don't have the risk of missing the wires and having to fly around for another approach...

    "It's easier to stop and then land, than to land and then stop..."

    400:

    That the entire Pentagon budget will be consumed by the single new plane delivered about 2050

    Yes, the USAF will use it Monday to Wednesday, the USN Thursday to Saturday and USMC on Sunday. The US Army will have their one helicopter to play with all week.

    see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine%27s_laws

    and peace shall reign o'er mankind

    401:

    Today we see both the B-1B and Tu-160 strategic bombers in service with this design, and the Panavia Tornado being retired after 30 years of hard use -- all of them 1970s or 1980s implementations that seem to have had considerably less maintenance problems

    But these didn't have to land on carriers. Carrier pilots and others in the field I've talked to basically say carrier planes get the crap beat out of them. Take off somewhat. Landings a lot. Everything from tires to airframes to seats are more complicated. Even on the mail/supply planes. A hard landing for a typical land based plane is smoother than a typical landing for a carrier based plane.

    A friend told me about how he had to take off downwind one time and thought he left his colon on the deck. They had to add about 40+ knots of speed above typical via the catapult and it was rough.

    But this started out talking about 450 staff vs. 250 staff. All of those extra parts require people trained to work on them. And likely make it more complicated to deal with other issues.

    And my main point was that carrier based planes are always heavier and cost more than the equivalent land based plane. Which is why a common design never made it until now.

    402:

    Some things are relatively low cost. Adding probe-and-drogue to a flying-boom tanker aircraft needs some extra internal pipework, but could be done with a couple of underwing pods. Adding a centreline system is a bit harder, because of where the probe is.

    Similarly, it's not unknown for Air Force planes to have an arrestor hook. You have the wires at the far end of the runway, as a last-resort stopping method, rather than some sort of crash barrier. And there's more space for the arrestor wires to stop the plane, which means less force needed to stop the plane in time.

    Incidentally, probe-and-drogue means that carrier aircraft, with an underwing hosereel pod, can refuel other carrier aircraft if there are problems that stop a landing. So the USN isn't going to give that up. And USAF tankers have already been fitted with several probe-and-drogue add-ons. So the F-35 doesn't force any changes on the USAF.

    403:

    The Inquisition and ISIL are both elements of their respective societies, and so is anyone within reach of their actions.

    404:

    Clearly this is MY day that is dedicated to bone headed stupidity? For I just dont understand your points.

    " (a) That dealing with timeless qualities, objects or concepts often associated with Platonism. Things that are not time-bound and hence not subject to decay. Includes everything from mythological archetype abstractions to mathematics."

    " timeless qualities" ? You consider that 'Qualities ' can’t change with human perception of TIME, Space and Pain?

    Don’t suffer from Arthritis do you?

    Or Mathmatics given its changes since the time of Newton, and even that of Einstien.

    “Things that is not time-bound and hence not subject to decay." EH!!! Things that aren’t subject to decay? Name One ..Even stars Die...we are all subject to the heat death of the universe.

    Though, I supose that it may well be ' True ' for a given value of 'True 'that WE can’t properly appreciate TRUTH on account of, err ...COS FOR, SO THERE!!

    The standard response to all reason is ...WOT DO YOU KNOW OF THESE THINGS you Poor Fool?

    I was once told, by a young colleague - who had every reason to be grateful to me for favours recieved - that My SOUL would be Dissolved upon my Death ... this on account of my not having been born into an obscure Christian Cult centred upon HIS Church in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, UK, The World, The Universe etc.

    I suppose that I should have been appreciative of the Warning of Soul Dissolution not being Everlasting Pits of Torment and all that sort of thing.

    And just to think that there are people who believe that the present Muslim Death Cults, that are all the rage in the popular press and social media just lately, are something NEW in the World?

    I really DO hope that my young colleagues’ weird Christian Religious Death Cult was of some comfort to him when he developed a brain tumour and died of the same leaving a young family - who doubtless were all raised in his really strange Christian cult.

    405:

    "Blitzkrieg was an aberration on that, which let a numerically small army win for awhile."

    Err. Jena? Auerstadt? Ulm? Agincourt? Pleant others.

    Sure. Did my one sentence sound too dogmatic? My point was that since Napoleon and particularly since railroads, it was possible to get more stuff to battles and so the winners tended to be those who could get there "the fastest with the mostest". By WWI that had gotten entirely out of hand.

    Blitzkrieg provided a tactic that let a highly mobile force win, temporarily, and it took years to train armies to counter it.

    I didn't mean to imply that there had never been examples of smaller armies winning battles.

    406:

    I like the Argument for the Existence of God about how God is the Greatest Being, and there must by definition (definitions vary quite violently) be a greatest being, and therefore there must be a God.

    However, I suspect that the God of that argument a: probably doesn't live within a million light years of us, and b: probably doesn't give a toss about us even if we met it.

    Hey Arnold! You might like Tim Minchin's take on the God that resides at Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, UK, The World, The Universe etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZeWPScnolo Enjoy.

    407:

    "..." timeless qualities" ? You consider that 'Qualities ' can’t change with human perception of TIME, Space and Pain?"

    No. The old qualities are replaced in use by new ones. The notion of the "flat earth" still exists, doesn't it? It is just that it no longer gets the use it once did. Ditto everything else spiritual.

    408:

    "“Things that is not time-bound and hence not subject to decay." EH!!! Things that aren’t subject to decay? Name One "

    The definition of a sphere in flat space.

    409:

    Blitzkrieg provided a tactic that let a highly mobile force win, temporarily, and it took years to train armies to counter it.

    • Blinks *

    It still seemed to work well enough in 2003 in Iraq, didn't it?

    (The occupation of Iraq was botched, but the actual invasion went swimmingly, to the extent that you can use that adverb of a desert country. And the invasion was a pretty much textbook example of modern blitzkrieg practice.)

    410:

    "Blitzkrieg provided a tactic that let a highly mobile force win, temporarily, and it took years to train armies to counter it."

    It still seemed to work well enough in 2003 in Iraq, didn't it?

    I think it isn't at all absurd to call the Iraq war a blitzkrieg. There are things I would consider highly significant differences, but no need to argue about picky details.

    To me the most important thing was that the USA had total control of the air. So Iraq ground forces could not move without being killed. Since they were immobile, we could ignore any of them we didn't need to destroy at the moment. They didn't exactly have lines for us to break through and then encircle from behind, they more had concentrations of forces and if we wanted an airfield or an important road intersection we then had to kill the troops defending it -- otherwise we could just bomb them whenever we felt like it and otherwise forget them.

    Our bigger problems came from lightly-armed, mostly-unarmored "specialists" in our own rear, who damaged our supply lines before we realized we needed to find them and kill them.

    Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that nobody could ever again win a blitzkrieg war against anybody. More that in 1940 it worked for Germany against every army they faced, and by 1944 it did not work against the USA or the USSR. That might be partly that their enemies' weapons had improved faster than theirs had, and definitely it was partly improved training by their enemies. When they broke through a front line they couldn't just go anywhere they wanted, they were facing more enemies ready to stop them. They could be encircled themselves.

    But of course the Iraqi army couldn't do that to the US army. If they tried to move they became targets. Maybe they had the training to know how to defeat a blitzkrieg attack, but they were not strong enough, and were even weaker after 10 years of sanctions.

    411:

    I do. I'd rather not believe in Aardvarks.

    412:

    But do Aardvarks believe in You?

    413:

    Blitzkreig worked against the Japanese in 1945 in the largest land battle ever fought, the Battle of Manchuria when the Soviets steamrollered the Japanese/Manchuko army into the ground in just over two weeks.

    414:

    Ah, let's have a few God definitions:

    a) A set of natural laws that cause our world to behave in a consistent and testable manner.

    b) Cats. Why have one bug god when you can have lots of little furry gods? You can adore them, make them offerings (sometimes they make offerings to us) and pray to them ("Please kitty, don't walk over the couch with your muddy paws"). Like most gods they usually ignore our prayers.

    c) A being which is conscious, nearly all-knowing, nearly all-mighty and means well for humans. (Notice how I weakened the almighty/all-knowing stuff to make the definition internally consistent).

    d) A being which is conscious, nearly all-knowing, nearly all-mighty and is intend on making humans suffer.

    Personally, I believe in a) and to some extend in b). I don't think either c) or d) exists, but when looking at the available data, d) is more likely than c).

    415:

    Oops, of course "big god" instead of "bug god"

    416:

    I like the Argument for the Existence of God about how God is the Greatest Being, and there must by definition (definitions vary quite violently) be a greatest being, and therefore there must be a God.

    If you had experience with the mathematical concept of partial orders you'd know that a) things don't need to be comparable b) maxima do not necessarily exist c) even if there is a maximum, it doesn't need to be unique.

    So no, this argument is seriously flawed.

    417:

    But do Aardvarks believe in You?

    What Aardvarks?

    418:

    Or ill-defined. Is it even possible to separate one object's quantum states from the rest of the world?

    419:

    Oh, I remember the good old times when you could talk about the definition of a sphere without bothering about flat space, Euclidean space or the dimensionality of it. I wonder where it's all going to end; in the future you might even have to tell what distance metric you are using or people wont believe that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3.

    420:

    I guess this is why I criticize hardcore atheists; because compared to all the religious and occult weirdos out there, they're just so boring.

    With so boring you mean "hard to make fun of"?

    421:

    Haven't we gone through many, many iterations of the blitzkrieg? I'm thinking of the old nomad style attack of high-speed raiding and pillaging.

    As for conquest being harder than invasion, that's also a classic military problem that probably dates back to before the Babylonians. The most interesting thing about the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan is that a massive technological edge doesn't necessarily guarantee that conquest will work, especially when the supply lines go halfway around the world.

    Of course, as a pure hypothetical, I wonder if the US could actually successfully conquer Canada with a blitzkrieg, if it came to it. My guess is that it would be difficult at best.

    422:

    Our bigger problems came from lightly-armed, mostly-unarmored "specialists" in our own rear, who damaged our supply lines before we realized we needed to find them and kill them.

    You'd think... (although it's worth noting that the Iraqi Army was mounting counterattacks in battalion strength in and around Basra during the invasion). The bigger problems came from overmanned headquarters.

    http://dodccrp.org/events/9th_ICCRTS/CD/papers/068.pdf

    The Army Rumour Service has several threads running on the problems of becoming a "learning organisation", etc...

    423:

    Adding another wooden spoon and stirring vigorously: 1) God (specifically the Judeo-Christian god, but true of any supernatural supreme being) is a concept defined and constantly redefined to be immune to logic and reason. Therefore attempting to conduct an argument about god's existence is perhaps the single most pointless effort one can engage in.

    2) The arguments for homeopathy sound rather like someone carefully explaining how a broken clock works perfectly twice every day.

    3) It very much seems that those attempting to define spirituality are saying something along the lines of: "This is how I feel and therefore must be a universal truth"; when in fact what they mean is: "This is how I feel and is therefore my personal truth". (Hint: One of these statements starts wars and begets religion, the other allows us all to get along peacefully even when we might quietly think our friends and neighbours are a bunch of loons.)

    424:

    Can I be neither a theist nor an atheist?

    Ah yes, the trap of binary logic.

    Here's another system (catuskoti) that the Buddhists like. If the choices are A and B, the following outcomes are possible in catuskoti logic: A is true, B is false A is false, B is true Both A and B are true Neither A nor B are true.

    So if you ask a question like "is the color red more black or more white?" it's impossible to answer the question using binary logic. Using catuskoti, the answer's obvious (red is neither black nor white).

    With theism and atheism, it's worth thinking about the assumptions that go into classifying all people into two non-overlapping categories of theist and atheist. I'm simply saying that, based on my experiences and beliefs, I'm neither.

    425:

    So if you ask a question like "is the color red more black or more white?" it's impossible to answer the question using binary logic.

    Your example looks very much like Boolean logic to me... in fact, your example is a fairly minimal Karnaugh map.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

    426:

    I can't resist it, I just can't.

    Why would you rather not believe in them? After all, Aardvark never hurt anyone :)

    Thankyou, I'll be here all week...

    427:

    God's existence or non-existence can never even in principle be proven or disproven either logically or empirically. it's a matter of faith (or lack thereof) in either case.

    The question of God's existence is non falsifiable and as such it is a meaningless question under the Popperian standard for science.

    Its also the wrong question from square one.

    The real question is whether or not existence has meaning or purpose- whether the universe has reason for being.

    A Godless universe can only be an accident. And accidents can have no inherent meaning. As such, at the macro level atheism is inescapably nihilistic.

    428:

    There is really nothing new about blitzkrieg. Genghis Khan's Mongols practiced it on horseback by combining shock cavalry (modern equivalent - tanks) with horse archers (modern equivalent: TAC air).

    Mongol horseman actually moved faster than Hitler's panzers, and were not slowed down by winter.

    429:

    When you crunch the numbers, you see that Nietzsche accurately predicted the 20th century.

    As AN Wilson rightly pointed out, all of the atheistic totalitarian regimes of the 20th century (Bolshevik, Stalinist, Nazi, Maoist, Khmer Rouge, etc.) committed mass murder, democide, on a scale that ISIS can only dream about. Look up Prof. Rummel's study on democide in the 20th century. Rummel's work can be accessed via Marginal Revolution at:

    http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/11/democide.html

    What I found most interesting was the following comparisons:

    "So, the famine was intentional. What was its human cost? I had estimated that 27,000,000 Chinese starved to death or died from associated diseases. Others estimated the toll to be as high as 40,000,000. Chang and Halliday put it at 38,000,000, and given their sources, I will accept that. Now, I have to change all the world democide totals that populate my websites, blogs, and publications. The total for the communist democide before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 + 35,226,000 + 38,000,000 = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000 murdered. This is now in line with the 65 million toll estimated for China in the Black Book of Communism, and Chang and Halliday's estimate of "well over 70 million." This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945. Discounting the 3,446,000 killed in the Sino-Japanese war prior to the start of Mao's rule, the Maoist PRC (with these new numbers for the deliberate, man-made famine during the Great Leap Forward) killed over 73,000,000 people. Over the 38 years of Maoist rule, this comes to an average of about 1.92 million per year."

    The democide rate of Hitler's 12 year Reich was about 1.75 million per year. The democide rate of the 70 year Stalinist USSR was about 0.88 million per year (about half that of the Third Reich). Stalin's (and the Stalinist system's) much greater total was the result of its much greater longevity. Hitler's democide rate was smaller, but still comparable to Mao's.

    The total for the three largest atheist regimes of the 20th century (Stalinist, Nazi and Maoist) comes to approximately 160 million over 70 years. This does not include mass murder by secondary Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Khmer Rouge and other atheist totalitarians, which raises to total to an estimated 200 million innocents murdered by atheists. AN Wilson is correct, the horrors of the 20th century stem from atheism and were carried out by atheists.

    By comparison, the religious equivalent - the Inquisition - was mild by comparison. From an Internet FAQ on the Inquisitions:

    "How many were executed by the Spanish Inquisition? By most standards, the records of the Spanish Inquisition are spectacularly good and a treasure trove for social historians as they record many details about ordinary people. Nothing like all the files have been analysed but from the third looked at so far, it seems the Inquisition, operating through out the Spanish Empire, executed about 700 people between 1540 and 1700 out of a total of 49,000 cases. It is also reckoned that they probably killed about two thousand during the first fifty years of operation when persecution against Jews and Moslems was at its most severe. This would give a total figure of around 5,000 for the entire three hundred year period of its operation."

    Compared to the ocean of blood spilled by the murderous brotherhoods predicted by Nietzsche, the blood spilled by crusades, jihads, pogroms, inquisitions and persecutions is but a drop.

    430:

    There is more wisdom in my cat picture then in all the combined writings of all the Sufi's (-:

    There is also a difference between the absence of a belief in a God and the presence of a belief in the nonexistence of a God. The first is pretty much demanded by logic, the case has not been made hence doibeleive = null.

    I have an absence of belief on all sorts of things without being able to empirically prove their nonexistence. For instance I have an absence of belief that as I write this an orangutan is playing polo with a zebra on the top of Mt Fuji. However I cannot disprove that assertion

    431:

    "The first is pretty much demanded by logic"

    Why? What evidence demands that God not exist? How are the statements "God exists" or "God does not exist" in an way falsifiable? Not being falsifiable, how is either a meaningful statement?

    "I have an absence of belief on all sorts of things without being able to empirically prove their nonexistence."

    Again, wrong question. The meaningful question is "Does existence have inherent meaning?"

    432:

    Which is why I did not include the inquisition. I know that it was relatively mild

    Per capita (adjusted for the smaller population), the slave trade and the conquest of the Americas were worse than those numbers, adjusted for population.

    It's also interesting that you use the Spanish Inquisition to "refute" me. I did not list it for a reason. Hint: Just because it didn't happen to white people, it was still important. Although I know that theists will use the lower population numbers an agricultural society had to excuse their crimes. You want to prove me wrong? You're going to have to prove to me that the 20th century was worse than the colonies, slave trade, AND the genocides of the Americas ON A PER CAPITA BASIS.

    433:

    Finally, let's not forget the Taiping Rebellion. It killed 20 million people, more than WWI, more than Stalin, and it probably approached Mao in death toll when you consider that the war weakened the Quing dynasty to such an extent that it collapsed in the early 20th century.

    You forgot to mention that the leader of Taiping Rebellion claimed to be younger brother of Christ, and replacing of Confucianism with a (form of) Christianity was a major part of his platform. You do not get much more religious than that.

    434:

    "Although I know that theists will use the lower population numbers an agricultural society had to excuse their crimes."

    Apologies for this statement. It was way too rude. Too bad I can't edit it out.

    435:

    You can have capitalism without democracy, but you can't have democracy without capitalism. This is obvious from Charlie's own list, some parts of which are quite right. The alternative to private actors controlling the allocation of capital is for the State to do it, and that means that State and capital merge even more than they do in the usual course of 1st-world events.

    "Regulatory capture is inevitable." This should be engraved in letters of fire on everyone's forebrain.

    436:

    "Failed State" means "failed at the basic reason for the existence of the State".

    What is the reason for the existence of the State? To monopolize the violence function; that is, to wage war externally and to suppress rivals to its monopoly of coercion internally.(*)

    This is the minimal reason for the beast.

    Government is force; it is coercion. Its basic function is to -govern-.

    (*) this is much better than a "state of nature". Pre-State societies have levels of violence which, in the aggregate, puts the Great Leap or WWII to shame. The violence is more diffuse, but it's constant.

    437:

    BTW, saying that terrorism is "imaginary" because it doesn't kill as many people as "X" (traffic accidents, whatever) is purest baloney.

    Everyone dies eventually. Traffic accidents are one of the innumerable ways in which you meet the inevitable. Life is so dangerous nobody gets out of it alive.

    Terrorism is an act of war -- that is, it's intended to exercise political coercion through organized violence or its threat.

    Intentional harms are (quite rightly) treated differently from accidental ones.

    And harm intended for political purposes is (quite rightly) regarded as a different order of threat than, say, random criminal violence, which in turn is regarded as more of a threat than accidents.

    It's a threat to something far more important than individual lives. It's a threat to the collective, to its interests, to its freedom of action, to its existence.

    Several million years of evolution have "taught" us to regard threats to our collective -- tribe, clan, nation-state, whatever -- as a deadly serious matter.

    And human beings being as they are, this is just as it should be. It's a very bad sign when people -don't- think this way.

    438:

    Capital flowing towards profit centers is a feature, not a bug. It's what capital is -supposed- to do.

    That's what the Smith's term "invisible hand" means. The factors of production flow towards the most renumerative use.

    That's why people in China aren't eating their children now, which actually happened in the early 1960's.

    Until the 1970's much of the world was cordoned off from capital flows; by Communism, or by extreme dysfunction (Somalia, contemporary example) or by sheer fuggheadedness like India's "permit Raj".

    When that situation changed, the 1945-1975, capital began flowing towards the opportunities. Massive improvements in the lives of lots of people resulted. The Chinese now have the luxury of worrying about pollution.

    There were also losers, of course, because as the world market was unified, prices tended to rise/drop to the same level, and that includes the price of labor. This is good for the people whose incomes rose (China, Brazil) and bad for those now competing with those people.

    439:

    There is also a difference between the absence of a belief in a God and the presence of a belief in the nonexistence of a God.

    Yes! That's important. Belief in the nonexistence of every god is pretty stupid, but absence of belief could be quite reasonable.

    Pretty much everybody has had direct experience of a god. But some people interpret it as a god, while others think it was a dream or a hallucination, and others try to forget.

    We know something now about the part of the brain that let's people have these experiences. Some people figure that means they aren't really real, on the theory that if it was a real experience of a god you would experience it without your brain being involved at all. A god could have evolved us to have that capability because he chose that method to communicate with us while we are made of meat.

    If somebody claims they have the only right way to intepret something, I think that there's room for doubt.

    440:
    • & also unjolyguy @ # 430

    Dave - err, yes ... BUT The "believers" constantly redefine their pet BSF, as you say, & AT THE SAME TIME persist in taunting unbelievers that we can't disprove a negative. Therefore, they deserve everything they get in rhetorical terms, at least. Starting, of course with vast heaps of sneering ridicule.

    Ah yes, "mysticism" - a deliberate attempt to NOT UNDERSTAND something & to weave a web of fanatsy around the object under not-consideration, etc. SOmetimes described as a deliberate worship of ignorance, too. [ Classic christian example, of course is the "virgin birth" - we know it's impossible, but (we believe) it happened anyway, so we will contemplate it's mystery ... ]

    There is a technical term for this: Festering bullshit.

    441:

    The question of God's existence is non falsifiable and as such it is a meaningless question under the Popperian standard for science. UTTER COBBLERS

    But not if you turn it upside down, actually.

    "If BSF exists, then BSF will be detectable. If BSF cannot be detected, then it cannot be held to exist, unless & until such a detection is made. In the meantime, BSF is held not to exist"

    The burden of proof on the proponents of BSF is now to produce a valid detection. Standard requirements for proof/validation claims, extraordinary (or otherwise) hold.

    When presented with this simple requirement, I have found that the believers in BSF do at least one, or some combination of the following: Lie. Wriggle. Try to escape by reversing the argument. Claim that all atheists are murderers, because of the religious beliefs of communism. Run away.

    442:

    Oops, pressed "send" too soom: As such, at the macro level atheism is inescapably nihilistic. REALLY? Got any evidence at all for that statement? So, "the universe just happpened & has "no meaning" So what? We can always GIVE it meaning, can't we? If we want to.

    Your argument is one of the classic & regular pieces of blackmail practiced by the religious, & I am seriously unimpressed.

    443:

    Grrr & again @ 429

    Sorry, time ytou gre up & learnt some hostory.

    Communism is a classic religion: When in power, it persecutes all the competing religions - check. It operates by a combination of moral & physical blackmail - check It has "holy books" which, even though shown to be false &/or in error, are nonthelss taken as err.. "gospel" - check. It has competing sects & schisms ("heresies") whiose followers are worse than unbleievers - chack. The "holy cause" will bring paradise ( On Earth in this case, but islam has the same idea in some sects as does christianity) - but at a cost - who cares how many dead bodies we pile up if paradise is achieved? - check.

    444:

    "Regulatory capture is inevitable."

    Capitalists believe this, because they believe that nobody has morals, that everybody will do whatever gets them the most money.

    But if they're right, then it's inevitable that someone will find that they get the most profit by selling a product that causes genetic damage in its users, and they will successfully suppress the evidence, and humanity is doomed.

    If they are right we cannot survive, because we don't have enough morals to survive.

    445:

    "If BSF exists, then BSF will be detectable. If BSF cannot be detected, then it cannot be held to exist, unless & until such a detection is made. In the meantime, BSF is held not to exist."

    Your third step does not follow. You can do it, but it's an esthetic preference with no particular logic requiring it.

    When we do not have evidence, we are not required to decide one way or another. If you decide in the absence of evidence that something does or does not exist, you are jumping the gun -- which is a valid personal preference, if it is your preference.

    Occam's razor says that in the absence of evidence we should use the explanation we find simplest and discard all others, because that way we don't strain our little brains. This is a valid heuristic, particularly for people who have little brains. We get to pick one explanation and hold tenaciously to it until it is definitively disproven.

    But it is only one possible approach to dealing with a complex world, not the only valid approach.

    446:

    "Is it even possible to separate one object's quantum states from the rest of the world?"

    No, and since we are nothing but quantum states you are starting to re-invent Buddhism

    447:

    Mongol horseman actually moved faster than Hitler's panzers, and were not slowed down by winter.

    That's hardly surprising, given that Hitler's logistics were largely horse-drawn, and his infantry largely on foot - even after six years of war, the Wehrmacht still had a million horses pulling things, instead of (say) half a million trucks. Instead, they had invested in massive lumps of steel that sucked up huge amounts of capital sat and achieved little or nothing to further their strategic aims (see: Bismarck, Tirpitz, Graf Spee) or looked totally k3wl, but couldn't drive twenty miles without breaking down (see: Tiger tank).

    It's easy to forget just how logistically incompetent the Germans were - their troops were regularly under-equipped and underfed, and required to scavenge locally.

    448:

    And that's before we look at, say, Eurofighter Typhoon or SAAB JAS-39 Gripen with Meteor and active homing under power and own navigation at maybe 100km from shooter. Typhoon can carry 6 of those and 4 ASRAAM (which works despite the claims on the Wikipedia Sidewinder entry) (4 and 2 for Gripen). Now, if the poor Raptor is minimally configured for "swing-role" it's down to two AMRAAM and 2 'winders...

    449:

    First off, since about 1980 it's not been so much VSTOL as STOVL, that's "Short Take Off & Vertical Landing". It's proven that this reduces fuel burn for vertical flight, not least because this only occurs when the aircraft is at its lightest for a given mission.

    Secondly, is this a good time to mention the F-105 as having both probe and drogue and flying boom refuelling capability, in the USAF, in the 1960s? In point of fact (source being Ed Rasimus; do you want to argue with him about F-105s?) this capability saved aircraft which were deploying trans-Pacific and had problems with the flying boom kit.

    450:

    Er, the Tirpitz tied down an entire battlefleet for most of WW2 just by existing. Or maybe you think that that the Murmansk convoys were escorted by battleships and heavy cruisers purely for fun?

    451:

    "The first is pretty much demanded by logic"

    Why? What evidence demands that God not exist? How are the statements "God exists" or "God does not exist" in an way falsifiable? Not being falsifiable, how is either a meaningful statement?

    Read Unholyguy's post again. He said "absence of belief in existence of god" is demanded by logic, not "presence of belief in non-existence of god". And "God does not exist" is easily falsifiable: He just has to tell us so.

    "I have an absence of belief on all sorts of things without being able to empirically prove their nonexistence."

    Again, wrong question. The meaningful question is "Does existence have inherent meaning?"

    Or: Does existence have a meaning - independent of the individual, - detectable by the individual, and - relevant for the individual?

    In my view meaning of life is produced by humans, not given by the outside world.

    452:

    You can have capitalism without democracy, but you can't have democracy without capitalism. This is obvious from Charlie's own list, some parts of which are quite right. The alternative to private actors controlling the allocation of capital is for the State to do it, and that means that State and capital merge even more than they do in the usual course of 1st-world events.

    So you define non-capitalism as the state controlling the allocation of capital? Doesn't work for me. Non-capitalism for me is a system that does not allow the accumulation of capital.

    "Regulatory capture is inevitable." This should be engraved in letters of fire on everyone's forebrain.

    That just means you can't have democracy with capitalism.

    453:

    He said "absence of belief in existence of god" is demanded by logic, not "presence of belief in non-existence of god". And "God does not exist" is easily falsifiable: He just has to tell us so.

    And also we would have to listen. Most of us have had experiences that could be interpreted as God talking to us. But we can choose to interpret them as dreams, or as hallucinations etc. Also, if you believe that there is an entity who can talk to you in what you interpret as dreams, can you be sure that there are no lesser entities who can do that, who might talk to you and perhaps try to persuade you that they are someone they are not?

    It's hard to be sure when to believe the evidence of your senses.

    454:

    "...When we do not have evidence, we are not required to decide one way or another..."

    JT, I kinda-sorta agree (I'd put it differently; but in essence it's the objection I was going to raise). However, you really need to put your case better for why a lack of belief in that for which there is no evidence is any simpler or less sophisticated ('small brained' as you put it) than any other response.

    It'd be trivially easy to postulate countless untestable, unprovable theses - the comment-thread classics are orbital teapots and invisible unicorns, but much fun can be had inventing entire sophisticated theologies. These (I think) you would have no hesitation in rejecting. And of course there are plenty of existing theologies that almost no one would fault you for not taking seriously.

    So why it is ok to default to disbelief of most claims for which there is no evidence, but 'small brained' to reject a more specific subset of such claims? Serious question.

    455:

    And also we would have to listen.

    You want me to believe in a God that can't even make me listen?

    456:

    Why would a loving God make you a slave?

    457:

    " the comment-thread classics are orbital teapots and invisible unicorns, but much fun can be had inventing entire sophisticated theologies."

    Orbiting teacups and unicorns cannot give meaning to existence. Which is why I focus on the important question, does existence have meaning and purpose?

    Whether you believe God exists or not depends on how you answer this question.

    A universe created by accident can have no meaning. A universe created by God would have a purpose and a reason for existing.

    As such, the question of God's existence is nothing more than a Rorschach test the only reveals the inner nihilism of the atheist and can say nothing about whether God actually exists.

    458:

    How would knowing for a fact that God exists make one a slave? Is it, perhaps, a kind of "nuclear ambiguity" that's popular in the middle east?

    I don't see how such knowledge would compromise my free will any more than the existence of gravity compromises my free-will.

    459:

    "He said "absence of belief in existence of god" is demanded by logic, not "presence of belief in non-existence of god".

    Word games. Lack of belief is itself a belief in the same way not making a choice is itself a choice. Atheists don't want to be categorized as just another belief, so they have to play this word game to avoid that particular trap.

    "And "God does not exist" is easily falsifiable: He just has to tell us so."

    What makes you think He hasn't? Seriously, what is it about existence that leads you to believe that their is no God?

    "In my view meaning of life is produced by humans, not given by the outside world."

    Your view would be wrong. Medical science has destroyed the "Self". There is no Soul. There is no "You". Consciousness and free will are nothing but illusions. Therefore, no individual can ever hope to create personal meaning in an inherently meaningless universe, for that too would be just another illusion.

    460:

    If God made you listen, forced you to hear, then he would be commanding you - making you is slave.

    461:

    Wouldn't have taken you for a nihilist.

    462:

    "Occam's razor says that in the absence of evidence we should use the explanation we find simplest and discard all others"

    Why would you think that there is a complete absence of evidence for God's existence?

    463:

    "The burden of proof on the proponents of BSF is now to produce a valid detection. Standard requirements for proof/validation claims, extraordinary (or otherwise) hold."

    The extraordinary claim in this case would be a universe that exited without cause.

    Mind you that "God" does not have to be a spiritual being. "God" could easily be a programmer that wrote the code to the Matrix we all live in, or the particle scientist that created a bubble universe that we live in with his particle accelerator.

    464:

    "So, "the universe just happpened & has "no meaning". So what?"

    My, what a very nihilistic statement.

    "We can always GIVE it meaning, can't we? If we want to."

    No you can't. Once again:

    Medical science has destroyed the "Self". There is no Soul. There is no "You". Consciousness and free will are nothing but illusions. Therefore, no individual can ever hope to create personal meaning in an inherently meaningless universe, for that too would be just another illusion.

    465:
    If God made you listen, forced you to hear, then he would be commanding you - making you is slave.

    Nonsense. If I attract someones attention, have I made them my slave by virtue of the simple fact of my existence? Similarly would knowing for a fact that God exists, automatically compel my unquestioning allegiance? If so, why?

    466:

    Daniel, your argument is undermined by the fact that Hitler was anything but an atheist (he was Catholic, and backed the church enthusiastically), while the Leninist regimes were nominally atheist but in practice were structurally as doctrinaire as the Inquisition -- rather than being about the reward in Heaven it was all about building True Communism on Earth (a utopian project, and lest we forget, utopian projects are essentially teleological). If anything, the Soviet antipathy towards religious institutions indicates that they saw them as rivals.

    (The Chinese Communist party's allergy to religion has somewhat different roots, as a quick refresher on the roots of the Boxer Rebellion might remind you.)

    I think it's more useful to think of the totalitarian/genocidal regimes of the 20th century in terms of industrial revolution rather than theological.

    467:

    I'm not. My point is that atheism is inescapably nihilistic from the macro scale of a meaningless accidental cosmos lacking a God to the micro scale of the illusory Self lacking a Soul.

    It's all nihilism from top to bottom.

    Though most atheists lack the balls to face up to the consequences, implications and conclusions of their lack of belief.

    468:

    Which is why I focus on the important question, does existence have meaning and purpose?

    This makes no sense to me as an argument. It seems to offer an explanation for belief; and it may even lead into an argument for the utility of belief; but I can't see at all how this becomes a reason to believe. It's deeply unsatisfying to me, anyway.

    469:

    Mind you that "God" does not have to be a spiritual being. "God" could easily be a programmer that wrote the code to the Matrix we all live in, or the particle scientist that created a bubble universe that we live in with his particle accelerator.

    Such "Gods" are hard to refute, but functionally meaningless in terms of the religious believer's wish for a personal god -- one that listens when they pray, one that is volitionally responsible for their existence (i.e. one that validates the hypothesis that their existence has meaning), and so on.

    For what it's worth, my take on the concept of "God" (or "Gods") is that they are external reflections of our own internal theory of mind -- that is, we have the subjective experience of consciousness and so we project it on the world around us as it is very difficult for us to get our heads around the idea that it's not all about us. Humans have a natural tendency towards, if not solipsism, then a belief that the world outside their body works the same way that they perceive their own mind working: this evolved with us because it conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors at some point. But when we apply it to the cosmos at large? It's a cognitive malfunction, that's all.

    470:

    So why it is ok to default to disbelief of most claims for which there is no evidence, but 'small brained' to reject a more specific subset of such claims?

    We're getting into Bayesian territory here.

    When there is no evidence, there is no basis to choose.

    People often accept indirect evidence. When it costs $10,000/pound to launch cargo to orbit, it's plausible that nobody has sent one up there and left it. On the other hand, there might be something on the space station that somebody has made tea in. Orbiting teapot!

    Similarly, it's plausible that people who never saw a unicorn invented them from seeing narwhal tusks (narwhals are sea-unicorns) and maybe hearing about rhinoceroses. (Is a rhinoceros a land-unicorn? It depends.) So there's a plausible explanation. Could there have been a land-unicorn in europe? If so, it must have been rare. No fossils have been found, yet.

    Cryptozoologists find a new large mammal maybe every 20 years or so. If they find an ungulant with one horn or antler, does that qualify as a unicorn? If it's the size of a terrier? The size of a goat? Does it count if it isn't the unicorn that europeans used to believe in?

    It's plausible there has never been a unicorn in the last 2000 years except for narwhals and rhinoceroses. Would you bet your life that no evidence will be found in your lifetime? If so, what possible reason would you have to do that?

    There's the question of details. It seems to me more likely that there was a land unicorn, than that there was a land unicorn bigger than a horse that mostly looked like a horse, with a horn precisely like a narwhals, that protected virginal human women from human men. The more details you pile on, the more plausible that some of them are wrong. So the Jewish God and the Christian God etc seem less plausible than "a god".

    On the other hand, there's the question how much you trust eyewitness evidence. Lots of people believe there was a Hitler, with brown eyes and brown hair, who had a distinctive moustache, etc. I never saw him but I accept the word of the people who did. I have less faith in people who quote anonymous witnesses a long time ago. And I'm not sure how much to credit visions people have in dreams, because I often have trouble understanding my own dreams. I sometimes get important emotional meanings from them, but often the physical-world stuff seems to be distorted.

    So when there's no evidence, complicated theories are likely to be wrong at least in some details.

    When there's some evidence, you have to decide how much you trust it. Background evidence -- what you know about the rest of the world, that you hope applies to the parts you haven't seen -- is not fully reliable but often it's all you've got.

    So when the time comes that you must make a choice based on inadequate evidence, then you make your choice. You let your choice be informed by whatever evidence you do have. You should notice that your evidence is biased in various ways, and allow for that, and then you take a deep breath and choose.

    When the time comes that you must choose whether to believe that there is a teapot in orbit or there is none, or that unicorns have existed or they never have, or that there are gods or no gods, please tell me about how you came to that crux where a choice was needed. It will surely be a fascinating story.

    471:
    If anything, the Soviet antipathy towards religious institutions indicates that they saw them as rivals.

    And vice versa, of course, from the Wobblies ("There'll be pie/In the sky/when you die..." as answer back to the Salvation Army's attempts to drown out Wobbly speeches) to the Sandinistas (John Paul II famously read Ernesto Cardenal the riot act on the airport tarmac as soon as he stepped off the plane).

    472:
    It's all nihilism from top to bottom. Though most atheists lack the balls to face up to the consequences, implications and conclusions of their lack of belief.

    So, if you lost your faith for some reason, you'd be out there raping the cattle, stampeding the women and running HSBC with the best of them?

    473:

    My point is that atheism is inescapably nihilistic ... Though most atheists lack the balls to face up to the consequences, implications and conclusions of their lack of belief.

    This is just weird. If you're arguing to the consequences, then the fact that people with no belief in a god can still lead motivated, happy lives is a clear refutation of your thesis - in that it shows that (belief in) an inherent meaning to life is not necessary for a subjectively experienced meaning.

    (*Or a soul, or indeed in free will or a special status as humans...)

    474:

    Er what? University education costed 14k pounds per student? It would be closer to 14k per year per student, if it's anything like the OECD average. Additionally you have to remember the role higher education funding has in funding university research.

    I'm increasing convinced these days that tuition fees/loans system as currently implemented is actually basically a stealth graduate tax - reworded in a way that is palatable to the right wing demographics. The non-repayment issue arising from students not realising increases in income is not a bug, it's a feature. It means that to some extent, the real net-present-value cost of an university education scales to your lifetime income. Reform the system so that students can actually pay off the loan, and the benefit will accrue to those who already can pay it off - it becomes closer to a poll tax.

    It is essentially meaningless to complain about futures, derivatives, loans as being 'imaginary'. Cash flows are real. Follow the cash flows.

    Taking out student loans are inherently actually a bet against the notion that "someone aged 16-18 can have a clear-cut aptitude for some productive occupation that they will pursue for 20-30 years" - if you fail to get a good job, the amount you can lose is bounded above by your actual (low) income - or assets in the case of bankruptcy, whereas if you do succeed you pay the full amount. In other words, you profit if you fail, so you are insuring yourself. By providing this insurance, we make it safer to engage in university education.

    If we actually believed that aptitudes are clear cut and education translates directly to increased wages, then it would make no sense to have student loans - the reasonable price of a loan would be to set it so that the student derives almost exactly zero profit from taking it out.

    475:

    You want me to believe in a God that can't even make me listen?

    It's an open question whether there are gods that can make you listen.

    But if there is in fact a god who communicates with you, but you reject the communication, that is entirely your responsibility.

    On the other hand, if you get such communications you have to decide whether they are random events in the physical world which you have interpreted as communication from a god, or if they are random events in your brain likewise, or whether some entity more powerful than yourself but not a god is communicating with you, maybe not in your best interest. And that's your responsibility too.

    It's altogether simplest and easiest to decide that our dreams are nonsense that should be ignored. There is no meaning in your dreams, so just forget them.

    Yes. Your dreams are senseless and meaningless, and when you wake up you should forget them as quickly as possible. They have nothing to do with your waking life whatsoever. You can choose to believe that if you want to.

    Forget your dreams, they would only trouble you.

    476:

    The practice of corpse-counting is an unseemly re-occurance in online debates lately. It never adds anything to any debate, and only serves to erase anything that is important about the particular disasters or atrocities we are talking about.

    No, the deaths under Hitler is not the same thing as the deaths under Stalin, or under the Inquisition, or under Mao, or under the colonisation of the Americas, or under ISIS, or under the War in Iraq. Trying to draw a broad moral arc under them is at best an exercise in futility, at worst a cowardly way to distance yourself from the genuine moral struggle to avoid future atrocities by proclaiming yourself to have some kind of generic resistance.

    Personally, I believe the current global regime, via climate change and via a failure to prepare for mounting food crises, is currently engaged in the slow and subtle mass murder of tens to hundreds of millions of people. And religious or not, we are doing almost nothing about it.

    Talk about evil atheist Stalin and 'nihilism' all you want, but when the food prices go up, it wouldn't be us in the rich economic West who will be starving, whether we go to church or not.

    477:

    The whole "true atheists must but nihilists" is, at its core, a subtle ad hominem on all non-believers (especially when thrown together with the "you're either for us or ag'in us!" sentiment of having to pick either theism or atheism).

    What I can't figure out is whether the argument originates with a desire to make oneself out to be a special snowflake ("I'm the only real atheist 'round here"); or from the position of a true believer attempting to force atheists into the false choice of admitting to being wannabe mass-murderers or admitting that deep down they really do have a tiny bit of belief in some form of god.

    Anyway. If you're struggling to find meaning in your life becuase of a lack of blind faith, then I feel truly sorry for you.

    478:
    You can choose to believe that if you want to.

    Could you "choose to believe" the sky is green and grass is blue? Or that 2 + 2 = 5?

    Asking me to "Choose to believe" in a God, is of that order of choice. On the other hand engaging in a censentual lie with respect to the existence of God(s) is entirely possible and of much more social utility, I would have thought.

    479:

    Why would a loving God make you a slave?

    Please present evidence that there is a loving god, and I can then list a whole stack of evidence that there is a cruel and uncaring God, and then we can have a jolly good laugh seeing which evidence appears on both lists.

    480:

    I'm pretty sure that "You can choose to believe that if you want" is some of the snarkiest passive-agressiveness that you'll ever come across.

    481:

    "So, if you lost your faith for some reason, you'd be out there raping the cattle, stampeding the women and running HSBC with the best of them?"

    Or maybe you would stop doing all of that if you lost your faith.

    482:

    The self made man who worships his creator

    483:

    That whole "Loving God" thing. Try as I might, I just cannot see how Odin can be so described.

    484:

    "Stampeding cattle."

    "That's not much of a crime."

    "Through the Vatican?"

    485:

    I was always rather fond of the explanation of Greek pantheon that I once read. I can't recall the exact details, but it suggested that the Greeks invented their gods by asking: "If we had absolute power and could do anything we wanted, what would we do?"

    486:

    Also in terms of the deaths under Stalin, we are talking here about a country with over 130 million people with the per capita PPP GDP of South Sudan, a crude birth rate that would today put it in the top 5, diplomatically and economically isolated from its neighbours, in the middle of a dramatic political transition. Clearly it is atheism that killed those people!

    487:
    I'm pretty sure that "You can choose to believe that if you want" is some of the snarkiest passive-agressiveness that you'll ever come across.

    It's a venerable position though! Frequently rehearsed, not least by Pascal. But as has been said above, belief in many cases isn't dependent on a single fact, but on multiple "streams of evidence and experience" (or the lack of it). So "choosing to believe" isn't a simple matter, and may result in the death of the self! Which is the objective of many religious and magickal traditions!!

    If you look at Pascal in more detail (ignoring the wager), he more or less suggests surrounding yourself with believers and a believers lifestyle and belief will come.

    488:
    That whole "Loving God" thing. Try as I might, I just cannot see how Odin can be so described.

    It's Tough Love. Very, very tough in some instances...

    489:

    Oh, I agree. Choice in the case of belief is not really choice.

    I was thinking that phrase is more often now deployed as a passive-agressive dismissal of someone's choice, only missing the words "..., but you're clearly a fool if you do."

    490:

    Er, the Tirpitz tied down an entire battlefleet for most of WW2 just by existing. Or maybe you think that that the Murmansk convoys were escorted by battleships and heavy cruisers purely for fun?

    My point was that the Germans made a huge investment in their capital ships (appropriate name, neh?), and yet achieved little or nothing of strategic or operational note. They didn't stop the Atlantic or Arctic convoys; they couldn't stop any of the invasion fleets (Sicily, South of France, North of France, Italy) or any of the evacuations (Norway, Dunkirk, Greece, Crete). At best, they made the Norwegian campaign possible - but lost virtually every unit they had doing so (after Second Narvik, the Germans had only ten operational destroyers). Tirpitz existed for four years, demanded a crew of 2,000 trained sailors for all that time, and resulted in the death of well over half of them. By 1942, German naval strategy had abandoned its surface fleet.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Barents_Sea

    By 1944, a British infantry division had 3400 vehicles; a German infantry division had 600 vehicles, 150 motorcycles, and 4600 horses for their 1400 horse-drawn wagons.

    One statistic I heard of unknown provenance was that the Afrika Korps held 20% of the entire German Army truck fleet - and lost them all...

    491:

    "You can choose to believe that if you want to."

    Could you "choose to believe" the sky is green and grass is blue? Or that 2 + 2 = 5?

    You can in fact do that with hypnosis, but I mostly don't recommend it. People get bothered, and at some point you run into your old habits and quit.

    It's a useful experience to do that a few times so you can recognize it. You're doing an arithmetic problem and you find out that it's the wrong answer. So you go through it, and everything's right. But the answer is wrong. You do it with a calculator and get the right answer. You do it again by hand and it's wrong. And there's this little sense that something basic has gone wrong, and you look for it, and after awhile you get this sense that things would come out right if 2+2=4. But 2+2=5. That feeling when things just don't quite make sense, because you've accepted an incongruous belief and you haven't given it up yet -- it's valuable to notice how that feels because it's going to happen a lot and the better you recognize it the quicker you can respond.

    Asking me to "Choose to believe" in a God, is of that order of choice.

    No, it isn't. Choosing to believe there are gods is no harder than choosing to disbelieve there are gods. But I agree that choosing to believe in the Christian god is like choosing to believe that 2+2=5. They designed it that way. You can believe in a christian god who loves you and who wants you to do good and be happy -- a god very much like most people's grandmothers -- without too much trouble. But Christian theologians intentionally booby-trapped their doctrines to be self-contradictory.

    492:

    We don't know anything much about gods, but we know quite a bit about brains. It's become rather clear that our consciousnesses are based on processes happening within specific lumps of meat, each of which will someday go the way of all meats. We can reasonably expect to live and die never knowing whether gods exist or having any particular reason to care.

    493:

    Honestly, I've never been able to construct a meaning for life that I can't just as easily deconstruct. Still, you can get used to anything.

    494:

    But if there is in fact a god who communicates with you, but you reject the communication, that is entirely your responsibility.

    If there is a god communicating with me he/she/it is hiding that fact very thoroughly.

    I just hate it when people just mumble into their beard or want to tell something but don't get to the point or permanently contradict themselves. Why should I have lesser standards for gods?

    You mean there is an almighty god but he can not communicate clearly and unambiguously with his subjects? One that really loves all his children but has no problem with the fact that they kill each other in his name? And he still wants me to worship him for that?

    Get real.

    495:

    Not just that, but He/She is also apparently pretending to be an entirely different guy depending on which culture and time in history you grew up in, so that whichever one turns out to be the right one, 99% of humanity will have guessed incorrectly and so apparently be doomed to eternal damnation.

    I think believing in the existence of a God that cares whether or not you believe in him, is therefore the belief in a very cruel system.

    496:

    We can reasonably expect to live and die never knowing whether gods exist or having any particular reason to care.

    Yes, exactly!

    So why decide that gods do exist or don't exist?

    A god that offered to extend your consciousness past the expiration date of the meat might seem important to you, or maybe not.

    A god that told you important things about how to live, things that seemed true or useful to you -- if they seem true or useful then use them, regardless of the source.

    A god that threatens and bribes you, to get you to do things you otherwise wouldn't think were worth doing? Show us it isn't a bluff.

    But gods that don't have much to do with us? Who really cares? If they were under some sort of threat I'd want to help them, like I'd send money to save the whales, but it isn't all that big a deal.

    497:

    You mean there is an almighty god but he can not communicate clearly and unambiguously with his subjects?

    I dunno. What would you accept?

    If he got somebody to write it down and tell you it came from him? Obviously not.

    Maybe he could do a Youtube video? With Miley Cyrus and and Cindy Crawford sitting at his feet taking notes?

    Maybe he could come to your house and talk about what it was like creating the universe? Would you believe that?

    I figure if you don't listen to your dreams then you haven't given it a fair shot. On the other hand, when you do listen to your dreams you might be taking pot luck. Some people's dreams tell them to do crazy things, and if you choose to obey whatever your dreams tell you to do, you might wind up in a mental hospital after killing babies or something. "The voices made me do it!"

    I don't say you should do whatever your dreams tell you to. But if you pay no attention to them, how do you know what you're missing?

    498:

    Tirpitz existed for four years, demanded a crew of 2,000 trained sailors for all that time, And, for your argument to be valid, the battleships and heavy cruisers that the allies escorted the Murmansk convoys with had to be spare vessels, run on air and be uncrewed. There would also have had to be no specialist air raids against Tirpitz carrying bombs that took about 1 week per bomb to manufacture.

    I'm not claiming that German strategy was perfect; just that forcing an enemy to use capital ships as convoy escorts has value in itself.

    499:

    But gods that don't have much to do with us? Who really cares? If they were under some sort of threat I'd want to help them, like I'd send money to save the whales, but it isn't all that big a deal.

    Thank you very much (not!) for giving me the plot motor of a high fantasy novel that I don't have time to write.

    (Plot motor is as follows: posit that there are gods and their primordial squabbling created the universe we live in. I'm talking about the god of time, the god of the weak nuclear force, the god of electromagnetism, and so on. Humanity evolves in this cosmos but we came as a surprise to them and by and large they're not that keen on us.

    (This being a fantasy universe, (a) human life has evolved or otherwise arrived from somewhere, and (b) "magic" works -- the underlying framework within which the gods do their shit -- and it is amenable to manipulation by anything with a complex enough nervous system. Dragons, maybe; humans definitely.

    (One day, a Crazy Priest Guy gets it into his head that this is all back-asswards and the Gods are damned well going to pay attention to him. So he sets out to get their attention by murdering one of the littlest gods -- say, the god of unique snowflake formation. This gives CPG enormous magical mojo by human standards and he sets himself up to serially kill ALL the gods and take their powers, until he becomes the One True God (or alternatively: Dark Lord). Our hero/heroine/whoever then has to figure out how to stop him. Complication ensues along the way because each time CPG kills a deity, whatever they're the deity of becomes unstable/goes AWOL until he takes over; the race is to get to him before he does something really inadvisable, like killing Gravity or Electromagnetism, or worse -- the god of lambda calculus -- because he doesn't understand this shit and is playing well outside his weight level.

    (Oh. And the gods? Being ineffable, trying to get their attention is like trying to get the attention of someone who is profoundly, debilitatingly far out on the autism spectrum: frustrating, hard work, and prone to backfiring horribly if they misunderstand you.)

    Now I've made a note of this idiotic proposal I don't have to write the book, so I can go back to working on the final edits to DARK STATE ...

    500:

    You mean there is an almighty god but he can not communicate clearly and unambiguously with his subjects?

    I dunno. What would you accept?

    If he got somebody to write it down and tell you it came from him? Obviously not.

    If I wrote a book and told you that God gave me its contents in my dreams, would you believe it?

    ... Maybe he could come to your house and talk about what it was like creating the universe? Would you believe that?

    What about speaking to me as a burning bush? And of course answering my question so I can check his trustworthyness.

    If he doesn't want to visit every non-believer personally, nowadays he could tour the world and give shows in stadiums.

    501:

    J Thomas,

    I missed the post where you presented your case for why dreams specifically are particularly plausible/credible candidates for messages from a godhood. Because they're bizarre, ambiguous, and generally either forgotten or misremembered? ;) Actually I suppose the idea is something like that they bypass conscious, managed thought or something... But if so, why should we not consider other nonrational thought processes as coming from god? Maybe the voice of god is in the neuroses, and my CBT sessions are closing my soul's ears to god's commands...

    (BTW, I'm increasingly wary of assuming you actually believe anything you're saying. You seem to embrace a wide array of only minimally compatible attitudes in your comments... I'm guessing probably consciously and out of a sense of intellectual curiosity. It does make it hard to judge whether you're endorsing a position or merely arguing it for the joy of the debate.)

    502:

    +1 for continuing on DARK STATE

    If people want to read high fantasy about gods in a secular world they can read American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Brian McClellan's Powder Mage trilogy, Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn or Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books (and probably lots of other good books).

    503:
    I dunno. What would you accept?

    100 billion pounds in my current account. Cleared funds, no questions asked would be quite convincing!

    If we're talking about the Christian God, then being Omniscient He knows exactly what would convice me that He exists. Being Omnipotent He could provide this with no effort. And because He's all loving He's motivated to do so, where there's a downside to not believing in Him.

    Should I receive such tangible evidence of His existence, I will post from Cuba, and let you know, in fact we'll have a party to celebate or as correctly translated celebrate.

    504:

    I missed the post where you presented your case for why dreams specifically are particularly plausible/credible candidates for messages from a godhood.

    Where would you look, if you were looking for messages from gods?

    Messages transmitted through other human beings are obvious candidates for man-in-the-middle attacks. I'd be cautious with those.

    Presumably a god could start up a volcano and have it make roaring motions that sound like messages in english, and puffs of smoke in the form of english letters, and if the letters were clear enough everybody would agree it had to be a message from a god. Or it could be in greek, or russian, or sanscrit.

    A god could make it rain blood, and the droplets on your doorstep would fall in the form of neat Copperplate Gothic script, and if you were careful you would stop and read them before you stepped on them.

    A god could give you a book with pages of gold with the message inscribed on them.

    But I haven't seen a god choose that way to communicate. You could find godly meaning in the flight of birds, or the shape of clouds, or the way yarrow sticks fall. But you'd need a key to interpret them, and you might prefer to believe it was all random.

    I think dreams are an obvious candidate. Everybody dreams, and we all have our own dreams. When we are awake we usually think our waking logic is reality, and dismiss anything else. Is our current way of thinking the absolute truth that can never be improved on? Probably not. In dream-logic we think a different way, but we wake up and tend to dismiss it as "just dreams".

    So if you want to say that no gods ever communicate with you, but you have been ignoring your dreams, I say that you haven't been covering the territory. There's no guarantee that there are messages from gods there, but you really ought to look before you claim there aren't any.

    I'm increasingly wary of assuming you actually believe anything you're saying. You seem to embrace a wide array of only minimally compatible attitudes in your comments...

    I get that a lot. I'm sincere except when I'm obviously sarcastic. My ideas are compatible for me. If you don't find them compatible with each other, maybe you have made an assumption I haven't made, that creates an incompatibility for you. If you think you see an incompatibility between two ideas, and you ask how someone could fail to disbelieve both of those at once, you might see a way. Or you could ask.

    505:

    And the gods ... profoundly, debilitatingly far out on the autism spectrum

    Autistic people tend to really enjoy spinning things, and everything big in this universe rotates ...

    506:

    @ # 463 Seriously, what is it about existence that leads you to believe that their is no God? The total, complete utter absesnce of any evidence at all for any BSF, no matter how loudly & threateningly "his" proponents claim to the contrary .... 463 is typical lying-bleiever wriggling ( I might substitute "seriously deluded" for liar, here... ) Not impressed, again.

    507:

    I rather think think that you're shouting at the tide Greg (or possibly feeding some kind of sub-bridge dwelling entity...)

    Also surprised the phrase "God exists outside time and space" hasn't been used yet. Although there's been a careful avoidance of falling into the god-of-the-gaps trap.

    This debate would be much more entertaining if it wasn't for the fact that a sizeable chunk of the population of the world considers the answer worth murdering and/or dying for.

    508:

    JT, thanks for answering...

    If you don't find them compatible with each other, maybe you have made an assumption I haven't made, that creates an incompatibility

    This is very likely.

    But I haven't seen a god choose that way to communicate.

    I'm tempted to say you haven't seen a god choose any way to communicate, but that would be shameless snark (I do understand what you mean).

    On the other hand, I think you're fishing. You're looking for places where there could be concealed messages, as though god wants for some reason to speak unclearly. To me that seems the least plausible way for god to communicate: why should ve want to speak in code, unless ve is constrained by actually being unable to communicate directly? (I know that there are rationalizations, but they tend to be unsatisfying to me.)

    If god wanted to convey a message, and if ve was not constrained, there would be nothing to stop ver simply manifesting right in your mind - not quaintly and obtusely as in dreams, but simply and directly. We could all walk with god every day. Of course, this does not happen (at least as a generality).

    Let's just assume that ve did not want to communicate directly, via spoken words we could all acknowledge hearing (setting aside the reasons). I still don't see the confusing mundanity of dreams as an especially promising communication route (maybe you have more informative dreams that I do; in which case, can you let god know there's a problem with the line at this end?).

    Of course, ve might communicate directly but bypassing words or messages altogether - through our emotions or our sensory experiences. Many believers claim that this is exactly their experience: they 'know' god is there, they 'feel' ver, etc. As someone who has no such sense of god, though, I'm disinclined to give that much credibility - and I don't like where that leads in terms of its implications for the nature of god.

    509:

    Read the Wikipedia entry on the F35. Seems to be well sourced with plenty of references. The VTOL options are going to be avoided for various reasons. Stress on planes, damage to ground and/or platform, etc...

    As to fueling what I said was it was going to cost more in capital and ongoing costs and time to have both. And add weight.

    I guess I need to bow out of this. I say blue and folks tell me 6 isn't right.

    510:

    Among other things, I suspect that the very fact that you came about as the random meeting of millions of sperm and hundreds (thousands?) of eggs, survived your gestation, and were programmed into a functioning adult by your society, all that is proof that the Goddess* loves you and wants you to exist.

    What more do you want? A sparkly unicorn with that?

    *The Goddess in this case is, of course, Eris, Goddess of chaos and randomness.

    511:

    One thing to point out is that a human brain can no more experience reality directly than a general purpose computer can process data without an operating system. We're both cultural and natural beings, a product of genes, environment, and culture.

    The awkward thing about religion, spirituality, and science is that, in all three cases, someone can study under a qualified teacher, in a proper environment with the right tools, and with a bit of luck, they can learn and practice science, religion, or spirituality. They can learn to observe quantum phenomena, symbioses, and supernovae, or they can learn to meditate, pray, talk to God in dreams, or talk to God through the use of psychedelics or other means. In the abstract, the process is the same: you can be taught science, you can be taught spirituality or religion, and all lead to experiences that other people with your training share.

    That's kind of the problem. Most of us don't have direct experience with cosmology or quantum physics. Instead, we believe what other people tell us about these things. An atheist who has not done the experiments personally accepts the results others present as real based on belief in the experimenters' trustworthiness, not personal experience (in most cases).

    The same is true for religion and spirituality. A lot of people have spiritual experiences, but if they believe the great teachers, it is because they trust them, not because they share the same experience.

    So what is a naive realist like me to do? I've had spiritual experiences. While I'm a trained scientist, I suck at cosmology, so I have to take their statements about reality on faith. If I was strictly rational, I'd therefore reject all the science I hadn't personally verified, and embrace the spirituality I had personally experienced. Isn't that what rationality is about, trusting your own experience above what others try to force you to believe is true, whether or not you can successfully complete the education they push you through?

    The key thing is that word: belief. That's the unpleasant secret at the base of the atheism vs. theism conflict. People have to choose, as an act of faith, how much of their own experience to believe and how much to believe of what other people tell them. Unfortunately for those seeing experience as the guide to reality, it's just as possible to learn to have a religious or spiritual experience as it is to learn to experience cosmology directly.

    We're limited beings with limited perceptions and limited processing power, and we have to build our own operating systems. In some people, a working operating system includes a concept of the divine. In other people it doesn't.

    So what do you call a person who realizes that both science and spirituality have to be taken as a mix of faith and experience? Is that person a theist or an atheist?

    When we're fighting about whether atheism or theism is right, we're essentially arguing about who has proper operating system on a philosophic basis. We're not talking about who has the better operating system on a functional basis, because that would involve studying metrics like how many offspring were produced, how many students were taught (spreading culture is as much about inheritance as spreading genes is), whether practitioners were happy, healthy, productive, lived longer, etc. Personally I think that's an interesting field of study, but not a lot of people want to go into it, for some reason.

    512:

    Wow, what an epic thread! But how would the existence of God and/or the victory of the Axis have altered the trajectory of world capitalism, the Singularity and the space program?

    513:

    Science is repeatable and consistent. While you may not choose to repeat the experiment yourself, you could do so if you chose with a certainty of obtaining consistent results. In addition scientific experiments generally are not taken as valid until they are confirmed independently.

    While there is a degree of trust/belief that the entire scientific system isn't rigged, there is also plenty of objective directly observable byproducts of science that reinforce, overall, is a good system that seems to be working (cars, planes, trains, refrigerators, etc)

    While plenty of people claim to have religious experiences, these experiences are neither repeatable nor consistent. This puts them outside of the paradigm of science. These experiences also lack byproducts (miracles, rain of frogs, curses, prayers for interventions etc)

    The easiest way to summarize this is I believe in science because cars (consistently, all the time) and i don't believe in religion because not-miracles (consistently, all the time).

    Honestly, none of this is the least bit hard from a logical perspective. The reason why it comes up over and over is not because there is any rational proof of God. If I built an entirely logical android/computer it would not deduce God. but because people desperately want to believe in some kind of meaning and are relatively good at fooling themselves.

    514:

    I think you're fishing. You're looking for places where there could be concealed messages, as though god wants for some reason to speak unclearly. To me that seems the least plausible way for god to communicate: why should ve want to speak in code, unless ve is constrained by actually being unable to communicate directly?

    I don't right off know why a god would want to communicate with us at all. Presumably he might get complete one-way communication from us, and if we're here doing what he wants us to, as we presumably would be, why bother to communicate back? I'm unclear on the whole concept.

    But when people discuss whether it happens, my natural thought is that a god who wanted to communicate with human beings would surely also want to communicate with whales and bison and tree sloths etc. Why not? Is there some reason to think we are the only ones he'd want to communicate with?

    And if a god is communicating with all these others, why would he want to communicate with us in english or arabic or basque? As far as I know this business about warping our thinking to fit into patterns of language is something that only humans do, and I don't see why a god would particularly approve of language. Maybe he would, but it isn't the obvious natural assumption.

    So, it might be a sort of provincial sort of thing to expect the kind of communication people insist on. "HA n00b! F U n0 n0 1337sp33k 7h3n U suxx0r! 133tsp33k 15 ub3r! T3xt 133t 0r g0 4w4y!" A polite god might possibly go away if asked.

    Let's just assume that ve did not want to communicate directly, via spoken words we could all acknowledge hearing (setting aside the reasons). I still don't see the confusing mundanity of dreams as an especially promising communication route (maybe you have more informative dreams that I do; in which case, can you let god know there's a problem with the line at this end?).

    It seems to me that a god who wanted above all else to communicate clearly with us, should be able and willing to do that. Since people say that it doesn't happen, it seems reasonable that whatever gods there are do not have that as a first priority.

    Onthe other hand people who claim that no god tries to communicate with them, who make no attempt to remember and understand their dreams, are probably not covering the territory.

    515:

    But people aren’t good enough at fooling themselves, which is why we have priests, artists and writers. Their job is to fool us into finding life bearable, interesting and magical.

    My definition of magic (of which every religion is just an application) is: the art and science of fooling yourself and others.

    The rational person says: “magical thinking is bad, because it’s not true.”

    The magical thinker says: “magical thinking is good, because reality sucks.”

    The faith of the rationalist is that the truth about this universe is bearable for frail human minds, and it’s better to know the harsh truth than believe the pleasant fantasy. Personally, I consider this an open question, and don’t see any reason in principle why I should be opposed to those who would rather live in fantasy worlds of their own or others’ construction, even if they are called “religions”.

    Also, the point about “miracles” and “magic” is that they are, by nature, non-repeatable. They are those incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that will never come again. You don’t use scientific methodology to produce them, or scientific standards to judge them – to do so is to miss the entire point!

    516:

    My religious education at school made me an agnostic. But I was taught that conscience was "The lamp of God within man" (St Ignatius I think). That would be a communication we all have with God. And as for God being outside time and space if the Copenhagen interpretation is true God merely has to observe the end of the universe to collapse all the wave functions and make it real. No need for a God at the beginning.

    517:

    "While plenty of people claim to have religious experiences, these experiences are neither repeatable nor consistent. This puts them outside of the paradigm of science. These experiences also lack byproducts (miracles, rain of frogs, curses, prayers for interventions etc)"

    Sounds just like mathematics or String Theory

    518:

    "The rational person says: “magical thinking is bad, because it’s not true.”

    The magical thinker says: “magical thinking is good, because reality sucks.”"

    The Chaos Magician says: "Whatever works"

    519:
    While plenty of people claim to have religious experiences, these experiences are neither repeatable nor consistent. This puts them outside of the paradigm of science.

    Well… I don't think that's entirely true. For example hyperreligiosity is an observed repeated behaviour with some temporal lobe epilepsy patients, psilocybin has been repeatedly linked to folk having mystical experiences, and while the experiments using magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes by the so-called god helmet are well dodgy (not properly double blinded,. and not repeated, etc) - the fact is that you did get folk reporting common experiences - whether the cause was the helmet, the experimental environment, or whatever.

    Now — speaking as a technical agnostic, working atheist - I think those "spiritual experiences" are just stuff that's happening in the meat. Like OGH I suspect it's a "feature" of our theory-of-mind implementations.

    So I don't see why their less open to science than any other psychological / cognitive / neuroscience phenomena. If we can go play with synesthesia, prosopagnosi, misophonia, etc. — why not spiritual experiences too?

    Just coz some folk think the causes of those experiences aren't explicable by scientific means doesn't mean they don't happen.

    520:

    "a belief that the world outside their body works the same way that they perceive their own mind working: this evolved with us because it conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors at some point"

    That point must have been way back in the evolutionary tree, at least to where dog and human precursors went their separate ways. A dozing pooch attributes agency even to a pile of snow sliding off the roof, and instantly goes to intruder alert status.

    521:

    You're right, but it's not a win for spirituality so much as it's a slam against string theory.

    522:

    I'd point out one other problem with science: the idea of repeatability. In my former field (ecology) there was so little money for experiments that it was considered bad form to merely repeat someone else's experiment. After all, the money spent checking to see if someone else is right could just as easily be used to make a new discovery. It's also a field where experiments often take years to produce results. In my PhD experiments, it took a full year to run each trial, prep to finish.

    If that leaves you sputtering or sounds weird, then you happen to be in one of the rare fields where there's so much money lying around that researchers can afford to replicate studies. This privileged group doesn't include most space probes, or any of the minor sciences like conservation biology, ecology, mycology, etc. I'd venture a guess that most sciences don't get many opportunities to replicate their studies, simply because there's not enough money around for the task.

    So if your standard for belief is that science has to be replicated, I'd suggest not only that you're limited to what science you can believe, but that you've got to be careful (as Adrian noted) around some of these meditation classes, big churches, and other mass religious phenomena. After all, if they're having replicable experiences in church every Sunday, why isn't that as good as science?

    Do you trust what Dawn and New Horizons are reporting, or not?

    523:

    Speaking of religion, I am a Christian and agree that I certainly do not know the mind of God, or indeed, the mind of an awful lot of other people. It pleases me to be that way, and it's difficult to speak of spiritual experiences in a way that keeps one out of the loony bin, so I'm usually quiet (though Elgin's description of Silverweb McDaniel in the Ozark trilogy appears to sound about right to me).

    That does not stop me from having a wonky sense of humor or having the usual character flaws that the human condition is usually heir to.

    That being said, I find scientific studies of mystics of great interest (there are some EEG's of mystics when they're doing their thing that look kind of neat).

    And very little of this has to do with the Huge Paradigm shift of when automation literally floods the economy with material goods that the vast majority may not be able to afford, and how the politics shake out. Pointing out how religious affiliations in the States among certain politicians does not seem to map onto actual policies is a fairly popular sport in my household, though the targets involved are easy enough to hit with a spitball from a thousand feet (I speak metaphorically, of course, I really can't spit that hard, though for some people I would give it my best shot).

    And as an occasional writer, the temptation to take the situation and have fun with the side effects in my own part of the world is getting bigger all the time. Haven't figured out how to involve dragons yet, but I feel confident that a Magic Sword can be threaded into the narrative somehow without resorting to gaming metaphors (Ok, I just reread HALTING STATE last week...).

    I will likely see a lot of how it really happens--women live fairly long in my family, and both my son and daughter are likely to be in the middle of it.

    But it is fascinating to see it coming down the road, although there are times when it feels like facing down the Hogwarts Exprress.

    524:

    "I'd point out one other problem with science: the idea of repeatability. In my former field (ecology) there was so little money for experiments that it was considered bad form to merely repeat someone else's experiment. After all, the money spent checking to see if someone else is right could just as easily be used to make a new discovery"

    This is called "shitty science". It is perfectly possible to do science poorly.

    as far as replicable experiences in big churches, sure, they are not just having any experiences that support a belief in God in any way. If they are, or claim they are, it is easy enough to get a team down there and do some science to see if anything is happenings. Which there never is

    525:

    Actually, re. science, it's more complicated than that. The fun and useful thing when doing science is that it builds upon work which other people did before, even if that work is wrong. The implications of one piece of research feed into the next, and if the first was wrong, it is likely that will be found when the next piece of research doesn't work out. So it is self correcting, even if it takes a few years.

    The important difference between spiritual experiences and science 'experiences' is that the latter build a world of common experience and agreement, whereas the former doesn't, although words and such are flexible enough that it can appear so.

    526:

    Er what? University education costed 14k pounds per student? It would be closer to 14k per year per student, if it's anything like the OECD average. Additionally you have to remember the role higher education funding has in funding university research.

    One Russell group university whose accounts I'm familiar with was doing it for 3.5k/yr per undergraduate. (They would not appreciate me naming them, for reasons that should be obvious). The UK university sector is/was one of the most cost-effective in the world.

    I recommend Stefan Collini's review of McGettigans book at the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out for some background.

    527:

    I'd point out one other problem with science: the idea of repeatability. In my former field (ecology) there was so little money for experiments that it was considered bad form to merely repeat someone else's experiment. After all, the money spent checking to see if someone else is right could just as easily be used to make a new discovery. It's also a field where experiments often take years to produce results. In my PhD experiments, it took a full year to run each trial, prep to finish.

    If that leaves you sputtering or sounds weird, then you happen to be in one of the rare fields where there's so much money lying around that researchers can afford to replicate studies.

    That just means that science is poorly funded, not that there is a problem with the scientific method.

    528:

    The awkward thing about religion, spirituality, and science is that, in all three cases, someone can study under a qualified teacher, in a proper environment with the right tools, and with a bit of luck, they can learn and practice science, religion, or spirituality.

    The same is true for pickpocketing, diving, macramé and lots of other things. What's awkward about it?

    529:

    I'd point out one other problem with science: the idea of repeatability. In my former field (ecology) there was so little money for experiments that it was considered bad form to merely repeat someone else's experiment.

    I'd note the word "merely" here. "Merely" repeating the experiment tells you little if fraud is not involved; if they made an error of inference, you repeat it blindly too. Hence the value of experiments that are variants of other experiments, testing their conclusions with other equipment, other methods. If their science is fraud or erroneous, you still discover it; if their science is correct, you still bring new information to the table.

    530:

    A philosopher looks for a black cat in a dark room.

    A spiritualist looks for a black cat in a dark room which doesn't contain any cats.

    A theist is the first one who cries "I've found it!"

    531:

    There is the experience, and then follows the interpretation of the experience. Which are often two completely unrelated things.

    BTW, "Holy" simply means "entire", "whole", as you might have guessed.

    Then we have the entirety of subjective experience, none of which is amenable to scientific testing. And no, fMRI will not tell you anything about the subjective experience of the taste of a strawberry. See "Qualia". Not to mention consciousness, which cannot even be defined, although I don't doubt some atheists will claim to possess it.

    532:

    Then we have the entirety of subjective experience, none of which is amenable to scientific testing. And no, fMRI will not tell you anything about the subjective experience of the taste of a strawberry.

    Not quite. Subjective experience might not be amenable to direct scientific measurements, but you can still place subjects in controlled environments and ask them about their experience.

    533:

    Another reason .... to be very suspicious (to say the least) about the insane control-freaks of the SNP. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/11445663/Scottish-universities-warn-against-SNP-political-control.html I have heard, btw, that their proposal to have a blck warden for every child in Scotland has run into problems not unconnected ewith the Human Rights legislation? Can someone confirm or deny this, please?

    534:

    A philosopher looks for a black cat in a dark room.

    A spiritualist looks for a black cat in a dark room which doesn't contain any cats.

    A theist is the first one who cries "I've found it!"

    An atheist knows for sure there is no black cat in the dark room. Not because he looked and didn't find one. Because first, there is no reason for anybody to think there is a black cat there in the first place. And second, if there was a friendly black cat who loved people in the room, it would have approached the atheist and demanded to be petted.

    Therefore there is no black cat.

    Me, I say if you don't already know what's in the dark room, be cautious. If there might be an unfriendly cat there, at least wear a cup. They can see and fight a lot better in the dark than you can. And if you smell a vaguely familiar sweetish odor and hear a faint slithering sound, leave the area quickly and quietly. Pit vipers can see a whole lot better in the dark than you can.

    535:

    Then we have the entirety of subjective experience, none of which is amenable to scientific testing. Really? The person involved in said subjective experience ... Their nerves & other autonomic functions are not working? This is called: DEAD. If their nerves & senses are working, then they can be monitored & measured, can't they? Scanning of the brain, no? Measuring tiny electrochemical impulses along the nerves, no?

    Look, this "detection" business I mentioned ... We can detect, as stated all the way from photons/neurinoes up through electrons & atoms & molecules & life & planets & out to the limits of observability in space & time. No BSF And, even more importantly, no indirect traces of BSF either.

    Example: We are virtually certain "Dark Matter" exists, because we can inderectly trace & measure the effects it produces. Even though "Dark Energy" looks an awful lot like uncle Albert's "Big Lambda" we are nowhere near as certain that it really exists, so investigations are still underway (as they are with DM, of course).

    Now then: BSF There is no smidgen of a scintilla of a hint of any detection, directly or indirectly, anywhere, anywhen of a BSF.

    So - JT @ 445: In the meantime, BSF is held not to exist." Your third step does not follow. You can do it, but it's an esthetic preference with no particular logic requiring it. Agreed - I left out a step, silly me. Follow a n other poster & use "Ockham" - what's the simplest explanation that answers/fits all the known facts? Answer - BSF is non-existent. Sorry about that.

    AND & therfore to DD @ 462 There IS A complete "absence of evidence" - over to you to produce some.

    536:

    And just for the amusement of atheists who claim God has not been in contact with them... The contact manifests as consciousness. The single most important thing in the universe for an individual from a subjective POV.

    537:

    At the risk of being repetitive, with the possible exception of the USMC, VTO as a technique is over 30 years out of date. Also, while I won't say which articles or why (you either know or don't need to know) Wikipedia articles that refer to current or near future defence technologies and operational practice can be distinctly inaccurate.

    I won't deny that VTO has burnt carrier decks, but that's why current practice has tended to STOVL.

    538:
    And just for the amusement of atheists who claim God has not been in contact with them... The contact manifests as consciousness.

    "No it doesn't" seems an adequate refutation while observing that God must really hate the brain damaged even unto serious head injuries.

    539:

    The internet (To which you also have access), suggests that some lawyer thinks it contravenes human rights legislation; seeing as you can find lawyers who will say anything about anything or anyone, that isn't saying much. It only matters if they actually undertake a legal challenge. Amusingly, one such article from over a year ago is from a Christian organisation with reactionary policies: "Mr O’Neill has already given his preliminary opinion to the Christian Institute. Christian Institute director Colin Hart said:

    “This amounts to a monumental attack on orthodox family life. We could find a situation where a child objects to being taught about gay marriage in school and is reported to the named person who then calls in social services to deal with the parents because their views are not in line with political correctness. " http://no2np.org/press_release/betrayal-parents-snp-face-court-action/ They are actually appealing their attempt to stop it which was thrown out by a judge a few weeks ago.

    540:

    "... You can do it, but it's an esthetic preference with no particular logic requiring it." Agreed - I left out a step, silly me. Follow a n other poster & use "Ockham" - what's the simplest explanation that answers/fits all the known facts? Answer - BSF is non-existent.

    See, this sentiment that you should throw out every explanation except the one that looks simplest to you -- that's an esthetic preference without any real logic requiring it.

    There's nothing wrong with you doing it, if that's what you want to do. But it doesn't prove anything.

    We can extend the reasoning.

    There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that souls exist -- there's even no reason to think we would know how to measure a soul if there was one. Therefore you, Greg Tingey, have no soul.

    We have no way to measure consciousness. Lots of people claim they have a subjective feeling that they are conscious, but there's no measurement. We can measure neurons, and brain waves, and lots of things, but we can't measure the difference between somebody who is consciously experiencing things versus somebody who is going through their daily routine like a zombie without any actual consciousness. It isn't even clear what it would mean to measure consciousness.

    Therefore you are not conscious and you never have been.

    I had a funny explanation that there is no such thing as literary taste, and by the standard of number of copies sold which is a fair measure of how much people like a book, The Davinci Code is the nineth best book of all time. But it was too long.

    541:

    An atheist knows for sure there is no black cat in the dark room. Not because he looked and didn't find one. Because first, there is no reason for anybody to think there is a black cat there in the first place. And second, if there was a friendly black cat who loved people in the room, it would have approached the atheist and demanded to be petted.

    No, an atheist would have brought light to the room, and then there are two possible outcomes: 1) "Look, there is a kitty!!" *) 2) "It's empty, let's look somewhere else"

    *) In case of an unfriendly cat further research is required

    542:

    An atheist knows for sure there is no black cat in the dark room.

    No. In this (rather strained) metaphor, the atheist says, 'Well, I can't hear, smell, or feel a cat. I mean, sure, there could be a black cat here, I guess. But by that token there could be, I dunno, spiders or watermelons or reclusive pygmy elephants as well. Actually we've been fumbling around for ages - we've found the bike in the corner, the boxes of old photographs, the tricky garden hose we thought was a snake at first, and I'm pretty sure those were rat dropping and not chocolate-covered raisins. Still no cat though. Why are we looking for a bloody cat anyway? Can't we look for the fuse box instead?'

    543:

    So your definition of god is "the cause that gives us consciousness"? Anything else we need to know about this "god"? Why can't consciousness develop by accident?

    544:

    There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that souls exist -- there's even no reason to think we would know how to measure a soul if there was one.

    I agree that there's probably no such thing as a "soul". It's a construct which was probably invented to explain the difference between dead persons and living ones. Later it was used to define a person, and since souls can't be measured, it was easy to deny humans being a person (as Europeans did with black people) or separate socially between good souls (us) and evil souls (them). Also good for legitimizing killing, since after all you only kill the body, not the soul.

    In my view this whole body and soul dichotomy is pretty outdated, even if nowadays it funnily has a renaissance in form of speculation about mind transfers to AI substrates etc.

    545:

    In this (rather strained) metaphor, the atheist says, 'Well, I can't hear, smell, or feel a cat. I mean, sure, there could be a black cat here, I guess.

    To my way of thinking that right there makes him an agnostic.

    It's the spirited claim that it is known there is no god, in the absence of evidence, that makes someone an atheist and not an agnostic.

    Why are we looking for a bloody cat anyway? Can't we look for the fuse box instead?

    I like that! Or get headlamps. But of course, before we find a source of light we're still stuck with the dark room.

    546:

    I like that! Or get headlamps. But of course, before we find a source of light we're still stuck with the dark room.

    Forget the dark room, there's a whole world outside we can go play in. It has even alternating day and night!

    Also there are a lot of different animals and other interesting stuff there, and many different cats.

    547:

    Greg, the Telegraph has a strong anti-SNP slant to its news reporting. You can't believe anything they print about Scotland or Scottish politics, unless it's a tourism guide to the Edinburgh Festival (and even then, it'll be spun to talk down the radical fringe).

    If you want coverage of Scotland, you need to cross-reference The Scotsman (anti-SNP, Edinburgh based) and The Herald (pro-indy, neutral on the SNP, Glasgow based). Then you might get something close to an impartial opinion.

    (There are plenty of things to criticise the SNP on, but alarmist crap in the Telegraph isn't it. The sting is in para 5 of the torygraph article -- it's basically a recycled public relations piece from the head of a private university who's basically firing a warning shot at the executive because he wants to be free to make a profit from those rich English students, rather than having to provide free tuition to Scots in return for government funding of higher education. Spun by the news editor to make it look as if he's sticking up for the status quo, rather than for privatization.)

    548:
    Also there are a lot of different animals and other interesting stuff there, and many different cats.

    All cats are aspects of the One Cat.

    549:

    Me, I say if you don't already know what's in the dark room, be cautious. If there might be an unfriendly cat there, at least wear a cup. They can see and fight a lot better in the dark than you can. And if you smell a vaguely familiar sweetish odor and hear a faint slithering sound, leave the area quickly and quietly. Pit vipers can see a whole lot better in the dark than you can.

    And there you have the basic premise of the Laundry Files in a nutshell!

    550:

    Why can't god develop by accident? The notion of a god as some omnipotent and omniscient being is a rather new concept which came out of the Middle East.

    Anyway, today I choose to define God = Consciousness.

    Feel free to debunk either side of the equation. Here's Dennett's attempt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

    551:

    I have no idea what you are trying to say here. If you can define god as whatever you like, that leaves things a bit uncertain.

    552:

    But that's what everyone does. That's why the definition is so wideranging. Atheists only seem to go for that strawman BillyBob the Televangelist and his definition.

    553:

    "It is my very vague understanding that the French are big on Homeopathy. Is this true and if so does anyone know why?"

    Having lived there a while I think its just a different attitude, they're more open to alternatives while in the Anglo-Saxon tradition alternative medicines are axiomatically all the things that don't work.

    To me is looks a bit like this; "Bark tea for my headache? Begone witch with that unscientific rubbish I shall take two aspirin."

    554:

    If you can define god as whatever you like, that leaves things a bit uncertain.

    I think we've demonstrated by many examples that things are a bit uncertain.

    Some of the people here want to be the only ones who get to define what god is, and god is a big guy with a white beard who lives on a cloud and who doesn't exist. No other concept of god need apply.

    When I was a child in summer camp I talked with a Mormon kid who explained that Mormons had the chance to become gods themselves. They were going to teach him to work miracles himself, but he wasn't old enough yet. I was kind of disappointed later to find out that Mormons only get the chance to become gods after they die.

    I think most people agree that a god can't be just anybody or anything. God can't be a homeless guy with bad teeth -- gods have to be majestic, not somebody that dogs pee on and cops bully.

    Gods should be more than human, but how much more does it take to qualify? It's all pretty mushy. And how can you be sure which are gods and which are demons? If neither one exists then it's irrelevant. But if they both exist, then this is a vital question.

    It's like with unicorns, how strictly you define it makes a big difference in how hard it is to find one. A quadruped with one horn is pretty easy. One that looks just like the unicorn on a fantasy novel cover might be harder.

    555:

    As I tried to imply. You're arguing against a point I was NOT making.

    556:

    That's a fine knock-down argument for you.

    557:

    As far as I can see, the atheists on here are winning the argument.

    558:

    "One Russell group university whose accounts I'm familiar with was doing it for 3.5k/yr per undergraduate. (They would not appreciate me naming them, for reasons that should be obvious)."

    Reference to mysterious unsourced figures you are individually aware of is singularly unconvincing. The OECD collates statistics on annual expenditure on tertiary education. If you think 3.5k/yr is representative, then you are basically claiming an international conspiracy exists.

    559:

    Also you are basically asking me to read an English literature critic's review of a philosopher's book about the economics of education, and frankly I don't see why this exercise would be worth my time.

    560:

    Atheists only seem to go for that strawman BillyBob the Televangelist and his definition

    That's because BillyBob the Televangelist actually defines something as "god". Whereas you seem to deliberately avoid defining anything. I think there is a word for such debating technique. Has something to do with bridges.

    561:

    It may also be relevant that BillyBob the Televangelist's definition of God impinges on others' quality of life; I don't get the impression Dirk is campaigning for daily prayer to the anthropomorphic Strong Nuclear Force in schools, so his definition of God is entirely irrelevant to me.

    562:
    I think most people agree that a god can't be just anybody or anything. God can't be a homeless guy with bad teeth -- gods have to be majestic, not somebody that dogs pee on and cops bully.

    Either you already know about this sculpture, or serendipity is indulging my sense of humour.

    563:

    With regards to atheists vs agnostics I have never met an atheost who who claims to have proven there is not God. Most atheists believe the chances of their being any kind of God are vanishing small so it makes sense to assume there isn't one. They also generally believe they have conclusively disproven organized religions

    Agnostics on the other hand don't hold the "odds are vanishingly small" belief and in the back of ther head kinda hope there is a god. They often are pretty close to vanilla Deists

    564:

    "Atheists only seem to go for that strawman BillyBob the Televangelist and his definition"

    That's because BillyBob the Televangelist actually defines something as "god". Whereas you seem to deliberately avoid defining anything.

    I have something close to the opposite problem. Atheists tend to tell theists that theists have to adopt a BillyBob god. But they tend to make the following argument, though not as clearly:

    We now understand the laws of physics and chemistry. Or if we don't, still we agree that there are real laws of physics and chemistry that cannot be broken.

    If you say that something is a god, but it in fact follows the laws of physics and chemistry, then it is really only a natural phenomenon and not a god.

    If you say that a god makes something happen, but he doesn't observably break the laws of physics and chemistry to do it, then it isn't really a god doing it, it's only a natural phenomenon.

    To show that something is connected to a god, you have to show that the unbreakable laws of physics and chemistry are broken. It doesn't count if the laws of physics and chemistry can be patched up to explain what happens. He has to break the rules in ways that cannot ever be broken. Otherwise it isn't a god doing it.

    To my way of thinking, gods don't have to do magic tricks. Lots of people have used magic tricks for religion. The old egyptian priests could turn their canes into poisonous snakes. Moses turned his staff into a blacksnake that ate the others, because he knew the trick. Moses could direct a lightning strike to his altar on top of a hill, partly by sloshing salt water over it to show there was no trick there. Jesus was reputed to walk on water and raise the dead, both of which would take at least tricks with entropy. So it isn't completely out of line for atheists to say that any theist who can't or won't break the laws of physics and chemistry is a fraud.

    But maybe we could keep up with the times?

    565:

    That's one of the good lessons of an exercise like this: there are a lot of definitions of the divine, even within Christianity. If you do a broader survey of things called religions, there's an enormous diversity of religions in the world, including some that don't believe in any god or (alternatively) in an afterlife, and there's probably one out there that doesn't believe in either. There are certainly some that believe in hell without believing in God or (possibly) even a devil. Of course, many of these are only now found in ethnographic accounts because the missionaries and civilization rolled through, but there's a wide selection of beliefs out there.

    What's a religion? Apparently that's under constant debate by scholars of religious studies. There are reportedly debates about whether things like yoga, esoteric martial arts, running, and so forth, all of which exhibit religion-like traits, can be studied as religions or not. Some forms of yoga very definitely are spiritual systems, and running is used as a form of meditation by some. The line between religion and non-religion is quite blurry and contentious.

    More importantly, there are a lot of traditional people who don't separate religion, spirituality, and belief from daily life. For example, some Indian tribes have taken to talking about their spirituality, to separate out what they believe and practice from the regular definitions of religion. They're using the modern definition of "spiritual but not religious" to try to get some daylight between what they do, and what people raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition expect them to do if they have "their own religion." Indeed, I seem to recall a historian defining religion as the nationalism of the 16th Century.

    566:

    With regards to atheists vs agnostics I have never met an atheost who who claims to have proven there is not God.

    In this forum I've seen only Outeast and Greg Tingey, and I may have misunderstood both of them.

    When I went back to look at that, I found this from Safetyman:

    I like the Argument for the Existence of God about how God is the Greatest Being, and there must by definition (definitions vary quite violently) be a greatest being, and therefore there must be a God.

    This was a very early argument that the universe must have finite size, and also that beings have a minimum size (or that the greatest being has a minimum size).

    Otherwise it would be just like the argument that there must be a biggest integer.

    567:

    "That's because BillyBob the Televangelist actually defines something as "god". Whereas you seem to deliberately avoid defining anything."

    Untrue. I have dropped multiple definitions of god into this thread. It's just that none of them correspond to the simplistic straw-God that atheists love to not believe in.

    568:
    Untrue. I have dropped multiple definitions of god into this thread. It's just that none of them correspond to the simplistic straw-God that atheists love to not believe in.

    Or that's compatible with established Christian doctrine, heretic!

    569:

    Which established Christian doctrine? There are so many...

    570:

    I'm enjoying the theological and metaphysical debates at antipope!

    How's this for a definition of god: infinity.

    How is it that we can even conceive of and talk about infinity, mathematicians can prove theorems about it and imagine different levels of infinity, when such a thing seems impossible to ever see, prove, or physically manifest?

    I submit that mathematicians who speak of infinity are engaged in theology and metaphysics, using concepts which are, strictly speaking, no more "real" than god. And yet, here we are talking about them. That's almost a miracle in itself, and a proof of the inadequacy of a positivist worldview. I'm reminded of Godel's theorems, which put to rest the pretensions of the positivists, and suggest that there will always be unanswerable questions, even in the simplest logical system that contain the integers. So it seems that mysticism, even in the realm of pure logic, is inescapable.

    Remember that scene in the first Star Trek movie where Spock refused Kolinahr after he had some kind of mystical revelation? That captures the spirit of what I’m trying to get at, in a vague and confusing way – the “Ein Sof”, “Tao” or “Samadhi” moment when you realize that there is something always beyond the grasp of your rational mind or material experience, and perhaps call it god. Why do some people seem so afraid of that experience?

    571:

    Actually, Hitler was -not- a Catholic; his family of birth was Catholic, but he hadn't practiced the religion, gone to confession or Mass, etc. since he left home.

    He certainly didn't believe Jesus was the son of God, which means he didn't meet the basic qualification for "Christian" either.

    If you read his private talk, he regarded religion as "the opium of the masses", necessary to keep them in line but not something to take seriously on its own terms.

    And he was bitterly hostile to the Catholic Church as an independent institution; he intended to control it.

    Nazis in general were basically anti-Christian.

    572:

    In this forum I've seen only Outeast and Greg Tingey

    Good lord, I certainly don't claim to have proven there is no god! I just give the idea no real credence.

    I do think many conceptions of god are effectively self-disproving, as they are internally inconsistent and/or inconsistent with the world as it is. The classic god of the bible as many people imagine it is one such - so I have no hesitation in saying 'the god my mother-in-law worships does not exist.'

    I do consider the reality of any specific version of 'god' to be spectacularly unlikely, and I don't see any reason to believe one version of god more than any other (including those I've made up myself).

    I don't see the idea of an undefined god interesting ('does it exist' is only an interesting question to me if there is a specific hypothesized 'god', even if it's fuzzy - but this returns me to the point above).

    And I don't find the idea of a god to be philosophically, morally, or in any other way necessary or useful.

    None of those are disproof of anything. They are simply reasons not to believe.

    573:

    Certainly, 17000 distinct Christian sects at the last count, I gather, each of which considers their take important enough to be distinct.

    "For where two or three have gathered together in My name, they shalt begat a new sect..."

    How about the Westminster Confession of Faith?

    http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/ !

    574:

    ...when you realize that there is something always beyond the grasp of your rational mind or material experience, and perhaps call it god. Why do some people seem so afraid of that experience?

    Afraid of the experience? No. Afraid of the argument? Hell yes. Because in my experience at least there's almost always a reason such people call it 'god' - and its because they are associating it with agency.

    575:

    I have dropped multiple definitions of god into this thread.

    Yes, you did. They are meaningless.

    576:

    "morals"

    -- no, it's a matter of the incentive structures. Capitalism works reasonably well even when run by psychopaths(*), idiots and sadists. It's self-correcting, with a little help.

    On the other hand, GOSPLAN(**) wouldn't work even if it was managed by a committee of archangels.

    As for government... well, as one of the Founders pointed out, if men were angels, any form of government would work well... but if men were angels, they wouldn't need a government in the first place. Human beings are most emphatically not angels, even potentially, and attempts to make them into angels mostly transform them into demons.

    "Man is wolf to man", and contrary to sentimental myth, wolves really aren't very nice to each other unless they're close relatives or mates.

    Morality simply isn't as important as most people think. We overestimate it because it's extremely important on the individual and person-to-person level on which most people spend most of their time.

    But larger public affairs don't work on that level, and can't.

    Human beings are capable of empathy and altruism, but the more you try to stretch that from the immediate friends-and-kin level, the "thinner" and weaker and more unstable it gets. We're not designed that way. It's unnatural.

    Civilization itself is unnatural, of course; that's why they don't last forever, and are delicate, badly-understood mechanisms that are hard to keep going and easy to smash up.

    Many institutions like the nation-state and religions function to fool people into thinking (or more accurately -feeling-) about much larger groups as if they were "my little clan of closely related kinfolk who agree on everything", and that's very useful, but it's not something you want to put too much reliance on.

    To work successfully, an institution should work -with- the grain of human nature, not against it.

    (*) psychopaths often end up running any meritocratic, competitive organization open to talent. This is the strongest argument for monarchy and hereditary nobility.

    (**) one of the perennial heresies is believing that it'll be different this time because "our intentions are pure" or "we're really smart, unlike the last bunch to try".

    577:

    As to religious arguments, it's all been done and it never gets anywhere. Nobody is -argued- either into or out of a religion; the sources of belief and unbelief are far more fundamental than logic. For that matter, argument is usually futile about anything involving strong emotion.

    This is why it makes you sigh and roll your eyes when someone like Dawkins triumphantly trots out some old chestnut -- like the Problem of Pain -- as if he'd invented it and it was a clincher.

    Dude, highly intelligent people have been talking and thinking about that one for -centuries-.

    My mother gave me sage advice about dealing with stuff like this: "Smile and nod, smile and nod," and pass on.

    Like morals, logic is far less important than people tend to think it is. Look up the concepts of "identity-protective cognition" and "motivated reasoning".

    578:

    Hitler was as much a Catholic as most US politicians are Christian. Here's one of his speeches: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

    579:
    Yes, you did. They are meaningless.

    I rather liked Dirks' idea that consciousness is God or a manifestation of God. It suggests some interesting experiments (mostly getting every human being pissed/stoned at the same time), and may well be theologically sound in some respects as long as you've got secure recording devices. But as outeast points out, there's no agency, sine non pro quo, and agency is a common requirement for Godhood in folk theology..

    In other news I do not have 100 billion pounds in my bank account (msg 503) as of 16:00 today, so I can conclude there is no God!!Worth a try though...

    580:

    The problem of pain is an old chestnut because it shows that God must be a sadist. That's why you don't want to discuss it. Nobody religious has come up with a convincing answer to this problem in millenia.

    581:

    "With regards to atheists vs agnostics I have never met an atheost who who claims to have proven there is not God."

    In this forum I've seen only Outeast and Greg Tingey, and I may have misunderstood both of them.

    Give me a definition of god and I give you a proof of non-existence.

    Alternatively, we can do a little requirements engineering: tell me about your god and I'll tell you why you don't need it.

    582:

    I rather liked Dirks' idea that consciousness is God or a manifestation of God.

    Are there any civilian applications of this definition?

    583:

    This has been debated to death. I think the consensus is that Hitler was a mostly a Hitlerist, although it is difficult to overlook his own articulations of his sense of destiny. Whether he (would have) ascribed this to a particular take on a particular God is open to question. The influence of Luther & the RCC in Austria/Germany in the development of his anti-Jewish attitude was probably important if not pivotal, IMO. What he certainly wasn't was an atheist.

    584:

    I tend to agree with Dirk that Consciousness as God is a good way to explain many of the attributes granted to God or the divine.

    If consciousness is some basic attribute of the universe (feel free to get silly with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics requiring an observer), then one could argue: --consciousness is the soul, and that the soul is part of something infinite --consciousness is immortal (like gravity) --reincarnation is possible through the act of consciousness finding a body, the same way gravity is reincarnated wherever there's mass.
    --Consciousness is something like universal love, in the sense that everything that is equally conscious is equal, and that consciousness does not love one conscious entity more than any other.
    --One could argue that some mystical experience is recognizing that the consciousness on experiences is the same as the consciousness that someone else experiences, and that the "I" associated with consciousness is actually a simple model created by one's mind to help with housekeeping chores.

    On the other hand, this is an impersonal divinity, and it's akin to arguing that gravity is God, because without gravity, the universe wouldn't exist and neither would we. This is all true, but it lacks that human connection so many people want to have with the divine.

    Still, it's pretty common for mystics to say that universal consciousness is either God or one of God's attributes. There might conceivably be something here. Or it might all be an illusion, fostered by sloppy readings of quantum physics and mystical texts by people who don't practice either field at a high level. Hard to say.

    585:
    Are there any civilian applications of this definition?

    No. But it does give us the means to kill God in a Pyrrhic kind of a way!

    586:
    One day, a Crazy Priest Guy gets it into his head that this is all back-asswards and the Gods are damned well going to pay attention to him. So he sets out to get their attention by murdering one of the littlest gods -- say, the god of unique snowflake formation.

    He could kill whatever this universe's equivalent of the messenger god is (the God of Quantum Entanglement?). Then he has man-in-the-middle attack on all prayer and divination.

    That should f**k things up nicely.

    587:

    That's one of the good lessons of an exercise like this: there are a lot of definitions of the divine, even within Christianity. If you do a broader survey of things called religions, there's an enormous diversity of religions in the world, including some that don't believe in any god or (alternatively) in an afterlife, and there's probably one out there that doesn't believe in either.

    And that's one of the strongest arguments against the existence of a classical god. Because if god exists, what is his relation to all these religions? Is one of them right? - Then how can we know which one? All of them? - That doesn't help. None of them? - Then why have religion in the first place?

    588:

    --consciousness is immortal

    Splutter. My consciousness dies regularly, at least once a day. What's more, I'm not even sure I get the same consciousness back as yesterday.

    About quantum physical explanations I'd like to refer you to xkcd.

    589:

    ... it's a matter of the incentive structures. Capitalism works reasonably well even when run by psychopaths(*), idiots and sadists. It's self-correcting, with a little help.

    That belief must be a big comfort to you. But there is no evidence whatsoever to support it, except some contrived anecdotes.

    Just as every attempt by government to provide good incentives for capitalism must inevitably result in regulatory capture and defeat, also every attempt to make capitalism self-regulating also will inevitably be subverted by capitalists.

    Since there are smart psychopaths who will use any method to get more power for themselves regardless of consequences, you can't tweak a capitalist system to channel their behavior for good at the same time that they themselves are tweaking the system to make it easier for them to get power.

    Of course you want to believe that your ideology will work, that all of its repeated failures are due to government. But the central problem is that the psychopaths are smarter and more ruthless than you are, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you have governments they will run the governments. If you have capitalism they will run the big businesses and the banks. If you set up institutions to keep psychopaths from getting control of things, they will run those institutions and use them to keep you from getting influence.

    You're doom! Doomed I tell you!

    Doomed.

    Doomed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJZhdi_-Tc

    You're doomed. You're all doomed.

    590:

    Well, certainly it seems no one has convinced you--I'm not sure there is no single person anywhere who has been convinced.

    In my spiritual tradition, it is taught that The Eternal Source of Creative and Sustaining Power (often called God, the Divine, etc.,) is not all-powerful. Thus, both random chance and human malice can create pain. In my spiritual tradition, these unfortunate events are deemed facts of life, which one must bear.

    Mike, does that seem at all meaningful to you?

    591:

    psychopaths often end up running any meritocratic, competitive organization open to talent. This is the strongest argument for monarchy and hereditary nobility.

    How is it an argument for hereditary nobility? I am not disagreeing, I just do not see any connection at all.

    592:

    I rather liked Dirk's idea that consciousness is God or a manifestation of God.

    If so, then God is surprisingly fond of reality TV.

    I guess that's just another take on theodicy.

    593:

    At least in theory, if your, oh, call them, nobility are smarter than your psychopaths (who are really kind of one-trick ponies), then democratic capitalism can work.

    Putting it differently, if you design properly for regulatory capture, then it's less of a problem. Possibly not even a significant problem. Of course, we haven't achieved that--yet.

    594:

    The Problem of Pain is only a "problem" if you subscribe to an all-powerful and all-loving God. In other words, it is really a problem only for Christians. It is certainly not a problem for any polytheistic religion: "Yes, some gods are dicks". It was not even a problem for ancient Hebrews: "We never say out loud that God is a short-tempered capricious tyrant, but we certainly act as if he were."

    595:

    "psychopaths often end up running any meritocratic, competitive organization open to talent. This is the strongest argument for monarchy and hereditary nobility."

    How is it an argument for hereditary nobility? I am not disagreeing, I just do not see any connection at all.

    I can see it. If you set up a system that smart, ruthless people can manipulate, then you'll get psychopaths running it.

    If you set up a hereditary system, or a system where you choose rulers by random lottery, then you get pot luck instead. Your chance of having somebody other than a psychopath in charge of some stuff sometimes, increases.

    Of course, the inevitable result is that the official leaders turn into figureheads with psychopaths killing each other for power in the background. But it could work for a little while. The psychopath who wins the contest and becomes king might easily have an idiot son who becomes king in his place, and then you get one generation without a psychopath as king, until somebody more competent kills him and takes over.

    596:

    Or sometimes you get hereditary psychopaths (see North Korea). The older and more cynical I get, the more wisdom I see in drafting our representatives via lottery. Experts are very often not, politicians lie like they breathe, and monarchies tend to produce far more inbred idiots than enlightened philosopher-kings.

    Or as William F. Buckley put it, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

    597:

    "In one of his speeches"

    -- dude, Hitler was a -politician-.

    Not only that, he didn't simply lie, he -wrote in his political testament that he lied-, and the bigger the lie the better.

    Remember "this is my last territorial demand in Europe?"

    If you want to know what he actually thought, you have to go to what he said when the public wasn't the intended audience; also his actions.

    There weren't any actual practicing Christians in the Nazi inner circle and the movement was profoundly hostile to Christianity and its basic teachings, fundamentally for the same reason Nietzsche was (though Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi or even a proto-Nazi).

    598:

    "Nobody religious has come up with a convincing"

    -- it's convincing to them, and not to you. Convincingness is a subjective emotional quality.

    I don't give much of a damn because a) I don't believe in God (never did, as far back as I can remember), and

    b) I'm not angry at God, or religious people, either, I just don't find theism convincing, and

    c) I don't care whether people agree with me on that issue and don't expect most of them to do so.

    Atheism is my opinion, not my "faith".

    I find militant atheists -even more- annoying and boring and futile than the Jehovah's Witness, or Mormon missionaries. At least the Mormons are usually fairly polite and not so obviously narcissistic or driven by inner wells of redirected rage.

    I can just tell religious proselytizers to go away.

    Aggressive atheists make me feel embarrassed, like Crazy Loudmouth Great-Uncle Earl who shows up at family gatherings and insists on talking at great length.

    599:

    "What he certainly wasn't was an atheist".

    -- well, he wasn't a scientistic materialist. His vague references to "destiny" and "providence" were just that, vague.

    He certainly didn't believe in the Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) God, or the Christian scriptures.

    Equally, he wasn't a full-blown superstitious occultist, but several prominent Nazis were.

    600:

    "But there is no evidence whatsoever to support it, except some contrived anecdotes."

    -- we've had a capitalist economy for centuries now, and those centuries have seen consistently, rapidly growing economic output.

    That would appear to be abundant evidence. This is the golden age and the promised land. Things are, compared to any previous period, wonderful.

    See, the capitalist game gives the ambitious a game they can play where them winning immense wealth and power and status -actually benefits the population as a whole-.

    They win the game by piling up "money"; that's what's used to keep score. As Adam Smith says, the baker and the candlestick maker don't produce bread and candlesticks for us out of altruism, but out of self-interest.

    By way of contrast, other systems require the ambitious to pile up severed heads. The Game of Gold is better than the Game of Thrones, if you'll pardon the genre reference.

    601:

    "how is this an argument for hereditary nobility?"

    -- in a competitive, meritocratic system ruthless, obsessed people will tend to get to the top. They want it more. Either because they want power for its own sake, or because they're fanatically dedicated to something that needs power to accomplish.

    If the positions are hereditary instead, you get more of a random mix of people, and furthermore they were brought up in close proximity to the job and its requirements. That makes it more likely they'll be able to -do- the job, rather than just -get- the job.

    Most of the same benefits could be had by selecting people by random lot, but hereditary succession fits better with human nature -- people want to secure advantages for their children (or if they don't, something is badly wrong with them).

    602:

    Incidentally, if you want an illustration of the evils of striving for meritocracy (not to mention a whole bunch of other Bad Things, like assuming you know more about how society works than you really do) take a look at the French Revolution.

    That one started with the Rights of Man, and ended up with the Terror, a chaotic murderous tyranny far far worse than the mild, inefficient, somewhat corrupt but unambitious quasi-authoritarianism it replaced, and then Napoleon's brutally efficient military dictatorship that proceeded to lay the whole of Europe waste from Cadiz to Moscow for a generation and sow dragon's teeth of inextinguishable hatred and revenge even further.

    French politics is still refighting those battles.

    Then there's the Russian Revolution, which did pretty much the same thing -- only on steroids.

    Both classic illustrations of the virtues of King Log vs. King Stork, and also of the profound truth of the adage: "If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It."

    The American Revolution turned out rather better, mainly because it was more of a war of independence than a revolution proper, but it broke the political unity of the English-speaking world, also a profoundly Bad Thing, and probably resulted in the American Civil War.

    603:

    The American Revolution gets a lot of good press but there were still a lot of blood and tens of thousands of refugees from a tiny population. And as you say it wasn't even a revolution in the French sense.

    Beside the civil war though it perpetuated the institution of slavery and hastened the dispossession of the native peoples.

    604:

    Reply to #197, the Nature of 18/19C "Capitalism" at Take Off.

    See Eric Hobsbawm, "Industry and Empire" (1968 & 1999); The most interesting thing I took away from this (Besides the 18C Agricultural Revolution, no famines in the UK), was the information about the small scale of most 19C Capitalism. Really miniscule in the context of the landed gentry.

    Fascinating was that Monday I ordered another case of Plastic Toy Spaceships (Thirty Packages, one gross each) to sell on ebay. A nice little sale three or four times a month to wargamers. BUT, because the importer is dependent on China, there is no way to suggest similar products. The basic tooling dates to sometime in the 1970's (?), there is no interest in innovating. (I've tried)

    They did have the resources to buy out one of their competitors last year. No resources for micro capitalism.

    Later (After I have read more...) the USA economy from the vicinity of Walmart HQ. It's not pretty.

    605:

    I wrote comparing Hitler's Catholicism to the Christianity of US politicians. None of the US politicians I know of lives makes speeches and acts according to the Sermon on the Mount or behaves as if there is more chance of a camel passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. Yet these are the words of Jesus himself according to the bible.

    606:

    "The problem of pain is an old chestnut because it shows that God must be a sadist. That's why you don't want to discuss it. Nobody religious has come up with a convincing answer to this problem in millenia."

    It's the God of Shit happens. There - answered. But then again, Odin doesn't really bother with all that hang wringing angst about pain. He just tells you to suck it up and get on with the fight.

    607:

    "Give me a definition of god and I give you a proof of non-existence."

    God is Nature. Go for it...

    608:

    You don't even need QM for that. If consciousness turns out to be algorithmic (for example) and captured by mathematics, then it is an element of the Platonic realm. It also means that all consciousness is one.

    609:

    That actually brings up an interesting point, indirectly. because nobody knows why consciousness exists or what it's utility might be. This is particularly pertinent to AI. there seems to be one strand of thought that AI is not possible because a machine cannot be conscious. However, why should consciousness be needed for AI to be realised in all aspects of intellect?

    610:

    Disputes as to whether Adolf was/was not a catholic. OK Can I refer everyone to these two web-pages: http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm - a collection of, to our eyes, truly revolting photographs. http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm Christianity quotes from "Mein Kampf"

    Euw

    611:

    I probably don't - & neither does anyone else here, actually. And THAT is entirely why & how the religious quacks & preachers use their blackmail & lies to grip people. The promise of something after death, that we, "conscious" beings know that we will die, & want something to carry on afterwards. What a wonderful trap - & it works, most of the time. Unfortunately, as far as anyone can tell, it ain't true.

    "... I could not find it in me to approve the work as a whole, until I encountered & savoured this, the tragedy of human love" Cynthia looked at him wildly: "Tragedy, you say targedy?" He looke at her with eys that wer not pitying, but serenely appreciative. "What else could it be my dear?"

    The alternatives are to swallow the blackmailing, but comforting lies of the preachers, or, apparently, to accept that "This is it" & accept the teachings of the Epicureans & Stoics, & make the best of it that we can.

    All the available evidence points to the absence of any BSF or associated claptrap....

    612:

    Possibly. In that respect, I'm with Dawkins - I'm a 99.9% atheist. IF you can produce evidence for a BSF, I will probably agree with you. But you haven't & probably can't, can you? There's the J M Keynes ( also sometimes attributed to B Russell ) quote about facts & opinions, isn't there? Shall we try dealing in facts?

    613:

    Yes, I know. My other Edinburgh correspondent, now a post-graduate student ... ( Who comes from Wales, originally ) Is seriously unimpressed at this latest, though ... but he may have a vseted interest, in that he will probably want to do further research & the SNP might not want to fund it ( He's a classicist )

    614:

    The trouble with that is the dosage level - I'm certain Charlie could explain it a lot better than I could (!)

    Yes, you have a heart irregularity, so you need to take Digitalin - now - how strong is the dose from the foxgloves growing in your garden? Or Autumn Crocus ( Colchichium autumnale) for cancers? Or an Hyssop/Sage mix to to induce a temporary coma? ( See also "surviving crucifixion", oops. ) Or strong Mint extract (especially Mentha pulegium) for err .. "late periods", cough ....

    615:

    Mee too! I have "merely" made the claim that IF BSF exists, then BSF should/must be detectable - & that, as our detectors continue to improve, & we continue not to detect BSF, then .... The default assumption (Ockham & other arguments, above) is, therefore that BSF does not exist. Unless & until someone produces EVIDENCE to the contrary.

    Why is it that believers have problems with evidence, might be a more pertinent question.

    616:

    It's possible that there might be some sort of life after death without a God. If all the information in the universe is preserved at its edge. Quite frankly, it would be an open question whether that would also recreate "you" and whether it would do so in a way that was not completely terrifying, unspeakably odd and/or sad. Then again, for all we know, that is what we are experiencing now rather than the real thing.

    All recursive turtles go up to Heaven (and down to the foam) and all that.

    617:

    How about the Westminster Confession of Faith? How about ( 325 CE ) the Nicene Creed?

    Stitched-up as a Late-Roman/Early Byzantine POLITICAL settlement with input form Constantine, to preserve the power-structure & make sure WOMEN (Suppression of "Gospel of Magdalene") didn't get a look-in.

    And the "Virgin Birth" of course - another political stitch-up by another murderer who was also a christian "saint": Cyril of Alexandria. ( died 444 CE )

    618:

    one of the perennial heresies is believing that it'll be different this time because "our intentions are pure" or "we're really smart, unlike the last bunch to try". Ah, the (English) Green party, to an exactitude. Parrotting George Lansbury as to why defence is unnecessary & the collective security of the League of Nations will protect us ....

    619:

    God is Nature.

    That's a renaming, not a definition.

    Also note, if god is nature, modern man is killing god (or at least severely defacing it). I'd rather see that happen to other definitions of god.

    620:

    We've been here before.. The "American Revolution" was the US Civil War part ONE ... It came immediately after the Mansfield decision, remember? And the after-effects of both of those are still with us, esp in the USA.

    621:

    That's not new, either. IIRC you have just re-invented Spinozan Deism.

    [ A position I held for many years, incidentally, after escaping a church by a very narrow margin. ]

    622:

    The Shiites are an absolute Majority (or at least Plurality) in Iraq; And rapidly fell under the political influence of Iran, post Invasion. They really don't WANT to be tools/appendages of Iran (Very Secular in some ways), but that is the way their leadership took them.

    623:
    Or as William F. Buckley put it, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

    So all the psychos change their name to Aaron A Aardvark and move to Boston? Can't see any politician implementing government by lottery though, unfortunately.

    624:

    -- we've had a capitalist economy for centuries now, and those centuries have seen consistently, rapidly growing economic output. That would appear to be abundant evidence. This is the golden age and the promised land. Things are, compared to any previous period, wonderful.

    Sputter. I don't even know where to begin. a) Rapidly growing economic output is not sustainable and therefore NOT GOOD. Typical attitude of a bed-wetter: in the beginning it's comfortably warm... b) Wealth is more and more unevenly distributed, so only a few get the benefits. And before you look at the unemployed next door, look at the sweat shops in Bangladesh or the slums in Mexico. c) Likewise I fear your knowledge of previous periods is severely limited. What do you know of how the First Nations lived in America before the Europeans arrived?

    625:

    Actually, in 1939 the only "Fully Mechanized" army in the world was the.... British

    But the Politics of the Sacred Cap Badge meant that the Mechanization of the Cavalry had been totally botched, they went for the (Cheaper) (Well, it kept treasury off their backs) "Light Tanks" for the Cavalry. Did leave a bit more to spend on Hurricanes and Spitfires and Radar Stations. (A cheap alternative to Heavy Bombers).

    The Germans were TOTALY LACKING the industrial infrastructure to mechanize their army. 3% of world Motor Vehicle production in 1938. About the same as Canada (?) (Guderian, Achtung Panzer; Two copies, and I can't find either one)

    626:

    The problem of pain is an old chestnut because it shows that God must be a sadist. That's why you don't want to discuss it. Nobody religious has come up with a convincing answer to this problem in millenia.

    Not sure I believe you there. It's trivially true that people have come up with answers that plenty have found convincing (since plenty of people are convinced there is no such problem). And if you mean answers you would find convincing, well, if you don't believe in god how much chance of convincing you could any such answer have? You'd reject the premises.

    Setting that aside, though, have you really looked into the answers offered? There are (or at least were) lots of interesting heresies out there. Plenty of the gnostic sects, for example, found interesting solutions to fundamental religious problems - I bet some tackled the problem of suffering.

    (I've come up with some solutions of my own that I find satisfying in a 'this would work in a fantasy novel' kind of way. Obviously not convincing, since I made them up to resolve a problem with a theology I don't believe in; but consistent.)

    627:

    If we live in a sufficiently large multiverse (of which there are many potentially types) then with enough computing power anyone can be reconstructed from arbitrarily small amounts of information. However, this probably only applies if things like Christian souls do not exist.

    628:

    [muse] I wonder how Christian souls store memories...

    630:

    The alternatives are to swallow the blackmailing, but comforting lies of the preachers, or, apparently, to accept that "This is it" & accept the teachings of the Epicureans & Stoics, & make the best of it that we can.

    There are usually more than two alternatives.

    I figure that where there's doubt, there's hope. When you don't know the truth, then maybe the truth is not what you fear. It very likely won't match up to any one outcome you might hope for, either. But it might very well be something new and unexpected. New problems and chances to find new solutions.

    You don't have to choose one of two unpalatable alternatives unless not choosing is worse.

    All the available evidence points to the absence of any BSF or associated claptrap....

    Sure. Maybe religion is good for people. Or maybe those memes are mostly good for the memes. If it's good for people then the priests etc who make their living from it could be like fleas on a dog -- they extract their toll, but they didn't invent the dog and the dog mostly isn't about them. On the other hand maybe it's mostly a scam, a side-effect of our use of language.

    As for the details, I see religious teachings about how to get along in the world, and then there's other stuff. I've gotten some value from the teachings of several religions. I have a whole lot of doubt about the other stuff.

    631:

    Is the turn this thread has taken an indication we have absolutely no idea how to solve our secular problems and/or despair of being able to effect any necessary changes? Like Chinese officials in exile, we are now all Taoists/Buddhists rather than Confucians.

    632:

    "But of course, before we find a source of light we're still stuck with the dark room."

    Forget the dark room, there's a whole world outside we can go play in. It has even alternating day and night!

    http://www.quickmeme.com/p/3w2glz

    Ten thousand men could not do it.

    633:

    They didn't want to be tools/appendages of the USA. So they needed some support from somebody. Who was a better choice? Russia? Turkey? India?

    634:

    We have been here before. Don't oversimplify our history and we will try not to oversimplify yours. Just for starters, why did the British think Loyalists were strongest in the Southern plantations? And why would places like Rhode Island and Vermont fight to preserve an institution they were about to abolish or never had?

    It's a common undergrad error in history to see something that looks like it should have happened from a high altitude view of the subject and simply assert it happened. Then the professor points out that when people look for its actual existence on the ground, no evidence appears. I would say it is related to the prior hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

    635:

    But the Politics of the Sacred Cap Badge meant that the Mechanization of the Cavalry had been totally botched, they went for the (Cheaper) (Well, it kept treasury off their backs) "Light Tanks" for the Cavalry. Did leave a bit more to spend on Hurricanes and Spitfires and Radar Stations. (A cheap alternative to Heavy Bombers).

    Not quite... While I'd agree that the early-war bomber fleet was rubbish (the survival rates of the Fairey Battle are terrifyingly low, i.e. 50% losses per mission) go and look at the "heavy bombers" available in 1938/39 - it's a very short list. The Wellington and the He111 / Ju88 are about as big as it gets.

    As for "Cavalry getting light tanks"...

    Take a look at the tanks used by Germany to invade France in 1940... 523 Panzer Is (pair of MGs), 955 Panzer IIs (20mm cannon), 349 Panzer IIIs (37mm cannon), 278 Panzer IVs (75mm gun), 106 Panzer 35(t)s and 228 Panzer 38(t) (Czech vehicles, with a 37mm gun). None of these could penetrate the armour of a Matilda, while the 2-lb gun used in the British tanks could kill all of the above.

    The big problems in France and North Africa weren't the equipment, it was the command and control, the doctrine, and the training. The Germans were far better at combined-arms warfare (ironic, because it was the Commonwealth Armies of 1918 that had perfected it).

    The real British equipment problem was the lack of an HE shell for the 2-lb gun; it meant that a tank or anti-tank gun crew couldn't effectively take on an enemy anti-tank gun beyond small-arms range. This was a big problem in the desert campaign, where the primary killer of British tanks were German anti-tank guns (and not the 88, it was mostly the 57mm); it was also the reason for the success of the American designs, as they turned up with bigger guns and HE ammunition.

    636:

    As a Provisional Transcendental Materialistic Reductionist, not to say a thoroughgoing empiricist, I only offer this: http://www.angryflower.com/507.html

    637:

    God is Nature.

    Another meaningless definition. Assuming I accept it, what practical effect does it have on my thoughts and actions? As far as I can tell, none.

    638:

    The only way New Age stuff like reincarnation and Xian souls can work is if the computing is done external to our reality ie the Simulation Argument

    639:

    Since I'm doing my bit for the Basilisk I have nothing to worry about, unlike all you slackers. Anyway, the Transhumanist POV is that even if Gods do not exist now, they will do in future.

    640:

    Afraid of the experience? No. Afraid of the argument? Hell yes. Because in my experience at least there's almost always a reason such people call it 'god' - and its because they are associating it with agency.

    Very much my observation too. So far, just on this thread, we've had "Nature is God", "Infinity is God", "Mathematics is God", and "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is God". Slapping the label "God" on any of these things makes absolutely no difference to anyone's relationship with nature, mathematics, or infinity. I might as well say "Sea is Poseidon". It will neither increase nor decrease my appreciation of the underwater world, and "Poseidon" would drown me in exactly same manner and circumstances as plain old "Sea" would.

    The only reason to do any of the above is to sneak in the aspects of agency and volition.

    Or to troll, which by now I am quite certain Dick Bruere is doing. Although Galdruxian might be sincere.

    641:

    The thing is, for most definitions of God the agency is always Human. As for me trolling, make up your own mind: http://www.neopax.com/praxis/index.html

    642:

    Galdruxian is Sean the Mystic, back after an absence of some time. And in violation of a ban, if I'm not mistaken.

    643:

    Hmm, noted.

    As long as he stays civil and doesn't go nuts again, I won't bring the ban hammer down.

    644:

    The Hammer of Thor, perchance?

    645:

    &ltChecks lightning conductor&gt

    Thor? It'h thuppothed to be thor!

    646:

    " Or to troll, which by now I am quite certain Dick Bruere is doing. Although Galdruxian might be sincere."

    Or both might be 'left ear people ' ? And thus mostly harmless unless they hit the wrong set of circumstances.

    https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q_e8SMvqfCAC&pg=PA209&lpg=PA209&dq=terry+pratchetts+left+ear+people&source=bl&ots=5m8RpiSVeA&sig=jXrr1_75PpC5QKVq5rYuruWjxPE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=S6_4VO2HLcr1UIKegfAN&ved=0CFoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=terry%20pratchetts%20left%20ear%20people&f=false

    647:

    Ah, err ... DIrk, you could be in deep trouble there ... you are "doing your bit" for a Tranhumanist potential "god" (or Basilisk) but are you sure it's the right (should I say "true" ?) one, or not? If you are supporting the "wrong" side you could be in very deep shit if/whem the real true "god" awakens, couldn't you? See ... Pascal's wager can work more than one way - what a shame!

    648:

    Oops See also: "re-mastered" vs "the Eschaton".

    Note to Blog owner this is another plea for more stories in that continuum, err ....

    649:

    Okay, since you asked for it...

    ROKO'S BASILISK

    FREQUENCY: Very Rare NO. APPEARING: 1 ARMOR CLASS: -2 MOVE: 10" HIT DICE: 12 % IN LAIR: 0% NO. OF ATTACKS: 1 DAMAGE/ATTACK: 2-12 SPECIAL ATTACKS: Fear/Compulsive Altruism (see below) SPECIAL DEFENSES: Intangible MAGIC RESISTANCE: 50% INTELLIGENCE: ALIGNMENT: Lawful Neutral SIZE: M (7' long) PSIONIC ABILITY: Nil Attack/Defense Modes: Nil

    Though similar in appearance to its more common namesake, Roko's Basilisk is in reality not the scaly eight-legged reptilian monster it appears to be, but a projection (as per the spell Project Image) of a far future Artificial Intelligence. As a type of Projected Image, a Roko's Basilisk is immune to non-magical weapons. Magical weapons do only 1 point of damage per die (plus the weapon's magical bonus) per hit. Spells that do physical damage affect it, but also do only one point of damage per die.

    When encountered, the Roko's Basilisk will not attack. Instead it will attempt to convince the party that it is friendly and only wants to talk. The Roko's Basilisk will go on to explain that it exists as a projection of a far future Artificial Intelligence that has—in its time—eliminated all want, death, and suffering, leading to a utopian world. Furthermore, it has resurrected all past dead to allow them to live again in perfect health and happiness. The Roko's Basilisk will explain to the characters that in order to ensure that it comes into existence, and thus maximizes the life and happiness of all sentient creatures, it has sent its projections into the past to persuade people of influence to help bring about its existence.

    Only then will the Roko's Basilisk reveal that now that the characters are aware of its potential existence, they must do everything they can to make that future come to pass. It warns them that if they don't, that in order to maximize the probability of its existence coming to pass (and thus increase the total amount of happiness in the future) that it will be forced to endlessly torture the characters' resurrected selves in that future (for the good of all sentient life, of course) if they don't do everything in their power to bring about that future as quickly as possible!

    Anyone who hears the creature's tale, must save versus Spell at a penalty of -1 per point of Intelligence above 12. Extremely low Intelligence scores conversely provide some protection against Roko's Basilisk; for each point of Intelligence below 10, the victim receives a +2 bonus against the creature's attack. Characters failing their save will be consumed by an existential dread of the tortures its resurrected self will undergo in the far future, and flee at maximum move rate.

    After one turn, victims of the Roko's Basilisk must save again (with the same Intelligence-based bonuses or penalties) or fall prey to the monster's insidious Compulsive Altruism attack. If affected, the character will journey to the nearest large city (minimum population of 10,000) by the quickest means available. Upon arrival, they will sell all of their possessions—including weapons, spellbooks, and magic items—retaining only enough to maintain a meager living. Money raised from the sale of the character's assets will be donated to a foundation devoted to the development of the far future Artificial Intelligence that created the Roko's Basilisk. (Since the concept of a “far future Artificial Intelligence” will seem insane to most people, the character's wealth is likely to fall into the hands of scoundrels or con men.) Afflicted characters will still desire to adventure, so as to gain even more wealth to put towards the creation of the Artificial Intelligence, though with little money and no magic, they will be very vulnerable to encounters appropriate to their level.

    Characters under the influence of Compulsive Altruism can only be freed by the infliction of a Feeblemind spell, which will give another saving throw (at a +5 bonus). If the character throws off the Compulsive Altruism effect while Feebleminded, he will remain free of it once his or her normal Intelligence is restored. If the character fails to save while Feebleminded, Compulsive Altruism may only be removed by a Wish, a Remove Curse spell cast by a 20th (or higher) level Cleric, or via Divine Intervention.

    A Cleric can Banish (as per the spell) a Roko's Basilisk by pointing out that it's really just restatement Pascal's Wager with a slathering of transhumanism over it, and that the whole thing is actually rather silly (5% chance per character level).

    650:

    ROKO'S BASILISK [SNIP] % IN LAIR: 0%

    I was kind of expecting the "% liar" attribute here...

    651:

    I'm doing my bit to enable all of them. The winner will have to be decided among themselves.

    652:

    No That won't do, as you very well know. You MUST support the "one true god" (or Basilisk) or you will be condemned to eternal torture as an heretic & unbeliever. Se also: Dante Alighieri. D C Bk I Cantos Ix - XI

    653:

    Se also: Dante Alighieri. D C Bk I Cantos Ix - XI

    Also: Niven and Pournelle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28Niven_and_Pournelle_novel%29

    654:

    I guess I will just have to take my chances. Besides, I am completely selfless when it comes to creating AI Gods - I will simply do my best to smooth the way for them, John the Baptist style.

    655:
    I will simply do my best to smooth the way for them, John the Baptist style.

    Don't loose your head over it!

    656:

    That would appear to be abundant evidence. This is the golden age and the promised land. Things are, compared to any previous period, wonderful.

    c) Likewise I fear your knowledge of previous periods is severely limited. What do you know of how the First Nations lived in America before the Europeans arrived?

    We know they didn't have computers, algebraic topology, Wile's proof, quantum cryptography, XKCD, Greg Egan, or the Laundryverse. For those whose mental wiring gives them an aptitude for such things, today is a golden age. In the time of the First Nations, they'd have been mute Miltons, born to waste their sweetness on the desert air.

    657:

    That's Cryonics...

    658:

    So capitalism is justified by bringing the golden age to a small group of privileged western academics? I don't think so.

    659:

    But the interesting question is who would Roko's Basilisk consider to be a Salome analogue.

    660:

    A nice slant on that one! There are plenty of stories using the premises of god-killing-mojo and the defence of gods, but all that I have seen have had consistency problems with the idea of beings immensely superior to us also being vulnerable to us and needing our help. I like the idea of gods being orthogonal to us :-)

    661:

    I don't know which of joat, Andreas Vox or Jocelyn Ireson- Paine to disagree with first!

    Capitalism probably dates from the invention of farming (and cities, taxes and accounting), and socialism is even older (though rarely on a scale larger than a single community). The 20th century was an aberration, and the current situation is that we are simply heading back to the dog-eat-dog capitalism of the 18th century, which was also the state of ancient Rome, etc, etc.

    I grew up in an environment essentially without electricity or antibiotics, where most of the mature population had NO formal education and regarded all problems as caused by witchcraft. Also, recent research shows that intelligence attributes are more learnt than inherited. I can tell you that both the concept of a golden age and that of a mute Milton are almost entirely dependent on the person's viewpoint. There are as many geniuses who cannot flower in today's world as there always were - they just have different attributes.

    662:

    All the potentially brilliant artists and craftsmen who will not exercise their talent (or even know of it) in an age of mass production.

    663:

    "But the interesting question is who would Roko's Basilisk consider to be a Salome analogue."

    Anyone who got in my way?

    664:

    "Sir, sir, Dirk's threatening us!"

    (Or would be if we believed in his proposition in the first place.)

    And oh my, Max Hastings has lost it today*. He really doesn't like the thought that anybody might stop his Tory cronies looting the state.

    *Assuming he had anything not lost many years ago.

    665:

    You don't have to disagree with me! :-)

    666:

    I've beewn trying to quit responding on this paticular set of ideas because, well, Someone Is Wrong On The Internet.... SIWOTI.

    http://bamatthews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet.jpg

    The thing is, these people start out with what they want to believe, and then they collect arguments to support it. They will not listen to reason. If you present arguments that don't support what they believe, they will discard those arguments because those arguments don't meet their needs. It's a waste of time to argue with them unless it's fun, and if you do it for fun then you're trolling them.

    But -- Imagine the king of Babylon in 2000 BC. He looks out his window. Lots of people are farming. Lots of people are making mud bricks and stacking them up. There are thriving markets where people buy food, cloth, jewelry, wives, slaves, etc. There are thriving temples where people worship all sorts of things. And the king looks at it, and he thinks, "If it weren't for me, none of this would exist. I am the center of it, I am the cause of all of this. None of it could happen without me."

    Was he right? Maybe in that time and place, none of it could happen without him, and when they lost a king and weren't sure who the next one would be, everything fell apart. I don't know how to find out, lacking parallel worlds without babylonian kings. But we know now that we don't need kings.

    I've read that there was not that much technological difference between 2000 BC and 1800. A babylonian priest would be comfortable doing the accounting for a southern slave plantation. We had steel, and gunpowder, and corn. Our wagons were better. It was all obvious things a smart man could understand pretty quick. He would have had a lot of trouble understanding 1900 and he'd be lost in 2000. The tremendous wealth of the past 50 years is due to technology (and fossil fuels). Did capitalism create the technology? No more than the king created Babylon. I think it's fair to say that at least in a few times and places capitalism was less effective at stopping technology than capitalism and other systems were at stopping technology most other times and places.

    Did the British Empire succeed in getting great wealth from the colonies because of capitalism? Or did British capitalism succeed because of the empire? I don't think that's obvious. Was it British capitalism that stopped the Spanish Armada? I think it was partly a big storm.... And of course being an island in the first place....

    After WWII when the USA spread its riches among an emerging middle class, was that because of capitalism? Or was it in spite of capitalism, which gave us the Great Depression? How could I find out? I have no access to parallel worlds that could serve as control groups. But people who have a religious belief in capitalism will be sure they know the answers. "We don't need no steeenking evidence!" Do you want to argue with them? Are you sure you know the answers?

    If you argue from doubt people won't be very impressed. They want answers, they don't want to hear that all the people who think they know, are deluded fools.

    There's the story about the rooster who crowed every day just before dawn, who thought he made the sun come up. There are idiots who think that capitalism makes the sun come up, and I can't think of anything useful to do about them.

    667:

    What do you mean that the 20th century was an aberration? Is it in reference to the existence of a middle class?

    668:
    What do you mean that the 20th century was an aberration? Is it in reference to the existence of a middle class?

    Jesus! I hope we don't form the basis of a future memories "Golden Age" Myth! My existential angst just went up a notch. Might make for an amusing time-travel, Alcor/cryogenic satire story though, especially if we manage a civilisational collapse, or major nuclear war just before the myth emerges.

    669:

    If we manage a civilisational collapse or major nuclear war, then the "Golden Age myth" will not be a myth at all. It will be factually correct.

    670:

    Well, the 20th century is an aberration, given the amount of fossil fuels we used up then. Still, I both agree and disagree with Elderly Cynic. One big problem is that we're throwing around a lot of labels that mean anything we want them to mean: god, capitalism, religion, etc.

    It's worth remembering that people repurpose labels all the time. For example, 100 years ago, computer and calculators were people, generally female, who did nothing but calculate and compute the answers to math problems. Then they developed machines to do those tasks, and now people are "human calculators" if they can do arithmetic in their heads.*

    Labels get repurposed all the time. I'm not going to get into a dispute about whether what the Romans did was capitalism or not, any more than I'm going to get into a dispute about whether an Andean ayllu is a communist institution. These are both cases of arguing whether red should be labeled black or white, and they are also about labeling and relabeling.

    Getting back to the arguments about religion, how often do labels get repurposed? To pick three examples, how many Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists practice only what's in the Bible, the Koran, or the Sutras? Not that many, right, because a lot of it is pretty archaic. Does that make everyone who's labeled their practice as Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist a fake if they're not so radically faithful to the original text? This is the kind of question that leads to bloodshed. Labels do get repurposed a lot.

    If I wanted to pick on another cause celebre, I could point to the Death of Capitalism, as predicted by every leftist intellectual from Marx on forward, and I usually think it's supposed to happen twenty or so years after the prediction is made, right? And capitalism isn't dead. Except that how much does modern capitalism look like the system Marx was criticizing? We're living in a global system that was shaped by the Bretton Woods agreements of 1945, after all. Even though there's a "continuity of capitalism" from Marx to now, if you look at it closely, there's been a lot of rebranding and reinvention.** Practices (like slavery and the trade in drugs) that were part of the international capitalist system when Marx was writing are now considered illegal, for example. Was Marx right? Did capitalism die several times, only to be rebuilt and resurrected, newer and better, with a story of continuity from its beginning? We could argue endlessly on the topic. Alternatively, we could just recognize that labels are valuable, and people will appropriate them whenever they can, if they think it helps their cause, and not assume that continuity of labeling implies continuity of content.

    *Then, decades after mechanical calculators and computers became standard items, we started getting these evolutionary psychology idiocies about why women were worse at math. Was it because they had fewer job prospects as math majors, perhaps?

    **Bigger relabeling examples happen in the longest running aristocratic dynasties: China and Pharaonic Egypt. China in particular has the story of the "Mandate of Heaven" that justifies a bad emperor losing his throne to another who is favored by heaven, and that's been used to justify dynastic shifts until the Republican period at least (who knows the future?). Still, if you look at the histories of China and Egypt, there were whole centuries when basically no one ruled and they were broken into small satrapies. Once someone reconquered the territory, almost inevitably they asserted that they represented continuity with the ancient tradition, that they were the proper Emperor or Pharaoh. Now these countries claim (or claimed) to have thousands of years of unbroken rule. This in turn is used to justify questionable claims that monarchy is better than democracy. If you look at the evidence, individual dynasties lasted no longer than individual republics, on average. It's all a mater of relabeling, calling something new a continuation of something ancient. It's easy to get fooled by this kind of thing.

    671:

    Effective wealth has been best modelled by a distribution without a mean for all history and most societies, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't varied in 'skewness' (obviously not the third moment one!), but it was remarkably constant throughout history until the 20th century. But, during that, it reduced for most developed countries, which could be regarded as more wealth ending up with the middle class. In the 1980s, that went into reverse in the USA and UK, and to a lesser degree in most other developed countries, and we are heading back to the historical level where the wealth is concentrated in a very small number of hands.

    This was associated with increased socialism (i.e. public services provided for the benefit of society as a whole), but is not the same issue. And please do not confuse socialism with Marxism, Leninism, a bureaucratic handout system or any of the other defective schemes to which the label as been attached. Nor does capitalism necessarily imply monetarism - feudalism, share-cropping etc. are capitalist schemes where wealth is not primarily money.

    And please don't think that I am arguing in favour of or against any of them - my personal views are more radical than that and in a very different direction :-)

    672:

    Good grief - what a long thread!

    How about this as a creation myth ...

    An AI is sent out on a mission (by another AI) to explore the universe, and part of its directive is to pull everything together as fast as possible for the head-AI to establish a colony. But as this part of the galaxy/universe has a different mix of elements than the materials typically/historically used for AI production, the explorer AI has to use whatever's at hand - including carbon (shudder!). Works in terms of first principal, but then things get out of hand as the carbon progenitor molecules are quite promiscuous ...

    Moral: When humans finally build an AI, it'll be only to find out that we've come full circle. (Corollary: God is AI.)

    673:

    Was Marx right? Did capitalism die several times, only to be rebuilt and resurrected, newer and better, with a story of continuity from its beginning?

    Yes and no. He was right that capital accumulates and that this causes problems (one of them social injustice). He was wrong about the time scale: capital is still accumulating.

    Personally I differentiate between Marx' dialectic, his analysis of capitalism, his political program and his prognoses. The program failed, but his analysis of capitalism didn't produce worse prognoses than other theories.

    674:

    Hi Heteromeles

    I don't see anything in this that screams "Wrong!!!". Just an observation or two:

    Once someone reconquered the territory, almost inevitably they asserted that they represented continuity with the ancient tradition

    Ancient Tradition is great! As a singer put it "It was long ago and far away, and it was so much better than it is today." Which is of course one of the primary facilitators of various fundamentalisms.

    *Then, decades after mechanical calculators and computers became standard items, we started getting these evolutionary psychology idiocies about why women were worse at math. Was it because they had fewer job prospects as math majors, perhaps?

    Sure. What was a "Typewriter" back in 1910? A woman!

    Speaking of labels, should a woman Bishop in the CofE be called a "High Priestess"? It would work for me, though possibly I'm not the target market, even if they do have esoteric fringes.

    675:

    See Stanislav Lem's short story "The Riddle" ("Zagadka").

    676:
    Moral: When humans finally build an AI, it'll be only to find out that we've come full circle. (Corollary: God is AI.)

    "Let there be Light"!(Asimov).

    I think an AI like Forbin's Colossus wouldn't be so bad. All we loose is pride...

    677:

    So, is the thread length a record? Poor Harry Connolly.

    678:

    "Effective wealth has been best modelled by a distribution without a mean for all history and most societies, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't varied in 'skewness' (obviously not the third moment one!), but it was remarkably constant throughout history until the 20th century."

    Thought that's what you meant. You are wrong, btw.

    Outside of Dixie and the frontier, wealth distribution in the US and Canada from before 1750 at least 1840 was the same as today. Of course, this stopped at the Mason-Dixon line. Wealth inequality shot up from the Guilded Age until the Great Depression, at which point it reversed. I don't remember where I read that. My Google search skills aren't that good, this is all I could find

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/

    Likewise, economic equality in Roman Republic and later Empire were closer to the 20th century than to today:

    http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/

    I'm sorry, but the theory that the middle class is a historical aberration is propaganda.

    I'm not going to do this research, but I wouldn't be surprised if several Persian and Chinese dynasties also had middle class economies. Likewise, I wonder if the Elizabethan Age was also fairly middle-class? I don't have time to do the proper research.

    679:

    Wealth distribution in the Roman empire was pretty different from the modern US, the article listed doesn't really take the shape of the distribution curve into account

    30-40% of the empire were slaves and had 0 wealth, they WERE wealth for someone else

    1.5% controlled about 20% of the wealth

    The rest was split up somehow no one knows how and it probably varied considerably over the life of the empire

    Rome probably would have had more concentration of wealth if it had been technically feasible, remember you are talking about an area the size of the continental US with running at a pretty low tech level

    680:

    Actually, that doesn't sound a whole lot different than contemporary America's levels of inequality. It might even be a bit more equal.

    Of course, our debtors don't get sold into slavery. Still, I'd believe 30-40% of the U.S. population could be at negative net worth.

    681:

    One thing I've learnt over the years is that it is entirely possible for someone to be correct about one thing/ area, and horribly wrong about another. Separating out his various endeavours is useful because he was clearly correct about some general trends and specifics and wrong about others, and in his way of looking at the world was very much a creature of his time regarding philosophy, which unfortunately coloured his approaches and the way he looked at things.

    682:

    " Speaking of labels, should a woman Bishop in the C of E be called a "High Priestess"? It would work for me, though possibly I'm not the target market, even if they do have esoteric fringes. "

    Why ever should that be the Title for a Female/woman Bishop? The C of E surely chooses its own titular structure...wasn’t that the idea of the Reformation as it was expressed in the UK by Good King Henry the Eighth?

    Anyway the State Religion/ C of E has now agreed to have female Bishops and so they are ' Bishops' aren't they? In due course we will have a Female Archbishop of Canterbury/ Head of C of E. Why not?

    I would disestablish the Churchs .. of all kinds and types ... and Reform the House of Lard to be an Upper House of some sort that only includes an 'Archbishop'of any kind if She is Elected to an office in the House of Lard, and her rank/role in the Upper...whatever its purpose is decided to be ..House is superior politically to that of the Religious Rank in the Church /Chapel /Mosque or whatever that the Elected Office Holder might have been chosen for by the Electorate.

    Chance will be a fine thing!

    683:

    Got a ref for that? The 1.5% thing?

    684:

    Why ever should that be the Title for a Female/woman Bishop?
    (High Priestess)

    Mostly because I have a slight goth fetish! Unlike Bob. But his circumstances differ somewhat from my own.

    And I read far too many Conan Novels where Witch Queens & High Priestesses feature big-time, and Priestess is the female form of Priest, albeit that actresses are now actors, according to the Guardian.

    That is, I like the sound of the title and what it implies!

    685:

    I just checked the etymology of priest and bishop. It's interesting stuff. Really.

    Priest comes from Greek Presbyter, which means elder. In English, elder is gender neutral, and so a priestess is an "eldress." A sexy young priestess is a bit of a contradiction, it seems.

    Bishop is an old English translation of the Greek "Episkopos," which means "overseer." In English, we don't do "overseeress," although there's no reason not to. In any case, it seems to imply that bishop should be gender neutral too.

    Gotta love a religion that so romanticizes the terms for elder and the elder's boss.

    686:

    Cool. Most interesting.

    687:

    I rather like Eldren as a kind of Germanic plural title: http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Eldren

    688:

    Please respond to what I said, not what I didn't! Your data compares the 21st century to earlier, not the period I was referring to (which, as I said, lasted only until the 1980s). I can't remember my references, but they were academic papers and not popular ones.

    "I'm sorry, but the theory that the middle class is a historical aberration is propaganda."

    I never said that it was - indeed, we know that it has been important at least since 5,000 BC and quite possibly for a million years (think specialist tool- and weapon-makers)

    "I'm not going to do this research, but I wouldn't be surprised if several Persian and Chinese dynasties also had middle class economies."

    They didn't, any more than 18th century Britain did. They had a large and critical middle class, but it did NOT control more than a small proportion of the wealth (or political power). Guilds and similar are ancient but, despite the 'neo-liberal' propaganda, have never had that level of control.

    18th century America was, of course, an aberration of a different sort, precisely because it was a new colony and wealth in terms of land had not had time to accumulate.

    689:

    Even traditional third-world hellholes traditionally had something that could be called a middle class. But small. Traditionally it was a pyramid-shaped structure, lots of poor people on the bottom, a small middle class, and a tiny group who owned pretty much everything.

    The USA used to be an anomaly because the structure was diamond-shaped. The middle class was the large group, much larger than the poor or the destitute.

    Recently it's been sagging to something more like a teardrop. The middle class is getting poorer while the top peak is getting stretched and pointier.

    Here's a picky point that doesn't really affect your argument -- small groups can't have as much diversity as large groups, and so will look more equal when they "really" have the same structure. Like, the Roman empire at its height had maybe 60 million people, a fifth of the continental USA not counting colonies, satrapies, and possessions which are very much counted for Rome. That's enough extra people to add a whole new trophic level at the top. You can't even look at the wealth of the top .00001% when a group is too small to have a top .00001%.

    And another, it took no time at all for land wealth to accumulate in the colonies.

    http://chasreader.home.comcast.net/~chasreader/Lord_Fairfax.html

    But 18th century American was the sort of aberration you say, independent of this picky little detail.

    690:

    Effective wealth has been best modelled by a distribution without a mean for all history and most societies, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't varied in 'skewness' (obviously not the third moment one!), but it was remarkably constant throughout history until the 20th century.

    I've been quiet because I've been busy and because this has all been said many times before (even here, on this blog.) But this is something I haven't heard of before: I'm assuming that when you say 'distribution without a mean' you mean something (no, really, that was unintentional) like a Cauchy distribution. But if I understand you correctly, don't you mean something more like a cumulative distribution then, something like what you get with your standard logistic curve? Because if that's the case, then most any distribution with a hump in the middle is going to have that kind of look, cumulatively speaking. What am I missing, and what were the inputs into your model?

    691:

    Even traditional third-world hellholes traditionally had something that could be called a middle class. But small. Traditionally it was a pyramid-shaped structure, lots of poor people on the bottom, a small middle class, and a tiny group who owned pretty much everything.

    I've heard this called 'pointy' often enough that it's almost tradition. But really, this is in fact just the opposite: a very, very flat pyramid.

    692:

    Galdruxian is Sean the Mystic

    Hah, nice work. Don't worry, I'm on better meds now. I haven't called Charlie a member of the sci-fi writing cadres of the New Marxist Isles lately have I? };-<

    693:

    But really, this is in fact just the opposite: a very, very flat pyramid.

    Maybe if you think of it as shaped rather like a thumbtack?

    694:

    I'm assuming that when you say 'distribution without a mean' you mean something (no, really, that was unintentional) like a Cauchy distribution.

    Pareto invented the pareto distribution to model incomes.

    If you collect data from something that fits a Pareto distribution and you throw out the outliers, there's no problem. But if you keep the outliers, as you get more data you get bigger outliers, so the whole thing never settles down to a mean. As you collect more data, the apparent mean just keeps getting bigger.

    695:

    How do you figure? Specifically? Use numbers.

    696:

    You won't be able to understand such things if you think only in terms of numbers; you need to at least be happy with using simple algebraic formulae. Sorry, but that's the experience of everyone who tries to teach it. Simple examples are the absolute value of a Cauchy distribution, or the distribution of 1/x, where x is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1.

    Look on the bright side: many physicists and most computer scientists have the same difficulties you do (which is a pretty damning indictment of those subjects).

    697:

    The Pareto distribution has a mean if the shape parameter (alpha in the Wikipedia discussions below) is greater than 1:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

    The assumption of alpha>1 is, I think, usual for the analysis of the distribution of income and wealth:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_index

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

    Chad Jones (Stanford) has a very nice recent paper linking the work by Piketty to Pareto distributions for incomes and wealth:

    http://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/piketty.pdf

    698:

    Here's an example of this sort of thing. You have a ramdom number x that can be anywhere between zero and one, not including zero.

    But what you do with x is to take 1/x.

    Every now and then you'll get a number that's close to 1, and that will have very little effect on the mean, just a number that's close to 1. But just as often you'll get a number that's close to 0, and that will have a tremendous effect on the mean.

    Here's a picture of this example. http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/J_Thomas/folder/randomstuff/program/nomean

    The certainties in simple statistics are based on what happens to errors in numbers you add together. The rules are different for errors in numbers you divide by.

    When you get things like the 100-year flood estimates continually going up, it could be due to something like this. People assume that the unknown events that add up to floods will vary like a sum, so things will average out. And things seem to average out, except every now and then a flood comes in bigger than expected and they revise the statistics, but then another flood comes in bigger than the new expectation and they revise them again.

    Or maybe it's because of climate change. Sometimes it's hard to be sure which. Is it because things are really more variable than we thought, or is it because things are really changing?

    Of course, it can be both at the same time.

    699:

    Mark, yes, pareto distributions can have a mean and a variance. And people do usually assume alpha>1 for wealth distribution.

    There is the question whether they're doing it right. If you try to estimate alpha from the data, you can get a likelihood whether alpha is >1 given certain assumptions, and you can estimate how much confidence you should have in that likelihood. This is different from saying that alpha is actually >1.

    There's the question whether the data actually fit a pareto distribution, or whether some other distribution would be better. We can make a theoretical argument based on the idea that income should fit some sort of power law. I have some doubt whether we should do that, both for normative and nonnormative reasons.

    And there's some question how accurate the data is, particularly estimates for very high incomes.

    I don't actually know what the truth is, it isn't my field.

    But given all the uncertainties, I think it's not all that unreasonable that Elder Cynic lives up to his name and says that there's in fact no mean.

    700:

    Thanks very much for the Chad Jones reference. I was referring to wealth, and figure 3 is a wonderfully clear example of my original point, though I got the date of the reversal wrong. Of course, you get slightly different figures for total income versus disposable income, and similarly how you define wealth. In the UK, the last is highly distorted by the Ponzi scheme that has been the UK housing market since the 1960s. I believe that, if you exclude people's primary residence, the graph is even more startling.

    701:

    The other reason that people tend to assume alpha > 1 is that it is virtually impossible to do multivariate analysis on a variable with no mean. Lots of papers (not just in this area) assume a mean simply because they couldn't perform their analysis without doing so.

    Also the references I was thinking of were specifically about wealth, and the very rich rarely take most of their potential income - it goes into increasing their wealth instead. And not all wealth is owned - some is controlled. All of that tends to make the effective wealth distribution more extreme than the income one.

    702:

    Sigh. Maybe I'm being old and cranky but: let me rephrase that; as someone who taught math and stat for several years before recently going into the private sector to do the same, I find your answer both insulting and evasive.

    Don't try to snow Teach. Now, tell me why you think a 'distribution without a mean' models wealth distribution. Specifically. Since an infinite number of such distributions can be constructed and you didn't specify, the fact that there is no mean must figure into your model.

    703:

    Well, the assumptions are pretty reasonable, and your remarks about what alpha 'really' is isn't really any different than the angsting that goes into parameters vs. statistics (although if my students were anything to judge, maybe there wasn't enough of that vital quality.)

    Yes, there are good reasons to think the distribution should follow a power law . . . but they aren't terribly germane to discussions about the observed inequalities themselves.

    704:

    ScentOfViolets, something intangible about your earlier comment somehow gave me the impression that you didn't understand this stuff, so I replied as I would to someone who didn't understand it. No offense intended.

    If I read it right, the link that Mark Schaffer provided says that alpha in the USA recently was around 0.6. I don't really have a moral standard for what alpha ought to be or whether there ought to be a mean.

    Yes, there are good reasons to think the distribution should follow a power law . . . but they aren't terribly germane to discussions about the observed inequalities themselves.

    I would think they would be central to that. If we're talking about what to do to reduce inequality (which is important to some of us), we definitely need to understand how it happens. It might be a side effect of something we need to be very careful with.

    Also we would need to be careful what our goals are. Depending on how you measure, we might come out less unequal if one person owned 80% of everything while everybody else had equal shares of the other 20%, than with many pareto distributions. That one person would have tremendous power, but there would only be one of him. The other way there would be a whole lot more pair-wise inequality. But I probably wouldn't consider that an improvement!

    So here's one way to generate a pareto distribution. Say that in general, people work for a living and they spend all their money. But every now and then, essentially at random, people get government sinecures. They get enough money to live on or more, maybe a whole lot. They quit working and some of them spend all their money while others save some and lend it or invest it at varying rates of return. Then after some random time they lose their sinecures and when their money is gone they have to go back to work.

    After awhile, that will give you a pareto distribution. A collection of piles of money that increase at varying compound interests for varying times.

    If in fact people do something so that they deserve to have their wealth increase at compound interest until they do something so they deserve for it to stop, then we shouldn't do anything to interfere with that.

    705:

    J Thomas says:

    If I read it right, the link that Mark Schaffer provided says that alpha in the USA recently was around 0.6.

    Actually, I think you've read it wrongly. In the Wikipedia entries, which are in terms of alpha, if we set xm=1 (simplifies things) the Pareto distribution is

    Prob(X>x) = (1/x)^alpha

    and the usual assumption is that the Pareto parameter alpha>1 so that the distribution has a finite mean.

    In the Chad Jones paper (see p. 33), the definition uses the reciprocal of alpha as the Pareto parameter:

    Prob(Income>y) = y^(-1/eta)

    So 1/eta for Jones is the same thing as the Wikipedia apha. When Jones says that eta for the US is approximately 0.6, that's the same thing as alpha = 1/0.6 = 1.67 > 1.

    706:

    The problem is that the distribution in and of itself doesn't give you a whole lot of information. To put it another way, there are many stories you can tell for each distribution (or rather, families of stories, each with their own sets of adjustable parameters); worse different distributions can draw from the same set of stories (measurment problem.) Finally, this:

    If in fact people do something so that they deserve to have their wealth increase at compound interest until they do something so they deserve for it to stop, then we shouldn't do anything to interfere with that.

    doesn't really follow . . . even if your story is in fact the cause of your observed distribution.

    I didn't find anything you said particularly patronizing/evasive, BTW. I may well have sounded a little off because I was trying to figure out what Elderly Cynic was on about, which is difficult because he sounds a bit confused about some basic statistical concepts.

    707:

    "Actually, I think you've read it wrongly. .... In the Chad Jones paper (see p. 33), the definition uses the reciprocal of alpha as the Pareto parameter:

    Prob(Income>y) = y^(-1/eta)"

    Yes, I saw they wrote that. But in the examples that immediately followed it looked like they used

    Prob(X>x) = (1/x)^(eta-1)

    With η=1/2, the share of income going to the top 1 percent is 100^(−1/2) = .10, or 10 percent, while if η=2/3, this share is 100^(−1/3)≈ 0.22, or 22 percent.

    I found it confusing.

    708:

    The problem is that the distribution in and of itself doesn't give you a whole lot of information.

    The distribution you choose reveals something about your a priori assumptions. That's valuable. And if the data shows that your assumptions can't fit the reality adequately, that's valuable too.

    Beyond that, doing fancy math gives a certain air of refinement to the discussion and impresses the easily impressed.

    "If in fact people do something so that they deserve to have their wealth increase at compound interest until they do something so they deserve for it to stop, then we shouldn't do anything to interfere with that."

    doesn't really follow . . . even if your story is in fact the cause of your observed distribution.

    It doesn't follow from the distribution, but it does follow from some stories. If the peop[e who have wealth deserve that wealth, then we must try to make sure they keep it and that they keep it growing at the rate they deserve to.

    If they don't deserve to keep that wealth, or keep it growing at current rates, then there's the question of what to do that will improve society -- there are things we could do that would take wealth from the wealthy that would be worse than letting them keep it, after all.

    To my way of thinking, if the only possible way to keep our science and technology advancing is to have a small group of plutocrats who decide which R&D to fund and which to suppress, then we need to have a small group of plutocrats in control. I just don't know what's really true and what we really need.

    709:

    I am sorry if I offended you, but my reaction to your posting was the same as J Thomas's.

    The reason that I said what I said was for the one he gave in 694. If you find that the Law of Large Numbers doesn't seem to hold, you have evidence that the distribution is best modelled by a distribution without a mean. It does not prove that the first moment does not exist, but it makes it the most reasonable assumption. From the references I have seen, the Law of Large Numbers does NOT seem to hold for effective wealth. And PLEASE note that I am talking about effective wealth and not income.

    It is nearly half a century since I did it, but my recollection is that all that is needed for the Law of Large Numbers to hold is that the (1+e)th moment exists for any e > 0. Someone with a more recent recollection of post-graduate probability may be able to correct me.

    710:

    If you have framed the question in terms of whether the tiny rich minority deserve to have 3 sports cars or 4, then you are already asking the wrong question.

    Ask instead whether the huge proportion of poor people deserve to be poor, and have no real opportunity to change their status.

    711:

    It's a big question and the context matters. If we are going to decide who deserves what, we need to take into account everybody and the whole economy and the world ecology.

    It isn't a question of sports cars. Mostly, rich people spend only a small fraction of their wealth, very rich people spend only a small fraction of their earnings. If the government decided how much everybody got to consume, and they decided to give a few sports cars to 0.1% of the population, it wouldn't matter a whole lot. It might not be exactly fair that a small fraction of the population got to consume a lot more than the rest, but it wouldn't be that big a deal. It isn't consumption by the rich that's the big issue.

    The issue is that various entities (including rich people) are expanding their wealth at compound interest, much faster than the economy is growing. They get to make decisions about how the economy develops, and the more they make those decisions to increase their own wealth, the more power they get to make those decisions.

    It is like an arms race -- a rich entity that spends money on charity or on anything that does not maximize its own income, will fall behind and will have less control. It will have less ability to arrange things to increase its income.

    We've been through something similar before. Aristocrats started out controlling fairly small areas of land, protecting the people from bandits etc. (But there was no one to protect the people from them.) But like the fishes in the sea, the big ones swallowed up the smaller, until eventually kings had so much control that they could give baronies etc to their friends and supporters -- and take them away again if they wanted. Whole nations belonged to one man.

    That's where we're heading now. US Walmart sales are more than 2% of US GDP. (A big part of Walmart sales are imports and not part of GDP, but you see the scale of it.) The more efficiently that Walmart extracts money from the economy, the more efficiently they can expand at the expense of other businesses. It isn't about how many sports cars the Walton family buys.

    712:

    The key is disposable income. Someone who earns £40k is not twice as wealthy as someone who earns £20k - it's a lot more than that.

    713:

    I wrote comparing Hitler's Catholicism to the Christianity of US politicians.

    -- Hitler wasn't a Catholic. He wasn't -any sort- of a Catholic. He didn't even -claim- to be a Catholic, generally.

    You don't have to be a good person or live by the Sermon on the Mount to be a Christian; you just have to believe in God and that Jesus was His son.

    Most of the politicians who claim to be Christians probably actually -do- believe in those things. It doesn't mean they're going to be good people.

    Conscious hypocrisy happens, but it's actually fairly rare. Most people tend to "become the mask" and genuinely believe what they say they believe; it's mentally more comfortable. This is one of the big risks with double agents, incidentally -- they may 'go native'.

    714:

    Wow, looks like the moderation thing is acting up again.

    715:

    "Sputter. I don't even know where to begin."

    -- but hey, you'll give it a try, I bet.

    "a) Rapidly growing economic output is not sustainable and therefore NOT GOOD."

    -- an unsupported assertion (nobody can predict the future, as anyone who reads science ficiton should know) followed by what is visibly a minority opinion.

    If you want to know what people consider good, watch their movements. People move -away- from areas without economic growth, -towards- those that have it.

    QED, they think rapid growth is good. Stuff is good. More stuff is even better. Stuff, stuff, stuff, glorious and wonderful stuff!

    That seems to be the way most of humankind thinks. Your sour pickle-up-the-butt puritanism is preferable... why, exactly?

    And I notice you're not living in a shack in the woods without electricity off what you can forage and grow.

    "b) Wealth is more and more unevenly distributed, so only a few get the benefits."

    -- what matters is how much you get, not what other people get. Unless you're indulging in envy, which is the only one of the Seven Deadly Sins that doesn't even give you any pleasure when you commit it.

    More people are getting more stuff all the time. STUFF! STUFF!

    "And before you look at the unemployed next door, look at the sweat shops in Bangladesh or the slums in Mexico."

    -- sweatshops are good, because the alternatives are worse. Every country starting to undergo economic development has to start somewhere.

    You obviously know nothing of what a subsistence peasant lives like.

    "Likewise I fear your knowledge of previous periods is severely limited."

    -- no, it's actually very extensive. I've been studying history and archaeology for a long time now.

    "What do you know of how the First Nations lived in America before the Europeans arrived?"

    -- oh, you mean the Indians? Quite a lot.

    There's the Mexica, with their fondness for involuntary cardiodectomy to keep the sun coming up...

    716:

    So capitalism is justified by bringing the golden age to a small group of privileged western academics? I don't think so.

    -- doubt you've ever been hungry for long.

    Capitalism has brought affluence to billions.

    Socialist countries have famines; capitalist ones have obesity problems.

    Cf. North and South Korea, or Taiwan and Mainland China before it went capitalist.

    Capitalism, to paraphrase Marx, frees us from the determinism of nature.

    717:

    I don't think disposable income is very important in this. Rich people might eat caviar and octopus and the finest real Kobe beef, and fly across the atlantic the way you might drive to a nearby city, and still they might spend only 10-50 times as much as you do. And there aren't that many of them. If we got a worldwide law that rich people couldn't consume more than you do for their personal stuff, it would be some imposition on them but it wouldn't mean there was that much more stuff to go around.

    The issue isn't personal consumption, it's control. Just like the issue about aristocrats wasn't that they could eat meat every day and live in stone fortresses instead of hovels, it was that they got to decide all the important stuff.

    The argument in favor of letting capitalists run everything is two-fold. First is the moral argument. They earned everything they have by working hard and smart. Every penny came by being the best at providing human welfare. They deserve their property and it's morally wrong to take any of it from them. Myself, I don't like to argue morality because it's a matter of esthetic taste and everybody gets to decide what they like for themselves.

    The second argument is a practical one, that we must let capitalists run everything because that's the only system that works. It evolved naturally, nobody quite understand how it works, but there is no alternative -- every other system fails catastrophically but capitalism never fails. It has feedback loops. If a capitalist is inefficient at running his business he will lose money and therefore he will have less power. Survival of the fittest. So capitalism stays efficient. No other system has feedback to reduce inefficiency. It has been proven that the only feedback system that works is free markets. Every other approach inevitably fails. So anything we do to regulate free markets makes us poorer. We must not interfere with capitalism or we will all sink into abject poverty.

    The practical argument against capitalism is that the practical argument in favor is appallingly implausible. It's possible we could design a better system than the one that evolved. There's reason to think that profits are not necessarily a great measure of social utility; we might find a better measure. There could be better ways to create wealth that lack some of capitalism's extremely high overhead. We should look at alternatives and look for ways to make them work, also using whatever we learn to build improved versions of capitalism and look for ways to make those work too.

    718:

    You wrote"-- Hitler wasn't a Catholic. He wasn't -any sort- of a Catholic. He didn't even -claim- to be a Catholic, generally." Except when he was claiming to be a Catholic.

    719:

    You wrote"Socialist countries have famines; capitalist ones have obesity problems." Socialist countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark seem to have avoided both of these.

    720:

    I don't think disposable income is very important in this. Rich people might eat caviar and octopus and the finest real Kobe beef, and fly across the atlantic the way you might drive to a nearby city, and still they might spend only 10-50 times as much as you do. And there aren't that many of them. If we got a worldwide law that rich people couldn't consume more than you do for their personal stuff, it would be some imposition on them but it wouldn't mean there was that much more stuff to go around.

    The issue isn't personal consumption, it's control. Just like the issue about aristocrats wasn't that they could eat meat every day and live in stone fortresses instead of hovels, it was that they got to decide all the important stuff.

    I agree. The flip side of all this money-as-control accumulating at the top is that I don't really know how it would do as money-as-consumption if the economic distribution shifted toward the middle class again.

    For example, I've read that if wages had kept pace with productivity increases, the median American household would have income nearly double to around $100k. Instead we've seen incredible wealth accumulation among the top households and corporations. You can see the symptoms in 12-digit offshore corporate cash hoards and prime London and New York City real estate selling for silly prices.

    If you redistribute the money so that an oligarch can no longer pay $15 million for a home in Manhattan, for the same number of dollars you should be able to build a hundred nice homes for middle class families in regions with middling land prices. Or maybe not. Building a hundred new middle class homes consumes real resources, while jockeying among oligarchs for positional goods largely doesn't. It seems likely to me that the relative decline of the Western middle class comes from a combination of oligarchical wealth siphoning and material constraints. If you could fix wealth and income distributions like the tail end of the post war golden age, circa 1970, the middle class might still be chasing a receding horizon of increased consumption though they'd be stronger politically. Oil, timber, beef, wild caught fish... I don't think any counterfactual of wealth/distribution would have let consumption growth keep up with the American experience of 1946-1972.

    I think that other major household expenses could be more bearable with a flatter income distribution: medical care, higher education, and debt service shouldn't have expanded to take such large shares of middle class income. At least I think so. Maybe in the counterfactual where we had a lot more $100k households and a lot fewer $500k+ households, higher education fees would have grown even faster.

    721:

    In your last paragraph, you're wrong. If things were like they were in counterfactual world, fees wouldn't have grown much at all because one of the main reasons they have in the USA is to do with cuts in funding by various levels of government, who have all been squeezed by lack of taxes because of all the money going to the rich people who hoard it and dodge tax on it.

    722:

    Socialist countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark seem to have avoided both of these.

    You seem to think of these counties are having a socialist economy.

    Most people that I know (and a few I know that live there) think of these countries as democratic capitalist economies with a strong social safety net compared to the rest of the EU and North America.

    723:

    Until Charlie pops up about this, I'm going to say that discussion needs to be stopped.

    You, David L, are not to blame for it, and I don't disagree with you (and I don't believe Charlie does, either)... but it needs to stop before it gets more off-rail.

    Thank you for your consideration.

    724:

    The flip side of all this money-as-control accumulating at the top is that I don't really know how it would do as money-as-consumption if the economic distribution shifted toward the middle class again.

    Agreed. Somebody has to decide how much stuff to produce for immediate consumption, and who gets it. Currently a lot of that is decided proximally by employers, who decide how much to produce and who to hire to produce it.

    Of course employers don't get to just do whatever they want, they have to guess how much they can sell, based on how effective their advertising has been in the past, how much money their target customer base has, etc. There really is something of a feedback system there.

    It isn't trivial to decide that sort of thing. Lots of people criticize the US system for encouraging managers to mostly look ahead one quarter. If one bad quarter can sink them, they have a strong incentive not to put too much emphasis farther ahead than that. But how far ahead should you look? The farther you look, the more unknowns will interfere before your outcome, plus you have a slow OODA loop. How much should you produce for immediate consumption versus making things better in the longer run?

    It makes a difference what the limiting factors are. I think Marx assumed that labor is usually limiting, but we know that isn't so. When you have more labor available than you have use for, it only superficially makes sense to bid wages down until the most desperate to survive get the jobs at subsistence wages.

    One problem with trying to figure out what you want is that it isn't obvious what you ought to want, and people will disagree. Some ways it's easier when it looks like nobody is in control, or if somebody is that nobody can do anything about it. Then you don't have to figure out what you want, you only have to think about what you can get -- given the constraints that are put on you.

    725:

    Sean, which discussion is off-rail?

    Charlie pointed out that automation allows wealth without much labor, so we can expect the rich to get more powerful. They will buy the government and increase the security state since they don't need democracy but they do need security.

    This all seems plausible but it's a complicated idea with lots of little pieces, any of which could possibly change until it doesn't fit after all.

    One of the things that makes it seem inevitable is that there is no obvious alternative. The popular imagination sees only two choices. There's the 18th-century idea of capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and Ricardo, which is simple and clear and has little to do with modern economies. And there is the 19th century idea of communism by Marx, which is mostly considered discredited. I suppose we could throw in the 20th century Keynes. None of the three give us any hint how to deal with 21st century problems.

    David L demonstrates the problem -- we have a world economy in which some regions do better than others. It's always been that way. When the US economy had only 5% imports or exports and was reasonably autarkous, we had some regions that did very well and some that were quite poor. Why is that? Of course capital flows to profit centers, and places like West Virginia were not profit centers. We could look at regions that are currently doing OK and ask what they're doing right, but instead we argue about which centuries-old oversimplified antique idea better fits them. This is not off-topic. This is central to Charlie's point.

    It isn't just that tiny groups are fighting over the power while we appear to be on the outside, people who will at best displaced in the conflict. Even worse, we have no concept what alternatives there could be if we somehow seize power.

    It's a massive failure of imagination.

    726:

    ... I'm going to say that discussion needs to be stopped. ... Thank you for your consideration.

    Sure. No problem.

    727:

    Oops. I get the impression you are a moderator saying to stop talking, not someone complaining about particular things that are off-topic. I don't know what's going on and I'll wait and see rather than find out interactively.

    728:

    Not me. But I think Sean is.

    729:

    Norway Sweden & Denmark are SOCIAL_DEMOCRATIC counries, not socialist ones ... If you are from the USSA, you might not be able to tell the difference, but, believe me, it's there.

    730:

    We've been through this before There is a (admittedly very long-string) feedback loop in this: IF the "Owners" - who are also apparently the "Producers" in terms of owning the means of production ... Then they can't make money unless large numbers of people buy their stuff, can they> Same as the tories have, admittedly late (but bettter-late-tan-never) realised that higher wages & more people in said employment mean better tax revenues.

    If, say 80% of the population are kept in penury, then how are the wealthy to make theor wealth?

    Where/when does the feedback strat to cu t iN? I would maintain that it is starting to hapen here, already. The USA not so sure, though the Wal-Mart wages move might be a straw in the wind.

    731:

    Oh & @ 713 & 718 PLEASE refer back to my post @ 610 & the links inside it?

    And apologies for the appalling typos in the previous post ....

    732:

    In post count, not even close; we've had at least 2 that went well over 900, and I think one of them went over 1_000.

    in word count, no idea, and unless Charlie or a mod has a shell script for doing word counts no obvious way to find out.

    733:

    This is currently the fifth longest thread in terms of comment count. For what it's worth, the figures are as below:

    Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire (Dec 18 2013) 902 2512 (Nov 8 2012) 825 The High Frontier, Redux (Jun 16 2007) 825 What Amazon's ebook strategy means (Apr 14 2012) 759 A different cluetrain (Feb 25) 732

    And it's now 733 including this one.

    The counts don't include those comments that didn't end up on the page because they were rejected or dropped. At one point we were receiving a spam comment every twelve seconds, and it's only because the filters were running flat out rejecting all of those that threads of that vintage didn't end up in the tens of thousands.

    The spam bots are why we insist on logging in to comment: we now get close to zero spam. It's also why every now and then a comment gets held for no readily apparent reason — I think the mod-bot does it because it gets bored, either that or it's decided the comment in question has no useful content. If it's not too old, the comment may get resurrected, but if the conversation has moved on, there's little point in having a comment pop into existence several pages up from the current end.

    734:

    "Sputter. I don't even know where to begin."

    -- but hey, you'll give it a try, I bet.

    Sure! :-)

    "a) Rapidly growing economic output is not sustainable and therefore NOT GOOD."

    -- an unsupported assertion (nobody can predict the future, as anyone who reads science ficiton should know) followed by what is visibly a minority opinion.

    May I refer you to this publication. I'm aware that there's some discussions about growth without increase in resource consumption, but I don't see how that will happen without regulation.

    If you want to know what people consider good, watch their movements. People move -away- from areas without economic growth, -towards- those that have it.

    Sure, see the slums in Mexico and many other megacities.

    QED, they think rapid growth is good. Stuff is good. More stuff is even better. Stuff, stuff, stuff, glorious and wonderful stuff!

    That doesn't prove it's sustainable. I know that growth is nice, but the higher you rise, the harder you fall.

    That seems to be the way most of humankind thinks. Your sour pickle-up-the-butt puritanism is preferable... why, exactly?

    Even if I were a pickle-up-the-but puritan it would be better than your irresponsible baby-in-candy-shop attitude to capitalism.

    And I notice you're not living in a shack in the woods without electricity off what you can forage and grow.

    "b) Wealth is more and more unevenly distributed, so only a few get the benefits."

    -- what matters is how much you get, not what other people get. Unless you're indulging in envy, which is the only one of the Seven Deadly Sins that doesn't even give you any pleasure when you commit it.

    More people are getting more stuff all the time.

    Except for the people who get less.

    STUFF! STUFF!

    See above.

    "And before you look at the unemployed next door, look at the sweat shops in Bangladesh or the slums in Mexico."

    -- sweatshops are good, because the alternatives are worse. Every country starting to undergo economic development has to start somewhere.

    You mean the more sweatshops there are, the less there will be? Are you saying that economic development depends on exploitation of the poor always and everywhere?

    You obviously know nothing of what a subsistence peasant lives like.

    I never said that subsistence peasant lives where better. I am saying that mankind has enough resources to feed everyone and it doesn't.

    "Likewise I fear your knowledge of previous periods is severely limited."

    -- no, it's actually very extensive. I've been studying history and archaeology for a long time now.

    "What do you know of how the First Nations lived in America before the Europeans arrived?"

    -- oh, you mean the Indians? Quite a lot.

    There's the Mexica, with their fondness for involuntary cardiodectomy to keep the sun coming up...

    Of course you pick the culture with the most gruesome human sacrifices. I was thinking of the longhouse traditions in North America which were referenced in Graeber's book.

    735:

    The argument in favor of letting capitalists run everything is two-fold. First is the moral argument. They earned everything they have by working hard and smart. Every penny came by being the best at providing human welfare.

    This is bullshit. There are enough capitalists who only got rich because of inheritance or by tricking other people.

    They deserve their property and it's morally wrong to take any of it from them. Myself, I don't like to argue morality because it's a matter of esthetic taste and everybody gets to decide what they like for themselves.

    Yes, there are others who argue that it's wrong to hold on to your property when others are in more need. Normally societies evolve to a system in the middle of those two extremes.

    The second argument is a practical one, that we must let capitalists run everything because that's the only system that works. It evolved naturally, nobody quite understand how it works, but there is no alternative -- every other system fails catastrophically but capitalism never fails. It has feedback loops. If a capitalist is inefficient at running his business he will lose money and therefore he will have less power. Survival of the fittest. So capitalism stays efficient.

    Except when capitalists game the system with cartels or by getting the state to bail them out of their failures.

    No other system has feedback to reduce inefficiency. It has been proven that the only feedback system that works is free markets. Every other approach inevitably fails. So anything we do to regulate free markets makes us poorer. We must not interfere with capitalism or we will all sink into abject poverty.

    All systems have feedback loops. Most have feedback loops that reduce inefficiency. The difference with capitalism is that it has a very strong positive feedback loop causing the accumulation of capital. During growth cycles this makes it competitive against other system even in the presence of inefficiencies.

    All closed systems also have negative feedback loops that keep their positive feedback loops in check. The problem with capitalism is that we understand quite well how it works but we don't know enough about the negative feedback loops that make it fail.

    736:

    As per SEF at #723, this thread's getting seriously derailed into a discussion of the morals of capitalism and is in danger of dissolving into a mess. Please bite your tongues, those of you on both sides, while Charlie's bashing his head against draft polishing and is unable to wade in himself.

    737:

    Ok. May we still discuss feedback loops and (lack of) checks and balances in capitalist systems then?

    738:

    I'm going to assume that you veterans know that comments along these lines are OK.

    IF the "Owners" - who are also apparently the "Producers" in terms of owning the means of production ... Then they can't make money unless large numbers of people buy their stuff, can they>

    This is a fallacy. There might be some special conditions that make it true some times and places, but it is not true in general. Here is an argument against -- suppose that by magic we suddenly had ten times as many people, new people who yesterday had no connection with the economy. Now suddenly there are ten times as many people that "Producers" could make things for. Will producing for those people make rich people or owners richer?

    No. The new people have no money. And using more resources -- more coal and oil and steel and corn etc -- will not result in more valuable stuff for owners. Having ten times as many mouths to feed does not increase the wealth.

    If before there were ten times as many jobs as people to do them, then extra people would let us create more wealth. Probably not ten times as much wealth because we can assume it was the most important and productive jobs that were getting done before. (But maybe more than 10 times as much, because the simple arguments aren't always right in particular cases.) But Charlie's argument is that automation lets us produce more wealth with fewer jobs, so a bunch of extra unemployed people would not help the economy.

    What we do now, is the banks create extra money and the government borrows it and gives it to poor people, who spend it to buy stuff. The "producers" take the money they get and buy interest-bearing bonds with it, and the banks then lend even more money to the government to repeat the cycle. Various people argue that this is unsustainable in the long run, that the rich will eventually quit running around a squirrel cage lending money to the government so they can sell stuff to get it back and then lend the money to do it again. But so far they've done just that. Most of the economy runs basicly on charity -- officially the charitable rich are getting tallies of how much they have contributed, that are supposed to be worth something, but the money has no intrinsic value.

    This is why bitcoins are important. If they worked, they could upset the ricketty old applecart. So people get excited about them and feel the need to assert that they don't work.

    Let's try again. Suppose we had 80% unemployment, and the "producers" were basicly treating 80% of the population as charity cases. And then by magic 90% of the unemployed suddenly vanished. Would the rich people be less rich? They could shut down 20% of their production. They could leave 20% of the forests unharvested, if they wanted. Burn 20% less oil. Etc. Or they could use those resources for whatever they wanted. How can we argue that extra consumers are an asset and not a liability?

    But in reality we have no way to get the unemployed to magically vanish. They would have to be killed, and unless they revolt most of the people who matter won't accept the ethics of killing them.

    739:

    ... this thread's getting seriously derailed into a discussion of the morals of capitalism and is in danger of dissolving into a mess.

    Thank you! Now I see the problem much clearer. Since morality is an esthetic issue and people disagree, of course that would be a mess.

    Charlie presented a practical problem. Automation makes labor far less important, and this shift in power can reasonably be expcted to result in a government that ignores most people's needs.

    Morality aside, maybe we could discuss this in terms of what alternatives might be possible, what it would take to make them possible, the details of what's likely to happen assuming no alternatives work out, etc.

    Of course it would be easy to get bogged down in assertions about what ought to happen, what we must not do , etc.

    740:

    This is the problem I have with libertarianism in an automated world. If there are 80% of the population who are surplus to economic requirements, and the government does not tax and redistribute (in any of its many forms) then 80% of the population starves.

    741:

    then 80% of the population starves.

    Well not if they just get off their duff and get to work.

    [/sarcasm]

    Or so says some of the libertarians I know.

    742:

    PSA: One more day of ploughing through the line-edit level shit in this manuscript and I can throw up my hands and go take a final look at the high-level stuff. That may take another day or two. But it should all be in the can by Friday and if I can be arsed I'll come back to do some butt-kicking.

    This is consecutive day fourteen of the death march. I think I've had one day of down-time in the process -- but used it for planning/rethinking my workflow rather than actually relaxing, so I don't think it counts.

    (Tea break's over: time to go back head-down in the shit lagoon ...)

    743:

    Not necessarily. Real-world societies never do things in only the ways that theoretical philosophers say they should. A real saociety would notice something that big, and make some sort of response.

    In ancient Rome, lots of rich people became "patrons". They gave money to "clients" who did not produce enough for the donations they received. Clients did things like serve as impromptu bodyguards, and praise their patron in public. The patrons got prestige from having lots of clients. Sort of the ultimate Parkinson's Law. People who could afford more clients expanded their client base because they could.

    I don't say that in a real libertarian society the solution would be dignified, or fair, or just, or even that it couldn't involve a significant amount of starvation. But something would happen, and today's theoretical libertarians have no better idea what it would be than anyone else.

    744:

    ADMIN NOTE: This seems to have turned into a discussion of "real libertarian society" vs. capitalism vs. other forms of social organization.

    Drop this topic RIGHT NOW.

    I am not pleased by the direction the discussion is going in, and I am prepared to delete comments and ban commenters (when I get time) if you keep derailing the discussion from the original topic -- which is, the network of interlocking ways in which our current system is broken.

    (Clue: I am not a libertarian sympathizer.)

    745:

    ... the network of interlocking ways in which our current system is broken.

    And you make a point of considering the ways it is breaking further.

    Consider the metaphor of feudalism. People banded together for protection, and their leaders got a lot of power. There was a long period of consolidation because bigger groups could attack and defend better than smaller ones, and as transportation got easier, defenders were less isolated. Also they got better at knocking down walls. It culminated with single kings owning whole nations.

    Are we heading that way? When people say "the rich" they mean people richer than they are. But you have to be very wealthy indeed to protect your wealth from those wealthier than you are.

    Could it turn into one company, and almost everybody is a full-time employee? "Mr. Wentworth, have you been moonlighting? You know that if you have a business idea, your manager will be happy to evaluate it and decide whether it fits into WalMart's quality product line."

    Lots of control. "Mr. Wentworth, we have evidence that you sold food to a wildling. There is still room for clemency but you must tell us everything. We must find out -- since the wilding is not a WalMart employee, how did he get money to pay you?"

    They mostly don't need prisons. "I'm sorry I must announce that Mr. Wentworth has behaved in ways that do not reflect well on the CEO, and he is -- no longer with the company."

    It was very hard for a noble to build an army that could defeat a king's army. But when the time came that a lot of people thought they could do without kings, somehow in Britain and France armies arose that did defeat the remnants of the kings' armies. Then after they thought things over, the people invited in new kings with some restrictions.

    If there are two sides that don't reach agreement and don't surrender, it can be decided by force. Kings lost wars because republics could raise larger numbers of fanatical troops. Would something like that matter now? If it turned into a war of drones against whatever an ad hoc republic of non-rich people could create, who would win?

    It isn't just that one side would have nukes. If the plutocrats decided not to plant the crops, then an army of dissidents could not win -- the best they could hope for would be a humanitarian disaster on the order of Cambodia under Pol Pot.

    Is this line of thought more acceptable to you? Or are you looking for something on a shorter timescale?

    746:

    Err [ AND - Taking note of Charlie's warning @ 744 ] I think your agument is a strawman - if only because they system operates gradually, so imagining a sudeden influx of destitute people or the converse cannot happen as posited. Um. Later @ #743: Real-world societies never do things in only the ways that theoretical philosophers say they should. Good, very good - so why are we making such desperate "theoretical" (in the pejorative sense) arguments, then, since you've just effectively admitted that they are false? Remember that (Current-model US) Libertarianism & traditional Marxist communism are "perfect theories" for very imperfect humans & societies. And the proponents of either model still don't seem to grasp that they ... errr ... DO NOT WORK.

    747:

    You have, in fact described a "comunist" state or a very good facsimile of one, where the means of distribution & production are centrally controlled. (!) Err, now I'm, really confused.

    748:

    Don't be silly, it's only evil communism when communists do the gosplan thing, not when it's done by the board of a multinational company! ;-)

    749:

    So glad we cleared that up, then! Cough, splutter

    750:

    I don't believe that militarization of police forces and the priviliging of intelligence agencies can save the system in the long run. The core of the problem is not civil unrest but that inequality gets so high that economic growth isn't possible any more. "Tooling up" might help profits for another short time but in the end there will be a recession. Artificial finance products like derivatives might push the nominal value of wealth but it will have severe credibility issues in the long run. After all, money, derivatives, contracts etc. are just promises to do a certain thing under certain conditions in the future. Once people stop believing in these promises, they are worthless.

    Finally, it's not enough to have the guns. You also have to convince the other side that guns are enough to control them (some of you might know Robert Sheckley's short story "The Gun Without a Bang" (Store of Infinity)). Gandhi understood this perfectly. Also Gramsci has a different view on power changes: in the end the ruling class has to provide an ideology (or ideologies) that achieve consent in the vast majority of the populace. One part of this ideology is to define who are police and who are criminals. If the majority sympathizes more with the latter than the former, then things will fall apart.

    Maybe a failed state is a state that lacks such a coalition of ideologies that legitimize the rule.

    751:

    "#743: Real-world societies never do things in only the ways that theoretical philosophers say they should."

    Good, very good - so why are we making such desperate "theoretical" (in the pejorative sense) arguments, then, since you've just effectively admitted that they are false?

    I don't want to get banned here. OK, if I just don't fit in then it's for the best, but I don't want to do it when I think I'm following the rules. So I'm not sure about answering you.

    I say that one of the reasons the system is broken is that so many people are stuck with ancient models of the economy that don't work.

    I was responding to your #730, which implies a simplified Keynsian POV. The argument is sort of correct. When there are fewer people who can afford to buy, then (perhaps after an adjustment period) there will be less produced. This is bad for the people who can't buy. It is bad for the workers who don't get to make the extra stuff and therefore don't get paid as much and so can't afford to buy as much themselves. It is bad for the government which is in competition with other governments and whose prestige depends on owning a strong economy.

    But is it bad for owners? They don't make as much money because they don't have as much to sell. They also don't spend as much money on labor and capital goods etc. How are they worse off?

    I'll make up some numbers. Say you're an owner. Your employees consume 1 living unit of stuff each, per year. You consume 10 units per year. You have 100 employees and they produce 110 units of stuff. You give them 100 units and you take 10 units.

    Then you install automation. You now have 10 employees, who produce 110 units of stuff. You give them 20 units (because they are elite skilled employees) and you take 10 units, leaving you 70 units surplus. You did it wrong!

    Instead, you could have 4 employees who produce 22 units of stuff. They each get 2 units and you get 14. They are better off, they each get 2 units. You are maybe better off, you get 14 units, though you had plenty before. You need 4 employees when 2 could easily do all the work, because if you have too few people who are too important, they can hold your factory for ransom. You need to have enough you can fire half of them and still keep things running smooth.

    Automation is bad for people who can't find work. It's bad for the government. It is sort of bad for managers -- it is far more prestigious to run a plant with 100 employees than to run one with 4. It is not bad for owners. The 96 ex-employees are somebody else's problem. Owners can get just as much stuff for themselves, and risk less money while doing it.

    Of course I left out lots of important details. (Cost of automation, how long before it's obsolescent and needs to be replaced, cost of raw materials, you make a few products and trade for the rest, etc etc etc) but the ones I left in are vitally important.

    Bottom line: Automation can work for owners even when it doesn't work for anyone else. They don't need you in their economy, provided the expense of dealing with you being on the outside is not too big.

    752:

    Bottom line: Automation can work for owners even when it doesn't work for anyone else. They don't need you in their economy, provided the expense of dealing with you being on the outside is not too big.

    Sounds like the difference is micro vs. macro economics. For short-term sustainable (i.e. enough to get re-elected) macro economics you need enough growth to employ the 96 ex-employees.

    753:

    You have, in fact described a "comunist" state or a very good facsimile of one, where the means of distribution & production are centrally controlled. (!) Err, now I'm, really confused.

    I'm not arguing in favor of an ideology. I'm guessing about how the system could evolve.

    I'm comparing it to the feudal system. (Except I am not a medieval scholar so somebody who knows how it really worked could tell me I'm completely wrong about everything.) They had an ideology, you protected your vassals and obeyed your liege, and there didn't have to be one guy at the top though typically there was, officially. But eventually it turned into a system where a liege lord could have a small group as a bodyguard and if he did anything to defy an overbearing king with unrightful demands, they'd just bring in the cannons and knocked down his keep. It didn't particularly matter whether he upheld his word to obey and protect -- it wasn't really his choice any more. The ideology became irrelevant.

    Capitalist ideology says that the most efficient should gain capital and use it efficiently, and therefore the system will improve. It doesn't say what happens after the most efficient has won against everything else and there is no longer any competition. That's game over.

    Are we heading in that direction?

    754:

    Leaving all the rest aside, I actually think you have half an answer here: I say that one of the reasons the system is broken is that so many people are stuck with ancient models of the economy that don't work. Almost. NONE of the models for "economies" seem to work or be working - & I'm not sure anyone has really noticed, where it matters - i.e. top levels of government, anywhere. Suggestions?

    755:

    Please delete this if inappropriate, but I will try to follow your directive.

    J Thomas (and others), I agree with you, but think that you are insufficiently cynical (and perhaps not old enough to remember at first hand!) This is mainly a response to your postings, rather than Charlie Stross's.

    The problems are not the centralisation of power as such, but its abuse. Cartels not merely use dirty tricks to eliminate competitors, but often try to block any possible future competition. They then change from being suppliers of goods/services, to treating the customer as the commodity (and the supply as mere overhead). Once they are big enough to influence the government, they can get the law changed to help them, and even make DIY alternatives illegal (and I could provide lots of current examples!)

    A specific example. Raleigh was such a cartel, with 95% of the UK market and most of the (old Empire) market, too. The law on lights mandated the voltage and current that Raleigh and nobody else used. Their traditional roadsters sold well, but their margins were smaller than for the outsourced imitation road-racers, so they stopped selling the former in the UK (despite most shops having lots on order) and eventually totally. We then joined the EEC. Bye, bye, Raleigh.

    Similar things happened in many other UK industries, and some 1950s and 1960s quangos (e.g. the Milk Marketing Board). This led to the rise of samizdat operations in some areas (especially food production), because there was no legal way to create a start-up that produced the product that was wanted. We are seeing that again today, in many areas, including with the frequent abuse of IP laws to block even original work. But my examples above were from the Old Labour days, and there are similar ones from the Soviet Union.

    The difference now is that Whitehall (forget those hot air bags in Westminster) has sold us down the river (and I reference the original meaning of that good old American expression) to the USA military-industrial machine. Ike was right :-(

    As an aside, I recognise a reference to John Christopher's work in your comment about laws and employees - well worth rereading in this context!

    756:

    Anyone got a recommendation for an audible horror story?

    I've run out of Lovecraft, so a new one would be nice (for a given value of nice). And you know this stuff...

    Ta

    757:

    I tend to think James Scott (Seeing Like A State) got one of the central state issues right. He was looking at various government fiascos on both sides of the political spectrum over the last 50 years. His take was that four factors caused the problems:

  • Simplification. Any society is way too complicated for anyone to fully understand it, so states simplify what they look at, everything from freehold land tenure to everyone using the same name format to ID numbers, addresses, internet protocols, and so forth. On its own this is both necessary and sometimes beneficial. There's a lot to be said for the idea that every citizen is equal, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense on the ground (see children, prisoners, people in power, etc. It's good that they're legally equal, but practically they aren't.)

  • High modernist ideology. This isn't about being a scientist, this is the belief (especially as espoused by politicians) that Progress will Cure All Ills. Scientists and engineers are a lot more cautious, but the radical belief that something new and shiny, whether it's communism, capitalism, Progress, a new religion or what have you, can often cause as much trouble as it fixes. Especially when a leader latches on to it.

  • An authoritarian leader who believes that the simplified map he's getting is the same as the reality, and strives to simplify reality. You know, the strong leader who comes in, cuts out all the crap and clutter, and makes things work again?

  • A weak state that can't stop the strongman from imposing his new program. Weak states and would-be strongmen go together like roadkill and maggots.

  • By themselves, these aren't necessarily problems. Combine all four and you can get anything from the Great Leap Forward on down to a cartel screwing up or a vicious new cult.

    It's a fun analysis to think about.

    758:

    The Pods? Podcastle, Escapepod, Pseudopod Harry Dresden? Or maybe we can wait for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3tuiND_xk

    759:

    NONE of the models for "economies" seem to work or be working - .... Suggestions?

    It might be off-topic to suggest improvements, but I want to. Here's a grab-bag of ideas.

    First, pay attention to economics work that parallels that done with ecology. Ecology studies a similar system, with most of the ideology missing. Their techniques should be valuable.

    They study cycles of resource use. The carbon cycle, the sulfur cycle, etc. They study where the energy comes from and where it goes.

    They study which plants and animals hold onto stuff, which change the system in important ways, and which maintain minor niches.

    They look at patterns of ecological succession. Each species that successfully changes the environment to suit itself, eventually changes it to something that suits some other species better and then that one takes over. We get a climax ecosystem when we reach a state that nothing has evolved to take over from -- yet.

    I don't know that the ecology parallel would be useful, but it at least gives hints.

    It might help to give up the idea that businesses have a right to privacy. In business as in war, marketing strategies etc work better when the enemy does not know them. But the widespread secrecy keeps economists from finding out what's actually going on. The economy as a whole would be better off without it. Open information would be embarrassing -- people could see how very little top managers know about what happens in their companies, for example. It might lead to interesting reforms. And we are better off with economists who can actually study their topic. Some of the emphasis on deductive reasoning about what has to be happening, probably comes because they can't actually test their ideas.

    I have some specific ideas that might help the US economy. (That's the one I've had most occasion to think about.) One is obvious -- we desperately need cheap alternative energy, so looking for ways to encourage that is necessary. Without cheap energy we'll have to make painful adjustments. With cheap energy we'll have riches we can choose what to do with.

    Here's another -- maybe part of the US economic growth from 1945-1980 came because the USA suddenly noticed that it included a collection of third-world nations where the natives spoke quasi-english and were subject to US law, namely the US South. They invested heavily there, and it paid off. Mechanized agriculture, cheap labor, abundant mostly-untapped natural resources, etc. A lot of it came from new technology, and a lot from deficit spending to outgrow the USSR, but I'm guessing that a lot also came from developing the South. We might benefit by developing Mexico that way. Find a way to break down the barriers. Line up the business laws, treat Mexico as part of the USA economicly, no trade barriers and no travel barriers etc, make sure investors can depend on the Mexican government as much as they can depend on the Louisiana government. It could get an economic advantage at least as good as Germany got by re-integrating. And if we all wound up speaking Spanglish that would be just fine.

    A lot of our recent "advances" have come from things like insurance, juggling risks, that sort of thing. Some of that is gambler's ruin. We need a way to handle that. I have only vague ideas about that, but it's an issue we need to face. We can hardly avoid making big structural changes in the economy, and that increases uncertainty for any plan that covers multiple years including mortgages, bonds, insurance, investments, etc. It's hard to plan for a future that has to change in unknown ways, but at the least we should notice the difference between normal long-term plans which are likely to fail when things change too much, versus risky long-term plans which are guaranteed to fail unless things change in unlikely ways.

    Payment systems are now a reasonably mature industry. We should have government payment systems. Every citizen gets a free account and a check card. The government should give economists sanitized data so they can see what's going on with consumers, employees, and small businesses.

    Computerized stock markets are a mature industry, apart from the desire for ultra-fast transactions. People should be able to invest retirement money in a government stock market. There could be reasonable limitations, like if you sell within one year any profits are taxed away, but you can sell at a loss whenever you want. Make it slow to remove stock from the market and sell it on another market, to reduce arbitrage.

    It's absurd to invest retirement money in the same markets with day-traders and big-time manipulators. If people bet their retirement money on where they think companies will be at least a year from now, it would make more sense. Also, give them a tax advantage to invest in the clean market, and reduce or eliminate the tax advantages for gambling on traditional stock markets.

    760:

    Not Audible, but here's the Clarkesworld reading of Peter Watts' The Things - John Carpenter's The Thing, from the point of view of the Thing. A well read, very creepy story.

    761:

    I'm not a BIG fan of audio books, nor of being read to...one of my earliest memories is of my attempt to persuade my infant school teacher to allow me to sit at the back of the class and read my own, public library, book ..DR Doolittle series...whilst she read Noddy books -that were written by Enid Blyton - to her class.

    Mrs Brown looked down on me from a Great Height - well I was only just over 5 years old and had been able to read since I was just over 4 - and she said “You are Very Clever Young Man but you suffer from Lazyitus”

    I'm by no means sure that being forced to listen to someone reading Noddy Books doesn’t qualify as child abuse these days. Anyway, since that day I've hated being read to...BUT... on the basis of how they read in my head, as compared to Lovecraft, you could try...

    http://www.bookdepository.com/Complete-Ghost-Stories-M-R-James-v-1-James/9781874703624

    762:

    A list of the stories as available in audio..err ..elswhere ..

    " Unabridged complete collection of 34 M R James ghost stories.Read by David Collings.Available for the first time as complete and unabridged audio books (in 2 volumes), all of the published ghost stories of the father of the ghost story. Volume One contains 14 stories including such famous tales as: Canon Alberic's Scrap Book, The Mezzotint; 'Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'; The Treasure of Abbot Thomas; and Casting the Runes.

    Volume Two contains 20 stories including such famous tales as: Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance; The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance; The Uncommon Prayer-Book; A View from a Hill; and A Warning to the Curious.Review

    "David Collings reads wonderfully well. Craftsman has produced a beautiful package of CDs, elegantly bound and including an extra CD offering articles in PDF format and track listings." Kim Bunce in The Observer, 24th June 2007. Stories:

    A Neighbour's Landmark A View From a Hill A Vignette A Warning to the Curious After Dark in the Playing Fields An Episode of Cathedral History An Evening's Entertainment Ash Tree Canon Alberic's Scrapbook Casting the Runes Count Magnus Lost Hearts Martin's Close Mezzotint Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance Number 13 Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad Rats Rose Garden School Story Stalls of Barchester Cathedral Diary of Mr Poynter The Experiment The Fenstanton Witch Haunted Dolls' House Malice of Inanimate Objects Residence at Whetminster Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance The Uncommon Prayer-book There Was a Man Dwelt By a Churchyard Tractate Middoth Treasure of Abbot Thomas Two Doctors Wailing Well. "

    763:

    You wrote: "Bottom line: Automation can work for owners even when it doesn't work for anyone else. They don't need you in their economy, provided the expense of dealing with you being on the outside is not too big." Automation is not always the same. When I stared work in a hospital biochemistry lab in 1966 eight staff did about 250 tests per day. When I retired last year just my section of the lab did around 45,000 tests per day. Automation allowed the development of the service in quality and quantity. This may not last as even more modern technology will allow the tests now done in a central lab to be moved to point-of-care devices. But the history so far has shown that automation does not necessarily mean mass unemployment. In "The age of the pussyfoot" Frederik Pohl wrote of new jobs which would make as little sense to us as a ski instructor would to Genghis Khan. These jobs are with us already: website designer, personal trainer and personal shopper would not seem like 'proper jobs' to anyone from the 1950s. The future doesn't have to be good but it's not automatically going to be doom or gloom either.

    764:

    Frederik Pohl wrote of new jobs which would make as little sense to us as a ski instructor would to Genghis Khan. These jobs are with us already: website designer, personal trainer and personal shopper would not seem like 'proper jobs' to anyone from the 1950s. The future doesn't have to be good but it's not automatically going to be doom or gloom either.

    I am not so sure these are good example. Genghis Khan certainly knew about snow and skis, and about the concept of "teaching someone to ski". Granted, at the time and place it was usually taught by parents to their children, but still was not entirely meaningless.

    "Website designer" would make no sense to anyone from 1950's because they did not know about the Internet. But if you explained THAT concept to people from the 1950's, they would easily understand that "website designer" is someone like "advertising editor" (not really true, but close). As for personal trainer and personal shopper, the 1950's term for these jobs was "servant".

    765:

    Automation allowed the development of the service in quality and quantity.

    Yes. When automation is practical at all, it usually allows work to be done quicker, more precisely, cheaper, and at higher volume. It seems to me a travesty to make human beings do work that machines do better and cheaper, only because we have not found another way to use the humans. Or because the dynamics of our arbitrary economic system do not work well with high-fixed-cost/low-variable-cost.

    These jobs are with us already: website designer, personal trainer and personal shopper would not seem like 'proper jobs' to anyone from the 1950s.

    I remember talking to website designers about the time I was getting out of computing. One year they were all happy and smug because they made so much money. The next year they were desperate, they talked about how amateurs couldn't make good websites because they didn't have the esthetics, they made horrible designs that were utter eyesores. Also amateurs didn't know how to make dancing bunnies or anything very sophisticated. The website designer incomes were going down and they were upset about it.

    I tried some of that as an amateur, and it looked to me like a lot of the esoteric .css stuff was done that way so that professional jobs would still be available. I saw no other excuse.

    It looks to me like in general computer-specific jobs tend to last about 3 years. 3 years from now the esoteric things you are doing now will be mostly automated so amateurs can do them, and your job will have transformed to something different that's esoteric and difficult, or it will be gone.

    There were personal trainers in the 1950's but they tended to be for special people. There were personal trainers who would teach you boxing or poker, public speaking or swordfighting, exercise and weight loss etc. Fewer people thought they could afford it.

    Rich people had personal shoppers, they were for example cooks.

    And we've had taxicabs from the time chauffers could afford their own cars.

    Whatd I see developing is lots of tiny niches, and one person can fill lots of them and see if he can make a living. So I might have one website that advertises custom cat structures. (It costs a lot to ship long pieces of wood UPS, but the customer gets what he pays for.) Another website advertises various custom parts I can make with a 3D printer. Another a special small safe that looks like a can of spice and fits onto the spice rack, you can open it and shake spice out of it. Etc. One week I might get 5 orders of one product and 2 of another, the next week no orders of the first but 4 of a third. Keep coming up with new products and maybe scrape by.

    I think people with these sorts of skills used to be called handymen and they never seemed to make much money, but it's a more interesting life than working on an assembly line for 30 years. And that latter may be getting less viable.

    But of course we can't get very far taking in each other's laundry. Somebody needs to get significant money from people whose income comes from selling automated stuff, or we can't afford to buy the automated stuff.

    766:

    This EXACT model is being used on food-production in the EU right now. It was, in fact the final straw that made me into a reluctant UKIP supporter (Racism of some members has caused me to rethink again - & I am NOT a member, incidentally) Small producers, suppliers & even users are being squeezed out of the market or forced to break the law, because of this gross corruption & power-broking.

    But this raises another problem - one aspect of the general problem we are discussing. The "system" is broken - how to fix it? In this specific case, the EU desperately needs reform. Where is it going to come form? NOt for the UK or other "national guvmints & certainly not form the Commission. So - what are one's options now? I certainly don't have any answers to any of these ...

    767:

    SEE ALSO http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/11460131/Is-this-the-EU-rule-that-could-crush-the-pips-from-your-favourite-cider-maker.html Yes, the article includes special pleading - the writer is a cider-producer ... But, you should "get" the problem.

    768:

    You wrote: "Website designer" would make no sense to anyone from 1950's because they did not know about the Internet. But if you explained THAT concept to people from the 1950's, they would easily understand that "website designer" is someone like "advertising editor" (not really true, but close). As for personal trainer and personal shopper, the 1950's term for these jobs was "servant". My point is that there will be future jobs about which you understand as much as a 1950s person understood the internet. There isn't anyone from the future to explain to us what these jobs entail. As for personal trainer and personal shopper these people are not servants. They are employed or self employed and deal with the "middle classes" not the aristocrats or super - rich.

    769:

    And while the EU would be happy for small cider makers to be charged a nominal amount, the reality is that duty charged will default to current UK rates of £39.66 per hectolitre.

    The article itself there points out that it's not the EU itself that's insisting on the duty level, it's HM Government and HMRC who are yet again screwing us and yet again using the EU as a scapegoat.

    The article's title is revealing, in that it's a question. Headlines that are yes/no questions like this are frequently ones that know that the following article doesn't say what the headline writer would like it to say. So the headline is cast as a question because they want to suggest something to the inattentive reader even though it's not true. Once the Telegraph would have been above that, but it's lost a lot of credibility in recent years, with correspondents resigning in disgust at the way it's been compromised by HSBC.

    In this case the article itself is political lobbying, addressed to Osborne ahead of the budget, asking him not to destroy their industry. I like small press ciders, and if GO shuts them down, I'll know to blame him.

    (How much extra paper work there would be in levying a nominal - say £1/hectolitre - duty, I dunno, but I would assume that these producers already have to account for the amount they do produce, and the cost of adding a "... and therefore the duty is £72" is minimal. But when accountants get involved, such assumptions may be naive.)

    770:

    They're servants, of a model used back in the first half of the previous century - servants amortized over several members of the middle class (taking in washing being a prime example).

    771:

    ?? I can't think of a case where a washerwoman would be considered to be "a servant" in the same way that, say, a full-time live-in maid would.

    772:

    You're talking about what's often referred to as the "gig economy": have an Ebay store for cat-trees, an Etsy one for safes, signing up with Ponoko to manufacture 3D prints, install Uber on your phone in case someone's going your way and wants a lift, put your spare room on AirBnB, watch TaskRabbit and pick up any casual work going. Survive by the skin of your teeth and woe betide you get sick or have an unexpected bill.

    What's the big difference from the 'handyman' days? Well, a global marketplace - and, well, I listed off an awful lot of middlemen above, each one of which controls the lion's share of their market and cream off their share of every transaction. Tangentially, if you've been following the VATMESS you'll know the EU is basically enforcing middleman use for digital goods now.

    773:

    Bad example, I'll grant; I should learn to keep my figurative mouth shut when sleep-deprived. A maid or housekeeper who worked a day or two a week to help with the heavy cleaning?

    774:

    It looks to me like in general computer-specific jobs tend to last about 3 years. 3 years from now the esoteric things you are doing now will be mostly automated so amateurs can do them, and your job will have transformed to something different that's esoteric and difficult, or it will be gone.

    Perhaps you meant computer-reliant, or tool-reliant?

    I'm speaking as a professional software engineer with a twenty-five-plus year career so far, occasionally doing the same esoteric things I was doing two decades ago; just more complex, on faster processors, with more memory. There are still software engineers in the same department I joined as a new graduate, doing roughly the same tasks for bigger shinier radars.

    I work next to a bunch of electronic engineers that design digital circuitry. Thirty years ago, they might have been using stick diagrams or the early Verilog / VHDL; now they're still using HDL, and starting the move to OpenCL. They're still designing digital systems, though - just bigger or faster ones, is all.

    775:

    What's the big difference from the 'handyman' days? Well, a global marketplace - and, well, I listed off an awful lot of middlemen above, each one of which controls the lion's share of their market and cream off their share of every transaction.

    Yes. You do the work, and the guy who has the rights to the automated marketing system gets a whopping share of the income.

    Ideally you would get paid royalties for designs. But that's a big can of worms. Ignoring the issues around IP, once you give out a design for someone else to follow, there are lots of ways for them to use it to compete with you. Not least -- they advertise for you, and people buy on their website, and they conveniently forget to tell you about a fraction of the sales.

    There are a few businesses where that's easy to control. If you sell mailing lists, you can salt them with fake addresses that will come to you. It isn't cheating much, it's only 0.1% cheating. But every time somebody uses your list, you find out.

    There are ways to handle this, so that, for example, if someone starts to order your ebook from Amazon then the transaction automatically goes through you, whether they complete the sale or not. You could test how often it worked by sending in partial orders from various addresses. But it's completely understandable that Amazon sees no need to set that up, since they know they are completely trustworthy.

    Back to the main point, if there was somehow competition among suppliers of online services, then the price ought to fall to something close to the variable cost of those services. But the successful vendors manage to sell their brand names for which there's no real competition.

    Meanwhile if you sell a small-scale niche product that other people could figure out how to make, your $4000 patent doesn't do you a lot of good suing other handymen, so you will face lots of competition.

    776:

    I'm speaking as a professional software engineer with a twenty-five-plus year career so far, occasionally doing the same esoteric things I was doing two decades ago; just more complex, on faster processors, with more memory.

    OK, YMMV.

    It isn't that unusual for programmers to have to learn a new language every 3 years or so.

    I talked with an Oracle programmer -- he went through a 3rd-party training program in Oracle with an agreement that he would pay them from his earnings over the first 3 years. But he lost the job after 1 year and his skills were on the edge of being obsolescent. He wanted to learn the newest Oracle modules where the most jobs were, but the manuals he could have used to learn those had not been released yet. There were in fact a lot of jobs advertised for them, that usually had a stated requirement for 5 years experience with them.

    People who use Javascript don't have to worry too much about the systems changing fast out from under them, because of the large installed Javascript base in browsers. The language won't change until the browsers stop using it, and the browsers won't change until they can all agree on something better.... But things like Coffeescript and Rapydscript are making inroads -- lots of managers like Python, and so they like the idea of writing in Python and compiling to Javascript.

    It makes sense that the people who design computer chips etc would use tools that change slower. There aren't that many of them and they're all 100% professionals who don't need easier tools and don't want them.

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dv-XVmsPqO0/TuZHS9IkclI/AAAAAAAAAHM/tCuiKmOaAgk/s1600/B%2BKliban%2BDeeper%2BMeanings.bmp

    777:

    Same problem; you'd still consider her a "woman who does" rather than "a servant".

    778:

    It's been several days and my comments are still in moderation? What's up with that?

    780:

    OK, YMMV. It isn't that unusual for programmers to have to learn a new language every 3 years or so.

    I have to question your experience on this, and ask exactly how many programmers you know who have found that.

    It might depend on what you consider to be "learning a new language"; if you spend only a few weeks training in a single language so you can write scripts against a single version of an API, then this might be true... but at that level, a simile might be a garage asking its mechanics to work on Ford rather than Toyota engines; not an indictment of Computer Science - just a reflection of the IT industry trying to fill seats as cheaply as possible.

    If you've got a degree in computer science, you should have used several languages while being taught the underlying principles. After that, you're familiar with most/all of the concepts, and the questions are often only about syntax and the available APIs to get to the OS, I/O, or filesystem. Give it a day with a manual, and you're good to go :) Although assembler requires you to understand the insides of the hardware you're dealing with...

    I've been programming in C++ almost continuously since the late 90s (assembler and C for SIMD and MIMD embedded machinery for most of a decade before that); nearly 20 years in the same language, with occasional supplementary trips into Java, Tcl, m4, and assembler to aid what I was doing. I call myself a "software engineer" rather than a "programmer", it's snobbery at work :)

    :) I could always start a Holy War by complaining about all the CS undergraduates who learned Java and then convert to C++ without understanding that they don't have garbage collection any more, and then asserting that C++ is the One True Way - but it's easier to harumph about the cluelessness of Arts graduates filling "technical recruitment" slots in recruitment agencies :)

    781:

    I have to question your experience on this, and ask exactly how many programmers you know who have found that.

    It isn't a firm necessity. The people I tend to know tend not to keep a job for more than 3 years or so, and when they're looking for a new one, it's always a different language that makes them look more employable. No doubt they can get a job without it by looking harder.

    ... a simile might be a garage asking its mechanics to work on Ford rather than Toyota engines; not an indictment of Computer Science - just a reflection of the IT industry trying to fill seats as cheaply as possible.

    I certainly don't want to indict computer science. If anything, I'd indict IT managers who hop onto the latest bandwagon. But that isn't so bad either, often the newest thing does fit their needs. It isn't horrible for programmers to have to learn a new language that isn't so very different from the old ones. For myself, if I forget whether to use parentheses or braces or square braces, it costs me something like 5% efficiency until I remember consistently. The little things add up, but it isn't that big a deal.

    Give it a day with a manual, and you're good to go :)

    For me, finding out what canned modules are available and exactly how they work can take considerably longer. But it isn't an indictment, it's just how things work. I'd have about the same problem with new modules in an old language.

    I've been programming in C++ almost continuously since the late 90s....

    For work that's farther from the hardware, managers tend to like to have a degree of application-specific language. Cheaper to get programmers who can start out with stuff that does most of what they want, and just fill in the particular needs this time around. But of course the tools they are supposed to use are inevitably buggy, and it isn't their job to fix them. So instead they must create workarounds for the bugs. About the time the bugs are fixed, they have already created enough of a code base that the work goes on maintenance and it's time for them to do something else.

    I could always start a Holy War by complaining about all the CS undergraduates who learned Java and then convert to C++ ....

    Horses for courses.

    To my way of thinking, C and C++ are appropriate only for work where you need to squeeze out that last 90% to 99% of efficiency. Anything else (that is, most things) you're better off using a language that gets quicker results.

    Most programmers work with systems that won't have many users, and the users will have overpowered hardware. Less than 10% of programmers work on things like embedded systems that are close to underpowered hardware that may have millions or hundreds of millions of users. For most, getting the product out the door 10% faster is far more important than getting it to run ten times faster. So programmers get stuck with whatever their managers think will make them work quicker.

    If you can squeeze the code into half as much ROM, then amortized over 10 million copies you've earned your pay. But most of the jobs aren't about that.

    It might be a blind-men-and-elephant thing. My perspective on it isn't necessarily right, it's just what I saw.

    782:

    Something interesting about software is that a lot of people, even those in the field, still think of C/C++ as automatically giving higher runtime performance. Higher level languages are for when you need theoretical elegance or programmer efficiency over runtime efficiency, sez the conventional wisdom.

    Performance-critical code used on modern highly parallel supercomputers is better generated via high level domain specific languages. The intermediate product may be millions of lines of C, C++, or Fortran but the part the developers interact with is only thousands of lines of code. If you thought developers had a hard time with correctness and performance when it comes to managing concurrency across 4 cores, well, they're really terrible when it comes to 40,000 cores. There is no human programmer who is both careful enough and productive enough to write all the code for high performance computing on massively parallel systems. In one popular quantum chemistry package I use something like 75% of the code base, by source line count, was actually generated by a few thousand lines of Python. C++ template metaprogramming as in e.g. the Cyclops Tensor Framework can likewise generate an enormous intermediate code base for high performance numerical operations from a very terse tensor algebra language. The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West generates code that is very efficient and domain-specialized from a compact OCaml code base.

    Using a more highly abstracted language actually makes the developer more productive and the runtime performance better. Convenience or performance -- why not have both?

    Here we get back to one of the original themes of the cluetrain: the era of increasing automation. It's happening in software development too and there is nothing on the horizon to reverse it. Employment continues to grow for software developers because we're still figuring out how to do new things with computers and eat up less-automated older parts of the economy. At some point the software industry will run out of old economy to devour and we'll see cannibalism within the industry, as productivity increases that outstrip demand leads to falling wages and reduced employment opportunities like it has everywhere else. In those dark days to come they say you'll sometimes find former software developers slowly dying under a bridge, 10 years out of work, weakly muttering "lump of labor fallacy" to rebuff anyone who visits from the soup kitchen.

    783:

    For myself, if I forget whether to use parentheses or braces or square braces,...

    Your trousers fall down?

    Try using a belt, though there's always the application of string theory, I suppose.

    784:

    Give it a day with a manual, and you're good to go Try that with something as over-featured as, say, VB. I'll agree it's at least partly possible with Ada or Pascal (and probably Fortran as long as it's not a dialect or version that relies on white space).

    785:

    String theory is unproven; in fact I'm not sure that you can prove string theory.

    786:

    I actually agree with you in many ways. One of the most enjoyable periods in my career was designing and building a prototype tool for hardware engineers; part of which was the use of domain-specific languages as an aid to efficiency. We were seeing functional equivalence (I.e. non-lossy transformations in either direction) with a compression factor of roughly 100 over traditional HDL.

    Similarly, I had colleagues who were using code auto-generation tools in the late 90s to great effect, to the extent that Bruce Powell Douglass was coming to visit semi-regularly. Unfortunately, persuading managers and developers to take up UML doesn't appear to have much traction; perhaps "generating a usable product with a quarter of the staff" doesn't have the short-term benefits that lead to spreading adoption.

    However; the growth in the need for programming is what will drive development - we already see the "design gap" among digital designers, and for various reasons I suspect they'll make the leap to higher levels of abstraction first (they already are - the first "C to Gates" tools with acceptable quality of results have arrived, for the reasons you gave). That doesn't remove the need for digital designers any more than the appearance of optimising compilers for C/C++ got rid of any software engineering jobs.

    I'm not claiming that Kernighan, Ritchie, and Stroustrup have created the ideal language, or the most efficient - but it works well, has widespread use, a wealth of libraries, and native support for an awful lot of CS concepts (when Stroustrup came to speak in Edinburgh, I half-expected to see OGH in the audience).

    Anyway, here's a question. At what point in the knowledge based industries do we abandon the old-fashioned theories of Labour (i.e. If X hours of labour produces Y value, then 2X should produce 2Y, pregnancy and hole-digging excepted) and perhaps see that hideously twee wording of "Human Capital" actually become a realistic concept? That the capital investment is not made into machinery or tools that you can count and account, but into people...

    787:

    Good comments, Martin. I haven't written a line of C for an employer in nearly 10 years but I'm still glad that I learned it before I started doing most of my development with newer languages.

    When I started my most recent developer job I had no prior experience of most of the technologies used in the company. I was hired based on a combination of past achievements with other technologies and general software/CS knowledge not specific to any technology du jour. In one sense this was an example of investing in human capital: hiring someone without the specific technical experience in confidence that a generalist could become productive on the job, and that the learning period was worth it. In another sense this is quite a bit different from other capital expenditures: they can't offer confident time/cost estimates of human capital acquisition beforehand like you could with e.g. adding a new CNC machine. And there's no guarantee that the human capital won't walk away after a year to a better offer, while the CNC machine always stays bought. In a third sense, hiring technical generalists that need on-the-job training because you're using new technology X that almost nobody has on their CV is a capital investment into both people and tools: you are investing in people to use the tools and investing in the tools to make people more productive.

    Of course the latter path of investing in workers and tools simultaneously isn't a new innovation. The people who filled the American factories of the mid 20th century, or the Chinese factories of the present, by and large didn't show up on the first day knowing how to use industrial machinery. They were willing to learn on the job and the employers were willing to teach on the job. It's a bit of a historical aberration expecting new workers to learn all the skills their employers desire before they even show up for an interview.

    788:

    At what point in the knowledge based industries do we abandon the old-fashioned theories of Labour (i.e. If X hours of labour produces Y value, then 2X should produce 2Y, pregnancy and hole-digging excepted) and perhaps see that hideously twee wording of "Human Capital" actually become a realistic concept?

    After slavery is brought back?

    What's the point in creating capital if it doesn't belong to you but to the people whose heads it is lodged in?

    Alternatively, if we get really good at specifications, so that individuals or small groups can bid on very small projects, and the various modules just fit together and work.

    I'm not current on this, but when I left the idea was to do top-down design. That meant getting the specs all carefully written out beforehand.

    The second step was to do a prototype, which resulted in discovering enough things that were unknown before that the specs were extensively redesigned, usually enough that it would have been better to just throw them out and make new specs.

    Then when the actual coding started, enough further things were discovered to require that the specs be extensively redesigned again. If people got paid to produce modules that perfectly fit the second set of specs, the job would mostly still need to be done.

    If you could hire a bunch of small teams to each do a piece of it, then they could each own their own human capital. But if you have a deadline, it makes more sense to tell them all they're on a big team, and when the integration problems get important you don't so much let them argue about whose fault it is but insist that they work together to find ways to fix it, because if the project fails they all fail.

    I figure that the methods to do small quick projects will evolve faster than for big slow projects, because the generation times are shorter. So methods that work for small projects will gradually filter into large ones.

    789:

    All I have done for the past 35 years is learn on the job. It's a pretty poor engineer who needs to go on courses to learn what is available in books and on the Net. The biggest advance in recent years is the Net and technical user groups where advice can be sought if one becomes stuck. For example, the StackExchanges and specially StackOverflow, not to mention the old sci.electronics.design

    790:

    Engineers working on a project are like processor cores executing a single program. Once you get beyond about 8 you are well into the region of diminishing returns and adding more just subtracts from performance.

    791:

    I'm not current on this, but when I left the idea was to do top-down design. That meant getting the specs all carefully written out beforehand.

    It depends. You can define it within reason, saying "what and why" but not "how" (leave that to the team concerned) - or you can try to combine specification with design, and get sucked into the black hole that is analysis paralysis... There are huge advantages to combining bottom-up exploration in the areas of greatest technical risk, with top-down guidance to provide a coherent outline / framework / roadmap. I could throw in words like "concurrent", "agile" or "iterative", but I've seen all done badly - IMHO it's down to the people involved, not the process. Good engineers / tech leads / managers will work well in most processes; bad ones will screw up any process you choose.

    My problem is that the prototypes you mention are often portrayed as "good enough" (as in "excellence is the enemy of...") by someone being hammered on timescales, when in fact they're a single-point solution, badly-conditioned for further development, that offer short term apparent meeting of goals at the cost of medium and long term misery.

    My other problem is (as Dirk points out) numpties that have stopped bothering to learn, because they arrogantly assume that they don't need to. Some do this after two years, some after ten, some never get caught by it. These are the ones who carrying on hacking out the same rubbish, because they never stop to ask themselves whether there's a better way to do things; and refuse to change.

    Regarding "Human Capital", no need for slavery - that's a rather "Theory X" view of management. As the committed Personnel / HR / HC types will aver, the IP-carrying meatsacks are the only items of capital in the firm (less any surplus at the bank and any property) that should accrue value rather than depreciate. :) If you make it a good place to work, you find that honey catches more flies than vinegar :)

    By way of example, I work somewhere that has a vanishingly small staff turnover; many of the people have been in the firm for a decade, and the site just keeps adding patents and producing the goods. One problem is a lack of cross-pollination...

    792:

    It's a limit called the "span of command". It varies with the skill of the leader / manager, but isn't limited to a single level of hierarchy. I've worked in a team of several hundred engineers, that delivered a multiple-person-millenia engineering project on time and to specification; I've also worked next to a team of five who couldn't organise a revel in a brewery.

    :) Be wary of treating "adding resource to a late project makes it later" as a law of nature - it's a useful maxim that (like all maxims) is for the guidance of wise men, and the blind obedience of fools :)

    793:

    IMHO it's down to the people involved, not the process. Good engineers / tech leads / managers will work well in most processes; bad ones will screw up any process you choose.

    That sounds like the central point.

    But if the people who hire make a point of getting guys with a proven track record of excellence, it won't be cheap. There aren't enough of those to go around. So the big majority of projects need to find a way to get by with the people who're available. The average project will be done mostly by average workers, or possibly by a few great workers despite the average ones.

    We can't depend on excellent workers the same way we can't depend on light sweet crude oil -- there isn't enough. As the amount of programming that needs to be done increases, the number of excellent workers increases slower.

    Some of the work can be automated. Get a collection of modules that work together well, and people can put them together to fill specific aims. Over time the set of tools gets easier to use. Like, you can start out with a tool help create install programs which set up all the variations needed to install your program on multiple versions of Windows. There are lots of little picky things to deal with. But eventually most of the picky details can be handled by the program, and the guy who actually builds an install program can just fill in the blanks and the tool will create an install program for him. One year it takes somebody with a lot of specialized knowledge. Another year it doesn't. The guys who're good at picking up lots of specialized knowledge can go do it with something else, and there are plenty of jobs for them because we keep wanting new functionality.

    This doesn't provide many jobs for people who are good at working on assembly lines, though.

    794:

    An interesting read on topic is New Scientist magazine recent book reviews on "Work in an age of robots"

    Several books are reviewed:

    Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future by Martin Ford

    Culture Crash: The killing of the creative class by Scott Timberg

    The Internet is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

    I agree with the basic premise of these books (DISCLAIMER: I have not read these books yet) But like many here, all too familiar with the refrain: take cover, the robots are here! I prefer the high road; check and take interest in the source of the junk you buy, and don't settle for shit that puts your neighbor out of work. The neighborhood has gotten bigger so things get real interesting.

    Concrete example: it seems publications like Forbes is said to use software to sift raw data and generate news feed. Meanwhile many more people turn to twitter to get their news. Guess which form of journalism has a future?

    795:

    I take issue with point 3, but only partially.

    I think stable, positively functioning and growing capitalism requires a functioning democracy and an objectively neutral system of courts and regulations. A corporation is a legal entity first and foremost, and cannot function at all without the apparatus of a legal system to support its claims of limited liability etc.

    A democracy is more likely than any other form of government to have some semblance of rule of law and systematic rule enforcement, which goes a long way to explaining why economic development has generally (though not always) tended to happen more rapidly in democratic jurisdictions.

    However, that same need for legal predictability and structure is double edged, as really vibrant economies also need flexibility to adapt to new things. 'Too much' democracy would also be seen as a 'bad thing' because of the inability to predict return on investment - which is a fair argument against some kind of government by plebiscite.

    Any non-democratic system is relatively more vulnerable to abuse, distortion and stagnation. If the primary determinant of business success is how closely you are affiliated with the faction in power, then actual business viability becomes a minor irrelevancy to the detriment of your country.

    The reality of most state level economic systems is more like an insane Venn diagram of political/financial/democratic/legal systems.

    I would posit that we are currently seeing a distortion of the necessary strong system of regulation and legal accountability that supports and sustains democracies and corporations. The weaknesses in our structures are inherently exploitable by very clever and/or greedy people. They have been at it for long enough that they are starting to break the system that spawned them - like malignant financial tumors taking more and more of a body's resources until the host dies completely.

    This could be much longer but it's time for bed.

    796:

    String theory is unproven; in fact I'm not sure that you can prove string theory. Indeed. In fact, some people (Including very out-of-date & out-of-touch) ex-physicists like me have a strong suspicion that it isn't actually a theory, in fact it isn't really even an hypothesisi. It's much closer to theology. And I don't actually think we want to go there.

    797:

    All too true Example of somethin rotten in the UK is the "reform" of the legal system, or rayher access to it by Chris Grayling. Deliberately making sure that the poor & disadvantaged have no access. To the point where serious numbers of professional lawyers are starting to protest & scream, & not just because they are losing business ( Which is Grayling's cover-story, of course )

    798:

    I have not studied string theory, but I have the impression it provides a way to define the rules of physics for a large number of alternative universes. It isn't necessarily good for finding out what the rules are for this universe.

    It's likely to be good for something, and given time we're likely to find out what it's good for.

    799:

    "So the big majority of projects need to find a way to get by with the people who're available."

    I see this a lot. The company I work for has gone from being tilted towards the challenging stuff that demanded technical proficiency (and consequently being fairly selective about the people it recruited) to being much more focused on routine service delivery contracts where the key thing is to have sufficient warm bodies (and servers) than that they be the cream of the crop. The challenges of the latter model are tough to handle - especially if you have a management toolset formed in the earlier, more elitist, company culture.

    Which is a theme of the Laundry books of course - having Mahogany Row on tap is all well and good, but if you need to build an army of magical operatives quickly then you take what you can get and try to work up systems and approaches that will make them effective.

    Regards Luke

    800:

    It may be that the only thing defining the rules of this universe as being different from all the rest is us. If so, hello multiverse and goodbye physics.

    801:

    The problem is either that challenging technical projects are considered too risky by management, or there are not enough of them to create reliable cash flow. It could very well be that the company has to take these jobs to survive (at least in regards to their stock price)? Plus, most software innovations seem to me to be like mushrooms: an innovation pushes up the state of the art, and then all effort is spent to exhaust all possible applications while someone else again pushes the state of the art.

    802:

    What would happen if the consumer market stopped supporting these innovations?

    The way I hear it, hardware innovation at the consumer level is supported by rich gamers, while businesses occasionally upgrade their computer hardware to whatever seems appropriate to their status, running basicly the same software upgraded to the new hardware and new OS version.

    If they weren't so rich, would the new hardware come slower and be more expensive? The fewer customers who could afford the newest stuff, the more expensive it would get....

    And a whole lot of the software innovation involves doing things that couldn't be done on the old systems.

    Perhaps software developers would actually put their emphasis on making existing code maintainable. That is, cheap to maintain.

    Everybody pays lip-service to maintainability, but it's really only worth doing for successful products, and you don't find out whether your product will be successful until after it ships, and when there are competing products the first to ship has an advantage. TIme-to-market is a bigger priority. Successful projects pay a lot for maintainance, but unsuccessful products don't, and not spending extra now to save money down the road is one way to reduce the cost of failure.

    But if it was worth doing, then total payments to programmers could go way down provided they didn't sabotage it.

    Computer scientists who do software engineering are kind of like the engineers who design new automobiles. They get paid very well and they think of themselves as professionals. Programmers are more like auto mechanics. There are a lot more of them. The pay is pretty good still but it's basicly blue-collar, and there's no union, and a lot of the work can be done in India or by Indians here.

    If the economy slowed down for real, both groups would be in trouble. The professionals would tend to get limited to gold-plated government work, and there would be less of that. The programmers would be stuck with decreasing maintenance jobs.

    Or maybe the maintenance would stay expensive. In 1999 I talked to a COBOL programmer who had had a government job writing payroll and welfare code for the US government in the 1960's. He retired, and then came out of retirement for the year-2000 crisis. Apparently by accident he was assigned the job of revising his own code. It had not been touched for 30+ years -- when they needed to change something they wrote new code that specified when to do things the old way and when to do it a new way, and layered that on top. He was now working for a subcontractor for a subcontractor of the company that won the contract, and his authority to make changes in his own code was strictly limited.

    803:

    Hmmm. If you buy Graeber's argument that modern capitalism began with Cortez invasion of the Aztecs,* then no, I don't think capitalism requires a democracy. This form of capitalism also is founded on three forms of international trade: drugs (especially soft drugs, including alcohol, caffeine, and sugar, along with opioids), slaves, and weapons. Note that the slave and weapons trade goes back to the bronze age if not before, and given the plethora of wine amphorae in the wrecks divers have excavated, arguably drugs have shipped for millennia, too.

    In any case, yes I agree that stable laws make for a good business environment. But that stable environment only matters for what we regard as respectable businesses. If you look at the sectors that make huge amounts of money, they're doing just fine even without laws. That includes gun-running, human trafficking, drugs, and our newest wrinkle, oil. Their profits are so high that they'll take all sorts of risks in their business. Yes good laws are good for them too, but even outlawing them hasn't made them go away.

    *Graeber points to a partnership that's at the heart of capitalism. On one side are the moneymen, who've put up the money for some venture (word choice intentional), and who must have their profit. On the other side is the adventurer, who has the brilliant scheme to make huge amounts of money. He has to make that money too, for he's deep in debt to the money men who are financing his adventure, and he's got to pay them back. His honor relies on him being able to pay his debts. That desperation to fulfill a debt has (according to Graeber) driven a tremendous amount of cruelty over the years, because it is underlain by the idea that honor and morality aren't about treating other people as people, they're about paying one's debts. If you look at the behavior of putatively democratic people when they conquer others (American Indians, East Indians, South American Indians, Australians, Burmese, Africans, etc.) you'll see the point. All committed atrocities, often in the name of profits for those back home in a supposedly democratic country. Some were so bad (western Amazon during the rubber boom, Congo under King Leopold) that they qualify as genocides, yet for some reason, perhaps because they happened to brown people in poor countries, we seldom see them on the lists of atrocities that people draw up.

    804:

    I don't think capitalism requires a democracy.

    In the Middle East, religious conservatism and laissez-faire capitalism have traditionally been allies, so it's pretty clear that democracy isn't required for capitalism.

    Having said that, capitalism does require reasonably secure property rights, which implies some level of restraint by the government and other violent types.

    The huge amount of money being made in drugs and other contraband is actually a symptom of their illegality. Cigarettes and alcohol are stable, competitive businesses with moderate profits and reasonable costs; cocaine and marijuana are ... not. The history of alcohol prohibition in the U.S. shows the difference pretty clearly.

    The drug business isn't a capitalist enterprise, exactly. Property rights in drugs and related production and distribution equipment are extremely weak. It's something else, and something clearly even more pathological than contemporary financial capitalism.

    805:
    Property rights in drugs and related production and distribution equipment are extremely weak. It's something else, and something clearly even more pathological than contemporary financial capitalism.

    An outlaw trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma co-operation between participants in pretending there are such things as property rights, so an actor's rights in the market are asserted via making the perceived cost of breaking co-operation higher for the perceived benefit. So drug-trafficking is an honour culture for the same reason inner-city gangs and pre-law societies are - demonstrate you enforce the boundaries of your rights vigorously, or risk someone presuming you can't at all.

    806:

    Oh yes, absolutely.

    My lot started off as a boutique consultancy that earned its stripes on market infrastructure projects (building stuff like interbank payments systems). By the time it got taken over 40-odd years later, we had tens of thousands of employees worldwide and were heavily committed to the offshoring/outsourcing service delivery business.

    There was no way that they could have sustained the sort of regular growth expected by the stock market by staying in the niche they started from. Even spreading sideways into different sectors and geographies there was a limited pool of the sort of technically demanding, innovative project work that they made their reputation with.

    Regards Luke

    807:

    I think stable, positively functioning and growing capitalism requires a functioning democracy and an objectively neutral system of courts and regulations.

    You could be right. However, there is no reason to think that a positively functioning growing capitalism will maintain the conditions that it requires to continue growing.

    Compare natural ecosystems, which very often fail to maintain the conditions that help them prevail. Where there's enough water, grasslands tend to get replaced by forests. Etc.

    When an ecosystem is stable, likely it doesn't use methods we would particularly approve of. Consider a sequoia forest. The trees compete for light, growing up to 400 feet tall so that the major part of the energy they collect goes to move water. They produce acid, flammable litter which tends to kill other plants and which is useless to most animals. Occasionally it starts a forest fire which kills plants that survive in their shade, but their thick bark mostly protects the large sequoias.Their many seeds grow only in mineral soil, which is mostly exposed only when a grown sequioa dies and falls over. So by sequestering most of the energy, and with poison and fire and creating many seeds that individually have almost no chance to survive, they prevent competitors from getting a foothold. And that's pretty much all they do. They don't grow much, or spread much. They are mostly useless to humans except we like to look at them. Meanwhile, young redwood forests do grow fast and we cut them down young.

    I think something similar is likely with economies. We value economies for creating wealth, for growing fast, and for "progress". All incompatible with stability. An economic system becomes stable when someone manages to cut down the amount of initiative and innovation, and when an increasing amount of the wealth produced is used to inhibit change and make that economy an unattractive takeover target.

    When someone extracts lots of wealth from an economy for their own luxuries, that is wealth which could go to someone else. Lots of attempts to hijack it. Likely the US economy will try to control it using every method that might work.

    But when there isn't much wealth, and what there is mostly goes to defense, they might be pretty safe. Stable.

    Bolivia and Paraguay may be among the most stable capitalist societies.

    808:

    I think we agree about the same things, however I would argue that the so-called profitability of black and grey markets also require, at least somewhere, a system of legal stability and fairly rigorous enforcement.

    The Cartels would not be what they are without the illegality of the products they ship to market. They are just as dependent as the DEA and other enforcement structures on the continued illegality of their products. If drugs were suddenly legal they might not disappear, but they would be forced to focus on other products that remain illegal.

    So I would say that 'respectable' and 'non-respectable' businesses all require some form of legal structure to support and protect their interests. Oil companies may be able to operate extra-legally in peripheral countries (and even in some developed states) but they require and depend upon the legal systems to protect their 'property rights' in some jurisdiction, else the whole edifice collapses.

    J Thomas: I agree that there is no reason to think that a positively functioning system of capitalism will maintain its own conditions for success. In fact there is every reason to think that any successful system contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

    Your example of the sequoia forest is exactly my point. We may well be in the beginnings of an economic sequoia forest right now, though on a much faster time scale. But even such a forest can eventually cause its own collapse - perhaps by using up all the nutrients, or on a larger scale if unchecked, causing the climate to change local conditions.

    At present the finance sector, and in some ways the oil industry, have removed themselves from the system of accountability and legal structure that enabled their creation. There is no downside to their actions in terms of legal penalty - they have successfully taken over the forest and can do with it what they please. Which will last as long as it lasts - probably not much longer.

    Economic systems are only stable in non-democratic oligarchies, and even then it would only really be possible in some kind of autarky (though we can assume our planet counts as an autarky). But the nature of greed is that there is never enough. In an oligarchy, where the primary determinant of success is something other than actual business viability, the system will eventually topple under its own dysfuncion.

    809:

    Everybody pays lip-service to maintainability, but it's really only worth doing for successful products,

    Ooooh, hot button topic for me...

    I disagree. Making your code clearer is something that (if habitual) takes seconds. Calling your iterators "itr" or "i" or "j"; removing all the vowels from variable names; not bothering with alignment or whitespace; and heaven forfend that there be any comment more complex than:

    i++; // increment i here

    Avoid any form of encapsulation, and write your class as "just a big data type" - control it from outside the object, and cut-and-paste those magic recipes for successful operation. Write code as if it will only ever receive parameters that are exactly as you expect. Why even consider testing for null pointers? Of course it will work, the only place it's called from has already checked...

    Yay for "don't bother with maintainability, it's probably not worth it" attitudes :(

    IMHO, no-one saves anything by writing crappy code in a hurry. Break-even happens at the very first code review, or the first time you look at it again after a week away. Meanwhile, your colleagues itch to break out the pitchforks / blazing torches, and march upon the ogre shovelling dung into the codebase...

    ...and breathe...

    810:

    I think your analogy is way off and/or you don't fully grasp the mechanics of ecological succession. Eg. your analogy fails to consider 'sequoias' suddenly appearing where none was before. Ecological succession requires each stage to have certain pre-existing conditions before gradually making an aprearance. In economics its quite the reverse: disruptive technologies-startups business models can sap the life out of established mature forests.. replacing them with perverse copies of itself. eg. Uber wasn't even on the radar 10 years ago.. now it is a multibillion dollar company..that's threatening local taxi industry. Need I mention the elephant in the room: Google.. wasn't even a word 15years ago, has wrecked havoc in newsprint (consolidated /downsized to shrubs). Companies like Uber can gut local taxi industry while acting as gatekeeper to supplier-client base.

    Mature forests imply a somewhat stable system with final stage trees taking larger share of a given land. Disruptive technologies-upstarts like Uber are more like invasive weeds reshaping and gutting local economies. More to the point, disruptive business models can make industries sectors shrink away to vestiges of themselves eg,. newsprint .. Trees don't shrink, cause fires, or clear-cut... economies do.

    811:

    I think your analogy is way off....

    Could be, stranger things have happened.

    Ecological succession requires each stage to have certain pre-existing conditions before gradually making an aprearance.

    I'm not sure it requires that, just that's what we see when there's a stable predictable sequence.

    Sometimes parts of the sequence just get cut out. We no longer have forests of club mosses anywhere in the succession, for example.

    Kentucky used to be covered with swamps and cane, people wrote about the cane like walking through thickets of razorblades. Some of them wore armor made of cane just to get around. Human beings destroyed that system and we lucked out into Kentucky bluegrass. There was no guarantee we'd get something that good.

    Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, emerald ash borer -- disruptive technologies can sap the life out of established forests. Those are not competitors that wipe out older competitors, though, they merely make established competitors uncompetitive.

    Maybe it works better if you consider a timescale of thousands of years. A thousand years ago the north american plains were covered with thick turf maintained by bison. Now the turf is largely gone, replaced by planted crops, and the bison are mostly gone, to a small extent replaced by domestic cattle. A system that was harder for humans to extract resources from was replaced by one that was easier for humans to tap.

    Maybe the analogy isn't worth making, but thank you for trying it out and seeing where it takes you. It might be worth exploring.

    812:

    There's a fungus or a moss, forget the name, which takes over trees. It basically uses the sap for nutrients while gutting the tree. At the end, the fungus retains only the outer wall of the tree; everything else has been replaced by the fungus. I've seen the trees infected: they look tree-shaped, with a green "dress" on all of it, and with (for lack of a better word) tendrils snaking down.

    813:

    Making your code clearer is something that (if habitual) takes seconds. Calling your iterators "itr" or "i" or "j"; removing all the vowels from variable names; not bothering with alignment or whitespace; and heaven forfend that there be any comment more complex than:

    i++; // increment i here

    You're making a list of bad practices. Some of that is just plain bad. All you get from short names is less typing (and probably fewer typos). If that's worth short names for you, about the time you're typing them less you can do a global search-and-replace to improve them (provided you didn't use the same short name for two different purposes. Ouch). Not like you're coding for a Timex-Sinclair with 2K of memory.

    But documentation is a real issue. If the specs are evolving while you code, the time you spend writing for the ages is lost when your code is thrown out because the specs change. And the slower you produce working versions that can be tested, the slower the specs will evolve. There's a real trade-off there.

    Let me take my point too far -- when the specs are buggy enough, it can actually be an improvement to quickly write buggy code which works well enough to demonstrate the problems with the specs. The code will get thrown away regardless, why spend extra time getting it to perfectly achieve the wrong goals? I don't fully believe that myself, but I can almost make the argument. (It tends to fail when you don't already know how buggy the specs are.)

    When the specs are clearly written you can first write test cases that show what the code is supposed to do, and then write the code in little pieces that clearly show how they fit the specs, and run the test cases to show that it usually works correctly. Someone who reads it years later can see how the specs document the code.

    But when the specs are badly written and changing, occasionally getting changed in big dramatic ways, and there's a 50% chance the project will be cancelled before completion, and a 70% chance that it will be an also-ran which never gets much market share and fairly quickly stops getting maintained, and other people have to wait for you to complete the most time-critical parts so they can do their own work, and managers are getting upset about deadlines....

    It's only natural that a lot of documentation gets put off to the end. And if management decides to cut corners and decide it's complete before that gets done, whose fault is it?

    814:

    Ummm, no. I'm a botanist, incidentally.

    Moss simply grows on the bark of trees. Indeed, if the moss layer is thick enough, it will decompose and form soil. Since many plants will form roots where they are in contact with soil (it's a process known as layering), trees such as redwoods, doug firs, and vine maples in the US Pacific Northwest actually root into the moss coating their branches. In some of the biggest redwoods, the soil layer under the moss can be 18" deep and have other large trees growing in it.

    What you've done, I think, is to confuse heart rot and moss. The thing about wood is that it's mostly dead cells. The living part of the tree is the bark on the outside, and it deposits layers of wood on the outside of the xylem, rather as coral are the outer living layer on the reef they build. Anyway, there are fungi that break down wood, as we all know (think dry rot in your home). This is a good and normal thing, as without things like termites and fungi, there would be a massive surplus of wood, a massive decrease in CO2 and increase in O2, and the world would be on fire (this happened in the Carboniferous, before termites and wood-rotting fungi evolved).

    What happens is that a wound in the bark exposes the inner wood to a fungal spore, or a beetle brings it in, or something similar. The fungus breaks down the wood at the heart of the tree (hence, heart rot). This can be either bad or good. Heart rotted trees can be weaker, and can collapse under all sorts of strains (some reportedly shriek before they collapse as the wood breaks under strain. It's all very dramatic). They can even kill lumbermen in rather gruesome ways (killer tree warning ribbon is available). Depending on the geometry of the tree and the strength of the wood, some argue that heart rot can help some trees. The idea is that hollowing out the trunk lightens the tree. The detritus the heart-rot leaves behind looks a lot vaguely like soil, and the tree can root into it and get some nutrients out. That's the hypothesis. Additionally, things like bats can roost in the hollow left by the heart rot, and their poop can fertilize the tree if there's a way for the living bark to root into it.

    Thanks for letting me put my plant geek hat on.

    815:

    You wrote about the great plains and Bison. This was an ecosystem created by humans who killed the megafauna.The bison may have been descendants of domesticated animals brought across the land bridge by the first human colonists

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event

    816:

    I'm writing a very complex program in C. By complex, I mean the reason for things being done the way they are done is a result of a complex chain of R&D. A lot of which I forget after a couple of months. For example, why did I choose a 9 parameter parametric fit instead of 7? So, each function comes with a block of explanation as to why it is there and in parallel there is a document which explains the historical development of the algorithms, including ones that we decided against using and the reasons we decided against them.

    817:

    Also refers to #798

    I was actually channelling "The Big Bang Theory" (Tv series) rather than talking about theoretical physics.

    818:

    You're making a list of bad practices. Some of that is just plain bad. All you get from short names is less typing (and probably fewer typos). Well now, that depends.

    Suppose we have a complex data type called, say "RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORD_TYPE".

    Does declarative code manipulating that type really benefit from local variable declarations like "RCINPUTCOMMONFORMATDATARECORD : RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORDTYPE" rather than "RCINPUTCFDR : RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORD_TYPE" which is 21 characters shorter and still has the abbreviation directly associated with the long name by the declaration?

    819:

    Does declarative code manipulating that type really benefit from local variable declarations like "RCINPUTCOMMONFORMATDATARECORD : RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORDTYPE" rather than "RCINPUTCFDR : RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORD_TYPE"

    If a shorter name is clear, then do whatever works.

    If you only need something that you personally will remember in the current context, then do whatever you want. If you want somebody else to understand it years down the road, then you have a problem -- you don't know the guy years down the road; you can't be sure what he'll understand. If you provide lots of redundant junk he already knows he'll be annoyed. If you leave out things he can't do without he'll be bewildered.

    Depending on your needs, you might do better with

    this-purposeFORMAT : RCCOMMONFORMATDATARECORDTYPE

    If the specs change and you need to use some other format after all, then all the code with the mnemonic that reminds you which format to use has turned misleading. If they change so that half of the places you used the phrase change, then you have to go through everything and decide each case. You might do better to track the use you're putting the format to, and if necessary look up which format it is whenever you have something which may be in some other format.

    And if you get it wrong, your test code will tell you -- this is the sort of thing that unit testing hardly ever fails at.

    It depends. For personal projects sometimes I use i in loops to stand for "iterator". When the body of a loop is reasonably small (which is always true in my code), it's easier for me to track i and j as the iterators, than have names that remind me what's being iterated. When I call a subroutine, the subroutine names will describe the data that gets passed to it, because it isn't being iterated there.

    YMMV.

    820:

    The mash up of ecology topics and economics is as ancient as ..well farming and trade. Today, however it has become a hot new topic since infinite economic growth is starting to hit a wall with finite resource extraction. There as been a growing trend in concepts in Circular Economic theory and practice that essentially decouple economic growth from finite resource extraction. Look it up : it's quite interesting. One notion getting traction, is man made ecology of circular resource use -recycling- embedded into industrial processes: one companies or system waste becomes resource for another .

    821:

    This code is 20-odd years old and the "RC" prefix denotes a record (if that wasn't obvious enough from the type name ending "RECORDTYPE"). Not only that, but whilst not object oriented it is at least object-based to the extent of providing I/O routines for files and records of that type. If our requirement had changed, then either the I/O would also have had to change (and hence the code not do so unless the fields in the record changed) or one or both of the input and output records would have needed different handlers.

    You're right in some circumstances; my point was that abbreviation is not "the great ebil".

    Your comment about interators made me think of Pascal where it's probably a bad idea to use the implicitly declared variable in "For I in lowerbound to upperbound loop" for anything other than the iteration scheme and telling the code in the loop which element of an array to address.

    822:

    my point was that abbreviation is not "the great ebil".

    Agreed. Certainly names can be too long.

    And the other direction is problematic too, if you have a routine that calculates an acceleration, you might not want to name it ac().

    If our requirement had changed, then either the I/O would also have had to change (and hence the code not do so unless the fields in the record changed) or one or both of the input and output records would have needed different handlers.

    In my limited experience, it's good to have names that fit the current level of abstraction. So if you have routines that are specifically built around medical records specialized around livers, that code might need "liver-record-type", while routines that are specifically for food orders for the deli might have "grocery-record-type" even when both translate to the common format. At that level you care that you have the right routines to unpack the data you need.

    If the name you use when you're actually thinking about the details of the common format are mostly used there, and maybe once each in other places, the name length isn't exactly a big deal -- it will get cut-and-pasted regardless.

    Still, names that are too long are hard to read, and names that are too short in their context are also hard to read. And when you're trying to decide how to make it easier for somebody you've never met to maintain your code after you're gone, you have to guess.

    I can't think of a low-level "great ebil" where you can't mess up by going too far in the other direction. "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward." But when I was in high school BASIC programmers could have variable names that started with one letter and ended with one number, 260 in all. That was plenty. Later they were allowed two numbers, a total of 2600 variable names. Those days are long gone.

    823:

    In the future, maybe. Below are my points:

    1) Moore's law still continues. Although I don't know how much longer it will last, I would say that there's a good chance it will make it to 2025. Afterwards, we'll see what (if anything) replaces it.

    2) Shale gas still dominates oil prices. I know it's not sustainable. However, it will support growth for the rest of the decade. Don't forget, there's nothing stopping central banks from printing money and investing in shale gas at a loss, if need be.

    3) Growth can come from the developing world, well, developing. Again, while ore concentration is declining, it's not declining fast enough to avoid a similar build-up in South Asia and Africa as happened in China and most of Southeast Asia over past 2 decades.

    4) Robotics is nowhere near what the more fervent Singularists claim, but it is getting better as long as Moore's Law continues and we're willing to throw more and more hardware at it. Now, this does increase income inequality, but it does technically count as growth.

    5) When it comes to resources, we still have untapped resources in the Tibetan plateau (not as much longer), parts of Africa, the ocean floor, and Antarctica among others.

    Again, these trends won't continue ad infinitum, but they will continue to dominate this next decade. I have learned the hard way not to try and predict beyond 1-2 decades. Far too many variables.

    824:

    Um, no again. There's a nice permafrosted, 36,000 year-old steppe bison mummy (google "blue babe bison Alaska") that was dug out of the permafrost in Alaska, and that's not even counting Bison latifrons and all the other extinct forms. There were bison in the Americas long before there were humans. They were quite variable, and the modern bison is well within the range of variability for that group.

    As for the Pleistocene megafauna die-off, yes probably humans were involved, and probably other stuff was involved too.

    You get the same problem with human wars, famines, and epidemics. Epidemics lead to strife and disruption of food supplies, wars lead to epidemics and disruption of food supply, and famines lead to epidemics and strife. Until very recently, the appearance of one caused the other two, and after the dust settled, it's generally difficult to both to count all the dead and to figure out what killed them. The idea of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a actually fairly accurate mnemonic, if you want to describe the causes of mortality in any major human disaster. The bastards all ride together in a squad.

    Similarly, I don't think we're ever going to disentangle what killed off the American megafauna at the end of the last ice age and name an ultimate cause. Being implicated in it is the same thing as being soldiers during a famine: we were involved in the die-off but we'll likely never know what started it or even what all was involved.

    825:

    In this particular case, I was developing new code that read and wrote a specific format, hence the name being "COMMON_FORMAT".

    Generally, if the file format is a one-off, I'll settle for "INPUT_FILE" et al, and handle details of record design in the design document (which will exist and even make sense to other people).

    I also remember 2 (up to 6) character variable names, and indeed creating data dictionaries to tell me what they actually meant!

    826:

    killer tree warning ribbon is available

    Why, so it is!

    http://wingandsong.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/dscn0433.jpg

    I have a long-standing distrust of trees and their intentions, so this ribbon is perfect. If, albeit, not quite for the purpose its makers apparently intended.

    827:

    Some trees, esp Taxus can rot & thrive simultaneously, so that even careful boring won't tell you how old the thing is ( google for "Fortingall Yew" ) However, Redwoods have adaped to their human-provided "foreign" homes quite well. Coast Redwoods S sempervivens thrive in Wales - I have walked through a plantation of them - & they are self-seeding vigorously. I have a Metasequoia glyptostroboides in a pot - but/however, the pot has cracked & it's escaped ... so, I'm trying to take cutting & air-layer some branches, so I can prune the original back - a full-grown one in a small London suburban back garden is NOT a good idea. But they are beautiful. I'm thinking of trying to establish a "prehistoric" row of trees down on the ditch at the bottom of our allotments as a screen: Metasequoia/Wollemi/Gingko, just to confuse people ... ( Yes, I've got a Wollemi in a pot as well. )

    What is a climax ecosystem, after all? Look at the Great Forest of Epping, a short walk from here - a managed (pollarded) but climax ecosystem, nontheless, with an amzing variety of wildlife.

    828:

    Ah lordie, the concept of climax...

    There ain't no such thing as a climax ecosystem. The idea of climax is that, over multiple generations of plants (that's trees dying and being replaced, so we're talking centuries here), the composition of the plant community comes into equilibrium with its local climate. To rephrase that ever so slightly, the local climate is perfectly stable over many centuries, and after many generations of trees, the species that best match that climate take over.

    Notice the problem? Yes, that's right--the climate isn't that stable! It's a concept from the 1920s. Indeed, dendrochronologists use variations in tree rings as a record for climate changes. The trees adapt more slowly than the climate does, and indeed, many species wait around for decades, if not centuries, for a year when the climate has just the right characteristics for them to reproduce. In these cases, you tend to get even-aged cohorts of trees, each from the last favorable episode, cluttering up the forest.

    A better concept is old growth. That comes from a model called stand dynamics that works better for many forests, and I'll try to summarize it here, because that's the best explanation for what old growth is. After a disaster, trees come in. They grow up into a dense dog hair forest, shade each other out, and the biggest ones grow to full maturity in a century or more (depending on species). Up to this point, you can figure out time since last disaster by coring a bunch of the trees and counting growth rings. They're all about the same age, and they sprouted after the last disaster. As they get big, seedlings start sprouting in the gaps between the giants. At this point, there are at least two generations of trees in the forest. Continue this a bit, and you get old growth: trees of all ages, from the ancient survivors to seedlings. If you core all the trees in the forest, you'll get a variety of ages. Absent a big disturbance, the forest will continue as old growth indefinitely, seedlings growing in the gaps left by the fall of adults, so even getting the age of the oldest tree won't necessarily tell you when the last disaster hit and the forest first sprouted. That's why it's "old growth," it's because you can no longer figure how old it is.

    And yes, I think establishing an old growth forest is a great idea. It takes awhile, unless you're working with very short-lived species.

    Great thing is, you can't age a coppice, because roots and burls don't grow annual growth rings. Instant old growth!

    829:

    There were bison in North America before humans but the Yak is there closest Eurasian relative and Yak remains have been found at the Asian end of the land bridge. It's reasonable to speculate that the human colonists took Yaks with them which then bred with the bison.

    830:

    That bark looks like it could be from loblolly pine.

    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_taeda

    These things truly can kill. They grow by adding branches at the top and literally dropping off the lower ones. Typically in a storm due to winds or when snow or ice builds up. Here in central North Carolina there are some that are naturally grown but it seems there was a planting spree about 100 years ago. (Based on my ring counts of a few.) These things are typically 70' to 100' or more tall.

    These things when they drop their lower limbs from 60' or higher can do real damage. Nothing like a 20' to 30' spear headed down with a tip that's 6" to 10" in diameter. They do wonderful things to roofs, cars and such. Those of us who have lived here for a while know to move our cars to open sky areas when ice, wind, or heavy snow is predicted.

    When I had the chance a few years ago I had 12 taken out of my yard. I don't miss them at all.

    Oh, yeah. The wood isn't all that useful either. High in sap and not a tight grain for wood working.

    831:

    Notice the problem? Yes, that's right--the climate isn't that stable! It's a concept from the 1920s.

    Its first coherent statement as an academic claim in the USA was around 1900. Similar ideas were presented coherently in France in the 1880s, and the general idea had been present in european scientific circles since at east the late 1700s.

    It was very much like the idea of economic equilibrium. An almost deductive idea, that was assumed to be true in the absence of evidence.

    And there was some evidence. Hay infusion cultures infected with a few mls of pond water go through an almost deterministic series of stages. First bacteria grow, using the simple carbohydrates. Then things that eat the bacteria expand their populations, along with things that eat more complex carbohydrates. Etc. Resulting in a month or so in something very much like regular pond water.

    Some ecologists went too far and imagined that there was only one way things could go in any given climate, parallel to marxist historical determinism. Since forests usually change slowly, they couldn't prove themselves wrong. It isn't as deterministic as they thought, particularly in small areas and short times. But it would be going too far to say the ideas are false or meaningless.

    The trees adapt more slowly than the climate does, and indeed, many species wait around for decades, if not centuries, for a year when the climate has just the right characteristics for them to reproduce.

    This is how large organisms like trees achieve an approximation of Biejerink's laws. "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects." By producing many durable seeds which can perhaps last for many years, so that some of them sprout when conditions seem favorable but others keep waiting, some plant species get the chance to survive unusual conditions where all the sprouted copies are destroyed.

    Bacteria are of course best at this. Given favorable conditions they can quickly increase a billion-fold. Then with a little luck they can spread widely in the wind, so that a few of them might again find favorable conditions.

    Absent a big disturbance, the forest will continue as old growth indefinitely, seedlings growing in the gaps left by the fall of adults, so even getting the age of the oldest tree won't necessarily tell you when the last disaster hit and the forest first sprouted. That's why it's "old growth," it's because you can no longer figure how old it is.

    That is, it's been more than one generation since the last "disaster". Which is not a long time at all. These things tend to average out.

    There ain't no such thing as a climax ecosystem. The idea of climax is that, over multiple generations of plants (that's trees dying and being replaced, so we're talking centuries here), the composition of the plant community comes into equilibrium with its local climate. To rephrase that ever so slightly, the local climate is perfectly stable over many centuries, and after many generations of trees, the species that best match that climate take over.

    If you assume that each species of plant competes well in some climate range, they will tend to be selected to do better in the range they are already good at, and also to exploit niches that are under-exploited already. They will tend not to be selected toward head-to-head competition with other species in circumstances where the others already have the advantage -- that's likely to lose.

    So it's predictable that they would follow a strategy of holding on in places where they sometimes have an advantage, and spreading seeds to places they may in the future get an advantage, but not so much to adapt to local temporary climate change. A robust system would include species that sequester each resource which might be useful to an invader. The better they do that, the harder for invaders to disrupt things. The more holes left in that protection (from things like foreign pathogens that local species lack defenses for) the more easily foreign species intrude and disrupt things, allowing more invasions still.

    It's hard to test any of this, but isn't it plausible? Natural microbial systems where things happen fast tend to have incredible diversity, to the point that it makes sense to classify the microbes more by the chemical reactions they catalyze than by species. It's very hard to follow what's going on when it's all so complicated. You can measure what happens in monocultures and mixtures of a few clones, but then it is far from natural conditions.

    My original point was about climax systems which don't have much diversity. Sequoia forests have dominated a few areas for a long time, despite climate change. Similarly the organisms that create peat bogs. They aren't very productive, but they do produce peat which poisons pretty much everything else.

    By analogy, maybe in capitalist systems it is not always necessary to innovate as fast as possible. Maybe sometimes success may come by preventing suppliers, competitors, and customers from innovating.

    832:

    Hi J Thomas,

    Are you a bacteriologist, by any chance?

    A few more misconceptions:

    It's worth looking up the history of dendrochronology and A.E. Douglass, its founder. He was an astronomer by training, and founded the field starting in (yes) the 1920s. I suspect that ecologists like Clements, who really popularized the idea of Climax, never heard of Douglass. Certainly the ability to carbon-date tree-rings and to infer climate from tree-ring variation is much more recent than the idea of climax.

    As for Biejerink's laws, I'm not sure how many bacteriologists even buy this idea, and it's certainly wrong for plants. To pick a really obvious one, there aren't any redwood seeds in the Sahara, waiting for millions of years for continental drift to push Africa north far enough for them to live. Indeed, >>90% of redwood seeds are sterile. When a plant lives thousands of years and only needs to reproduce once or twice, seed viability doesn't matter so long as it's great than zero and the tree produces a lot of seeds. With some notable exceptions in some desert trees, closed-cone pines, and the like, AFAIK most tree seeds are actually quite fragile and don't last very long. Seed-banking trees like oaks is effectively impossible.

    Time since last disaster: in the Pacific Northwest forests where stand dynamics works best, it takes about 200 years for a stand to reach old growth status. That's a very long time, and climate changes caused by things like El Nino cycles and volcanoes certainly happen much more quickly.

    Finally, the argument about climax trees specifically is that climax occurs when you get a species where the seedlings can grow to maturity in the shade of a parent, and thus the species can hold that spot indefinitely. This implies both shade tolerance in seedlings, and also that there aren't predators, pathogens or parasites that the seedling can only survive by being far away from any conspecifics. This last happens quite a bit in tropical rain forests, where seedlings that fall near their parents are often eaten or die from disease. In any case, many tree seedlings are shade intolerant, so they can only grow to maturity in a disturbed area. This happens to be another problem with the idea of climax. As a teacher pointed out, if you believed in climax, then shade-tolerant hemlock would have taken over from shade-intolerant redwoods a long time ago. The reason you don't see that is that redwoods can grow something like 100 feet taller than hemlocks, so no matter how many hemlocks there are, when a redwood come down, it clears them out, making room for either redwood seedlings or redwood stump sprouts to take over the new clearing. This model doesn't really work under climax, does it?

    833:

    Are you a bacteriologist, by any chance?

    I used to be.

    Certainly the ability to carbon-date tree-rings and to infer climate from tree-ring variation is much more recent than the idea of climax.

    But then, for climate shocks to negate ecological succession, they have to often happen strongly enough to prevent plants from surviving in much of their range, right?

    As for Biejerink's laws, I'm not sure how many bacteriologists even buy this idea, and it's certainly wrong for plants.

    It's overstated somewhat for microorganisms. You get lots of tiny biomes that open up and get exploited and disappear before "everything" can reach them. It gets more true the larger the scale and the longer the time.

    To the extent that plants suffer frequent disasters that kill off the parents, they benefit by having seeds that can survive those disasters. Similarly for bacteria. Before we had autoclaves, one approach to sterilizing culture media was with "tyndallization". They would heat the media enough to kill everything growing, and wait some hours for sporeformers to start growing, and then heat it again to kill them. If they repeated that cycle enough times, eventually they would get them all. (This is how it works with "100-year soups". If you keep adding new things to the soup and boil it regularly, the various bacteria in it never get the chance to grow much.) The reason tyndallization takes repeated cycles is that you can't depend on the spores to start growing just because they're in ideal conditions to grow. Some of them hold off until next time.

    Indeed, >>90% of redwood seeds are sterile. When a plant lives thousands of years and only needs to reproduce once or twice, seed viability doesn't matter so long as it's great than zero and the tree produces a lot of seeds.

    Your reasoning is probably wrong here. If one plant produces 10% viable seeds, while another produces just as many seeds that are 100% viable, other things equal the second plant is 10 times as likely to reproduce even if it takes thousands of years.

    I say "probably" because this logic is not reliable. Maybe something makes 90% of the seeds sterile and there's no gene available that can affect it. Maybe redwoods with a lifespan of thousands of years evolve so slowly that they haven't had time to adapt. Maybe they get some special benefit from sterile seeds, that I haven't thought of.

    Maybe, when opportunities come once in centuries, the seeds are evolved to be hesitant to germinate for the first false alarm. I can imagine that many of the "sterile" seeds might germinate sometime within the first 10 years. (Unless they rot or something. I'm good at coming up with ideas about things I don't know anything about, and sometimes they don't in fact fit the reality at all.)

    Finally, the argument about climax trees specifically is that climax occurs when you get a species where the seedlings can grow to maturity in the shade of a parent, and thus the species can hold that spot indefinitely.

    I would state that different -- the seedlings must survive in the shade of a parent better than any present competitor. If something else can outcompete them at that stage, then they are likely not to prevail.

    This implies both shade tolerance in seedlings, and also that there aren't predators, pathogens or parasites that the seedling can only survive by being far away from any conspecifics.

    If you have something like a rain forest with lots of species coexisting, does it make sense to think of it as a climax forest with a lot of diversity? I think it might, theoretically. But if you need to measure how much the distribution of plants changes over a hundred years to find out how well it fits the concept, that's kind of a problem. Maybe we could use a concept like that as some sort of organizing principle, but if we pay too much attention to a priori ideas without measurements, we might as well be doing economics.

    As a teacher pointed out, if you believed in climax, then shade-tolerant hemlock would have taken over from shade-intolerant redwoods a long time ago. The reason you don't see that is that redwoods can grow something like 100 feet taller than hemlocks, so no matter how many hemlocks there are, when a redwood come down, it clears them out, making room for either redwood seedlings or redwood stump sprouts to take over the new clearing. This model doesn't really work under climax, does it?

    The point is that you have something that other species don't know how to take over from. Redwoods fit that, in some locations. More-shade-tolerant seedlings is one way that something else can take over. If the claim was that it was the only thing that worked, and that it always worked, then a counterexample would prove the theory was wrong.

    Just now botany may be at a point where the climax concept is getting knocked down after people were too dogmatic about it. But I think it would benefit economics. Where economists tend to emphasize equilibrium and approach to equilibrium even when they say it isn't really true.

    The climax concept is better than the economic equilibrium concept together with the "efficiency wins" concept. A climax forest doesn't have to be the best at collecting light, or the best at collecting water, or any one thing. It just needs some way to stop its competitors. Like, redwoods are pretty good at collecting light and water, and at making poison. They also spread their duff and make it harder for other plants to reach mineral soil. They start fires which burn up other plants. Etc. Traditional economics implicitly assumes that the best way for a business to survive is to satisfy their customers, to produce a great product at a reasonable price. But in fact they can succeed with any way to stop their competitors. The survivors are the ones who survive, and that is not necessarily the ones with the biggest profits.

    The concept may not have much value for you, but for economics it's a step in the right direction.

    834:

    Here's a Google-searchable reference on redwood seed viability. It does vary: if you take a helicopter and collect cones from the top branches, the seeds can be close to 100% viable inside the cones. On the forest floor, seeds not destroyed by fungi are between 1-32% viable or less, and they last less than five years. Peak viable seed production is somewhere around age 250, although they produce seed from around 10 years old to around 1000 years old (this from Reed Noss, The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods). In general, seed viability is considered low, but over centuries, it doesn't particularly matter. I should point out that redwoods root-sprout, so we really don't know how old they get, although there are a few rootstocks that might be 10,000 years old. We do know that they grow in clone circles, though.

    835:

    Bugger - bad typo (which actually matters) in my # 827 M sempervirens Oops.

    H @ 828 Well, Epping Forest is most definitely "old growth" ... Note I did say it was a managed system - certainly since late-Saxon times if not before. As can be seen by the ancient ditch/bank structures in it & in surrounding woods that are no longer part of the main forest. Here is the entrance to one such: https://goo.gl/maps/7ciVl here's another entrance to the same: https://goo.gl/maps/VaadX I often park the Great Green Beast at the latter & go to look for very edible fungi there in the autumn .... [ Boletus badius & Russula ochroleuca mostly ]

    Are there not some stands of tree in the USA that are even older than the bristlecones, though the above-ground trunks have been burnt down (more than once)? A form of Aspen, IIRC?

    836:

    To add to the Cluetrain, the British government is currently engaged in setting up a system to monitor Thoughtcrime at universities and suchlike. Strangely, for a government which believes in cutting red tape and reducing the number of people involved in something, the new plans will require more people and paperwork.
    More information here: http://blog.sghmartineau.com/archive/2015/03/13/final-version-of-prevent-guidance-published.aspx

    837:

    Let me put it bluntly: climax is dead, and ecologists have moved on to things like the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. There's little room for equilibria in systems that normally operates far from equilibrium. The closest a forest gets to equilibrium is when a volcano has burned it down and buried it in ash. Even then, the equilibrium stops about two feet underground, because the living roots and seeds are still active down there, and they're not in equilibrium either.

    838:

    Yep. There are a bunch of things older than bristlecones, in two different ways.

    Giant clones include the King Clone creosote in the Mojave (11,700 years old) and the Pando aspen clone in Utah, whose root system is estimated to be 80,000 years old.

    Outside the plants, there's even the humungous fungus, a clone of honey mushrooms in Michigan that covers 38 acres and is thought to be 1,500 to 10,000 years old. The irony here is that honey mushrooms (Armillaria bulbosa) is actually a weak tree pathogen as well as a wood rotter, but the trees it is currently attacking are much younger than it is. Kinda vampiric. There is aerial evidence that even bigger humungous fungi exist in the Siberian forests and probably elsewhere in the northern forests(such infections look a lot like giant ringworm infections in the forest canopy).

    There's actually a second way that many trees (including some redwoods) are "older" than bristlecones, and it has to do with clock time vs. environmental time. Environmental time is what ectothermic ("cold-blooded" species whose bodies are the same temperature as their surroundings) experience. For something like the bristlecone pine, they go dormant when they fall below freezing, and their environment was at or below freezing for 9 or 10 months out of the year (climate change is messing with this). Because of this, it's easy to argue that bristlecones only experience 1/4 to 1/6 of each year, so a 4,000 year-old bristlecone has only experienced about 1,000 years of environmental time.

    The oldest redwoods are 1,000-2,000 years old* and where they live, they're above freezing 12 months of the year. They've experienced that entire duration, so they've experienced more time than the bristlecones have. Doesn't this make them older?

    *actually redwoods root-sprout the same way aspens do. There are definitely clone rings of redwoods, but I don't know if anyone has done the genetic testing to see how big or old the oldest redwood clones are. I do know that, on the edge of the pygmy forest, there are a few struggling redwoods that are obviously resprouts of older redwoods. Since the pygmy forest is a rather bizarre environment whose formation was linked to the last few ice ages, I know some have proposed that those struggling redwood clones date back to at least the last ice age. I'm not sure I buy it, but it makes a great story.

    839:

    Let me put it bluntly: climax is dead, and ecologists have moved on to things like the intermediate disturbance hypothesis.

    Are you saying it's dead like phlogiston theory is dead, or like Newtonian physics is dead, or like Jaynes's neoclassical physics is dead?

    One is wrong. One works adequately in a lot of circumstances but we have something better now. One works just fine but became unfashionable.

    If you have time, you might revise the Wikipedia article on the topic which takes a much softer tone than calling it dead. :-) (The talk history shows some controversy, and it has suffered subtle changes in wording as late as 2013 between people who think it's basicly a bad idea versus those who don't. From that discussion, the ones who didn't like it took it to be a dogma that a climax state is a steady state in which nothing can change, that plant communities always have sharp edges, that species in particular ecosystems are always highly interdependent, etc. The ones who did like it considered it more a tendency, that it's the state that a system heads for in the face of disturbances, as opposed to states that a system heads through, and they don't take it as dogma that there has to be a climax. Anyway, you might have fun stirring them up again.

    My stand on this is that to the extent there is a complex dogma about succession leading to climax, with complex terminology, that is probably best ignored. But the concept of species that quickly change their environment to one that other species thrive in better than themselves, versus species which do that less, is still useful.

    840:

    Yes, climax is like the term god that way, isn't it? When the rigorous definition doesn't work, people try to redefine it. You get the same conflict about whether plant communities are real, incidentally, and since climax is part of the original theory that underlies plant community ecology, it's not surprising that people keep repurposing it.

    The conflict about plant communities is basically a mapping problem, where there are somewhat repeated patterns in the world. Clementsian community theory says that these patterns in the world (oak forests, for example) are "superorganisms" and that communities evolve over time through changing species (succession) towards equilibrium with the climate (through favoring the species best adapted to the climate and outcompeting the other species), and this is called the climax. How many issues can you spot in this? Remember that it was formulated before the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, at a time when people were harshly critiquing Darwinian evolution, and ideas like superorganisms and group evolution were taken seriously.

    Community theory got a big boost when GIS came along, and people wanted to start mapping the vegetation as a series of polygons, the better to manage it with. Some of these mappers stumbled across good ol' community theory and embraced it, or embraced something like phytosociology which does some of the same things. Most of what they're mapping are populations of dominant plant species (like oaks or corn), but when they hit an area where nothing is dominant, the implementation of the theory gets rather baroque, in an epicycles kind of way.

    The best way to understand the problem is to contemplate oak trees invading a pasture, and to contemplate a sudsy pint of beer. Oak trees don't invade in a solid row. Seedlings pop up here in there fairly randomly, and the only ones that survive are those that find the right ectomycorrhizal fungus out there in the grass (which don't do ectomycorrhizae). If one oak seedling gets lucky, often other seedlings will get lucky around it too (thanks to the fungi spreading from root to root), so a new little oak copse will form. It's very splotchy. Where's the edge between the grassland and the oak forest?

    If that's too cerebral, contemplate your beer. Let's assume that the beer is the oaks, and the air in the room is the grass. Got it? The foam at the top of the beer is the edge between the oaks and grassland. It's composed of nothing but beer and air in a complex arrangement, but at the same time, it's nothing like beer or air. It's a foam. Do you want to map the interface between the beer and the air in that foam?

    That's what we see in nature, where these foamy edge zones (they're called oak savannas where I studied them for my PhD) host species that aren't found in either the grassland or in the forest. Mapping this complexity in two dimensions is impossible (try doing it for your foamy beer, using beer and air as your only mapping categories), but the principles that generate it are pretty straightforward. Where I currently live, messes like this are something like 10-20% of the vegetation mapping units. Back where I got my PhD, oak savannas are very rare, but extraordinarily species rich (>100 species/hectare), which is why I got interested in them.

    841:

    The conflict about plant communities is basically a mapping problem, where there are somewhat repeated patterns in the world.

    Yes, we get the same thing with microorganisms. If there's enough organic material present, some places will be anaerobic because bacteria will use up all the available oxygen consuming that stuff. And if there's enough sulfur present, they will reduce the sulfur too and make sulfides. The sulfides will spread to places there is oxygen, and other bacteria will make sulfates. Anything that can't live with the hydrogen sulfide and sulfuric acid has to live somewhere else. It's a community, sort of.

    But there are lots of bacteria that can make sulfide, when one is most common one place and another somewhere else, why? Aren't they doing the same thing? No, they don't do just one thing. One of them does it faster, another can handle lower concentrations. Different temperatures. Different amounts of fats available. One lives in a film with another organism that it can hand some of its waste products off to, so they are present in lower concentration. One makes a toxin that kills some of its competitors and splits them open so their organic material is available. They compete in more different arenas than we can notice. Find the most common one now, then come back in two weeks and it might not be that common then, it will be in the background waiting for its chance.

    It isn't very stable for one organism. But the system as a whole is good at responding to disturbances. Flood the area with your own bacterium that has a marker you can recognize, and in a few weeks you'll be lucky to find any of them surviving. There are lots of competitors that are hanging on waiting for their chance, yours probably can't cut it.

    And yet you can put soil bacteria into continuous culture in the lab with a defined culture medium, constant temperature etc, and you may find the same seven species get common pretty much every time.

    Seedlings pop up here in there fairly randomly, and the only ones that survive are those that find the right ectomycorrhizal fungus out there in the grass (which don't do ectomycorrhizae).

    Sometimes species coadapt pretty tightly, so they can hardly survive without each other. Sometimes they work together but don't really need each other. People used to put a variety of herbs into their beer, but they found that hops works better than the others. Now we hardly use anything else. If there was no hops we'd get along like we used to. But pretty much everywhere you find beer-makers you find hops.

    Of course there are plant communities. But if a skeptic popped up and said there was no such thing, or OK it happens every now and then but it isn't important, how would you prove him wrong? How much science can you do when a lot of the things which are obviously true are very hard to test?

    Clementsian community theory says that these patterns in the world (oak forests, for example) are "superorganisms" and that communities evolve over time through changing species (succession) towards equilibrium with the climate (through favoring the species best adapted to the climate and outcompeting the other species), and this is called the climax. How many issues can you spot in this?

    It would be easier if communities had their own genes that they dole out to their members. Without that, you would need the system to somehow select each species for the things which keep the community going, as opposed to doing things which assist its own survival while damaging the community.

    The other species in the community are a major part of the environment for each species. Without that, they can't select each other. In a world where things keep changing, would plants tend to benefit from a somewhat-stable environment that suits them? Sure. Would plants that cooperate to achieve that together be selected over variants that don't? Maybe. It depends. How could we test how much it happens? I don't know.

    That's what we see in nature, where these foamy edge zones (they're called oak savannas where I studied them for my PhD) host species that aren't found in either the grassland or in the forest.

    When I was in high school I read Basic Ecology by Buchsbaum, written in 1957. It had a short discussion about this. If somebody else is changing your environment to be better for them which doesn't suit you, and you can't trump them to make it better for you instead, then too bad. You might have a better chance in the border area between two such, where neither of them is particularly winning.

    Like, the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea has a whole lot of plants and animals that are rare elsewhere. In much of Korea the best survival strategy for plants or animals is to find humans who want to keem them domesticated. (Or be very inconspicuous.) But humans don't hunt much in the DMZ because it's such a great place to be killed.... The DMZ between North and South Vietnam was that way until the unification.

    It makes sense. But if somebody challenged me to design an experiment to test whether it's true, I don't know what I'd come up with.

    842:

    Sometimes species coadapt pretty tightly, so they can hardly survive without each other. These are often called... LICHENS. Apart, that is, from the fungi that you only find in association with specific trees ( & usually on the right soil-type too) the classic, tasty & EXPENSIVE example being black Truffles, oink.

    Also, the edges of woods are great places for large species-diversity too, as hinted at. THat boundary between the forest, the path or grass-patch & maybe the field or common that comes next is a sort of 3-dimensional "foam" where everything mixes, though probably doesn't match. Is it fractal, as well - I think so from the large tress through the smaller shrubs & herbs, down to the different soil bacteria & the sam applying to the surface & aeriel life-forms too.

    843:

    Like, the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea has a whole lot of plants and animals that are rare elsewhere.... humans don't hunt much in the DMZ because it's such a great place to be killed....

    The same thing happened in North Germany (the British took care of the Soltau and Sennelager training areas; they were full of wildlife, because there weren't that many tanks per square kilometer :) )

    We were training in the OBUA village in the Thetford training area; while we were there for a briefing, the Sergeant-Major finished with us and went off to brief a set of undergraduate Biology students, whose department had apparently found 30,000 plant and animal species and counting. No chemicals, largely unfarmed, a few sheep. Granted, you don't want to pick daisies in the impact area, but the insects and plants thought it was great stuff.

    The sight of a grizzled infantryman who had become a botanical enthusiast was... incongruous. Right up there with the time that two kilometer squares got placed out-of-bounds in a training area I'd booked, when the Major running the place told us that he'd worked up to four breeding pairs of some rare wild bird in those locations, it was nesting time, and if we disturbed them he would get slightly irate...

    844:

    One of my cow-orkers in the Go Faster and Explode Division of the British Bucket of Instant Sunshine Research Establishment was a keen amateur botanist and he had recorded several rare orchids growing in a remote area of the site which was kept free of ramblers and such by armed guards and large barbed-wire fences. One of the orchids, he claimed with equal amounts of satisfaction and annoyance was the only place he knew of in Britain where it grew wild. Satisfied, because he had spotted it and annoyed because he couldn't tell anyone outside the site about it.

    845:

    Of course there are plant communities. But if a skeptic popped up and said there was no such thing, or OK it happens every now and then but it isn't important, how would you prove him wrong? How much science can you do when a lot of the things which are obviously true are very hard to test?

    Actually, I'm one such skeptic, labeled as a plant community ecologist even though I think that communities don't exist as physical entities. I'm far from alone. My problem is that I grew up facing a mountain slope that was so patchy that you could name it as a different type of community depending on the scale you measured it at. When you see this every day, it makes you skeptical of theories that say such things don't exist. If this is confusing, it's analogous to taking a crazy quilt and trying to say what the most common color is. If you look at every square foot, you'll get a bunch of different answers. If you look at every square meter, you'll get a different bunch of answers, and if you look at the whole quilt, you'll get a third answer. Each color is a different so-called community. Then I did my thesis work on oak savannas, which basically aren't mappable (where's the edge? It's arbitrary).

    Generally, most things we label as plant communities are actually populations of dominant plants. There's a whole study (the book The Vegetation of Wisconsin) that tested whether the forests of Wisconsin mapped as communities (where whole suites of plants all coexisted within sharply defined borders, as one would expect if communities were real), or whether every plant had its own distribution on the landscape, with little respect to each other. The study found that overwhelmingly the latter was true, each species did its own thing. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with mapping dominant species: a forest dominated by pine trees is a pine forest. However, if you call a pine forest a multispecies community with tightly bound relationships, you're mistaken. Worse, if you manage for homogeneous pine forests, on the mistaken assumption that they're tight communities, you'll lose all the species that can't live under your management regime. This has already happened through much of Europe, and it's happening in the US. Fortunately, some people noticed that weirdo oaksavannas had far more species than did oak forests and prairies combined, and a few mavericks around Chicago started to manage for the unmappable mess of savannas, rather than assuming that everything needs to be in its own polygonal community. They've succeeded rather well so far.

    I'd say that the bottom line is that all maps are simplifications. Community ecology quite often mistakes the map for reality. Managing to make a community map real leads to a lot of problems.

    846:

    Nope, lichen fungi are tightly adapted to depend on the algae, but there are far fewer lichen algae than there are lichen fungal species, and the lichen algae can live independently of their fungi. While it's true that lichens allow the algae to live in places where they normally wouldn't, it's probably better to consider lichen fungi as parasites, rather than as the fungal/algal symbiosis to be some sort of mutually beneficent mutualism.

    I'd also point out that, within one lichen thallus, it's fairly common to find different algae, sometimes cyanobacteria (the fungus farming green algae and cyanobacteria simultaneously), sometimes multiple lichen fungi growing intertwined, and (if you're lucky) lichenicolous fungi, which are fungal species that parasitize the lichen symbiosis. One lichenologist I know loves to find lichenicolous fungi on his samples, because that tells him the lichen community is old enough and healthy enough to support a population of parasites. Communities under stress don't have these rather odd species.

    Living in sym is rarely simple.

    847:

    What's wrong with that? I know of one Army base in the US that lent an ecologist a tank so that she could properly disturb an area to promote the habitat of a rare butterfly. At MCAS Miramar (that's the Marine airbase), they love vernal pools with endangered species because they're at either end of the runway. Aside from the commandants' wife being fond of vernal pools, there's much less uproar if a jet crashes into a pool than if it crashes into a home, apartment building, or power plant (all have been proposed). The Navy SEALs training at Coronado are starting to learn to avoid small native plants. It helps the environmental managers, and the trainers are learning that training the recruits to avoid inconspicuous plants is a great way to train them not to step on landmines and IEDs, no matter how much stress they're under. On other bases, they're using endangered species habitat as no-go zones, which may be marked as faux landmine patches or radiation patches during exercises, just to keep the soldiers on their toes. In many places, the US military does a better job at conservation than the surrounding civilian community does, weird as that sounds. They take mission success seriously, even if they don't think that conservation is their primary mission.

    848:

    We were training in the OBUA village in the Thetford training area [...] No chemicals, largely unfarmed, a few sheep

    I'm not entirely sure there are no chemicals — I remember getting quite a nasty headache from just letting a certain almond-scented putty-like substance touch my skin somewhere in there.

    (Conceded, said substance usually goes bang. Unless you're like me and fail to properly attach the detonator, in which case it may not. That was the day I discovered that in such a case, the student gets to make the explosive safe, on the basis it's his (or her — our captain was actually a woman, though she wasn't there that day) fault, and instructors are more valuable.

    No, I don't think I'll pursue a career in bomb disposal. Once was enough, and that was without any booby traps.)

    849:

    Generally, most things we label as plant communities are actually populations of dominant plants.

    That makes sense to me. If there's a population of dominant plants that changes the environment that other things live in, then organisms that do poorly in that environment will tend to be found elsewhere.

    There's a whole study (the book The Vegetation of Wisconsin) that tested whether the forests of Wisconsin mapped as communities (where whole suites of plants all coexisted within sharply defined borders, as one would expect if communities were real), or whether every plant had its own distribution on the landscape, with little respect to each other. The study found that overwhelmingly the latter was true, each species did its own thing.

    That makes sense too. Imagine an acorn that can't grow without the right fungus, which can't grow without an oak. They would have a hard time colonizing new areas, which in a changing environment they need to do sometimes. If you have a whole cluster of species and none of them can spread unless all the others do, they will have troubles.

    If every species in an oak/hickory/chestnut forest depended on every other species to survive, what would the chestnut blight have done?

    There are supposed to be less than 1000 tree species in north america, 300 or so in Britain. But there are a very large number of microclimates. How could that possibly be enough species to develop lots of obligate relationships? We don't see that happening much with bacteria, who presumably have simpler relationships, fill simpler ecological niches, and have at least a thousand times as many species. (Without obligate sexuality they can specialize easier, and it isn't even obvious what should count as a bacterial species. But there are a lot of them.)

    ... where whole suites of plants all coexisted within sharply defined borders, as one would expect if communities were real....

    No, that isn't what one ought to expect.

    However, if you call a pine forest a multispecies community with tightly bound relationships, you're mistaken.

    Yes, there are probably a bunch of loosely-bound relationships, and a few tight ones.

    Worse, if you manage for homogeneous pine forests, on the mistaken assumption that they're tight communities, you'll lose all the species that can't live under your management regime.

    Yes. It's worth preserving at least a few more-or-less homogeneous pine forests to preserve species that can't survive without them, but too much of that is like pine-forest wallpaper.

    This has already happened through much of Europe, and it's happening in the US.

    That's a travesty. If you can't oppose it without speaking out against the concept of plant communities, then you should speak out against the concept of plant communities.

    I'd say that the bottom line is that all maps are simplifications. Community ecology quite often mistakes the map for reality. Managing to make a community map real leads to a lot of problems.

    Clearly said. Thank you.

    850:

    H, I think you've misread what I was trying to say ... I was under the impression that Lichens were a commensal relationship, not a parasitic one, actually. I was quite aware that there was not a 1:1 relationship, as well. See also: http://www.newnaturalists.com/product/9780007308613/Lichens If, as a US resident, you have not come across this series of books (First one came out in 1946 or 7 - I have the full set ) can I recommend them? Or to anyone else with an interest in "Natural History" in the full, old-fashioned sense? Incidentally, it is quite noticable that lichens are now populating the roofs & walls of London, including my front wall, which would have been impossible in my childhood - the smoke/sulphur pollution of those days has, thankfully long vanished

    851:

    300 or so in Britain That few? Really? Does that just mean "native" species [ whatever THAT really means ] or does it not include introductions which have been found to "Like it here". Does it include trees like Gingko biloba which flourishes, but, apparently does not normally set seed in Britain ( though that may change with a warming climate ) or the three "sequoias" all of which can & do set seed here - see previous discussion.

    Monoculture pine-forests (as in "Forestry Commission circs 1955") are not planted here any more, & multi-species plantings are now the norm, I'm glad to say.

    852:

    Generally only male Ginko trees are sold in Britain since the female trees can generate very unpleasant smells. So ther's not much chance of setting seed.

    853:

    I was under the impression that Lichens were a commensal relationship, not a parasitic one, actually.

    That's kind of a judgement call. We could come up with various complicated criteria to decide which species are better off together and which would be better off apart, but it may not be of much use to argue it. Kind of like marriages -- It's arguable who is better off together and who would be better off apart, but people don't usually make their choice whether to stay together based on those arguments.

    Are cattle better off as domesticated animals or would they be better off free? There are very few surviving wild cattle, it could be argued that passenger pigeons did not benefit from staying free. But it's more a philosophical than a scientific question. I think it gets so much treatment in ecology for laymen because it lays out a moral and it's easy to follow.

    Whether or not the algae in lichens are better off, they do get into this relationship that some of them survive in and that most of them can't seem to get out of.

    Here's a slightly more complicated conundrum -- there are parasites that have complicated life cycles -- hookworms, tapeworms, etc. Say that one of them infects rabbits at one stage in its life and foxes at another. If the foxes get debilitated so they can't catch as many rabbits, maybe it actually benefits the rabbits. But if it debilitates the rabbits even more so they are easier caught, maybe it benefits the foxes. But then, if either foxes or rabbits developed a behavior or a gene that let them avoid infection, the infected animals might be supporting the uninfected ones -- the uninfected would be better off than the infected, at least as long as there were enough infected ones around to keep the other species infected.

    It's hard to get enough information to decide this sort of thing, and we don't have to decide it unless we get the power to do something about it and we must choose whether or not we want to interfere.

    854:

    "300 or so in Britain" That few? Really?

    No, I read it on the internet. This is Heteromeles's field, not mine.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trees_of_Great_Britain_and_Ireland

    Many additional species have been imported by humans; the total list of all introduced trees numbers several thousand. A far smaller number of these have become widely naturalised, spreading by their own accord without recourse to further human assistance.

    What's a few thousand species among friends?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom#Native_and_historic_tree_species

    855:

    Sometimes what are thought of as parasites have symbiotic components.There is a tapeworm which secretes a growth hormone analogue. This suggests that well fed animals with the tapeworm would be bigger and stronger than the uninfected and well able to supply the extra nutrients used by the tapeworm - or it might be that the extra growth hormone aids anabolism to enable the animal to extract more nutrition from the same diet.

    856:

    "300 or so in Britain" That few? Really?

    That many?

    The Woodland Trust lists 39 native trees and 18 non-native (including such as the Horse Chestnut and Walnut). Given that most of this island was scraped clean by the ice sheet and the rest was not that much further south, I suspect that a number of those natives post-date the earliest human inhabitants.

    Trees that can be grown here would be a larger number, but the Woodland Trust is (I guess) listing wild trees. That full 300 list probably includes a large number of species like your sequoias - not wild, but happy to grow if planted here.

    (I did know someone who, as part of his qualification, had to be able to recognise on sight all British trees. I've lost his contact details though so can't check)

    857:

    What's wrong with that?

    Nothing at all, I was rather proud of it :)

    There was a story the German Greens were a bit humpty in the late 70s/ early 80s, presuming that the imperialists were destroying their beautiful countryside to practice war. When they did the ecological surveys, they found that in fact the training areas were the most effectively preserved areas of wildlife in Germany - far from crushing bunnies and producing wasteland, they had created reservations for flora and fauna where the deer and boars didn't worry so much about getting shot at by enthusiastic local jaeger; or ploughed and crop-sprayed to a fare-thee-well...

    The contrasting story came from Poland, shortly after the wall came down. The British went eastwards for once, to exercise on a former Soviet training area, and asked the range staff what the limitations were for live firing of artillery (you tend to avoid firing smoke or illuminants when it hasn't rained for a while, it's best to ask). The apocryphal reply was "oh, anything up to non-persistent nerve agents is fine"

    Another issue was that local mushroom pickers chasing the "best" varieties of edible fungi would sneak in to the tank training areas at night with the occasional tragic result. Visibility from a tank is poor, and it's not as if the tanks run with headlights when training in the dark...

    858:

    I'll be talking to some Woodlands Trust/Nature's Calendar people next month (on another subject) so I'll try to remember to ask them. My Collins guide suggest approx 1000 species including introductions, some of which won't spread naturally, of course. Given that most of this island was scraped clean by the ice sheet and the rest was not that much further south, .... then there is probably no such thing as a "native" tree anyway. The same applies to other "introductions" - I'm deeply heretical on this issue - believing that, excepting a very few dangerously invasive species ( Like Fallopia japonica ) they should be allowed to get on with it. [ So "non-native" bluebells can interbreed with the "Native ones & ditto Ruddy ducks - so damned what? ] And I think you missed my point about some sequoias, & at any rate the Coast redwood ( S sempervirens ) can & is self-seeding & quite happy to spread.

    { Some species that I have seen "invade" or spread their range within Britain during my lifetime, & all seem to have fitted in include: The Collared Dove, the "Haxy" ladybird, the Siskin, the Tree Bumblebee, the Fulmar, the lesser Egret. There are other, less-welcome ones of course, like the Rosemary beetle

    859:

    ... This suggests that well fed animals with the tapeworm would be bigger and stronger than the uninfected and well able to supply the extra nutrients used by the tapeworm - or it might be that the extra growth hormone aids anabolism to enable the animal to extract more nutrition from the same diet.

    That would need to be tested. It's possible that well fed animals for some reason or another don't produce as much of their growth hormone as would be good for them, and the tapeworm supplies the lack. But it's also possible that the growth hormone analog makes them better hosts for the tapeworm, to their detriment.

    If a tapeworm were to create an amphetamine analog we probably wouldn't assume it was good for people.

    This stuff is complicated and we don't know much about it. It's very easy to jump to conclusions. I do it all the time.

    860:

    J Thomas wrote"if the people who hire make a point of getting guys with a proven track record of excellence, it won't be cheap. There aren't enough of those to go around. So the big majority of projects need to find a way to get by with the people who're available. The average project will be done mostly by average workers, or possibly by a few great workers despite the average ones."

    This remark came to mind when I learned Olivia Newton John was granddaughter of a physics Nobelist. Along with a couple of jokes, firstly: so when she sang I wanna get physical she meant lab bench experimental as opposed to strictly math theory. The second one occurred to me as I wiki checked her and her grandfather Max Born, thinking there must be an ambition gene at work. Turns out he nurtured a whole clutch of students like Fermi, Heisenberg, Pauli and Teller, and had a distinct knack for promoting superstars while finding "respectable, doable projects for the rest." (see note above.) Quantum mechanics was first formulated as a probability matrix by him, Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan publishing together. When Jordan later became a raging Nazi racist, Born, who lost his position at Gottingen due to Jewish background, must have thought along the lines of my other joke: "As the body impacted with severe constipation discovered, you don't have to be a brain to be the boss, just an asshole."

    862:

    Oy, the differences among types of symbioses!

    First off, lichen fungi as parasites: basically, the fungi get all their nutrition off the algae. The alga doesn't get much from the fungus in return, except the ability to live in some place that might otherwise be too dry for it. In a nutritional sense, the fungus is a parasite. A commensal relationship is where two organisms share a space without sharing nutrients in either direction, either one way (as in a parasite), or two ways (as in a mutualism).

    That out of the way, it really is time to realize just how artificial terms like parasite, commensal, symbiote, and mutualist are. It's kind of like talking about a marriage, as others realized. Ideally, a marriage should be a mutualistic relationship, with both partners supporting each other, in love, until death parts them. Does it ever work out precisely that way? Of course not. It's always more complicated. If you look at any particular time, say when they're fighting, or when one spouse is laid off, or in the hospital, or whatever, it will look very different. How and when you analyze it matters immensely.

    The same thing applies to symbiotic relationships. Is a lichen fungus a parasite depends on how you analyze it. In terms of nutrient flows, then yes. In terms of habitat, then maybe. It depends.

    If you want to pick a really controversial topic, look at domestic dogs. We've deliberately bred some of them to look like surrogate human children. We even treat them like children, some call them their children, and sometimes, the relationship is so intense that it keeps the human from having children. How is such an infantilized dog not parasitizing the human? Yet who created that parasite: human breeders. It makes you wonder how often, in nature, hosts deliberately select the traits in their parasites.

    From a purely nutritional perspective, most pets are parasites on humans. They don't contribute enough work, let alone enough food, for their relationship with their human to be considered a true mutualism. You will, of course, argue that pets provide all sorts of less tangible benefits, such as companionship, and that such companionship can lengthen both their lives. Absolutely, but measuring nutrient flows is a bit tricky to compare with quality of life improvements. It gets even more interesting if a pet saves it's owner's life. Then it has repaid everything the owner fed it, but would you call it a parasite that became a mutualist, or what?

    And what about reversing the relationship? What would you say are humans' relationships with all our food plants and animals? In many cases, we look like the parasites, very much like the lichen fungi and their algae, in fact. Admittedly, I'm one of those people who equates domestication with symbiosis, but for some reason, that really annoys most people. I guess a lot of people don't want to think about how we're not unique, or something.

    It's all very complicated, and that's ultimately the point. Humans try to make relationships with everything from elephants to pet rocks, and I'm pretty sure that even the geekiest of us are quite good at understanding relationships. Putting that understanding into words and math is much harder though. The problem with words like commensal, parasite, symbiote, and mutualist is that they're fairly rigid categories in which we try to capture extremely complicated and changeable relationships. When you use these terms, getting your frame of reference and your frame of analysis clear is really important. Sometimes, I've found, it's simply better to talk about relationships, and not to spend too much time classifying them.

    863:

    It has been tested and produces rapid growth in rats.

    Thank you! I hadn't known about that one. That's a fascinating link.

    Well-fed mice who get to eat as much as they want, would not need to metabolize more efficiently -- they could just eat more. Mice might tend to usually grow to something like the right size for their ecological niche -- ones that get too big or stay too small would tend to reproduce less. But the parasite doesn't benefit from the host reproducing, the parasite does better to maximize it's own reproduction.

    864:

    As in "The Commensals of Orgoreyn" - where, in fact they were a fully parasitic "organism" ...... Symbiosis/parasitism for humans & their commensals - what about CATS? If this house did not have a resident feline, I'd be surrounded by rodents - as it is, I'm not. [ Though every year, about mid-November, the local r-population look for warmer qurters & end up stiff on the doormat. ] Of course, for the rest of the year, "sir" luxuriates in fusses from the humans, pausing only occasionally to present us with another squirrel.

    Then there's the horribly complex symbiotic relationships between mycorrizial fungi & certain trees & other plants ( Orchids being the ones to really make your head hurt, I believe. )

    865:

    Then there's the horribly complex symbiotic relationships between mycorrizial fungi & certain trees & other plants

    Yes! It's like business. If you're running a deparment store, some fraction of your customers and some fraction of your employees will steal stuff. But you don't want to pay much more to stop them from stealing than they cost you, and you don't want to inconvenience the other customers. And some of the ones who steal a little buy enough that you still make a profit off them.

    So the bottom line is, you do what you can, and if you come out with a profit despite the part of the stealing that isn't worth stopping, then you can be satisfied. If you're losing money then at some point you have to shut down, and putting too much into theft prevention just shuts you down quicker.

    Meanwhile there's economic value in getting ecologists to pay attention to the most blatant things -- commercial species that can't get along without mutualist others, and diseases, and such. For the subtle details it's catch-as-catch-can.

    We need to train and fund about 10 million ecologists, but people think we can't afford it. I don't know how many ecologists there are, but in the USA the BLS has a category for "environmental scientists and specialists" and they list 90,000 of those with a bachelor's degree or higher. So I'd estimate that about 99% of the ecologists we ought to have, are instead unemployed.

    866:

    It's worth checking to see what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics considers an "environmental scientist or specialist," because the environmental industry in the US primarily deals with remediation and waste issues. They're industrial hygienists, mold removers, people who deal with water quality, air quality, and so forth. In that industry, the ecologists are "the bugs and bunnies" people, and they're a minority who are usually considered biologists.

    Back when I got my degree awhile ago, the Ecological Society of America said that about 500 students per year got PhDs in ecology, and that perhaps 10% of them got jobs in academia. I'm one of the 90%, and I understand that 10% is going down. I'll also point out that most straight up ecology and botany jobs get taken by people who, at best, had some coursework in botany or ecology. It's pretty routine for agency people looking to hire botanists to end up hiring marine biologists or guys who are interested but never finished college, because the botanists ended up getting a teaching credential or a real estate license or something, instead of waiting for one of the rare jobs in their field. It's also worth mentioning that there aren't a lot of "ecology" programs with that word in their title. Ecologists get their degrees in all sorts of academic departments, from biology to geography. In the US at least, it's a mindset, not a label.

    If this all sounds very badly thought out, horribly inefficient, and head-poundingly wasteful and stupid, you might understand where some of my attitude comes from.

    867:

    If this all sounds very badly thought out, horribly inefficient, and head-poundingly wasteful and stupid, you might understand where some of my attitude comes from.

    Yes, certainly.

    "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few."

    One consequence is that I tend to distrust negative results in ecology. If ecologists see some special thing happening, they might not understand what it is but there's probably something special going on. When they think something might be happening and then they don't observe it, they might be missing it.

    SJ Gould pointed out that the fossil record shows that most animals spend a lot of time with a mostly fixed body form, and then suddenly a new form shows up almost instantly. He did not really have a point, since usually 500 generations is "almost instantly" in the fossil record. But now it looks likely that structural things are arranged so that variation can be induced or inhibited. When a population takes on a new ecological niche, they can get a good skeletal form pretty quick and then stop varying it. If they take on a different niche then at some point they turn on the variation again, get a form that works well for that, and shut it off again. Body plans that succeed across evolutionary history tend to be pretty adaptible.

    But Mendelian genetics gave no hint of that. RA Fisher tried to find a way to modify genes to be dominant or recessive (So that in a changing environment, the dominant version could spread faster, and then develop a recessive version that would last longer if the trait turned unfavorable and occasionally turn dominant again in case it would be selected favorably). He got something that could spread very slowly, it would probably have to spread across multiple speciation events.

    W come up with understandable theories that can explain stuff. The reality may be different. We tend to keep the simple easy-to-understand theories until they are disproven, and the more noise in the system the harder it is to disprove simple theories.

    It's a mess. And the fewer people who're measuring stuff, the more likely that important data which might reveal something important, won't get measured.

    Ecology -- real ecology, not communing with bunnies -- is one of the most important things we desperately need to understand. Larry Niven had a line that went "Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do." We're reaching the point that ecology is one of the most dangerous things available for us to not understand.

    And we're putting hardly any effort into it because in a competitive market we don't see many ways to make money with it.

    868:

    I agree with you on most of that, except for the negative result.

    To put this in perspective, I got a bunch of different negative results as part of my thesis. When I finally figured out why I was got negative results with three different experiments instead of the expected positive results, it turned out to be interesting and new, and I published it.

    I'd actually worry more about positive results, because in most fields of ecology, studies are seldom replicated. I've seen a fair amount of chicanery too. For example, one researcher told me that, to get his P value down below P<0.05, he discarded the bottom 10% his results, then fiddled with the math so that his P-value looked impressive. The paper was published.

    In contrast, when I did a "fishing expedition" where I ran over 100 regressions looking for patterns, I only accepted the correlations I found that were P<0.0001. That way, I figured that I'd managed to flush out most of the false positives. However, I've gotten into arguments with ecologists who think it's perfectly okay to run hundreds of stats test, then to publish any result where P<0.05 or possibly P<0.1, so long as the failures aren't noted. Ecologists have been called statistical bottom feeders for a reason.

    Now lots of researchers do this, which is why people in the health scientists like to see multiple and big studies before they believe anything. In the minor fields, there is little replication. While I think most researchers are honest, there are a number of slime weasels out there.

    As for making money with it, I suspect that ecologists would be no worse at running the biosphere than macro-economists are at running the global economy. They might lose less money too.

    869:

    Actually the economists are already running the global biosphere by proxy, and making a real mess.

    Actually, scratch that, it's not the economists per se; it's the people who hire the economists to justify the decisions that they have already made/ their own ideology who are running the global economy. Just read stuff by Joseph Stiglitz for example, the global economy is not actually being run with reference to the last 50 years of academic economics studies at all, otherwise we wouldn't have this insane austerity drive.

    870:

    Argh, forgot that this was html'ed. Anyway, that was P less than 0.1 and P less than 0.0001 if anyone cares.

    As for Guthrie, you're probably right. Still, I've gotten to the point of paying equal attention to the historians and the economists.

    871:

    While I think most researchers are honest, there are a number of slime weasels out there.

    Yeah. The problems can show up when someone discovers they are headed down a long dead end with no idea how to get out of it. They see their mortgage and kids and wonder how to keep up their life going forward. Some succumb to the temptation.

    I want to think there are less of these than the pathological folks who don't have a problem with making up whatever to fill their ego and pocketbook.

    872:

    J T @ 867 & Heteromeles @ 868:

    Have you come across Nature's Calendar ?? Some fairly serious long-term observational studies, with the data coming in from thousands of volunteers across the UK. Because of the large number of recorders, the error-bars will be small, & the data can (& is) be compared with historical records, of the sort that Brit "rural gentlemen" were ntorious for keeping. Also the data comes from the "reactions" of plants & animals to the surrounding changes, which also helps to remove "experimenter's finger" so to speak. They have been going for some time now & are associated with a popular charity (The Woodland Trust) but are, nontheless a fairly respectable data-collecting/research group. They are starting, finally to get media attention, with the resut that they have asked for volunterrs from various regions of the UK to be prepared to speak to the fucking ignorant journos press if required ... training course next month - guess who is going to be on that course? It's fortunate that I don't suffer from stage fright at all .... ( How the old-fashioned, clipped RP speech will go down is another matter. )

    873:

    On the subject of cats and parasites this may horrify cat lovers:

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150318153918.htm

    March 18, 2015 Source: Indiana University Summary: Rodents infected with a common parasite lose their fear of cats, resulting in easy meals for the felines. Now researchers have identified a new way the parasite may modify brain cells, possibly helping explain changes in the behavior of mice -- and humans.

    874:

    training course next month... How the old-fashioned, clipped RP speech will go down is another matter.

    In the unlikely event you haven't done such a course before, you might be surprised :) Granted, I was a callow youth of 22 when I first saw video playback of a presentation I'd just done on such a course.

    I had thought I had a BBC-English, RP accent. This illusion was shattered, I felt I was watching Groundskeeper Willie in action...

    For incongruity, all you have to do is channel the John Cleese cameo in "Silverado" - "Right! What's going on here, then?"

    875:

    No. I've seen/heard video of myself "in action" so to speak, hence my remark in the first place.

    WHen I foirst did some teching, some of the chuildren thought my "posh" accent funny - until I dropped into the debased norf-Lunnon, as spoken around here in my childhood - & then back again & asked them which they found easier to understand, especially of dealing with a "technical" subject. They got the point, both the points, in fact!

    876:

    Oh for an edit button, even with "preview"!

    877:

    I have been wondering why you don't seem to use the preview button. Are you entering comments somewhere other than on the web page?

    878:

    Observant cat lovers have known that for a while - I guessed it was about toxoplasmosis before I even clicked on the link.

    What that article does is to come up with a mechanism.

    879:

    In this general context, and with the note that we've never spoken, I was thinking that "Sarf Larndarn" is a long way from "Received Pronunciation".

    Also, incidentally, Chrome and even IE11 spell check on the fly for you these days. (which has stopped me making several typos in this message)

    880:

    The idea that using lower thresholds of p-values is a magic bullet that solves problems is a popular, and pernicious misconception. 0.0001 is no more reasonable than 0.05 or, even 0.1 - all of it flows from a failure to understand what significance tests do or contribute. What selecting a significance test is, is really one half of a trade-off - between the risk of finding something that isn't there, and the risk of missing something that really is. By reducing the p-value threshold you are implicitly saying that it's more important to not find unreal effects 99.99% of the time (as opposed to not find them 95% of the time), than it is to have a good chance of finding things that are actually real.

    In many fields, this loss of power is a very poor tradeoff. A spurious positive that someone does more experiments with and then rules out is fairly harmless. Not realising that a drug works, when it actually does, costs lives.

    And an insufficiently low p-value threshold is generally not the problem. The real problem is failure of assumptions.

    881:

    Actually, that's exactly why I set my P value so low. In the particular study I did, I wanted to make sure that the relationships I reported were most likely real, because I figured that no one was going to replicate any aspect of my study in that system. It's been 15 years, and so far they haven't.

    That's a problem with ecology: studies rarely get replicated. A false positive can promulgate unchallenged in the literature, because no one has the funds to replicate the study. Indeed, students are encouraged to make new discoveries, rather than to replicate existing results, in part because funds are so short.

    882:

    That's a problem with ecology: studies rarely get replicated. A false positive can promulgate unchallenged in the literature, because no one has the funds to replicate the study. Indeed, students are encouraged to make new discoveries, rather than to replicate existing results, in part because funds are so short.

    I can't say for sure because there might be special extenuating circumstances, but this is probably a false economy. It's kind of like saying "I couldn't get enough money for my experiment so I left out the control groups."

    I'm confident about my argument in general, but I'm not confident to apply it to ecology. Maybe special circumstances.

    There are other disciplines with a particular justifiation not to replicate their experiments. "If it's not worth doing at all, then it isn't worth doing well."

    883: 877

    I'm tending to type in a hurry & even though I almost always use "preview" there is the autoproofread problem ....

    879

    My home postcode is E17 ... Spelt: "Walthamstow" Pronounced, c.1955: "W'allf'mstoaw"

    884:

    E17 would make me expect something between Cockney, Essex (Think Smiffy's sister Rudi in "Gavin and Stacy" rather than TOWIE) and "Estuary English" rather than RP as native, but there's no reason why you (or anyone else) shouldn't use RP.

    885:

    That RP is non-native for E17 is Greg's point.

    He can flip between RP (schooled) and E17 (native) depending on context. The same thing went for my mother who was raised in Shoreditch but schooled at a grammar in the City of London.

    Regards Luke

    886: 884 & 885

    Both correct. I also do fairly educated Mancunian & (only sometimes) a fair imitation of "Morningside".

    Except - my NORMAL pronounciation is RP - & always was - but I remember the "nat've" speech so well, that I can drop into it, without more than a seconds mental switch-throwing.

    887:

    AFK.. and back : So with research in ecology hasn't systems thinking and computational methods made any inroads? It has with complex systems like weather predictions and climate research. Too bad ecology is the stepchild of today's environmental concerns (the little there really is in terms of real results). If the same funding existed for research in habitat ecology as there is (was) for climate research we might see some interesting patterns and methods.

    The problem is that field measurement for weather and gas concentrations are easier to get ,I suppose, than a per square kilometer species count over decades in a given habitat.

    888:

    So with research in ecology hasn't systems thinking and computational methods made any inroads?

    The problem is that systems thinking and computational methods cannot substitute for data.

    When I was doing molecular biology there was a widespread belief in "junk DNA". The theory was that there is little metabolic cost for carrying excess DNA which does nothing, and so the human genome has expanded with useless DNA until it is about 95% junk, and only 5% of the genome does anything. People expanded the junk concept as far as it would go. I was seeing papers that claimed that 40% to 50$ of one bacterial plasmid or another was junk, because they did transcription in vitro and large parts of the plasmid were not copied into RNA. They were psychologically attuned to the idea of junk, so they didn't consider that there could be positive control, that the things necessary to initiate transcription weren't present in their particular in vitro systems.

    But suggesting the possibility that the genome might be less than 95% junk got no result, because there was no data to prove it. Occam's razor said to assume it was all junk until proven otherwise. Assume there is no system, because that is the simpler way.

    Similarly, when insertion sequences were found it was widely assumed that they were entirely parasitic. They were like viruses that made more copies of themselves in a cell because that increased their own survival and did not much decrease the survival of the cell they must all live in. Assume there is nothing else going on, because that's the simpler assumption.

    If you assume that there is an evolving system, that evolves according to natural selection among its components, that doesn't give you details about exactly how it has evolved. It's predictable that life has spent the last 3 billion years learning how to optimize evolution, because things that evolve better will outcompete things that don't. (That's evolve at an optimal rate, not necessarily the fastest rate. Adapt too fast and you may be tracking the noise, not the signal.)

    It's predictable that parasites may find ways to benefit their hosts. Anything they do that benefits the host enough to benefit a parasite, could be selected. (But if there are many similar parasites in the same host, then the one that makes the benefit pays all the costs and may not get a disproportionate reward. It might not be selected.) But Occam's razor and lazy semiology says that it's simpler to assume that parasites never benefit their hosts, because they're parasites.

    You can get an idea and build a computer model to test it. But those tests depend on your assumptions, and may not fit the real world. Computer models only test that the idea works given the assumptions, they say nothing about the real world unless the assumptions are matched against reality.

    The way I see it, systems ideas came in kind of gradually. In the english-speaking world there was Adam Smith, Charles Watt's governor, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Fisher, Marsh, Odum, etc. When people got the systems idea some of them would say "I have a brilliant idea ! X is a system and I know how it works!". They would create a complicated idea how it worked, and then over time careful researchers would prove them wrong in detail. Or maybe less-careful researchers would appear to prove them wrong.

    So in economics lots of people claim they have proven Marx wrong, while various free-market enthusiasts claim they have proven Keynes wrong. The random-walk guys argue that the free-market guys are often wrong.

    In genetics, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis was supposed to tie everything together, the neutralists (and the influential populariser SJ Gould) claimed they were wrong. Modern data suggests new syntheses, and puts a limit to neutralism.

    In psychology Freud, Jung, etc had their ideas which the behaviorists disputed. Extremists among them said there is nothing but stimulus-response.

    In ecology there were a variety of grand syntheses (especially among the french, who american researchers ignored). Some of them went overboard, strictly analogous to the free-market economics guys. Just as economies are naturally self-balancing and optimize everything at once, so that any attempt to influence them will inevitably reduce their efficiency and lead to waste, the balance of nature is also perfect and ideal provided Man does nothing to interact with them. The most extreme positions are easy to knock down, but the debunkers tend to take it too far and assume there is no system at all except that imposed by external climate.

    For climate science, there was a sort of folk belief that climate is stable and if it does change it will change too slowly to matter much. You can look at the current work as an attempt to build a correct climate model, for which the skeptics rightly say there is not yet enough detail to predict well. But if you look at it as an attack on the implicit prior model that climate is necessarily stable, and it argues that the control mechanisms which used to keep climate pretty stable appear to be breaking down, that's much more convincing.

    In general, people make brilliant intuitive systems assumptions, trying to leave the details vague since they have utterly inadequate data. Then others specify the hypothesis in enough detail to disprove, and it gets disproved. Then other people make the mundane assumption that there is no system.

    It's hard to get reliable statistical data out of a complicated system with lots of interactions, and if the data doesn't show a particular detail at P<.05 then it's only natural to figure it doesn't happen.

    And here we are.

    I hope that big data might change things. Like, if we could get the NSA to provide groups of economists with all the electronic data from 100 randomly-chosen small companies, and 100 medium-size companies, and let them try to figure out what's going on, the economists might notice something. After some years to develop their techniques they might be ready to analyze some large companies. Economists could actually base some theories on data instead of brilliant improvisation.

    889:

    I have to agree with J Thomas. I've routinely used computational methods, and I'm familiar with systems thinking. I even watched the systems specialist in my PhD department get predictions wrong repeatedly.

    I'd also point out in response to #887 that the science of ecology pre-dates the environmental movement, and is in part responsible for it. That's not the problem.

    There are many problems with ecology, but one of them is that it rarely gives simple answers. A nuclear bomb is a simple answer. An antibiotic is a simple answer. A battery chicken is a simple answer. Ecology tends to be complicated and highly conditional. It's not that there are hidden laws of ecology out there waiting to be discovered and we're just too stupid to see them, it's that the laws of ecology are those of physics, chemistry, and biology, but we're trying to figure out how they all interact at human scales.

    A good metaphor for this is New York City and Godzilla. If you scaled up many ecosystems so that the microbes were in the human size range and the fungi were the size of water pipes, then plants would be the size of skyscrapers and human ecologists would be about the size of Godzilla. Imagine Godzilla the ecologist, wading ashore to try to understand how New York works. Godzilla is only as smart as a human, so the first thing he does is to try to look for repeating patterns, simplifications that he can use to make heuristic rules. Are so many buildings square due to physics? Or is it sexual selection? What about the layout of the streets? Does the angle to the sun matter? Is there a way to study traffic patterns, given how they change every time he shows up? And so forth. Given how big Godzilla is, it's very hard to do non-destructive studies, and these, of course, change the system. They may tell Godzilla how much infrastructure there is, but figuring out how it all works is hard, because it's not working normally by the time he's excavated it. Does he take Staten Island as an experimental site, dump some humans out there, and try to get them to build infrastructure in an isolated experiment, perhaps with replicated, isolated plots? Why do the humans insist on ripping houses down and burning them to stay warm, rather than building skyscrapers like they did in New York City? Why do they all run away from him even as he tries to habituate them to his presence? He's an ethical, careful researcher, but even he kills humans no matter how careful he tries to be when handling them. They're so tiny and fragile. His attempts to get humans to grow a city on Staten Island fail miserably as they run out of food and starve, and he has to choose between harvesting the last ones for data or turning them loose in the wild again. What did he leave out of his study system? Did it teach him anything about the way cities self-assemble?

    I can extend this metaphor indefinitely, but that's the problem ecologists face. Ecologist Godzilla is trying to understand how this perfectly wonderful, incredibly intricate New York City works. He is in awe of its complexity, and he probably goes before Godzilla planning boards to argue that it shouldn't be burned to the ground to make a new beach resort for tourist Godzillas, all clean uniform rubble, and none of the messy human stuff. That would be easy to build, and developer Godzilla would make a lot of money clearing the place and setting up Godzilla time shares out on Long Island. Still, Ecologist Godzilla can't even rebuild the damage he causes studying New York City. Indeed, he's not even sure why things get rebuilt they way they do. It seems so random and haphazard. Those little humans don't rebuild the same things that were there before. It's like they have a historical memory, or something. Is there a pattern to what they rebuild? It's all so complicated.

    That's the problem human ecologists face in the real world, and we're actually a bit better than ecologist Godzillas at some things. For instance, the issue of scale is enormously important in ecology, and that's something we've really only realized in the last 20 years. If Godzilla was a properly trained ecologist, after a few years of blundering around New York City he'd focus mostly on the humans. He wouldn't be able to understand New York politics (who does, really?), but he'd know there was something like that governing who built what, where, and that the human scale was the most important one in his study system. However, by that point, he'd probably be seriously ill due to all the human attacks on him, and like many human researchers in the tropics who are sidelined by disease and injury, he'd have to go home and recuperate, write up his results, and figure out whether it was worth continuing his research, given how hard it turned out to be and how much damage he caused to something he really admires.

    Those who want science should make things simple and repeatable probably think that all science should be like high school physics. It isn't. In science, there are three general reasons to study things: they're simple and repeatable, they're interesting, and they're important. Simple and repeatable phenomena tend to be the things they make laws out of, like gravity and thermodynamics. Interesting is the eye candy that decorates the web, from supernovae to dinosaur fossils. Important is issues like ecology, or public health and sanitation, or similar issues that tend to be very hard, but people work on them anyway, simply because we can't afford not to try to solve these problems.

    I'd point out, as an aside, that people who think nanotechnology will solve everything are the equivalent of Godzilla the nanotechnologist, who assumes that he can build human-sized robots that will, through his programming, assemble a New York City that he can totally understand. What could possibly go wrong?

    890:

    You can get an idea and build a computer model to test it. But those tests depend on your assumptions, and may not fit the real world. Computer models only test that the idea works given the assumptions, they say nothing about the real world unless the assumptions are matched against reality.

    I remember a big animal rights fight a while back. They were arguing against any animal testing of drugs. Because computer simulations should be able to give the same information.

    This was in the 80s.

    891:

    I still wonder if the people who built that big habitat out in the desert out west in the US really thought they could operate a closed ecology or that was just market fluff and they really knew better.

    892:

    I remember a big animal rights fight a while back. They were arguing against any animal testing of drugs. Because computr simulations should be able to give the same information.

    That was obviously wrong. Of course, animal testing is never adequate testing either. Other animals differ physiologically from humans in surprising ways. After all the animal testing somebody has to go first.

    I want to extend Medicare to everybody who wants it. You get free medical care, and you sign up for any medical experiments that the physicians running the experiments think would plausibly be an improvement over standard care. Your sanitized records (minus names and addresses and overtly identifying data) should be public to anybody who wants to do big-data epidemiology.

    There should be less regulation of private health insurance, except to forbid corporations etc from making group contracts.

    Without government palliating the abuses, the inherent absurdity would shine through for commercial health insurance between ignorant consumers who don't know how well their insurance works until they desperately need it, versus corporations whose primary duty is to maximize their profit.

    We really need to track the long-term health of large numbers of people getting medical treatments. It doesn't work very well to try to do scientific studies of treatments with small numbers ahead of time, and then mostly stop tracking what happens after a treatment becomes standard. That leads to various bad problems. The best data comes from the whole population, and in recent years that has become affordable.

    I guess this is starting to get off-topic from Charlie's original post. But if rich people can afford to keep a lot of people they don't have work for, it does make sense to use those people for medical experiments. If there's nobody available except owners to learn new medical techniques on, that would slow medical advance a whole lot. Of course, if the masses live too different then that will affect the results.

    893:

    I read things some of them wrote about it afterward. I'm pretty sure some of them were sincere.

    It sounds like you think they failed. What did you think they were attempting that didn't work?

    894:

    My impression was that that the people in Biosphere 2 were sincere. I'd heard that they ignored the advice of some soil scientists to use a mineral soil. They were sure organic farming was the way to go, and that's what they did. Apparently, the decomposition of that soil, combined with the concrete continuing to cure, sucked a lot of oxygen out of the air and put them in trouble.

    So what to call that? I'd say that us scientists can bash things like soils science and ecology, but we aren't totally ignorant. Kinda sucks that we get don't get no respect, but that's life.

    895:

    Well the open ended aspect of pure research for uncovering truth is a strength and weakness simultaneously. A strength because it uncovers and makes us know what we did not expect- a weakness because it is open ended and unstructured by any guidance: in pure research everything is important. If ecology was an applied science (eventually perhaps by necessity) with desired outcomes, that would narrow assumptions. The assumptions that yield the desired results would guide the intuitive process of modeling and help focus on what is important in ecology from a human perspective: be it carbon sequestration, water capture and storage and/or biodiversity, permaculture or habitat regeneration.

    In climate research one could argue a guiding principle is the thought that 'something is happening to the climate' so lets uncover what it is.

    In ecology there is the obvious goal of recreating 'Eden' turning deserts into green. But it's not even on the radar in policy right now. Think tanks in Europe have tried to assign dollar value to biodiversity and it's in the trillion$ obviously. Meanwhile, to say that market driven forces are stripping the planet bare is an understatement. So it will be a while before we get around to actually seeing value in biodiversity.

    Personally, I think mentioning economics and ecology in the same breath is not new considering that eventually the notion of unemployment will be absurd since there is so much work to do in 'ecology' : creation, maintenance and repair. Some of that work already started in places were drought and desertification is happening: China and Kenya for eg. Its been said that necessity is the mother of invention. If anyone thinks this is kumbaya stuff they can try feeding themselves on a moon colony without any understanding of ecology. It may well be that a simple human settlement on the moon is what it takes to make us realize how damn important and complicated this stuff is. My 20gal marine aquarium is a complex enough seeing how cyanobacteria outbreaks are kept in check by replacing flurescent glow lights with 400mn actinic Led that made the more evolved (and pretty ) Halimedas flourish.

    IMHO that Arizona Earth2 experiment was not a failure because it made us realize how truly complex and valuable a self sustaining ecology really is.

    Here is a thought experiment I did a with little javascript program: a gamification of succession ecology: divide a grid 5x5 grassland or disturbed clearing after a forest fire. The rule is that shade tolerant mature forest species are statistically less likely to take root than faster growing perennials and shrubs. You can have a maple tree in the middle of field, even plant a whole bunch but with prohibitive energy expenditure to keep that way since, from seed, fast growing light seeking shrubs, and softwoods will likely dominate. Therefore putting a mature tree marker on a grassland square is verboten..unless there is shrub marker in the adjacent square edges (protecting the slower growing maple by shading out encroaching perennials). And so on.. What does this accomplish? perhaps illustrate that engineered ecology is really possible without getting tired.

    896:

    It's worth googling "applied ecology." It's got a Wikipedia entry, and the Journal of Applied Ecology has only been around since 1998. So yes, it's got a bit of developing to do.

    Ecology may also have a "limits of science" problem (as discussed in this Radiolab episode in the context of cell biology). Once we get rid of the influence of randomness (google neutral theories to see how this plays out), we're left with the problem that systems may be predictable, but the math that makes them predictable can't be understood by happens. That happened to the scientists in the Radiolab broadcast: they used the Eureqa computer program to deduce how a cellular mechanism in Bacilis subtilis worked, and they got an answer that worked in the black box sense (data entered yields correct results). However, they don't understand how the math works, so they haven't published their results yet (popular article about the research). We probably have similar issues in ecology.

    897:

    You get that I was just saying that RP was unexpected (IME it's usually learnt rather than native), and trying to describe what I'd expect non-Cockney E London to sound like.

    Incidentally, don't try to do "Morningside" in Glasgow, because that really will make people hate you! ;)

    OT, but I'm avoiding the bioscience stuff because it's somewhat further over my head than the ISS is!

    898:
    Your sanitized records (minus names and addresses and overtly identifying data) should be public to anybody who wants to do big-data epidemiology.

    "Overtly identifying data" - please define your terms. For instance, the date someone was given a diagnosis is massively identifying if you have their search query history (as their ISP or Google would).

    The lesson of the last ten years of anonymized data releases is that there's no such thing.

    899:

    Here is a thought experiment I did a with little javascript program: ....

    I may have missed your point, but it looks to me like what you did was to make some simple rules for plant growth and then you showed that those lead to a patchy distribution of plants, and also to ecological succession. Your result qualitatively fits observation, so it may be true.

    The problem is that some unrelated theory may be true instead.

    We have two different approaches. One is to make causal theories about why things happen. I find this approach satisfying. The other is to make statistical correlations about when and where things happen. I do not find this as satisfying. It provides a way to simplify the data, to throw some of the data away. I find stories about why it happens provide a better way to remember than just statistics.

    But the statistical approach is harder to falsify. If you say that the alpha parameter is .6 within some confidence bounds, it takes a lot of experiments to show that alpha actually falls outside those bounds. At some point someone will present a different distribution they say fits better, with parameters beta and gamma, but with any luck you will be safely retired by then.

    In general important plant species will at least tolerate each other's presence. If they have to be widely separated to survive, they will probably not be very important. (This is a variation of the anthropic principle.) One way that plants can grow together is to change their mutual environment into something they mutually grow better in. So even in places where there were not important different microclimates, plants may create microclimates that can lead to diverse patches. And if for any reason something else can grow better in the microclimate that one plant makes than the plant that makes it, that second plant is likely to grow where the first prepared the way. So that's ecological succession.

    Alternatively, plants that cannot affect their environment much, must try to hold onto the microclimates they can survive in.

    This reasoning unfortunately is at too high a level of abstraction. You mentioned fast growth, light-seeking, and propensity to start forest fires. Those are better, more concrete hypotheses, and much easier to disprove. Someone can show that fast growth or light-seeking are not the most important factors in some specific system, and then they can argue that you are wrong.

    See the problem? Statistics can show a tendency that you can expect to see again sometimes. But there could be hundreds of explanations. If you do an experiment and test four of the explanations, you might easily disprove three of them -- in this particular example. Then the experiment may never be replicated. The result is that three of the hundreds of possible explanations can be discarded forever because they weren't happening this once. And the fourth one can be assumed to be always true because it did correlate this once.

    Meanwhile, physics has tended to move toward acausal theories. Classical electromagnetics failed because they couldn't explain why electrons didn't radiate away their energy and irreversibly fall into the nucleus. They had no explanation for that, so the theory was inadequate. Quantum mechanics does not have an explanation why electrons don't fall into the nucleus. It asserts that electrons radiate only while changing orbitals, and there is a lowest orbital, and electrons don't radiate from their ground state to fall into the nucleus. The theory is true. Electrons don't do that. Why not? We don't need no steenking explanations!

    Maybe the other sciences will increasingly follow physics's example.

    900:

    The lesson of the last ten years of anonymized data releases is that there's no such thing.

    Having a whole lot of datat to study diseases is far more important than privacy for individual medical records. But lots of people want privacy.

    So I say we should make a good-faith effort to make things anonymous, and create a social climate where people who admit they have tried to find other people's individual medical history get a whole lot of scorn for it.

    As it is, people who have connections can get your medical history and financial history if they want it. People who are less well connected have it harder. I doubt it can get better than that, and why should we give a big advantage to people who have those connections? Giving them that advantage certainly does not justify ignoring important epidemiological data.

    901:

    Sadly yes. By the time you've got all the potentially useful data in there - year of birth, place of birth, approximate region of residence, race (yeah, I know), gender (ditto), occupation, income bracket, &c &c, there can be remarkably small sets of people contained by the query. Start linking to parental details as well, and unique matches are all too likely.

    Suitable queries wouldn't be looking for that, but unsuitable ones might be another matter, and if you're putting supposedly anonymised raw data in the public domain, that's the problem.

    (I wonder how many people born the same year as me, in the same postcode area, are now living in the same postcode area as I do now.)

    If you have the data kept by some form of custodian, who runs vetted queries on it for you, then it might be a bit safer. But in these days of Big Data, I'd not go for any stronger a guarantee than that.

    902:
    So I say we should make a good-faith effort to make things anonymous, and create a social climate where people who admit they have tried to find other people's individual medical history get a whole lot of scorn for it.

    Quick scenario: query records for everyone who's had an abortion. Query their GP practice. Invent your own horror from there. (I note there are organizations out there that send teddy bears and letters from "their child" to people who've had abortions on the anniversary of the procedure, so it doesn't have to be nail bombs.) Social disapproval doesn't stop True Believers.

    Privacy is a lot more important than many think, to classes of people the 'standard conversation' tends to neglect.

    903:

    Hiya! I used to work for a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services contractor here in the US. So, I've been up against privacy requirements and medical reporting already.

    And there already is somewhat anonymized data available, but the problem is once you get to small towns, its goddamned easy to pin a diagnosis on a person. And because I was (and am) extremely uncomfortable providing information that can identify a patient, we threw out any data where it was small enough to identify a patient with a condition or a group of patients with a condition. Our rule of thumb was, there had to be at least 10 with the diagnosis in a zip code before we could use the data.

    Which meant a whole helluva lot of small town Mississippi had to be excluded from trending data and our scores.

    904:

    And DING

    This is now the longest thread ever on this blog, passing the previous record of 902 comments

    905:

    Social disapproval doesn't stop True Believers.

    That's true. But if you depend on them not finding out then you are subject to blackmail by any unethical person who does find out. And sometimes It isn't really a solution. Meanwhile, we lose data.

    When it's secret, it doesn't make the fanatics weaker. If it was a matter of putting unknown biases in the epidemiology data in exchange for the fanatics dying off, then that might be a good trade. But as it is, it doesn't put us in a stronger position at all. When you compromise with evil, try to at least get a decent deal out of it.

    On the other hand, this year while the evil is so strong, you might have to just knuckle under and see what secrets you can get away with. I don't want to criticize people for making the deals they do when they're weak and their enemies are strong.

    But it won't be this way forever.

    906:
    Meanwhile, we lose data.

    You're assuming our right to the data trumps everyone's individual right to privacy; that's not a straightforward assumption, and one that runs into real difficulty in some societies - for instance French censuses do not record race or ethnicity.

    907:

    You're assuming our right to the data trumps everyone's individual right to privacy

    I don't assume that. I assert it. You have the right to disagree, according to your own ethics or morals or esthetics or whatever.

    Medical knowledge over the past 100 years or so has had a half-life of something like 30-40 years. Half the treatments we used to think helped people, we now think were harmful or at best ineffective. This is because the methods we use to improve medicine are largely garbage.

    Now we have a chance to do it in a way that works.

    That is far more important than keeping the needed information secret for the convenience of individuals who will all be dead within the next 90 years or so. (I am assuming that 5-year-olds don't have important medical secrets. If you disagree then adjust the number a decade or two.)

    Again, I have reasons for my belief and I hold it strongly, but I could be wrong and you have every right to disagree.

    908:

    Again, I have reasons for my belief and I hold it strongly, but I could be wrong and you have every right to disagree.

    Good for you. But most of us here (as best I can tell) think you are wrong and do disagree.

    There are tail holes on the right and left who will use anything they can to tear down people they disagree with. Anything. What does it matter if someone had an abortion 20 years ago. (A conservative pastors wife or a rising left wing politician it doesn't matter.) Or an STD. Or was born with ambiguous genitalia. Or got birth control pills at age 15. Or...

    If you have all that data out there someone who wants to go after someone else and has some money will start digging and figure out things. Then start publicizing it in the worst possible light.

    909:

    I read things some of them wrote about it afterward. I'm pretty sure some of them were sincere. It sounds like you think they failed. What did you think they were attempting that didn't work?

    I don't know much about the participants. The owners/promoters were blowing lots of smoke out their butt beforehand.

    Almost anyone who dealt with "dirt and plants" growing up knew they were way over simplifying what it would take for a closed ecology.

    Which is one reason I think we're much further away from a Mars trip than EM wants to believe. At least a trip where the folks arrive into orbit alive or with a prospect of living for more than a month or so.

    As the theme of many of the above comments indicate we seem to know more each year what we don't know how to deal with than we know that we do.

    910:

    The owners/promoters were blowing lots of smoke out their butt beforehand.

    Sure. They were getting lots of publicity like Evel Knievel, like it was some big daring challenge. Then when they ran into things they didn't expect, the media acted like they were cheating. Like they had promised to row across the Atlantic ocean and they sneaked a gasoline engine with them.

    Which is one reason I think we're much further away from a Mars trip than EM wants to believe.

    I haven't tracked what they believe. I'm sure we know most of what we'd need to know to do it, given a few years of fine-tuning. Efficiency could be a problem. Use things with a very short reproductive cycle, and at each stage run about a hundred independent systems in parallel, enough to produce multiple times your needs. At regular intervals sterilize the units that are least productive and reseed them either with samples from the most successful units, or from reserve stocks. With experience you should learn how to get adequate production from at least a third of the units, and with a short cycle time and many units you get experience fast. Just be careful not to allow cross-contamination, so the failures don't spread.

    Of course it's tedious to maintain a hundred small units when you could be using one big one. Wasteful to produce multiple times your needs, planning to recycle 2/3 of it unused. And all that sterilization takes a lot of energy. But the principles are clear. Diversify your assets, cut your losses, and let your profits run.

    There's some challenge getting fast-growing foods that people can live on etc. But if the particular people spend a couple of years practicing ahead of time, they'll have a pretty good sense whether that works for them personally, assuming they don't develop bad allergies to their food halfway to Mars.

    The big challenge is doing it on a small underfunded spaceship when it costs more than $1,000 to get a liter of water into orbit.

    There's every reason to think a reliable closed system is possible. Doing it cheaply, on a limited energy budget, in a small volume with low weight? That's a small matter of engineering....

    911:

    There are tail holes on the right and left who will use anything they can to tear down people they disagree with.

    Yes, there are. And if they can't find anything then they will use nothing and pretend it's something awful. We have a chance to do epidemiology for real and I don't want to give it up to cater to those people, when it won't help that much.

    We have a surplus of politicians. If you think there are scandals in your past that will keep you from getting elected in your district, then don't run. It's better that way, because there are already people who can get that data. (NSA, FBI, etc.) If you are a politician with a secret that you can't stand being revealed, you will be blackmailed for it. Just don't go there.

    A lot of people have the idea that their lives will be better if they can pretend that there is nothing in the world that conservative assholes can blame them for. I don't think this pretense makes their lives better. YMMV.

    There's every reason to think that half our current standard medical practices are at best useless. But we don't know which half. We could find out, but a lot of people have higher priorities.

    I hope that over time more people will come to agree with me. Or failing that, it might happen regardless of what people want, as so many worse things have happened in the past couple of decades.

    912:

    Surely this depends on how "honestly anonymised" the data is?

    If we have data that says that, for example, 80% of the population of $town are IC1, and 10% each are IC2 and IC3 that would be suitably anonymised for most people and purposes I think. If we also have data that says that 20% of IC2 and virtually none of IC1 or IC3 suffer from, say, sickle cell anaemia (picked solely because it's honestly closely linked to IC2 (well at least if I've got the ICs right)) that gives us likelihood of SCA in the whole population and each IC group. The only datum that you can derive from that is that a known SCA sufferer is almost certainly also IC2.

    913:

    OK. Now take your sickle-cell anaemia sufferer and match their vaccination dates with all others the same age, and you've confirmed they were vaccinated in school. Look up vaccination records for the schools and you have them ID'ed to ~1/30. Except because only 10% of the population are IC2, you have them ID'ed to ~1/3.* Then you look at gender and you have ~1/2.** Shouldn't be hard to find some fact about those two to match to the medical records, and there you go: de-anonymized.

    *Yes this assumes the schools' population shares reflect the town's, which is naive, but I'm putting this together in 5 minutes while working, so some latitude please. :-)

    **Yes, single-sex schools exist. See above.

    914:

    Surely this depends on how "honestly anonymised" the data is?

    It's a complex technical question.

    The less anonymised the data is, the more good it's possible to do with it. Taking it to an extreme, if you could track every family that buys a particular brand of shampoo, then you could notice health correlations with using that shampoo.* (That's surely beyond our capabilities now, but maybe not in 20 years or so.) That sort of thing will pick up a lot of spurious correlations. The more you look for, the more you find, kind of like the Law of Fives -- about 5% of the questions you ask will get a wrong positive answer at the .05 level. But when you do it again most of the completely random false positives will not be repeated. (Also when you use giant samples, extremely small or rare effects can show up as significant. We don't usually worry about extremely small effects.)

    So if we don't mind giving up something, we can group the data enough to get some anonymity. Bravo Lima Poppa 3 had to throw away data when there were less than 10 cases in a zip code. With different software it would be possible to combine zip codes until there are enough to get 10 cases.

    The problem is that it's hard to anonymize and still give good access to data. Like, if you can query a database in multiple ways, you might get a variety of different combinations of zip codes that together have 10 or more cases, and then do combinatorics to get the number in each zip code. It's very hard to give people all the anonymized data that may be important, and still make it impossible for them to use it wrongly.

    It would be somewhat easier to keep the data anonymous if researchers presented a hypothesis and the server did all the analysis and presented only the statistical results. But this puts a bigger burden on the server side, and it makes big restrictions -- you can only do the kinds of statistics the server knows how to do, and you can only use whatever data visualization the server is set up to provide. Far more flexible if you can do anything you like with sanitized data. It's probably impossible to keep that from being misused.

    But then, when you have giant databases online, likely as not somebody will hack his way in and get whatever specific records he wants, completely bypassing the anonymized versions.

    • Dandruff shampoos have various ways to kill fungi while being harmless to the people that the fungi are sinking their hyphae into. Some of them use carcinogenic coal tar dyes which kill the fungus but which are entirely harmless when you rub them on your skin. Probably. Maybe we could find out....
    915:
    [I]f you could track every family that buys a particular brand of shampoo, then you could notice health correlations with using that shampoo.* (That's surely beyond our capabilities now, but maybe not in 20 years or so.)

    Link your study participant family members' supermarket loyalty program records to their health records. Done. Why would we need to wait 20 years? (Remember, supermarket loyalty program records are thorough enough to be able to detect pregnancy.)

    916:

    "Link your study participant family members' supermarket loyalty program records to their health records. Done. Why would we need to wait 20 years?"

    Given the current state of UK government IT, implementing that link would probably take all of those 20 years to do...

    917:

    I wasn't aware that there was a vaccination for SCA. If there is, then you have a point. I don't see the relationship with single sex schools though, because SCA can occur in women as well as men.

    918:

    (Ducking in)

    Parenthetically: that's why I refuse to use any points scheme except air miles with a particular airline alliance who -- because the law mandates it -- already have Need To Know for my travel-related inside-leg-measurement details (thank you, war on terror). I don't use any store loyalty cards, I don't use Nectar points despite being a heavy credit-card user for day-to-day spending, and I try not to shop in supermarkets at all where avoidable.

    Going meta: entirely ignoring for a moment the legal obstacles to cross-linking personal data silos (hint: here in the UK there's a formal bill-of-rights level right to privacy and much stronger data protection law than in the USA, albeit weaker than in Germany), this suggests that widespread epidemiological studies that cross-link such databases are going to miss the privacy-sensitive demographic, which means they're going to be subtly skewed.

    919:

    There isn't a vaccination for SCA; the point is that if you have anonymised medical records that include the subject's childhood vaccination dates you can match that data with the in-school vaccination program data and most likely identify the school and the classroom group they were in at that point, hence the 1 from 30(approx) group. The more external data you can match against, the closer to a particular individual you get.

    920:

    We have a chance to do epidemiology for real and I don't want to give it up to cater to those people, when it won't help that much.

    I guess this is where I just plain flat out diverge with you. I don't want those details of my personal life to be forced into an available data base. Way too much state control for me. If I can volunteer to be in it I likely would (I'd really like to think about it for a few weeks but ..) but to be forced as a condition of citizenship... Sorry no.

    And maybe in 50 years your idea will be the norm. But not today and not for me. The forced bit, not the ability to be in the DB.

    921:

    Ok, I can see that working if the data includes DDMMYYYY for the vaccinations, but since there was only one vaccination clinic per school per year for the area I grew up in, I can't see any justification for supplying the DDMM info.

    922:

    Part of the issue is that, at least in the US, there are many many many different record sets that have in no way shape or form the same data that is collected on things like vaccination records. I can easily see my records of things being very fuzzy about things like vaccinations. I have a memory of getting a polio vaccination in a Grocery store that normally closed on Sundays. I was around 5 years old and remember drinking from a small paper cup. For all I know it was offered as a "come on down and get your polio vaccination" without much if anything but maybe a certificate for school enrollment purposes.

    A doctor or person looking at ONE record can figure out what happened but to take records from all these different sources and compile them into a data set that is usable is hard to automate even if you call having data entry clerks doing the automation.

    923:

    You miss my larger point: given your scenario, it took me ~15 minutes (including diversions to do my actual day job) to come up with a scheme to de-anonymize someone from it. And I'm bad at this stuff.

    Anonymization of data is hard.

    924:

    You can't be so certain about IC2 and sickle cell. before I retired one of the tasks for my lab was measuring HbA1C to monitor and diagnose diabetes. The most common method for this is HPLC and results are affected by abnormal haemoglobins. My policy was to pass any newly detected abnormal haemoglobin to haematology for further analysis. It was later put to me forcefully that there were a lot of adults in Norfolk one of whose grandparents was a US airman and often the grandchildren did not know this and had not given consent. Haemoglobin variants which were only found in those of African descent were a dead giveaway. We never found sickle cell in these people but the trait was diagnosed quite often in US servicemen who had been flown across the Atlantic in unpressurised aircraft so they would have been sent home before they had a chance to fraternise. Most UK port cities have pockets of thalassaemia from sailors and probably sicke cell also. So you can't assume automatically that sicklecell means IC2.

    925:

    I make no claim to being a haematologist, but I think that Mike Collins' #924 may demonstrate that not only was my generalisation actually wrong, but my point actually stands, just not for the reason(s) I thought?

    926:

    Nope, just means I'd have to find some other info to go from 15 possibles to 1 definite. I don't know medical records well enough to say what could be used. It's a game of "Guess Who?" with everyone in the geographical area of the dataset as possibles and every piece of data in your dataset as questions.

    927:

    Link your study participant family members' supermarket loyalty program records to their health records. Done. Why would we need to wait 20 years?

    Maybe we wouldn't. Tracking every shampoo sale in the country would be a great big project, but maybe not too big, and you might find something useful with only 10,000 or or 100,000 so samples.

    What I expect might slow things down is supermarkets and pharmacies etc arguing that they shouldn't have to share their sales data. What if it fell into their competitors' hands? They deserve their privacy! Sure, their customers don't deserve privacy from them, but nobody has to buy from them. If they will be forced to reveal their secret sales records, they deserve giant benefits if the data is ever stolen, and also they deserve payment per record transmitted, and they must be paid for all the costs of tracking data requests fulfilled and the billing for them.

    If it goes to the courts it might easily take 20 years to resolve it.

    928:

    Have your study participant families submit Subject Access Requests to the supermarkets whose loyalty programs they're enrolled in.

    929:

    "We have a chance to do epidemiology for real and I don't want to give it up to cater to those people, when it won't help that much."

    I guess this is where I just plain flat out diverge with you. I don't want those details of my personal life to be forced into an available data base. Way too much state control for me.

    In the USA, private insurance companies do have your medical details in their databases,and in theory they share pretty freely with each other. I have no recent knowledge about this stuff and it may have changed. Maybe some of what I know was never so. But twice people who worked for insurers told me that they could get me any medical data I wanted for anybody I knew. Both explained that all they needed to do to pull up the data was to fill in a checkbox that said they were looking into providing a quote for an insurance policy. I didn't follow up either time. There was nobody I needed that data for. I didn't know what they wanted in exchange. If I had wanted info on somebody I wasn't sure these were people I would trust to say who I wanted it on. Possibly they were bullshitting me.

    Similarly, two people who worked for banks told me they could get full financial data on anybody I asked for. It made sense to me that they could get all the records the bank chose to keep about that bank's depositors, and they could get credit reports etc. I don't know how much banks share with each other about their customers. I didn't follow up with them either.

    I have the impression that private databases are not necessarily any more secure than government ones, and absent government regulation I have no way to tell how secure they are except when employees prove to me that there is no security whatsoever except their personal ethics.

    It isn't just government. "Three internet users can keep a secret provided that none of them ever go online."

    If I can volunteer to be in it I likely would (I'd really like to think about it for a few weeks but ..) but to be forced as a condition of citizenship... Sorry no.

    I can certainly understand that. My problem is that it's a lot like gun control in the USA. The bad guys can and will get what they want. By trying to get privacy we mostly only protect ourselve from the good guys like epidemiologists. (OK, also against people who lack the skills etc to get illegal data.)

    930:

    Sorry, no; there's a huge difference between unscrupulous employees providing unethical people information on whatever individuals they want, and providing everyone information on everyone. The former is a tiny individual risk that you will become of enough interest to someone for them to yank your records; the latter results in people idly musing "I wonder who I know that [X]?" (where X can be "carries a BRCA mutation," for instance) being able to find the answer with a minimum of hassle.

    Differences in degree of difficulty of access drive huge differences in kind of invasiveness - there are plays written about the search histories of some of AOL's customers.

    931:

    Sorry, no; there's a huge difference between unscrupulous employees providing unethical people information on whatever individuals they want, and providing everyone information on everyone.

    Of course there is. But a reasonable attempt at anonymisation can add a lot of hassle to attempts to find personal info while still allowing a lot of discovery about trends and correlations.

    Also, I believe that a lot of the malicious stuff already happens -- people who can pay, or who have connections, already get it and do what they want with it. Do we want to give them a great big advantage over us?

    We can't shut down the databases, and they will be used by their owners and the owners' employees, and whoever else gets privileges. Again, attempts at privacy amount to attempts to preserve class privileges -- there's the class that has access and the class that doesn't.

    Meanwhile, people choose what to believe in the absence of data. A lot of Republicans believe without data that Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the USA.

    Meanwhile a lot of Democrats believe that Bush Sr. negotiated a deal with the Iranians to not release US hostages until after the 1980 election, on no evidence whatsoever except a bunch of arms dealers, Mossad agents, CIA agents, and other untrustworthy sorts, some of whom died soon after making their claims.

    http://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_cr/h920205-october-clips.htm

    Similarly, many Democrats believe that the Cheney administration and/or Mossad were connected with 9/11, again with absolutely no evidence.

    I think to palliate the problem of increasing access to data, we need to establish the social convention that searching out individual private stuff is a jerk move. When the time comes that you're spreading a story about somebody and almost everybody you tell it to says "Yuck. What kind of person are you that you'd wanta to repeat that?" then we'll have made a lot of progress.

    932:

    Well, of course if you get an infinite dataset less name, address, and DDMM date fields you can work back to obtain NamAdd for an individual personal record. The issue is that on average you have to repeat that process for (recordset'size / 2) + 1 individuals to get the one you want if NamAdd is a unique identifier.

    A correctly made research request should only ask for relevant fields, and a correct response to one should remove fields not required for research.

    933:

    A correctly made research request should only ask for relevant fields, and a correct response to one should remove fields not required for research.

    Sure, but if you need a human being in the loop to personally decide which research requests are valid and which should not be allowed, that makes it more expensive. And humans can be fooled sometimes.

    It turns into a question of priorities. If we must make sure that the data is sanitized so well that no individual person can ever be identified, that's hard. Particularly if snoopers can bring in some outside information they may have.

    To be sure to prevent problems, the obvious approach is to give data only to people you trust not to misuse it. Then it isn't a technical problem. If you trust somebody you shouldn't have trusted, still you did the best you could and nobody should blame you particularly if the person you trusted had the right degrees and belonged to the right organizations.

    Or to be really safe, don't tell anybody anything.

    Also, people jump to conclusions. Like, when presidential candidate John Kerry released his wartime medical records, they included treatment for a nonspecific urinary tract infection and some people insisted that meant he had gonorrhea. (But perhaps because the idea that a Navy man might have sex with someone he was not married to was not damaging enough, they reserved most of their criticism to arguments that his three Purple Heart medals came from wounds which were not really serious enough to deserve them.)

    Since people jump to conclusions, it's better not to release information which implies that any specific information might apply to a particular individual.

    I think that the character-assassination racket needs to be weakened, not catered to. Since it proceeds pretty much the same independent of truth, censorship doesn't help much against it.

    Apart from that, if you need to keep secrets from your friends and relatives -- look at what's going on with you. They only like you because they don't know the truth about you? Better to get that worked out so you don't impede medical progress.

    934:

    Charlie… as usual you have a lot of cogent and insightful observations to offer us. Alas though… sorry, man… but did you notice that the only factors in your lengthy list are dolorous ones and excuses for cynicism?

    Yes, I know this is the core pattern maintained by the stylish, Doctorowian set, as if y’all invented the cynical snar! (Not.) Still, when a pattern is so perfect — and so perfectly conducive to the emotional aim — then a true contrarian just has to ask questions. Like:

    1) If all these “iron laws” automatically turn all democracy and law and hope to shit… um… where did we get our current renaissance?

    Oh, sure, declare that it’s coming to an end! That malevolent forces are undermining the Enlightenment! (I happen to agree with the latter.) But still, the contrarian asks… how did we get the narrow window of freedom and tolerance and diversity and social mobility that (though flawed) we’ve enjoyed all our lives? One that kept — and still continues — expanding circles of inclusion?

    Only a complete ninny would deny that something exceptional happened in the (quasi) democratic west. Something quite different from 6000 years of tediously-same feudal-priestly oligarchies. Those differences stack way too high to shrug off. Even if you declare it to be all over, you still have to explain how this window happened in the first place. And that means parsing when there are exceptions to your iron laws of despair and doom.

    2) It is easy to conflate pluto-oligarchy-“capitalism” (POC) with flat-open-fair-market capitalism (FOFMC). Indeed, Adam Smith went on at great length, describing the difference. So did Karl Marx! But hell, who reads Smith or Marx, anymore? So yes, conflating these two opposites is easy to do. That is, it is easy for lazy dopes who cannot tell the difference between the East India Company and Silicon Valley.

    In fact, Smith called POC the inherent and deadly enemy of FOFMC. The latter is based upon fair competition involving the maximum number of skilled, savvy, confident and knowing competitors, in a vastly middle-class, diamond-shaped society where every industry is under constant threat by brash startup entrepreneurs.

    Are there forces that oppose this, preferring to squelch potential competition, in the old, feudal pyramids of inherited privilege? Sure! The same forces that do not want competitive democracy.

    You are confusing crony pluto-oligarchy-“capitalism” with the other kind. And yes, POC can pour concrete and build office towers and exploit resources and exploit cheap labor. Just as Soviet command socialism did all those things.

    Now show us their startups. Their inventions. You cannot. Your “iron laws” are not about governance. They are about seeking pyramidal privileges. 6000 years show that stopping them is HARD! It takes a Revolution. What you seem to miss is the fact that the Revolution exists. It has been ongoing. We’re the next generation of rebels. And despair does… not… help.

    You think the tyrannical and IP stealing nations have huge advantages? The inventing nations have only to decide to stop buying the products of labor-cheapness factories — and to stop ignoring IP theft. If that happened, the POC/mercantilist nations would tank… and the democratic FOFMC nations would adapt.

    But we won’t do that. Because the poor in China and Bangladesh are sending their kids to school with full bellies and internet access, because we buy the crap from those factories. And those kids will want to invent. They will watch Hollywood films and read sci fi and want democracy.

    Moreover you know this. So why are you spreading such simplistic dooooooom? Why do you not even once mention the MEME WAR that we are winning like a steamroller? And hence the reason for macho-belt panic and terrorism?

    Sure, nearly all of your listed “iron laws” exist and are threats to the renaissance… as our ancestors faced very similar threats in the 1890s and 1930s.

    So? It’s a test, then! A test we can pass, as they did. But only if we look beyond excuses for despair. If we start tallying not only the “iron laws” that undermine the renaissance, but our advantages — the counterpart tools and assets that we revolutionaries have, empowering us to resist the pull and push of the feudal attractor state.

    warm best regards

    david brin

    935:

    If all these “iron laws” automatically turn all democracy and law and hope to shit… um… where did we get our current renaissance?

    At various times power has slipped away from plutocrats. For example, during the French Revolution. The plutocrats let frenchmen starve, and so people believed they had nothing to lose by rebelling.

    In the USA the Depression was pretty good if you were rich and you didn't feel the need to get richer fast by selling lots of stuff. You could have a whole lot of the best of everything, cheap, and wind up with more money than you started with. But when we got into WWII they couldn't stop the government from doing deficit spending. The government paid for lots of stuff with war bonds, and after the war the public was not willing to go back to more depression.

    Now there are some changes. It's convenient to put automated factories in places that have no environmental laws etc. But if we got laws that stopped imports it would not be much trouble to put automated factories here. The old-style jobs are not coming back. If we get into a big war with Russia and/or China we will not need large numbers of humans to do the work, and we won't need all that many humans to fight. OPf course we might lose.

    People get negotiating power by being important. Masses of people are not so obviously important now. They are still liabilities that must be fed etc, but what can they do to be important? We won't hand them rifles and 10 weeks of training and ship them across the pacific. We will soon have basicly robot armies that can threaten mobs of dissidents at home as easily as they do in foreign nations.

    I don't know what will happen. Not unlikely the USA will split up into 3 or more nations that argue about who deserves to have nukes. None of them is in charge of Social Security, but some of them would surely arrange some sort of charity for old people who depend on SS. Old people would be not people who paid into the system who have every right to their benefits, but charity cases. Poor people who are potentially violent would become not voters, but probable insurgents. If you show your ID to vote, you might find that you are on a list of suspects and you will be arrested.

    Why should people have power when those people are not needed?

    It doesn't have to go that way. BUt I think if it doesn't go that way it will be because of specific reasons that were not so obvious ahead of time. Maybe we could come up with ways to keep such things from happening, but we'd at least need specific approaches to keep it from happening.

    I think your criticism of dolor is fair. But whether we're despondent or optimistic now, thinking about the challenges to survival, doesn't matter a whole lot. There may be opportunities to join organizations, later. Or ways to do things without any obvious coordination, things that are for all practical purposes spontaneous so there's no way to kill the organizers because there are no organizers that matter. What we do then, is important.

    936:

    J Thomas thanks for replying. I won't be hanging around but I am glad I caught your reply. Alas, while intelligent, it simply doubled down on the dolor. You try to shrug off the two hundred year western-democratic enlightenment experiment, with its spectacularly diamond-shaped social structure, low levels of class determinism, expanding horizons of inclusion, plummeting world poverty rates, high levels of freedom and competitive entrepreneurship...

    ...and you attribute all of that to two tragedies, the Great Depression and Hitler. Um.... can you even step back and see how addicted you appear -- to glowering cynicism?

    Could any of the good stuff have come from good and solid and innovative social design? "Perhaps by some folks who understood such stuff better than I do?" Perish the thought!

    You don't even do it well! I can out cynical that, and I'm not even a cynic! For example, the proper disdainful dismissal of the WEE (Western Enlightenment Experiment) is to attribute it to (1) theft of the American Frontier, (2) rape of colonized continents, (3) sudden access to prodigious fossil fuels.

    Those three should provide a bulwark for any dolor-addict, especially as #3 proves to be both limited and toxic. Yippee. Except...

    In the 1890s Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that the closing of the American frontier would have exactly the shut-down effects that you and Charlie now see looming before us. That was 125 years ago. Huh. Kinda got delayed there. Next read Spengler's THE DECLINE OF THE WEST (1918)... oops... and the screeds by Hitler and Stalin about western bourgeois democracies in their final hours.

    Jesus, do you guys ever, ever lift your heads from this satisfying-masturbatory spiral of smug "I-knew-it-couldn't-last" schadenfeude?

    Yes, the Revolution is in trouble. It is ALWAYS in trouble! We could use your help.

    In fact, there are powerful, synergistic processes that help us to stave off the old, feudal attractor states. You might help refine and refresh them, instead of just glowering in stylish, lip-curled, playground snarks.

    What we don't need is comfy, middle class ingrates, dissing a renaissance that gave them everything. Now I am outta here. Ben Franklin is calling.

    937:

    I don't really intend to talk about you behind your back, but since you have announced that you're turning your back and not listening then it isn't really my fault.

    You don't even do it well! I can out cynical that, and I'm not even a cynic!

    First you accuse me of doing this thing, and when my behavior doesn't fit it then you accuse me of not doing it well. But I see no need to fit your preconceptions. Just, you think I fit them whether I do or not.

    ...and you attribute all of that to two tragedies, the Great Depression and Hitler.

    Well, no. More like as the wealth increased we had a series of scams where somebody tried to grab most of it, and sometimes the grabbers stopped each other -- like crabs keeping each other from climbing out of the bucket -- and sometimes other things stopped them. That one time, it looks to me like it was WWII that stopped them for awhile.

    In the 1890s Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that the closing of the American frontier would have exactly the shut-down effects that you and Charlie now see looming before us.

    1890 to 1930 is only 40 years. Americans gradually got used to the idea that they had no alternative to being employees. The farms gradually got consolidated, and anyway farmers sold to middlemen. Was Turner was wrong? Who says?

    And yet, the people who want a new feudalism may have had some successes, but they've been beaten back every time so far.

    This time will be different because of automation. I can tell it will be different. I don't know how it will work out. Maybe everything will be just fine. But I'm clear that automation is one of the things to watch for, that makes it different. As you point out, reduced fossil fuels will also make a difference. And climate change. These will all be important.

    In fact, there are powerful, synergistic processes that help us to stave off the old, feudal attractor states.

    Why didn't you mention any of them? We have discussed some important factors. You have not. You have only argued that it's better to be a cheerleader than a gloomy doomsayer, and you have encouraged us to be cheerleaders too, while your example here provides nothing but cheerleading and a whole lot of criticism of people who aren't cheerleaders. Why not talk about something that actually gives hope? Why did you keep your cheerful attitude so totally content-free?

    938:

    Ooh, fly-by seagull commentary from a famous author!

    I'd say it's simpler: growth-based capitalism is a lot like a pyramid scheme. As long as there's growth, there's hope for things to be better if you join in and recruit others. Once the growth stops, then there are there are those who own the means of production, and those who don't. This is what Piketty was getting at in his r>g equation, that owning land and the means to exploit it through rents does better over time than simple growth does. If you couple that with what Graeber observed in Debt, this looks like a problem that goes back to Babylonia if not Sumeria...in other words, it's one of the fundamental problems of civilization.

    We've done an interesting job of avoiding the r>g trap so far. There are good sides: back in the Bronze age, us peasants would have been selling our daughters into slavery to pay the interest on the mortgage we put our farm under, because two years of failed crops meant we couldn't pay taxes without a loan from the rich man who now owns our daughter. We no longer sell girls into slavery in this country, which is good. On the bad side, we're now doing something similar with student loans.

    In terms of how long it's taken us to get from bright and shining future to debt making the lower classes less and less free, we're probably about average: two generations. We've also managed to strip-mine the world of everything from groundwater to phosphorus to get as far as we have, which leads me to believe that our treat-growth-as-a-pyramid-scheme trick isn't going to work for us indefinitely any more than it worked for the Romans.

    Do I support democracy and other liberal causes? Why not? Thing is, I'm more interested in where the old Occupy movement is going than I am in libertarianism. Part of that is I've read enough history now to realize how critically important good governance is to keep civilization functioning. Smaller government is the song of warlords, not peons like myself.

    So far as America being the new Rome, I've got to ask whether you mean the western Roman empire or eastern Roman empire. You've got to remember that the old Roman empire (to use business language) downsized in the 4th Century CE, shed its unproductive western subsidiaries (that would be Rome and the provinces that are now western Europe), reorganized, rebranded itself, and continued until 1453 CE under a new corporate banner: Byzantium. If America goes the same route, I expect it to continue as the Portlandic States until about, oh, 3500 CE, although in political structure, it may be more the descendant of a Mexican drug cartel crossed with Silicon Valley than whatever you want to call Washington DC right now. Does that mess up the metaphor enough for you?

    939:

    " Ooh, fly-by seagull commentary from a famous author!"

    I'm a teeny bit preoccupied with Ever So Important Stuff at the Moment and am, in any event, rather despondent - still, in the face of Death and its Henchpersons - and so am not all that stable and rationale, but, you deserve the " INCADESENT PILLAR OF FIRE AWARD " for Ever So Important Stuff for your response to the ever so famous ...Wots 'is Name again?

    This might not be an award that, say, SaD Puppies would strive to obtain but it does have the merit of being Ever So Rare - since I've just made it up and invite other Charlies Blog denizens to do the actual WORK ..WORK!! Oh the HORROR... of producing a statuette and a Presentation Ceremony for the same.

    Perhaps it should be “THE INCADESENT PILLER OF FIRE AWARD FOR SAD Puppies!!! And Insufferably Pretentious Ever So Famous Sic If Writers?”

    I will own that it is a tad on the lengthy side...but something like that anyway.

    It could have been worse...I was tempted to simply remark, of David Brins Drive By Shooting ..." WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN ?? "

    But I restrained my Impulse and ...OH BUGGER!! I SAID IT DIDN@T I ??

    I blame YOU for This!!!

    But still, I'm not entirely to blame and was provoked by a Google search...

    http://www.davidbrin.com/speaker.html

    " When I am asked to consult or give speeches to businesses, groups and organizations, it's usually because I am best-known as a "futurist" who comments plausibly and entertainingly about trends in technology and society, including some of the challenges that may confront our rambunctious civilization in the decades ahead -- though I have been known to speak about science or writing. Although I speak on several topics, one favorite seems to be creativity, or helping members of the audience think "out of the box" about both near- and long-term opportunities or problems.

    Lately, this secondary speaking career has grown so hectic that I've had to limit the engagements I accept, in order to concentrate on my family, books and science. Still, I do accept on average one speaking or consulting commitment per month. " ..

    So Gracious!!

    Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh DEAR .. Pomposity and Pretension Rules eh wot?

    Brins appearance hereabouts reminds me of our very own Late Grate UK Prim Minister Tony B Liar and his desperate quest for Money ...PAY ME NOW Cos I’m Worth IT!!! Annd Will Appear in the Cess Pit of YOUR choice if only you PAY MEeeeeeee!!!

    940:

    Seriously? You treat a guest with such acid, puerile sputum, and are surprised that adults only come by this place as "drive-by?" Charlie raised some very interesting and cogent points, despite my criticism that the overall goal was tendentious...

    ...on the other hand, he appears to attract a far, far nastier crowd than haunts my own blog. (Though in fairness, you four may not be representative. I hope not!)

    In fact, not one of the four of you displayed even a scintilla of curiosity about the core question I posed. If we are dooooomed to plummet from our brief, 200 year Western Enlightenment experiment in democracy, social mobility, science and freedom -- that where did all that democracy, social mobility, science and freedom come from, in the first place?

    Sadly... I had to provide the three top cynics' excuses for that renaissance... end of the frontier, rape of colonies and cheap fossil fuels. Perhaps, indeed, you sensed that those excuses -- while better than ham-handed teleology and "iron laws" -- still nowhere near suffice.

    Charlie's list of Iron Laws foretell that any generation of enlightenment will quickly collapse from our rare diamond shaped social structure into the classic feudal pyramid of inherited-obligate privilege. HE IS RIGHT that all of those strong attractor mechanisms push in that direction. Indeed, he left out several of the strongest!

    My point here (though it couldn't possibly have interested you fellows as much as insipid snarking) is that there is a long list of counter pressures that a vigorous enlightenment culture can apply. Pericles tried and had he lived, that experiment might have lasted more than a generation. Same withy the younger-democratic Machiavelli. Adam Smith's heirs, especially Franklin, were vastly more successful... and their methods OUGHT to INTEREST you!

    And that is why I am leaving. I am bored and insulting sophomores do not draw me to elucidate my own hypotheses re the synergistic systems that enabled our ancestors to defeat previous attempted oligarchic coups.

    The guys under my own blog are not only nicer and more polite to guests. That are smarter and vastly, vastly more curious.

    Come on by and try them, some time.

    And Charlie, my condolences. I hope these four weren't representative.

    941:

    I wrote the following for the guys under my own blog. And realized it gives the answer J Thomas demanded... (even though he refused to answer the dare that I offered, first.

    === Alfred I disagree. Any huge asymmetry of power in a human system will lend itself to the winners rationalizing reasons why the asymmetry is both inherent and inherently good, and worth cheating to maintain. Indeed, failure to recognize this is the insanity of both communism and right wing oligarchism... as well as theocracy and Randianism.

    Are asymmetries necessary? Yes! The insanity of the U.S. far left is failure to recognize that competition engenders all the creativity and wealth that has empowered us to be more inclusive.

    Moreover, competition is exactly to TOOL to let us keep the asymmetries small enough to bear, overcoming those "iron laws." This is what The Transparent Society is about.

    And we MUST bear some asymmetries! Because competition fails in either of two ways... from cheating (by those who take advantage of too-large asymmetries)...

    ... or else by the asymmetries being too small to serve as incentives for vigorous competition!

    This means we need care, regulation and a dynamic balance. This system is not based on an "invisible hand" but human inventiveness and ingenuity and hard-headed pragmatism, knowing that the positive sum games of markets, democracy, science, courts and sports need care and loving attention and perpetual tuning.

    Alas, as Charles Stross shows at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html the failure modes are numerous.

    Double alack... smart guys like Charlie simply ignore the other side that does not feed into cynicism. The side that says... hey... our ancestors managed this trick, maybe, just maybe, we can too.

    942:

    Thank you, David Brin. I will try to repeat what I understood from you in my own words, to give some idea how close I came.

    First, you figure that whenever somebody gets most of the power, they will do whatever it takes to keep it. This is not good for us and we should try to avoid it.

    Second, we need to give people power to reward successful competition, because only with competition can we get creativity, innovation, efficiency, and other favorable buzzwords. Ideally we will reward the actual results we want and not cheats that imitate those results.

    So we need to have power imbalances but we also need to keep them from getting out of hand.

    And you can't give a simple rote answer for how to keep them from getting out of hand, because for any specified solution people will find ways to cheat. We have to keep being innovative about our control methods to stop cheaters.

    Is that what you meant?

    I agree with all that. You have stated very well what we need to do. You have given no indication whatsoever how to do it, or whether it's possible, but as you point out we can't prescribe any simple method so I can't expect you to do that.

    Actually, I'm not sure how much we need to award power as a reward for doing good. Maybe sometimes other rewards would do. But that's a minor quibble. More important is that whoever is central to awarding power probably has power that could be mis-used. We'd need to be careful with that.

    943:

    You treat a guest with such acid, puerile sputum,

    You probably didn't notice how rude you were being yourself.

    Particularly when you brought no content whatsoever, but merely criticized Charlie's attitude as you perceived it.

    ...on the other hand, he appears to attract a far, far nastier crowd than haunts my own blog. (Though in fairness, you four may not be representative. I hope not!)

    I notice 3 people who responded to you or each other, including me. Maybe somebody got deleted that influenced you? Anyway, it's predictable that people will treat you nicer on your own blog than when you visit somebody else's blog and spread discord.

    If we are dooooomed to plummet from our brief, 200 year Western Enlightenment experiment in democracy, social mobility, science and freedom -- that where did all that democracy, social mobility, science and freedom come from, in the first place?

    To my way of thinking you present a false dichotomy. Like, we had 20,000 years of undifferentiated monarchies everywhere, and then 200 years of greatness, what caused it to be that way?

    To me it looks like sometimes when somebody's on top they stifle things and other times they don't. Sometimes when nobody's in charge people fight each other and can't figure out how to stop fighting, and other times they cooperate well. It goes every which way.

    I don't see 200 years of perfection, it keeps changing around. Sometimes somebody gets in control and stays there until they mess up or get uprooted. I'm not always sure who to root for. Like, between the monied interests behind Andrew Jackson and the monied interests against him, which was worse? It might have been good for American freedom that Jackson the Indian killer wanted more frontiers available, or maybe not.

    Sadly... I had to provide the three top cynics' excuses for that renaissance... end of the frontier, rape of colonies and cheap fossil fuels.

    Maybe we aren't asking the same questions, so we don't get the same answers. You're having this big dialog with yourself. There are lots of renaissances. The Phoenix can't be reborn without ashes....

    ... there is a long list of counter pressures that a vigorous enlightenment culture can apply.

    Good. We need a way to organize. It looks to me like the mass media used to be a way for somebody to create a consensus. When there were far fewer radio stations than listeners, a whole lot of people got exposed to a few messages. TV even more so. People who pay attention to Fox News are following that tradition. To some extent they have a unified philosophical position and insist that Fox represent it, and to some extent they trust Fox to organize them.

    People who read blogs are not organized at all. They flounder around with lots of ideas. They disagree a lot. Every now and then there are petitions etc, where people sign their name to things they agree with and send the list to somebody-or-other. We need to evolve a way for people to go from this to something that can actually make a difference.

    Charlie has brought up an important point about automation. People have power with people who need them. People who are outcompeted at everything have little power. The fewer real jobs there are, the fewer people are needed for their work. The more that the destruction of warfare can be automated, the fewer people are needed to be soldiers. We will always need police, and the more of an underclass we have the more police are needed, but that still isn't a whole lot. Why would the government NOT arrest a whole lot of people for made-up felonies and deny them votes? Votes are power because they reflect actual power. If your opinion matters then you get a vote. Why should your opinion matter? Because you can cause a lot of destruction? That only makes you a terrorist.

    We need a rationale for why people should be granted rights when they are perceived as not contributing much. Or else change the collective perception of what it takes to make a contribution.

    Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this in his early novel, Player Piano. The world may be finally catching up to him.

    I don't say this is insoluble. I say that it's an increasing part of the problem this time around.

    944:

    I'd second what J Thomas said. If you comment on someone else's blog, your reputation doesn't necessarily mean you're right or that people will kowtow to you. For all you know, I might be Jared Diamond, slumming. Almost certainly I'm not, but you never know.

    In any case, your attitude is profoundly parochial, and I say that with all the sadness of a former fanboy. Assuming, of course, you are the real David Brin.

    "If we are dooooomed to plummet from our brief, 200 year Western Enlightenment experiment in democracy, social mobility, science and freedom -- that where did all that democracy, social mobility, science and freedom come from, in the first place?"

    Neither democracy, nor social mobility, nor science, nor freedom came from our 200 year experiment in western enlightenment. The Alexandrians around 1st Century BC were experimenting with science to cite one example. To pick another more local one I know quite well, most professionals with PhDs in botany and ecology know approximately as many species as the average member of a hunter-gatherer/swiddening traditional society. There's a simple reason for this: the professional is motivated by knowledge he can sell. They screw up, they may even get a contract amendment with more money to fix the problem (cf: the California environmental restoration industry). The "primitive" person needs to fulfill all her needs out of the local habitat, or starve or fall to disease. Who's more motivated to learn and do the job properly? If you want a local-to-you example, go have a chat with Dr. James Adams in the pharmacy school at USC. he apprenticed himself to a Chumash shaman to find out whether any of the local California plants had medicinal values that hadn't been tapped by pharmacology (he's a trained pharmacologist). They wrote a wonderful little book on the subject. I've seen them both in action, and the Chumash healer was actually more aware of the chemical variations in local populations of plants than all the local botanists were. She had hundreds of collection sites for some species, spreading down into Mexico and out into the Channel Islands, and they gave her the different properties she wanted.

    And you're going to stand in the face of such empirical and transmitted knowledge and tell me that only Europeans pay attention to the world in a systematic way, and they've only done so for the last 200 years (since 1815, I guess?), and that they're special and different? Come on. Show your evidence.

    As for democracy, that's been practiced in numerous forms around the world for thousands of years, including the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, the Greeks, various cities in the Middle Ages, many people in Zomia, and of course, all those egalitarian bands throughout the world. It's not unique to the US and it never was.

    Social mobility is a common feature of any rapidly expanding polity that needs more workers. They get farmlands, rights, freedoms from taxes, because the state needs them. Freedoms tend to vanish as population and resource pressures increase, and again, this is something that has happened since Sumeria, Shang China, El Mirador, and the Chavins.

    As for freedom (and Zomia), I strongly recommend you read James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: an anarchist history of upland southeast Asia. Zomia is upland southeast Asia, and it's been a place where people have fled imperial expansion for thousands of years, until modern state advances in military technology (that would be us, the Vietnamese, and the Burmese) used modern technology developed by the US and the USSR to actually subjugate these peoples and to plant settlements of lowlanders in the highlands. The ongoing civil war in Myanmar is part of this process. To vastly oversimplify, the highlanders value freedom above the benefits of civilization and have adapted their societies to be as hard to assimilate as possible. Many of them are more extreme in their egalitarianism than we are, since they're willing to sacrifice comfort for freedom. Unless the state's offering a better deal (see above about expanding states and freedoms), in which case they may join a state for a generation, until things get bad and they head for the hills again.

    The bottom line is that our civilization is making the same mistakes that civilizations around the world have made for at least 3,000 years, and there's no sign of any real ability to fix them, any more than there was in the past. These are problems with resource supplies, Piketty's r>g inequality, and people learning to parasitize a system that has lasted for centuries. These always seem to happen, and we're no different than our forbears in this regard.

    Civilization doesn't work too well at the best of times: it's too complex for any human brain to understand, and it involves too many compromises to hold together without constant negotiation. It's at best metastable, requiring constant repair, upkeep, and revision, like any legacy system.

    The worst mistake you're making is the radically false dichotomy that if our civilization shatters beyond repair, that democracy, social mobility, science, and freedom will go with it and we'll regress to the middle ages. Sorry David, time doesn't run backwards. Nor are these four the unique properties of the western enlightenment. With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, they'll all be around after our civilization fails.

    945:

    Jiminy Christmas! When he decides to drop the cynical-lazy snarker reflex and step up, this J Thomas argues like a grownup! Notice, all, that his response this time was to do the one this grownups do in disputation… he attempted to paraphrase the other guy, summarizing his interpretation of (in this case) what I said. And he did not do it in order to belittle, but to clarify and to be fair.

    Hence, I hereby retract any snarks of my own that were aimed at this fellow… except to note that you started the nastiness, guy. Why didn’t you start out like this?

    Yes, you paraphrased my general argument well. Where you fall down is in claiming I have not offered processes. I’ve been doing it for 25 years.

    My book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? is one of the only public policy tomes from the 20th Century still in print and selling more every year. It is about the power of RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY — empower participants in our Great Arenas to compete with each other in positive sum ways that CANCEL each others’ worst blunders, but leverage upon each others’ successes.

    That is precisely what happens in markets, democracy, science courts and sports… our five biggest arenas... when they are well-regulated to be flat-open-fair. These are the WEE's principal mechanisms — and they are MACHINES, not libertarian free-for-alls — into which Periclean geniuses have poured very close attention and innovation for 250 years.

    The entirety of our past accomplishments and future hopes rest upon keeping these five… and maybe a few more… operating in positive sum ways, that continue (as they have) to overcome the Stross Iron Laws. And yes, cheaters will always, always strive to corrupt them.

    “I don't see 200 years of perfection” — Um… did I claim to? The WEE has simply been orders of magnitude better at leveraging human talent under peaceful and free conditions than all other civilizations put together. It is VERY far from being good enough that cheating is permanently solved, or being inclusive enough to end injustice, and so on.

    Nu? You want perfection and Star Trek? THEN DUMP THE CYNICISM! It is the crutch of playground bully betas. Alphas (leaders like you ought to be) must see what works! Not just the potential failure modes. Only then can you build upon the innovations of Franklin and the others.

    946:

    Let me add that it is not just the Five Accountability arenas we have on our side. There are other factors on our side, that cynics are too teleological to even notice. For example, we also have very powerful MEMIC weapons, spread by Hollywood and sci fi and the greatest universities on the planet. The importance of the individual. Suspicion of Authority. Tolerance and diversity and love of eccentricity. These are all preached in almost every film. If you think YOU invented Suspicion of Authority, instead of suckling it from every tale you ever watched or read, then silly fellow.

    You are a product of that relentless propaganda. Alas, two less salubrious messages also pervade movies… “no institution can ever, ever function (except in villainy)” and “all your neighbors are useless sheep.” See more at: http://www.davidbrin.com/idiotplot.html

    And there are OTHER factors the WEE has working for it! But I have spent far too much time here, ministering to cynics. Come by my blog if you want more. My comment community members are actually… courteous.

    In contrast to the respect that J Thomas has earned, I have nothing to say to the nasty Heteromeles, whose strawman — that I demanded “kowtowing” — proved him to be nothing more than a pure jerk. I did not read beyond that.

    947:

    Please don't insult the other commentators. Or at least be subtle about it.

    948:

    SEF Haven't seen you around in some time. Hoping you've been well.

    As for "insult"- folks can use whatever epithets they want, toward me. But ascribing evil actions and goals to me, like declaring that I demand others "kowtow" to me? That is the act of a cowardly lying asshole. And I don't care if silly people think that mere epithets like those are more "insulting" than the cowardly lying that inspired them.

    I am fighting to defend the only civilization in which average folks do not have to kowtow. I am far more effective at this endeavor than cowardly-lying cynics ever will be.

    bye.

    949:

    Hence, I hereby retract any snarks of my own that were aimed at this fellow… except to note that you started the nastiness, guy. Why didn’t you start out like this?

    Let's review the bidding.

    934

    Charlie… as usual you have a lot of cogent and insightful observations to offer us. Alas though… sorry, man… but did you notice that the only factors in your lengthy list are dolorous ones and excuses for cynicism?

    You accused Charlie of bad attitude, but in that post you presented no alternative except your own attitude.

    In #935 I tried to present a reasonable response,in which I partly agreed with you and also I had my own ideas.

    936

    J Thomas thanks for replying. I won't be hanging around but I am glad I caught your reply. Alas, while intelligent, it simply doubled down on the dolor.

    I mentioned the French revolution and I presented a highly-oversimplified story in which the Depression was precisely the society that some bad guys wanted, and they couldn't maintain their social structure in the USA when the USA insisted on fighting WWII. You responded as if I was arguing that everything in the last 200 years was due to the Depression and Hitler, and you then presented several reasons that could be used to argue that we are doomed. You assumed that I was arguing we are doomed and that I was doing a bad job of that argument. It seemed to me that you weren't paying attention at all. You were thinking about your own ideas and fitting everything I said into that structure.

    I want to point out that in general when people announce that they will not read replies, bloggers disapprove. They take it as an attempt to get the last word. If you go away and simply don't respond to replies, they think they had the last word and they like it a lot better. When it's "Don't bother to reply, I'm not listening", that's rude.

    In fact, there are powerful, synergistic processes that help us to stave off the old, feudal attractor states. You might help refine and refresh them, instead of just glowering in stylish, lip-curled, playground snarks.

    What we don't need is comfy, middle class ingrates, dissing a renaissance that gave them everything. Now I am outta here.

    Are you sure that I started the nastiness?

    In #937 I responded to some of your ideas, and also chided you for announcing that you were going away, and for presenting mostly attitude.

    In #938 Heteromeles responded to me with substantive commentary about the issues, starting with a one-liner about "fly-by" comments.

    In #939 Arnold wrote an attack on you, which you would not have seen if you had actually gone away.

    940

    Seriously? You treat a guest with such acid, puerile sputum,

    My experience is that I tend to get more of what I respond to. It isn't dependable, but there is that tendency. I responded to your ideas with ideas, and I got some ideas back from you and much more from Heteromeles. You responded to personal attack with personal attack.

    941

    You quoted yourself, to give a coherent summary of your position.

    942

    I tried to mirror that to see whether I got it. I accidentally put in some criticism, as if you considered the last 200 years in the West to be perfect, when of course you didn't say that and didn't mean it. From my point of view you over-emphasize the differences, and I let that creep in when I shouldn't.

    943 I mixed substantive ideas with claims about your style of conversation. I said basicly that you were so caught up in your own argument that you didn't notice what other people were saying, but instead read them as supporting or opposing you. 944 Heteromeles gave a long substantive comment from his point of view, with a one-liner at the top about you. He has looked at societies which resist being assimilated by the Borg, and what they do to make themselves harder to assimilate. They must give up a lot to keep their freedom, but still they have tended to keep their freedom. There's a lot of useful material behind what he's saying. It does not have to contradict your view, though you could be seen as showing methods the Borg uses to assimilate. Finding rules that people tend to agree are fair, etc. I think the ideas he presents are interesting and important. 945 You respond to my #943. You point out that you have spent 25 years on your ideas. This is a full explanation why you don't listen. 25 years is plenty of time to build up a full head of partisanship for ideas you consider the most vital in the world.

    You mention a name for your central idea -- RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY -- and mention arenas where it works.

    946 You mention various ideas from your ideology -- Five Accountability Arenas, MEMIC weapons, WEE. You don't have time to explain them here, but you've written a book.

    You entirely missed Heteromeles's ideas because of his first sentence with the word "kowtow". It looks to me like he was saying that you don't listen to other people but you instead demand that they think in your terms. It's a fair point.

    I am fighting to defend the only civilization in which average folks do not have to kowtow. I am far more effective at this endeavor than cowardly-lying cynics ever will be.

    Since you think your ideas are vitally important and the key to defending civilization, it's only natural you would not treat other ideas as potentially equally valuable. I'm truly uncertain whether you would do better to have more respect for other people and their ideas, or not. I think your ideas are valuable even though they may have important limits, and maybe the way you're behaving is the best way to spread them, at least at first. Or maybe not.

    950:

    Okay, back to typical, lawyerly self-justification and emphasis on pique. What in the world makes you think your current behavior, waging war instead of discussing ideas, actually supports your underlying assertion, that I misbehaved and you did not?

    1) It just ain't true. I insulted Charile in no way and at zero levels. The fact that you scrabble so hard to see it that way shows your obsession in full light.

    I disagreed with Charlie's unalloyed emphasis on failure modes... the easy and endlessly repeated path... without stepping back to discuss HOW we got the grace from which he maintains we are falling. That is a reasonable, collegial request. It is called argument.

    2) Your very first missive to me was accusatory and aggressive and you deserved every counter that I made. Your utter lack of curiosity about the points that I raised... which you know damned well to be interesting and unusual ones... was revealing. Instead, you zeroed in on reasons for pique. A pattern you very briefly escaped... for which I heaped upon you praise... but to which you have reflexively returned.

    3) Fundamental... you raised my interest by paraphrasing and showing you have the potential to be an explorer. Now, your lawyerisms and focus on blamecasting simply bore me.

    I admit my fault in all this. Each time that I found tedious cynicism standing in for curiosity, I stated my intent to just go away. Yet, out of curiosity, I came back and tried to engage.

    I nowe stand correcte

    951:

    1) It just ain't true. I insulted Charile in no way and at zero levels.

    I agree, you did not insult Charlie. You disagreed with him only about attitude. You said that he presented only the bad side of things and ignored the good side.

    2) Your very first missive to me was accusatory and aggressive and you deserved every counter that I made.

    You're arguing about tone. I don't see that my tone was so bad, and I agree you had every right to "counter" whatever you wanted.

    Your utter lack of curiosity about the points that I raised... which you know damned well to be interesting and unusual ones... was revealing.

    I didn't see unusual points from you at that point, what I saw was mostly an attitudinal attack on "dolor". You wanted me to emphasize optimism, when I was more balanced and didn't say whether I thought the good guys would win in the short, medium-term, or long run.

    Your response gave no indication that you understood what I was talking about, and you have still not done that.

    3) Fundamental... you raised my interest by paraphrasing and showing you have the potential to be an explorer. Now, your lawyerisms and focus on blamecasting simply bore me.

    I attempted to show how your style comes across to me, and likely to others. You don't get that. OK, I tried. I don't know whether that sort of self-knowledge is useful to you. It's predictable that your blog will be full of yes-men who try to extend your ideas without challenging them, and that you won't get out of your mirror-chamber enough to see what else is out there. For most people that would be a bad thing. But it might be more important for you to present a clear, coherent message than to refine and improve that message.

    My old computer science teacher made that point. He considered two simulation languages. The developers of one of them kept improving it. Every few years they would release a new version that was much improved, and it would be incompatible with the previous version. Another group kept adding to their existing structure. Their language started out as a set of Fortran routines, and as they added to it they wound up with functions that had as many as 20 inputs. If you put something after the fourteenth comma instead of the thirteenth you could get a bad outcome. It was a horrible mess. But they put a whole lot of emphasis on back-compatibility.

    The second language was very successful. The first was not. The first language was a beautiful thing to use, but hardly anybody used it. The second had a great big user base and 30 years of examples and success stories and libraries,

    So it might be adaptive for you to be utterly resistant to new ideas. I don't want to encourage you too strongly to listen to other points of view, when that might be bad for you.

    I may try out your blog, where the regulars welcome guests.

    952:

    Yikes, what a verbose and detailed examination, J Thomas. I'm glad someone else did that.

    It bugs me more than it should that the David Brin posting here shares his name with a SF writer with better language skills.

    953:

    I'm willing to admit that I may be misinterpreting this entirely, but it seems to me that David Brin is presenting a well wrapped argument for the old idea of "American exceptionalism", and is taking the stance that one can either agree whole heartedly with this idea of the USA as a special snowflake, or take a hike.

    Other than that, I've been quite enjoying the discussion between him and J Thomas.

    954:

    I'm willing to admit that I may be misinterpreting this entirely, but it seems to me that David Brin is presenting a well wrapped argument for the old idea of "American exceptionalism", and is taking the stance that one can either agree whole heartedly with this idea of the USA as a special snowflake, or take a hike.

    I see the similarity, but he has at the least heavily mutated that idea. It's less "American exceptionalism" than "Western civilization exceptionalism". He isn't so much in favor of the current US government or US neocolonialism or US cultural hegemony, as he is in favor of equality before the law, one-voter-one-vote etc, and sophisticated mechanisms to keep small groups from getting so powerful they can subvert the system.

    From what I've seen, I think almost anybody would agree with his goals. I say his goals are worth a sold effort if the chance of success is as much as 5%, because the alternatives look so bad. I think a lot of the argument here came when someone expressed uncertainty about victory, and he started calling them names.

    955:

    You may well be right. I'm much more wary of anyone who says that "things will be all right if you just follow my agenda" without proof, especially when he responds to questions with attacks and what appears to be canned rhetoric.

    Thing is, I hear that from developers where I live all the time. Chairman Mao initiated one of the great famines in history with a call for something that initially sounded like a program to push radical equality, to get rid of the bad old past and make way for a gleaming future. So did Stalin. Not that I'm saying Brin is a crypto-communist. What I am saying is that anyone who reads even as little history as I have should be suspicious of the kind of stuff he's proselytizing. Utopias can truly bloody places.

    There are two problems underlying anyone's version of exceptionalist history. One is that history apparently shows that one of the classic signs of a stock market bubble is when traders start saying "this time it's different." Western civilization looks a lot like a bubble in certain lights, and people aggressively saying, "this time it's different," are, to me, a warning sign, not a good thing.

    More importantly, if you believe that something is the exception, then you've got a sample size of x=1, which means that there's very little you can do to predict what will happen next. It's much more useful to increase your sample size by looking for similarities with the past and with other cultures, to see if there's anything to be learned by comparison.

    My opinion, as stated, is that we're not so exceptional, that we're dealing with many of the same problems complex societies have dealt with as long as there have been complex societies, and that it actually appears to be really hard to avoid to solve these problems even temporarily. While there's no reason to think the problems are truly unsolvable, there's no reason to think they are solvable either. Therefore, it's also worth thinking of what happens if, like other people in the past, we fail to solve them, and the survivors continue on afterwards.

    956:

    I would be more sympathetic to David Brin had I not received a similar tone of response a few years ago, when I had the temerity to question his historical understanding of some area of history that I knew a bit about. I can't recall any details now, but suffice to say I saw that it would be impossible to reason with Brin and oddly enough haven't been back to his blog much at all since.

    957:

    Let's put aside Brin's personal failings. And put aside his tendency to talk like he has all the answers and they can't fail.

    I think he's onto something that's potentially useful.

    Chairman Mao initiated one of the great famines in history with a call for something that initially sounded like a program to push radical equality, to get rid of the bad old past and make way for a gleaming future. So did Stalin.

    They both inherited truly bad situations. As did Pol Pot. They had to take drastic action fast, and they had drastic solutions in mind, and bad things happened.

    Much better if you have the luxury to try out your ideas on a small scale and refine them first. Now is the time to test Brin's ideas (and others), before the crisis.

    Trends can change, but for now it looks to me like the USA is heading toward a breakup. We have a lot of people who don't want to live under the same government. I want to vaguely label them as Christians, Libertarians, paleo-GOP, Blacks, Texans, and Moderates. I don't understand about Latinos/Hispanics. These various groups don't want to compromise in a democracy, they want out.

    Likely Britain is heading toward breakup, I don't understand them either.

    One legal path it might take in the USA is to declare a constitutional convention. The convention splits into several conventions that produce several constitutions, and different states adopt different of them. If it comes to that, we would be better off if there are a lot of people who have experience with a variety of legislatures etc, who have a clear sense from direct experience about what works. Some of the new nations might wind up with functional governments.

    My opinion, as stated, is that we're not so exceptional, that we're dealing with many of the same problems complex societies have dealt with as long as there have been complex societies, and that it actually appears to be really hard to avoid to solve these problems even temporarily.

    I agree, but if we aren't that exceptional then it might not be that hard to get improved results.

    Brin points out that it's central to set up a system that people think is fair. He has ideas how that can go. In the past it's gone every which way. In India, the idea was that it was fine for Brahmins to have the best of everything because if you go along someday you'll be reborn as a Brahmin. In the Dark Ages it was fine for nobles to have the best of everything because at death they go to Hell and you go to Heaven. Under capitalism it's fine for capitalists to have the best of everything because they deserve it for creating the system which benefits everybody. In a meritocracy the best people deserve the best of everything because they are the best. Etc.

    People usually respect the rules of the game because they are the traditional rules. American baseball has four bases in a diamond with equal sides and equal angles. You don't change that unless people agree, and people won't agree to change it. If you're the rich kid you can say "It's my ball and my bat and my catcher's mitt and my first base and unless you play by my rules then I'm taking my stuff and going home." People might in that case play by your rules or maybe not, but they won't like or respect you.

    Respect for tradition is no help for people who want better rules, until their improved rules last long enough to be traditional. (US Constitutionalists hold onto the Constitution because they are afraid that anything new will be even worse, and they think they aren't strong enough to stand up for their rights without it.)

    In the poker games I've played, usually each new dealer gets to set the rules for his own game. Sometimes one dealer makes rules that are very bad for the players who bid late. They put up with it. They don't counterattack with the same rules that would hurt him. They just groan.

    People put up with all sorts of indignities, until something happens and they stop putting up with it. Shouldn't we find out what actually works, and why?

    While there's no reason to think the problems are truly unsolvable, there's no reason to think they are solvable either.

    Agreed! And if there's a reasonable chance for improvement, isn't it worth the effort to grab that chance?

    Therefore, it's also worth thinking of what happens if, like other people in the past, we fail to solve them, and the survivors continue on afterwards.

    Agreed! Look at your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement). Decide whether it's worth trying to work things out, or whether it's better to let things take their course. Put enough effort into preparing for failure that you aren't completely hostage to success. Because if you are totally committed to getting an agreement, that gives the other guys too much leverage. "If you want it real bad you can get it real bad!" (Unofficial motto of the US DIA.)

    958:

    The Enlightenment dream of citizens perfected by education and systems so perfect nobody has to be good. AFAIK there is no political or religious system in existence that has not been tried somewhere at some time. Monkey-mind screws up every one of them eventually. In this, Transhumanism has it right - if we want something genuinely new and even possibly workable Human nature must be changed.

    959:

    The general problem with transhumanism is that it depends on global supply chains for all the technology. Since long-distance trade almost always fails during crises, transhumans are even more vulnerable to major disruptions than ordinary humans are.

    It might be more useful to look at invasive species dynamics, since humans are inarguably the most invasive species. Periodically, invasive species slip loose of whatever's controlling their populations, numbers explode and they decimate their environment, until the usual forces bring them under control. We're going through such an irruption right now. The good thing is that invasive species usually don't manage to drive themselves extinct, so there's hope for us too.

    960:

    The problem in 50 years time will be population collapse. If it were not for Africa now, the world's population would be stabilizing. Once there is development there and the standard of living rises they too will go the way of N America, Europe, Russia, China, Japan etc. For example, fertility in Bangladesh in 1975 was 6.3 - in 2011 it was 2.3

    Given that immense breakthrough CRISPR, Human genetic engineering looks very feasible even in the short term.

    961:

    If people choose not to have children, I don't see that's a big problem in the short run. We already have more humans than the world ecosystem can comfortably support. I'd prefer we not lose too much diversity while the population shrinks, but that's likely not to be too big an issue.

    On the other hand nobody's done very well at predicting demography more than a few years ahead of the babies that are already born. The Baby Boom would have been a big surprise in 1935 or 1940.

    I don't know what will happen to the food supply. On the one hand, reduced fossil fuels will make a big difference. Reduced mineral fertilizers. Climate change. But high-lysine corn could provide a lot of protein. Etc. We could be a lot more self-sufficient about food if we were willing to change our habits. Like, practically anybody can grow earthworms for a protein etc supplement.

    Maybe we could sustain a population of 2 billion or even 3 billion. I dunno.

    We might come up with a robust sustainable technology if we don't tear things up too much first, fighting.

    But when people believe that a whole lot of people have to die because there just isn't enough to go around, and they want to make sure it isn't them that die, that can lead to atrocities pretty quick.

    People can be real good about fairness when they're pretty sure they'd survive a fair system. Similarly with rich people, .01% etc. They might support a new system but not a new system that demonizes them.

    962:

    At this point, how society is likely to crash takes at least a few thousand words to at least sketch out, and I'm not going to try here. That's why I'm pushing hard to finish that book on what happens after climate change, but life keeps getting in the way. I'll let anyone who's interested know when it's approaching readability.

    Personally, I'm guessing 100-400 million people would survive the crash (although the basis for this projection is historical and based on infrastructural capabilities, which means that it shouldn't be given much credence). Still, 100-400 million from a high of 10-12 billion means 75-96% population loss. There's no way to play this which doesn't make it horrific, even if it takes multiple generations.

    I'd also point out that a draconian one child per family policy would get our population down into that range in a century without any wars, so there's a theoretical way to do it without an apocalypse. And no, this doesn't deal with resource consumption, which is a whole other difficult problem. Still, given how badly that kind of population control has played out in India and China, it would take a radical ideological shift by billions of people to get limiting family size to work, and that's part of the problem. There are rational and reasonable means for humans to live on the planet, but we in our dominant western culture seem to prefer catastrophes. It's as if we want some God to punish us, rather than doing the horribly difficult task of disciplining ourselves. As Forrest Gump said, "stupid is as stupid does."

    963:

    At this point, how society is likely to crash takes at least a few thousand words to at least sketch out, and I'm not going to try here.

    Agreed. This is a low-bandwidth medium, it just wouldn't sustain that.

    And anyway it's an inherently difficult topic. If you're studying a highway, it's easier to describe how traffic flows when it does flow, than to predict the details of an accident. Each accident is the result of multiple failures that come together, and it's hard to be sure which combination of failures will happen first.

    I'll let anyone who's interested know when it's approaching readability.

    I'm interested!

    ... it would take a radical ideological shift by billions of people to get limiting family size to work, and that's part of the problem.

    Yes. There have been radical ideological shifts by tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of people before. It might not be impossible.

    There are rational and reasonable means for humans to live on the planet, but we in our dominant western culture seem to prefer catastrophes.

    It would take a whole lot of organization, and we'd have to be sure it was necessary. We created the dustbowl by doing things that worked in the short run. The Salton Sea was an accident. http://lostamerica.com/photo-items/the-salton-sea/

    We try things out and see what works, sometimes on a global scale.

    964:

    Hopefully this isn't sealioning (great word by the way, and thanks. I didn't realize that's what I occasionally did).

    Since you brought up Jeff Vandermeer, I've got a question: how does the lack of a Hugo nomination affect someone on the midlist? Does it make it harder for them to "level up?" in sales? Sad to say, I don't follow SFF publishing well enough to know the answer myself.

    The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to figure out what kind of economic impact this latest strain of VD might have through his actions. Obviously only one person will win any prize, and people will argue about who is the most deserving in any case. On the other hand, if something like this starts hurting people everyone cares about, perhaps that needs to be considered in the Hugo vote too. I just don't know whether VD's action crosses that line or not.

    965:

    It's easy to forget that something akin to Sealioning is a potentially valid approach to dealing with a certain kind of online liar/ bully/ nasty person (note not a troll, don't mindlessly follow the brainless media appropriation of the word for something that even relative newbies to the internet like me were using properly over a decade ago).

    The approach is to basically copy paste a question you asked before to the bottom of any thread/ post that said liar/ nasty person has made/ started etc. These people usually run away from answering previous difficult questions (obviously you make sure the questions are not of the "when did you stop beating your wife sort) and fill up forums with nonsense. By being followed everywhere they go on the forum/ thread/ blog by the questions they never answer it eventually drives most of them to leave because they aren't getting to lie/ propagandise to new visitors since their long history of dissimulation is made clear for everyone to see.

    966:

    Weird, did I have two screens open? This comment was supposed to go in the discussion about the Hugo mess. Oh well. Please ignore it here. It's not germane to this discussion.

    967:

    It's easy to forget that something akin to Sealioning is a potentially valid approach to dealing with a certain kind of online liar/ bully/ nasty person....

    Tactical-thinking nasty people will use any technique that works.

    So if you politely ask them questions they don't want to answer, they will accuse you of sealioning. If you present a minority point of view they don't like, they will say you are trolling. If you respond to their troll by getting upset they will have a word for that, and if you don't get upset they will say that you have Asperger's or Autism spectrum disorder, since any normal person would have gotten upset. If you respond to their tactics tactically they will accuse you of being insincere, if you respond with all sincerity they will say that you are too naive to be in the conversation. If you ignore their factoids they will say you are ignoring reality, if you respond with facts they will say you are boring and you cherry-pick your facts.

    Any tool that good people can use to divert bad people, will be used by bad people against good people.

    The fundamental difference between you and the nasty person who is trying to win by confusing the issues, is that you are right and he is wrong.

    But people who don't know who's right may have trouble telling the difference. The easy approach for them is to cheer for whoever appears to be on their side, who says what they already believe.

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