An off-world colony as life boat is the wrong analogy, it's not a life boat, it's where we start building the 2nd cruise ship.
]]>Someone could use the same logic to argue Google or Amazon is too big to fail too, it's a slippery slop all the way down to government controlled centralized economy.
Disruption is good (TM), this is the market's way of breaking up the monopolies you are so afraid of, and it forces everyone to innovate.
]]>"See also that even if we get into space, it won't help things on earth much unless we do manage a giant sunshade.": So what's preventing us from managing a giant sunshade? And there're tons of other benefits, mainly nearly unlimited energy and resources.
"Also MOOCS are oversold and of dubious benefit": Please substantiate this claim, have you finished a MOOC course?
"Also adivising us to organise to change politics is extremely patronising because you don't know what we are doing/ have done/ have failed to do because the forces of darkness are too strong.": Well if you're already doing it then it's not patronizing, it means we're in agreement. Of course it's going to be hard to make changes, but nothing worth doing is easy.
]]>Just some quick comment: 1. For those living in a democratic country, if you're not satisfied with the political decisions your leaders are making, then organize those agree with you and replace them. This is a privilege a lot of the citizens in developing countries don't have, so use it wisely, it would also give you something to do if you are currently unemployed. 2. For those who wants to improve themselves, there is no better time than right now. MOOC is pretty amazing, give it a try. And no, it's not just theory, there're for example hardware courses where you need to work on actual hardware, of course you'll need to buy the hardware yourselves. Also if you want to do some software work to build up experience, consider contributing to open source projects, there're a lot of worthy open source projects that lacks developers. I don't see this demand of more programmers dry up until we have AIs that can program.
]]>And I have yet to see a first order approximation on how this can be done within the current government budget and works with the current international economical and political framework (i.e. if your plan assumes cheap labors from China and cheap oil from middle east, it's dead on arrival). The US federal government spend about $400 billion on welfare every year, divided by total adult population under 65 of 120 million, that's just $3333 per adult per year, well below the poverty line.
]]>It would naive to assume a super intelligent AI still depends on today's semiconductor industry, it would only do so in its first few generations (assuming the current silicon semiconductors can support a super AI at all).
]]>So is cash (Bitcoin is basically digital cash), are you going to ban cash transactions too?
]]>Yes, that is my bad, I should qualify that by UN, I meant the security council, since that is what we're talking about here (whether UNSC will authorize a military intervention).
"As for the flashy soldierly things go, the aim of the UN is to makes things as stable and peaceful as possible. Notably by discouraging unilateral action by superpowers, whether their government are "democratically elected" or not.""
I'm not going to debate what UN is trying to accomplish here (stable and peaceful? Yeah right, if you put everyone who doesn't agree with you into labor camps, you'll get a very stable and peaceful society, but it's not a society I would want to live in). But if this is their goal, it just proves that they would be useless in removing dictators, since some dictators are on the UNSC and can veto any resolution.
"Because if you go for the "Yeah, Freedum, go go bang bang", not only do you simply parrot US propaganda (so what is the point in existing at all),"
If you think freedom is just US propaganda, then we have nothing in common to talk about.
"but you miss your objective entirely since you do nothing to prevent escalation on flashpoint or proxy wars."
Except sometimes war is necessary to remove a dictator who just don't see the writing on the wall. If your objective is to prevent war at the cost of freedom, sure, you'll miss your objective if you intervene, but I don't share your objective.
"Yes, in some cases that means that the Freedomland does not get everything it wants. It's not a bug, it's a feature."
It's a feature for the dictators of the world, a bug for the people living under the dictatorship.
"So, excuse me for considering "democratically elected" a vague term and, from many Western superpowers, a hypocritical line (Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, you can stay; USA, UK, France: out)."
Yes, it is a vague term, which can get defined if we use it as a requirement for a seat on the UNSC. And yes, this may mean western superpowers get kicked out of UNSC, so what? I'm not saying US/UK should hold their veto power without question, it is you who implies I'm on the side of US government, while I'm not even a US citizen.
"Both the Third Reich and Japan withdrew from it when they embarked on their military adventures, as sign that an organisation like the LoN or the UN is indeed incompatible with military adventurism, and therefore quite useful."
So its use is to force Germany and Japan withdraw from this organization? Yeah, really useful indeed.
]]>Quotes like this are useless, since different people can get different lessons from history, even the same historical event can have different interpretations. History is not like natural science experiments, where you can get repeatable results, so I don't see any reason to use a specific past historical event as evidence for decision we have to make today.
I do concede that we can get some general principles from history, and my principle is this: It's never a good idea to allow a dictator remain in power, if a country's people rise up against a dictatorship, the democratic countries should support them.
]]>Huh? League of Nations was bloody useless."
Exactly.
Greg: I don't see whether I've heard of LoN has any bearing on our discussion, unless you meant LoN is a version of UN with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan holding veto power, and served a useful purpose in the 1930s, which I don't think it's the case.
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