If you believe that, you know no history.
Let me introduce you to an arguably more fascinating, brilliant and historically significant figure than Winston Churchill, his friend Jacky Fisher, who began moving the Royal Navy to oil-powered ships in 1904. Amongst much, much else.
Merely look at the man's portraits. You may not be surprised to hear the British king had to apparently tell Fisher once to stop waving his fist in the royal face--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adm._John_Fisher.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fisher,_1st_Baron_Fisher#mediaviewer/File:Admiral_John_Fisher.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fisher,_1st_Baron_Fisher
Aka John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, Admiral of the Fleet; The Right Honourable Lord Fisher, GCB OM GCVO,
At age 14, Fisher started as a midshipman, then became: - Director of Naval Ordnance 1886–91 Admiral Superintendent Portsmouth 1891 Third Sea Lord and Controller 1892–97 C-in-C North America and West Indies Squadron 1897–99 C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet 1899–1902 Second Sea Lord 1902–03 C-in-C Portsmouth 1903–04 First Sea Lord 1904–10 and 1914–15
]]>For all those people like EL at #85 who seem genuinely puzzled by this question ....
There's no inalienable basic income because if there were workers at, say, a company like Walmart (not incidentally, the largest employer in the US) wouldn't be compelled to put up with the conditions and pay there -- http://onlabor.org/2013/11/22/working-at-wal-mart-part-two-employee-morale-and-frequent-complaints/
...and in general the people who own such companies wouldn't get what they want: more for them and less for you.
It really is that simple. And since it's their country and the rest of us just live in it, they get what they want.
If at this stage anyone doubts this, note how existing U.S. benefits are structured so food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty programs do pay a big part of the living expenses of Walmart's workers. Thus, Walmart doesn't have to pay living wages, enabling higher profit margins.
Note, too, that in 2008 when the GFC hit, the U.S. government immediately made $700 billion available -- essentially, created it out of thin air -- to purchase distressed assets, especially mortgage-backed securities, and to inject capital directly into banks and other financial institutions.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008
....or (to put it another way) to shore up the existing wealth structure (much of it fictitious capital) as it favored the owners of the U.S.
Note, especially, that while those owners have no problem with money created out of nothing MMT-style-- guaranteed income in the billions, in other words -- when it's going to them as in the GFC bailout, they do have a problem with foreclosure relief, bailouts, etc. being made available to the general populace.
Because then, after all, the advantages they possess in terms of having capital during a post-crash situation (as we've continued to have since 2008)when everybody else has nothing would be lessened.
If the general populace had received even a fraction of the bailout that the financial classes got, for instance, private equity wouldn't have been able to buy up large lots of foreclosed homes at firesale prices in selected areas of the U.S., and then jam those areas' residents for rents that in many cases are higher than either rents before the GFC or than regular mortgage payments.
More generally, the 1 percent wouldn't have been able to capture (or loot) 95 percent of all income gains since 2008, while the general populace continues to struggle with less. And that's the real-world situation --
In the bigger picture, the coming decades of the 21st century will witness a global convergence of incomes among populations everywhere(whether they're workers or not). Average folks in, say, China and America are going to receive more equal slices of the global economic pie. What the plutocracy wants is for that convergence to result in a situation where average income worldwide is nearer that of average Chinese folks now, rather than average U.S. incomes in the 1960s.
It really is that simple.
]]>Regarding the Nazi V3 counterfactual proposed -- which you rightly shot down with 'US liquid-fueled ICBMs proved to be a first generation stop-gap; the real breakthrough ...was solid fuels -- that's what Polaris A3 ran on and, later, Minuteman, MX, Pershing, et al.' it's ridiculous for a couple of other technological reasons, both fascinating to any student of technology history - --
[1] In 1953, even missiles bearing A-bombs would have performed too inaccurately to hit targets at intercontinental distances. The game-changer was that H-bombs, with their far greater thermonuclear yields were going to become reducible to practical throw-weights.
And for that insight –- as with the digital stored-program computer, the A-bomb's detonating mechanism, the maths formalizing quantum mechanics, game theory, and much else –- John von Neumann was largely responsible. In March 1953, at the height of his Cold War eminence as head of the von Neumann Committee for Missiles and a member of various bodies like the Atomic Energy Commission, von Neumann attended a conference on intermediate-range bombers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. There, alongside fellow Hungarian Edward Teller, he told the assembled brass that the Teller-Ulam design for the “super” –- tested the previous year with Ivy Mike, a eighty-two-ton thermonuclear fusion device that produced a 10.4 megaton explosion –- would be downsizable enough that by 1960 the U.S. might construct such H-bombs at less than a ton.
If von Neumann was the initial catalyst for the ICBM – as he phrased it, “nuclear weapons in their expected most vicious form of long-range missile delivery” – in von Neumann's audience, a 42-year-old U.S.A.F. colonel called Bernard Schriever immediately grasped the idea, arranged a meeting with von Neumann at Princeton to enlist von Neumann's aid, then formed alliances with figures high enough in the Eisenhower administration to get an ICBM development program launched.
Schriever had a significant personal motivation. Curtis LeMay was trying to destroy him, after Schriever told LeMay that the nuclear bomber project -- origin of the molten-salt reactor -- was impossible because it could never generate sufficient thrust for take-off. Schriever isn't as well-known today as Hyman Rickover or Leslie Grove, but was apparently even brighter. NASA's Mercury and Redstone projects relied on adapted versions of his ICBMs, and he also established the contracting system Apollo relied upon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Adolph_Schriever
Schriever even looked the part -- http://www.npr.org/2009/09/26/113214858/the-man-who-kept-the-cold-war-cool
[2] While ICBMs were initially very blunt weapons, their guidance systems advanced very rapidly. What enabled that was U.S. development of the semiconductor at Bell Labs in 1947, and then of the microprocessor and the integrated circuit. In 1963, one-hundred percent of ICs made in the U.S. were bought by the Pentagon; even as late as 1967, seventy-five percent were still being bought by the U.S. military.
Contrary to Silicon Valley's myth about itself, therefore, the Valley was entirely built on government, military spending -- and specifically military spending for the U.S.A.F.'s ICBM guidance systems and for the SAGE early-warning system in the 1950s (a significant ancestor of the ARPANET.)
]]>However, it turns out that the late Stanislaw Lem was a genius who was only secondarily a science fiction writer. In the late 1950s-early 60s Lem already had independently come up with concepts like the Singularity, virtual reality, machine swarm intelligence, and -- at the same time as Richard Feynmann -- the possibility of nanotechnology.
Most of us don't know this because Lem's non-fiction has never been translated beyond Polish and German. I'm not a Pole, incidentally, and have myself only slowly discovered the truth about Lem over the past decade myself.
In regards to the SETE/CETI question, Lem began with the observation that the earliest stable stars arose more than eleven billion years ago.
Hence, if life evolves into intelligence and creates enduring civilizations at all, it could have done so at any time since that early era of the universe.
What if when humanity’s astronomers observed only a silent universe, Lem proposed, that void reflected merely humanity's own abject failure to conceive what forms cosmic civilizations might take and what aims they might possess after enduring and prospering for billions of years?
(What if humanity's SETI/CETI notions reflected merely tapeworm logic?)
The Lem novel "His Master's Voice" and certain of his "non-fiction fiction" pieces like "The New Cosmogony" and "Golem XIV" propose some fictional variations on transcending tapeworm logic.
I'm not going to attempt to summarize any Lem's ideas or his logic, but they leave the notions of everyone here -- including, pardon me, our host's -- in the dust. If anybody's truly interested in pursuing these questions, they should go look at Lem.
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