John Kurman

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• Commented on Things Can Only Get Better! (Part 1)
  Let me guess. In September, a big melt pulse as the entire Greenland ice cap sloughs off into the Atlantic. In December, 12 feet of water inundates shores of lands along or near the Tropic of Cancer....
• Commented on The present in deep history
  All of the 5 Big Things are but rubble rolled about by the Columbian Exchange. True, Enlightenment is independent, but the rest are contingent upon discovery of the New World. Late 20th cent. Capitalism merely looks like it won, when...
• Commented on Inverted realities
  What about the "They Live" trope? There are sounds I cannot hear, colors I cannot see, thoughts I cannot think, and perhaps some species takes advantage of that. Anyone done a proper audit of civilization, see if all energy expended,...
• Commented on Inverted realities
  Two themes, maybe three. Okay maybe four. 1) Sexy animal parasites in nature? Yeah, us. Some would argue we are predators, but I'd say that as a trivial category matter, like whether witches are Things that Float. So, predation as...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  Hi amigo, "My prediction is that we'll get to more sustainable populations running on 100% renewable energy by the end of the 21st Century." Hope you're right, because the most likely alternative to your 2100 is another P-T extinction event,...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  "What other fGF scenarios can you think of that don't require magical technology or unknown physics and that could effectively sterilize a galaxy, starting from a one-time trigger event?" Dust. Dust is easy to make. As a griefer, I'd direct...
• Commented on A major ebook announcement
  Fuck fuckety shit dickless fucking fuck cocksucking asshole cunty fuckstain. I'm sorry. I had it set on maximum filthy....
• Commented on My Country Tis of Thee
  This was covered in Saunt's West of The Revolution. The Russians standard tactic was (since guns were useless in hunting sea otter) was to take Aleut hostages and force the rest of them to hunt sea otter. Really classy. Initially,...
• Commented on My Country Tis of Thee
  My impression is, especially the latter half of the 19th century, and in North America, the motivation was privation, more specifically, the prospect of eating as much meat as you wanted to. Not freedom, and not freedom to worship or...
• Commented on My Country Tis of Thee
  I know it's a bit late, but I would have recommended "Families, Nations, and Empires" by Anne F. Hyde. It covers America west of the Mississippi from 1800 to around 1860. Two words. Fur trade. The book does not paint...
• Commented on Things I would make if I had a 3D printer ...
  What would I print? Mobius gears. And a little plastic jesus dashboard Charles Stross who will protect me wherever I drive from all things tentacular....
• Commented on DO YOU 'LIKE' THE SUN? The Content Casino vs. the Long Game
  You might be interested in reading Arthur de Vany's Hollywood Economics. http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780415312615 Section Four is where de Vany lays out the stable Paritean hypothesis (the fat-tail distribution people like Nicholas Nassim Taleb seems to favor over the Gaussian). Or, if...
• Commented on Wag that puppy
  Right. Shotguns that pack the power of Tiger tanks. Or that pick off people from hundreds of feet away (my favorite is Lee Marvin blasting a several yards distant bad guy with a shotgun in the movie "Prime Cut", which...
• Commented on DO YOU 'LIKE' THE SUN? The Content Casino vs. the Long Game
  "But how much of "Hollywood" is the cinema?" In terms of 2012 box office receipts, 63% and falling: http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/apr/02/hollywood-hold-global-box-office...
• Commented on DO YOU 'LIKE' THE SUN? The Content Casino vs. the Long Game
  My understanding is that the big game changer for Hollywood were DVDs, themselves now going the way of VHS I suppose what with streaming and mobiles, and then whatever is in the pipe as these all head towards Mr. Sterling's...
• Commented on DO YOU 'LIKE' THE SUN? The Content Casino vs. the Long Game
  Yup, my thought as well. Thing is, though, it's a dynamic fitness seascape, not a fitness landscape, and both r- and K- are used in some type of minimax formula that their quants work out, but they tilt towards K-....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Neptune's Brood
  I'm sorry to belabor this, but... Its funny how people object to various handwavings, like whether it's possible to colonize space with travelling manufactories and fricking lasers beams, or if anti-matter is upsidaisium. Or whether the ending of the book...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Neptune's Brood
  Well, I found Neptune's Brood internally consistent and enjoyable. And unique. It may not be the first accounting detective story, but I believe it is the first one set in interstellar space. I read Graeber's book, but I don't think...
• Commented on Drink Me: The Horror Hotel Story, and Where Ideas Come From
  Interesting. And yet, if you lived in that hotel for a year, or a lifetime, you would find it normal. You'd have produced adaptive behaviors to compensate, pride yourself on clever hacks and end-runs around the incompetencies, inconsistencies, and inadequacies....
• Commented on The referendum question
  I suppose I was thinking more in economic terms vis a vis, downside for Scotland, versus downside for the UK....
• Commented on The referendum question
  "close to the people government" Government close to the people also suppresses best. Again, you can have Big Government at the local level, and Small Big Government can be far worse than a vast tenuous out-of-touch and far away Big...
• Commented on The referendum question
  Noted. Let's say worst comes to worst. How about the scenario of a 1) a failed Scotland in, say, five years, versus, 2) a failed UK in five years? Obviously, Scotland has no nukes, not that I'm aware of, so...
• Commented on The referendum question
  Texas is a good example, as it composed of roughly five or six regions: the piney forests of East Texas, really more like Louisiana or Arkansas, the lakes and prairies around Dallas, the Gulf Coast, the central hill country surrounding...
• Commented on The referendum question
  I would argue that size is mostly (not entirely) irrelevant, and, that in fact, petty authoritarianism is harder to root out than in a larger state. Ferguson is a classic example where local government creates the majority of its revenue...
• Commented on The referendum question
  "Could nations and their services be abstracted from the physical layer?" Yes, they are called multinational corporations, and they don't particularly like you....