It's been an interesting bunch of discussions we've had with you here. Thanks for enlarging the discourse and making me think about things in a somewhat broader perspective.
SF isn't very good at predicting the future, but it's got an interesting track record of creating it by inspiring its readers and fans, which is part of what Alan Kay meant when he said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." May you continue to inspire us to do so.
]]>Art, it turns out, is hard.
No shit, Sherlock. And as long as you have to work hard at something to succeed, it ought to be something you enjoy doing, worked at in a way that rewards you, and that produces results you can be proud of. You're likely to regret it if you don't at least try hard to fulfill all of those objectives.
]]>I'd like to agree with this just from my own irritation at having the corporate research lab I worked in shut down in 1992, but while it is true that there's a lot less non-military corporate R&D in the US than there was a generation ago, there is still quite a bit left, and much of it is basic to modern industry.
Case in point: Intel Corp., which is, and has been for a long time, the world leader in the development of integrated circuit design and manufacturing techniques. Their global R&D center is about 15 miles from here, in Hillsboro, OR, USA. This includes not only the semiconductor fab R&D and pilot plants but also a large part of their system and circuit design R&D. In 2011 Intel spent roughly USD 3.4 billion on R&D, 8% of their total revenue.
]]>What scares me about this statement is that we seem to have entered a cycle of constant wars of opportunity, in which constantly re-electing the incumbent will keep the wars coming. Obama, despite his promises, has either not been willing or not been able to ramp down the war in Afghanistan, and several covert wars have been started during his administration. We may be in for a couple of decades of "Lukewarm War" before bankrupting the US sufficiently that it can't carry on any more.
]]>I'm a far-left progressive, and this is pretty much the way I feel about Obama. He never was a liberal, or even a centrist from the point of view of mid-20th century politics, which is where I started out. From any real historical perspective, Obama is a mildly conservative Republican (well right of Nixon, and rightwards of Reagan on some issues; he'd be Reagan if he were viciously anti-union instead of neutral on the subject and somewhat less tolerant of government stimulus).
Thane Walkup, that's a pretty good analysis of the origin of the batshit wing of American politics; there's some additional detail that's worth mentioning from later than 1877. There's a large part of the right-wing in the US that is still trying to erase Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal from reality (thank Cthulhu they don't have access to a time machine). There are a number of motivations behind this, including the belief that having a social safety net is a moral hazard because it entices people to idleness ("Idle hands are the Devil's playground" seems to be the guiding principle here, which indicates how Puritan Protestant thinking has infiltrated political ideology in the US).
Another motivation is the notion that the New Deal was a fundamentally communist idea, intended as a means of softening up America for conquest by the Soviet Union, or Russia, or Communist China, or Saddam Hussein, or someone. Note that while the enemies have changed over time, the evils attributed to them have remained pretty much the same ("Communist" has become a largely semantics-free label for whomever you happen to be afraid of on a given day). The "Red Menace" was installed as an all-purpose enemy in the beginning of the 20th Century, IMO learned from its successes in preserving the capitalist-imperialist status quo in England in the end of the 19th century. Large empires in the federal government were established, ostensibly to counter the depredations of Communism and Anarchism, and they have flourished to this day, in part because of their partnership with large corporations and the money they can provide.
Part of what's going on in the current lunatic fringe of the Republican party is that the linkage between fringe evangelical Christian ideology and anti-communism, which until recently was not considered respectable outside of its base, has emerged as a set of political wedge issues, and the captive media, much of it owned by the corporations that want to benefit from the breaking of the labor movement and the regulatory system that the right champions, has treated these issues as legitimate mainstream concerns, rather than the fringe ideology they are. Whether the average American voter will accept these issues as legitimate depends largely on whether they're satisfied with the state of the economy come the Presidential election.
]]>Each residential pickup has 2 wheelie bins, one for all recyclables (plastic, paper, metal, etc.) plus a small plastic bin for glass recycling, and one for compostables (all food scraps, paper with food waste on it, yard debris, etc.), and one 33 gal. waste can for everything else. When the compost scheme was set up last year we were given a small plastic container (5 or 6 liters at a guess) to collect the scraps in the kitchen.
Where the system needs some improvement is in the pickup schedule and the kitchen container. The container doesn't seal well, so after a day or so it starts to smell. I've solved that by putting a plastic bag inside to hold the scraps, and another over the top to keep in the smell and then after the pickup I toss the inside bag and rotate the outside bag to the inside. But that uses up a plastic bag every week, which isn't optimal. I'd use a paper bag, but they get wet and leak.
The problem with the schedule is that the municipal agency that manages waste wanted to keep the cost of pickup constant, to make the changes more acceptable to citizens, so they scheduled compost pickup every week, and regular waste pickup on alternate weeks, on the theory that taking out compostables cuts the waste in half. The problem is that while it may do that on average (though I'm dubious), there are often times where the trash mounts up to more than a can's worth in 2 weeks. This is especially odorous for us as much of that waste is dog shit (it's amazing how much poop a couple of small dogs can create).
]]>If you're talking about Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary, he did support her, though he mostly refused to discuss her in public, and she would not comment on the Bush administration's attempts to push a right-wing homophobic initiative against gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular. All Dick would say about it was that "it should be each state's decision." In other words, DIck supported his daughter, but wasn't about to support anyone else's kid. Classic response for any politician of the Me First party.
]]>We just had all the carpet in the lower floor of the house ripped out and replaced with polyurethane-coated concrete, because carpet is just so damn much work to keep clean (and you really can't if you've got dogs). Now the only cleaning downstairs is to run a wet mop over the floor if anything gets spilled. We still have some carpet upstairs, but that's going to be replaced just as soon as we can afford it. In the meantime I've just bought a floor cleaner for the carpet and the wood floors upstairs. It's much like a "steam" carpet cleaner that pumps a solution of hot water and cleaner (which it mixes itself) then sucks it of the floor or out of the carpet into a storage tank while scrubbing the floor with a set of rotary brushes. We'll be trying it out in a day or two; I have high hopes for having a tool that will make cleaning the floors easy enough that we can start doing it again regularly. Don't tell me that engineers won't design household cleaning devices, I found some fairly clever engineering in the cleaner when I assembled it.
We invested in another useful labor-saving device when we bought a new stove several years ago. We bought a stove with a sealed top instead of a bunch of holes and extrusions that are very hard to clean. Cleaning the stove is usually my job, and I hated it when I had to take the bloody thing apart and then scrap out the space underneath the burners to get the crud out. Oh, and when you're listing the labor-saving devices, don't forget the self-cleaning oven. That saves me at least a couple of hours a month.
]]>The discontinuity of temporal causation explains where Stasis got the wormhole technology in the first place: in a future which has since been erased.
]]>It may be just my prejudices about the importance of tactile interfaces, but I suspect that we're going to be living in a world were we can feel where things are and tell them what to do at a distance by motioning. That's going to make the way people think of their environment as different from the way we see things as mobile phones and mapping searches have made us see our world differently from a generation ago.
And that's hard to describe in text (I tried a few experiments), but it would be even harder in visuals on TV or in movies. Though it might be fun to try.
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