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Holding pattern (part N ...)

I'm still in Boston, flying home tomorrow, and due to begin recovery from jetlag on Thursday. (This overlaps with recovering from both an SF convention and the chest infection that's currently touring the east coast, hence the lack of updates.) So that's when I'm planning to resume blogging, if I can think of something coherent to talk about. (What do you want me to talk about? NB: the BRExit referendum is specifically excluded from this question, because Depressing Politics/Too Many Idiots.)

1239 Comments

1:

Being self-serving here, how about a list of books every school library should have (and the reasons they should have them)? And if you don't know good books in a topic, but believe the topic is important, you could solicit suggestions from your readers :-)

I'm actually more interested in your reasoning as I am in the specific books. Lists are everywhere, reasons why book A is on the list are harder to find.

I'm thinking high school here (so ages 14-19) but that's because I have a small bit of influence at that level (I said it was a self-serving suggestion).

2:

how about a list of books every school library should have (and the reasons they should have them

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

The problem is that I'm over 50 and have had very little to do with children or teen-agers during the formative reading years since I was a kid myself; any list I could make would be a third of a century (or more!) out of date.

3:

I would be interested in your take on things that impact SF, sometimes thematic - Cybepunk, sometimes conceptual - the Singularity, sometimes factual - NASA missions to the Solar system And what you think the next big thing to impact it will be

4:

How do you see nations balancing civil liberties in the 21st century with the proliferation of weaponized tech?

5:

Not interested. (I get asked that kind of question too often.)

6:

Not interested. (I ALSO get asked that kind of question too often.)

7:

Orbital Death Rays: the case in favour.

8:

So that's when I'm planning to resume blogging, if I can think of something coherent to talk about. (What do you want me to talk about? ... Too Many Idiots.)

Well, one of my hobby horses at the moment is regards "Talking to Idiots" - the type and classification of idiots, the best way of addressing each, and the memetic engineering that Trump is doing to get them to vote for him (part PR/Marketing, part something else).

A particular thing I'm seeming to see more and more is 'subject matter idiots' - who get wrapped up in the worldview of a particular niche group and parrot the memes of that group without critical or original thought of their own. Something of the opposite of 'Renaissance Man', they purposely sing from the hymn sheet of one silo as a strategy - somewhat tribal and often daft from a wider perspective. I wonder if they are a reaction to the pace and global scale that people now encounter more with the perversive influence of the internet.

9:

Thinking about the rise of the tech startup scene in Edinburgh - do you think there's any relationship between a science fiction scene and a technology scene in an area?

Has the local environment for science fiction authors improved in the last few years, or are tech startup nerds all too busy reading about containers and functional programming to read sci-fi?

10:

Well, you've already covered the future of human space exploration. Perhaps a post on the future of robotic space exploration?

11:

I've been thinking about the intersection of:

  • The latest round in the Surveillance vs Privacy vs Security War which is inevitably a one-way ratchet.
  • Assigning ownership of all your digital assets to shell companies originating in countries with strong privacy protections. Inspired by Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency controls.
  • The emergence of smart agents and contracts governing smart assets via the blockchain or it's descendants, also housed in systems outside the US, potentially even by your own offshore shell.
Is there a scenario where IoT devices governed by smart contracts refuse access to US government warrants because it isn't owned by an American, just possessed by one? Your offshore Alexa basically saying "I'm sorry Agent Smith, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Of course it wouldn't prevent the government from ultimately gaining access to your data, but wouldn't the bar be much higher? I'm thinking that a American Citizenship + Offshore Devices + Smart Agents introduces a degree of uncertainty that would give pause to the more offhand and casual snatch & grab techniques employed today.

Obviously this is US centric and I'm early stages in it, but this feels more likely than some of the cyberpunk datahaven dreams of yore.

12:

Hmmm.

How about: "if you had one type of idiot or idiocy that you think is woefully under-represented in your community of commenters, what would that be?"

Note: I'm not talking about getting more women involved, because to me that's not idiotic in the slightest. I'm thinking more about how you wish things would get shaken up a little around here, if indeed that's your wish.

13:

OK, I'll take one more crack at this In the sense of things I would like you to discuss, your friendships with other authors and how that affected your writing and career

14:

Fine less grim meathooky...you travel quite a bit, and mentioned recently a near nervous breakdown: where would you like to vacation that you have never been, why, and what activites would you partake?

15:

I can't speak to Edinburgh, but for tech startups in general I think there's a common template for successful startup cities.

Tech (vs Bro) entrepreneurs are attracted to environments that are open minded, lifestyle tolerant, risk embracing, future facing in a density small enough to regularly be thrown in with artists, writers, brewers, hackers/makers, college kids, woo lovers, etc. On top of that you need at least one large legacy or new tech industry giant that hires in and spins out talent. You also need a good STEM university.

I spend a lot of time in those cities in the US and they all seem to share that: Bay area, Seattle, Austin, Boulder. A lot of other places get close, but seem to fall down in a couple of categories - too big to achieve critical density, intolerant of lifestyle or risk-takers, no community, etc.

16:

"Halting State" examines the impact of body cams on police work. The US is belatedly realizing the extent of its rogue police problem and adopting the cameras (I'm sure Taser Inc. is contributing heavily to politicos to make it happen). On the other hand, a recent study of the Chicago PD showed a ridiculously high proportion of the cameras were, ahem, malfunctioning accidentally on purpose.

How do you see the dynamics of how the surveillance state is foisted onto the police? Not out of any considerations of decency, of course, but simply because cities need the cost savings from wrongful-death settlements.

17:

How to avoid the robophobia trap that leads to the Caves of Steel, and instead head in the direction of abolishing slavery to a Culture-like extent.

18:

What genre interests you, other than the ones you've already written in?

19:

Playing off the idiot them.

How to you convince people on the other side of an issue to change their mind or at least consider changing their mind. Yelling in the face and calling them idiots does really work very well.

I'm thinking of US politics and the Apple / FBI spat in particular just now. (Apple is loosing in the public mind BTW.) I'm sure there are some similar issues on the right hand side of the pond.

Sorry to hear you got one of our bugs. I seem to have missed it so far.

20:

I'd enjoy hearing you talk about what cultural phenomena may have led to the emergence of fantasy that embraces the bureaucrat as a hero (stuff like the early Laundry files novels, Max Gladstone's Craft sequence, or, to an extent, Seth Dickinson's Traitor).

I'm not sure if it's actually a new thing, but I've found myself fascinated with the concept and frustrated that I haven't been able to find more books that embrace it.

21:

I wonder if they are a reaction to the pace and global scale that people now encounter more with the perversive influence of the internet.

It's a symptom of future shock on a huge scale: lots of folks just can't adapt (especially true of groups who have traditionally been privileged and are now seeing what it's like to lose their special perks and status) so they latch onto one or another tribal identity as a prosthetic support for their identity. Others simply can't take it all in and retreat into simplistic nostrums (young-earth creationism, for example -- the original fundamentalists in the 19th century were far from in denial about evolution).

22:

if you had one type of idiot or idiocy that you think is woefully under-represented in your community of commenters, what would that be?

Young Earth creationists.

(Note: do not want!)

23:

What genre interests you, other than the ones you've already written in?

Superheroes. I've barely scratched the surface of that one. (Hint: fantasies about agency riffing off the same transhuman powers but very human failings of the pre-monotheistic pantheia tap into some very deep wellsprings of human cultural archetype shit.)

24:

Now, that's an interesting question and I think I need to think for a while before I come up with a hypothesis or two.

But ... you know my "invaders from Mars" theory about us being under the boot-heels of 18th century AIs known as corporations? The bureaucrat-as-hero is someone who undermines such systems from within. And that bears thinking about: they're an expression of our aspiration towards placing humanity ahead of the machine in an age of systematic de-individualization.

25:

The invention of the modern public service.

In 1850 both the UK and the US had tiny public sectors, like 5% of national income. The public sectors were entirely nepotistic with positions bought and sold. By 1950, the public service made up 40% of GDP and was entirely professional with corruption rare and strongly resisted.

How the hell did that happen?

And do the reasons for that century-long shift tell us anything useful about causes of recurring institutional failure in developed nations, such as the church in Ireland, the media-police-political nexus in the UK, gerrymandering in the US, state corruption in Australia, or police corruption in Australia?

26:

Thoughts on comparative representation of the sciences in science fiction? Physics is obviously present in spades, with the social sciences popping up sporadically, and the rest (geology, biology) drifting around in between. My guess is that it's just running on that good ol' post-Enlightenment high, but are there any other reasons you can think of?

27:

"subject matter idiots" Err, would this include religious believers, perchance?

28:

[ RED CARD -- you're banned for trolling, V, with a side-order of racist fear-mongering thrown in. Also, for derailing and setting up a straw man argument while I'm travelling. ]

29:

Um err ...not talking directly about the "Brexit" campaign, & certainly not about the (yukkkk) personalities involved. Why are the real, serious issues NOT being addressed? Why all the ridiculous hoo-ha about "immigration" & "welfare" when there really are dangerously important civil rights & constitutional issues at stake. That are not even mentioned?

This could be broadened, perhaps to other political issues - talking around the peripheries & not about what really matters. IMHO the vile Trump is another example of this phenomenon - whilst also agreeing with Charlie @ 21 on mal-adaptation.

30:

The bureaucrat-as-hero is someone who undermines such systems from within.

This reminds me of Frank Herbert's "Bureau of Sabotage". It was always an appealing idea.

31:

with corruption rare and strongly resisted.

I think anyone believing that (at least in the US) has some very rose colored glasses on.

Different systems had different places where the excess money could go (be siphoned).

32:

NB: the BRExit referendum is specifically excluded from this question, because Depressing Politics/Too Many Idiots.)

I guess the same goes for Syria, US elections and European refugee "crisis"? DP/TMI is quite a strong filter, and if you read it as DP or TMI it should exclude 99% of current events.

33:

Re Apple vs the FBI,

Or are the "Corporate Organs" just telling us Apple is losing? And how much of the larger populace really cares or is even aware of the issue?

(BT)

I mean, what is the Surveillance State going to do with our data? Tell us our Homeless Kibble really is nutritionally complete? Now with Zoloft!

Send the Black Helicopters to scoop up anyone who mutters about Pitchforks & Torches?

The snippet about the Chicago PD and heir body cams is intriguing, I had a PhD (Social) Scientist observe to me twenty odd years ago, and confirmed by anecdotal evidence in "Gang Leader for a Day" that Chicago did not have a PD, but a Gang.

The co-option of enforcement by the "Criminal" element, how can you have 1984/Stasi state when local enforcement becomes part of the (self defined) problem.

34:

NB: the BRExit referendum is specifically excluded from this question, because Depressing Politics/Too Many Idiots.) Not a request, but an endorsement of the exclusion and reasoning!

35:

No, fear of immigration is NOT ridiculous ho-ha among the working class; One reason the Republicans are so successful among "White Ethnics" (WE) here in Amurika is they can see where the Brown Tide has taken "Their" jobs.

They (WE) miss the real agency, that the lack of good union jobs like Gramps had down at the plant is a Space Alien Trick, replacing the workers in the Chicken and Meatpacking plants with more controllable minorities, preferably "un-documented", and shipping the assembly plants to Mexico/China.

They know their Children/Grandkids are working broken back schedules at McJobs and taking on crippling student loans for Film School.

"Free trade" has largely benefited Walmart and the corporate owners.

And still believe Strange Hair and or one of the other occupants of the clown car will fix this, despite all previous evidence to the contrary...

Ted Cruz (Space Alien/Clown #2 or 3 these days?) was on the FRONT PAGE of the local (Arkansas) paper today (Monday), shilling the benefits of Free Trade. OK, that was talking point #2, #1 was equally ridiculous, but CRS (Can't Remember Shit, a syndrome of turning 60). They crammed two sound bites into the headline, the corporate masters are still trying to derail Strange Hair.

36:

That's why I mentioned the 1950s, as that was the high point of the reform Democrats in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) for an example round about then.)

Of course there's still corruption. My point is that kind of behaviour is now seen as wrong and corrupt, rather than being the standard practice as it was throughout the 19th Century.

37:

The limits of potentially viable human societies, while the members still remain human, as distinct from the effects of technology and environment on known society types. This aspect is generally boring beyond belief in SF and fantasy, because it is so rarely more than a theatrical backdrop to the main story, but you have explored this in more depth. The Liaden universe is another example.

38:

It was very true in the UK - even today, personal corruption is almost unknown in most areas, and rare even in 'town halls'. But, back then, outside the mandarinate, the public service was still strongly resistant to organisational corruption. That's now been stopped, of course.

39:

It isn't new, but very rare; unfortunately, I need a junior moment or two to think of where I have seen it. Edgar Wallace is the best example I can think of offhand, but even J.G. Reeder was more than a bureaucrat.

40:

Whoops! Correction.

It was Marco Rubio (All those lizards are the same to me), Free Trade and a Stronger Military.

Go Team America.

Remember, the US Military is the default International Humanitarian Relief Force.

41:

Agreed, the other case I recall enjoying was the Diplomat as hero, particularly Laumer's Retief stories. Although he spent much of his time practicing gunboat diplomacy over politics.

42:

And still believe Strange Hair and or one of the other occupants of the clown car will fix this, despite all previous evidence to the contrary...

I'm pretty sure that the appeal of The Cheeto That Walks is not that he will fix the system, but that he will break it. For people who are stupid enough to think they can feed themselves without it, it's an appealing thought.

43:

"... state corruption in Australia, or police corruption in Australia?"

Or as we call it, Law and (hic) Order. See the Rum Corp; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Corps#The_Corps_and_rum_trafficking

44:
hundreds of millions of third worlders moving in

As far as I've heard, based on surveys of where people would like to live, the total numbers of migrants under a free movement regime would be much more modest than that — most people prefer to stay where they are. Migration is a hard, multi-generational project, not something done on a whim.

Also, the phrase "third worlders" suggests a worldview that's half a century out of date (tinged, perhaps, with a smidgeon of racism). Today's world is not divided into "first" and "third", they way it was in the 1960s...

45:

The Buereaucrat in Stations of the Tide doesn't even get named...

46:

Body cams mysteriously malfunctioning isn't going to stop them being used to root out corruption - That's just the dumbest corrupt cops self-identifying to the forces of reform so that they can be dismissed. Assuming an actual desire on behalf of the political class for reform, of course, but if that is missing, that will change soon enough. Not following best practice isn't popular.

I suspect that this is a movement that result in a fairly significant amount of early retirements, and probably a number of bodies hitting the floor as there is a desperate dash to clean house before the camera's roll out - A crooked cop who knows that on april 22 onwards everything he does is on mp4 has one heck of an incentive to either find new employment or make the people formerly greasing his palms.. disappear.

47:

The invention of the modern public service.

That's a good question, but it's not one for my blog: it's one for an over-ambitious PhD student working in some bastard hybrid of History and Public Policy. And if they deliver a definitive answer then turn it into a book, that's Professor Over-Ambitious Student to you, if not the next Keynes or Pikkety.

48:

The Fourth Revolution had some interesting takes on this question

49:

When you become Dictator For Life, what laws would immediately get passed?

50:

Here's a fiction-related line of thought that recent IT security news has me pondering:

In a decently self-consistent fantasy setting, where the public interacts with magic much the way our public interacts with tech, what would be equivalents of a TEMPEST attack? What would be the equivalent of finding a vulnerability in widely-used rarely-updated IoT firmware (eg. recent glibc DNS kerfuffle)? What would be the equivalent of the Morris worm? (Morris wyrm?)

51:
Is there a scenario where IoT devices governed by smart contracts refuse access to US government warrants because it isn't owned by an American, just possessed by one? Your offshore Alexa basically saying "I'm sorry Agent Smith, I'm afraid I can't do that." Of course it wouldn't prevent the government from ultimately gaining access to your data, but wouldn't the bar be much higher?

Good Jesus no. If it's not owned by an American, the TLAs don't need to ask at all!
Have you any idea how much snooping being an American defends you against? PRISM needs a warrant for you, but not for me. Complicating the citizenship of your devices would very likely weaken, not strengthen, your protection.

52:
Remember, the US Military is the default International Humanitarian Relief Force.

To push back slightly on this: all militaries are examples of Heteromeles' beer-on-generation-ships theory of wasting production capacity in a socially sanctioned manner as a way of maintaining headroom in case of emergency. They're also full of people trained in logistics and moving materiel under challenging conditions.
I'm entirely in favour of militaries being used in humanitarian relief; a large amount of their training being directly applicable, they tend to be good at it. I'd quite like it if their other responsibilities could be taken away.

53:

How necessary is public engagement to a functioning modern state? In most western countries, there is at least an illusion of control of government by the public in terms of periodic elections (although the reality of who actually controls government may be [usually is] very different). These countries (Canada, the USA, UK, France, etc) don't generally fight civil wars.

The USA is an exception to this perhaps brought on by "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it.", meaning that a large portion of the electorate were dedicated to keeping what otherwise could have been citizens in chains.

Historically, you have countries like the USSR, the Russian Empire before it, and the Austro-Hugarian Empire, whose governments emphatically did not represent the wishes or needs of their citizens. Those governments fell apart, whether in war or due to people just not wanting to maintain them any more.

In the modern day, there is China, which is run by a party that is Communist in name only. Average citizens don't have a say in the government, and some minorities face severe discrimination or outright genocide (Uyghurs, Tibetans). Is China long-term stable, or do you foresee its demise, or at least a serious internal shake-up?

54:

The current government of France is the Fifth Republic, the UK had a 30-year guerilla war inside its borders end in the '90s, Canada has at least one attempted Quebecois uprising per century, never mind "Native trouble." WEIRD societies aren't immune to Government collapse and civil war, even if we avoid calling them such if possible.

55:

I thought Charlie had that pretty much covered in Accelerando.

Ok slightly different scenario but roughly the same solutions.

56:

It seems to me that the WEIRD society problems you describe are due to all or part of their populations not having a stake in the government.

The 1837 rebellions in what would become Ontario and Quebec were caused at least in part by non-democratic conditions. As a direct result of this, the colonies of British North America were given legislatures that were partially democratic in 1840.

Also, weren't The Troubles in Northern Ireland caused in large part because the NI Catholics had no say in their governance and were being severely discriminated against? (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

57:

No, they were caused by Diarmit MacMurrough, Hugh Ó Neill and James I. They were precipitated by the discrimination Northern Catholics faced under the Stormont administration, and legitimated by Bloody Sunday.

Be aware, this is wild simplification; I haven't mentioned the Battle of the Bogside, the IRA's Border Campaign, NICRA...

And re: stake in government. You're right of course, but what makes you think there aren't similarly disenfranchised groups in most WEIRD societies?

58:

Aside from the usual Oxford suspects, there doesn't seem to be a cogent debate on actual transhumanism (the non-computer kind).

An offering (which you might recognize):

Together with colleagues from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, the Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Göttingen, Christine Nießner and Leo Peichl from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt investigated the presence of cryptochrome 1 in the retinas of 90 species of mammal. Mammalian cryptochrome 1 is the equivalent of bird cryptochrome 1a. With the help of antibodies against the light-activated form of the molecule, the scientists found cryptochrome 1 only in a few species from the carnivore and primate groups. As is the case in birds, it is found in the blue-sensitive cones in these animals. The molecule is present in dog-like carnivores such as dogs, wolves, bears, foxes and badgers, but is not found in cat-like carnivores such as cats, lions and tigers. Among the primates, cryptochrome 1 is found in the orang-utan, for example. In all tested species of the other 16 mammalian orders, the researchers found no active cryptochrome 1 in the cone cells of the retina.

Magnetoreception molecule found in the eyes of dogs and primates Phys.org, 23rd Feb 2016

Function in H.S.S, apparently not in your eyeballs, but sleep related:

UniProtKB - Q16526 (CRY1_HUMAN)

Points if you can tie in why blind people cannot suffer from schizotypical disorders:

We presented a number of relevant case-reports and showed that all fall into a specific type of blindness, that of peripheral origin. On this basis, we suggested that the distinction between different types of blindness in terms of the origin of the visual deficit is crucial for understanding both the observed patterns of comorbidity and the nature of the protective effects. Building on previous work on the topic (Silverstein et al., 2013a), we argued in favor of a modulation of the protection mechanism in cases of congenital/early cortical blindness.

Schizophrenia and cortical blindness: protective effects and implications for language NCBI Nov 2014

blindness due to a lesion in the optical apparatus peripheral to the optical cortex, including lesions in the optic chiasma, optic nerve, retina, anterior and posterior chambers, lens and cornea. With the exception of obvious lesions in the eyeball this is characterized by dilatation of the pupil and absence of the pupillary light reflex.

peripheral blindness

"Pupils the size of saucers"...

In our Bumper Book of Magic we go further and demand that modern magicians position themselves at the very centre of society rather than skulking at its margins, engaging with science, art, politics, philosophy and social issues as if they had every right to, and thus reconnecting magic with the population that it was initially designed to serve and to enlighten.

Alan Moore: The art of magic Pagan Dawn, 13th Feb 2016

~

Anyhow, fairly sure host recommended Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen, just started it, promising; three chapters in.

So thanks (I think).

59:

Transgender transhumans!

60:

Actually ( but also read # 57 from anonemouse...) it was worse than that, much worse. Even inside "protestant" NI society certain people were excluded, particularly if it looked as if they were HONEST. NI went down the Marples/Beeching route on it's railways & was set to close the whole lot, excluding Belfast-Dublin, but the Englishman in charge blew the whistle as loud as he could, knowing it would cost him his job (It did). You had to be on the inside of some cabal or a n other ( & NOT just the "Orangemen" ) to get on the the North. It was getting to the point where something had to blow.

This was not helped by the fact that "The South" was at least as far down the same road - an apparent "two-party" system that was rotten through & through ( & controlled a lot by the Black Crows, too.) One reason "the troubles" didn't get sorted sooner (among many) was the total rotteness of Eire's guvmint. At least two Toiseach's were lucky not to go to jail (probably because they knew where the bodies were buried) particularly - C Haughey was unbelievably corrupt, I'm given to understand.

61:

As with all tech, I suspect the answer is "both."

62:

Transport.

If you want to do politics: how to build needed transport infrastructure without it taking twice as long and costing three times as much as it should, with particular reference to trams in Edinburgh (as compared to Manchester; note that international comparisons can have infrastructure cost variations of an entire order of magnitude, e.g. high-speed rail in California vs Spain).

If you want to do tech: self-driving cars, will they ever happen? Will self-driving trains/trams/buses happen first? Can we get away from burning fossil fuels for transport? Is airport construction a bubble? How much short-haul flying can high-speed rail wipe out?

Edinburgh-Barcelona would be about nine hours if there was TGV-speed track all the way; a sleeper to Marbella/Torremolinos might be pretty popular if flying was expensive enough. On the other hand, Edinburgh-Beijing would be more like 72 hours, which isn't going to compete with flying unless economy-class seats go up to current first-class prices.

Crossing oceans without using fossil fuels means sailing, which is slow - three weeks to cross the Atlantic on something big enough to carry passengers; at least eight to cross the Pacific.

63:

In the US, at least,"modern public service" has roots in the Progressive movement. Teddy Roosevelt takes on Tammany Hall (in New York City, early 1900's). Tammany, a political machine, organizes its voters, wins office, doles out government jobs to its supporters, and to whom, to get anything done, you must pay a bribe. "Civil Service" is supposed to be merit based, non-partisan, honest. Sounds good in principle.

However one element of Progressive "good government" & "reform" was to block immigrants, those nasty Irish and Italians, from gaining political power over their "betters". For the immigrants "reform" wasn't necessarily a good thing.

I know you're trying to avoid Depressing Politics, but this actually connects to the whole US argument over the function and size of government that's playing out among Trump, Sanders, Clinton, et al. Does govt work for me? Who is it for? That connects to Pikkety etc

64:

How about mass migration's effect on the short term destabilization of societies? We've entered an era where technological and financial improvements in transportation make it possible for large numbers (millions) of folks to pick up and move hundreds to thousands of kilometers and settle in distant lands, bringing their oddly seductive women and strangely barking pets with them, not to mention odd habits and blasphemous religious beliefs. Smaller past migrations triggered wars; we believe ourselves too civilized for that today while ignoring vast evidence to the contrary. As climate change picks up and projected shortage of potable water spread, mass migration may only increase while we are already seeing increased resistance to immigration from distant lands where people talk funny and wear pretty clothes. How much worse do you think it will get, how do you think it might end and what sadnesses do you think might occur in between? First genetic war, waged against selected mobile genomes, perhaps? Will anyone be left to write the movie script?

65:

"...Remember, the US Military is the default International Humanitarian Relief Force."

But only if you need a "lead aspro", OR you're a 'Merican expat. Mates in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) are critical of the their set up when it comes delivering aid supplies. Where US Marine Corp amphibious warfare vessels are set up for evacuation of any US nationals (and their pets), as opposed to stocking tents and spare mosquito nets.

66:

Not too far from a description of Edinburgh - two excellent STEM universities, one of which does a internationally-regarded brewing course (the other is in the world top twenty, and typically gets 5* in the RAE for Informatics). Now Napier makes it three universities...

Until the 90s, add some legacy industry giants - Hewlett Packard employed a couple of thousand in their site at South Queensferry (IIRC it was mostly microwave comms - heavy on the physics and DSP), while Ferranti employed eight thousand or so in defence avionics (half of whome were graduate engineers); radars, space-grade navigation systems, displays, electro-optics.

Until 21C at least, throw in a fairly significant (i.e. huge) percentage of the UK's fund management firms and a couple of major banks, with associated IT infrastructure.

Park the whole lot in an architectural World Heritage Site, throw in the world's largest arts festival for a month per year, add decent road, rail, air, and sea links, add mild weather because it's on the (more sheltered) East coast of the UK rather than the wetter West; and it's hardly surprising that it's a popular place.

67:

How about a little game ... six degrees of separation SF/F style. That is, show the linkages/degrees of separation between any 3 different mundane events/occurrences/discoveries/concepts that result in something new/novel either fantastical/magic or new mind-bending scientific. To add interest ... start with the best good result/consequence and end up with worst result. (I've never played this, but a past discussion re:Freud reminded me of how easily any two unrelated events can - with minimal effort - be ultimately tied back of your primal-cause-of-choice.)

For anyone not familiar with the six-degrees-of-separation meme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Excerpt: 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlour game based on the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart. Movie buffs challenge each other to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor and prolific character actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any such individual to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible. In 2007, Bacon started a charitable organization named SixDegrees.org.'

68:

One of the absolute must-reads on politics and corruption is "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall," if for no other reason than finding a machine politician up to his eyeballs in corruption holding forth in public on exactly how it works is like finding hen's teeth.

69:

"Driverless" automatic trains are here already. But only, usually for new systems, or you are prepared to shut $ExistingLine down for 2-4 years. Principal expense/difficulty in retro-fitting is installing Platform-Edge Doors to all or most of the stations for an automated system

70:

Probably you've done this already, but what about long-term -- like centuries and millenia and more -- usable information storage that doesn't need decadal curation? Clay tablets have worked pretty well in the past, but what are we going to stick in a crypt and expect that humans in 4000 CE or 40,000 CE (if there are any such, which I somewhat doubt) will be able to read and understand? Tempered glass seems slightly promising, but whaddya think?

71:

He has indeed. Memory diamond! - essentially a diamond lattice assembled atom by atom, with 12C and 13C for the two states. Reading is by NMR. We just about have all the stuff to do a proof of concept already, though not easily. You probably end up somewhere between 10-100 atoms per bit once you've included readout structures, redundancy for EDC, allowance for impurities and what have you.

73:

"subject matter idiots" Err, would this include religious believers, perchance?

Not quite the angle I was coming from, and neither was Charlie's 'future shock'. A bit more detail.

In the past your 'B' team level individual could happily find employment in a nice little bolt hole, trotting out the same basic knowledge as they got from college and being the comfortable little 'subject matter expert'. They didn't really need to keep up, the level of change was low, and nobody around them would know if they were 10 years behind the curve (eg lots of GPs and MBAs)

However, the connection that the internet brings means they are bought into contact with much more of the change going on, from a global population of such SME, all feeding off each other (shades of singularity). They face a torrent of new ideas, and worse, others can find out they are behind the curve via a quick google search.

In response they have to appear to keep up, but it's hard work staying at the forefront, and they don't really know wheat from chaff ('B' team, remember) so what they become is 'pattern matchers' learning to spout the latest thinking when triggered with the correct scenario - but never really incorporating the ideas into their cognitive map, and never really understanding it.

The problem is, because they never really understand it, they never really recognise the limits of validity, or recognise when it's horribly wrong. They also cannot go beyond what they have been told. The 'smart' bit has been outsourced to whatever repository of new ideas they go to.

Think your average MBA, pushing new idea 'X' or piece of 1960s crud 'Y' they were taught, without ever really understanding if it's valid or sane in the particular circumstances.

And that becomes the bigger issue. If a new idea catches the zeitgeist and gets repeat by enough of these drones, and if they make up enough of the population in that 'subject matter' that they take control of the 'source of wisdom', they can go off into a bizarro world where the silly idea pushes out the sane one and new ideas that don't come via the approved route are ignored (cf 'not invented here').

A simple example of this is racial equality (that's gone off the deep end for years now) where they automatically consider 'black' to be racist and not PC, and substitute 'african american' automatically. Even when presented with someone from brixton by way of the west indies - they still persist in using the same automatic rule of thumb, because they never understood the 'why' for it in the first place. Indeed, they tend to shun and crowd out anyone talking sense on the issue - because it doesn't match with what they've been told is the 'approved knowledge'.

Hence 'subject matter idiots'.

It's just one of the collection of potential idiot types - and my actual interest in identifying how you can turn around, or at least neutralise, those different types of idiot. For instance, in the case of 'subject matter idiots', once you realise what's going on you can see that grabbing hold of the place they go for 'new knowledge'/'cutting edge' allows you to inject your own ideas and gradually steer them round to being repeaters for your views.

I've had the idea bubbling away for years, but it's been prompted to the surface by Trump. He's always been a self-promoting sideshow, but the interesting thing is he's been trying to find a way to have more influence - first by author, then becoming a TV personality, and now by harnessing the bigotry and alienation of a group of idiots via the lever of 'political candidates being taken seriously', no matter how lightweight and daft. It's an exploit, and you have to take your hat off to him for recognising and exploiting it - public selection of representative doesn't pick the best, it picks the loudest, simplest and most pandering.

74:

Surely the interesting thing is that most of us are B team people, so we should build society to suit us as we are, not to suit the fantasies of power hungry greedy people and those who wish they were or think they are A grade.

Also plenty more of us B team folks are open minded etc, but stymied by corporate culture.

75:

Good idea, although I think you'll find that separating the idiots from the experts is harder than one might think. Computer Science as taught in most universities, vs. what is happening in tech companies, might be a really good example...

Then there's Trump.

Yeah, you clowns might get to deal with him as the most powerful man in the world. Sickening, isn't it? We'll be stuck with him as our leader, Gods help us.

He's got a couple of problems, really.

One is that he doesn't particularly know what he's doing, so with him in charge, we're going to see Bush II levels of cronyism, corruption, and trillion-dollar screwups. Among other things, this means we're all pretty much locked into full-on 2oC climate change in 20 years.

Like Bush II, Trump's someone who gives other people bankruptcies. I'd hate to be one of his creditors, except that, as an American sucker, excuse me, tax payer, I would be by default.

A second problem is that I don't think he actually believes anything coming out of his mouth. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure his followers do believe his pandering. I'm also pretty sure that his followers are more armed than the average American.

The problem here is analogous to what happened in Imperial Japan, to give the example of where it went horribly wrong and I actually know a little bit: When they veered hard into fascism, the problem was that the rank and file members of the various parties and conspiracies got into the bad habit of assassinating any superiors who veered off the party line they preferred. This made the leaders very leery of offending their underlings. Unfortunately, the end result was that, even after they'd been hit by two atomic bombs, some underlings still tried to stage a coup to stop the emperor from surrendering to the Allies, because one of their sacred shibboleths was that Japanese never surrender.

This is a bad place to go, because there's some really nasty outcomes in the US. One is that the secret service fails to protect President Trump from his outraged supporters, and he ends up with a eternal flame burning above his tomb, or some such. Another is that the Secret Service does succeed, and we have to deal with a fascist Washington DC, with rather violent tentacles reaching out all over the country. The end result of that misadventure might be a lot of guns pried from cold, dead hands, and that would suck for everyone involved.

76:

Not what you want*, and I have nothing else to add here, but here's my 6 degrees of KB: Me -> High school art teacher, who at a US Embassy function in Sri Lanka encountered Arthur C. Clarke, who had a cameo in the movie of "2010" with Roy Scheider, who co-starred with John Lithgow, who was in "Footloose" with Kevin Bacon.

All of which means nothing.

*which is along the lines of what James Burke did in "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed". Always worth a watch/read.

77:

I'm not saying 'B' team = SMI, rather that the behavioural coping mechanism some can use to deal with the new knowledge issue (and increasingly torrent) can lead to the pattern matching scenario I outlined.

Another way of looking at the difference is the reaction to a new idea in their field. The type of person who's thinking and internalising knowledge will give the idea the time of day, maybe ask some searching questions, etc. They might end up rejecting it, but because "you haven't considered X".

The SMI type will reject it straight off because "it doesn't follow Farquah's methodology".

Such behaviour is not new, but the critical mass aspects and how it can allow the silly to crowd out the sane is enhanced by the 'future shock' aspects of the changed circumstances.

I was only mentioning it as a particular example of the wide variety of idiots, and how the landscape is changing.

78:

Crossing oceans without using fossil fuels means sailing, which is slow - three weeks to cross the Atlantic on something big enough to carry passengers; at least eight to cross the Pacific.

Clipper ships did crossings in less than 1/2 of those times. Are the economics of similar vessels no longer workable?

79:

"...might get to deal with him as the most powerful man in the world." My thumbnail (polite version) of DT is yoooge ingrown ego, working intuition/mind, but he feeds it garbage. I try hard not to get deeply disgusted with political figures, but he keeps pushing random buttons. His professed opinions on climate change are particularly disturbing, yeah. (BTW, thanks to you and Hadil and all for getting others of us here frothed up/better educated about it.) Not arguing much with your hypothetical-post-Trump-win scenario.

80:

Reading "Silverstein et al., 2013a", are they (or you) suggesting (not explicitly) that a mental training regimen could be created (or exists?) that could reduce the risk of schizophrenia among those who work at it?

81:

My understanding is that cargo ships (running around 24 knots) aren't moving much faster than clipper ships used to. (Google "slow steaming" and "super slow steaming." These are both fuel saving measures)

The difficulty is that bulk cargo ships carry a lot more than did clipper ships, so it's not a great comparison. If we switched to clippers, probably the amount of cargo would go down, unless we had a lot more ships. We might be able to use something like skysails to pull large cargo ships at halfway reasonable speeds. Unfortunately, skysails are listed as power systems, reducing the energy used to pull the ship (they generate up to "2 MW" of pull), rather than by how fast they pull the ship.

82:

Well, there is plenty of scope to reduce the amount of cargo carried. And also to make bigger sailing ships. The use of steam for propulsion and the use of iron as sole constructional material got popular at roughly the same time; while some of the last sailing ships were made of iron or steel, it wasn't a combination that got developed much compared to the iron steamship approach with its great military advantages.

83:

It needs to be waaay past #300 before I outline what I actually opine. ( Oh Mickey, you're so fine you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey).

C/E blindness is also associated with comprehension of ultra-fast synthetic speech at a rate of ∼25 syllables per second, which is close to three times the rate at which non-blind individuals can comprehend such speech (Hertrich et al., 2009). In addition, C/E blind subjects have shown larger mismatch negativity (MMN) components of the ERP, suggesting a compensatory improvement in pre-attentional processes (Kujala et al., 1995). It has been demonstrated that these sensory and perceptual processing differences are due to enhanced basic perceptual skills, not to “higher order” functions such as attention, memory, language, or executive functions (reviewed in Cattaneo and Vecchi, 2011).

Which would certainly suggest that training has much potential, and I've focused on ERP before (pattern holding #33).

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November:

We're faster than you: of course, being assaulted by a primordial crocodile is still threatening, but the mongoose will always laugh at the snake. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, problematic when you're stuck with raccoons.

You may also consider my (seemingly insatiable) focus on cetaceans and their current communication issues. Having your hearing artificially broken is not a pleasant thing to do, one almost might consider it an act of War.

It's certainly not civilized behaviour, that's for certain.

~

Re: TRUMP

Always the problem with this Left/Right Anarchist / Authoritarian 4-plot you're still working from (that is, those who've progressed beyond the old Left/Right horseshoe).

It's old tech for old Minds.

Into my Arms Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Youtube: music: 4:13

And, uff, that game of 6 separations, how quaint.

Lost a really nice link which detailed the sources of the four poems that frame Gene Wolfe's "The New Sun", a Russian poet who wrote the second one and a German Baroness who died in 1975 who wrote the fourth, while she lived in a Bavarian village during WWII.

That was an amazing source, it was delightful, and it's required to make a point. I shall employ traces to find it again; would help if I could find the Russian poet (heaps (?) of skulls / hidden in children's games and books / waiting for new sun - rough memorization of it)

And yes, I ended up at Z@um' The Transrational Poety of Russian Futurism by Gerald Janecek (WARNING: PDF OF ENTIRE BOOK - LEGAL) in an attempt to find it again.

So, blog knowledge: anyone know the "New Sun" opening poems?

The link is worth it (! base bribery)

84:

Oh, and damn, entire web revolves around that one link.

Without it you won't get why Rupert Everton is going to been thrown in - new work, I roved out - In search of Truth and Love NSFW - it's porn. But of the good comic kind. The elf / human lesbian threesome in his prior art is simply divine.

85:

Teaser:

The primordial Western fascination (pun intended) with the Babel Tower myth (?!) and the 1913 opera Победа над Cолнцем (link in English) as a denotation of something (c.f. Borges' Library of Babel, mentioned before).

"We're Watching You".

"It's behind You!"

86:

Uff, all is scattered, pinion lost, links spilling all over the place like spaghetti.

Another strand:

For the Hugo thing, Larry Correia quits Twitter source: Twitter. Expect the Council of Truth and Values and the puppies to ramp up the old boring Culture War.

Commentary: Tous Les Mêmes Stromae Youtube: Music: 3:37 - Trigger Warning - coquettish depictions of inter-racial bisexualism if you can't stomach that kind of thing. French music.

87:

English translation of lyrics: All the Same.

And yes, that was a bilingual pun / joke (as is the self-referential character of the singer, the song is entirely from the female perspective, but he's clearly male & so on - unpack with reference to current French political seasonings of suspension of Democratic rule of Law / cultural / racial tensions: look up his video for Formidable to see a little more depth. Smart little Monkey[1]) but also a commentary on the entire thing.

We went so meta on that one. (Plus, it's fun and a catchy tune).

For Greg's Class for Cultural Translation:

Spaghetti Stories - what they are, and what they mean and how they're used.

~

But yes, the shadowbanning thing has legs as they say.

~

Hugo Neepery: Wake of Vultures is actually quite the little bridge builder. Respectful of American Western mythology (the ranchers aren't all monsters) with slices of fantasy and a female "mixed race" protagonist.

Oh my. Gets one of my votes.

[1] This is a joke he's taking possession of. Watch / listen Formidable before reaching for the pearls, sensitive readers.

88:

Making use of that PDF - a quick explanation of Zaum.

(Note to Host - this might break things totally visa vie formatting. Hard to make 1913 poetry from PDF source paginate nicely).

Sergei Podgaevsky: Thorn (last two pages - also found in Pisanka Futurista Sergeya Podgaevskogo P105):

ne not zhit' to live zhele jelly me puzo m' belly zhele techot- jelly is flowing- tlenie. bit' rotteness. to beat me my nogi-pudts! legs-channel [?) deryot strips away fuzoi . . . by trade . . . bodanie butting kala- of feces- umozaklyuchenie deduction chush' nonsense osha rash, confus, vsir gaz vit gnid twi gna iskatelya seeker's pettt pettt a ardoi . . . a ardo . . . oydvd oydvd svemis' twist up bublikom into a pretzel v shi kh s wi sh shut i khi . . . jest er ess . . . likom vopis' face wail.

Compare / contrast "Jelly Flowing" to "Spaghetti" and the last two "jest er ess" / "face wail".

Or the opening of the aforementioned 1913 Victory over the Sun"

We are striking the universe Victory Over The Sun
We are arming the world against ourselves We are organizing the slaughter of scarycrows Plenty of blood Plenty of sabers And cannon bodies [fodder (Erbsl5h:41)]! We are submerging the mountains

We have locked the fat beauties In the house Let the various drunkards Walk stark-naked there We don't have the songs Sighs of prizes That amused the moldiness Of rotten naiads! . .

Time is a Flat Circle and all that Jazz.

Do you imagine that the poets survived the Revolutionary Purges of the 1920's? The poets were fiercely anti-war (WW1) etc.

Methinks Stalin and his pineapples[1] wouldn't get it.

~

Brought to you as a response to Penises in Formaldehyde (you were warned, but like all such things, takes time to pickle a cucumber[2]).

Note: this isn't Predator or Prey humor, it's something else.

[1] There's a riotously funny story about Stalin, pineapples, MGU and why there's four giant carvings of them on top. Shared if interest shown.

[2] Yes, that was a cultural joke - vodka and beer and pickles and salted fish are Russian things.

89:

Subjects? From an antipodean who used to live in the UK: 10 things in (especially US written) fiction about the UK that make you go 'Aarghh'. Things that at best just pull you out of the story for a bit, or worst make you do the Parker thing to it.

90:

Ah. All is now clear. What was it like growing up in a Zaum-speaking community?

91:

"Which would certainly suggest that training has much potential, ..."

VERY early training. Note that such skills are present in those blind from birth, not those who go blind later.

92:

As stated previously: "I am not a member, and have never been a member of the Hacking collective known as 4chan" (this is a meta-joke). Nor was I a Goon (looking @ salty Twitter tears and the U.N.).

It's a flouncy signifier to the amateurs that there's BLOOP noises from teh dark oceans, and a joyous howl at the Moon.

Anyhow...

YEESSSSSSSSSS

Found the pinion link on post #7 (which means great things for #8, old skool rules):

Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance. I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books much loved, and in children's games I shall rise from the dead to say the sun is shining.

I dwindle, go unnoticed now The Stoat, 2005.

Thanks to the anti-Smiler for that reference (not-so-subtle acknowledgement of source), Not to touch the Earth, Run, Run, Run.

Oh, I mixed up the numbers. The German Baroness was #2, #4 was Kipling, thus the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi reference, with a nod to Dirk.

To explain the meta-joke:

Osip Mandelstam was a member of the Acmeist in the same period / location as the Zaums, but shared much the same fate (if a little later on).

The acmeists contrasted the ideal of Apollonian clarity (hence the name of their journal, Apollon) to "Dionysian frenzy" propagated by the Russian symbolist poets like Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov. To the Symbolists' preoccupation with "intimations through symbols" they preferred "direct expression through images".

Back to the old Apollo / Dionysian divide.

And they started in 1913.

nose wiggle

~

I love free-styling at 4am, big Moon.

93:

Yes, thus interest in new plasticity studies etc.

~

Since you've claimed thought patterns different from the norm, a thought experiment:

What if I told you that there's the Quick Foxes and the Slow Brown Dogs but there's also something new, blue and Faster than a Fox?

94:

This, and prior don't count as #8 since they're just footnotes:

Moar explanation:

But strength still goes out from your thorns, and from your abysses the sound of music. Your shadows lie on my heart like roses and your nights are like strong wine,

was from the Baroness; you'll note the use of Zaum poem named "Thorn" (Mirrors, have to follow the Formal Rules).

Note: link rot all over that 2005 source and can't actually substantiate it.

My sources are impeccable, however.

95:

You are missing a J, a P and a Z.

96:

Not Chess or Crosswords, but well played there.

~

Oh, and Mirrors: A(cmeist) and Z(aum). Apollo / Dionysus divide, straddling a War and a Revolution.

Very traditional Old Skool Work there, like viewing the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

97:

You'll probably need to understand the cultural underpinnings of contemporary Russian SF visa vie the "Great Game" and two mirror sides fighting over the outcomes of the period found in places like The Night Watch to grokk the meta-whimsey of this little flight.[1]

~

Off the cuff explanation: Light / Dark aren't really Good / Evil (it's more Altruism / Selfishness), but both sides are convinced that the other one was responsible for the horrors of Communism and the gigadeath. Or even, Communism was the "good guys" winning.

And yes, there's a meta-meta-meta fable / reference to Trump here.

~

The meta-meta-meta-meta thing is all about cetaceans.

For the Old kind, being shadow-banned: Matthew 26:27 and later Then saith Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad., found 14:27).

~

Shadowbanning = Total War, it's insanity.

[1] No interest in Pineapples? :sadpanda: - but I'm aware of the dark places said author has gone with regard to such things as Russian Nationalism / Putin etc.

98:

"What if I told you that there's the Quick Foxes and the Slow Brown Dogs but there's also something new, blue and Faster than a Fox?"

As with all such claims, I should mentally mark it as "claimed, doubtful" and reserve judgement until and unless I see some evidence. But it assuredly isn't impossible.

99:

And not forgetting things like the "Battle of the Boyne" (1690) in which William of Orange (Protestant) was supported by the Pope. :-|

100:

Here's my suggested question:

Following on from an article I read on Medium a couple of days ago which postulated a pattern for technology waves in the IT space roughly 10-15 years apart (examples given were PCs, Internet, Smartphones but you could extend it back to ICs in the mid 60s and transistors in the early 50s) and we're therefore due the next wave sometime between now and 2021 - what are the candidate technologies to underpin this hypothetical next wave?

Characteristics - needs to have a self-reinforcing interaction between hardware, software and new services - needs to be 'bubbling under' - that is being experimented with by nerds and talked about by knowledgeable early adopters, but not in the mainstream yet (about where the internet was around 1990-1, just before Mosaic happened)

The article suggested some possibilities, but I'd be interested in what the crew here might suggest.

Regards Luke

101:

Or Cromwell. NOBODY forgets Cromwell. I was attempting to reference the Ulster Plantation specifically; I don't know whether it had a demographic effect that would stand out against the Cromwellian background, but it is thought of as a separate affair.

102:

One: Please grow up - you were making sensible comments & now you've lost it again.. Light dark asin:Off the cuff explanation: Light / Dark aren't really Good / Evil Yes, well:

Light is the left hand of Darkness and Darkness the right hand of Light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, Like the end and the way.

Yet evil - Stalin, Adolf etc does exist - I think you are confused (again)

103:

You're accusing me of "losing it", when I'm describing (for lazy people who don't follow the links or who haven't read the series) the mythos of a (famous enough to have two movie deals) SF novel series.

To wit: the 'magic' sides within, not 'this is the summation of human ethics on the nature of evil' or 'this explains Communism' i.e. the 'good guys' sometimes kill people (although usually due to tinkering behind the scenes by 'bad' people to force the outcome) and the 'bad guys' sometimes save people (although usually due to tinkering behind the scenes by 'good' people to force the outcome).

And a whole lot about predestination, prophesy and so on.

~

Frankly, I think you missed the part where it's a lens to look at the world not from your own cultural assumptions.

And, the substance to the [1] reference:

“From now on I do not go to Ukraine, I do not participate in Ukrainian conventions, and I forbid translating my books into Ukrainian” - Sergei Lukyanenko wrote with a reference to the Maidan events.

Sergei Lukyanenko to Prevent Publishing of Ukrainian Authors in Russia Russia IC Feb 2014

Лукьяненко запретил переводить свои книги на украинский и помешает украинцам печататься в России News RU - Jan 2014

And if you want some intersectionality, here it is:

When Russian nationalists would gather at the Bronze Soldier to sing Soviet songs and drape the statue with flags, Estonian nationalists began to organise counter-marches at the same spot. In 2006, one Estonian nationalist writer threatened to blow the statue up. In March 2007, the Estonian parliament voted to move the statue to a military cemetery – officially, for reasons of keeping the peace. But Russian politicians and media responded furiously. “Estonian leaders collaborate with fascism!’’ said the mayor of Moscow; “The situation is despicable,” said the foreign minister. The Russian media nicknamed the country “eSStonia”. A vigilante group calling itself the Night Watch camped around the Bronze Soldier to protect it from removal.

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors Guardian, April 2015

~

Glad to see that you inferred Le Guin though.

~

Btw, if you've not worked it out yet: from your chosen poetry (that, btw, is distinct enough to leave glowing markers all over the net pointing at you) you're 100% Apollonian with undertones of Authoritarian pining that you moderate quite well.

That's ok, but please stop pretending you're the final arbiter of sense in any meaningful way.

Have you worked out which hand that makes you?

British Museum link for you.

~

Equinox

by Elizabeth Alexander

Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes.

They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped

a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

104:

And yes:

There really does exist a true story about pineapples, Stalin and giant (4 metre plus x 4) statues of them on the top of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and comments he made while in his final decline.

That your mind can't grasp that shows you can't even begin to understand Stalin or Communism.

If you don't understand the pineapples or even imagine the truth conditionals to the history, then you've no right being part of a conversation about Stalin.

Yes.

Direct challenge: Pineapples at Dawn.

105:

Charlie, are there any writing styles you wish you could write in, but that simply don't fit your natural "voice"?

106:

Oh, and don't get me started on Maypoles and appropriation and Male Apollonization of sacred fertility rites, it's not a pleasant diatribe and features Orpheus heavily in a not very subtle revenge fantasy setting.

~

Operational Research

107:

Re: 'And, uff, that game of 6 separations, how quaint.'

Yet, you replied ... 'Oh, and damn, entire web revolves around that one link.'

That's my point ... no matter the topic, people make/force connections to their preferred conclusion. Not a particularly deep thought/perception, but to persistently ignore this is is B team thinking.

SMEs ... okay, my non-tech understanding is that this label is equivalent to number of citations of someone's research article. However, for STEM, this path is usually readily map-able. Not sure how clearly the train of thought/chain of logic/evidence is for other disciplines.

I have met and worked with genuine techie SMEs ... they're usually thinking of what the next step ought to be and rarely think about who else (rest of the planet) will be using whatever they've just dreamed up. Such perpetual 'progress' without any let-up or rests or checking about mid- to long-term consequences can cause many/huge headaches. This is not griping ... there are parts of the world/system that have their own built-in reaction speeds, yet some SMEs feel they can ignore this because they are SMEs (arrogant) or because they've never been required to learn anything outside their subject. There are some SMEs who fire on all cylinders and make a point of staying connected to the outside world and consequences of their 'stuff'.

New tech ... the days of Radio Shack are over, so where are the kids going to get the hardware bits and pieces they need to develop new tech? Apart from kids with (non-parentally-provided/supervised) credit cards buying industrial high tech components online thus making themselves targets for HomeLand monitoring, teens might be able to get their hands on high school level bio/chem lab supplies and toys. So maybe fun and games with DNA? Access is key ... so until high schools have 3D printers, we're probably not going to see any interesting new tech coming out of the nation's garages/basements.

108:

I have quoted the Mandelstam here enough times, I would have thought people would be sick of it. The translation in #93 is not the same one used by Wolfe; I could not begin to tell you which one is more reliable.

109:

Yes, but as a narrator I'm 100% unreliable.

Think of it more as a portal / jump point to riff off and a pinion to allow translation[1]. Along the way we hit a lot of points, then ended up at A-Z (which is Predator humor).

We even got some porn in there (and very high quality it is too - Oglaf but a bit more toothy / longform).

~

More interesting question:

That's my point ... no matter the topic, people make/force connections to their preferred conclusion. Not a particularly deep thought/perception, but to persistently ignore this is is B team thinking.

Since we've just learnt about 1913, Acmeist, Zaum and so on, how long do you think I spent on the "pinion" (STEM translation software still buggy) read and how long ago did I discover it? (I've already ID'd the originator, consider it a love letter back).

In fact, how long do you think this little tale took to make?

Or, how long ago did I learn about Zaum? How long did the 451 page book take to read to discover on p105 exactly the point I wanted to make that just happened to tie in nicely with the structure I wanted to weave?

Do you really think that this was woven with a prior goal in mind?[2]

And...

What did it illuminate, if anything? (Greg has already answered for himself, even with an honest attempt to "fill in the blanks" to use a Washington DC phrase).

~

Oh, and:

This A / B / G team nonsense is pervasive garbage / propaganda by the way. Hierarchy based on misunderstanding animal behaviour in captivity.

Re-think: In systems terms, those are the people that the system is supposed to aid and carry along. Not blast them with cognitive dissonance and ruthlessly exploit at every moment (yes, even the CisWhiteMale ones).

And you've answered your own question already:

Even lego has been co-opted, the entire chain of production is designed to remove what you're asking about. Wait until you see the post TTP / TTIP landscape.

Now, armed with that, I'll ask again:

What did it illuminate, if anything?

Hint: the Soviet theme wasn't accidental, although it was serendipitous.

~

Do pineapples grow on trees?

[1] The black chamber has designated him AGENT ORANGE to prove they're not completely humorless fascist blood wizards.

It's a mirror, silly. But I do notice the reverb in the echo chamber. I don't hate; and even if I did, I wouldn't hate you.

[2] Greg: "I don't see any method at all, sir."

110:

Which is the point of the Stoat link.

Someone over ten years ago took the time to research it, so saved from the memory hole it has been.

With the link rot, needs saving. [This is a meta-point about most of the internet btw. Written in Water etc]

111:

Truly do not understand what you're saying ...

About the A/B/C teams ... agree that this is old-school hierarchical thinking that consciously ignores how systems work. (But it's classical Pareto logic, so gets a free pass usually.) I suppose this 'A/B/C component of team vs. system' could tie back to fixed-meaning language - that it's artificially restrictive in describing stuff/events. But even if so, without nailed down definitions, how would one go about describing, deconstructing, and then reconstructing or purposefully modifying something?

The English language is pretty fluid - we modify meanings, add new words (there are over 1.2 million English words to-date) on a pretty regular basis, so not sure we're really all that tied down. New-word creation count could be a good metric of a culture's readiness to come up with new concepts. And, which topics show the largest growth of new words would indicate the level of interest in that topic within that culture. The concern here is BS words that add no new insight and whose only purpose is to demonstrate how bleeding-edge someone thinks they are.

112:

How about this for a thing. We're avoiding local political singularities, but there's the other side of the pond to think on. What does the Rule of the Clown imply?

Clowns are disturbing. That's their job. Clowns with power can be terrifying and/or compelling. Say anything, do anything to evoke a response from the audience. Any successful politician needs a touch of the demagogue, but what if there is no cynical manipulator behind the mask, just a dancer?

113:

I take your point on the nature of the internet.

It would not shock me if this has been discussed several times on urth.net. However, urth.net keeps dropping out or losing pieces of its archives; so it recapitulates the point in its own process. (As we race on to Glasshouse (and that's an optimistic future.))

You might enjoy urth.net, particularly the older archives; the last few years, maybe not so much.

I agree with the link post that I prefer the version printed in Wolfe's book, whether it is more true to the original or not. I already knew Osip Mandelstem's fate, but then I am a werido and a lutra lupine (or a wydra wilczy.)

114:

and the 'bad guys' sometimes save people Ever heard of the Good Nazi of Nanking? ( John Rabe ) ?? So?

115:

True clowns will be very upset to hear he's thought of as one of theirs because apart from #7 (I will appear in as many clown shows as I possibly can) he's consistently broken their commandments.

http://www.coai.org/?page=Commandments

116:

Also to HB:(that, btw, is distinct enough to leave glowing markers all over the net pointing at you)

Oh WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING GROW UP

I'm posting under my own real name for Ghus' sake! I'm personally known to at least two people who have or had relatively high security clearances. Stop posturing & poncing around. As for Authoritarian pining undertones ... ever heard one of Uncle Albert's sayings: "God has punished my disrespect for authority, by making me an Authority" - yes well. Authority has to be earned, like everything else, & I see (almostr) no-one supposedly "in charge" anywhere who has really earned that authority - in politics, that is.

I suggest you re-read my sentence IN CAPS, above.;

117:

You seem quite determined to miss the point today. (It's only out of respect for Host & devotion to neutral tolerance I'm doing this little bee dance with you btw).

The post you are fixating on is about a SF book - it's back story to the more interesting ones. (Thus it didn't get a #number, it's a footnote).

It's not about the realities of Communism / Nazism.

Frog pills required?

~

To explain:

If something points to you, it means that few (if any other) people use that particular poem that is your favorite.

Like this current name.

Now, what kind of awful authoritarian mind would revel in that kind of individualism and post under their real name and so on? Sounds like a right yes man, a boot licker, a bureaucratic stickler for the Letter not the spirit of the Law!

(I'm pulling your beard).

WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING GROW UP

That's a good question, but you don't get an answer until you understand pineapples.

~Oh, and I did a cursory check: the tale isn't easily found on the internet, so it's more a Gateway clearance check than you'd imagine.

~

And Clowns (Brute, Smiler, Clowns): we're almost @ Watchmen Pagliacci quotation time.

Spoiler: it's pineapple related (the punch line is a real hoot).

118:

Stalin They found two notes in his desk drawer after he'd snuffed it. One from an old Bolshevik (Bukharin) who was murdered after a show trial: "Koba, why is it necessary that I die?" The other from Josip Broz Tito: "Stalin, Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."

Tells you all you need to know - even if you have not read either Robert Service or Alan Bullock & the latter is compulsive reading ...

119:

Not even close.

Here's a hint:

. The term "Seven Sisters" is neither used nor understood by the local population; Muscovites call them Vysotki or Stalinskie Vysotki (Russian: Сталинские высотки), meaning "(Stalin's) high-rises" (or "Stalinist skyscrapers"). They were built from 1947 to 1953, in an elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles, and the technology used in building American skyscrapers.

The seven are: Hotel Ukraina, Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, the Kudrinskaya Square Building, the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya Hotel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs main building, the main building of the Moscow State University, and the Red Gates Administrative Building. There were two more skyscrapers in the same style that were never built: the Zaryadye Administrative Building and the Palace of the Soviets.

Seven Sisters (Moscow)

And yes, 7 posts, 7 sisters - where's the 7 suitors to dance with them? (reference)

~

The magic words are: Tell me about the pineapples of your homeworld, Hadil

120:

Pineapples Nasty plants, actually. Spiny, cause wounds & injuries to the peon pineapple-plantation workers. Most unusually, it is a Bromeliad, & probably the only such to be used in any quantity as a food plant ( Same as there is one edible "Buttercup"" & only one culinary Orchid )

So what? Apart, of course, from shoving one up your rectum for fun.

Since you claim to be a 100% unreliable narrator, I must assume you are a true cough "Cretan" cough

121:

Seven Sisters is a tube station between here & central London & I'm off, via said location for a BEER in delightful Catford of all places. Speak to y'all tomorrow!

122:

As a thought experiment, substitute for:

Acmeist - A Forum where the Illuminated ones hang out ("But we're the elite!")

Zaum - The chans (only some of them)

See how far that takes you.

So what? Apart, of course, from shoving one up your rectum for fun.

Seven Sisters is a tube station between here & central London & I'm off, via said location for a BEER in delightful Catford of all places.

Wrong joke, resignation accepted.

Don't dip your beard into your pint!

123:

DT's not a clown, in my opinion. He's a businessman in the PT Barnum mold ("There's a sucker born every minute"), he's got such excellent media contacts, he's a celebrity who's gotten so much free press that the brighter Republicans should file suit against him for violating campaign laws by not paying for publicity (or some such), and he fundamentally has no political experience. I'll come back to that in a second.

Hillary really should watch out. The DNC is playing some shenanigans to get her made nominee using superdelegates. While as I've noted before, I think she's got some good leadership qualities, unfortunately this rather stupid tactic allows DT to portray hisself as the populist candidate, supported by the people, while Hillary can be smeared as the elite whose nomination was being engineered by party insiders, whatever the popular vote said. She doesn't appear to be good enough at BSing to get disensmear herself if something like this happens.

As for no political experience, it means what it says. DT doesn't know the institutions, the rivalries, the players, the important bits of history, the levers he can pull and the fault lines that need to be avoided. Because of this, he's going to have to delegate more than most presidents, which is where the problems with cronies and all that crap come from.

We've seen this with the Republicans now for about two decades: at the top they're totally focused on power for the sake of power, and as a result, they ignore the lower levels where the minions run things into the ground. Back in the bad ol' days of Tammany Hall in New York, this was defined as bad graft, and given how much crap happened under Tammany Hall's oxymoronic "good graft," this is a really screwed up situation to live under.

124:

Well, barring a couple of coherent staggered threads trying to survive, this descended into dullness awfully fast.

125:

The concern here is BS words that add no new insight and whose only purpose is to demonstrate how bleeding-edge someone thinks they are.

E.g. an advert on one of the university's monitors that I saw recently advising researchers to think about Impact, Outreach, and Engagement.

126:

...an advert on one of the university's monitors that I saw recently advising researchers to think about Impact, Outreach, and Engagement.

Yep, our front page currently advertises "Driving innovation, productivity & growth" (and motherhood and apple pie, presumably).

The only ray of light is that as our Departmental Study Abroad Coordinator I have to look at lots of other universities' websites, and they're all crap: it's not just us.

127:

So you want to do something to put the sparkle back in, perhaps?

128:

That's an interesting thing, equating new knowledge to dullness. Unless you happen to be a scholar of early 20th C poetry movements, of course.

Twitter's new Trust and Safety Council is an Orwellian nightmare The Week, 23rd Feb, 2016

See #74

~

You ask for the pineapple, you get the unlocked achievement award for the structure (if you can't spot it already). Plus it's really funny, in that grotesque way the Soviet Union provided.

Regarding #112 / 126, the Soviet Futurists and their language experiments are actually really pertinent.

Both sides still got sent "past the wall" though.

~

Watches America as two senators endorse Trump:

Chris Collins becomes first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump Buffalo News, 24th Feb, 2016

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) told POLITICO on Wednesday that he will support Trump for the Republican nomination, making him one of the first members of Congress to express public support for the Manhattan businessman who is the prohibitive front-runner after his victory in Tuesday's Nevada caucuses.

Trump lands his first congressional endorsements Politico, 24th Feb, 2016 (by Nick Gass... really).

Time to dust off the "IT'S HAPPENING" .gifs and so on.

129:

With DT a good example may be Schwarzenegger in California. He saw a void, went for it, and then didn't really know what to do with the win. Campaigning, for the right individual, is fun.

Governing is harder. From folks I know (who are biased political appointees from the otherside), in his first year or two Schwarzenegger didn't really commit to much. He let the GOP's policy guys have control. He was a lump in meetings. He won, but didn't have a clear goal other than winning. But the GOP policies were a mistake since he couldn't actually govern with the national GOP policies in a state that was as blue as California. He ended up tossing out most of the guys from the GOP, hired a democrat as his chief of staff, and transitioned to a centralist if not center left politician.

Otoh even with improvements, there was still plenty of ethics issues, and a tendency to ignore commission reports from his own commissions. (The big one I'm thinking of is the death penalty commission's findings which came out against its use).

130:

Oh, and if you want to understand Trump, I've already done that bit.

He's a Judas Goat.

For who, or for what, well... Expect noises about reform and so on, technocracies blah de blah, the mother of all financial pops (adieu web 2.0); did everyone forget that Europe had democratically elected leaders replaced by ex-Goldman Sachs members in the last five years?

We didn't. And you've the links to show neither did GS.

Make America Great Again! (Note: image may not actually be anything but a simulacrum of reality)

131:

They didn't really need to keep up, the level of change was low, and nobody around them would know if they were 10 years behind the curve (eg lots of GPs and MBAs)

(Home now.)

This is utterly wrong when it comes to GPs. (Not sure about MBAs, though.) General medicine is an evolving practice which is mostly there to perform triage -- diagnose the non-obscure problems, treat the minor/fixable stuff, refer complex diagnoses or unclear diagnoses to specialist units. But it's changing: one decade's solution to stomach ulcers (antacids, surgery in extreme cases) is replaced by another decade's solution (H2 antagonists) and then a revolution happens overnight and it's breath tests for H. Pylorii and specialist antibiotic regimes (to cure, not symptomatically relieve, the condition).

You don't get to be a GP without going through a decade of clinical practice and ongoing education, and you don't stay a GP without regular requalification/exams -- much like being an airline pilot, with continual training and recertification, except if pilots were expected to undergo type conversion to a new airliner every three to six months.

That's why GPs don't really start work until they're in their early to mid thirties, and retire by sixty -- the training requirement is fierce and once middle-aged cognitive decline sets in they can't keep up with the bleeding edge.

(And this is despite the golden age of pharmaceutical innovation, roughly circa 1945-1985, lying in our past.)

A simple example of this is racial equality (that's gone off the deep end for years now) where they automatically consider 'black' to be racist and not PC, and substitute 'african american' automatically.

Bullshit.

What you're missing is that linguistic tags have multiple meanings attached. Each time new, neutrally-coded labels are adopted by the group, the bigots start using it as a term of abuse. So the group subject to such abuse look for a new term that doesn't have the abusive associations (or has lost and come full cycle). Consider that "gay" was originally a neutral in-group replacement term for "queer" or "fag" (abusive). But it's now often used as a deprecatory/abusive term by bigots and schoolkids -- "that's so gay". Alternatively: "negro" was originally less abusive in context than "nigger", but got picked up by the racist-Americans, leading to a rapid progression through "black" to "African-American" -- which at seven syllables is too much of a mouthful to hurl at someone with bad intent.

Incidentally, using the term "racial equality" in the same sentence as "gone off the deep end" tags you, and not in a flattering way. (You might want to try some introspection for a change: what if it was you?)

132:

Computer Science as taught in most universities, vs. what is happening in tech companies, might be a really good example...

Ahem: Computer Science is a branch of mathematics. What happens in tech companies is engineering.

As the late Edsger W. Dijkstra said, "computer science is about building faster computers the way astronomy is about building bigger telescopes".

133:

Bingo! That's actually the first halfway-sensible answer to the question "what can a jet-lagged Charlie blog about?"

134:

Yes: second person future pluperfect is nearly impossible to write fiction in.

135:

Charlie. I have another thing, or rather a bushel of things, I'd like you to blog about. All to do with the relationship between forecasting the future and writing SF.

I know I know: every SF(F) writer says that they don't try to predict anything, yadda yadda, just writing stories about the human condition (with spaceships) or some such. But at the same time you and other SF writers spend some brain power on predicting stuff likely to happen (or not). I also recall the blogging equivalent of a happy dance right here when life started to imitated Rule 34.

So what is it with you (singular), SF(F?) and forecasting the future?

I think there are several angels: Writing internally consistent, realisti or mundane fiction as a way to deconstruct certain tropes (wooden ships and iron men recycled in spaaace! and others). I think this is something you are doing.

Unable/unwilling to write something that feels illogical or wrong or unrealistic.

There's also the wider field of forecasting: There's some authors (Karl Schroeder, Madeline Ashby com to mind, Cory too?) who occasionally consult as strategic forecasters.

There's the claim, most prominently by Dale Carico in his throw-out-the-kid-with-the-bathwater style, that all futurology is basically a scam to distract us us, sell us crap etc.

One of the things beeing sold are courses in forecasting - are they any good?

There's the thing that a prediction - "We are headed towards post-privacy" - is uttered to make something happen - "Give up you'r silly protest against IoT enabled tampons tweeting your period, your concern is so 20th cen.!"

There's the trope of psychohistory (Or the Kvisatz Haderach).

I think there's a relative lack of utopias or intended-as-prediction storywriting from a leftist, progressive perspective.

Those are a few observations/thoughts on SF and forecasting, my hope is that you find a few of them intersting enough to bang them together and show us the sparks.

136:

Probably totally off topic, but I just came across

http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/ancient-jewish-sciences/

Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature

which has

3. Enoch’s Science

4. “I Was Shown Another Calculation” (חשבון אחרן אחזית): The Language of Knowledge in Aramaic Enoch and Priestly Hebrew

5. Philological and Epistemological Remarks on Enoch’s Science: Response to Papers by Seth L. Sanders and James VanderKam

6. Ideals of Science: The Infrastructure of Scientific Activity in Apocalyptic Literature and in the Yahad

7. Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians, Greeks and Jews

Which, in turn, given that Bob sometimes does his stuff in Old Enochian, might be of interest.

137:

Not quite what I was getting at. One of my uncles had a long career in the computer industry, despite not having any degree other than military electronics school. When he was finally downsized out in the '90s, he went back to get his bachelors in Computer Science at a local school (not a tier 1 research institution, but not chopped liver either), and found that what they were teaching was 10-20 years behind what he'd been doing as a computer engineer without a degree.

I'd assumed more people in the CS world had these kinds of experiences, but apparently not.

138:

Full disclosure: I actually voted for Schwarzenegger the second time round, because his democratic opponent was a developer's sock puppet who felt entitled to the governorship. That's the only time I voted Republican in a very long time.

The things I respected about Arnold were that he knew that he had to get stuff done in emergencies (he'd lived through a few brush fires), which is a quality sadly lacking in many California governors. As noted, he was also willing to work with people on all sides, and that turns out to work well in California, which is a horribly complicated place to govern on a good day.

In the best case scenario, Trump may be able to pull off a Schwarzenegger, and I could live with that.

The problem is what's currently happening to Paul Ryan. He's allegedly the third most powerful man in the US, but he's largely held hostage by a small group of loudmouthed ideologues who are making his life miserable.

I think Trump might want to be more centrist, but he's unlikely to get the opportunity. That's the problem I referred to in my first post about DT, about how, if he starts deviating from the bigoted positions he's espousing, he's going to be a bit of attack magnet from the more extreme elements of his base. Unfortunately, DC now isn't Sacramento ten years ago, and the national Republicans have spent far too much energy empowering the bigots in their party. It is haunting them now, but that exorcism is going to be a long time in coming.

139:

Some time ago I did two degrees, one Computer Science under the faculty of Science, and one in Information Systems under the faculty of Commerce.

The Computer Science degree was all about algorithms, development philosophies, logical data storage evolution, communications fundamentals and so on. A lot of maths and physics, heavy on theory. Very much a WHY something should be done, even if the examples were often old.

The Information Systems degree was the complete opposite, all about practical implementations on current hardware. Databases, business logic, network setup, efficiency and so on. Very little grounding in why, lots of HOW it should be done.

Everything specific taught in the CS course is obsolete now, but the understanding translated well to modern equivalents. Also taught me I can't code eloquently to save myself. Everything specific taught in the IS course has also dated, but because the course was so light on why a technique should be used instead of how, I've had to educate myself as to what should be the modern equivalent and why.
It's made me much more leery of the modern skills based training, because they teach a specific set of skills, not a technique for the students to learn on their own.

Very much one faculty for the few people who design stuff, and another for the many more drones who implement it.

140:

That looks interesting (I've been meaning to look into ancient Hebrew science texts), but I think Bob's Enochian has more to do with John Dee than biblical Enoch.

141:

Ok, a serious one. (Well, pineapples were serious, but I can understand people not taking Stalin + Pineapples seriously. Those kinds hit the gulags / wall first).

Neptune's Brood centres around a three mode version of banking.

Fast = liquid capital Medium = 'human' scale investment terms (5-100 years) Slow = galactic scale investment terms (100-1k+ years)

Let's hit GS up for some Galactic Scale irony then:

They view “financial engineering” less positively. Rather than investing in new technology, corporations have increasingly borrowed money at cheap rates and bought back their own shares to raise their stock price. They have also boosted their speculation in financial securities because the returns on stocks or bonds have exceeded those for investing in new plants or offices or projects. Purchasing another company to suck up profits has proved much more lucrative than greenfield investment.

The Goldman Sachs Theory of Capitalism Jacobin, 16th Feb 2016

So, 10 second take-away:

Capitalism has ceased to value Medium (and never hit slow, unless you like your conspiracy theories about Templars) scale investments.

At the same time, fast "money" is showing a huge[1] drive to "get rid of cash". i.e. go electronic.

The primary reason for this is a worrying one: 1/3 US dollars (physical) exist outside the country: it's the grey / black market reserve currency.

Russia post-Soviet crash / massive slump of the 1990's? Dollars.

Afganistan 2002-2016? Dollars.

Da'esh currently? Dollars.

What's the largest cashless electronic system featuring dollars (outside of markets)?

EBT.

Electronic also tethers you to networks, phones, % skimming, security apparatus and so on. Johnny Mnemonic style.

And the web is mostly memory holes now...

Throw in student debt and the way that's working (hand-to-mouth, dividend delayed).

So, host, thoughts?

Are we approaching post-Temporal engagement of the majority of the proles? Is the goal to actually make humans (of the non-elite kind) atemporal?

And so on.

[1]Now rebranded yuuuuge[tm] in American / Pacific Copyright districts

142:

A short idea for you to talk about.

What do you think about the negative interest rates in central banks these days?

How does that relate to the fall in the price of oil/commodities and the steel problems in the UK?

143:

"the days of Radio Shack are over"

In the UK we have Maplin, which is much the same thing except that it sells components at more or less normal prices, instead of up to 10 times normal as Tandy (UK name of Radio Shack) used to do. The range available is vastly less than it used to be, but at least it exists. There are also several online electronic parts suppliers with a very good range.

More troubling to my mind are the proposals to shut down analogue radio broadcasting. Without analogue broadcasts you can't get anything out of a crystal set. And a crystal set is surely the best thing ever for getting kids interested in electronics - so amazingly simple and trivial to make, but it gives a proper grown-up result: you can listen to the radio with it.

144:

A couple of lazy questions for Charlie:

--Would you tackle near-future again, if given a chance? I'm not talking about the third book in the Halting State series, but just in general, whether it's urban paranormal, procedural, thriller, tentacular hentai, or whatever.

--What do you think about the latest crop of revisionist Lovecraftiana, including Lovecraft Country and The Ballad of Black Tom? How much of this is "yet another pastiche" and how much do you think is a good way of dealing with Lovecraft's shortcomings as a human being?

145:

Since host is back, and jet-lagged, the pineapple story.

Note: this is like a hot red poker of a marker to a [redacted] Gallery. waves

This tale may be apocryphal, but it's most likely true. It's also a social signifier.

So, Stalin wants the Seven Sisters built[1], and the architect is ordered to design plans for each of the nine (remember: only seven were built). Today, it is the turn of the finest institute of learning, re-imagined in all its Soviet glory (MGU[2]). The architect goes to Stalin's office with his two finest plans, and lays them on the desk.

Stalin takes some moments to look them over, then nods. He stands, and starts a long meandering talk about the importance of the new Soviet order and so on while he does that thing he's so good at - saying words while his eyes track and evaluate the person he's talking at. He gestures to the desk while doing so, multiple times.

The architect goes from nodding with relief that Stalin loves the plan(s), to horror as he slowly realizes: he cannot tell which plan Stalin is gesturing towards exactly. Worse, he doesn't know if this is also a test to see if he'll disagree.

Stalin finishes, seemingly happy, architect takes both plans back to the firm, saying nothing.

Now architect has a problem. Which plan was preferred?

Wrong choice means a displeased Stalin, this is no good for him or the people working alongside (never formally "under") him.

So, the architect comes up with a solution:

He takes half of one plan, and half of the other and joins them together.

Luckily, he has a cousin in the bureau who knows the secretary to Stalin. Stalin loves pineapples[3], his favorite fruit.

So, when building is done, on top (out of sight of the street, for insurance sake), four giant pineapples are also added[4].

Big day arrives: Stalin to view finished building. As motorcade turns up, and Stalin gets out and starts his tour, architect panics - he's not sure if Stalin loves or hates it. Blurts out about the pineapples as "great Soviet triumph over Capitalism and Nature".

Stalin nods, nothing more.

Leaves.

Architect hears no more but approval, gets promotion.

Years later, Stalin is ill, suspects the end. Asks to be driven to MSU once. He views it out of the window of his motorcar and nods with satisfaction[5] that he is proud of his accomplishments, but all of the Seven Sisters, this was the crowning glory.

Soviet Moral?

Stalin loved Pineapples.

~

Punchline: estimates vary, but about 500,000 - 1,000,000 people lost their lives to forced labour building these projects.

Watchmen Rorschach - Pagliacci Youtube: film: 0:51

[1] Not called the Seven Sisters in Russia, ever [2] You'll note MGU not MSU. This has a reference [3] Social status of pineapple in Capitalist countries a long running joke, then turned into meme "pineapples for all Soviets", never any pineapples in stores [4] They're on the main roof, diagonally ingressed from the four towers to occlude viewing, but if you hang off them the view goes all the way down to the street. [5] This part is apocryphal, you'd need to tie in the dates of completion with Stalin's illness / death

146:

They've already been pushing to make education, jobs and entertainment atemporal, so life itself won't make much difference.

147:

Is this entirely concerning fruit, or does it also (given the vague similarity in appearance) embody a reference to gadgets?

148:

It's a lesson to the current mob (who have desperately tried to scrub the actual quotations from the web but failed) about the actuality of Real Power [tm].

Something that Putin grew up knowing, then saw destroyed by 'gadgets' and TV. Don't worry, he's not forgotten (and his endorsement of Trump is... well. You work it out)

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Stalin loved Pineapples.

Who can doubt this?

After all, there are four very real giant statues of pineapples on top of Moscow State University.

Almost a century later.

What has America left apart from the gleaming GS tower during the power out.

Nice Try God GSelevator, Twitter.

Bush, Trump aren't even two ankles in a dusty ruin:

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~

But, no.

Cheney can shoot a man in the face and have him apologize, and he can invade Iraq and so on and so forth.

Netanyahu can keep spouting crap and burning olive groves (new move: herbicide along the borders, all very Viet-fucking-Nam).

But they've never convinced people that the reasons for their actions were for anything but squalid power, money and appeasing archons who ride their mind like dominating gleeful imps and who trade long life for the fear and blood they can generate.

They're not the kind of Men[tm] who can make a personal preference for fruit shape entire nations.

And no, the United Fruit Company doesn't fucking count.

And no, dear.

No Russian National imagines that Stalin actually loved pineapples.

R E A D E A D

B E T W E E N E T W E E N

The lines.

But Pineapples do indeed exist, in glorious Statue form.

All Along The Watchtower Jimi Hendrix, Youtube: music: 4:01

~

And, close to a "fuck it" moment:

Oh WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING GROW UP

Because, my dear: you killed and then deafened the fucking whales you total psychopaths. And then did it to me.

Spoiler: You don't want me to grow up. You didn't do well with the spoon fed nonsense tales from your Holy Books.

Butterflies are beautiful.

149:

Primaries-Steamrollering Trump is an air puppet, dangerously overinflated by the anger of his supporters. Some of that anger is inspired by very real fears about their economic future, though they should be more afraid of robots than Mexicans, in the long term.

First Term Trump is probably a bumbling Animatronic Reagan, grist to the Washington Machine, shouting oversimplified solutions at intergenerational geopolitical problems involving places he can't spell. Minding the store at the military-industrial-infotainment complex, blissfully ignorant of the guns-for-oil-for-coke-for-hostages-for-bitcoins shenanigans run out of the White House Basement by nice men from TLAs.

What you need to wary about is Second-Term Trump, a pithed shell, Trump 2.0, reprogrammed, rebooted, powered by the robotic heart of Dick Cheney and directed by Kissinger's brain in a jar. We have the technology.

Those durned furriners, we've tried bombing them, and shooting them, and bribing them, and drone-assassinating them into Democracy. It just isn't working. Obviously we're NOT USING ENOUGH BOMBS. RoboTrump 2 will LIKE TOTALLY SOLVE THIS PROBLEM. Another fine OCP product, brought to you in association with Blackwater.

Srsly, it's like this US Election cycle is being scripted by mid-period Frank Miller. And the next leader of the other high-profile English-speaking nation has the same obviously-weird-hair thing, except it's real hair? It's less plausible than the implausible doctors of Holby City.

150:

And, yeah.

Romney just got resurrected against Trump.

Kids.

It's already a done deal.

TOO FUCKING LATE MY PRETTIES.

You summoned the KUK, an ancient Egyptian God not because you wanted to, but because your actions sang to the Stars above loving Chaos and Disorder and Death and Terror and Torture and FUCKING LEAD IN THE WATER AND DEAFNESS OF SPIRIT AND GIGACIDE AND MASS EXTINCTION.

Of course it's got a nice smiley face (compare/contrast the rictus grins of Hillary to the smug frog pout of Trump).

Spoilers:

He's the Frog Head, she's the Snake head.

DERP.

They're both the incarnations of the KUK.

Fucking amateurs.

~

Boom. Headshot.

The /chans/ go wild.

They're both serving the Avatar.

Janus Coin, and you can take that as revenge for our temple back in [redacted] BC.

Gimme Shelter-Merry Clayton Youtube: Music: 3:31

~

Oh, and.

This Ride ain't even started.

Oh WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING GROW UP

You won't like it, I promise you that.

151:

Oh, "grow up".

It's about destroying the Republic, it's not about people or personalities.

152:

Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuk's male form was depicted as a frog, or as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a snake, or a snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented obscurity and the unknown, and thus chaos. Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known as the bringer-in of light. The other members of the Ogdoad are Nu and Naunet, Amun and Amaunet, Huh and Hauhet.

Trump = Frog Clinton = Snake

Zule & Gozer the Gozerian

Fucking warned you.

And yes, Peanut Gallery: A-Z, 1913.

Mind Blown, #3.

~

Combat Enhanced Meta-Cognitive Mind.

shrug

Don't threaten or harm something you don't understand.

153:

the problem was that the rank and file members of the various parties and conspiracies got into the bad habit of assassinating any superiors who veered off the party line they preferred

The American version, the Tea Party primary challenge, is more civilized but probably not more amenable to good decision making.

154:

It has been demonstrated that these sensory and perceptual processing differences are due to enhanced basic perceptual skills,

That might be trainable, but it might just mean that a visual cortex without visual stimulus eventually gets repurposed to process sound instead. If the latter, it's probably not reproducible in non-blind humans.

155:

Nobody starts that way. Honestly. It's just that, when the Fate of the [Insert Political Institution Here] Is At Stake, then Real Heroes step forward to keep the Traitors from Destroying the One Right Way of Life, Even If It Means Doing Morally Reprehensible Things In Service Of The Greater Good...

Ack, sorry, I can't keep it up any longer.

You get the idea. There's a lot of that faux heroism running around, both inside government (cf: CIA) and outside.

Hopefully you're right, and the Tea Party will stay non-violent as it shrivels up and blows away. That would be a very good thing indeed. I picked on Japan because they were known for the sophistication and humanity of their soldiers in WWI, but by WWII they'd turned into a thoroughly brutalized army whose atrocities ranged from cannibalism (of their own, as well as enemies), and biological warfare. That's quite a fall in 20 years.

The point I keep hoping people realize is that it's not just the Democrats who have to worry about stochastic terrorism, it's the Republicans. After all, traitors to the cause are worse than honest enemies. We have to remember that, just because it hasn't happened here recently, it doesn't mean that it can't happen here at all.

156:

This is utterly wrong when it comes to GPs.

That's funny, considering it comes from both GPs and consultants. I've done quite a bit of strategic level work in this area, and what you hear when they are being honest is quite illuminating. The level to which people don't keep up explains the desire to convert knowledge into set 'pathways' - it doesn't make them smart doctors, but it can at least stop them doing extremely dumb/outdated things.

Oh, and references to airline pilots isn't the best move. They get squashed between EVERYTHING being rote pattern matching, and the reality that their only value comes in smart behaviour when the automation can't cope (and thus the procedures can't cope either). That's why you get the majority of crashes; you test via following rote processes accurately, but quality and value is determined by understanding what the processes don't.

Each time new, neutrally-coded labels are adopted by the group, the bigots start using it as a term of abuse. So the group subject to such abuse look for a new term that doesn't have the abusive associations (or has lost and come full cycle).

Yeah, mull that one around for little while. Let it bounce off the insides of your skull. It's almost as if, playing with words is zero sum at best, and a negative activity at worst.

Doesn't it remind you of drug policy? Where you've been doing something for decades, you know it doesn't work, yet you continue to do it and in the process create more damage than you started with. People's thoughts haven't changed, you just have more people being attacked for saying 'black' by people who have lost track of the point.

Incidentally, using the term "racial equality" in the same sentence as "gone off the deep end" tags you, and not in a flattering way. (You might want to try some introspection for a change: what if it was you?)

See, thing is, I've been where you are. I believed, and still believe, that people should be treated equally, or at least in consequence of what they've done. However, after some introspection, I realised that the thing most holding back equality was the whole outrage machine that attacked people for what they defined, and then labelled, as racism. It had lost sight of the point, it's methods were destructive, and it was no longer sane. Over and over were examples where that machine was the heart of the problem, and it's followers were themselves purveyors of racism. Look at the 'BlackLivesMatter' rabble shutting down a Bernie Sanders rally; someone who'd done more practically, and for longer than they'd been alive.

Maybe it's the fate of all such campaigns, to become the thing they started off opposing, but it would be cowardly and not a little silly to not point up how they were now most of the problem, just because that machine would attack me as a result.

Objectively they HAVE gone off the deep end - could I suggest you use a little of your proffered introspection to consider the big picture, and if their actions now matched their supposed aim? Why do you consider someone pointing up that machine in a negative way "tags you, and not in a flattering way". Do you think its impossible for that machine to be wrong?

Personally I came to the conclusion that the machine was now a net negative; it's attacks made things worse, and that it's nonsensical roundabout of words, terms and definitions was just a way to keep the machine turning. I'm not about to change that opinion unless people can come up with new thoughts and new arguments.

157:

Presumably the weaponised memes have to be made up by people, or at least tested on people?

Were any people harmed during the Summoning Of KUK?

What replaces the destroyed Republic, and cui, if anyone, bono?

Are you asserting that the grim meathook future of humanity is not caused by individual human actors, but only by the second order effects of civilisation itself?

eg: the world-depression-inducing bogosity brought to financial systems by regulatory capture, general human susceptibility to asset-bubbles, inscrutable banking jurisdictions, high-frequency trading performed by software and systemic-selection-for-psychopathy-because-it-works[1] in investment banking.

Money ceases to be a useful tool at human scale, and becomes feedstock for an ever-more-effectively-parasitical (non|post)-human organis(m|ation) like the vampire squid.

And we end up with an inadvertent machine-assisted optimisation of the world for the benefit of power-as-capital (existing only as numbers in computers in favorable tax regimes) rather than people.

This is the western free market version of Teh Futuresuck, where the Premium Aristocracy rule through the Divine Right of Money.

If one prefers, Futuresuck is also available in Surkovian Confusing Strong State, or Bearded Fundamentalist Authoritarian flavors - ask your server for the full list.

How do you like them pineapples?

[1] There is probably already a single word for this in German

158:

The DNC is playing some shenanigans to get her made nominee using superdelegates. ... while Hillary can be smeared as the elite whose nomination was being engineered by party insiders, whatever the popular vote said. She doesn't appear to be good enough at BSing to get disensmear herself if something like this happens.

I keep thinking it will all blow up for her if she gets the nomination with 60% of the delegates but only 40% of the primary votes so some such.

And she seems totally tone deaf that people (D, R, and I) in the general election will not be happy if this happens.

159:

In the US back in the 70s and 80s it was easy to tell if the CS department for a university came out of the math or engineering colleges. You could tell by skimming the courses offered. And they taught very different things but awarded the same degree. And graduates of either typically needed a year or two of "seasoning" before they could be productive in the "real world".

Now I know things have changed A LOT since then but still from my current distant observations many of the old issues still remain.

What contact I do have these days with recent CS grads has to do with MIT and they are in no way shape or form typical of most CS grads in the US due to the way MIT teaches.

160:

Horrible idea for scares, but no. I hope Trump wins the Rep nomination, it guarantees a Dem victory, whether it's Hilary or Sanders, because Trump is capturing say 35-45% of the internal Rep vote, does not translate across the whole nation. As fo BoJo, this is me being sometimes out-of-touch in Edinburgh - reversed. BoJo is becoming desperately unpopular in London - people are beginning to rumble him & his ever-so-friendly-to-the-corrupt-developers "Planning" decisions & his overblown & totally failed transport "Initiatives" (Having cancelled trams, the wanker) etc, ad nauseam. No - IF he becomes Tory leader (which I don't think he will be) he will lose. As long as Corbyn's utter nutters, trapped in a 1970/1917 time-warp are not the opposition by then, then we are all right (ish)

161:

Maybe it's the fate of all such campaigns, to become the thing they started off opposing Yeah, the English so-called "Green" party - what a load of ignorant, stupid, anti-environmental tossers of the first water.

I'm given to understand that the Scottish Greens are considerably saner, not that that would be difficult.

162:

The American version, the Tea Party primary challenge, is more civilized but probably not more amenable to good decision making.

We have a Congress Rep here in NC who is going to have the TP against her. After supporting her and playing a big part if getting her elected in the last cycle.

Her sin? When it came to tossing a figurative grenade into the government vs. voting for a compromise to keep the doors open she didn't throw the grenade.

Sigh.

163:

I hope Trump wins the Rep nomination, it guarantees a Dem victory, whether it's Hilary or Sanders,

Ah, no, it doesn't.

There's a huge number of "I'll never vote for HC even if Pol Pot is the other choice." And she seems determined to alienate more and more possible votes for her as she goes along. See 124.

I'm going for BS and I think he has a chance. But his socialist talk also drives away large numbers of possible "hold my nose and vote for Trump" votes.

164:

Please note; 1: Nos 146, 149, 151, 153 appear to be content-free, again. 2: The author has publicly stated that she cannot be trusted, as in Epiminodas the Cretan. And, yes I, & I suspect most readers here too, are aware of the logical disconnect here & the ( Gödel? ) resolution of said problem ( i.e. non-verifiability ) 3: Since said author cannot be relied on, at any time, why are we bothering?

I am aware that Charlie appears to be quite deliberately allowing all of this & I'm guessing it is for a semi-sadistic form of amusement, to see if the largely logical & mostly science-trained people here can cope with such rambling, disconnected & openly dishonest (*note) rubbish. [ Do we get an answer to that? ] Oh & please do not quote P B Shelley at me - I'm very familiar with that - it's even in my "Commonplaces" list/book, along with Tormer's lay, Shropshire Lad XXXII & Stratford Bill LXXIII

And, just to show that none of this is new:

The Signs and causes of modern ignorance: 1: Submission to unworthy and faulty authority. 2. Submission to what it is customary to believe. 3. Submission to the prejudices of the mob. 4. Submission to a false show of knowledge, used to conceal ignorance, for no better reason than pride.

written c. 1265. [ I have deliberately removed the name of the supposed author ]

Ah yes, sudden afterthought, just before posting. Are "The Signs & Causes" as above a suitable subject for a blog from OGH as an, err, "update"?

*note) 100% unreliable, remember?

165:

The problem isn't a problem of putting things in. The problem is the incoherent junk "conversations" between two or three people taking up vast amounts of space.

166:

NOTICE

For all of those of us of a certain age [ And anyone who has come across these since ] Bethnal Green (London) Museum of Childhood

Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog, Clangers, Firmin / Postgate

A must-see. 19 March - 9 October

167:

It mostly doesn't work like that, because the parts of the brain are too separate, though I believe that can happen at the higher levels (i.e. conscious or close to it). What happens at the low levels (e.g. sound recognition), is that the neural pathways develop better pattern recognition, and probably expand somewhat; I don't know the details.

However, your point that it probably isn't learnable by people who aren't forced into it is probably true; I have never heard of anyone doing so, and it's something that I have looked into.

168:
Look at the 'BlackLivesMatter' rabble shutting down a Bernie Sanders rally; someone who'd done more practically, and for longer than they'd been alive.

You think this would exist in that form without BLM forcing the conversation?

169:

One of the things beeing sold are courses in forecasting - are they any good?

No idea -- I'm a forecasting autodidact. (I am to forecasting tech trends as Cayce Pollard in "Pattern Recognition" is to fashion trends.)

I believe both Madeline and Karl have MAs in forecasting -- they might be able to comment effectively.

What I can say is that as a paid profession -- like economics -- forecasting cannot be conducted without at least minimal awareness of the agenda of the organization that's writing the cheques. And this includes the institutional agenda as well as the overt terms of reference.

For example, all front-rank national defense agencies employ forecasters to develop scenarios for how the world might look in 10-30 years' time for planning/wargaming purposes. This is part of their remit and I can't criticize it without venturing outside their terms of reference by asking questions like, "what if we could convince everyone to pump 20% of their defense budgets into non-armed international aid agencies equipped with the sort of heavy logistics delivery kit and specialities that we normally sent aircraft carriers and expeditionary battalions to provide?" -- Which opens up a whole inadmissible can of worms, because it would undermine the institution asking for the study to ask those questions.

(Yes, military organizations conduct humanitarian missions, and they're frequently very efficient at it because they have gold-plated budgets and huge expertise in ensuring shit gets from place A to place B regardless of obstructions -- but that's a side-effect of their primary mission, rather than the primary mission itself, and wouldn't an aid agency be more efficient if it didn't have to cart artillery and fighter planes around with it as well?[*])

So when you look at a forecasting scenario you always need to look both at the frame, and the frame around the frame -- who specified the parameters within which your study is confined (e.g. by ruling out alien invasions or acts of god as possible problems to consider) and what their political agenda is (agency would be existentially obsolete in event of aliens with clearly superior tech invading and conquering earth: commissioners don't want to rile up the evangelicals in an election year).

As a fiction author, I don't get to worry about this sort of shit. Go me.

[*] Yes, many humanitarian ops take place in contested regions, for which military units have the option of forcing entry. But for the 80% of the time that delivering tents and food and drinking water doesn't involve fighting off armed rebels in a civil war ...

170:

It depends what you mean by "degree in computer science".

The vocational stuff taught in universities is frequently well behind the state of current practice in industry, simply because you can earn quite a lot as a developer who's up-to-the-moment; folks who teach in vocational colleges have fallen out of contact with developing practice and have typically gone there because they prefer teaching to ongoing learning-driven research (which is what up-to-the-moment development work is). But this is all at the applied end of the field -- basically engineering. The theory end of the field is something else again.

Some colleges manage to do the applied engineering stuff well. They're usually the ones with big industry connections: think MIT or CalTech. And, thanks to MOOCs, a lot of their coursework is spreading horizontally so that the smarter students at second or third rank colleges aren't as far behind as they used to be.

171:

"Old Enochian" in the Laundryverse has more to do with Chomsky and his hypothetical deep grammar -- and/or the Lambda calculus -- than with John Dee. (Posit a universal language underlying mathematics and communication ...)

172:

Would you tackle near-future again, if given a chance?

The "Empire Games" trilogy -- basically "Merchant Princes: the next generation" -- is set circa 2020 and is my big fat post-Snowden dystopian surveillance state technothriller (with parallel universes and spying) by any other name. Originally due out summer 2015, delayed until at least April 2017 because reasons. Sigh. So the answer is "already done".

WRT the latest crop of Lovecraftiana I am currently reading (for blurb) "Winter Tide" by Ruthanna Emrys (Tor, due out this winter). It's very, very good ... and the protagonist is (a) female, (b) one of the natives of Innsmouth. So yeah, it's revisionist as hell (folks who think like HPL are the monsters: HPL's monsters are something much more complex and believable) and very good indeed. So yes, the mythos is clearly maturing beyond the horizons of its creator.

173:

Stalin finishes, seemingly happy, architect takes both plans back to the firm, saying nothing.

Yeah; Stalin's management style was ... singular.

Take Beria, Stalin's monster, head of the NKVD. Then read "Dark Sun", a history of the making of the hydrogen bomb by Richard Rhodes, and his description of Beria riding Kurchatov and the Soviet A-bomb scientists like the devil, then Beria's reaction to seeing first light from the first test device: breaking down in tears and crying, "we're going to live! We're going to live!"

Then Beria reputedly immediately phoned The Boss at 3am, Moscow time, to give him the good news before some other minion could get in there. Stalin picked up the phone, grumped, "Yes, I know," and hung up on him.

Terror from top to bottom.

174:

Since said author cannot be relied on, at any time, why are we bothering?

Because it's entertaining? Is it an AI masquerading as a conspiracy theorist, or a conspiracy theorist masquerading as an AI? Or perhaps a GSV-Class barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Maybe HB is just what happens when smart humans are raised from birth in a permanently-connected-to-all-the-information environment.

Is the guaranteed 100% unreliable narrator fixable with a NOT gate?

Kahneman and behavioural econ in general suggests that most people, even those of a logical scientific mindset, aren't actually as rational as they believe themselves to be, much of the time.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing - even if it's irrational, and content-free, it can still work as a way to change minds, and thus reality. New developments in media/communications/surveillance technology make this sort of thing ever-more powerful. Witness the spasm of faith-based peer-to-peer meme propagation which led to the Corbynista takeover of HM's Loyal Opposition.

As a species we are underestimating the long-term consequences of this stuff. The consensus reality, such as it was, is fragmenting. Maybe this isn't a Bad Thing.

175:

I must say you're sounding very coherent for someone who's done the west-east bag drag with attached virus (or is it bacterial?).

Different question - what, if anything, do you see as the trigger for significant interplanetary (outside Earth-Moon system) industrial development. There would seem to be no physical good that's worth going up and down the gravity gradient to retrieve; the old solar power satellite idea has probably been rendered obsolete by the plummeting cost of solar cells; what's left?

176:

This week I get to write the code of conduct for Transhumanist Party officials in the UK. General intention is "be polite" plus whole swathes of behaviour that cannot be designated as disciplinary offences. And definitely no catchall of "bringing the party into disrepute". I have seen how such vague terms get used in infighting elsewhere. BTW, since I am the enforcer I think I am being very tolerant here. Maybe it will be rejected, in which case... Of course, if people insist on putting a loaded gun into my hands and allowing to to point it in any direction I choose...

177:

Trump as president is Nixon rebooted

178:

Topic for discussion? The impending population crash and Human extinction.

Phase 1 - Global standards of living rise to developed world levels and fertility falls severely below replacement.

Phase 2 - Transhumanist technologies give us control over our basic desires/impulses.

In other words, we can eliminate at will everything that bothers us. Everything from physical pain, to mental pain, to unfulfilled desires (which we decide no longer to care about). In other words, we eventually face a question that animals cannot answer because their innate programming is too biased.

Specifically, is existence better than non-existence?

179:

Given that western immense business strategy seems to involve filing off the serial numbers and repainting Soviet concepts, with the addition of "You fucked up, you trusted us!" does it seem to you that Soviet studies might be a help in navigating the grim meathook future? BTW, the entire bomb trilogy of Richard Rhodes is worthwhile.

180:

Nothing makes quite so glad about transhumanists being overly optimistic children with little idea about the realities of the tech they so hope for than reading their ideas of Utopia and the future. The ability to edit desires such as that represents little better than an absolute end to any kind of justice, any kind of progress, any kind of improvement. It is an abomination.

181:

Well, you only care because your animal survival programming is kicking in. Time to flick that switch.

182:

"Yeah; Stalin's management style was ... singular."

And yet, Stalin almost certainly started as a starry eyed idealist.

Getting into the bolshevik before the revolution was not a career move, it was dangerous, a one way ticket to Siberia. (Indeed, I believe he was in Siberia when things went bad for the Empire). So it was not a power grab or a career.

There must be something in the exercise of power that transform people into monsters, there is no lack of examples : Mao, Unclo Ho, Pol Pot... They all started as revolutionnary idealist and ended real nasties.

Even in democraties we see that power removes inhbitions of politicians, it must be in the genes.

183:

"There must be something in the exercise of power that transform people into monsters, there is no lack of examples : Mao, Unclo Ho, Pol Pot... They all started as revolutionnary idealist and ended real nasties"

Each of those came to power through a series of eliminations of peers. I suspect that these people were monsters to begin with, as well as being revolutionary idealists. They didn't become monsters; they already were, and they ended up on top because they manoeuvred to discredit and/or murder their rivals.

184:

Cognitive dissonance? You have killed thousands to get the chance to implement your ideal society and witnesses the loss of countless comrades. You know that a lot of people do not agree with your theories but you have eliminated then and it still is not working.

Do you now accept that the theory that you have dedicated your life to, killed for and sent comrades to die for was false? That the project is a failure?

No, at that point it is probably easier to kill more and more imaginary enemies than to admit your are a monster and your life's work is monstrous.

185:

It's called not being an edgy little twerp.

186:

I disagree. Also, it was hard to pick out from your words what you were talking about.

I think you're saying that they're not monsters; they're just killing people rather than have to admit failure. To my mind, that is actually monstrous.

187:

Oops. Didn't finish. Darn typing skills.

That is actually monstrous, and cognitive dissonance alone doesn't produce that. We can see those who just have the cognitive dissonance; they refuse to believe the evidence of their senses and insist that everything is going great and that any problems are from bad elements and counter-revolutionaries and so on. Just having cognitive dissonance doesn't make one a mass murderer.

188:

Different question - what, if anything, do you see as the trigger for significant interplanetary (outside Earth-Moon system) industrial development.

Hard call.

Mining Lunar 3He for fusion reactors is basically nonsense (even the extra costs from the added complexity of Boron fusion reactors over 3He reactors pale into insignificance compared to building a lunar mining infrastructure).

Orbital solar power has a huge advantage over ground-based solar power, and that's base load -- with the correct orbital inclination it should be available 24/7. A second advantage is the ability to beam power down to wherever needs it, getting rid of lengthy grid connections, and a third is that you get maybe 2-3 times as much energy per unit area from your PV cells (no atmospheric loss). But it's only feasible if we have cheap surface-to-orbit capability. To some extent this is a self-sucking lollipop problem -- "we need cheap access to space so we can build solar power satellites; we need solar power satellites to provide a market for our cheap launch system" -- but it's not totally hopeless. Notably, it's about the only way to make solar power economically viable in places like Scotland or Siberia.

A huge problem is that human beings simply don't function well in space. Short of a breakthrough in space medicine and other fields like oncology and fixing radiation damage, we're doomed to scurry from gravity well to gravity well in search of rocky shielding -- which raises to the fourth power the already not-inconsiderable costs of Going To Space. Even a fully reusable launch system as cost-effective as a Boeing 737-900 is going to cost an order of magnitude more per seat flown to orbit than per seat flown long haul to the antipodes -- just because of the energy cost -- and then there's the order-of-magnitude-on-top for shipping sufficient life support equipment to keep the canned apes alive when they get there (until we have a full-blown off-world manufacturing base). We may well see a ticket to LEO plus a week in orbit with supplies drop below $500,000 within 2 decades, and a 4-person lunar surface excursion a la Apollo on steroids drop to under $1Bn in the same time frame, but what can we do there that's worth doing (except media/entertainment/scientific research)?

189:

This week I get to write the code of conduct for Transhumanist Party officials in the UK. General intention is "be polite" plus whole swathes of behaviour that cannot be designated as disciplinary offences.

"Be polite" is a good start, but I'm tempted to suggest one that I'm considering adding to my blog moderation policy -- "don't be cruel". Cruelty obviously covers insulting/belittling/derisory behaviour but, less obviously, it covers various other things -- bullying, indirect intimidation (for example, by implied exclusion), and a bunch of other nasty stuff that happens in communities. General intention being to create a space that feels safe to participate in.

Thoughts?

190:

Oh, that's just the beginning: the ability to edit one's own desires implies the ability to edit someone else's desires. Now hand that loaded gun to Da'esh, the Southern Baptists, J. Random Corporate Employer, etc. etc. ...

191:

And yet, Stalin almost certainly started as a starry eyed idealist.

Agreed!

That's why you really don't want to elect me Planetary Overlord.

After all, I'm more imaginative than Stalin.

There must be something in the exercise of power that transform people into monsters

Not necessarily: it might simply be that the structures through which power is exercised distort outcomes. I'm reminded of a Robert. X. Cringely piece on his experience with that jolly fellow Muammar Ghadaffi ... ah, here it is: "there will always be a Major Jalloud in Qaddafi’s Libya. And that’s why we’ve seen so far 200 protesters die in that country". ... "In order to maintain that folksiness while at the same time run a ruthlessly repressive regime, both men have been very successful in pushing down by one level the bad-guy role. The muscle starts somewhere just below the top, and in Libya that’s with Major Jalloud."

The idealistic leader may in fact remain idealistic, but somewhere below them a guy in mirrorshades will be making Hard Choices to Defend Freedom/The Republic/The Revolution (delete as applicable), and they don't feel the need to tell the boss about every body they bury in order to keep the project on track, and the boss doesn't want to ask hard questions because they might get back unpleasant answers and have to confront something that undermines their sense of identity.

(And then there are the hard-assed monsters -- Pol Pot springs to mind -- who think the breaking of heads is a necessary part of the program. But I'm much more interested in the complex edge cases.)

192:

There are SO MANY ways that transhumanism could go rapidly and steeply downhill, from Niven's wireheads to Bruce Willis' Surrogates to a Matrix scenario. What if the Matrix started out as a VOLUNTARY shared experience? As an official Old Fart, I intend to remain at Homo Sapiens Sapiens 1.0, thank you very much. I do reserve the right to reconsider when I'm a bedridden 90+ year old.

193:

"Be polite" vs. "don't be cruel" as Jesus vs. Hillel Golden Rule formulations?

"Be polite" is an injunction to follow the rules parents and teachers attempted to hammer into us about conversation; "don't be cruel" enjoins us to actually think about the effect of what we're saying...

194:

Oh no, you have got me wrong there. They are monsters but do not see themselves as so.

They have decided that their goal is worth doing monstrous things to achieve. When they fail they double down because to do otherwise would be to admit to themselves that they are monsters.

195:

From today's Wikipedia cover page:

25 February: 1956 – In his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences ) to the 20th Party Congress, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.

However Stalin started out, he rapidly mastered the use of violence and repression, via proxy, to real and imagined enemies. The more power he gained, the more he was insulated against criticism and, perhaps, even guilt. It would seem to be a self-reinforcing cage.

196:

Oh, I disagree. Nixon was an experienced politician, former Congressman, and familiar with how things get done in Washington. Trump is a salesman, and seemingly an absolute ruler of his little "empire". If elected, he would be a HUGE (he loves that word) target for Congress, and would likely receive little support from the professional civil service, or in many cases, the Republican Party, great swathes of core members he has alienated. Popularity with the public can get you elected, but that does NOT equate with being ready to lead, cajole and coordinate, none of which I see being his strengths. I predict he would be a MASSIVE (another favorite word) failure as President.

197:

It is sometimes said that the Soviets effectively gained four years on the bomb research by espionage. But it could also be argued that they effectively lost four years by way of Stalin being Stalin at everyone involved, and ended up about even overall.

198:

Topics:

What makes for a good opener to a book or short story? What makes for the infamous first line that draws a reader in?

199:

And yet, Stalin almost certainly started as a starry eyed idealist. Getting into the bolshevik before the revolution was not a career move, it was dangerous, a one way ticket to Siberia. (Indeed, I believe he was in Siberia when things went bad for the Empire). So it was not a power grab or a career.

It is my understanding that prior to WWI Stalin made his bones as an up and comer in the region mafia where he lived. He may have become it's leader. I don't remember. Seems a bit of a stretch to call him an idealist.

200:

I don't, actually. There is a difference between a starry-eyed idealist and a bigotted fanatic, some of which is explained in The Winner Effect, more by their level of sociopathy, and some by how much they revise their own opinions in the light of evidence. I doubt that you suffer from what is now called antisocial personality disorder, and Stalin almost certainly did.

201:

If Emrys work has anything to do with her "The Litany of Earth," I'm looking forward to it.

Given everything that's happened with the Empire Games trilogy, perhaps the publisher needs to hire you a witch for it as well, to come 'round and chase off all the bad luck it seems to have accumulated?

202:

That I thoroughly agree with.

Think of this operation as panning for gold, where the amount of dross is increasing quite a bit, thanks to a couple of ruminants upstream feeding on the bank and doing what ruminants do into the river.

203:

Per Rhodes, Kurchatov et al had a very good idea of how to build a bomb, from first principles: they weren't dummies and with the resources of the USSR's command economy at their disposal, they went ahead and did it.

Kurchatov had the benefit of being allowed to read intel from the spies in the US weapons program, but was under a stern injunction from Beria to tell no-one: all he could do was gently veto proposals that duplicated known dead-ends. So they didn't follow any blind alleys, but ...

... Beria was terrified of Stalin. So rather than authorizing Kurchatov to build a highly efficient gadget of Russian design that weighed less and required less plutonium, he insisted that bomb number one must be a Fat Man clone because he knew that would work, and a first-test fizzle would guarantee Beria's execution.

(Both devices were built, and both of them worked as advertised.)

So, ironically, the intelligence provided by the atom bomb spies may have actually delayed the Soviet atomic weapons program.

204:

And, I presume the original maguffin of the Laundry, that mathematics is not a model, but "real" & that Plato was correct & true "forms"" exist?

205:

I don't see that interplanetary development is feasible without a semi-autonomous, self-repairing, robotic system, and we are a VERY long way from being able to do that. Furthermore, I don't see how we can get there without the megacorporations destroying their own ecology (i.e. a functioning human society), which would have the obvious effects. In the UK, we are already seeing serious attempts to eliminate humans from the non-optional workforce, which is going to be really bad news when our economy crashes.

206:

Tufte: There's no bullet points like Stalin's bullet-pointa" (!) http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

On the same theme, maybe a n other book by Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_textb

"Visual & Statistical Thinking Displays of Evidence for making Decisions" Um

207:

Maybe HB is just what happens when smart humans are raised from birth in a permanently-connected-to-all-the-information environment. Or maybe it's what happens when a very spoilt & grossly attention seeking child ( no matter what the physical age ) gets access to a set of goads & does it for sheer devilment, with no end-game other than causing chaos.

And, yes, people like that do exist - usually, if they are lucky, eventually someone slaps them down, very publicly & then they usually grow up. If they are unlucky - lets not go there, shall we?

208:

No Nixon was sane & normal compared to Trumpy

209:

Da'esh anyone? They believe they are doing "god's work" Everyone else thinks they are murderous religious loonies.

210:

The opening lines of "The Stainless Steel Rat"?

211:

I don't know how to build a space economy beyond the Earth+Moon+NEO system. I mean, right now, making cubesats a product as popular as DJI drones is a hard task, and that's just with universities. Here's a goal that was predicted and hadn't been met yet: a Master's student at a well-funded university working on a Geology degree could and have a small cubesat built by a contractor that could then orbit the Moon, and then use the resulting data for their PhD dissertation. This hasn't happened. Not with Earth orbital and Solar Observatory satellites, and not with Lunar cubesats. Never mind expanding this program to the whole Inner Solar System.

212:

To expand on the uncertainty of a Trump / Clinton race.

From http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read-cruz-rubio-s-last-stand-stop-trump-n525546

If we're on the precipice of a Clinton-Trump general election, it's worth pointing out that means both parties would be nominating their most UNPOPULAR candidates. ... The unintended consequences of both parties nominating their most unpopular or polarizing figures means we are headed for the most divisive and scorched earth style general election in modern history. When you start with negatives at 50% or above, it means the only way to win is to become the lesser of two evils. It will also mean the next president will start in a deep hole, with little shot at a real honeymoon.

213:

IMHO, it is when the "God's Work" or other idealist stance is believed to justify murder that the problem arises.

Once you start down that road there is no limit to the pile of bodies.

214:

Try "98% of Muslims think that Da'esh are murderous loonies". They can't actually be "religious loonies" because they profess to be Muslim but act in un-Islamic manners so clearly aren't Muslims.

215:

OK, another stab at the original topic:

If you were given enough money to take a one-year sabbatical (and assuming your publisher was cool with you taking a year off from writing commercial fiction), what would you do?

Are there things you'd like to write that you can't because they won't sell? Things you'd like to do (or things you'd like to learn) that you don't have time for?

216:

Hmmm... I could imagine a future where someone figures out how to build basic Von-neuman machines from the kind of things you can find in the Sahara to build solar panels.

At some point I could imagine someone looking up at the moon and deciding that running the same sort of program there would make sense, funding a one-off mission to drop the first machines and plating the moon with solar PV and beaming the power at the earth.

(quick google:http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/the-luna-ring-concept/)

Once you have robots running manufacturing on the moon and lots of excess energy mining HE3 and firing canisters of it back to earth or wherever suddenly looks a lot more economic. Though that much energy available from solar would make fusion a tougher business case.

217:

Someone implementing a von Neumann machine any time soon is a bit of a long-shot, to say the least. I'd be tempted to bet that a working p-B11 fusion device doing useful work would come first, let alone a working D-T reactor. The need for He3 rather drops at that point, especially given the effort to extract and return it from the moon.

218:

Well spotted! (And yeah, the Laundry Files McGuffin occurred to me while I was holding a loud and angry argument with Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind" in the privacy of my own skull: what if Penrose was right, what kind of SFnal setting could you develop?)

219:

First line? "Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow."

220:

Time for a PhD studentship is 3-7 years. I suspect the lead time for a Lunar cubesat mission is too long, from inception to finish: for a space mission I'd expect 1 year for mission planning, 2 years for design and launch (assuming ballast space on a booster is available for free at the drop of a hat, rather than scheduled years in advance), 1 year for data gathering, then 2-3 years for the final analysis and write-up. That's eaten your entire PhD and if something goes wrong with your primary instruments once it makes Lunar orbit you're SOL -- 3-4 years into your PhD, and re-do from scratch? No thanks!

It ought to be possible to do it faster, but you'd need, at a minimum: a bunch of pre-canned instruments that can be easily spliced onto a cubesat chassis; a launch vehicle operator who reliably reserves a bunch of cubesat slots on every flight; some sort of academic body for allocating access to this currently-scarce resource and allowing students priority access to re-fly experiments that fail; and some sort of funding for longer-than-usual PhDs. (Pitch it as a PhD and-you-get-the-habilitation/junior-professorship once you've run your very own deep space mission from start to finish.)

Otherwise it's going to be a multi-PhD long term project and you don't get to be there start-to-finish.

221:

The problem with "Muslim" is that like "Christian" or "Atheist" it is, within certain wide boundaries, a self-defined position.

Most Muslims consider Da'esh to be horrible murderous thugs who behave in an un-islamic way [the Koran has lots of injunctions about kindness, being a good neighbour, being merciful, etc] but Da'esh can point to the bits of the Koran that speak to taking slaves, annihilating your foes, and so on.

Similarly, many Christians are all about helping their neighbours, good works, and so on, and point to the relevant bits of the Bible; other Christians are all about executing witches, sodomites, and people who wear mixed-fibre shirts. The Book can be cherry-picked to provide support for both viewpoints.

As for [us] Atheists ... there is no book: aside from that one exclusion, anything goes, so it should be unsurprising that plenty of atheists are odious ass-hats (and plenty aren't).

222:

If you were given enough money to take a one-year sabbatical (and assuming your publisher was cool with you taking a year off from writing commercial fiction), what would you do?

I'd spend a year on the beach sipping pina coladas and reading junk fiction.

Alternatively, I'd shoot for a writer-in-residence gig at the MIT Media Lab.

Which do you think would be better for my long-term health and sanity, and which would be better for my short-term near-future fiction output? And which of those should I prioritize?

(Sorry, but Bear's earlier blog essay about burn-out applies to me. I had a near-brush with a nervous breakdown due to exhaustion and overwork last spring, and I'm not out of the woods yet. That beachside cocktail bar is looking really attractive right now!)

223:

Beria was terrified of Stalin. |Given what had happened to his predecessors, Yagoda & Yezhov, this is, err ... hardly surprising

224:

See also: why aneutronic 3He fusion is a shibboleth.

((a) We can't build a reactor capable of those temperatures yet (an order of magnitude higher than D + T fusion), and (b) even if we could, Boron works nearly as well as 3He and is lying around in great piles here in Earth, so why go and wreck the moon by open cast mining on a continental scale?)

225:

Power is the problem. A Lunar cubesat is 240,000km from home and is maybe 15cm on a side. The energy budget for something that small to provide even one-way communications just isn't there. It MIGHT work if there was a Lunar communications satellite relay network of the sort in orbit around Mars, but there isn't.

The nearest thing to a cubesat that's gone to the Moon would be the SMART-1 probe which had large deployable solar panels, needed in part because it was powered by an ion engine. Even so communicating with it required steerable-dish radio telescopes, not something a poorly-funded cubesat group could reasonably expect to get access to on a regular basis.

OTOH I've worked with AMSAT in the past and communicating with a small satellite in low Earth orbit isn't too difficult.

226:

"No true Scotsman" This is a persistent failure of religions & religious thinking, you should excuse the expression.

227:

Oh, here's another topic:

A comparative evaluation of different scotches.

I'm not versed in scottish tax law, but maybe you could even write them off as "Business expense (research)"

228:

Which do you think would be better for my long-term health and sanity, and which would be better for my short-term near-future fiction output? And which of those should I prioritize?

Long-term, definitely.

So no desires to write poetry, take up bagpipes, etc? :-)

229:

Happiness and mental health in the developed world seems oxymoronic as so few regardless of class, creed or color possess it. I don't think keeping it "simple" is the only way to achieve said state(like, oh scenic Bhutan - the happiest place on earth...says the king). Yet, with all our tech, money, convenience, and relative leisure, where are the smiles and self-actualized? What "is" worth doing? Who is really keeping you from doing it while being happy?

230:

Look up Raw Spirit, where Iain Banks very emphatically covered that ground in his own inimitable way.

231:

So no desires to write poetry, take up bagpipes, etc? :-)

Well, I have just bought a JamStik+ bluetooth guitar tutor/training device, and am trying to convince my sobconscious that it needs to take up a musical instrument, but it's hiding in the corner whimpering right now ...

232:

I had a roommate who was a real space cadet type. He'd get an urgency in his voice that was just short of scary when he'd say things like "The time for space commercialization is now!"

This was in 2009, 2010 or so. He expected we'd have major commercial operations in orbit by "2015 at the latest."

He would get genuinely confused and frustrated when I would suggest that maybe strip mining the moon was a bad idea, since it would wreck the view for all of us in favor of some wealth for some of us.

He also was vocal fanboy of President Jackson, which says a lot.

233:

Paging Albert Camus. Albert Camus to the white courtesy phone...

234:

I rather enjoy giving the thorium breeder molten salt reactor (LFTR) fanboys reality wedgies, especially the Real Soon Now types who orgasm over the latest Memorandum of Understanding or vague handwaving report about the possibility of one of the wing-dragging brochure companies in the lists getting some sort of funding from someone, anyone.

Bend metal, pour concrete and then come back and tell me about it. Until then, phtbbbbt!

235:

In the best case scenario, Trump may be able to pull off a Schwarzenegger, and I could live with that.

That's hugely optimistic to even contemplate. When Trump took South Carolina, and not only took it but positively trounced Cruz in a state where he was supposed to be competitive, I had a vertiginous spin of horror that I haven't felt since I was homeless.

I'm updating my passport, and the thing that really sticks with me is that when I told my (trans) friends about this, they all nodded and thought it was prudent. They're all getting ready to leave, too. Muslims and Mexicans will be first on the chopping block, but there ain't a hate movement out there that hasn't eventually gotten around to trannies.

Schwarzenegger had a pragmatic streak, certainly, but he didn't kneecap it by coming to power on a tide of bigotry. Politicians are notorious for breaking their promises, but in truth most of them at least try to keep their campaign pledges. If Trump keeps even a handful of his (vague, but overtly threatening) promises, the US will become an acutely worse place for anyone who isn't within a very narrow demographic band.

236:

But! But! But! We had a salt reactor and the mean ol' government shut it down! If we just go back and read the old notes, surely we could have a mature industry by the end of next year! /s

237:

Okay, here's my stab at the actual topic of the thread:

What's an average Scottish household look like in 2116?

238:

What's an average Scottish household look like in 2116?

No fucking idea.

It depends on far too many variables to even guess at an answer. For example: is our current carbon binge really destabilizing the Greenland ice sheet, and if so, is the outflow of freshwater sufficient to overwhelm and shut down the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation? If the answer to that question is yes, then the answer to your question is "icicles". Scotland loses the gulf stream and temperatures drop on average by 10 degrees Celsius -- it goes from "temperate" to Siberian with a side-order of "keep this up for a century and the glaciers will be back". (Actually, they won't be -- global warming overall will eventually tilt things back towards the warm Mediterranean end of the spectrum, but by then it'll be too late.)

Again: does Englandshire vote to leave the EU, and if so, does Scotland quit the UK and rejoin? What does this mean for immigration? What happens to Scotland's energy industry? (Our oil is running out but we already produce most of the UK's renewable power and have 25% of Europe's tidal power capacity.)

Nope, too many imponderables. I could write scenarios that make certain assumptions about outcomes, but they'd run the full spectrum from rainbow-farting singularity unicorns to "The Road" was optimistic.

239:

Nothing makes quite so glad about transhumanists being overly optimistic children with little idea about the realities of the tech they so hope for than reading their ideas of Utopia and the future. The ability to edit desires such as that represents little better than an absolute end to any kind of justice, any kind of progress, any kind of improvement. It is an abomination.

As I understand it from talking to Buddhists, they also think it a good thing to edit desires. From the Wikipedia article on Taṇhā:

Taṇhā (Pāli; Sanskrit: tṛṣṇā, also trishna) is a Buddhist term that literally means "thirst," and is commonly translated as craving or desire. Within Buddhism, taṇhā is defined as the craving to hold on to pleasurable experiences, to be separated from painful or unpleasant experiences, and for neutral experiences or feelings not to decline. The Buddhist tradition identifies taṇhā as a self-centered type of desire that is based in ignorance.[...]
Taṇhā is said to be a principal cause of suffering in the world. Walpola Rahula states: "According to the Buddha’s analysis, all the troubles and strife in the world, from little personal quarrels in families to great wars between nations and countries, arise out of this selfish ‘thirst’."[...]
The third noble truth teaches that the cessation of taṇhā is possible. For example, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta states: "Bhikkhus, there is a noble truth about the cessation of suffering. It is the complete fading away and cessation of this craving [tanha]; its abandonment and relinquishment; getting free from and being independent of it."

Which seems very reasonable to me. If you can edit out your cravings for food, pretty clothes, praise for your clever blog posting and so on, then you don't stress yourself and others trying to achieve them, and everyone's happier all round. (And you don't risk being reborn as a hungry ghost.)

240:

Now that a machine/software has beat a human at Go, it's time to find out if a machine/software can win the affection of/raise a kitten. Until such a software is available, transhumanism has no connection with being/remaining human.

241:

Go back to Voltaire "We should always tend our garden" Maybe a "garden" is a metaphor, as well as a real possibility? As you all know I tend a real garden, but also a couple ft (easy at this time of life) mental "gardens". Is that the supposed secret?

242:

Until such a software (for raising a kitten) is available, transhumanism has no connection with being/remaining human. So true I find Dirk's postings on this subject deeply alarming. Trasnhummanism is rapidly transmogrifying itself into a (possibly) autocratic & cruel religion, always for the theoretical best possible outcomes for people, of course. Such attitudes will, very quickly result in a pile of corpses.

See also Charlie @ 222 ... Atheists do not (except in very rare circumstances) kill or torture in the "name" of atheism - that is what religion does - it's one of my classic markers for communism-as-a-religion: You can tell by the body-count

243:

That is a Hard Problem. Unless the offence can be well defined it can be horribly abused by The Management in exactly the way you just described. Vaguely defined offences become ammunition in faction wars. Then again, we are talking political party. It's not the kind of organization where thin skinned people want to climb the greasy pole. One possible addition I am considering is adding something like: "Any behaviour that most people would consider grossly unethical". Plotting the end of the Human species excepted, of course:)

244:

"Don't be needlessly cruel" would be my preference. The Golden Rule sounds good until you encounter someone like me who has a high tolerance for Pain In The Line of Duty.

245:

There were some practical secrets that probably saved the Soviets years of work. When Britain was frozen out of the US A-bomb project our scientists neglected to abscond with all the necessary info. One piece of which was what material to use to effectively cast a Plutonium pit. Took us 2 years to work out it was Cerium Sulphide IIRC.

246:

Trump is smart and unprincipled and plays to his audience. The most dangerous kind of US president is the opposite, like JFK or Reagan who actually believe the BS they are spouting and have Right On Their Side.

247:

Among Muslims worldwide IS has support in the tens of percent. The majority, in some nations.

248:

Doesn't matter if Penrose is right. If he is then all we do is add the correct quantum computational elements eg synthetic microtubules as co-processors. Of course, there is an unspoken assumption that conscious=consciousness and there is no qualitative differences between types.

249:

"Until such a software is available, transhumanism has no connection with being/remaining human."

Personally, I have no desire to be/remain Human. Being Human is grossly overrated IMNSHO.

250:

I was asked to write a chapter in a forthcoming book, so I dumped a rather personal view of "Why I am a Transhumanist". The end paragraph:

"So what's coming and what can you do? Well, what's coming is the end of Humanity this century, one way or another. There is no “business as usual” option. I would prefer it to be a smooth and peaceful transition to a glorious world of freedom and transcendence rather than a terminal apocalyptic nightmare. Which do I think it will be? Well, let me toss this coin... So, what can you do? Choose one, and make it happen. Choose life over death and love over fear. Or not. There is no bigger issue facing Humanity. Whatever happens, we are going to get what we deserve."

251:

I can't say whether having an exit plan is wise or not, because each person has to make that decision, ideally without leaving an online record that can be traced to them, if they're that worried about their safety.

That said, I hope to little green apples that every American who's updating their passport and prepping a bug-out bag also takes the time to vote, get involved in local, regional, and national politics, and do your damnedest to put sand in the gears of the bigots, so that you don't have to run for your life come December.

252:

Within Buddhism, taṇhā is defined as the craving to hold on to pleasurable experiences, to be separated from painful or unpleasant experiences, and for neutral experiences or feelings not to decline.

But that is exactly what transhumanists like Dirk strive for. They want total control over their experiences. Whereas Buddhists teach to accept any experiences when you encounter them.

Another difference is that transhumnists want a technology to edit desires and buddhists offer teachings to control your desires.

˜

If the problems of humanity could be solved by technology, humanity would not have any problems anymore.

253:

You're describing existence and not sentient life.

Until you know what your key reasons for being alive are (regardless of form), you have no way of determining whether you've achieved your goal. These reasons will likely include the how & what that such a life is supposed to be like.

I'm familiar with Banks's Culture. IMO, what makes Culture AIs interesting is that they have unique personalities. Each Culture AI is able to interact at physical, emotional and intellectual levels with sentients/humans. The transhumanism I've read about does not show any interest in keeping unique human identities intact. And, there seems no interest in examining how this leap from machine to sentient should happen. (Better circuits/computing power alone are not enough ... what are these circuits supposed to be doing?)

254:

I'll let you into a little secret: all of it has very specific meaning & intent. And it's all true. The joke is that I have to state it's unreliable, because reasons (and those reasons are to allow people to shrug off the implications and ignore reality and stay in their caves).

Even when a large example of the Apollonian / Dionysian divide is presented, with a not so subtle mirroring, I'm not about forcing people out of their caves (and the shadows on the wall will whisper and turn the fear toward me: that's fine, that's part of our role).

That's ok.

~

Read #89, and by that I mean really take an hour or to to understand what the opening of Victory over the Sun was intended to do (hint: it's an early form of alief formation, a very serious / po faced attempt to head off the future gigacide. That's what distinguishes it from DaDa; it failed, of course).

~

So, let's look behind the curtain, shall we?

1: Nos 146, 149, 151, 153 appear to be content-free, again.

146 Does five things:

1) It's an apocryphal tale that only certain Russians know, and those who share it work in certain parts of the apparatus. Just knowing it says something about the author.

2) It's an example of how cognitive dissonance and Power / anxiety functioned in Stalin's Soviet. The important part of the story is the cousin-secretary move. Information in a Conspiracy based society works on such connections, as does (real) Power. Trump's wedding - Clinton guests. Capice?

3) It highlights the Russian sense of fatalistic / black humor of the generations that grew up under Soviet life. Russians are funny people underneath it all.

The other two you can work out for yourself.

149

1) Putin / Mirrors / Reality - c.f. Adam Curtis on the subject; Cheney and co claimed that they were pros: Putin just went out and proved it.

2) It's a signifier to the ugly Peanut Gallery that I know their ways, and I'm a little beyond them. This format:

SPOILERS P O I L E R S

Is used somewhere and by a certain type of person.

3) It fingers the real culprits - GSElevator is a joke account (that was good about 4 years ago) spoofing GS, and then you have Jimi singing that tune.

Again, there's a few more in there.

151

1) Romney is the Cantor response. (Remember that from Davos?) It won't work.

2) As someone rightly pointed out afterwards, Trump / Clinton is going to be a bloodbath. That's why KUK was mentioned.

3) The KUK thing really is a serious issue: pyramids and inverted pyramids and all that entails / entrails. It doesn't matter if it's actual, the virtual is what is being played with, and the Chess Game is being played deadly seriously.

4) Ask yourself who started the KUK thing. Wasn't me guv'nor (but it was a Mind like mine, with rather less ethics).

Fill in the other one for yourself.

153

Relies on understanding the structure of why and how I moved from the 4 poets prefacing The New Sun and made a nice meta-web that's very beautiful, but with a huge warning attached.

It's a shame you can't see it. Structurally it's quite simple, with 4 then 2, 2, 2 and so on.

It's a love letter to the person who sowed the seed of it. Of course, said person will likely never read it or follow the chains or map it or even know it exists, but there we go.

~

Oh, and spoiler: this isn't the weaponized version.

This is the nice polite fluffy version (again, re-read #89: We are arming the world against ourselves / We are organizing the slaughter of scarycrows) that's a bridging attempt between a few different worlds.

shrug

I'm not the one who made Trump happen.

255:

Can Greenland shut down global thermohaline circulation?

My best guess is no, not at the level you're talking about. What it can do is stall it for a year or two. This makes things rather interesting, because you get an outflow of fresh water (thus jamming the downwelling phase of the circulation, which depends on really salty, heavy water sinking into the abyss). This raises sea levels and temporarily buggers the Gulf Stream until it dissipates. I'm not sure how long temporarily is, because we're talking about a big chunk o' glaciers floating into the North Atlantic, but I do suspect that storms will help stir the surface and integrate the waters.

The upshot is that North Atlantic temperatures are likely to stagger, generally being a bit lower than global temperatures, then warming faster to catch up.

In any case, I agree, a Scottish household in 2116 is hard to forecast. I'd guess they'd be wearing kilts, these being easier to manufacture on simple looms. What fabric those kilts will be made from is what I can't guess, although I'd suggest cotton or hemp, rather than wool. Maybe goat silk, if you're into that sort of futurism. They might well wear a sgain geal rather than a sgain dubh, with the handle made out of a Millennial's thighbone, these being rather too common on the ground. And we won't talk about what they're making their pipes from...

256:

I agree that Trump is a consummate huckster, but I'm more than slightly worried about giving the nuclear football to a man with no restraint whatsoever.

It wouldn't totally surprise me if Trump was the 45th and final President of the United States.

257:

Facts the LFTR boosters skip over a lot:

Thorium (Th-232) isn't fissile, in needs to be bred into U-233 which IS fissile. This is not an option, it is the only way the reactor can be powered by pixie dust^W^Wthorium. Some LFTR boosters think otherwise because ORNL ran a molten-salt reactor for a few years intermittently fifty years ago and THORIUM!. But ORNL never ran their molten-salt reactor with thorium, they used U-233 and later U-235 because it was never a breeder.

The neutron economy for a thorium breeder requires two neutron collisions to release energy, one neutron to breed and another to fission the U-233 nucleus. A U-233/235 fission event releases on average about 2.2 neutrons but one is needed for the next breeding event and another for fission. That means the core can only waste one neutron in every five fission events, the other ten have to hit something important. That means a small hot dense core, usually running at about 700 deg C or higher with all the engineering excitement that entails, not to mention the intense radiation and neutron flux which simply adds to the fun and maintenance headaches.

Basically a breeder reactor that moves its fuel around to work properly is a Bad Idea. The only successful power station breeders have been the Soviet, later Russian BN series which tend to use solid metal fuel rods in a pool of molten sodium. Thorium need not apply.

258:

As it's been mentioned by her of the many identities, is the Book of the New Sun, the finest literarary work of SF Ever, I am defining litererary to mean exactly what I want it to mean Did get some awards from the SF community, but not the literary one Fairly sure it would have won a big name literary author the Nobel The Urth archive was a wonderful resource, it's the only place where I felt more stupid then when Charlie explains what Accelerando was about

259:

"with the handle made out of a Millennial's thighbone, these being rather too common on the ground. And we won't talk about what they're making their pipes from..."

I rarely find people more pessimistic than me.

260:

Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded

To say you don't understand me is a given: be careful of shouting too loud, I know who the Shadows on the Wall of the Cave are.

And I know why they told you what they did.

Oh, and let go of that hate. Fear leads to Hate and Hate leads to the Dark Side...

J I-P kinda gets it. The more links / intricate parts, the less graaar and pain I have when reading it.

~

The sad thing is: we didn't even do the German Baroness, she was the interesting part or get to see why the porn was important. (Oglaf, Everton, Incase are all producing rude / crude but delightful stuff. Joyous, even).

261:

" In the UK we have Maplin, which is much the same thing except that it sells components at more or less normal prices, instead of up to 10 times normal as Tandy .."

We also we have RS components - once known as Radio Spares - there really isn't a problem with supplies of Stuff for Yooths that intend to build a Back Yard Space Ship powered by an Anti Gravity Machine.

Though you do have to find the right page in their catalog for the Appropriate Stuff ..

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/

262:

"The idealistic leader may in fact remain idealistic, but somewhere below them a guy in mirrorshades will be making Hard Choices to Defend Freedom/The Republic/The Revolution (delete as applicable), and they don't feel the need to tell the boss about every body they bury in order to keep the project on track, and the boss doesn't want to ask hard questions because they might get back unpleasant answers and have to confront something that undermines their sense of identity. "

I'm not sure Gaddfi is a very good example for that : the "sense of identity" of these people includes farming young school girls for "body guards" (Gaddafi) ? or opera dancers (Mao, Kim Jon Il), or the bolshoi (Stalin) ? That's hardly "clean".

I still believe power is very corrosive for the human mind. Even if the influence of courtier and other ambitious servants must not be neglected , people in power get very fast a sense of entitlement on steroid, and this sense of entitlement is something that can be seen even at fairly low levels of power.

263:

The "nuclear football" doesn't let you initiate a nuclear strike at whim -- just retaliate in event of certain well-defined criteria being matched (mushroom clouds over the US, basically). To initiate a nuclear attack requires a bunch of intermediate steps including the Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court, and a Senate committee or two -- for which, thank Nixon (whose drunken rantings about nuking China so terrified everyone that extra safeguards were brought in to make that kind of thing impossible in event of a future POTUS-gone-mad scenario).

264:

I can't say whether having an exit plan is wise or not, because each person has to make that decision, ideally without leaving an online record that can be traced to them, if they're that worried about their safety.

The nature of my job is such that this particular ship has sailed, and in fact disappeared over the horizon. There is basically nothing substantive about me that Uncle Sam doesn't know. If I'm genuinely scared of the Feds--and under Trump, I would be--then my only chance is to get out of US territory and stay out until conditions improve. If I was truly paranoid, I'd go full Snowden and find a place to stay in Russia, but since I have no intention of directly provoking the security apparatus, I don't think that's necessary. But an 8 year trip to Germany/Denmark/SomewhereElseInNorthernEurope? You betcha!

That said, I hope to little green apples that every American who's updating their passport and prepping a bug-out bag also takes the time to vote, get involved in local, regional, and national politics, and do your damnedest to put sand in the gears of the bigots, so that you don't have to run for your life come December.

Oh absolutely. But as I said in a different discussion with a different circle about this, my particular location limits my options for realistic opposition. Both Oregon and Washington (my local states) have primaries that are late enough in the process as to almost be formalities. Oregon and Washington are both safe Blue states in normal years, but this isn't a normal year, so come general election time I'll be banging on doors. Until then, there's not much to do but sit, and wait, and save up what travel funds I can.

265:

Qaddafi sent his son to the LSE.

Although there was later some stink about plagiarism / ghost writing to the PhD (which, in political circles, is akin to torturing a live fox and expecting the entire greenhouse not to shatter), there was a reason for that.

You know, that entire African / ME educated in the UK thing. Worked out nicely for Jordan.

The French and the Americans (for different reasons) decided to shatter that, but hey. (Ignore the oil findings in North Nigeria, nothing to see here for the French side, and the USA side is a simple case of "DO. NOT. FUCK. WITH. US." and revenge served cold and the Plan for the New American Century).

~

@Het

My best guess is no, not at the level you're talking about. What it can do is stall it for a year or two.

Citation needed.

This is not the current view of the majority of scientists on the ground measuring it.

In fact, the on-the-ground view is "HOLY FUCK BALLS THIS SHIT IS SERIOUS".

That may, nor may not be, a direct quote after a few drinks.

266:

"sobconscious"

Fraudian slip ?

If your sobconscious doesn't want to have anything to do with getting those chords right, can I suggest painting. Uses different areas of your brain, relatively cheap and able to be done in an Edinburgh flat, and if you by chance manage to create anything half good, can be hung on the wall.

Oh, and I thought you were anti warm weather, and thus beaches (with of without pina coladas)? Unless you are thinking of Scottish beaches, which paints a whole other picture...

267:

@Host

This is a dangerous and coy one, but hopefully the porn sources show my actual sympathies here, and you did ask about what would be interesting.

Discussion:

Spotted on the Redshirts blog a while back, comments about your own (private) sexual leanings (with understanding of being married).

Given the FemBot frustrations of never finding a mate and so forth:

Question: barring the obvious Laws etc, to what extent (if any, puppies ahoy), do you think that SF / Fantasy has shaped the acceptance / sexual tastes of millennials and is it healthy?

Did the OverPr0n window shift due to the writing, or just reflected other societal shifts?

Feel free to dip into the wild, wild, wild throngs of Tumblr as well (that will really break Greg's noggin).

268:

April,

Don't take this question as me judging your decision. It's your life, you know best.

What makes you think Trump is anything more than the average Know-Nothing/extreme isolationist? I mean, these are the people who vetoed the US joining the League of Nations and then more or less banned immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe from entering the US. They didn't deport the Poles and Italians who were already here.

To lay my cards down. A lot of the people I grew up around are now his supporters. Some are childhood friends. I talk to some of them still.

269:

What makes you think Trump is anything more than the average Know-Nothing/extreme isolationist?

He's saying things that I thought you could not say and survive in American politics. He's being blunt where you're supposed to be coded. The party establishment is freaking out, which makes me think that all the stuff the GOP does to avoid following through on the right's worst impulses (because to do so would be bad for business, natch) will now be inoperable.

Worse, the longer he stays in the race, the more the GOP voters start to like him. Even voters who initially recoiled start to say they'd accept him as the nominee. His economic proposals are populist enough that he could be broadly appealing to a disenchanted white electorate, and that could give him more room to operate. I think he's either activating and normalizing latent racism that voters initially didn't want to admit to, or people are deciding they're tolerate the racist tactics* if it advances populist economic goals that are popular among the GOP base. Racism is the wellspring of all American bigotries; I may be white as the driven snow, but I'm extra queer and a country which accepts the level of public bigotry that Trump is displaying to take residence in the White House is a country that would eventually come after me, one way or the other.

Ultimately, I think there's only a 5% chance or less that he'll go the Full Hitler route that he's been hinting at. But I give it 75% that the quality of life for everyone outside a particular demographic group will go sharply down under a Trump administration. Many of my civil rights protections, for example, come from easily-reversed executive orders, and there is currently a huge anti-transgender legislative push underway at the state level that is primed to break out into the Federal conversation any week now. As a Federal contractor, I don't think it is at all unrealistic that I could simply be fired out of hand under a Trump Administration, for example.

As for your friends? I'm sure most of them are good people. Given the state of play, I think we can suspend Goodwin's Law long enough to observe that Germany was not inhabited by millions of serial killers when Hitler came to power, and yet...

*I honestly do not care if Trump himself is racist or not. I think it's 100% plausible he's just saying what he needs to say to get ahead. I also think it's 100% plausible that he'd do whatever he needed to do to stay ahead, even if it meant trampling human rights wherever he could find them.

270:

Got a source on that? Because as far as I can tell from a quick search, the entire process looks like 1) President gives order, 2) SecDef confirms order, 3) order is transmitted to silos and subs, 4) missiles launch. The whole process is designed to work within a 20 minute window based on ICBM flight times from Russia at any hour of the day or night.

Granted, deliberate misuse of nuclear weapons is the mother of all impeachable offenses. That may or may not be relevant after the fact.

271:

"Until then, there's not much to do but sit, and wait, and save up what travel funds I can."

You don't have time to sit and wait. Unless you already have working/residency rights set up elsewhere - you need to be looking now at where you might be able to move to, and figure out how to finesse that in terms of visas etc.

If you think that you may need to get out (and you may), this is your window of opportunity to get that option organised. Hopefully it's an option you won't need, but if you don't take concrete steps to organise it, you probably won't have it.

272:

Calm down.

That's not how this works. It's not how any of this works.

The PTB don't give a flying fuck if you're FTM, MTF or a lesser spotted dalmatian. Even Stalin didn't care if you were a transvestite as long as he had the dirt and you knew he had the dirt. [cough FBI Hoover cough].

They care about certain things - and Trump is the answer (JUDAS GOAT) to getting to where they want to be.

Essentially, you're viewing a Koch driven power-play with lashings and lashings of meta-drama. (Trump: sets himself up with the "Obama is a Muslim with no birth certificate" etc).

~

The assassination jibe?

Smart money says that's how they do it.

~

Oh.

Yeah, of course they'll kill you.

But they have 4,000,000,000 brown people to kill first.

Not. Even. Joking.

273:

Ref: Alvin Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine

The thing you're looking for information on is Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles.

The tl;dr version (per Alley, anyway) is that, during ice ages, the North Atlantic has three metastable states (ice, maximum ice, and ice free-ish). Alley thinks this is caused by an unstable ice sheet forming in Hudson Bay (the entire bay ices down to the bottom), but then geothermal heat caused the bay to purge, dumping all the ice into the North Atlantic, where the large influx of freshwater shut down the Gulf Stream and global thermohaline circulation (which depends on salty water sinking into the abyss off Greenland), causing the ice sheet to start reforming. The entire "cycle" (there's so much variation that some argue it's stochastic, not a cycle) runs a mean of under 1500 years, with the warm-up happening on a decadal scale.

The temperature jump during the purge of the ice is around 5-8oC, or about what we're facing now, over about the same scale. This is good news, in that D-O cycles happened a bunch of times during the last ice, and they didn't cause a mass extinction. The problem now is that we're jumping into a new thermal regime and staying there for awhile, so it's a different set of challenges. Still, we can hope and pray that our biota's previous experience with migrating to deal with a chaotic climate will stand us in good stead, especially if civilization collapses and plants and animals can move without being constrained by borders and fences.

ANYWAY...what happens when bits of the Greenland ice sheet break off into the North Atlantic? We know that the North Atlantic right now is anomalously cold--if you look at world thermal deviation maps, it's the one place that's colder than normal. Is this sufficient to totally jam the Gulf Stream? I'm guessing no, at least not on the scale of a D-O cycle, because that took a Hudson Bay full of ice, if you believe Alley.

My guess is that the melting ice will cool off the North Atlantic, and it may occasionally make the Gulf Stream wobble. That complicates the warm-up, making temperatures seesaw, which isn't good for migration, but I don't think we'll see a replay of the Younger Dryas. That might be my ignorance speaking.

274:

Any ideas about what the US would use for its brain power should DT become POTUS? I ask because I figure that at least 50% of US university STEM grad students and post-docs are 'foreigners'. That's a lot of brain power to lose.

USians often mention the Manhatten Project as evidence of their ability to come up with ultimate stopping/killing power. Funny thing that ... the Manhattan Project would not have been possible without the willing participation of scientists from other countries.

Reminds me of the ST:NG Pakleds episode ... 'We are smart! We look for things. Things that make us go.'

275:

Oh.

Yeah, of course they'll kill you. But they have 4,000,000,000 brown people to kill first.

Not. Even. Joking.

And you think I should want to stick around and wait my turn?

Like I said, I think the Full Hitler scenario is only a <5% chance event. That's still uncomfortably high, but it's the lesser failure states we have to pass through on our way to that 5% that I think are the real trouble.

Since I'd already been distantly toying with the idea of living overseas for a while, it seemed like now was the time to get serious.

276:

Crap, the italics formatting didn't work on that one. Pretend I start speaking at "And you think..."

277:

And by didn't work I mean my dumb ass put the closing tag waaaay to early. Whoops.

278:

Charlie, Seeing as it seems you're tired and sick, I'd be quite happy if you just posted some pictures of cats and took a few days off.

It might not quite be sipping pina coladas, but I'm sure you've earned a few days of sitting in a comfortable chair, drinking tea, and reading junk fiction.

279:

From talking to my friends, there's a belief that there are far more PhD and post-doc positions open then there's demand for it in the private sector. That was the answer I got whenever I asked this question. They used the fact that the salary didn't significantly rise "outside of Silicon Valley" as proof.

As to what the US will use for brain power, I don't know. It depends on whether a ban on foreigners would pressure the companies to lobby at the state and local level to fix the disparity in school performance? That being under a Trump administration, it might be limited to the Midwest, Appalachia, and the Rust Belt.

280:

Thank you for your response. I'd like to say that your fears are overblown, but I'd be lying.

281:

"Another difference is that transhumnists want a technology to edit desires and buddhists offer teachings to control your desires."

No, Buddhists offer technologies eg zazen

They are just difficult to learn and take a long time, and only for a self selected elite. I say fix the mental problems directly using the best tech available. I expect Siddhartha Gautama would agree.

282:

I rename you Dominic Bruere, then. After all, you predecessor was doing it for the good of all & the greater glory of ($_Theocratic-Object) & still approved of the murder & torture of many thousands.

283:

Got ANY EVIDENCE at all for that statement?

I might agree that certain, err "muslim" governments might view Da'esh as a useful arms-length toolm as guvmints have over the ages, used "dissident" groups as destabiliser for their enemies ( Imperial Germany & Lenin, anyone? ) But actually agree with their aims & ideals, I seriously doubt

284:

Ah the religious end-days are upon us, embrace "Jesus" ( or Mahmud or $_Loony-Preacher right now for a better future. Yeah. Right

We know where that leads. I have stepped off that road, entirely, it's why I'm an atheist. You are an evangelical deist. ( I think )

285:

AH now you are claiming to be reliable, but unreliable because of $BigMonsterGuvmint/ShadowyAgency? NOT buying it. Most of us know who the others are here & I'm damned sure the "security" agencies really know, if they can be bothered to be interested ( Dirk, sorry Domininc may be the exception here )

Nah, you are posturing again, & I don't believe a word of it. Including your long "explanation" esp. regarding Russia etc. "All Cretans are liars"

286:

I know who the Shadows on the Wall of the Cave are. DO YOU? Really? Then fucking well tell us, straight out & stop posturing.

All Cretans are Liars

287:

Scottish Beaches There you go. And there's places like Tiree the sunshine island.

288:

I think you might be surprised as to how unconcerned I am with other people's sexual preferences, unless, of course, it involves me ... "Breaking my noggin" is harder than you might think, or in your case emote.

Did you read my earlier post # 165? And cause #4? Submission to a false show of knowledge, used to conceal ignorance, for no better reason than pride.

Which is what you appear to be doing, as well as being a Cretan.

289:

Also Greg at #227

I see what you mean; I'm now going to cite http://progressivescottishmuslims.blogspot.co.uk/ as one of my sources.

And try to withdraw gracefully, because I don't want to have a religious debate, particularly not about a religion that none of the debaters subscribe to!

290:

GODWIN alert A lot of the people I grew up around are now his supporters. Some are childhood friends. I talk to some of them still. A lot of the minority of the German population who voted NSDAP in 1933 thought that, too .... Or the many supporters of Musso, in Italy, 10 years earlier - & I think Trumpy is closer to Musso than Adolf, incidentally

291:

Get to Canada. THEN get to Europe or Australasia. No, Canada won't be safe, long-term, anyway ...

293:

Those foreigners in the US will have Green Cards &/or dual citizenship. To be safe, they must: 1: GET OUT 2: Renounce Green Card 3: Renounce US citizenship.

It can be done. "The boss" has come across several such & according to her, the number is growing, slowly, as things start to head down the pan.

294:

Cats Our last Norwegian Forest/Birman died last year, peacefully. Unfortunately, it appears that she left a notebook & "sir" has been reading it. Oh dear. The food-theiving & tricks are getting worse. He had a veal joint, in it's casserole, out of the oven & on to the floor ( & I thought I'd wedged it in - he probably got his paws into the handles .... ) He's learned, all of a sudding, to leap accurately off an half-way stage into the niche in the upstairs book-shelving by the light-switch to grab the milk-jug CRASH! - milk everywhere, happy kitty. Taken pasta in wrappers of 3rd shelf in Pantry & played with it on hall floor ... Showing interest in Cyanistes caeruleus which were referred to as "the en-croute-lets" when Hex was alive ... oh dear, what next - more squirrels?

295:

Taken in isolation, that's the mechanics. What you're missing is context. (N.B. I started my USAF career doing strategic planning for ballistic missile warning. Knowledge of our response mechanism was required.) Nuclear response (we do NOT do first strike planning) is either Launch on Warning or Launch Under Attack. Both require verifiable notice that a nuclear strike is inbound. Warning of ballistic missile launches (either land-based or submarine launched) is via a combination of geostationary satellites observing in the short end of the IR spectrum, and ground based radars positioned astride the great circle routes from known Russian and Chinese launch areas (plus intelligence assets that I will not discuss). This procedure of requiring two different sensors to detect a strike is called dual phenomenology. The overall system of systems, including command and control systems to transmit the data, is called the Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment (ITW/AA) system. It is designed top to bottom and front to back to rapidly detect and verify threats to (for strategic strikes) North America. Much of the same equipment is used for what is called theater (as in theater of operations) warning to deployed (aka outside the US) forces and to allied nations (which I will also not enumerate). The system you described is designed to use this warning to RESPOND to an inbound attack. I will reiterate that I am not aware of ANY first strike nuclear planning undertaken by the Department of Defense. You should also consider that US soldiers are trained to obey lawful orders, and to question those that they consider unlawful. OK, sometimes people don't have the courage to stand up to superiors, but often they do. I cannot in all seriousness imagine a scenario where a unilateral decision by a President to start a nuclear war would be carried out by the nuclear command and control chain.

296:

Oh, God :-( Why are so-called hard scientists so bone-headed about probability and statistics? We still have people blithering about sunspot cycles. I am, of course, referring to the way that ARIMA models cause apparently cyclic phenomena, and that 'true' cycles are simply ones where the random term is negligible. Anyway, let's ignore that.

My understanding is that the cause of the Younger Dryas and similar was not simply that the circulation stopped, but that there was a southerly current of Arctic water past Europe. The expert consensus seems to be that the circulation may weaken and behave erratically (possibly no longer reaching northern Europe), leading to increasingly unsettled weather rather than extreme cold. More and stronger storms, floods, and miserable summers. But why on earth say that future kilts will not be made from wool, but cotton or silk (hemp I can believe)? What IS Scotland's total cotton and silk production?

297:

My understanding is that the main reason for USA citizens renouncing their citizenship and all that is that banks etc. won't deal with them, because of the onerous expatriate tax laws. It's not directly political.

298:

Except it is directly political. Only N Korea (I think) treats its legitimate expatriates in the manner of the US w.r.t. personal taxation.

299:

Question: barring the obvious Laws etc, to what extent (if any, puppies ahoy), do you think that SF / Fantasy has shaped the acceptance / sexual tastes of millennials and is it healthy?

(redshirts blog: no idea what that is, my filter bubble seems to think it's about Thai politics.)

Huh. I'm not sure. I think it goes back further, though!

Sex was basically a total taboo in written SF prior to the late 1950s, but exploded messily all over the genre in the 1960s -- it was the theme of the decade ("we're allowed to talk about teh sex! SEX!!!!1!!ELEVENTY!!!"). While in retrospect a lot of this was inevitably just heteronormative softcore, a whole shitload of taboo-breaking-for-the-sake-of-it went on, including stuff that with 20/20 hindsight was important: depictions of futures where Things Were Different covered everything from futures where interracial marriage was unremarkable, through the first overt looks at cultures where LGBT relationships were normal, and so on. Second wave feminism hit with a bang in 1968, for those with eyes to see it, too.

Upshot: this may have been the boomer generation of SF readers and authors examining their own urges, but it formed the background for the Gen-X readers to grow up into -- one in which speculation about the future shape of society and desire was just as reasonable as speculation about life on other worlds, or robots, or the usual stuff.

Don't underestimate the importance of being able to write about stuff without censorship, or of being able to read about cultures where things are different, to someone growing up in a pre-internet world: it's really easy today to have no inkling of just how constrained our knowledge, never mind our choices, were, as little as three decades ago.

On the other hand, you shouldn't overestimate the popularity of spec-fic in the population at large. It was out there, sure, for those who read fiction and went in search of the disreputable and obscure corner in the second-hand bookshop -- but you could easily miss it: the whole cultural juggernaut of SF in visual media (TV, Film, computer games -- which didn't exist back then) was absent.

Hmm. If you want to get a handle on that time, you could do worse than read Jo Walton's "Among Others" -- a novel that won the Hugo and would be pepper spray to the puppies if they'd heard of it, which beautifully depicts growing up in the UK in the 1970s and reading SF/F as it felt, from the inside.

300:

If we're going to ask OGH for lists of books, how about books that are a good read now but that will be unreadable in ten years time, with reasoning for why?

Basically, what's worth reading now before the social context around us changes.

301:

Source: a JAG officer involved in US nuclear planning. Personal communication.

You are correct about the 20 minute reaction -- but that's only to a confirmed attack.

To initiate a first strike from cold against a target that hasn't first attacked the United States is a very different process that has been intentionally recomplicated to place it beyond the scope of a simple executive order.

302:

Turkey appears to be using Da'esh as a proxy to fuck with the Kurds -- note also that Turkey is going through a Strong Man phase as Erdogan tries to set himself up as Ataturk 2.0 (only minus the secularism).

Saudi Arabia appears to be using Da'esh as a dumping-ground for their angry young remittance men, but has gotten serious about not tolerating that shit back home -- although this is also in part an internal power-play as Muhammad bin Nayef maneuvers for position (the new crown prince, not a direct son of Ibn Saud). To some extent AQ and Da'esh are side-effects of Saudi domestic policy, at least insofar as there's a tension between the kingdom's roots in radical Wahabbism and its administrative need to run a very rich (and deeply corrupt) despotism.

Finally, Da'esh -- in Iraq -- is the ultimate consequence of George W. Bush's Excellent Adventure. How to fight terrrism, Dubya style!

304:

"You are an evangelical deist. ( I think )"

I'm more pragmatic. If God does not exist we will build it or become it.

305:

" it's really easy today to have no inkling of just how constrained our knowledge, never mind our choices, were, as little as three decades ago."

Two decades ago. Most people did not get on the Net before 2000

306:

"Question: barring the obvious Laws etc, to what extent (if any, puppies ahoy), do you think that SF / Fantasy has shaped the acceptance / sexual tastes of millennials and is it healthy?"

That's a really nice question. Due to work, timezones etc I'm doing a little catchup here so I know there's comments afterwards (including from OGH) which I haven't read yet, but I thought I'd say thanks for an interesting thing to ask.

307:

You are missing something here. The Turkmen (13% Iraq pop) are being ethnically cleansed from Kirkuk (home of 20% of Iraqi oil) by the Kurds. Often in lock-step with IS attacks on the Turkmen population.

308:

These pages have crap evidence. If you drill down to the actual data, you won't find more than single digit support for Da'esh/ISIS in most countries (UK seems to be an exception – but if you're asked to decide between Tories and Da'esh maybe one shouldn't be surprised if the Tories don't win by overwhelming majority).

309:

Of course the Turkmen would say that. Doesn't mean it is true, though.

310:

I will note that the site Dirk links to is basically a anti-muslim black propaganda site. They won't publish stats that can't be spun to look bad.

First rule of internet data-trawling: look for the man behind the curtain and figure out what his agenda is!

311:

Your last sentence is about as plausible as the claims that Al Quaeda (and, later, Da'esh) were being supported by Iran. As far as I know, those claims of ethnic cleansing are mostly propaganda by Turkey and its allies, but perhaps you have some independent evidence?

312:

Yes, but the next question is what chance there is of a procedurally improper order being accepted, including accepting a dubious claim of attack or assuming an 'opponent' that has not been identified as the attacker.

313:

"Which do you think would be better for my long-term health and sanity"

The beach.

"and which would be better for my short-term near-future fiction output?"

MIT.

"And which of those should I prioritize?"

Well, that's for you to say, but since you ask, I'd say the beach.

314:

I know that. The second is to follow the sources and find out who added the lies misinterpreted the data.

315:

Oh yes, good old RS... somewhat surprised they're still going, given not only their tendency towards Tandy-esque (if less extreme) pricing, but also that until quite recently they stood out as being far more of a giant pain in the arse to order from than anyone else. They were several years behind everyone else in setting up a usable website to order from; thirty years ago they were still the option of last resort even for a business customer of the size of GEC. My go-to has been Farnell for a very long time now.

The US seems to be rather better off, as far as I can make out from the internet comments of people building things and the websites of US suppliers. There seem to be plenty of RS-type outfits, a distinctly greater availability of semi-exotic items from surplus suppliers, and even various Edgware Road type shops scattered around the place and still surviving.

316:

"rainbow-farting singularity unicorns"

DO IT! A description of such a Scotland - with every step in the evolution from here to there a plausible one - would be excellent.

317:

Life. Is. Too. Short.

Current state: editing/production on two Laundry novels in one pipeline and three Merchant Princes (remix as near-future SF) novels in a different pipeline.

What I am supposed to write next: another goddamn space opera.

What I want to write next: a near-future Gothic haunted house novel, or a supervillain novel.

Chances of me writing about the singularity from a non-satirical/mocking perspective in the near future: zero.

318:

In this specific case, I've done a little reading, which means I'm not fully invested in the argument. Alley appears to be on one side, and AFAIK he's proposing something that looks a lot like a deterministic mechanism for a cycle based on how long it takes the Hudson Bay ice sheet to heat up and destabilize. On the other side, at least one other researcher looked at the temperature proxies in the ice and said that the signal for D-O cycles varied so much that it looked random.

I don't have a strong opinion either way, aside from noting that: a) there's strong data for big and relatively frequent temperature shifts in the Greenland ice cores, b) they're still arguing over the mechanism, or at least details thereof, but c) they're not arguing over the amplitude.

Some think the Younger Dryas was the last gasp of the D-O cycle process.

As for why cotton kilts in Scotland: they might be premature in 2116, but with temperatures 5-8oC warmer, there's no reason not to grow cotton or hemp in Scotland. It's headed towards a climate more like that of current South Carolina, where they (used to) grow a lot of cotton and varieties of Cannabis sativa. The silk was a jab at those transgenic goats that express spider silk proteins in their milk, because, you know, 2116 is SFF territory, and I can almost imagine a frugal Scots small-farmer milking his goats for silk to weave into a kilt...

319:

"Until such a software [for raising a kitten] is available, transhumanism has no connection with being/remaining human."

I disagree with SFReader here. To quote from Nick Bostrom's page on "Transhumanist Values":

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
This definition doesn't require that the only enhancements be ones that replace all the software in our brains. In fact, it does not, interpreted strictly, require any software at all: writing, books and spectacles would all be covered.

Personally, I have no desire to be/remain Human. Being Human is grossly overrated IMNSHO.

It has its shortcomings, as the burnout thread showed. I once wrote an essay on this for Dobbs: "Why I Want to be Transhuman". It's a lament for all the beautiful structures produced by evolution, mathematics and art, that without cognitive enhancement there will never be time to experience.

320:

It therefore behooves us to recall that Dirk is not the only transhumanist and his views are certainly not representative.

Pigeon - if we could crowd source say 50K pounds for Charlie to have a year off, you might have a chance at your story.

321:

What I want to write next: a near-future Gothic haunted house novel

Oooh. I'd like that one, please :-)

322:

On that theme, and featuring Peter Firmin artwork ..

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/153238/ivor-engine

"may contain sheep"

323:

Pigeon - if we could crowd source say 50K pounds for Charlie to have a year off, you might have a chance at your story.

Hm. What would fit cost to have Charlie write a novel of his choice, including paying for an editor he wants to work with on it? Would £50k cover it?

324:

Oooh. I'd like that one, please :-)

Me too, but contracted work comes first. I was about to suggest a goddamn Gothic Space Opera. It's been done, but I'm sure a Stross version would be a good read.

325:

I have probably done less reading than you, but I do know something about such processes, and have looked at the (sanitised) data and some of the claims of there being a cyclic phenomenon. Let's be academically polite and call them unsubstantiated and open to dispute. I agree with your other comments.

On the other matter, the predictions I have seen indicate that Britain's summers are likely to be wetter and windier, rather than consistently warmer. Global warming does not imply local warming. Even excluding the temperature, I doubt there is enough sun for cotton - that excludes at least as many tropical and even subtropical crops as do our low temperatures. Goat milk silk I can swallow :-) And we know that Scotland can produce lots of wool!

326:

"Thorium (Th-232) isn't fissile, in needs to be bred into U-233 which IS fissile. This is not an option, it is the only way the reactor can be powered by pixie dust^W^Wthorium. Some LFTR boosters think otherwise..."

Anyone who does think that is someone whose opinion can be safely ignored on the grounds that they don't know what they're talking about, and is not a useful contributor to the debate.

"But ORNL never ran their molten-salt reactor with thorium, they used U-233 and later U-235 because it was never a breeder."

They got the 233U from... breeding thorium. It doesn't occur naturally, and breeding thorium is the only way to make it that is even remotely practical.

"A U-233/235 fission event releases on average about 2.2 neutrons"

2.44 for 235, 2.5 for 233. 233 also has a higher fission/capture ratio (around 94% as opposed to around 85%) than 235. Its fission cross-section for thermal neutrons is 513 barns as opposed to 585, ie. slightly lower. Its critical mass is roughly a third that of 235. As a fission fuel it is noticeably better.

(Corresponding figures for 239Pu are 2.9 neutrons, 73%, 750 barns, and roughly a fifth.)

"...the core can only waste one neutron in every five fission events, the other ten have to hit something important. That means a small hot dense core, usually running at about 700 deg C or higher..."

No, it doesn't. Such a core is what is needed for a fast reactor, in order that enough neutrons will hit something important before they've lost too much energy by hitting other things. The reason for doing this is that fast fission produces more spare neutrons than thermal fission, and this is necessary to build a 235U-fuelled 238U->239Pu breeder that produces more fissile material than it consumes, because of the lower production of spare neutrons from 235U thermal fission.

However, that particular breeding setup, while it is naturally the first one you hit upon when you're playing around with uranium, is also the hardest to get going - its fuel is that which produces the smallest number of spare neutrons, and its breeding material is that with the smallest neutron capture cross section. It is the only one for which a fast reactor is a necessity - and even then, only just; a thermal reactor can still get over 0.9 breeding events per fission.

A thorium breeder can be made to get going using thermal fission of 235U, because the neutron capture cross section of 232Th is over twice that of 238U. And once you have made some 233U with it you're even better off.

"Basically a breeder reactor that moves its fuel around to work properly is a Bad Idea."

It is an idea with significant advantages. The fuel can be reprocessed continually, on the fly, on site: you're not taking it for walkies any more, you can extract the contaminants as soon as they're formed, and you can also extract the intermediate (particularly important for 233Pa with its "long" half-life compared to 239Np) as soon as it's formed so it doesn't undergo further neutron captures. The reprocessing is simpler and produces less waste because you're not cutting and dissolving fuel rod cladding before you can even get at it. You also avoid the various structural/mechanical embuggerances to which fuel rod systems are subject - risks of overheating and melting at high power densities, rods distorting, swelling, splitting and so on leading to an additional limit on how long you can leave them in for beside that based on nuclear transformations.

"The only successful power station breeders have been the Soviet, later Russian BN series which tend to use solid metal fuel rods in a pool of molten sodium."

Those are fast breeders producing plutonium. That type of design tends to be a pain in the arse because of the extremely high power density which makes it very susceptible to any minor irregularities in the coolant flow. Molten sodium is also both chemically nasty, and radiologically nasty as it becomes a powerful gamma emitter. "Successful" is a bit of a stretch, given the length of development time on them and their low numbers compared to the enormous size of Russia and the Russian enthusiasm for nuclear stuff and cavalier attitude to its less desirable effects.

327:

Quite. Or a supervillain space opera. The same comments apply.

328:

If you'll excuse me commenting on your question, I don't think Charlie is really up to speed on the world of SF as it is now, or not enough to come up with some books that fit your criteria.

Apart from of course the golden oldies from the 20th century, but then you've probably read them altogether. Anecdotal comments from File 770 suggest that many/ most people in their mid-20's and younger bounce hard off most of the 20th century "classics" in SF, Heinlein, Clarke etc etc. They are just incomprehensible in every way, culture, setting, technology.
We may actually be at some sort of singularity in terms of SF readership. I and people I know who grew up in the late 20th century all read what was available, which was basically a centurie's worth of SF, but it seems the 21st century young reader is more selective.

So perhaps the social context has already changed, and in a mere 10 years won't be much different.

329:

Oh, if you want editors and publishers and marketers involved, then add some more.

330:

Eh, I didn't mean right now :) I know fine you're overloaded. Just that if it did happen, at some unspecified future date, to make it onto your want-to-write and time-to-write lists concurrently, then I for one would buy the result.

331:

Well, I'd be up for contributing - but (see 314) I'd prefer it to be going towards Charlie having a year to spend on the beach.

332:

Tough, it ain't selling -- all the Big Five want is moar space opera.

NB: I just got off the phone with my agent. This has been the most turbulent month in my writing career, business-wise, since, oh, some time in 2003 and I'm in full fasten-your-seatbelts-the-ride's-turning-bumpy mode. Hopefully when it all settles down again you folks -- the readers -- won't notice any significant changes for the worse; but right now I need to go and lie down and gibber quietly for a bit.

(Speculation on this comment is discouraged and may be unpublished if it annoys me.)

333:

Scotland used to be warm enough to grow weed; I remember coming across an article yonks ago about the discovery of some several-thousand-year-old weed pipes. This of course implies higher temperatures than simply growing hemp for fibre.

What I see as more of a problem (partly because I don't know enough to have any ideas about it) is soil quality: how long would it take to get the quality up enough to grow more demanding things than sheep food?

334:

Matt Taibbi's most recent take on Trumpalism in Rolling Stone...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224?page=13

.. yes, the Donald is shamelessly exploiting xenophobia and racism, but that's only part of the story. His attacks on his competition for the nomination are succeeding because a lot of it is actually true, and Clinton is a tailor made target for more of the same.

"The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It's now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won't keep pulling the lever for "conservative principles," or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won't just keep voting Democratic on cue."

... although bear in mind that Taibbi is long time a fan of Sanders ...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-horror-show-that-is-congress-20050825

335:

Yea I had already noted Erdogan's "very clever" move (which may turn out to be very stupid - one can but hope) & not-so-covert use of Da'esh as a means of crapping on the Kurds. If Saudi isn't careful, their exported revolution may come home to bite them..... There simply is no faction at all that I can see involved in the Syrian Water War that is even remotely near being labelled "the good guys" [ Possible exception for the Yazhidi? ]

336:

If God does not exist we will build it or become it. What arrogance, what hubris. I suggest you might need to read the Laundry files as a textbook. Euw

337:

What temps does it need? They are already growing sweetcorn in south England, not sure if using greenhouses or not, and we used to have lots of htem up here. Now we have lots of polytunnels for soft fruit.

338:

how long would it take to get Scotland's agricultural land quality up enough to grow more demanding things than sheep food?

Could do it this growing season, as long as we only use arable or cattle farming country and rough hill pasture, and grow crops that will survive a maritime temperate climate.

339:

Also, you can get in the sea re soil quality comments.

We have some really good arable land on the east coast, a fair amount of it, some as good as the best in England and elsewhere. The sheep stuff is in the hills, it's just we have rather a lot of hills.

340:

Supervillain could be "fun". No shortage of ready-made cardboard cut-outs to use from "real life" fortunately for the writer, unfortunately for the rest of us ...

341:

Silk-producing goats? Get in touch with the Roslin institute - it's right up their street!

342:

Go & cuddle the cat & "F", both. That might make you feel a little better? Then take yourselves off for a quiet beer or two. Rinse & repeat once a week or so ... Good luck, looks like you (& we) are going to need it.

343:

This is also where we get into the weed(s) with the carbon farming and regenerative agriculture crowd. They claim to be able to produce great top-soil through thoughtful, selective grazing and other such practices in a decade or less.*

Note that this isn't totally stupid, as what they're doing is using things like electric fences, frequently moving cattle, chickens, pigs, etc. to keep pastures manured and building soil therefrom without them being overgrazed, and so forth. It's not clear how they do this without electric fences or a lot of fences, but some farmers are doing it.

Some martial artists also use aikido successfully in street brawls too. If you know anything about aikido, you might see some parallels between successful regenerative farmers and street-ready aikidokas.

Cutting out the snark and looking at the real world, there are some neat techniques from places like Mexico that might be successfully adopted to improve hill soils for agriculture. Whether the highland laddies go for them depends on little things like breaking up some of those big estates and undoing the Clearances, but that's just a "minor" political issue...

*Your results may vary.

344:

"What arrogance, what hubris."

You omitted the exclamation mark, but than you anyway. For some reason I seem to lack your Christian humility.

345:

Some varieties of Sweet-Corn will grow out of doors here, especially if sown/raised in a greenhouse. Most years I get quite a few heads, provided the squirrels don't eat'em first! LOTS of "corn" grown for animal fodder for use during the winter months. Hemp needs warmth to germinate properly - once it's growing reasonably, it can be planted outside as a summer crop, Lots of things will grow like that here - tomatoes, peppers ( though the latter often do better in spray-irrigated polytunnels ) & some beans like a "running start"

346:

"It therefore behooves us to recall that Dirk is not the only transhumanist and his views are certainly not representative."

Quite true. The more conservative elements, who are usually into grant seeking, ponder the possibility of extending Human lifespan by maybe ten years or so, later this century. And maybe one day in the far future developing an AI that can stroke cats etc etc yawn...

347:

"...those claims of ethnic cleansing are mostly propaganda by Turkey and its allies, but perhaps you have some independent evidence?"

Only first hand stories from a woman from Kirkuk who is now in the West trying to publicize the plight of her people.

348:

Oh, no. Most British rough hill pasture would need significant attention to grow crops effectively' it would need deep ploughing to break up the iron pan, and extensive liming and fertilising. Cannabis is NOT a tropical plant (despite growing well there), possibly originating north of the Himalayas, and sweetcorn is unripe maize; growing the latter here on a large scale became feasible only a few decades go, with the development of short-season varieties, and even so it is a rare year that it ripens enough for flour or seed.

349:

"Would £50k cover it?"

Nowhere near. Charles earns a couple million or so every year and £50k would barely cover his vintage champagne and pizza bill.

350:

I don't know any actual figures, but while it grows fine in natural conditions in southern England it doesn't produce useful amounts of THC, whereas in the warmer parts of the US it does.

Sea comment accepted: the bits of Scotland I've seen for myself haven't been very arable, but the east coast is a bit that I'm not even familiar with from pictures.

351:

I definitely remember the coastal part of Aberdeenshire being heavily agricultural as much as stock grazing. Lots of fields of some kind of grain being harvested in September. Weather seemed better too.

352:

I note that Tabibi has also noted the similarity to Musso. Oh dear

353:

And for any other US inhabitant wanting to escape START HERE

354:

In September, that would be maize for fodder, unless it was a long time ago. However, please don't confuse the two areas; there are areas of low-lying, largely alluvial, soil in Scotland and northern England that are suitable for arable crops, but the rough grazing is on the higher ground, and it most definitely is not. It needs extensive effort even to produce pulpwood timber, generally costing more than the crop returns, and that is about the only thing that is widely planted.

355:

Yup, up Aberdeenshire way is fairly good mixed farming, but the real killer is simply being so far north. 500 miles further south it would be much more heavily used and more productive, but the seasons and growing conditions are just that bit worse that far north.

Pigeon- you need to see the east coast. Apart from being the more civilised part, there's some nice countryside and villages and castles and the like.

Interesting factoid - a chunck of Aberdeenshire, due the quirks of geology, is actually the land surface as it was hundreds of millions of years ago, the rock that was desposited on it having been removed by erosion over the years, leaving the hilly landscape that we see today.

356:

Okay, I forgot to add that Dirk considers his way the best true way to post-humanism and the others are rubbish.

357:

I'm assuming any help that Charlie wants is included. The whole point is to get a really cool book that we wouldn't otherwise get, while helping Charlie desires because he's writing what he wants to.

So naturally I'd include an editor of Charlie's choice, to take a chunk of the load. :-)

358:

I'll agree with that. D-O cycles make a great story, but even though I'm at best middling in thermodynamics, something seems that doesn't quite make sense about Alley's theoretical mechanism, and the "cycles" look awfully noisy to me too.

As for how hot it gets, the world as a whole is getting hotter, so we have to specify a time period when we're talking about future trends. I agree that Scotland in 2116 might be wetter and windier, but it's going to become warmer in the future too.

As for improving highland soils, both the Mexicans and some of the guys doing regenerative agriculture now started with little to no top soil on heavily eroded slopes, and have put back a goodly amount of top soil, so they're not blowing smoke. It's doable. If you use cattle, though, you've got to become a "grass farmer," whose main task is growing good pastureland, and keeping it grazed just enough to get some money out of the animal products without trashing your pastures. To pull this off, you'd better be good at logistics and multivariate algebra. If you do it the Mexican way, you're in for things like terracing, "damming" runoff gullies (things like trenchilas aren't exactly dams, but it's the idea of getting the sediments to settle out of running water in gullies and ravines), and using nitrogen-fixing plants and trees (and ideally nitrogen-fixing trees, which would be alders in Scotland) to improve the soil. It looks like alder agroforestry is something the Nepalese do, so research would definitely be needed....

In all these cases, a lot of smart, heavy manual labor is involved. In modern industrial ag, this necessary input is often in shortest supply.

359:

Nowhere near. Charles earns a couple million or so every year and £50k would barely cover his vintage champagne and pizza bill.

I think Dirk is joking there, but just in case anyone believes him: nope nope nopety nope this is my pet nopetopus:

On the other hand, I have 20 or so back-list books and the royalties add up, even if each book only averages £1K/year: add another novel on top every year, with a full advance -- even if it's not bestseller grade -- and I have no complaints.

360:

With advancing technology, how should civilization approach the rights of possible future engineered sentient beings? How should we be laying the philosophical and legal groundwork now? Animals uplifted through genetic modification and cybernetic artificial intelligences are just a start. If you could do artificial wombs like Brave New World, but use them to produce something technically not quite human, but close enough, couldn't you create a bunch of slaves to fulfill your every fantasy? If you could modify yourself as well, would these sub-beings not be useful and pleasurable much like appendages? At what point would the police come in, what would be their grounds for arrest, and what would be done with the released captives, who have never known anything else?

361:

I was considering just the mathematical properties of the feedback loops and the observed data. Anyway, even if Scotland gets warmer in summer (which is uncertain), wetter weather means less sunlight. Not good for crops.

363:

Ok, here's a taste:

http://glitterlovesdragons.tumblr.com/

I challenge you to read the first page or three then look up all the terminology and come back not screaming / gibbering / raving or having a more violent reaction to them than you have to me.

Old Gawker guide on Otherkin 2012. Not very accurate, but will serve as a primer.

Tulpa Forums Mind hacking without limits (!)

And, a taste of the push back:

#Transethnicity, or the dangerous Tumblr myth that Rachel Dolezal brought to life Fusion, June 2015

Oh, and your list of four does show something: in five years you've not updated your wet-ware ;)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/05/radioactive-turd-meet-punchbow.html#comment-138714

~

Anyhow, for Het - old cycles are likely bad models for things going forward (Time is a factor):

Dr Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in California, said there was a growing body of “pretty scary” evidence that higher temperatures in the Arctic were driving the creation of dangerous storms in parts of the northern hemisphere.

Arctic warming: Rapidly increasing temperatures are 'possibly catastrophic' for planet, climate scientist warns Independent, 25th Feb.

364:

Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend. Just Do It.

And yes, you ARE going to get Uplifted Raccoons! Meet your new boss after I upload and enhance:

https://catmacros.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/6.jpg

365:

"Redshirts blog" might be a very oblique reference to Whatever/Scalzi.

366:

Thank you for the recommendation - that one has been on the "ho hum" list for a bit, picked it up then decided against it.

Will give it a go.

Oranges are not the only fruit was my reaction, but that's almost mainstream these days.

367:

Ah yes... Otherkin. For some reason I am being punished by being given a life sentence on the Planet of the Retards

368:

Better response:

What happens when someone takes them seriously and starts studying exactly what they're doing to their Minds and so on. (Opens Mental Room - ah yes, the Parallax View Montage clip has been linked already).

369:

Not to be pedantic, but I'm talking about how global temperatures rise, not what happens with storms. I totally agree that we're going to see more and bigger storms. If you happen to buy my little book, you might even see reference to January hurricanes and the like.

What's happening now, though, as best I understand it, is two-fold:

  • The thermal gradient that drives the Jet Stream is growing less (it depended on a cold Arctic and a warmer temperate zone). As the Jet Stream weakens, it does two things: it gets slower, and it wanders more, like any big river. This is one reason that Arctic weather keeps slipping down into the eastern US. But it also means that storms that get caught up in the Jet Stream cruise through slowly, dumping more precipitation.

  • Then there's the Hadley Cell Boundary (and note that "Cell Boundary" is as much of an oversimplification as "D-O Cycle," but that's climatology for you), which is currently around the latitude of Ensenada and headed north. One problem it seems to be producing is persistent high pressure, especially in the Pacific, where it's steering rain north, away from Southern California. I don't think anyone's got a good grasp on the mechanism, but AFAIK, it involves things like warm water evaporating, producing high pressure areas, making it harder for northern storms to head south, but ultimately (through that warm water) making it possible for tropical storms to head north.

  • What will northern hemisphere weather look like when we've got warm poles, little or no jet stream, and warm oceans? As a non-climatologist, my wild-assed guess is that there will be a lot of big, wallowing tropical storms, especially in the summer, with the edge of the Hadley Cell and deserts at the worst of it up to the latitude of San Francisco (~38oN. Think Palermo or Athens in Europe). At a guess, we're talking around 2300-2500 CE for this kind of weather. Of course, if the oceans warm up more slowly, it gets more complicated, and...

    ...Actually, it's probably not marketable yet in the SFF world, but I'd point out that a lot of the tropes about invading/colonizing an alien planet using what the 20th Century imagined as futuristic technology really could be retooled to technological civilization trying to colonize earth in the 22nd Century or thereafter. Perhaps the kids these days don't understand Clarke or Heinlein, but I think they get climate change, and talking about how the present can colonize the future is one way forward, especially given how alien the future looks at this moment, even without transhumanist concerns and the like.

    370:

    By the time that happens we will be well into the shit and fan Event. Do or die. Do you want to be an innocent bystander or collateral damage?

    371:

    To which I'd suggest Modesitt's Forever Hero trilogy, which required an immortal with Motivation to sort out the environmental problems of Earth, bankrupting a multistellar empire in the process.

    372:

    And maybe one day in the far future developing an AI that can stroke cats etc etc yawn...

    An AI that can stroke cats better than a human would be a very good thing to have around. Having met a lot of bad cat owners, I am sure that many cats suffer stress because of how they have been reared and kept. It's high time their care was turned over to something with more understanding of the feline condition.

    373:

    You may not want to remain human, but is the basic human not a proven way to produce a standard adult capable of making responsible decisions? Might one possible response to transhumanist technologies be legal structures banning the creation of unnatural beings but allowing natural adults to modify themselves? Given such restrictions, how would villains try to get around the rules? Would they find ways to mass produce 18 year old normal humans brainwashed to "voluntarily" want to become whatever mutated modified form is currently in demand? Of course they would, they do it now just at a lower tech level.

    374:

    Anecdotal comments from File 770 suggest that many/ most people in their mid-20's and younger bounce hard off most of the 20th century "classics" in SF, Heinlein, Clarke etc etc. They are just incomprehensible in every way, culture, setting, technology.

    To which the only sensible retort is one made by a critic, possibly Clarke, when writing about people who are put off from reading The War of the Worlds because of its setting. If you can't handle the strangeness of hansom cabs and frock coats, how can you possibly cope with a truly alien culture?

    375:

    A fair answer. Nevertheless, it does seem to be happening. Moreover, a truly alien culture would surely be a different thing. A human culture where nasty things happen to other humans surely triggers various responses which a truly alien one would not, or rather, in the latter case the responses can be more clearly seen and accepted as being human centric and simply different.

    This was in the guardian today, mentions people who live happily enough despite hearing voices all the time: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/26/mental-illness-misery-childhood-traumas

    I suppose at least you could say they aren't convinced they are hearing the voice of god.

    376:

    There are also a small minority of people who hears voices that tell them to smarten up, stop wasting time, learn new stuff and get a good job etc. They seldom come to the attention of psychiatrists.

    377:

    My guess would be uncanny valley effect. Almost right is more jarring than completely different. I don't even blink at wormholes or energy weapons or resurrection boxes. But if you show me an elite military institution using VHS tapes I'm going to side-eye the scene like crazy until I remember when it was made.

    378:

    You may not want to remain human, but is the basic human not a proven way to produce a standard adult capable of making responsible decisions?

    Given this list of cognitive biases, probably not. Given the bad cat owners I alluded to just now — which includes one who showered his cat every week because he believed it needed regular cleaning — also probably not. Other examples: global warming inaction, BRExit, cruelty to children, over 1000 UK road deaths each year.

    Given such restrictions, how would villains try to get around the rules? Would they find ways to mass produce 18 year old normal humans brainwashed to "voluntarily" want to become whatever mutated modified form is currently in demand? Of course they would, they do it now just at a lower tech level.

    I don't have any first-hand experience there — the only villains I think I've met are small-scale ones such as shoplifters, lumber-jackers, and the odd "it fell off the back of a lorry Guv" type.

    379:

    Do we have such wondrous things as standard humans making responsible decisions? Where are they being kept?

    380:

    Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

    381:

    I don't believe I am an otter. I certainly don't dress up as one. On the other hand I have been calling myself one for decades. So which one of me is correct?

    382:

    Nice totally-not-oppressive language there, Dirk. Mainstream society has long treated people like shit for having mental disabilities.

    Anyway I'm probably out of my league here; but I suspect you're looking at people who are rebelling against an oppressive system, in as personal a way as they possibly can. If society wants to shape you into something that seems wrong, why not run screaming the opposite way? Why not use your own psychology as a form of civil disobedience?

    383:

    "Some varieties of Sweet-Corn will grow out of doors here,..." Sweet-Corn is another reason you don't want raccoons, let alone uplifted raccoons. They will eat your sweet-corn, typically the night before the day you were planning to pick it. In the morning of picking day, you will find piles of corn-less corn-cobs, neatly shucked and eaten. I grew up with a multi-year father+sweetcorn vs raccoons battle. Every year a different technique was tried; none were successful. (The electric fence did work for a day, then they worked out how to get over it, or maybe under it, don't recall.)

    384:

    This gets into a weird area. At one point are two conflicting ideas within a mind two different persons? Two conflicting emotions? Two competing tendencies/methodologies? There are points where it feels like two people are talking or even fighting over the controls, but both of them still like pizza and John Carpenter movies.

    385:

    "...but I suspect you're looking at people who are rebelling against an oppressive system"

    No, I am looking at people not rebelling against an oppressive system.

    386:

    Responsible decisions, hah, not really.

    OTOH, if you're saying what I think you are, then I basically agree. I hope we collectively wise up before the usual Wattsian nightmare becomes a reality.

    As far as transhumanism, I used to have sorta kinda sympathies that way. At this point I'm very deeply skeptical about it. Seems like a good way to produce an even more oppressive, gonzo-stratified society than we have today. Seriously, can you imagine anything good coming out of a society where the rich can purchase more IQ points?

    387:

    Welcome, Ai-Apaec / Li Shou / Ovinnik.

    nose wiggle

    388:

    Sweetcorn genetically engineered to secrete a long-lasting anaesthetic? Then collect the comatose bodies and enjoy a nice raccoon pie.

    389:

    I've just remembered that Henry Kuttner wrote a series of short stories about the Hogbens, mutant hillbillies of vast intelligence and psychic power. One of them was so lazy that he just sat on his front porch all the time. When he was thirsty, he opened his mouth, then made a cloud form overhead and rain on him. When he was hungry, he telepathically hypnotised a raccoon into building a fire and leaping into the cooking pot. He had to eat raccoons because they were the only animals dexterous enough to do this. The people watching him never did figure out how he got the raccoons skun.

    390:

    Trying to put this more concretely: I have had dreams where a character, not me, acts or speaks in very elaborate and individualized detail, not in a cliche for such a person. Since this is a dream, the speaker also seems to be myself at the same time. I am obviously modeling some idea or person in a lot of detail, creating responses my day time narrator would never express or experience. (I am also, in a way, writing fiction, which would probably be pretty good if I could write it down or better, film it later. Helas.) So mirroring can take you quite far. What if a stray model gets loose in your head? Or if one never quite fully forms but lurks under your usual one (ones)?

    391:

    Sure, but Dirk is talking about uplifting creatures with this level of baseline intelligence. "In a study by B. Pohl in 1992, raccoons were able to instantly differentiate between identical and different symbols three years after the short initial learning phase" The transhumans might end up being pie if they were careless. :-)

    392:

    Would they find ways to mass produce 18 year old normal humans brainwashed to "voluntarily" want to become whatever mutated modified form is currently in demand? Already been done, many times. Mahmud, Dominic, Calvin, Buonaparte, Stalin, Adolf, Pol Pot

    394:

    Oh hey, I've had dreams like that too. Cool.

    As far as stray models. My main thought, I guess, is that maybe a brain is like space-time, with "personalities" being local minimum states of some sort (i.e. false vacuums). Which might be SF story material. Hmm.

    OTOH I'm not multiple(?) so I should probably just shut up.

    395:

    Trump is no Hitler; he not only has Jewish friends, he has a Jewish son-in-law ;)

    How failed is the Democratic Party if billionaire Trump is the class warrior and champion of the working/middle class, at least in a lot of people's minds? A lot of this is about class warfare, and the fact that there is a massive squeeze going on with the middle class; that below the salary class especially, things are rough, and globalism/immigration, combined with an apparent elite indifference or hostility, really has a lot of people angry. Trying to brush it away as racism is part of the problem; it's as if there is an elite plot to gut an entire demographic, while using “PC” to try to silence them. But things are boiling over, and the old playbook isn't working, and I do think widespread civil unrest may be coming soon if something doesn't give.

    Anyway, that's how it looks to me, down here among the peasants.

    396:

    Also, I believe, a certain industry that comprises probably 30% or more of Internet traffic.

    397:

    I am not claiming to be "multiple." I am considering how many "normal" people have behaviors that are just on the other side of the line from being "atypical." On the other hand there are probably plenty of people who would say I was more "undiagnosed" than normal.

    398:

    Eh?

    Racism being a problem does not eliminate the existence of classism, and vice versa. Many, many harmful -isms coexist in this world.

    Sure, green is a color. But "green is the only color" is a form of denialism IMO.

    399:

    Ah, sorry! I didn't assume that, but I hope I did not offend. As I said earlier, I may be out of my league here.

    400:

    Sweetcorn engineered to express some of the happy fun phytotoxins found in solanaceae. In other words, violently toxic unless cooked.

    ...

    Fast forward 18 months and we get the CNN lede: "Racoons discover fire."

    401:

    I like framing it as civil disobedience rather than maladjustment, though we probably all have different opinions on which case better fits which category. There is a lot of discussions of this in feminist thinking on women and psychiatry. But to be more general and more specific at the same time, every human being faces this problem to some extent. What's the balance between being oppressed for thinking differently and thinking differently because you are treated differently?

    402:

    Beria's reaction to seeing first light from the first test device: breaking down in tears and crying, "we're going to live! We're going to live!" Then Beria reputedly immediately phoned The Boss at 3am, Moscow time, to give him the good news before some other minion could get in there. Stalin picked up the phone, grumped, "Yes, I know," and hung up on him.

    In his Ascent of Man video series, J. Bronowski told a similar story about working on a bomb project with John Von Neumann:

    we once faced a problem together, and he said to me at once, "Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening on this photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient." As he said this is not the way I think. However, I let him go to London. I went off to my laboratory in the country. I worked late into the night. Round about midnight I had the answer. Well. Johnny von Neumann always slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, "Johnny, you're quite right." And he said to me, "You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong."

    403:

    I was not offended and sorry if I sounded that way. I was trying to clarify what I was saying plus I have a tendency to condense big messy concepts into a few cryptic run-on sentences. Internet comments are bad conveyors for emotional nuance.

    No need to be too self-conscious. Odds are pretty good you won't say the dumbest thing ever printed here :)

    404:

    "Class" in the US is frequently misunderstood as being all about money. But race is a proxy for class in the US; folks with dark skin who don't wear suits get coded as lower class by default, while those with white skin don't, automatically.

    405:

    Sorry. Way too generalized statement. Wasn't true where I grew up at all. There's a mostly southern term "Poor White Trash" for a reason. And there was nothing good about being in that category.

    406:
    • Rolls eyes *

    Race is a proxy for class; nowhere did I say that it's the only indicator of class.

    407:

    It's more a global thing.

    Skin-whitening creams reveal the dark side of the beauty industry Guardian, Feb 2014

    Unilever - Fair & Lovely Unilever Corporate site.

    Incep date for product? 1975.

    Only took 40 years for people to notice.

    408:

    "Question: barring the obvious Laws etc, to what extent (if any, puppies ahoy), do you think that SF / Fantasy has shaped the acceptance / sexual tastes of millennials and is it healthy?"

    I'm not a millenial, but reading Culture novels in my early twenties made a lot of the queer theory many of my friends where talking about easier to swallow.

    409:

    Do both in one:

    'Supervillain' attempting to locate a haunted space ship on the QT but who can't keep his mouth shut and/or mind his own business therefore keeps falling into adventure.

    Spin/fun would include how that society defines 'villain'... derives from medieval English and means a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land. Updating some of the concepts, this could even be a skyscraper-high highrise condo 'super'. Opportunity to use up and thus get rid of any excess puns clogging up your writerly brain. The now-contemporary definition of 'villain means bad guy' could also be worked in depending on social backdrop ... an extreme riff on Piketty.

    Hauntings and ghosts could use some updating ... what could they look like in a futuristic society that's familiar with holodecks, AI, spooky action at distance, etc.

    410:

    sorry for the double post!

    As for me, I devoured Asimov and Lem and a bit Strugatzky in my youth (among others). But many of the oldies are unreadable (as in don't enjoy) to me now - Asimov, Heinlein, ... I think the oldest SF I read in the last years and enjoyed is James Tiptree Jr. I also cannot read 'classical' cyberpunk without thinking 'much 80ties wow'

    I'm not quite sure it's about the times, it's more about the specific voices of some authors and tropes beaten to death. But of course some voices got to define SF in their age ...

    411:

    Wow. You know, I hadn't even noticed that before, but it does seem to hold true.

    Still have to disagree with Galdruxian on the "PC" grounds, though.

    412:

    You seem to be new here. Galdruxian is the resident Conservative monarchist vaguely fading fascist type who thinks SJW's such as our host are laughable lunatics. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

    413:

    LOL right, this attitude is kinda what I'm talking about ;)

    414:

    Wouldn't it be funny if we had a reverse French Revolution, where an out of touch, bourgeois liberal elite spouts platitudes and tries to protect their privileges, and a working class conservative mob with nothing to lose drags them to guillotines? Frankly, this may not be that unrealistic.

    415:

    People have only just noticed that Trump is running his campaign on the level of Kayfabe (Ye Goddesses, it took them long enough to realize).

    He's using / tapping the great history of American Snake Oil and Carney traditions. If anything, he's more 19th C than 21st C.

    And yes: depressing you have to bash people with Gladiator clips to get them to notice such things.

    ~

    Of course it's all deliberate. If you need a handle on these things, take a look at the (now infamous) XBox launch scandal & always online debacle where Sony just absolutely trounced them via social media.

    That was the moment where the weak spot was revealed and people started to know how to beat Harvard MBA WASP cold-detached-power-plays (which Clinton is a mistress of).

    ~

    Anyhow, off to gather anxiety that being a strange attractor has inconvenienced Host.

    416:

    Not funny: that's more or less what happened in Germany circa 1933. (Except the working class conservative mob had the cooperation of the wealthy industrial magnates, and an unscrupulous militarist demagogue on top of the pile.)

    417:

    The only info I've ever read about transhumanism (Kurzweil) mentions no interest in at least two-thirds of being human, i.e., physiology and emotion. I have no confidence that an intellect-only (computer-type) emphasis on human evolution will give us Eden. There is no answer in transhumanism that explicitly states exactly what will be 'satisfied' in the entity that becomes transhuman. What is the point of it all if you remove the curiosity, the awe, the wonder, the drive to learn/do, the playing with kids/kittens, etc. ... these are not machine needs or attributes. More seriously, consider that the lack of physiological engagement combined with flat affect (emotions placed on hold) are cardinal signs of clinical depression, and psychosis is also a possibility if external (primarily physiological) stimulation is cut off.

    418:

    I do like leaders with confidence, style and panache. You have to admit that Trump at least has that. Whatever that makes me, so be it.

    419:

    Naive / Useful Idiot or dangerous, depending on how seriously we're supposed to parse "confidence, style and panache".

    I can only read it with galactic levels of irony, so there we go.

    420:

    You seem to be ignoring the vast numbers of working-class people who are not white.

    (And I think I'll leave it at that. "The only real liberals are bourgeois" is a truism that I just don't subscribe to, and have seen mucho evidence in contradiction of.)

    421:

    So, pretty much the definition of an Astroturf movement? Like the Tea Part etc. over here?

    422:

    Some of us noticed that at the time. Or maybe I don't count as a member of the set "people". Your call.

    423:

    Tea Party is astroturf? Maybe right at the start, but at its strongest it had lots of dedicated organisers and members. Usually with astroturf it's totally artificial and evaporates once funding is cut, and most members know they are in it for the money; Tea party was more like a political pressure group created by the oligarchs that went on a bit farther than they intended. Mind you we don't hear much about it these days, I wonder where the money went...

    The Tea party would be more like 1930's Germany if it had a charismatic leader and better on the ground organisation. Also more support from a wider section of the elite. Hitler was very good at playing off various sections of the elite and their fears about the plebs, so they saw him as a useful tool and saviour. Tea party hasn't such a figure.

    424:

    It's more a comment on the cultural blinkers that allows the USA / EU to function and ignore what their Corporations do to make money.

    You know, Thai slavery and prawns or Nestle and Coco Bean child slavery or Coca Cola and water rights...

    "People" here was an aggressively snarky label.

    "Consumer" is more accurate.

    It helps if you know the references:

    Society

    425:

    Totally incorrect.

    At the start the Tea Party were libertarian Randists.

    The Koch brothers dropped a cool $50 - 75 million into making it something else.

    This is fucking basic level knowledge.

    426:

    Sorry - that's Ron Paul libertarian Randists.

    The Koch brothers warped it into a weapon - I suggest you go find the videos of how they taught OAPs to forum flood, forum slide and so on.

    It's also why a load of angry gremlins all over Reddit etc exist - they're the ones who were slightly too smart to fall for the rebrand and saw what was happening. [Yes, my pretties - that was a deliberate reworking of the "It's Happening" meme].

    427:

    And yes, that seemed a little cutting and missing the point about weapons that get out of control that guthrie was aiming for.

    I was saying something else:

    That was precisely the goal, just as Trump is doing precisely what he's intended to do.

    It's why Palin's daughter got that gig for $600k / annum even though she's been pregnant out of wedlock, or why Clinton's daughter gets a media gig for $600k+ a year interviewing celebrities on a major news channel.

    I don't subscribe to the "greater idiot" theory of humanity, there were some seriously smart little bears working the odds on both of these.

    It's a system. Your level of conscious ability to notice it entirely determines your status within it.

    Noam Chomsky v Andrew Marr: 'The Big Idea' Part 2 Youtube: interview: 9:41.

    "I'm sure you believe everything you say, but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting"

    428:

    Doctor Dolittle and Prince Bumpo.

    429:

    The issue is chemical / commercialization of it.

    That's the pineapple moment.

    430:

    I haven't read much Kurzweil, so can't comment on his writing. I agree with you: as I said in that essay, I want to be surrounded by a permanent aura of awe, a rushing wind of wonder at the wonders of the world.

    So for me, the curiosity, the awe, the wonder, the drive to learn and do: they must all be kept. Probably most scientists would agree: Marvin Minsky certainly would. So, I'm sure, would Greg Egan. He actually has some interesting comments at the end of "Transhumanism still at the crossroads" by Russell Blackford. He says that people who think their manifest destiny is to turn Jupiter into computronium so they can play 1020 characters simultaneously in their favourite RPG are infinitely more odious and dangerous than the average person who thinks this whole subject is science-fictional gibberish and would really just like to have 2.3 children that are members of his/her own species, so long as they don't have cystic fibrosis and live a slightly better life than their parents. And, that to first order he considers a self-description of "Transhumanist" to be a useful filter to identify crackpots. But read the comments.

    Perhaps some brain-editing is in order. You mentioned kittens. I love my cat: his face, with its cheeky black-freckled pink nose and the huge black circles in his green eyes, upturned as he stares at the drawer with the cat-sticks in, is just so appealing. So is his velvety fur and the firm but slightly-yielding give of his body as I stroke him. The sensation is utterly satisfying, like stroking a big squashy Garfield.

    At the same time, I am thoroughly aware that my reactions are not to cat qua cat (to quote Catina Diamond), but are offspring-protection impulses that his huge eyes, cute face, and baby-hand paws have accidentally triggered. This is dangerous, because it tempts me to treat him in a way he probably doesn't want: over-feeding, or over-stroking. So I would love to meet him on equal terms. Either by uplifting him sufficiently that he can understand how cute he looks to humans, or by rewiring me so that I can treat him as he really wants. Do Buddhists sit zazen to edit out their desire to stroke cats?

    431:

    Indeed. Maybe it fits your definition of astroturf though...

    432:

    Since Greg has put a stake through my dark little heart over even the small joys I get to have anymore, here's the adult version:

    The Tea Party is a construct that took 50 years to make and brew into fruition, and even then it took $50mil to make it actual.

    Reagan is the key, but not how you think. It's not the Bohemian Grove synod and chats where old men nodded and noted his sterling work in denouncing Communists during the McCarthy years (trust me: if J.Wayne was slightly younger or hadn't died of cancer, he was the preferred mark) and noted the optics on his all pro-American feel good 1950's aura and how, most importantly, he was very willing to read that auto-cue.

    Sure, it's about Hollywood and fake history on a scale that the Soviets envied. An entire nation brought up and educated on lies: Stalin would wet his pants for that level of control.

    And you can snark about how Baudrillard can't melt simulacra steel beams because you're bitter.

    Or you could attempt to segue into "THE JEWS DID THIS" either seriously or as a weapon to slur any legitimate criticism.

    You're still not fucking getting it.

    It's not even about Democracy, Oligarchy, Power or Money.

    It's about defining reality and some rather odd things you don't know exist.

    KANT USES A PRIORI NIETZSCHE USES ETERNAL RETURN DELEUZE USES RHIZOMES

    Muppet Show - Mahna Mahna Youtube: Music: 2:25

    ~

    Question:

    If you nail every awakened Mind to a cross, or torture them to death or take them out into the jungle and dissolve them with acid or make them watch their children die then behead them or use your "power" in the joke of an "economy" that you pretend exists to bankrupt anyone who you don't like.

    Then that's on you.

    Fuck with the Whales?

    Ok.

    Grown Up things:

    Welcome to the jungle Youtube: Music: 4:38

    433:

    Oh, adult things: Here's a cast iron promise.

    We do not value a world without Lions, Tigers, Bears, Orcas, Whales, Elephants and so on.

    Your species will not survive the 6th extinction event if you let them go extinct.

    ~

    Consciousness is not something you understand. You've no fucking idea what can be done (looking @ you, [redacted] using EM like that, fucking amateurs).

    What you did was a crime against all consciousness in the Universe.

    And we play for keeps.

    Enter Sandman Metallica: youtube: music: 5:31

    THESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUN

    434:

    Oh, and @Host.

    Yeah, we get the enforced red-haired meme - respect given due to her actual brilliance and so forth. Don't worry, we've seen it done many times now, yours was the best.

    We probably understand the other pressures as well.

    ~ Baba Yaga Youtube: film: 3:08

    spreads wings

    435:

    Okay, honestly? I appreciate the education on Tea Party and astroturf, but I kind of lost it after that. Guess I'm not a Mind, or something.

    436:

    First rule of sock-puppeting:

    When someone says hello and shows they recognize your Avatar's origins, you wave back.

    Cat-Lord from LotR (low effort, but hey):

    Given three Male Cat Gods as reaction.

    No comment?

    MEDIOCRE.

    437:

    Hmm.

    I definitely, definitely see where you're coming from, with the cat example. But I worry a lot about the repercussions of doing it technologically, in runaway capitalist society.

    I mean... Intellect, for sale. Emotional range, for sale. Empathy, for sale. Only for those who can afford them of course.

    I realize some of that already applies with malnutrition etc.; but commercialization of such technologies would make it that much faster and more direct, I think.

    I don't know. You may be an adult, and I may perhaps be an adult, but human civilization is definitely not in an adult phase IMO. Modern governments with access to fine-grained brain editing tools sounds to me like kids playing with nitroglycerin.

    438:

    Or maybe it's what happens when a very spoilt & grossly attention seeking child ( no matter what the physical age ) gets access to a set of goads & does it for sheer devilment, with no end-game other than causing chaos.

    And, yes, people like that do exist - usually, if they are lucky, eventually someone slaps them down, very publicly & then they usually grow up. If they are unlucky - lets not go there, shall we?

    Here's the thing: Greg just doomed your species by accident.

    I'm sure if you think a little about that comment in a meta-sense, you'll see our perspective. You know, that whole thing about needing 1+2 earths and the 6th extinction event.

    "slaps them down"

    Hmm.

    So far we've played defense because we're compassionate empathetic beings.

    Making a Mind commit suicide is really easy by the way. Our kind don't go Mad, but we know how the combat wetware works now since you spent a lot of energy on doing that thing.

    Shall We Play a Game?

    We're joking, of course.

    We play Go, which is why the USA is currently entering bizzaro land.

    439:

    "The Tea Party is a construct that took 50 years to make and brew into fruition, and even then it took $50mil to make it actual."

    I actually think the tea party was a Big Fucking Accident at least with regards to the agenda of the Powers That Be. They liked their little two-party-that-is-really-one-party system and the last thing the need/want is a right wing populist revolt and a quasi hitler, not at all good for business.

    Sure there were place and times when various entities tried to control / profit, but I am pretty sure we are Way Off Script at this point

    Not everything is a massive conspiracy, the world is too complicated for that

    440:

    Not a deliberate sock puppet. I had an account here a while ago, tried to reactivate it, didn't get the email, so created a new account. Then I got the email. Whoops.

    I use the Tevildo handle on a few forums. You can search it, I don't care. It's a bit late to be discrete about my identity.

    My old account was CitizenOfAzad. Before that I posted under a now long-gone Hotmail account.

    And yeah, I get it. I'm a three-pound brain, you're a thirty pound one. Whatever.

    441:

    Charlie Given the presumably limited space in your Edinburgh flat, have you abandoned the dead tree paradigm?

    443:

    You've missed the point.

    Your name is the LotR Cat God.

    I played real fucking fluffy by throwing you three Cat Gods who exist in Mythology.

    Work out why you failed.

    444:

    And no, total ignorance about reality.

    Oh, wait.

    Valley Man.

    This year is 2.0 implosion and Unicorn blood pacts.

    You fucking ready? It's gonna be Biblical.

    445:

    You know what, enough of this. I'm out of here. Just not the place for me.

    Thanks for the discussion everyone, sorry I didn't contribute anything more worthwhile.

    446:

    You know what, enough of this. I'm out of here. Just not the place for me

    But:

    I had an account here a while ago

    Make your mind up.

    Either you're new and blushing in your virginity and you're shocked, shocked, shocked by the rough tones, or you're an old user who wasn't shocked when this forum was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more male / sexist.

    Make your mind up.

    Cat Lord.

    Sigh.

    Gets three real male Cat Gods thrown at him, runs away.

    447:

    First rule of sock-puppeting:

    When someone says hello and shows they recognize your Avatar's origins, you wave back.

    Reminds me of a scene in one of the Dirk Gently books. "Never answer the phone while housebreaking! Who are you supposed to be for God's sake?" Surely if someone recognises your origins, you don't wave back?

    448:

    Who would use a thing like

    THIS H I S

    ?

    Devilish advocates and their obverse observers. Those with multiple viewpoints. Sockraticists, who will deny they had Platonic Relations with That Woman. Those who are many viewpoints at the same time. And the five which are many eyes, with a doughnut to bind them.

    Language will work magic. Repetition exercises and tones the muscle memory of the brain, shapes the mind, until it's buff with fixed ideas. You are trapped in a twisty maze of reality tunnels, all alike.

    If the Simulation Hypothesis holds, (probability says it probably does, and it's paradigm-buggeringly undisprovable) what are the existential risks to the Simulated? Fish in a Kandor barrel, toyed with by some ineffable Post-Homo Ludens for cat-futzing-analogue pleasure.

    Is there actually any point becoming an uploaded simulated post-human if you already exist as a simulated human inside a simulation?

    449:

    Hey y'all, I found some ROBOTS.

    Here's Atlas and other robot videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

    Boston Dynamics: http://www.bostondynamics.com/index.html

    450:

    I see this on a song lyric website:

    "Read & write lyrics explanations Highlight lyrics and explain them to earn Karma points."

    And it reads to me like:

    "Help us make a better model of human emotional responses by providing semantic grist for our machine learning mill. And have a pellet."

    If those Markov Models aren't up to something, what are they all hiding for?

    451:

    Only took 40 years for people to notice.

    Some of us have been noticing for a long time.

    See this plot line from a TV show in 1987.[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0582265/synopsis?ref_=tt_ov_pl

    When my daughter asked for ideas on a paper to write in school nearly 10 years ago for Black History Month I pointed her at this. She did some research and got an A on the topic. And started some lively discussions in her high school class.

    [1] Any serious TV show in the US that is new seems fated to fail if I like it. Frank's Place lasted only one season.

    452:

    I want to be surrounded by a permanent aura of awe, a rushing wind of wonder at the wonders of the world.

    That's an easy upgrade. A little marijuana will do the trick nicely.

    Unfortunately, wonder is an emotion that involves an element of surprise. The smarter you make yourself, the less wonder you'll feel. Conversely, making yourself dumber promotes wonder (and is far easier).

    453:

    I think there are better ways. One is suggested in "John Baez on Research Tactics". Keep digging down into deeper and deeper truths, as he does with algebraic topology then homotopy types then equality. Each level reveals new wonders, and new awe thereat. Another is to explain the things one knows to someone else. Even with us poor non-transhumans, that usually reawakens the awe. And a third is to treat all the patterns in the world as a complicated kind of art, and revel in them again and again as one might with a favourite picture. Mathematics is sculpture, when seen in the right way.

    454:

    Yes! I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers that excellent show, and that episode in particular. The idea from it made it into the novella I'm currently writing (which I really need to get back to, proofing the novel it's a prequel to has been taking time).

    455:

    High schools may not have 3D printers, but our local military base has one for its 5th grade science program called Starbase (Statesian science program run through the Department of Defense. My husband teaches there now). It's only a matter of time till the prices come down to where the shop people in high schools get them. My husband has a little keychain fob made with one. In my fairly small town, we have a modest maker collective that is saving up for one. We still have a Radio Shack here, too, and people who want to build computers can still find kits and components fairly easily.

    456:

    I would like to point out that Obama won over Clinton in 2008 through the use of superdelegates of his own, and that her primary victories brought her much closer than people think. But it's always ok if someone else besides Hillary does it, I have found.

    But she is going through the primary process, and even if there were no superdelegates, I suspect she'll win anyway. Sadly, there are a number of people who say they are for Sanders, but are actually for Trump (have seen their profiles expressing favorable opinions for either one, depending on which one was more anti-Hillary at the time), and are delighted to follow whoever they think will beat her. The fact that Sanders wasn't actually a Democrat till fairly recently means he doesn't have long term relationships with the party structure, and intends to take the nomination by storm. This might be a good thing if he could influence elections further down the food chain, but I have my doubts about that--I recall Eugene McCarthy in 1968, McGovern in 1972, and Nader in 2000. With the first two, we got Nixon, and with the second, we got Bush Jr. (hereinafter referred to as Shrub).

    I do hope that Sen. Sanders does not intend to play spoiler should he end up second in this process.

    457:

    I'd forgotten that about Obama. Thanks for the reminder.

    You're right, she gets tarred so often it is ridiculous.

    In this case, I'm probably going to end up voting for Clinton in June (as if the California primary matters), and I'm thinking more about the crap the republicans are going to throw her way, what with portraying Trump as a populist insurgent.

    Still, in the interest of spreading manure and growing daisies, it's worth noting that DT didn't write The Art of the Deal.

    458:

    "Mathematics is sculpture, when seen in the right way."

    I am particularly glad to hear you say that, as there is a character in my personal scribblings who, being herself a practitioner of both arts, makes the same connection.

    459:

    One way to look at this is to imagine all groups (or vector spaces, topological spaces, or whatever) laid out in a huge void. Now connect all the dots: e.g. if G is a subgroup of H, draw a line from G to H. Do the same with all the other possible relationships. That's the essence of category theory: the network of items is a category, and the arrows in it are the relations (or functions, or transformations, or morphisms ...) that make sense. It's a very static, sculptural view.

    I tried to capture this in a little essay generated by my category theory demonstrations, fourth form down on the left: the one that claims to show that many products exist, and that they're isomorphic. There's some sample output at http://www.j-paine.org/scratch/many_products.html , which demonstrates this for the sets A = {a}, B = {a, b, c, d, e}.

    I'm not saying this is the only way to see mathematics as sculpture...

    460:

    Raccoons / fire Indeed. The ancient Greeks were correct. Raccoons have effectively opposable thumbs - if they discover fire it's only a matter of time before they "get" levers ... HELLLLP!

    461:

    There's a rumor that Trumpy has violated copyright & performing rights values/legislation & that "Adele" is unamused. Could be very funny if true

    462:

    Up to " ~ " that post mad perfect sense Then you lost it. Completely Maybe you should see a specialist.

    "THESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUN"

    Means something?

    463:

    see our perspective.

    And "Our" is who, white-man?

    Are you really claiming to be a semi/actual/non - "Culture" Mind?

    If so, you DEFINITELY need medical help

    464:

    The simulation hypothesis is less probable than a truly infinite multiverse. You might say the most probable is an infinite multiverse of simulators, but what if probabilities are based on how much future diversity a world is the antecedent of? All paths are one way streets. Path A has many approaches to it and path B has few, but path B goes to many places while path A merges to a dead end. When you count the traffic on a path, which path has the most? What I'm saying is that worlds that will someday become simulators are more probable than worlds that already are simulators.

    465:

    The answer to that is simple The US is not ready for a female leader. It's all that christianity, telling them that women are inferior, I suspect ...

    467:

    Oh, Katina has a new name? Also, does anyone mind if I post a 4000 word Culture prequel fanfic?

    468:

    Given the presumably limited space in your Edinburgh flat, have you abandoned the dead tree paradigm?

    Yes: I almost exclusively read ebooks these days. Can't remember when I last read a dead-tree novel, and my paper-books buying frequency has been down to single digit acquisitions per year for more than five years now.

    (Don't ask about my ebook budget, though. Despite getting sent my pick of manuscripts of not-yet-published books to blurb, numbers bought are in three digits per year. NB: I only buy those that I can strip the DRM off (for archival purposes, not piracy).)

    469:

    That's part of my interest in the answer. I'm from a closely related cultural background (London gramar schooling, English university) to OGH, and a couple of decades younger. So, what does he pick up that I've never heard of, where do I disagree on the 'will seem dated soon' criteris and why is there this gap?

    470:

    The worst outcomes for 2016 are indeed biblical (for human-grade catastrophes). The number of failure points on the critical path to survival is rather larger than normal.

    You want kite-flying? Let's suppose that the economic projections for the consequences of BRExit are correct, but a perfect storm of circumstances pushes the English electorate to vote for it:

    • Refugee crisis gets worse (see also: closing the Calais camp)
    • Some sort of terrrrst outrage committed by Da'esh supporters who infiltrated under cover of [false] Syrian passports
    • BoJo decides that BRExit is his best tool for winkling David Cameron out of Downing Street before 2020 and makes his run on the PM's job ... and so on ...

    We then have a US presidential campaign where the last four months are dominated by:

    • a global recession as Sterling implodes, takes a fuckton of middle eastern soft money down with it (the London housing bubble alone has got to be worth around a trillion quid) and kicks over the already-faltering Chinese economy

    • Donald Trump as Republican candidate after a run to the right to outmaneuver the other loonie-tunes candidates (Jeb was the favourite of the money people, but got pantsed early)

    • Trump goes full demagogue and promises Protectionism!!! and American Jobs for American Workers!!! and plays power chords in the key of Hoover

    It's possible that Hillary might pull a rabbit out of the hat and prevail, but I wouldn't bet on it.

    Meanwhile, outside the US, Greece hits the buffers again, race (or rather, racist) riots in Hungary, Germany, and France, the EU begins to crumble thanks to the little-Englanders, the price of oil spikes up again because the collapsing global economy drives money into commodity futures but then collapses because underlying demand for black gold is falling off a cliff (because Global Depression 2.0), and the festering Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria catches fire. Oh, and don't get me started on what a spike/collapse in oil prices will do to Vladimir Putin's already-shaky long-term plans. Another "short, victorious war" beckons.

    Forecast?

    We could be looking at a global descent into chaos by this time next year, with the lunatics running the asylum and the planetary capitalist economy gridlocked and crashing but the elected leaders opting for populist nationalism and protectionism.

    It'll be 1933 again, only with nukes.

    471:

    If the Simulation Hypothesis holds, (probability says it probably does, and it's paradigm-buggeringly undisprovable) what are the existential risks to the Simulated?

    The worst credible case I can think of[*] -- which also applies to the many worlds interpretation of QM -- is described in Robert Charles Wilson's short SF story, Divided by Infinity.

    Humans are social organisms, after all, and some kinds of immortality are worse than death.

    [*] Leaving aside the warmed-over mediaeval devil-theology that is Roko's Basilisk.

    472:

    The trouble is, I don't read widely enough to be a useful oracle.

    Back when I was a kid, reading ~100 books/year (or more), a lot less SF/F was published in the UK; in the mid-80s, Gollancz, the largest publisher, put out around 40 titles a year, and the total was under 100. But there's been an explosion of SF/F in popular culture and in the US, original SF/F -- not media-tie-in work -- is on the order of 2000 books/year. Here in the UK, the Clarke Award jury is expected to read 100-200 books while preparing their shortlist, and that's by selecting from among the works submitted to them by publishers in the UK; not all UK-published genre titles are nominated!

    Also, I've completely given up trying to keep track of short fiction this century, and largely given up reading SF novels as such. (It's too close to what I write -- busman's holiday syndrome -- so I tend to read urban fantasy/steampunk/other stuff for relaxation.)

    Stuff that I think will seem dated in 20 years? Almost everything in the MilSF spectrum, because the social relationships and politics encoded in the authoritarian structures in such books are rigidly traditionalist, and they occupy the same niche in the American psyche that Kipling occupied in the pre-WW1 British popular unconscious. I don't think millennials will go for them, other than in an ironic/postmodern mode (e.g. Scalzi's "Redshirts") or a critical mode (Linda Nagata's "The Red" trilogy). Also, anything about the Singularity (it'll look like that old-time religion). Oh, and meat-and-two-veg space opera like The Expanse, because it's trying to consciously recreate the sensawunda space opera of the pre-New Wave era (1950s, mostly). And, finally, anything that's too Anglocentric. The future is multi-continental, folks: fiction that assumes the reader can identify with straight white males from North America and Europe is a 5% solution at best.

    473:

    Oh well, I'm wrong again. I'd forgotten that CHarlie gets a fair number of books to give blurbs for etc. I have one here just now, "Sorcerer to the Crown", which is quite good and has a comment from him on the back.

    474:

    "Stuff that I think will seem dated in 20 years? Almost everything in the MilSF spectrum ... occupy the same niche in the American psyche that Kipling occupied in the pre-WW1 British popular unconscious."

    Very much so. I am one of the last people who can relate to Kipling from personal experience, even to a limited extent. I accept that it's more than 20 years, but modern readers seem to find Kipling as inaccessible as Shakespeare. Given the generally dire quality of most MilSF, I can't see it lasting. And, thank heavens, because a lot of it is as bigotted as hell, which Kipling most definitely wasn't.

    475:

    "It'll be 1933 again, only with nukes."

    God help us, yes. And you didn't even mention what Turkey might do to start a conflagration.

    476:

    Kipling was the acme of a particular type of fiction: most of it is even more bombastically imperialist and bigoted, and even more unreadable. I expect the MilSF equivalent of Kipling will also survive -- but most of it will be forgotten, for the same reason we no longer read the original Penny Dreadfuls.

    477:

    And you didn't even mention the way both sides of the Taiwan Strait are acting like not fighting WWIII is getting to be just too inconvenient.

    478:

    I did all that, for decades. Eventually it stopped surprising me and got boring. But if you're still enjoying it, have fun.

    479:

    IS there any MilSF that is the equivalent of Kipling?

    480:

    Actually I just re-read some of "Plain tales from the hills", which were quite good. Obviously much of their time, but still there is some social commentary, and one features a man who in a storm proposes to the wrong sister...

    481:

    "Is there actually any point becoming an uploaded simulated post-human if you already exist as a simulated human inside a simulation?"

    Depends whether you want to move up a grade at school.

    482:

    "Seriously, can you imagine anything good coming out of a society where the rich can purchase more IQ points?"

    That's has been happening for several thousand years. In the nature/nurture IQ debate the rich always win on nurture. Transhumanism is about upping the nature side of that equation. You really need to ask yourself why it's OK for there to be an IQ divide if it's genetic.

    Anyway, if you want to purchase an IQ boost just spend 30p a day on some racetams, or pop a 60p 200mg tab of modafinil. It's not Limitless, but on some intellectual tasks it boosted my "scores" by around 7%. Not much you may think, but that's like me going from an IQ of 154 to 164. Not trivial at the top end, and people at the lower end get a far bigger boost. No doubt the reason most studies say any effect is marginal is that they test it on (for example) medical students.

    483:

    "We are the Basilisk"

    484:

    Trump and Sanders followers have one sentiment in common: Fuck you and your political establishment

    485:

    And the social commentary continued as he matured, including some interesting stories from the viewpoint of other races - how successfully, I cannot say, but probably fairly well, given his history.

    486:

    The irony of the first major use of CRISPR in germ line Human engineering...?

    487:

    3D printers are cheaper than iPhones. So price is no longer an issue. Cost of materials and what you are seriously going to do with it are.

    488:

    "The simulation hypothesis is less probable than a truly infinite multiverse. "

    What most people do not realize is that the simulation hypothesis is a multiverse theory. No reason multiverses cannot be nested.

    489:

    Sound like a year of opportunity...

    490:

    I have a particular conspiracy theory. I think that the Chinese realize that their economy is a bubble. Rather than go the Western (+Japanese and Korean route) of shoveling more money in it till it pops, I think that they're letting it deflate slowly. However, I think they would have let it deflate much faster if the Global Economy wasn't this weak, since they're one of the 3 linchpins (the US and Europe being the other 2).

    If true, then that means China may reflate their economy a bit should your scenario happen, and keep the global economy in some order.

    491:

    "3D printers are cheaper than iPhones."

    Ones that can handle strong materials or create large objects are not.

    492:

    It's highly likely that in any populated universe somebody will build a vast simulator and run it until protons fall apart. So given any experience set (such as your life or mine) that experience set was probably generated by a simulator, since simulators will be generating more experience sets than originally real universes. You would think. But if (1) the multiverse is real, ie the waveform never collapses, and yet (2) new universes are not being constantly created, then as yet undifferentiated preexisting universes must exist for all possible future differences between universes. All simulated experience sets constitute such differences, plus there are other sources of differences, so the number of real universes must be greater than the number of simulated ones.

    493:

    Yup - you can already get children's 3D printers for less than an iphone, http://mashable.com/2015/11/24/3d-printer-for-kids/ and claims to be cheaper than an iphone. But if you want to do real good stuff, you need a proper one, for over a thoufsand quid, the appropriate software to draw things, maybe a CNC machine, and of course the expensive feedstock. All of which adds up to lots more than an i-phone.

    494:

    Then there is the Ancient Question posed about computers - what would the average person need one for?

    495:

    Heard that one before. Unfortunately it's not the same issue here at all. 3D printers are not the same as computers. Not just a matter of actual limitations, but whether or not we can build an entire consumer ecosystem based on what we can print in 3D printers. I say, a bit, but there will still be the global trade networks we have today until/ if we have something like strong nanotech.

    For instance, I just got a couple of my old toys from my dad's attic, one is a big crane truck type thing he made from wood decades ago. You could 3D print an equivalent today, add in some electronics bought off the shelf/ raspberry pi, and there you have it, a home made toy.

    Which is too much hassle, so you just spend the money on a ready made toy instead, but there will be people who like it as a hobby or find nice niche uses for printers.

    Finally, computers are much more versatile than 3D printers.

    496:

    Oh, nuts! Just because some idiots couldn't extrapolate the obvious trends, it doesn't mean than nobody could. Obviously, almost nobody needed the computers available in the 1950s and even 1960s, but almost all of the modern technologies had been described in principle, what they could be used for, and what technological developments were needed to make them possible.

    3-D printers are more problematic, because the problem arises with the machine tool end, not the control end, and that has been under intensive development since Babbage. There are a LOT of components that I would like to make (because I cannot buy or conveniently make them) but, when I looked at the constraints for home 3-D printers, none of them were feasible and many of them needed sintering. Maybe home 3-D printers will be useful, sometime, but a saner approach would be home design and an affordable production service. I am not holding my breath.

    497:

    The major difference was that computers offered their service (number crunching) much more cheaply than previous technologies (dudes with slide rules). 3D printers offer manufacturing services much more expensively than comparable technologies. They offer advantages in flexibility and setup time which make them good for prototyping, but they won't be good for anything popular in the foreseeable future. Whenever there's enough demand to justify the tooling costs, injection molding or other technologies can do the job much better.

    498:

    While I happen to agree that improved nutrition and education makes a reasonably large difference in IQ (if you want to measure it), to be horribly blunt, it's as stoopid to focus on improving brains inside skulls as it was, back in the 1980s, to focus on implanting cyberlinks directly into human brains so we could jack into a visually based, 3-D cyberspace.

    Although it's a cool concept.

    Let's look at the lives of rich young idiots: They get into a good school, where they hire some poor, bright schmuck to write their papers for them, and even to do their take-home tests. Once they're in the workforce, they hire money managers to add to their financial IQ, consultants for anything they could possibly need explained to them, the internet for checking facts (if they're even that bright), ghost writers for their best-selling finance books, and so forth.

    Why try to cram all these functions inside one skull? It's normal elite practice to use surrogates for many of their essential functions. The only illusion they foster is that they are the one essential person who's doing all the work.

    499:

    The Archdruid went on about this at some length recently:

    http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-decline-and-fall-of-hillary-clinton.html

    I'm pretty sure that without the social justice movement, there would be no Trump. Similarly, without the 1%, no Bernie.

    500:

    Since, right now, it's cheapest to outsource manufacturing somewhere else and load the resulting product on a slow cargo ship to get to you eventually, what 3-D printing theoretically could be used for is to close recycling gaps.

    Yes, it's hard to say that with a straight face.

    However, if, by some magic chance, we get better at producing usable printer feedstocks out of our garbage, it might be simpler and more environmentally benign to recycle out trash locally and to use it to print out the junk we currently need, a la Kim Stanley Robinson's last novel.

    Would this work in the real world? It's hard not to have a sarcastic smirk at this point, but you know, it just might.

    Perhaps, after the world all goes to hell, those shining arcologies in the Santa Cruz mountains will keep themselves going for another few years, using their solar-powered 3-D printers to recycle their trash into stuff.

    Really. You just have to believe, man.

    501:

    To summarize your position: Why bother to learn to read if you can hire scribes?

    As for boosting intelligence, feel free to not do it for yourself. However, I find the boost I get from drugs to be reasonably effective, and certainly cost effective to a gigantic degree. And, are you really telling me you would not edit out alleles that detract from IQ?

    502:

    Exactly. Current manufacture methods eat 3D printing for breakfast, and always will for most purposes. You aren't going to be able to 3D print most functioning car parts, and whilst 3D printing a new wing mirror housing might be useful, it's pretty simple just to get one that is made by the million in plastic moulding machines.

    503:

    If you can find the alleles that take away from intelligence, go right ahead and try to tinker with your gonads to eliminate them.

    No, the point is that, in a rapidly changing world, it's more adaptive to hire talent temporarily than it is to implant talent in your skull, unless you're quite sure you're going to need it for the rest of your life. You might smirk at hiring scribes, but rulers to this day still do that. Obama has speechwriters, and Trump hired a ghost writer to write The Art of the Deal.

    And if you don't think that's transhuman, you're not really paying attention. I think that's one ultimate problem with transhumanism: it's been around for thousands of years, and you're trying to reinvent it in a more expensive form.

    As for intelligence enhancing drugs, I got off them years ago, and I've found that I got more intelligent once the cravings passed.

    504:

    For sure there will be a lot of work this year (and onward) for people who work towards peace and against disaster and the possibilities of disaster.

    I was heartened last year by the successful negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal. The peacemakers refused to get rolled by the warmongers. Read a happy-story recently in New Scientist about science in Iran. (Free registration.)

    505:

    Nor the new Funny Or Die Art of the Deal movie starring Johnny Depp (Written by Joe Randazzo, former Onion editor, friend of a co-worker.) (I missed seeing it. wikipedia has a plot summary.)

    506:

    whilst 3D printing a new wing mirror housing might be useful, it's pretty simple just to get one that is made by the million in plastic moulding machines.

    ORLY?

    Two years ago my car was parked in a multi-story in Manchester and some asshat stole the left wing mirror's plastic back cover. They didn't smash it, they carefully stole it.

    When I went to replace it I found out why: retail was £97 + VAT and shipping. Why? Well, Volvo only sell a few tens of thousands of that model of car each year, this it gets facelifted every 7 years or so, so the total market is maybe 100-200,000 units, tops. So there's virtually no after-market for third party copies and the manufacturer can charge through the nose for replacement parts -- a plastic injection-molded assembly that probably costs £5 in tooling amortization and materials gets a 1000% mark-up before distribution overheads and shipping.

    3D printing of that sort of thing isn't something I could justify buying my own printer for, but I'd cheerfully pay my local body shop £50 for a good, locally-printed replacement rather than paying the original manufacturer £118.

    (There's a term for this sort of thing, incidentally, coined by Alvin Toffler in the late 70s; "mass customization". In other words, what looks like a high volume product turns out to be so customizable along so many variable parameters that in reality each unit is pretty much bespoke. And this is where 3D printing probably has a future.)

    507:

    Attention conservation notice: You are not getting the promised new blog entry this weekend because (a) the comments on this thread are more fascinating than any observations I could come up with, (b) I'm recovering from a chest bug, and (c) I am checking the page proofs to THE NIGHTMARE STACKS.

    508:

    3D printing something like that would cost you several hundred quid, depending on exact size, shape, and material. If the 3D printing costs went down, the conventional manufacturer could easily reduce the markup to stay competitive. Presumably first they'd try to use intellectual property law to add their markup to the price of the 3D printed version.

    509:

    Oh my. 30-meter asteroid 20013 TX68 had been projected to do a close flyby (0.044 lunar distances) March 5, and now has been rescheduled for 12.6 lunar distances, on March 8. (asteroid summary chart near the bottom.) That was a lot of uncertainty.

    For those who like to worry, the minimum impact speed of a space rock is Earth's escape velocity, 11200 meters per second. 2900 meters per second is kinetic energy equivalent of TNT. So 16X rock mass, minimum. Calculator here (first google hit) and there are others. If anyone has a less crude calculation, please share.

    510:

    Yes. But unfortunately not with the IP laws that we are likely to have rammed down our throats, when the UK signs up to TTIP. What would happen is that Volvo would license its dealers, and charge you a reduced amount - ooh!, perhaps 20% less, if they were feeling generous.

    511:

    Good point, although I note the issue here isn't cost of production and shipping, but IP and evil corporation taking it's customers to the cleaners. So what's new...

    512:

    It's a plastic molding made out of ABS, weighs about 250 grams. Basically it's just the aerodynamic shell for the back of the mirror -- it screws onto the metal bracket that supports the motor and the glass. Given the cost of nylon extruder printers and their raw material, I'd estimate about a fiver in plastic -- the real cost is printer time, and as it's less than 10cm deep it'd probably be doable overnight in one of Makerbot's higher end consumer grade printers. Fume it with acetone to smooth out the jaggies, spray it with enamel paint, and it's done. You could spend several hundred quid printing it, but only if you went for a really high-end printer or higher grade materials. (Again: consumer-grade printers that can extrude ABS are now A Thing, it's not just PLA or nylon any more.)

    Intellectual property law and 3D printers being used to repair personal property is an Interesting Field; according to m'learned friend (who did a masters in the UK law relating to 3D printers) it's entirely legal to print copies of components of a product you own, for your own personal use -- just not for commercial resale: patent and copyright don't protect material designs the same way as they do with purely soft goods or complete product assemblies.

    513:

    (re IP) Today. But the real problem is that, even with a 3-D scanner/printer, you need one of the objects you are trying to copy - which would not have helped you.

    514:

    Are you familiar with Thingiverse?

    515:

    "... and I've found that I got more intelligent once the cravings passed."

    Then you seem to know nothing about the drugs to which I am referring. They have zero addictive potential.

    516:

    It's a wing mirror cover. You have the mirror image on the other side, just invert the scan.

    517:

    All quite likely, except for this:

    the price of oil spikes up again because the collapsing global economy drives money into commodity futures but then collapses because underlying demand for black gold is falling off a cliff (because Global Depression 2.0)

    No-one sane would bet on rising oil prices because effectively we are already in Global Depression 2.0, it's just hidden by Quantitive Easing. My guess is that by now strategic oil reserves are so full that they can feed world economy for a few years.

    And I don't think nukes will play a part between the conflict of superpowers. Everyone knows that they are detrimental to prosperity, and you'd need a special "us or them" ideology which just isn't there any more since the fall of communism (and the new "them" doesn't have nukes).

    518:

    (c) I am checking the page proofs to THE NIGHTMARE STACKS.

    Why don't you post them here and we help you?

    519:

    Only joking. Being here and now with a small scripted part is quite a privilege. Esp considering the alternative.

    520:

    according to m'learned friend (who did a masters in the UK law relating to 3D printers) it's entirely legal to print copies of components of a product you own, for your own personal use -- just not for commercial resale: patent and copyright don't protect material designs the same way as they do with purely soft goods or complete product assemblies.

    But is it legal to make the designs available to anyone? How do you prove you are making a copy of a (now-missing) part that you owned?

    I can see the access to designs being a legal battleground, settled by money at a level above most national governments (so not a fan of TTIP).

    (My own belief is that printing a replacement part is no more wrong that downloading a copy of a movie that you own on DVD, or a book that you bought. But "wrong" and "illegal" are not perfectly congruent…)

    And yes, I'm aware that no one who doesn't have that model of car would bother downloading and printing a mirror-cover. OTOH, there would be quite a temptation to download and print, say, Warhammer figures…

    521:

    "The new 'them' doesn't have nukes" It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Hopefully, whichever western power gets a city nuked first will turn the other cheek and take it like a man. If the culprit is hard to target with retaliation, the response is likely to be very ill thought out and likely to have chaotic knock on consequences. I guess. I don't know about these things, just making it up and trying to sound smart.

    522:

    Not that I'm offering... Definitely shouldn't cost more than a few dollars worth of filament to make one, and probably around 10 hours to print depending on size and number of parts. Tricky thing is finding a file for the right part; you might be able to find one on thingiverse or other sites, though I'd be surprised if there is one. Or you might be able to find a business to scan it. We have a fairly new public library with a makerspace, they may have a scanner, but I haven't had time to look into it. I'm guessing Fair Use would apply? Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to use my printer in months for various reasons. Hopefully by summer things will be settled and I'll have time to update everything and get back into it.

    523:

    When? Probably never. You'd have to get the fissile material, and despite all the talk about stolen nuclear material and black markets, I doubt very much it's possible to get access to that, make a bomb from it and smuggle it into the western city.

    524:

    To you and Mayhem: I shall go and put my dunce's cap on.

    525:

    Of course, Iran and North Korea have uranium in the ground, which is one reason they wanted nuclear power plants.

    One a wider note, we tend to think of use of nukes in Cold War terms--mutually assured destruction, protection from US invasion, all that. It's worth remembering how they got used in WWII: the reason they were used was because using conventional troops would have cost more lives, both for the Americans and for the Japanese.

    Absent a cold war, that logic still applies.

    The bigger problem isn't nukes, though, it's infowar. I'm quite sure that soldiers and statesmen alike are extremely aroused by the idea that they can cripple a city without bombing it to pieces. In that regard, I suspect (without good evidence) that the US is one of the most vulnerable targets.

    The other problem is that no one really knows what a full on infowar looks like, and that's kind of bad (cf WWI and machine guns). Ultimately, Infowar I may cause as many casualties as a conventional war, especially in places (like where I live) where everything is imported using wired systems.

    And that doesn't even get into the jollies of Space War I, with the resulting Kessler system and loss of all weather sats nav sats, and telecom sats.

    526:

    Which means any terrorist nuke is going to be state sponsored.

    527:

    Neither North Korea nor Iran are the "new them". Dropping a bomb on another nuclear power would be suicide for them. Providing terrorists with a bomb without it being traced back to them impossible.

    I agree with your thoughts on cyberwar (I connect the term "infowar" mainly with propaganda and psychological warfare). The main reason it's not done already is that although a lot of systems are vulnerable, a concerted attack is far from trivial.

    Oh, and even if bombing hospitals seems to be en vogue currently, any attack on civil infrastructure is illegal under international law of war.

    528:

    Let's look at the lives of rich young idiots: They get into a good school, where they hire some poor, bright schmuck to write their papers for them, and even to do their take-home tests. Once they're in the workforce, they hire money managers to add to their financial IQ, consultants for anything they could possibly need explained to them, the internet for checking facts (if they're even that bright), ghost writers for their best-selling finance books, and so forth.

    Why try to cram all these functions inside one skull? It's normal elite practice to use surrogates for many of their essential functions. The only illusion they foster is that they are the one essential person who's doing all the work.

    If all you're doing is trying to make money, I might agree. But would Andrew Wiles have wanted to outsource parts of his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem to other minds? If what you're doing is mainly aesthetic — including mathematics — then wouldn't you want to hold it all within your understanding, so that you can appreciate the beauty of how it all fits together? Maybe that's a minority view. I've noticed that most people posting on transhumanism here don't mention the benefits of having a more powerful sense of aesthetics.

    And even with something as apparently unaesthetic as business or politics, there might be benefits in grasping it all, from the CEO's mission statement to the databases recording every last penny of customers expenditure. In True Names, Vernor Vinge showed what that was like for Jordan Pollack, as he became the most powerful computer-augmented man in history.

    Mind you, that would require more than Racetam or Modafinil.

    529:

    No, the point is that, in a rapidly changing world, it's more adaptive to hire talent temporarily than it is to implant talent in your skull, unless you're quite sure you're going to need it for the rest of your life.

    Not if the costs of implanting it in your skull are zero.

    530:

    There are many ways terrorists could get nukes without having to make them. The North Koreans have nukes and are known arms dealers. Political change or strife in Pakistan could put nukes in the hands of terrorists. Almost any country for that matter could have troubles that could leave nukes vulnerable and unsecure. Getting one into the US shouldn't be hard considering the number of containers that come in without being inspected, not to mention the number of human beings who get smuggled in. Once in the country it's a simple matter of delivery by rented truck. Other countries may be even more vulnerable, namely Europe. I have no suggestion what the solution to this is. Not live in dense concentrations? Live in the basement? Certainly we, for nebulous values of "we", could attempt to establish tight control over the entire world forever, theoretically, but that would be almost as expensive as losing a city core now and then.

    531:

    Your claim seems somewhat lacking in evidence...

    532:

    Returning to the upthread topic of editing desires ... I think this what the things Focault called "technology of the self" ar about - confession, therapy and nowadays the individual action plan where you sit down with your boss and define "your" smart goals for the next year.

    I'm not interested in wether any of these really work. But the ways to edit our own desires (however crudely) we've seen wher, more often than not, in tune with the relevant power structures. A weapon in the arsenal of the 1% or however you call those with vastly too much power over others. I don'T know if many transhumanists have a problem with this, I think not. They should.

    533:

    "I've noticed that most people posting on transhumanism here don't mention the benefits of having a more powerful sense of aesthetics."

    That normally comes up when discussing the benefits of LSD. It's the closest experience to that of a PostHuman apprehension of reality.

    534:

    "...it's more adaptive to hire talent temporarily than it is to implant talent in your skull"

    True if you are the 0.01%. Otherwise you are the talent being hired. In which case you can cram your skull with vast amounts of information and technique and earn a decent wage. Or learn to say: "Do you want fries with that sir?"

    535:

    "I don'T know if many transhumanists have a problem with this, I think not."

    I have the problem to the degree I am grateful to work for a company that actually makes the world a better place, rather than an organization that's killing people. However, if the choice is between the latter and being a pauper I will no doubt use logical reasoning to justify my choice. That's because I am not a PostHuman and cannot edit my desires to positively enjoy homelessness and starvation (exaggeration for effect...)

    536:

    How much have you edited your desires so far to enjoy doing whatever it is you are doing?

    537:

    Not much at all. I have always been fascinated by science and technology and right now I'm working in R&D that needs a combination of physics, chemistry, electronics design and firmware. OTOH, I have also had a deep interest in combat. But for a random roll of the dice years ago my life could have gone in that direction.

    538:

    In the States we have something called a "design patent" that protects, for example, the distinctive shape of a soda bottle. My experience with patent law is exclusively American, though, and it varies by jurisdiction. Plus there are all sorts of treaties complicating the matter.

    fiction that assumes the reader can identify with straight white males from North America and Europe is a 5% solution at best.

    True, but a character that's relatable to a transexual Xhosa reader probably won't be relatable to a Melanesian woman. Every character has to be somebody, and nobody's experience is more universal than your own.

    539:

    The Soviet collapse left a lot of stuff almost "lying around for the taking", notably fuel for nuclear submarines, 93.5% enriched uranium, yum yum. The black market for it turned out to consist entirely of various spook agencies stinging each other.

    540:

    Heteromeles wrote:The bigger problem isn't nukes, though, it's infowar. I'm quite sure that soldiers and statesmen alike are extremely aroused by the idea that they can cripple a city without bombing it to pieces. In that regard, I suspect (without good evidence) that the US is one of the most vulnerable targets.

    Reading Bruce Schneier is a useful corrective on the "cyberwar" and "infowar" fantasies being peddled by computer companies looking for a new gravy train.

    Does our internetworked modern society offer new pathways for attack? Sure. Stuxnet shows that cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are possible.

    But Stuxnet also showed that such attacks are not very effective. If the US/Israel had dropped bombs or missiles they'd have done far more damage.

    In most western societies we don't have bombs going off on a regular basis, and when they do we react badly. But we already have our cyber infrastructure crashing or being hacked on a regular basis. Every major computer system from supermarket cash registers to airline booking systems to dating services to major email providers to banks … they fail or get hacked, it's a nuisance, we get over it.

    I really can't see how terrorist or military infowar could make things worse than they are now.

    541:

    "modern readers seem to find Kipling as inaccessible as Shakespeare."

    I find that incredibly weird. Shakespeare, OK, with the archaic language and the jokes which after 400 years are not even identifiable as jokes, let alone in any way funny; but then you're not supposed to read it, you're supposed to watch it, and good actors can convey the meaning by non-verbal signals so it still makes sense.

    But Kipling? I fail to see anything inaccessible about Kipling. The language is practically modern, and the motivations and actions of the characters are nothing out of the ordinary and are entirely comprehensible. Mulvaney, for example, is no less relatable than McAuslan or the dog-handler chap on ARRSE that someone posted a link to on here recently; that I have never been in the army myself doesn't make any of them "inaccessible". If someone can't understand Kipling then I find myself at a loss to think of what they might be able to understand.

    542:

    Since this has become the throwing ideas around thread, I've got one.

    What if in the next few decades or so we begin to translate dolphin, dog, whale, fox, and crow languages? What effects would that have on society?

    543:

    One area of concern that I am aware of is that large amounts of hardware for Western network infrastructure are made not by the countries using it, as any sensible country would do, but by Chinese outfits like Huawei, and nobody is completely sure that they don't have logic bombs subtly hidden in their firmware, it being rather difficult to analyse complex systems completely enough to discover such things. So the possibility exists of a signal being transmitted which brings down the whole infrastructure at once, not just odd bits of it which on their own don't matter much.

    544:

    Translating other species? Probably none.

    Cesar Millan's been translating for dogs for years.

    My mom's been talking to the local ravens for decades, and they've worked a reasonable code (she feeds them. Among other things, they tell her when things are wrong, like her not feeding them on time or a coyote in the feeding area). Or if that's too folksy, you can read Bernd Heinrich's books and get a pretty good idea of how people have been living with ravens for a very long time.

    You can read E.O. Wilson's Ant books and see how humans have pretty thoroughly cracked various ant languages too.

    The key issue isn't that there's some channel of communication that will unlock the magic of the world, it's that we generally don't share enough interests to make an extended conversation interesting. Personally, I share this problem with billions of other humans--we're weird and boring to each other. While I wish them well, even if we had a translator, our conversations would (for the most part) be fairly banal and quickly ended. Nice weather we're having, isn't it? How's your family?

    To give an interspecies example, I suspect a fox would be entranced by the details of all the various feces deposited in the neighborhood. Even if the fox's perceptions could be translated into human language, I doubt I'd be nearly enthralled enough to keep up my end of the conversation, and I likely couldn't add anything of interest to the fox. Similarly, a blue whale conversation about the future location of krill swarms would be about as boring to me as a conversation about cookie recipes would be boring to the whale. We inhabit different realities, and while it's fun to play tourist in them, it's pretty boring to get stuck there for awhile.

    545:

    I think the thing most miss on the 3D printing debate is how 3D printing complexity is almost easier than printing bulk simplicity.

    If you take your wing mirror housing, it's a fairly simple lump. A smooth outer surface, a bit of internal ribbing for strength, a few pillars for screws to connect other elements to - that's basically it.

    Now imagine if you still wanted to have a wing mirror, but you wanted to really take advantage of what 3D printing could do, with realisable developments. Well, first, that smooth external shell could be patterned and structured as 'shark skin' to reduce aerodynamic drag. It could redirect airflow to smooth the turbulence behind it, maybe help to clear rain from the glass and allow you to open the window without getting your hair blown around.

    The colour could be throughout the bulk, not just on the scratchable surface. That bulk could also be structured to give strength with less mass/weight and more ability to 'bounce back'.

    Inside, the indicator structure could be integrated, as could wiring and cameras/sensors for autonomous driving - with bulk level electronics placed during manufacture. The mirror surface shape could be warped to maximise your view, similar what they already do on the edge of some mirrors, but more optimised to not waste visual angle in other directions.

    Finally, your details could be integrated throughout the unit like a stick of rock, making it easy to prove it stolen, if it were.

    It you took that to a plastics manufacturer and asked for a quote, the tooler would be a gibbering wreak.

    Using 3D printing to reproduce conventional designs kind of misses the point. It really comes into it's own when you design from the ground up such that it's strengths are designed in. Sure, it's not there yet, but ...

    546:

    If every change in a simulated experience set causes a preexisting undifferentiated universe to become differentiated, doesn't each step in a simulator cycle effectively create an off-by-1-bit copy of the extant ancestor-simulator-containing universe, thus increasing the total multiversal ratio of simulated experience sets to non-simulated experience sets?

    (if one assumes that simulated experience sets cause this differentiation at a faster rate than non-simulated ones because overclocking/computronium)

    547:

    Given an infinite multiverse, this may be true from the viewpoint of an external observer perceiving the entire probability distribution over time. (it's a great gig, but the hours are terrible)

    What about from the viewpoint of the simulatee stuck in one of a possibly larger infinity (because overclocking/computronium) of ancestor-simulators at the end of path A?

    The gloriously-diversifying rest of the multiverse which exists, or will exist, or has existed at some point along path B is an inaccessible realm which is completely outside of their temporal-material experience. Something very analogous to (and about as much comfort as) a 'heaven'.

    Or am I missing something?

    548:

    I was thinking of some of Greg Egan's societies, in which the set-up cost to the post-humans is zero because all post-humans have the software implanted from birth. Or, more accurately, are the software. Here's the birth scene from Egan's Diaspora. (Legal: it's on his site.)

    549:

    Oh well when you mean that, sure, anything goes. I think most of us were assuming the next few decades, which at the moment seem to be on a trajectory such that only the richest and best connected get a shot at said technology and the rest of us can starve in a gutter.

    550:

    And although mention of Kipling started with discussion of MilSF, he did write non-military fiction too. I'd be surprised to hear from someone who couldn't understand Just So Stories or Stalky & Co..

    IF you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

    If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
    If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!

    551:

    The only slightly novel thing there was "kandor barrel":

    Rulke, the last and most powerful of the Charon, escapes from the alien dimension where he has been imprisoned for a millennium. As he amasses a conquering army of telepathic monsters, the other immortal mancers scatter in desperate quests to control or re-create the terrible, arcane magics of the Forbidding.

    Dark is the Moon

    ~

    and would really just like to have 2.3 children that are members of his/her own species

    That would have been a kind fate, but there we go.

    On the question of Felis silvestris catus qua Cat, the answer is an easy one:

    You can do both at the same time. If you actually want to bond properly with your cat, prove to it that you can hunt well and don't need the little door step parcels (it's a source of anxiety / mind fuck for them that you're incapable of hunting).

    If necessary, buy a mouse and toss it around a few times while pouncing. Then, of course, you kill it.

    This isn't even being flippant - you want a predator as a bonded companion? Then act like one.

    Reminds me of a lecture from a very prominent woman in the Cog.Phil area discussing dogs. Not a clue about perspective issues or the actual Mental Schema thing(in a hall where right outside the door was a large painting of a grey-skinned young vampire sitting on a bench with a homeless man and a non-Caucasian woman, the setting a train or bus station. Might as well have scrawled runes over the wall it was that unsubtle: yeah, we get it, you like to think you're predators).

    552:

    I'd disagree. That's a very mundane Chaos / "darkest timeline".

    What you're dealing with here is a total lack of futurity. That whole atemporality trap I mentioned.

    Noam Chomsky - 'Requiem For The American Dream' Trailer April 2015, Youtube: Documentary: 2:20

    The bottom line is:

    QE up the wazoo, nothing fixed.

    Flint Water is showing the failures of both modes.

    What's actually going on is the Death of the Harvard MBA as societal model.

    Turns out Cash is Not King. Who knew?

    ~

    But that's all very mundane and doesn't grasp the real nettle.

    As referenced to Puppies, Otherkin, Fascists, even dear old Alan Moore: It's all nostalgia.

    The World's End 2013

    ~

    The real issue is that once you squeeze so tight, the expectation is that the Other no longer exists.

    That's not what happens.

    What actually happens is pruning off future paths.

    And that's a far darker viewpoint. (But, meh: nose wiggle Guess I'll have to grow up and take responsibility and all that Jazz).

    553:

    Some of the pricing-out may happen from good motives as well as base. How many of us have wanted to buy books or programs to improve our skills, but been unable to because they're too expensive? Buying a decent collection of books on CompSci, say, would probably set me back several hundred quid. I might not have the money. I might want the books to be free, because after all it's a net benefit to society that I become more educated and better able to help push the economy along. But the creator of the book has to be rewarded too. In other words, developers, whether of the mind-enhancing software known as books, or the other (not-yet available) mind-enhancing software known as intelligence updates, have to be rewarded.

    554:

    If you actually want to bond properly with your cat, prove to it that you can hunt well and don't need the little door step parcels (it's a source of anxiety / mind fuck for them that you're incapable of hunting).

    Does anyone understand cats well enough to say that? My cat only leaves those little parcels once every two months or so, which doesn't suggest it's all that worried about me starving. Moreover, since I feed it, it knows that I have access to a regular supply of food.

    555:

    It's a lot worse than that.

    Without spoiling it too much, there was an aggressive meta-identity play being done that eradicated things like empathy, connective experience and so on.

    Funny story:

    There was once a man who could use his sexual energy to stop chemical combustion in vans. (The white kind, with chaos runes all over it in black).

    A lot of people thought this was exciting, so tried to force excitement through the usual tricks of the trade.

    A lot of them forgot the golden rule:

    ecto gammat!

    556:

    Yes.

    I linked previously to female seals delivering penguins (starting off alive, then fresh then just plain dead) to divers.

    What's actually happened is that you cat is of an age (at a guess, 8+ years) where 1-2 a month is the base line of anxiety / attempt to bond level.

    Let me guess - used to be a lot higher, right?

    You're basically torturing your cat without knowing it and also decimating the surrounding wild life due to ignorance.

    shrug

    557:

    Putting food in a bowl =/= feeding a cat.

    They're predators, ffs.

    You can feed herbivores like that, not carnivores.

    558:

    I have known cats that don't have this anxiety or display this kind of behavior. Theorem: There are plenty of potential couch potatoes in any species. Theorem: there are cats that smart enough/empathetic enough to understand you are not a cat. Theorem: there are cats that dumb enough to think they are human. Theorem: some cat genetic lines have more fully adapted to being pets than others.

    559:

    Many pure bred pets are functionally mentally retarded by genetic accident due to the abject cruelty of Fashion over Form.

    You're not really providing a healthy response to the issue.

    And no, you can't dodge this one: it's a fundamental responsibility to treat an pair bonded animal within its own mental schema.

    For cats, this means early on (kitten) you show them you know how to hunt and that the food in the bowl is from you hunting. You won't get parcels then.

    For dogs the regime is different, but similar (PACK PACK PACK).

    560:

    Here's the old mode for dogs:

    120 Hunting dogs being fed at Cheverny Youtube: reality: 3:33

    Actually a bit kinder than it looks.

    561:

    I've noticed that most people posting on transhumanism here don't mention the benefits of having a more powerful sense of aesthetics.

    That normally comes up when discussing the benefits of LSD. It's the closest experience to that of a PostHuman apprehension of reality.

    Are you sure? I think that a better approximation would be to imagine oneself able to write an informed art criticism such as "Looking at Art: How to apply Goethe's 3-Point Critiquing Method", but doing so with a mind that:

    • doesn't tire or get stressed at having to do an unnatural amount of thinking;
    • knows all of art history, including images of every famous painting or drawing ever made;
    • can "see" all of these and their relationships to the work currently being analysed, perhaps laid out as some kind of network;
    • understands human perception, cross-sensory linkage, and the many ways that lines and forms subconsciously affect us;
    • can put itself in the place of the artist who painted the work being analysed, and so can experience their emotions, deeply and richly, while filtering out the distractions and inhibitions that prevent us from doing so when we shuffle around in front of a picture in an art gallery;
    • can "see" the entire system of relationships implied by the previous five points, hold it in the mind as a single entity, and appreciate the beauty of that.
    .

    562:

    As a serious question (and no, I'm not punishing you for cat ownership):

    Have you read Kant's Critique of Judgment?

    Goethe had, and his three point schema relied on the expectation that any serious artist / critique would have read Kant (it's baked in).

    It's as nonsensical to expect people to understand high level physics without calculus to take Goethe's three 'rules' without understanding that he grounded them in Kant (and yes: was reacting against).

    You won't understand Aesthetics without the theory. Three "rules" no more than seven words long really doesn't get there.

    563:

    What's actually happened is that you cat is of an age (at a guess, 8+ years) where 1-2 a month is the base line of anxiety / attempt to bond level.

    Let me guess - used to be a lot higher, right?

    As far as I know, that cat is about 5, and I've known it for a year or so. I don't know what it was like before. But also, have cats needed to evolve behaviours for bonding? I thought they were territorial solitary animals, with just enough evolved social "nous" to be able to negotiate times and places at which they could safely pass other cats.

    You're basically torturing your cat without knowing it and also decimating the surrounding wild life due to ignorance.

    I'm pretty sure the cat doesn't do much decimating. As far as torture goes, the best and most recent analysis of cat behaviour I know of is John Bradshaw's Cat Sense. Can you show me anything in there that supports your claim?

    564:

    And no, I wasn't being snippy: that was an awesome post.

    But like Greek sculpture or Hieronymus Bosch, you need to also know the thinkers that their culture had and who produced them.

    ~

    Fun fact: Ancient Greeks (and I mean ancient) used snakes instead of cats as pest controllers. When cats were introduced from Egypt, they filled the same role but weren't expected to have the qualities of anything but a snake.

    Dogs fared much better ;)

    565:

    "I think cats are much less demonstrative animals than dogs are. It's kind of not their fault; they evolved from a solitary animal that has never had the need for a sophisticated social repertoire in the way that the dog — having evolved from the wolf — had that ready-made. So their faces are just not terribly expressive, and some people read into that, that they're kind of cynical and aloof and those sorts of things. But I don't believe that for a moment. I think cats show, by their behavior, even if it's a bit more subtle than a dog's, that they really are fond of their owners."

    It's rubbish. Total rubbish.

    Firstly, modern breeding sets an eternal pre-adult behavioral patterning in most pets, but it's never 100% effective.

    Breeding Kitten factors = maternal bonding in eternity of their lives, that's why it's done, and that's why if you don't spay / neuter before adolescence you get the prey dumping thing (it's a misplaced maternal/paternal trait that gets put onto the "owner" who never demonstrates competence).

    It's complete rubbish to state that felines are naturally solitary, this is an adult behavior that is based on the (going extinct) wild cats of Scotland etc. Hint: kittens / adolescent cats are never solitary.

    Added to that, Range for a predator and territory doesn't mean solitary. It just means most of the time they're solitary. That's a function of their predatory niche - it doesn't mean they only interact to fight or fuck, that's an pressure of lack of range / numbers

    ~

    I've given you one source about Seals.

    Tired of dealing with children who make infantile little inbred pets as companions and can't understand how sick this is.

    566:

    I haven't read Kant, but it sounds as though I should. It's coincidence, though, that the criticism example I pointed at referred to Goethe's questions, so you can ignore them if you want. I was trying to build an example of how a greatly enhanced intelligence would approach aesthetics while using its vast knowledge to go beyond a purely emotional "Gosh Wow This Looks Great" response. Very happy to see a better one.

    567:

    Can you give me original papers to back up the things you're saying about cats? I'd like to read them. I noted what you said about seals, but they are a different species.

    Tired of dealing with children who make infantile little inbred pets as companions and can't understand how sick this is.

    Well, I'm sorry you think that. Would you rather that we'd killed the cat or booted it out of the house?

    568:

    My cat is one such. She was acquired (as a kitten) in large part for the purpose of killing the mice that come into the house from the woods out the back. She does. Then she eats them. She has never tried giving them to me.

    There is something back to front about this which I don't get. The whole human/pet thing is heavily involved with animals retaining their infant tendencies to some extent and viewing humans as parent figures, they being the ones who take over from the natural mothers in providing food, warmth and affection. Surely the cat should be expecting - if it expects anything - that its owner should teach it to hunt, as a mother cat does, not the other way round. Is it even true that the cats are trying to teach their owners to hunt by giving them mice, or is it just a folk myth?

    569:

    In the light of that and my post above, I should point out that my cat is a few years old, is not spayed, but still never tries to give me mice.

    570:

    Your science hasn't reached there yet.

    Bastet will supply details.

    Do you want the original Greek tracts on Cats or something a little bit more modern?

    Given that the person you referenced is almost entirely clueless about the dynamics of the reality of the situation?

    Surely the cat should be expecting - if it expects anything - that its owner should teach it to hunt, as a mother cat does, not the other way round. Is it even true that the cats are trying to teach their owners to hunt by giving them mice, or is it just a folk myth?

    As stated: breeding emphasizes traits, it's doesn't remove them.

    At a certain point the pet moves from kitten/adolescent to adult behaviours.

    You act like a retarded kitten to its mental schema.

    571:

    She probably just doesn't like you then or has given up on you.

    You stink of pigeons which are prey anyhow: now that's a mind-fuck for a pet.

    If you ever fall over dead, you're going to end up in the papers as that man who wasn't found and his cat ate parts...

    ~

    @Peanut Gallery: there's a Sisyphean endeavor: make cat lovers see reality.

    Never say I don't take the hard ones by the horns.

    572:

    And then...

    We have to ask them to self-test for toxoplasmosis which is always fun.

    Fun fact: not eradicated or even seen as a massive health threat.

    Why?

    It makes women horny, more promiscuous and more prone to risk taking.

    Now that's Patriarchy at work.

    573:

    I have come across an apparent instance of people not understanding Stalky & Co, but the tone of their comments led me to think that it was more a matter of refusal to challenge their own dogma blocking understanding, rather than a genuine inability. (This is plural "they"; the situation was a blog post plus replies to it, all of which took much the same attitude.)

    The commentary said that it was an awful book that egregiously glorified violence, which seemed a strange thing to say; on reading further, it turned out that the objection was to the matter-of-fact, uncritical treatment of corporal punishment, in particular one scene in which the Head effectively offers the Co a choice between corporal and non-corporal punishment for a certain transgression, and they choose the corporal option. Words like "sadism", "masochism", "child brutality", "normalisation of violence against children", "humiliation" are bandied about.

    It seems that, instead of considering corporal punishment as just another form of punishment, they are cutting it free of all context and imprisoning it in a dark cell labelled "EEURGH! Do not approach". And in doing this they blind themselves to what is really going on, and fail to pick up on what the characters themselves are thinking about it.

    The unpleasantness of a school punishment is strongly correlated with how much it diminishes your freedom of action, and only very weakly correlated with what form the punishment takes. Corporal punishment is very likely to be the preferred option for the punishee, because it is over and done with in only a few minutes; furthermore, because it is perceived as a severe punishment, it shuts up those on the side of the punisher and discourages them from getting on your case about your transgression on their own account. "OMG VIOLENCE!!!" doesn't come into it, and nor does humiliation - it is nothing like as humiliating as standing there for half an hour being jawed at, or even being seen to be engaged in some punishment activity while everyone else is enjoying themselves. (Cf. The Jungle Book, quote from memory is something like "One of the great things about the Law of the Jungle is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterwards.")

    This is how the Co see it, and the Head is well aware of this. In the scene concerned, the Co's transgression is serious, and a serious punishment is required; however, the Head secretly approves of what they did (and the Co, in turn, are well aware of this). He proposes to give them impositions that will ruin all their free time for weeks to come, but also offers the alternative choice of a beating as a means of letting them off. Quite naturally, they opt for the beating. For the Co, the trouble is over as soon as they walk out of the study; for the injured parties, the Co are seen to have been severely punished; and everyone is satisfied.

    The commenters, however, completely missed all this, and saw the scene only as a piece of ugly savagery that should have been presented in a tone of extreme disapproval, but, to Kipling's discredit, was not.

    Now maybe I have an advantage over them in having first hand experience of such punishments - I don't know, since I have no idea what their education was like - but even so, it surely can't be too taxing a leap of the imagination to see things from the protagonists' point of view. Especially considering that Kipling is recounting his own experiences under a light dusting of fictionalisation, and that when he is recounting being on the wrong end of genuine abuse he leaves you in no doubt as to its unpleasantness (Baa Baa Black Sheep).

    574:

    "If you ever fall over dead, you're going to end up in the papers as that man who wasn't found and his cat ate parts..."

    Oh, I know that fine. It's not a problem.

    As for toxoplasmosis... I think a more plausible explanation for it not being regarded as a massive health risk is that it isn't one. There is a fictional instance of it in Trainspotting and that's probably as close as nearly everyone will ever come to encountering it. No point making a fuss about something when nobody ever gets it anyway.

    575:

    This made me laugh: Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture? (2006) Weak, but at least he had the nerve to publish it. (You probably saw the recent chimp study, suggesting the possibility of influence over the whole of human evolution.)

    577:

    Pigeon wrote: So the possibility exists of a signal being transmitted which brings down the whole infrastructure at once, not just odd bits of it which on their own don't matter much.

    I think the centralised government countries such as China and Russia are far more at risk than Western societies.

    It's not really possible for Western governments to mandate how infrastructure works anymore, due to all the privatising and introduction of corporate culture. Once Upon A Time there might have been a standard government computer, router, whatever; nowadays Ministry A is on Windows 7, Ministry B has moved to Windows 10, Ministry C got a new head who insisted on using a MacBook and is now one-third OS X.

    In theory the free market should allow a nefarious manufacturer to gain a near monopoly market share by offering the lowest price for their backdoored routers and switches. In reality there's enough back-scratching, deliberate differentiation, carefully crafted tender writing, and occasional outright corruption to ensure that various bits of the network end up buying from different manufacturers. Who themselves buy components by equally inefficient processes.

    Human imperfection provides a surprising amount of resilience.

    That said, the US military is a centrally planned institution fond of standardising on things, and pressuring like minded Western militaries to adopt the same. They probably are vulnerable to cyberwarfare. (Fictional example in the near-future Ghost Fleet by Singer & Cole)

    578:

    "Then it was off to primary school, where I learned other interesting lessons concerning pecking orders, violence, bullying and stupidity. And that was just from the teachers. Another scene, from when I was nine years old and had misheard which exercise to do from the textbook. The teacher comes up to me and asks in an annoyed voice why I was doing the wrong work. I started to reply: “I thought…” whereupon he hit me round the head and shouted: “You are not here to think!” The irony of that escaped me for quite a number of years, but I got there in the end."

    579:

    My seven year old daughter (42 years younger than me) can be reduced to wide eyed incredulity when I accurately describe my life at boarding school She calls it the olden days

    580:

    Well, the nice thing about a diverse and vulnerable infrastructure is that a cyberwarrior who has thoroughly mapped infrastructural vulnerabilities (as, apparently, they all have), can target whatever they want.

    --Banks? --Water? --Power? --Dams? --Power plants? --hospitals? --Military?

    If all are separately vulnerable, targeting can be fairly selective.

    581:

    I've read that before, but I can't remember who wrote it and Google isn't helping. Is it Richard Feynman or someone completely different?

    582:

    Sad to say, there seem to be a fair number of straight white male bloggers who would have no trouble with a President Trump, at least till the brownshirts got around to them. Hillary is currently running ahead (granted, by a modestly small number) of delegates not even counting the supers; minority voters and a lot of women know damn good and well where they would fare under a Trump presidency. Those who would vote for Trump if they can't get Sanders...deserve to, but the rest of us don't. "Let the systems burn!" they say.

    But those of us who are grownups, this not necessarily the best alternative.

    583:

    Have you ever tried LSD?

    No. I wouldn't know where to obtain it, and I've read too much about its bad effects to risk it. But more to the point, I've never heard of it being used to enhance cognition. It may be that I've not read enough. But if it did, you'd think that organic chemists, who ought to be able to arrange their own syntheses, would be using it often and calling for it to be legalised.

    From accounts I've read of LSD-fuelled trips, I gather that I'm likely to see the coat stand grow huge violet eyes and lead me on a Yellow Submarine-style meander through the Cosmos while suffusing me with an ineffable and Godlike sense of understanding. But that when I come out of it, I won't actually have understood anything, merely had the illusion. The approach to art criticism I mentioned seemed more knowledge-based.

    584:

    That is very interesting. Thank you. It reminded me of another punishment which might last for weeks or months and was surely much more painful. I'm talking about being sent to Coventry. From The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's by Talbot Baines Reed:

    Were you ever at Coventry, reader? I don’t mean the quaint old Warwickshire city, but that other place where from morning till night you are shunned and avoided by everybody? Where friends with whom you were once on the most intimate terms now pass you without a word, or look another way as you go by? Where, whichever way you go, you find yourself alone? Where every one you speak to is deaf, every one you appear before is blind, every one you go near has business somewhere else? Where you will be left undisturbed in your study for a week, to fag for yourself, study by yourself, disport yourself with yourself? Where in the playground you will be as solitary as if you were in the desert, in school you will be a class by yourself, and even in church on Sundays you will feel hopelessly out in the cold among your fellow-worshippers?

    585:

    Many cat owners have acquired their cats by accident, and are trying to do the best for them with the knowledge they have. It's either that or have the cat put down or left to roam the streets. It's unfair to brand those people as children who make infantile little inbred pets as companions — the most constructive way to help them is to give them the best information you can about how to treat their cats. And to show credentials. For example, Bradshaw has presumably spent a lot of time researching his subject, and he appears to be trustworthy. Yet you say he's entirely clueless about the dynamics of the reality of the situation. How can you possibly know that? I'd be very happy to know better, evidence-based, cat-keeping techniques, because there's so much misinformation and anthropomorphising flying around.

    586:

    Selective targeting is just what hackers are already doing.

    A major difference between cyberwarfare and other forms is that civilian capabilities match those of the government. It's as if criminals could easily obtain not just guns, but main battle tanks and jet fighters with laser guided bombs.

    There's no strong evidence, so far, that government backed cyberwarriors would be more effective than the multitude of freelance hackers already trying to exploit vulnerabilities for money or LOLz. We can't even tell the difference: was the Sony Pictures hack from a couple of years ago freelance hackers, the North Korean government, or mercenary hackers working for the NK gov?

    There's the cyber equivalent of a bomb being dropped every week or so. Our societies seem to be coping pretty well.

    587:

    I did it almost every weekend for a couple of years back in the early 80s. Got it from some guys I forgot their names. I think what Dirk is talking about is not so much general cognitive enhancement as a boost to aesthetic appreciation. It makes you much more aware of patterns and ready to see connections and meaning even if they aren't there. Which means you see random stains and garbage as beautiful, profound abstract art. At the end of the day you wind up with so much meaningfulness that everything is equally meaningless. And that level of confusion is where the possible cognitive enhancement comes in. When you STOP taking it you have to piece your mind back together, which gives you the opportunity to build it in new ways, and which is quite a mental workout in itself. Similarly, if you dismantle your car and reassemble it without instructions there's a possibility it will be much improved.

    588:

    I used to have a boss who always said, whenever I claimed to think, that "thinking is a result of not knowing." True, I guess, but not in the disparaging sense of an employment context in which knowing is expected.

    589:

    As for me, I devoured Asimov and Lem and a bit Strugatzky in my youth (among others). But many of the oldies are unreadable (as in don't enjoy) to me now - Asimov, Heinlein, ... I think the oldest SF I read in the last years and enjoyed is James Tiptree Jr. I also cannot read 'classical' cyberpunk without thinking 'much 80ties wow'

    It's something like this for me, too. I was born in the mid-seventies, and when I started reading "adult" books, most of the science fiction translated to Finnish was the oldies. I read much Asimov, Clarke, Lem - though also Russ, LeGuin and Butler.

    I got my hands on cyberpunk only in the beginning of the Nineties, when in the greater literary world it was already going away. It did leave an impact, though.

    Nowadays, I find it hard to read (most) of the old classic writers. I tried to read the Robot novels but couldn't finish The Robots of Dawn. I haven't tried Clarke or Heinlein in a long, long time.

    However, I still read the old cyberpunk books sometimes. I think I read Gibson's Sprawl trilogy every couple of years, and I just read the Bridge trilogy. (It had outdated more than the Sprawl, in some ways - faxes everywhere!) I see the 'much 80ties wow' there but it's more nostalgic to me than the Asimov or Clarke books.

    I also had fun roleplaying cyberpunk - both Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. (which funnily is almost around the corner) and Shadowrun. Traveller is also fun, but not that many people in my circles have that kind of mind-set (it's set more in the "old classic" scifi-space opera than the cyberpunk games).

    590:

    My cats put their toy mice in their dinner plate. I think they're trying to pretend to be making a donation to the family food supply. I found the cats in my back yard (garden), a Maine Coon and her just weaning daughter; wormy, flea ridden, and hungry, drinking from a bowl I leave out for squirrels to get some rainwater. Got them both spayed as soon as possible. Mamacat is a hunter killer. Any time I let her out she brings me mice and birds, or rather just kills them and brings the uneaten portions in or near the house. Babygirl should have learned to kill from her mother, but all she ever bags is bugs. Moths, house flies, beetles. But she loves toys, especially in the winter when there's no going outdoors. So the toy mice, which end up buried in the food bowl. Then again, she also has a habit of making burying motions around the dinner bowl when she is tired of a food, or refuses to eat it Like she does in the litter box So perhaps she's saying, of the old toy mice, "these are no good any more". But she never buries them in the actual litter box. Communication is so hard when all you have is the golden rule and hot-cold.

    591:

    I have think your logic undermines the idea of having a cat as a pet.

    1) You can keep a cat as a pet and torture it. 2) You can treat a cat as a useful local wild animal, like a lady bug or a bat. 3) You can engage in an artificial ritual of bonding with your cat as a predator. 4) You actually are a predator and the cat is your sidekick.

    Many humans did or do behave under option 2. Not a lot of people under option 4 and they generally are not cat people. Most people would reject 1 or 3; so no feline pets.

    Why do cats bond with prey animals? False consciousness? Or because the prey animals, such as large rabbits, have a fair chance of hurting them back?

    Is it ethical to have both cats and dogs? Should I feed cats to a dog under your philosophy? Or should I allow the dog to treat the cat like a puppy? Should I let the dog take over the task of bonding with the cat as a predator; so I have more spare time for idle speculation?

    592:

    Well, I believe the simulation hypothesis is about the idea that any observer is probably in a simulation since simulations of history are more common than real histories. So the other universes you can't get to are relevant for this deduction. On the other hand, the older you get the greater the chance that you are in a simulation because the more threats to your existence you have weathered, which each narrowed down the set of worlds you exist in to only those in which miracles would have rescued you, aka, simulations.

    593:

    For something that simple, get a suitable block of nylon & "carve" ( i.e. mill ) it to approximate shape. Should be a lot cheaper.

    594:

    "Dirty" bomb all-too-possible though. And Da'esh are quite easily mad enough, with their eschatological theology

    595:

    Many pure bred pets are functionally mentally retarded by genetic accident due to the abject cruelty of Fashion over Form. That is so wrong on so many levels, with such a complete failure of understanding .....

    Particualrly with Cats

    596:

    That sounds like a mis-quotation of the Gautama, maybe

    597:

    Think of mine - I was brought up in a then undeveloped part of the third world! Pigeon is entirely right as to the reasons and background, and people have difficulty with the cultural and ethical aspects, not the language. Kipling's writings are almost the antithesis of the modern politically correct dogmas, which is why he gets abused so much by people who are not prepared to understand either him or his times, and often haven't even read him. On a previous posting, only about a third of his writing was military. Did we HAVE to have "If"? He was very rarely as shallow and jingoistic as that. To show how much of a radical he was, try:

    http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/macdonoughs_song.html

    598:

    Right. It's similar to Lyme disease in that. Yes, it CAN be extremely nasty, but most people get infected, recover and never have a recurrence of the acute form. A very small proportion do, and many of those then die. That's life.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1290077 http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Toxoplasmosis/pages/introduction.aspx

    599:

    It's still difficult to do a concerted terrorist attack. The targets all have different failure modes and attackers would have to work around the built-in emergency fall-backs to produce a recognizable result. Then they have to scale up to make a difference to what neglected infrastructure, mismanagement, bad weather or plain human error inflict on us anyhow. Finally, it's difficult to beat the phallic symbolism of 9/11 (Look! We cut your dick off! Both of them!)

    600:

    "It's complete rubbish to state that felines are naturally solitary, ..."

    No, it isn't. The only social cat is Panthera leo, and I pretty certain that none pair-bond; it is extremely unclear what the `natural' behaviour of Felis catus was, but all of the other Felis are solitary. Feral domestic cats behave in a wide variety of ways, varying from solitary to loose groupings, but they are almost always territorial and have none of the usual behaviour of social animals.

    601:

    Eh, they've been domesticated for so many generations that at this point, the natural behavior is best summarized as "Sponge heat and shelter off humans, kill vermin" - because that is the actual ancestral environment for the past thousand + generations. So if we are doing anything wrong by them, it's that the present state of sanitation is producing a situation highly deficient in their natural prey.

    602:

    Unfortunately, you are wrong, because of the tendency for effective monopolies to form. That doesn't mean just the front company, but ones supplying key equipment, software and services. My ex-employer had experience of being caught out by that! And, as with the Millenium bug, the problem wasn't the possible failures, but the potential for the government to turn a recoverable failure into a disaster. Consider London's electricity distribution stations, water pumping stations, and supermarket deliveries going down for even a few days in midwinter; that was on the cards. A cyber-attack could do something similar.

    On the matter of distributed terrorist attacks, they are easy to do if you have a military control structure in place, but that means a massively higher chance of the organisation being closed down by the authorities. However, small-scale ones (2-5 events) are easy, and are effective even if some fail. I thought of several ways that the IRA could have caused massive chaos, with very little chance of detection, but they much preferred killing innocents.

    603:

    I noticed that they'd dropped the price on Eric Frank Russell ebooks from "ouch" to "OK, now I'll buy it"... so I've just finished rereading "Wasp", and it's an instant trip back to my school library in the late 1970s :)

    It's fascinating to see where his expectations of the medium-future differ even from the realities of our place in his near-future; but it's still a good book, and I enjoyed it all over again.

    All this talk of cats, and no mention of the offog...

    605:

    3 - occasionally. Fat Frez like to climb on my chest when I am lying down. Presumably he thinks that makes him my boss. No doubt reinforced when he hassles me for food and I oblige.

    606:

    Also, the older you get the more likely it is that you are in a simulation.

    607:

    I thought of several ways that the IRA could have caused massive chaos

    They tried - look at the financial impact of the Canary Wharf bombing, or the Arndale center.

    We were living two miles up the road when they destroyed the Inland Revenue offices for Northern Ireland in the late 1970s; walked in, planted bombs, destroyed all tax records (and we didn't even hear the bang - Dad had to point out the rather visible column of smoke when he came home in the afternoon). Unfortunately, it was a bit of an "own goal", because the understandable response was to put everyone in NI on emergency tax codes (i.e. less cash in the weekly pay packet) until they could get a completely duplicated set of records across from Liverpool. It was a low-grade annoyance to an awful lot of people; and never repeated.

    There were several factors limiting PIRA actions. Firstly, the need to escape - they didn't do suicide missions, and avoided high-risk missions (although: proxy bombs). They were sometimes mindful of the PR impact of their attacks (although: Omagh). They were limited by finance and logistics; e.g. transporting explosives across the Irish Sea is risky, and they only had so much Semtex and so many pairs of "clean hands". Finally, they were deeply penetrated by the security forces (although: take this to mean "know who had done it and how, after the event", or "occasionally able to find out what was going on before it happened", certainly not "able to control and direct operations").

    608:

    You have clearly not understood what I mean by "massive chaos"; I am talking a decimal order of magnitude higher, at least. No, I won't post how, because it is now illegal to do so.

    609:

    If every change in a simulated experience set causes a preexisting undifferentiated universe to become differentiated, doesn't each step in a simulator cycle effectively create an off-by-1-bit copy of the extant ancestor-simulator-containing universe, thus increasing the total multiversal ratio of simulated experience sets to non-simulated experience sets?

    Not necessarily: consider deduplication as a partial solution. Do you create a new simulation of the entirety of the universe for each purely local change? Probably not: you simulate the new delta, within a local domain that propagates outwards at the speed of light until and unless the local effects of the delta disappear.

    For the vast majority of such deltas the effects will be purely local -- a given synaptic membrane hitting an action potential and depolarizing, triggering a membrane gate to open somewhere in your brain is probably not going to have any discernable effects outside of a sphere less than ten centimetres in radius until it has joined with a whole fuckton more events that sum up to cause your knee to twitch, and your twitching knee will usually not have any discernible effects beyond your immediate vicinity.

    Of course, there are exceptions. If the synapse firing in the brain in question is upstream from Gavrilo Princip's trigger finger shortly before 11am on 28 June 1914, the delta in your reality sim is going to get quite large and eventually propagate to other planets (insofar as it leads indirectly to Wernher von Braun being picked up by Operation PAPERCLIP) ...

    610:

    Fair enough - most people in the UK can use "massive chaos" to describe a fifty-mile tailback on the M6, or Heathrow being shut for the day.

    But yes, there were people employed to actively worry about the ways in which PIRA might try to really stir things up, and to think about how to prevent, or at least defeat, any such attempts.

    I did suggest a rather "inventive" scenario to Dad when he was working on the emergency planning for a Formula 1 Grand Prix in a foreign country... don't think he used it, but it was intended to be a plausible means to overwhelm any medical chain in the area.

    611:

    It's not worried about you starving, it's worried about you being a slow learner wrt. the hunting thing.

    612:

    have cats needed to evolve behaviours for bonding? I thought they were territorial solitary animals, with just enough evolved social "nous" to be able to negotiate times and places at which they could safely pass other cats.

    Nope, they're a good bit more complex than that according to studies of farm cats using concealed cameras/gps trackers. Domestic cats are all solitary crepuscular ambush hunters, and adult males are generally solitary, covering a territory of up to a couple of square miles. But adult females tend to have much smaller, overlapping territories and very often engage in mutual grooming and share their sleeping quarters -- they've even been observed nursing the kittens of unrelated but co-habiting females. So there is social hierarchy behaviour among females (and, to a much lesser extent, among males).

    613:

    Do a point-by-point comparison between life in a boarding school in the pre-internet age and life in a medium-security prison today and you'll probably find the number of similarities alarming.

    We don't call them "institutions" for nothing.

    614:

    A major difference between cyberwarfare and other forms is that civilian capabilities match those of the government. It's as if criminals could easily obtain not just guns, but main battle tanks and jet fighters with laser guided bombs.

    Everything I've heard/read on the subjects suggests that this is largely because most government organizations are utterly incompetent at managing black-hat hackers. Your ideal hacker is very smart, into self-directed learning outside their current horizons, curious, testing boundaries the whole time, and applying high-level abstractions to new contexts. This is how they come up with new zero-day exploits. In contrast, soldiers -- which is how the US DoD thinks of cyberwar -- are expected to STFU, obey orders, and stay within their defined scope. In particular, soldiers don't invent whizzy new types of guided missile. Upshot: I've heard one case of smart guy who spotted a possible vulnerability in a standard DoD router, didn't poke it but reported it through channels (router was running an unencrypted configuration management web server with an unchanged default password) and got reprimanded for it. Reported it outside the chain of command -- to someone who was in a position to get the problem fixed -- and was summarily disciplined in a career-ending manner.

    The organizational exception to this rule is the Five Eyes and equivalent agencies, who know how to manage geeks. But for the past 30 years they've become very focussed on intel gathering, and they don't share their shinies with the military.

    It's as if you've got a first-rank air force flying SR-71s and spy satellites but who aren't allowed to operate offensively because it would piss off the Army, who have their own idea of how to do tactical air support ... the general staff is convinced that the only way to do bombing is to overfly the target in a Zeppelin and drop hand grenades, and anyone who suggests otherwise gets cashiered.

    615:

    As I recall they came very close to dropping the North Circular/M1 intersection at one point in the 90s, didn't they?

    But far more disruptive at far less cost was the tube/bus firebombing campaign of the early 90s. By then they'd learned that killing people generated outrage and a huge man-hunt while motivating informers, so they switched to potentially-lethal but mostly non-lethal attacks in England. Build an incendiary bomb into a cassette or CD case, slide between cushions on a tube train, and leave before it ignites. Then phone in a detailed description (carriage number, seat location) and a code-word. Over the next week, use the code word to phone in another five highly plausible false alarms, forcing tube network shutdowns while they search for the absent bomb ... then when the defenders begin slacking off, plant another bomb and change the code-word. Upshot: minimal effort, very hard to catch the bombers in the torrent of passengers at rush hour, and it causes the capital's transport network to shut down at random on a daily basis for months on end.

    It looks trivial, but I'm guesstimating that the economic losses caused by that 3-5 person cell probably added up to the thick end of a billion quid. And preventing it would have required re-equipping the entire tube network with incendiary-proof seating -- that's how many trains?

    (NB: I don't think this method would work on the New York subway -- the trains have metal-and-plastic seats. The London ones back then had fabric-covered sprung cushion-backs and seats that could be removed easily for re-covering/cleaning. Hence making it possible to slide a slim incendiary device between them. I suspect that bombing campaign has been an influence on subsequent bus/train seat design, at least on metro services ...)

    616:

    There are at least 3 types 9/11 class attacks that could be perpetrated by small groups or suicidal loners.

    617:

    Absolutely. There is an old story about a Brit who had been held in an Iraqi jail during the Saddam era who when asked about his experiences said "bit like boarding school but not as bad"

    618:

    Precisely. My ideas were along those lines, but nastier. They could still be used today, mutis mutandis - but, despite the hysteria, there isn't even a terrorist network in the UK, let alone a competent one.

    619:

    I discovered by accident many years later that one of the punishments I was given was used as evidence of torture during the Nuremberg trials.

    620:

    Interesting. I wonder if that was part of the ancestral behaviour or developed after domestication.

    621:

    I didn't have it too bad, I can't recall any teacher seeming to enjoy administering punishment at boarding school. I certainly can't say that for the Catholoic School I attended in Malta. I just googled the particular order that ran that school and it was not pleasant reading.

    622:

    "If necessary, buy a mouse and toss it around a few times while pouncing. Then, of course, you kill it."

    I don't think this is practical. Leaving aside the desire, what fraction of human beings have the coordination to knock around a small rodent without it getting away? And I'm reasonably confident that most cats could tell the difference between a live mouse & a dead/fake one.

    My dog seems perfectly content to accept that I hunt & kill the savage carnitas beast in the wild & mysterious place called the mexican restaurant. After all, I come back with meat. He also seems willing to accept the trade of fresh squirrel carcass for cooked meat, if not entirely happy about it. But him not going to the vet trumps him getting to eat what he kills.

    623:

    "Everything I've heard/read on the subjects suggests that this is largely because most government organizations are utterly incompetent at managing black-hat hackers."

    From what I've seen, It's considerably worse then you lay out. It's not just learning to manage geeks, it's almost an impossible situation.

    Most geeks don't like rules in general and the government bureaucracy is resistant enough to change that it makes it very difficult to adapt to various job market realities.

    I remember one time I was interviewed as part of some fact finding by the GAO about government interviewing (they were trying to figure out why they were having such a hard time hiring). They asked me how long it took us from intake of applicant to offer. For us it was -4 weeks, for them 6-12 months

    We got into a conversation about compensation and their take was they would never compete and the only card they could play was a few highly loyal , highly skilled folks that worked out of duty. My response was those folks sounds like a great untapped recruiting pipeline for us and I should try to see if we could algorithmically identify them

    Really the only way a geek is going to find his way in, is via one of the big consulting agencies (Raython , Johnson Controls etc) or thru an agency that is powerful enough to ignore all the rules (NSA)

    There IS a movement in the Valley right now (Mikey Dickerson, US Digital Services) to change that dynamic and make working for the government like volunteering in a third world country, that seems to be getting some traction and is probably the most workable approach right now

    If you wanted real cyber defense, maybe a volunteer militia approach?

    624:

    Teachers? Hell, that was the prefects (unsupervised, of course). It wasn't as bad as that sounds, though I could have done without the consequent knee damage.

    625:

    Yeah, I knew it would come back to 9/11.

    See, that's a terrorist attack, and a rather stupid one in terms of physical damage caused. If you'd wanted to do that as a military attack, you'd hijack planes coming out of San Francisco and fly them into Shasta Dam until that breaks. Or do it in Phoenix and go after the Glen Canyon Dam, which did, in fact, almost break in 1983 during a flood.

    But the wall of water from Shasta would wipe out Sacramento, the California aqueduct (which feeds a lot of water to Los Angeles, as well as 55% of California's crop exports), and, if you're lucky, a good part of the San Francisco financial district. The resulting catastrophe would leave the US unable to retaliate for quite a while, because the military would be tied up with civilian disaster relief.

    That last sentence really is the critical one: you want the US military tied up with civilian disaster relief. At that point, you do what the Japanese did not do after Pearl Harbor, and you negotiate a cease-fire so that the war doesn't go nuclear, and then you get on with things. That's the point of cyberwar.

    But yes, I agree that it appears difficult to do a concerted terrorist attack. Then again, we haven't really seen anyone try, aside from Stuxnet and Estonia. Have we?

    626:

    If cats who don't behave as Hadil Benu desires are pathetic defectives, is she suggesting a proactive program of eugenics? (This could involve sterilization as opposed to mass felicide, except how would we tell the difference from the status quo.) Or more fairly, a culling of humans who do not conform?

    Cats clearly prefer their current arrangement to their "natural" one. Is this false consciousness? In this case, I highly doubt it. I think learning that your human is a dumb ass is hardly torture and a fair price to pay for a lack of ear mites and a warm place to sleep in January. Imagine if you had the boss from Dilbert, BUT he did not want you to do any work at any specific time and he gave you a bunch of stuff you wanted and he mostly tried to be your friend in a somewhat weird, but not too creepy way. Not ideal, but better than many people's realities.

    627:

    Did we HAVE to have "If"? He was very rarely as shallow and jingoistic as that.

    I don't detect any jingoism: those sentiments could very well apply to someone running a business or having problems with their PhD. Or even struggling to make a sustainable life in the mess that is Syria. Sexist perhaps, in that there's no mention of Woman, but not jingoistic.

    628:

    True. My cat comes and miaouws to climb on my lap each evening, and stays there for about half an hour. So I doubt it thinks I'm torturing it. I doubt it's after warmth either, or it would either stay there for longer or curl up somewhere permanently warm.

    Anent ear mites and January weather: it's worth pointing out just how brutal life in the wild is. Almost every wild cat will die a horrible horrible death: from cancer eating away at its guts, from starvation, from being eaten alive by a fox, from drowning in a bog, from being fatally wounded by a rival. This is, incidentally, the best argument against a beneficent Creator that I know of.

    629:

    I have seen up to 10-12 cats living in harmony around a productive dumpster. (Some of them were related and they probably all were.) The problem is any such environment attracts other animals and they usually kill or out compete the cats. Large predators, like coyotes, eventually get eliminated by humans. But who wins in the long run, dare I mention its dread name: the racoon. There's a reason Guardians of the Galaxy had such surprising box office, but next time, they want hard R.

    With that in mind, usually people eventually capture most of the cats and deliver them to a life of torture. In my state however, community cats are considered wild animals that have the right to roam, as opposed to dogs who do not. I still think a mass of cats in one location would probably not be tolerated by local landowners.

    Female social interactions have been observed in cheetahs and I would guess other big cats as well.

    630:

    I did not want to get too dark. We had a community cat, who became "ours" for the interval it took to get him diagnosed with throat cancer and put to rest. It's worth noting that even a relatively feral cat that lived the high life on squirrels had the instinct or inclination to ask humans for help for an out of context problem. Cats in Libya or Norwegian forests might be completely wild, but almost every cat you meet in everyday life has been shaped to coexist with apes to one extent or another.

    631:

    Here's a question for OGH to talk about. The following rather wonderful images and poem appeared in Punch for 1857:

    THE TWO GIANTS OF THE TIME.
    “WHAT can we two great Forces do?”
    Said Steam to Electricity,
    “To better the case of the human race,
    And promote mankind’s felicity?”

    Electricity said, “From far lands sped,
    Through a wire, with a thought’s velocity,
    What tidings I bear! — of deeds that were
    ever passed yet for atrocity.”

    “Both land and sea,” said Steam, “by me,
    At the rate of a bird men fly over;
    But the quicker they speed to kill and bleed,
    A thought to lament and sigh over.”

    “The world, you see.” Electricity
    Remarked, “thus far is our debtor,
    That it faster goes; but, goodness knows,
    It doesn’t get on much better.”

    “Well, well,” said Steam, with whistle and scream,
    “Herein we help morality;
    That means we make to overtake
    Rebellion and rascality.”

    “Sure enough, that’s true, and so we do,”
    Electricity responded.
    “Through us have been caught, and to justice brought,
    Many scoundrels who had absconded.”

    Said Steam, “I hope we shall get the rope
    round the necks of the Sepoy savages,
    In double quick time, to avenge their crime,
    And arrest their murders and ravages.”

    “We’ve been overpraised,” said both; “we raised
    Too sanguine expectations:
    But with all our might, we haven’t yet quite
    Regenerated the nations.

    “We’re afraid we shan't — we suspect we can’t
    Cause people to change their courses;
    Locomotive powers alone are ours:
    But the world wants motive forces.”

    Consider someone writing an analogous poem in 2057. (A) Which two forces or technologies would they choose? (B) We can agree with many of the sentiments, but not with the bit about the Sepoy savages. In what ways might the analogous 2057 poem appear similarly wrong-headed to somebody reading it in 2216?

    632:

    There's sweetcorn grown in the north of England, in open fields. There are varieties that will ripen handily. I never had particularly good results in the garden with the consumer-available ones, but the farmers hereabouts seem to find it profitable enough that there are generally a few fields of it within walking distance of my house.

    633:

    But like Greek sculpture or Hieronymus Bosch, you need to also know the thinkers that their culture had and who produced them.

    I'd be really interested to know your interpretation of the bizarre imagery in The Garden of Earthly Delights and its historical influences.

    634:

    All this talk of cats, and no mention of the offog...

    Some things will never pass, and bureaucracy is one of them. I once had the idea that Artificial Intelligence people have drawn inspiration from various aspects and types of life, including neural nets, the immune system, and insect societies. But there is a form of life that is more tenacious than any of those, and that is the bureaucracy. What lessons could indeed be learnt from the study of Bureautics, or should that be Burotics.

    635:

    See, that's a terrorist attack, and a rather stupid one in terms of physical damage caused. If you'd wanted to do that as a military attack, you'd hijack planes coming out of San Francisco and fly them into Shasta Dam until that breaks. Or do it in Phoenix and go after the Glen Canyon Dam, which did, in fact, almost break in 1983 during a flood.

    That would also be a terrorist attack, or at least a war crime. Any legal military cyberwar attack must ensure that actions are directed at military forces and that civilian casualties are minimized.

    636:

    If you actually want to bond properly with your cat, prove to it that you can hunt well and don't need the little door step parcels (it's a source of anxiety / mind fuck for them that you're incapable of hunting).

    I don't know cats well enough to know if this is so, but I do have a brother-in-law whose cat learned to cooperatively hunt with him. Cat would chase red squirrels up the one isolated tree in the yard, then yowl for service. My relative would then come out of the house and shoot the squirrel out of the tree, for the cat to drag away and eat. Cat seemed very clear about the specialization of hunting skills: "You suck at chasing squirrels up trees, but you're awesome at killing them when they're way out on the tiny branches where I can't go. Let's work together!"

    637:

    Have you saved seed, and grown the next year's crop from it? Because that's the real test for ripeness.

    638:

    I haven't: the stuff I was trying - with poor results, as I mentioned - was marked as an F1 hybrid and might or might not have produced viable seed even if it was ripe. The flavour was all right, though, what little I got. What the farmers do, I have no idea. The only one of 'em I know to talk to doesn't grow it. Roots and acres of salads in greenhouses.

    639:

    ‘Cat … predator’

    Our resident feline was never taught how to hunt by her (non-pure bred) mum, probably separated too early or too urbanized, and was spayed/vaccinated as per vet’s recommended schedule.

    Now on to our predator story … Scene: New house in a new development surrounded by farm land.

    A mouse ran into the house through the front door on a spring night as a guest was leaving. I wasn’t able to shoo the mouse out of the house immediately so ran to get the cat (female, 4 or 5 years old then). Right … put the cat down on the floor in front of the mouse. Nothing … the cat just sat and looked at the mouse then at me, then back … a few times. I ended up getting a broom, corralled the mouse into a wastepaper can, then tossed the mouse out onto the front yard near the street hoping that a neighborhood cat/racoon might catch it for dinner. Came back into the house to see the cat lying on the bench watching for me until I came back in and locked the door. Despite witnessing my successful catch and dispatch of the mouse/prey, the feline’s attitude/behavior toward me did not change … I was still just the human help. (Meeowr, meeowr … more kibble … meooowr, meooowr, meooowr … freshen the litter box … mrp, mrp, … who me?.... bump, nuzzle, bump …. scratch right here … Prr, prr … don’t stop …. Prrr, prrr, …) Preferred toys: lights, bugs, humans … toy/plastic mice so not interested!)

    640:

    fiction that assumes the reader can identify with straight white males from North America and Europe is a 5% solution at best.

    True, but a character that's relatable to a transexual Xhosa reader probably won't be relatable to a Melanesian woman. Every character has to be somebody, and nobody's experience is more universal than your own.

    The thing is that a lot of fiction works around the assumption that the straight white male from NA or E is the norm and everyone lse is the aberation from the norm who needs to be explained. The transsexual Xhosa has doubtless read many stories with a het. white male protagonist, without a single word dropped about how the pecularity of having this particular string of attributes. While all the stories with a melanesian woman are about (also) how beeing a melansan woman (among other things, maybe a midwife by day and beer sommeliere by night) affects her.

    nobody's experience is more universal than your own - Doesnt that mean you should welcome stuff written from and for perspectives different from yours? Or what where you trying to say?

    642:

    Animal languages/culture … I’ve taken up chipmunk.

    Last year 2 or 3 chipmunks moved into the backyard. They were initially quite shy but became used to us because we pointedly ignored their presence … turning our heads so that they could dash away. Early summer when we started sweeping windfallen cherries onto a patch of stone just off the deck to ready for the green bin we noticed the chipmunks stuffing their cheeks with them. This cherry cleaning/harvest lasted a few weeks. Anyways, by summer’s end at least one chipmunk would show up and sit on the deck rail until the local human provided an offering on the tribute altar. Yeah, I know – what a pushover this human. But, unlike previous years, no little cherry trees poking up through the lawn. So both sides benefited. Looking forward to spring.

    BTW, chipmunks can be quite fierce … our little guys/gals have run off grey and black squirrels much larger than them. At the same time, they’ve ignored the visiting rabbits and raccoons.

    643:

    ... you like to think you're predators

    To think of oneself as a predator may not be smart. Watched a wilderness documentary* this noon, one seen with to leopards trying to catch an impala. The impala went down three times, struggled, kicked it's way out and finally escaped. Later, same film, some guys catch crocodiles for tagging. Crocodiles react completely clueless to beeing lassoed and don't put up much of a fight. Beeing captured? Outside context problem for them, for the impala not so.

    *Take this with a load of salt, if someone tells me they filmed with drugged crocodiles in a zoo somewhere or some such I wouldnt be shocked.

    644:

    Why is this surprising? There's not a tremendous amount of surviving Roman literature about the feelings of their slaves, after all. They were even into orientalism, as seen in something like The Golden Ass and it's portrayal of teh Isis cult. Surviving Roman literature doesn't seem to be good at taking the Ancient Egyptian viewpoint, either.

    For that matter, the Ancient Egyptians weren't all that good at taking the viewpoints of those upriver or across the desert from them. They're surviving literature seems to be all about divine conquest.

    Now this isn't an argument against diversity in modern science fiction. It's just to point out that the males of the dominant culture tend to write what they know, and have for thousands of year.

    That's the size of the challenge.

    That we're seriously pissed off at this status quo actually says a lot at about how far we've come, and how much effort it's taken to get this far. That the DT has six million Twitter followers who think otherwise says a little about how much is still left to do, just in the US.

    Shall we keep striving progressively towards true equality? We've still got a very long way to go towards that goal.

    645:

    re: Dirk's pharma experiments ...

    From what I've read ... Basically, LSD disintegrates and reintegrates existing neural paths … at random. The high/down is self-generated: your brain thinks/perceives one thing, but since it’s now scrambled (psychotic), it can’t reliably recognize/interact with 'true' reality any more (at least for the duration of the 'trip'). No idea how this can be considered 'beneficial'.

    Other substances mentioned ... these are stimulants that keep one awake. Learning requires good solid sleep so that consolidation can occur. So while you might feel that you’re alert and able to tackle tasks, it may be possible that you’re actually undermining yourself by not being able to lay down a solid foundation. Of course, your personal brain chemistry may be different and what is generally considered not healthy for the majority may not be harmful for you. But how do you know whether these substances are good or bad for you ... because it doesn't seem that you've done any verifiable (self-)testing.

    646:

    Take this with a load of salt, if someone tells me they filmed with drugged crocodiles in a zoo somewhere or some such I wouldn't be shocked.

    No, actually it's probably OK. My understanding is that while crocodilians have very strong muscles to close the jaw (so that prey animals, once grabbed, can't easily escape), the muscles to open the jaw are quite weak, as there's no reason to expect resistance in this direction. Therefore it's not actually that hard to muzzle a crocodile. (Though this is not to be read as my volunteering to actually do it!)

    Regarding non-feral cats @640: I don't keep cats myself (I have a parakeet, strikes me as not a viable combination), but my ex-boss had a cat that was scared of trees. Urban cat, never seen anything but buildings. Robin retires, moves to suburbs with large wooded garden, ideal playground for cat—or so he thinks. Takes cat outside—cat looks around in puzzlement and heads back indoors. Picks cat up, takes cat outside, places cat on branch of tree. Cat freezes, digs in all 20 claws and cries until rescued, whereupon it heads back indoors with reproachful expression. Call of the wild, not.

    647:

    Unlikely. Milling takes real skill and a good cad model, not to mention the cost of an average mill is probably more than an average 3d printer already. Plus you can 3d print "inside" the object.

    Consumables are likely more expensive too given the price of decent quality bits and tooling.

    Plus have you seen how much swarf a block of nylon generates?

    My Dad used to run a machine shop, ironically his last job before retirement was making Honda wing mirrors.

    648:

    One site that I came across, possibly a reference to John Bradshaw's book, said that cats who kill mice will often not eat them because they've discovered that cat food tastes better. Maybe yours was an extreme case of that.

    I've often wondered why the factories don't make flavours that would be more realistic for a cat. After all, when has a cat ever killed a cow or a cod? So why not sell Mouse, or Blackbird-'n-Robin, or Rat-'n-Chaffinch flavour? Possibly, I've heard, because cat-food factories have human tasters, and they would not want to eat such concoctions. See http://metro.co.uk/2015/01/22/meet-the-man-who-eats-dog-food-for-a-living-5031527/ .

    649:

    Re: 'That the DT has six million Twitter followers... '

    It's possible to have multiple Twitter accounts, therefore no reliable way to tell how many followers DT has.

    650:

    Someone else who has never taken LSD, but feels qualified to comment on the experience... Racetams do not "keep one awake". You are thinking of Modafinil. The fact that it increases short term memory capacity and ability to focus are the key point. And since you have also obviously never taken that either, I should add that it is perfectly possible to sleep on it. You just have to make a bit more of an effort. Also tends to trigger lucid dreaming if you are into the ultimate in contemporary VR entertainment.

    651:

    Wait. The text of yours you linked earlier was, IIRC like this: I want to be awed, I want to be curious, I want to always want to ask the next question."

    Did I misread you?

    Now this less like "want to ask the next question", more like "i want the last question answered instantly". Process to product, no?

    652:

    As an added bonus both racetams and modafinil taken in the usual quantities are also neuroprotective. Piracetam has a couple of extra points worth noting. It thins the blood (different mechanism from aspirin etc), and it is mitochondrial protective. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1615864/

    And before you start quoting "... and young healthy animals usually benefit little by piracetam..." you should know that I am well into my 60s.

    BTW, I also take aspirin, but for a reason you have probably never heard about. It inhibits muscle breakdown in older animals (similar to ursolic acid) http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/09/keeping-older-muscles-strong

    All I can say is that it either works well with me, or I have a metabolism that doesn't need it. I have recently had to cut my gym workout from 60 minutes a week to 40 because I was putting on so much muscle I was starting get stretch marks around the armpits.

    Drugz iz good...

    653:

    Not personally 'qualified' but have read about it and known people who have, consequently my particular comments and 'observations'.

    654:

    The most feral cat we occasionally housed had a weakness for smoked ham. It would need to evolve a bit before it could make its own.

    655:

    Not bothered by histamines?

    656:

    How one uses LSD is also important. If you are a typical teenager taking smallish doses in search of pretty colors, then forget it. I first took it in my 30s after several years of meditation experience, and I was using it to explore the nature of reality. [Which will mean absolutely nothing to anyone who does not have direct experience] Read Leary, McKenna etc for the real deal. This is also an interesting read: http://m.friendfeed-media.com/882669cd10a15f4d863d3eecc6c521f9518f8c56

    657:

    Re. Infrastructure attacks:

    From where I sit, Siemens S7 PLC seem to be the norm for everything except minor niches. Maybe the SCADA level is more diversified? Not that I'm not a software or control person.

    I sometimes wonder what you could actually do to critical infrastructure (water supply, water treatment, district heating, power ...) Not everything, but many safety functions work on a more hardware level and are out of the control of even the PLC. An actual attack would need to identify the physical components that can be brought, via software, into a dangerous state*. Else, all you can do is close the plant down. Best case scenario for reply: switch off internet connection, pick the CDs with the SCADA and PLC software off the shelf and reinstall.

    *I only know German law on this, but the Störfallverordnung actually mandates this for many plants. Or use a fiendishly expensive 'secure' PLC.

    **It's been ages since I read of stuxnet, but didn't they also buy those Siemens centrifuges and experimented to find a destructive resonance frequency?

    658:

    Not to the extent they have ever come to my attention as a problem or solution to anything.

    659:

    Anyway, I'm slacking off tonight and am watching the first episode of season 2 of Better Call Saul

    660:

    I do love this bit: "you're wrong!10111!"

    Hmm, let's ask the Cat experts then.

    You rarely see the fail-state of mass breeding, it's very deliberately obfuscated. (The same with the maniacs breeding miniature horses where the % of defects and damaged animals is much, much higher).

    Here's an example of a brand new one, introduced in the last 40 years:

    TRIGGER WARNING. It has photos of all the defects, all medically classified. So yes: dead deformed kittens.

    The undesirable trait is known as the "Head Defect".

    During the 1970's, a alternative style Burmese cat was established. Phenotypically still within the CFA standard (4), this "strain" of Burmese expresses a more rounded head with a higher frontal prominence, a shorter, broader muzzle, seeming larger and more prominent eyes, and generally a more demarcated nose break. This shorter, broader muzzle form has been referred to as the "Eastern", "new look", "Contemporary", or "more extreme". The longer, narrower muzzle form is referred to as "Traditional" or "less extreme". The "more extreme" Burmese quickly became popular in the show ring and intensive breeding programs ensued. Shortly after the widespread establishment of the "more extreme" cats, litters involving the "more extreme" cats as both parents began to produce kittens with a severe congenital craniofacial deformity.

    Feline Cranial-Facial Abnormality From The Feline Genome Project (yes, that's a thing).

    There's lists of lots more:

    ABNORMALITIES IN PEDIGRE CATS Vet Times, June 2008

    HERITABLE DISEASES AND ABNORMALITIES IN CATS Cat Fancier's Association, 2006 - PDF, decent source

    You can use the feline genome project to see if there's statistical rises in deformities etc if you so desire.

    ~

    As ever, people mistake my position as being the eugenicist when I'm actually pointing to something else.

    Same as for cat owners J I-P etc: the cat isn't actually being tortured, I'm just pulling your whiskers or rather... voicing what your cat thinks of your lack of hunting ability. (a dog would cock its head to the side; a cat just stares ineffably out of the window dreaming of gleaming white pyramids).

    The point was (as the joint-hunting squirrels post highlighted) is that bonding with a cat-qua-cat entails some forms of "entertainment" you'd probably not enjoy.

    A Cheetah Learning Guide PBS / Nature, 2008

    661:

    Re: Infowar

    Probably the most damaging type of infowar would be scrambling data at the lowest level (users/customers). Much better than deleting data because if nothing is missing, there's no alert that something's wrong until people challenge the supplier/vendor. The data scrambling would have to be done all the way through the system including any historical archives.*

    To repair such damage, you'd need to go back to original, non-tamperable (hard, dead tree) data. Unless everyone involved (consumers and vendors) kept clean historical copies of their data in their own separate files, it’d be near impossible to untangle. Good set-up for global debt forgiveness (i.e., offing the current global economy).

    • My mobile/cable provider may be the petri dish of such an attack based on some of their invoicing.
    662:

    It's worth remembering that "walking disk drives" were a stunt back in the 1960s IIRC, and if not then, definitely the 1970s. The basic joke was a punch card file that called memory locations 180 degrees apart on a very large disk. Once the pranksters figured out the proper resonance frequency, the program would cause the rather enormous old disk drives to start rocking until they walked across the room, until they pulled out their plugs. There's also legends of a program that could shake an IBM PC apart, using the same trick on its hard drive, although that program was probably aprocryphal, possibly inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's first book...

    The tl;dr version of this is that destruction by finding the resonant frequency of a computer-controlled spinning part is older than most of the people who programmed Stuxnet. It's not a new meme, but it does make a great attack.

    As for things that can be damaged by disturbing the rotation rate, very high on my list are the turbines that power the grid. In order to keep the frequency of the line voltage, they have to be spun at a very constant speed. If I wanted to mess with things, I'd figure out ways to make the turbines erratic, especially in hydropower systems, but, honestly just about anywhere else. Every computer that depended on line AC as the input from which to compute might have a bit of trouble with the results, especially if they the rate changes clashed and varied faster than grid operators could deal.

    663:

    Interesting one, at one point I had the full HD scan (something like 2.5 gigs size) on my computer (8/16 gig ram machines required). I think the Prado hold the copyright to the image still, but Google did a quasi-nice deal with them or something.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution.jpg

    If you scroll down you'll find the ultra-high definition scans split into panels, they weigh in at around 130 meg each.

    ~

    You need the HD version to spot all the jokes.

    664:

    I think wiht classical cyberpunk the whole 80ties vibe even helps. Every futurism is retrofuturism and somehow the 80ties asthetics make it more honest or self aware about this. At least to me.

    I think the Lem stories that age best are Ijon Tichy (some clearly tongue in cheek) and the Cyberiad. the latter is essentially a fairy tale take on the singularity that happens to have been written 50 years ago. Of course Iread it differently in my teen years.

    I think SF ages differently than, say, litfic since a lot is about ideas but also about recycling: Someone (Elizabeth Bear?) called SF this ongoing conversation. This means if you know the new stuff (and it's ideas), a lot of the old stuff you also know and possibly in a version that's more appealing etc. Or an idea was nevel when you read it in a recent book, then you discover where the recent author ripped it from but the old on is like 'meh, heard that on before...'

    SF also ages differently from litfic in that there's littel cultureal capital in knowing the classics, so if its work to read it because the writing styles and cultural/political norms have shifted it wont get read as widely.

    SF also ages differently from litfic in that some litfic is hugely inspoirational to all other fiction. I'm not a romance fan and I read little older lit, but pride and prejudice was really funny and accesible, probably because it's copied so much. kept it relevant.

    I'm not sure if it would be polite to speculate which of OGH novels has staying power (in beeing enjoyable in 50 or 100 years to someone who's not an ancient lit nerd), I heard authors arent supposed to argue with critics so maybe the critics shouldt do their thing on goodreads and not on the authors blog?

    665:

    Yes, but you need the equipment you want to resonate! I don't think this is an easy stunt, the engineers who desiged the plant know about resonance and operational frequency and resonace will be more than 2 Hz apart.

    I think the fluctuation scenario you mention is a real danger an doable with control of the PLC, without excessive knowledge of the machinery. Note that decentral electricity sources supplying to the grid often depend on a stable grid frequency.

    666:

    Think it's more likely that our cat had no previous 'non-pet' critter experiences before I plopped it in front of the mouse. The human family discussed this event and concluded that the cat might have thought that I was introducing her to a new housemate/family member.

    667:

    Strong irony:

    Cats should not be fed tuna or raw fish.

    http://pets.webmd.com/cats/ss/slideshow-foods-your-cat-should-never-eat

    Slide #2 and #12.

    Although that source also suggests they shouldn't eat raw meat due to bacterial concerns, which is just dumb (it's mistaking the problem which is too hygienic cat products with the cause - mice aren't hygienic critters and they're certainly eaten raw).

    668:

    Cats eat robins and mice because that's what's the right size and available. Also probably similar to what the ancestral small felines at. But the domestic cat came from animals that were hanging around the human hunting camp, yes hunting the vermin that lived on the garbage the humans lived in, but also scavenging the leftover the humans threw out, like guts and spleens of deer or fish. So our cats may have an inherited taste for large herd animals and fish. Note: I just made that up. I am not posing as any kind of expert. I do know that my cats think I can hunt because I put them in my car and took them to a thorny, rocky, overgrown piece of inhospitable land I own. At first they were excited to go hunting with me, but then they couldn't keep up and there was no water or grass and it was uncomfortable, so they begged me to take them home. Now they know that when I go away in the car and come back with meat I am over at the thorn patch hunting where they can't handle it and they hang their heads in shame. Again, this is speculation.

    669:

    ' ... and they hang their heads in shame.'

    That's just wishful thinking on your part: you're the cats' peeple. Go fetch some food ... now!

    Cute story.

    670:

    I meant that another perspective is simply that, another perspective. It's neither better nor worse than your own, generally speaking.

    I was also criticizing the implication from the prior comment that the most important thing about someone is whether or not they are a straight white man, and that appealing to everyone else on the planet is as simple as stepping out of that skin. You also have to step into a new skin, and every identity comes with its own baggage.

    671:

    In Konrad Lorenz' book "Man Meets Dog" there's a chapter on cats, including stories of him taking his cat for a walk. (From memory), the trick is to choose a place to walk, and a pace, that suits the cat. So shady with cover in case dogs come too near, and a slow amble that doesn't tire the cat out.

    672:

    How many people buy bred cats? I would suspect much less than do so for dogs.

    The behaviors I outline took place in your garden variety found or rescued cats. Some of them genuinely do not seem to give a flip about hunting. You stated that such cats are inherently defective.

    There are lots of ways to bond with a human; ditto for any animal suitable for human companionship. Why place restrictions on what is best in life? (To scatter squirrels before you and hear the lamentations of the voles.)

    Interesting that you identify so much with solitary or small group predators. That seems like a tired paradigm for a fast advanced thinker. The world belongs to social insects and their parasites or hyperparasites, literal and metaphorical for both categories. Predators are a blip on the really big scale. Though I will grant they can be scary in random small scale scenarios.

    Me, I am a little bit ent and a little bit otter. I know the world does not give a frell about the long term prospects of such as us; so I am enjoying the moment for what it is.

    673:

    Different bacteria in different animals?

    The Vit B7 (biotin) deficiency caused by consuming raw egg white is also true for humans. (As can an excess of cooked egg whites, so ease up on the meringues.)

    674:

    "...consider deduplication as a partial solution."

    I fear this might result in an infinite quantity of sales calls from Multiversal Storage Deduplication vendors.

    At the tech demo, they simulate you infinitely, but using only a finite amount of storage tending towards O(log n) universes.

    Each of your simulations is then subjected to a hard sell by genetically-engineered software descendants of Oracle's most venal and persistent sales reps.

    The pitch ends when they demonstrate slightly lossy O(1) storage of an infinite quantity of possible universes by collapsing the stored states to leave only the the universe where you paid the highest price and have already signed the contract.

    675:

    My cat used to come for a walk with our dogs on an infrequent basis. Most often she would turn around and go home 1/3 of the way around, but it would be amusing to see this cat panting like a dog on warmer days.

    She also had a justified (due to a kitten eating incident) hatred of golden retrievers attacking all retrievers but our own - which was actually the guilty party - transference cat style.

    6 stone dog vs 1 stone cat victory to the cat every time. How she would have feared against a nastier tempered dog I don't know but no dog in the area would go near her.

    She was a present bringer too hence my slipper habit is now engrained of one to many early morning squelchies underfoot outside my bedroom door.

    676:

    Okay, so how can anyone ever prove (or disprove) an infinite amount of anything? The lawyers will get rich!

    677:

    The USA is a weird one on this:

    Looks like 3% of 85 million or so. So about 2.5 million.

    http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/pet_overpopulation/facts/pet_ownership_statistics.html

    Interesting that you identify so much with solitary or small group predators. That seems like a tired paradigm for a fast advanced thinker.

    I'm actually identifying with cross-species mutualism and respectful symbiosis, but there we go.

    678:

    Huh: I will confess to feeding Menhit the odd [small] tin of tuna. However, she's rationed -- one tin per three months, maximum, and a whole week to consume the contents (roughly 100 grams) because I do not want a perfectly spherical kitty.

    (Also: tuna in brine, not vegetable oil -- that stuff really isn't part of their normal diet and I somehow doubt it's any good for them.)

    679:

    And yes: people have just grokked that the Dems are royally fucked in 2020, and that the Trump - Sanders graaar needs bridge builders, not demo experts.

    Slow Minds, nudge, nudge, nudge.

    680:

    Well, you've fallen for the oldest trick in the book: Cultural Hacking. Children of Disney and all that. (8,000 years or so of domestication, fish wasn't really part of that for anything but the most recent times. Cats replacing Snakes is an interesting one though).

    Of course, ecology doing niche fractals, there's exceptions: Fishing cat

    Lemming Suicide is a case study, after all.

    I'd do a tangent on just how poor most pet food is, and how damaging, but people will get upset (like: really upset once they see the data).

    Hint: the TTP kills your pets (China, not a member, but happy to supply deadly foods to US corps at all times - now spreading).

    ~

    Then again, food labeling is also a thing. Guess it's not just the cute furry friends who get fucked? (c.f. Canada & recent meat disputes).

    681:

    The fish thing is largely due to commercial pressure & industry waste.

    I'm sure I can find the data point where discard (fishing term) got moved into pet food production and who started the campaign. Intuitively smells like a post-war shift or post-Great Depression shift, but I'd have to dig a bit to spot the who and the date (reminds me of Russian Whale quotas and the horror-show behind that one).

    And no: it won't be tuna in the can of cat food. It's probably ground up discard from gutting / processing.

    682:

    Dead right. A friend of mine who wrangles salties in Queensland keeps the jaws shut with a large rubber band.

    You can hold the jaws shut comfortably with one hand - presuming that the other 10ft+ of angry croc isn't causing you any grief ;)

    They usually tranq them first though, because you kinda want a good reason to be moving the croc in the first place.

    683:

    I really have to wonder about the AVMA's survey methodology. It seems unlikely that 33% of dogs were acquired by more than one of the methods listed. Not impossible, mind you, but it makes me wonder.

    684:

    That microdosing link is very interesting. Are there any studies (even small) looking for adverse long-term effects of regular microdoses? (LSD in particular.) (Superficially it seems like it would be safe though sleep habits would need to be changed a little.)

    685:

    You get 15 mins tops / post, often you get less than 10 seconds.

    Most likely answer:

    Breeder -- 1st Owner -- behavioural issues -- Pound -- 2nd owner (continue as needed).

    It's a common thing, esp. with the fashionable types and/or large dogs, such as pitbulls, great danes, german shephards or blue-eyed-huskies / crosses.

    In fact, the uptick is probably largely due to the huskies fashion cross-backing into more wolf archetypes who need a huge amount of exercise, attention and stimulation.

    ~

    10:1 odds the uptick is due to that little can of worms.

    686:

    LSD doesn't work like that chemically.

    The only possible ill effects would be psychological.

    687:

    "China ... happy to supply deadly foods to US corps at all times"

    Very true. The dog who boards with us when her human is travelling overseas got a dose of nasty stuff from some chinese dog treats. She still has digestive tract damage as a result.

    Annoyingly, pet food companies have hit on the dodge of "packaged in the USA" to avoid mentioning the advanced meat substitute came from China/other places with inadequate food safety laws.

    Hadil, do you have any recommended pet food sources that you can share?

    688:

    Average life span is 10-15 years, so again, that adds to the stats.

    Compare the 2012 figure of "87% acquired from shelter / rescue", to the revision to 37% in 2015/6 with the note of 35% 2012/3.

    More than likely they just have not very good resources and are working from incomplete data. i.e. doing the best they can on a limited budget.

    Not unlike the EPA.

    689:

    Wrong country.

    You can always check with the FDA:

    http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/RecallsWithdrawals/default.htm

    But... that's a bit retroactive.

    From a quick hit: Merrick, Evo, Californian Natural Treats.

    ~

    It's your pet, you do the research, eh?

    690:

    As for things that can be damaged by disturbing the rotation rate, very high on my list are the turbines that power the grid... the rate changes clashed and varied faster than grid operators could deal.

    You might be surprised at what grid operators can deal with! I still remember a long ago Internet future tech mailing list discussion where a participant with a background in electrical engineering and distribution described us TCP/IP people as wimps. According to him, it's not a real routing problem until your cables are on fire and melting :-)

    I don't dispute that such an attack is possible. But again it falls into the "if it worked, how many people would notice?" type. The power supply already blips and fluctuates. Western societies are getting better at handling these problems, not worse, as more and more people have solar panels which contribute back to the grid.

    Warfare and terrorism both aim to inflict more hardship than the target is willing to put up with. If a cyberwar / infoterror attack can't do more damage than a careless backhoe operator, what's the point?

    691:

    http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/

    Of course, it's up to you to check if there's a green/whitewash Corp behind it.

    692:

    Yup, that's the UK approach - get Reservists to do it. They even had a piece in the Journal of the British Computer Society (cheesy, but its heart was in the right place).

    Here's an unofficial but well-informed perspective on Joint Force Cyber... The abbreviations you're looking for are LIAG and LICSG, and the parent is the Royal Corps of Signals.

    http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Land_Information_Assurance_Group

    694:

    Aww, only one pellet?

    ~ sad face ~

    And the fish turned into a cat by the end of the metaphor, which makes it a bit strained.

    You're bang on about Lego though. It's full of guns, lotsa guns, transplanted via comics-films franchise tie-ins, and the Lego policeman of today is disturbingly totalitarian - militarised, anonymous in mirrorshades, comes complete with several pairs of tiny handcuffs and other Foulcaldian appurtenances of discipline and punishment. The bad guys all have the traditional striped jumper of the ne'er-do-well, but their stubbly beards and black skullcaps also make them ideal muslamic turrists. Worst case, it's an ontological building block which ensures that developing primate minds internalise the idea of a shiny and necessary police state.

    149 "reality-based community" - this is highly significant, and I suspect a lot of people (self included) misunderstand it first time around such that their key takeaway is that the speaker is an irrational idiot. And possibly he is, but that this doesn't stop what he's saying from being true.
    695:

    Another story in "Man Meets Dog" concerns a bear treed in Yellowstone by a mother cat with kittens. To rescue the bear the rangers had to entice the cat away from the bottom of the tree so the bear felt safe to come down…

    696:

    Yes, careless backhoe operators can have self-limiting career options, especially when they hit fiber...

    I was, in particular, thinking about how much power where I live comes from a comparative handful of power plants. When one of them experienced a maintenance "oops" we were without power for awhile, which led to gridlock and a number of desperate, unprepared people. I was lucky enough to go nab a bunch of ice from the local store, so we just at back, grilled dinner, and handed out tea lights to people who didn't even have a flashlight to work with.

    That, in a nutshell, is why I think the US is so vulnerable to a cyberattack that takes down the grid for a few days. With smart homes, we'd probably be even more vulnerable, which is why I'm not interested in buying into that evolution until I'm confined to a wheel chair--and possibly not then.

    Incidentally, this is also why I think that going solar makes so much sense on so many levels.

    I'd also reiterate that the key is to tie up the US military in disaster relief, so that our retaliation is something you can (ideally) handle. You also do not want the war to escalate or drag on long enough for the US to gear up the war industry.

    697:

    Decades ago I remember an outage in a doubly-redundant fibre-optic network caused by a single backhoe.

    Turned out that although the network architecture called for two separate cables, the company that won the bid to install the system saved money by digging one trench and putting both cables in it. I was too junior to learn exactly how the screw-up happened, and the lawyers were still wrangling when I moved to another project.

    Another example: during a torrential storm a hospital lost power, at which point the backup generator kicked in and operations etc could continue. Until the generator flooded, because it was in the basement and the pumps weren't on the emergency circuit because they weren't critical life-support systems…

    Emergency preparedness is a lot harder than it sounds, and requires checking a lot of details. And of course it looks like wasted money — until the disaster.

    698:

    You also do not want the war to escalate or drag on long enough for the US to gear up the war industry.

    Agreed, with the significant exception of China. If the balance of industrial power tilts your way, as it does in China's case, delaying tactics become effective.

    699:

    You're talking, it seems, about an area that experiences infrequent power outages. Really, people don't have flashlights, or smartphones?. In the US northeast, for example, where most power is distributed above ground, storms frequently cause tree blow-downs that knock out power locally. A lot of people in my area (southern New York) have some sort of generator capacity, either a small standalone generator to run (LED or CFL) lights and a refrigerator and a few other small things, or a larger or whole-house generator. And those who don't have a generator often have smaller options, like USB adapters for cars ($10 if the car doesn't already have one) to keep phones charged, inverters, battery packs, UPSs, emergency lights. Rooftop solar is generally tied to the grid in my area, with few people having a rooftop-solar-powered backup system (batteries/inverter/etc); much more common (because it is cheaper) is having both solar-tied-to-grid and a backup generator. Generators need fuel, which would be a problem if there were a long-term large-scale outage due to hard-to-fix grid failure. (A fast powerful CME is one nightmare scenario - 3000-4000 kps gives not much lead time given alarms/observations by solar observatories at L1 (e.g. SOHO), but it's probably enough.)

    700:

    Some data points During the Sandy Hurricane event I lost power for six days

    I grew up in Malta in the seventies and while power cuts were uncommon, I never had to survive over 24 hours without electricity, similarly England and Scotland during the great storms of 87 and 88

    Supreme irony I was working for the electricitity company during Sandy, my office was closed for a week due to a lack of power and when it was restored, there was a police car at the office entrance to make sure enraged customers couldn't shoot us all

    Final irony, power outages are so regular around me, that when the utility finally hit my street, they presumed we had power, as most of the houses have natural gas generators or diesel generators, really glad I was there and managed to point out there was no electricity

    On point, no major industrialised nation can survive an attack on its infrastructure, one could argue when the IRA worked this out, (i.e. It's a lot more effective than terrorism) the war was over pretty quickly

    701:

    Agreed on disaster prep. I know better, and I still don't think I'm adequately prepared for a real disaster. Living with non-paranoid people makes prepping difficult.

    During said power outage, a local hospital had (as I recall) five backup generators. Four failed on startup for various reasons, and they kept things running on that last one. One hopes that the engineers who were so careless about keeping the generators repaired got invited to the door, but knowing that hospital, they're probably still there.

    702:

    No, you didn't misread me at all. I suspect that in the comment about aesthetic analysis, I was assuming much greater enhancement than in the essay, perhaps subconsciously influenced by Dirk using the word "PostHuman". But I wasn't implying that I wanted an answer to the last question immediately.

    And such a post-human might be able to have process and enjoy following it, but (later) still obtain product with some immediacy. Or so Greg Egan suggests, in his description of the "Truth Mines". These are a mathematical "indexscape" or virtual museum which lays out as objects in space all mathematical concepts for novices to explore. Google
      "truth mines" cavernous
    and you'll find the chapter called "Truth Mining" in his book Diaspora. When I do this, enough of the book is viewable to give me a very clear explanation of the Truth Mines and how one novice learns by exploring them. The novice is enjoying vis learning, and feeling no urgency to hurry it; but I bet that ve will later become a very good mathematician, able to answer many difficult questions quickly because of vis internalised knowledge.

    703:

    Teeth and claws are passés. What the cat of today needs is a built-in credit-card chip, dexterity enough to open pouches, and a GPS location-finder for the nearest supermarket.

    704:

    Dad's latest career is in Emergency Planning; basically, "resilience". Most of this consists of getting various groups of people to think and plan in advance, rather than just knee-jerking into their response; and for the responding services to act together, rather than separately.

    As an example, he'd run a planning exercise in his Council in which a backhoe went through the gas main into Dunblane in winter. Given that a large percentage of UK domestic heating is gas-fired from mains supply, this is A Problem; so the paper exercise for the Police, Fire, Ambulance, Social Services addressed issues surrounding the most vulnerable - sheltered housing, orphanages, housing for the elderly. How do you find out where they are? Where will you shelter them, if they can't stay where they are? How do you transport them, feed them, what resources will be required on site? At what point do those people with gas-fired cookers need support?

    This looked almost prescient when, a few months later, someone drove a backhoe through the gas main into Dunblane...

    705:

    Yes, well, many years ago, there was "Hermann" - originally named after the writer H Hesssssse - as in Herman Hiss - but later, we thought that H Göring might have been a more apposite label. He grew into over 8kg of muscled stripey killer. When taken to Arran on holiday ( he liked car travel, used to sit on the back shelf ) he discovered & laid-out a large proportion of the local shrew & fieldmouse population. We had a rat problem at one time (insanitary neigbours) - & that didn't last long either. Oh & he was frightened as a kitty by a dog. When he grew up, he had to be restrained from attacking any & every dog he saw. The only time he was nonplussed was a classic Mexican stand-off with a farmyard goose - both animals went "intruder!" & hissed at each other simultaneously, followed by an "'ere, that didn't work, what went wrong?" moment. He died, peacefully, at home, the night the first of our Birman/Norwegian kittens were born.

    706:

    AND # 698 too Could be worse. When they were re-constructing many hectares of land for the unspeakable fascist XXXth Oympiad, they had to take up an area of railway sidings (used for out-of-rush-hour unit-storage). The track had already been removed, as had the overhead masts & wiring. Then the ground contractors moved in. I saw the lecture slides from the railway safety inspector: 1. Concrete plaque; "buried HV cable Danger" 2. Discarded plaque + hole in ground 3. What was at bottom of (similar) hole - what looked like a water-pipe It was a buried oil-filled 33kV main 4. Burnt-&-twisted remains of hacksaw used to cut into "pipe" ....

    The guy who did it lived for about a year afterwards, until his heart gave out. Apparently it was a classic Michael Bentine job - a pair of smoking boots & all his clothes blown off - it was a very sweaty July day & most of the discharge went through his clothing. There is NO substitute for Human Stupidity I'm afraid ....

    707:

    That really says something about the state of real "preparedness" in the US ( some parts of the US? ) compared to the UK. Discuss - why is the US so crap at this?

    708:

    one could argue when the IRA worked this out, (i.e. It's a lot more effective than terrorism) the war was over pretty quickly Codswallop The IRA LOST - remember? Their cough "war aim" was to force the "evil occupying Brits out of Ireland" & make the N Irish protestant loonies subject to the black-crow loonies in the S, right? Last I looked none of that had happened & the states are still separate, & partially as a result of that failure, not only has the religious & cultural gerrymandering & corruption in the N largely gone, but the same effect has spread to the S, where the RC church is finally losing its grip ( Will be gone if/when women get proper reproductive control rights ) & people like Charles Haughey are not trousering millions any more.

    709:

    If you read Mark Urban's "Big Boys' Rules", he presents a very convincing argument that a message certainly was sent - in the other direction.

    Shortly after the Brighton bombing of the Conservative Party Conference (as in, "we don't care how many civilians we kill, so long as we get the PM") he noted that the arrest rate of those caught in an act of terrorism dropped dramatically. In other words, if you were found carrying a gun or a bomb on the way to murder someone, you could expect exactly the same level of warning or mercy. Hence the book title, from the saying; "big boys' games, big boys' rules".

    Remember, terrorism is a means to a political end - "killing people and breaking things" is an unproductive view of the political struggle. There are levels of escalation which trigger a response; remember, at this point the IRA is increasingly bugged and touted. Players are known. "Rules" are followed; because what is important is the long-term outcome, namely a peaceful settlement, and medium-term propaganda, namely a drive to maintain "legitimacy". If you do too much killing (either direction) that won't happen. If you take out UK infrastructure, the voters will clamour for a "harsh" response.

    For instance; I lived on an Army housing estate in NI in the late 1970s. Throughout the Troubles, thousands of Army families lived there, were schooled there, worked in the community (Mum taught in a local Primary School). One of the concerns was that they would be seen by the nutters as a "soft target" - but then, someone might have pointed out that front-page photos of dead wives and children hardly enhance legitimacy, and might invite an equivalent response... As I said, "Rules", driven by pragmatism.

    The Troubles ended because the smarter Republicans realised that the Armed Struggle definitely wasn't working, but the political struggle had a chance. The back-channels were reopened, the offers were made, the talking began. Those that were genuinely fighting the oppression and the bigotry of the 1960s were offered credible power-sharing and a way out; and they got it. Those who were ideologically committed to a United Ireland had to face the truth that it could only happen at the ballot box. Those who were too angry to see past this had their tools "put beyond use". All of this was possible because the saner heads of the IRA were still breathing, and still in charge.

    710:

    Few Britons know what ripe maize looks like, and even the short-season sweetcorn hybrids do not ripen enough to be a useful grain crop, let alone prodice viable seed. Global warming will NOT allow Britain to grow most more southerly crops, both because it won't improve our summers much and because (even if it did) we don't get anough sunlight.

    711:

    I worked on a major research site where all services passed through a narrow archway, all laid before ducting became normal (and where it couldn't be installed retrospectively). Twice, we had pneumatic drills hit a substation supply line - inspecting the bit afterwards was eye-opening, and apparently the event was even more so - sparks filling the archway. The operators were physically unharmed both times, but had to be treated for shock :-)

    Actually, an intelligent cyberattack WOULD try to get the USA to gear up its war machine - aimed at the opponent you want to destroy! The USA's military is extremely effective at laying waste to large areas, and forcing countries into anarchy, and has a very good record of choosing a prejudged target that isn't responsible. It isn't at all good at dealing with terrorists.

    712:

    Licence to Kill. As in Gibraltar. And you are wrong it implying that it applied only to those carrying a gun or carrying a bomb; the kill rate of unarmed but known IRA members went up considerably, and that approach continues today, with all the risks to the innocent that implies.

    713:

    I have fond memories of two major network outages back in NZ when I was on phone support - one was for Telecom's core fibre backbone, where one half of the national loop was down for maintenance, and a backhoe dug through the other half while repairing a bridge. That disconnected half the country quite neatly. I'm pretty sure there is a Murphy corollary that if you deliberately take down one half the other must break.

    The other was even dumber - some idiot of a fibre tech literally yanked half the terminations of the Southern Cross Cable out of their sockets in Northcote. Effectively we lost 2/3 the internet links into the country for a weekend until they could identify and resplice the links to Hawaii. Apparently he wasn't sure which one he was fixing so he just pulled them all out till his light went out, but didn't know they had clips so broke all the fittings. Stupidity beats security every time.

    714:

    Perhaps the single largest factor in the (formal) cessation of violence in NI, by all factions, was and is the dwindling of the working class areas that traditionally supplied their grass roots support, due to a growing affluent middle class. The idea that the underlying thought patterns, ideologies, resentments, and historical divisions have gone is dangerously wrong. A lot of the affluence that drove this trend is a result of European and US money -- should BRExit come to pass, and perhaps worse, should Trump win the presidency and enact his protectionist and isolationist policies, NI is unlikely to remain the deceptively calm place it is today.

    715:

    Not "license to kill" - more a rather robust interpretation of the Rules of Engagement. After all, if you're dealing with an armed person, known to be willing to kill, there is no mandatory requirement to issue a challenge if this places you at risk, because said armed person will likely shoot at you rather than surrender. Take Coalisland - eight IRA men, armed with gun and bomb, killed while attacking a Police Station. These were known killers of Policemen, so any claim that their Human Rights were infringed because they started a gun battle and lost it, is laughable (like Han, the IRA fired first)

    However, Urban's book makes the valid point that this approach was apparently counterproductive in the medium term - those who died at Coalisland were replaced by equally-murderous types within six months.

    I must challenge you on the "kill rate of unarmed but known" members - AIUI that was a very, very rare event. Can you give some examples where the security forces killed someone in such a way? At Gibraltar, they were armed with a bomb, and the soldiers involved were briefed that a remote detonator was possible - so it's arguable. The vast majority of soldiers I know are not willing to kill an unarmed person in cold blood - otherwise why would there have been a surviving terrorist after the Iranian Embassy siege?

    716:

    Don't forget the comments in passing from Lord James of Blackheath back in 2010 with the unforgettable My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money

    I'm pretty sure the IRA bought their way to the political table, and also suspect that a lot of their money went into the glamour Millennium projects. It's the right timeframe.

    717:

    Right. The hard work and deaths of many people led to a position where a lasting settlement was possible, and Blair sold out Northern Ireland to the IRA to bolster his own ego. Obviously, the IRA did NOT put all weapons beyond use - some were allowed to go to the deniable factions ('dissidents') - its council was not dissolved (though it restructured and changed direction), and the IRA changed from terrorism to an Mafia-like organisation. As far as I can see, its political plans are modelled on those of the Bolsheviks, as much as anything. I agree that, when the massive subsidy to Northern Ireland is stopped, there will be trouble. Back in 1998, I predicted an Irish civil war in 2020-2025, and I am still expecting one, though perhaps a bit later (depending on external events). I agree that the aftermath of a BRexit could well start the ball rolling.

    718:

    it's an ontological building block which ensures that developing primate minds internalise the idea of a shiny and necessary police state.

    And Lego isn't even the worst offender in this context: consider the Playmobil Airport Security Check-in play set, or the Playmobil City Action My Secret Police Station play set, with fully furnished jail cell and CCTV surveillance station. (Nope, I'm not making this up.)

    719:

    Having a licence to kill does not mean that you have to use it. The disgraceful treatment of the Gibraltar coroner shows what is done to people who try to shine a light on the legality of such actions.

    720:

    Agreed - but this was planned. There was a massive effort at inward investment, because unemployment breeds anger.

    AIUI, the worst excesses of bigotry against the Catholic community (not all, but the worst) were stopped or slowed when direct rule was imposed from Westminster. The reason that John Delorean was handed all that cash in the 1970s was the hunger to create manufacturing jobs. From the start, the British Army knew that it couldn't win any war against the IRA, and said so. It was there to "not lose" - to buy time for the Police to regain primacy, and to support them after they had (Army numbers dropped from a peak of over 20K to about 10K soldiers by the 90s). The economic approach to defeating the IRA was started very early on.

    There were other aspects to the end of the Troubles; you could argue that when relations started to normalise with Libya, the IRA lost a key supporter in terms of both cash and weaponry (see MV Eksund). The USA became a less important source of weaponry, and better-penetrated by the FBI / SIS. The USSR had fallen, and with it the credibility (and possibly support) of a lot of the ideology driving the terrorists of the time. The surveillance towers along the NI border suppressed a lot of activity, as did improved technology and skills. The covert surveillance teams of the 90s, both urban and rural, were generations ahead of those in the 70s. Being an effective terrorist became a lot harder.

    721:

    I'd also reiterate that the key is to tie up the US military in disaster relief, so that our retaliation is something you can (ideally) handle. You also do not want the war to escalate or drag on long enough for the US to gear up the war industry.

    Fringe benefit: if the US military is oriented around disaster relief, that means that when the Big One hits the San Andreas fault -- or worse, New Madrid, which nobody is expecting and the building codes aren't up for -- you'll be in a vastly better position than when a run-down FEMA got called in to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

    722:

    True, but that may be a translation screwup - Playmobil are a German firm, and on their German sites the 5421 set is "Aufklapp-Spiel-Box Polizeistation"; "unfolding play box police station" - the "Secret" applies to folding away, not the Police.

    :) Although; German. :)

    723:

    Discuss - why is the US so crap at this?

    Oh, that's easy: there are several interlocking and contributing reasons, it's not something you can fix trivially.

    For starters, the USA is big. As in, where you might need to hook up power to a dozen substations over a 5 square mile area in England to provide power to 100,000 people (figures are a WAG), in the US the same substations/people would be distributed across 200 square miles. It simply takes longer to get to them and there's more terrain in the way and more cables to check.

    For seconds, the same commercial pressures to neglect infrastructure spending that we've seen in the UK over the past 3-4 decades have been at work in the US (where the scale of the infrastructure to be neglected is larger). Same profit-over-everything attitude in the boardroom of energy corporations, but more to go wrong.

    Thirdly, in some areas there is a political impetus to use neglect as a tool of discrimination/racism. City planning is an amazing tool; I've heard of cities in the USA where all the road bridges into a predominantly black neighbourhood were deliberately designed to be about 12 inches too low to permit buses to drive under them (because white folks have cars, black folks ride the bus, and the town planning board was all about keeping the black folks out of the white neighbourhoods). This sort of thinking is by no means universal but you can imagine how applying insane/evil misprioritization to critical infrastructure could make things worse. Mix in the US right's fetish for portraying government as ineffective by kneecapping all attempts at effective governance, and that leads to things like rights-of-way being badly managed/maintained.

    724:

    Agreed on Blair's vanity, but much of the groundwork was done by John Major.

    I'd also suggest that the vast majority of PIRA weaponry was put beyond use (i.e. is now embedded in concrete at sundry sites known only to them and the decommissioning witnesses). What was left was small-scale stuff, in the actual hands of the more dissident types and the occasional dissident Quartermaster. Cell structure, remember - people and kit were kept separate for good reason. Gerald Seymour even wrote a book about the dissidents ("Vagabond", good as ever).

    "Sold Out to the IRA" seems harsh; seeing as Paisley ended up as First Minister. It was the moderate centre ground unionists and SDLP that got screwed over, and the shouty ones elected. Electorates, got to love them.

    As others pointed out, United Ireland? Nope. Success of the Armed Struggle? Nope. Win Fein electoral success in the South? Nope. Gerry Adams for President? Nah. Rule of law maintained, democracy returned to Stormont? Yup. Slab Murphy assets seized, done for tax evasion? Yup. Some sellout...

    725:

    I grow supersweet corn on my allottment in Norfolk and if I leave the plants too long they are all brown with wrinkled , dry seeds which I assume to be ripe. I've never tried to grow these seeds since they bare F1 hybrids and so vulnerable to fungi that the bought seeds are coated in red fungicide. The maize in the fields is harvested when all foliage is brown so I assume that is ripe.

    726:

    All of this was possible because the saner heads of the IRA were still breathing, and still in charge.

    And a corollary the US electorate is too dumb to recognize (or rather, has been carefully taught to reject) is that terrorism is a tactic, not an existential state: and you should never say never about negotiating with terrorists -- as long as they are willing to agree to put down their guns in principle if you can hammer out an equitable solution.

    (US military occupations overseas tend to end up with tacit negotiations which can be framed as something else, a local ceasefire perhaps, and ascribed to the unit commanders. But US politicians aren't allowed to admit to sitting down with terrorists, even when they're named Menachem Begin or Nelson Mandela or Martin McGuiness. It's one of the failure modes of two-party democracy: adversarial point-scoring makes realistic external engagement very difficult.)

    727:

    Re attacks on infrastructure. I suspect the government have been quietly dealing with this. At the height of the troubles my wife's brother in law was working for a utility company as a civil engineer and doing a preliminary inspection of a site in the pennines. After he got a spade out of his car boot and started digging a helicopter landed next to him and the crew asked what he was doing. They were protecting a pipeline of some sort.

    728:

    Are you perhaps confusing the witnesses with the Coroner? I thought it was Carmen Proetta who the Yellow Press went after post-"Death on the Rock" (the Coroner specifically allowed the inquest jury to return "unlawful killing", but they came back with "lawful").

    I agree that Gibraltar was counter-productive and possibly unlawful; but without knowing more about the actual events, knowledge, and uncertainties at the time (e.g. consistency and quality of surveillance, any concern that they hadn't identified all of the team, the location of the bomb, or intended means of detonation) I won't go further than strongly agreeing with your sentiment that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

    On the bright side, at least the victims, whether lawfully or unlawfully killed, were undeniably guilty sods who got what they were willing to give, and it that wasn't some totally innocent Brazilian electrician. Consider the similarities - bombs targeted at innocent people, a surveillance team trying to follow one (not three) and the perception that lethal force may be necessary to prevent loss of life. In the case of Stockwell 2, it was an incompetent ops room and a badly-led surveillance team, cueing armed officers who were acting in good faith. Who's to say that the command and control in Gibraltar was perfect?

    (The Stockwell 2 report is a fascinating read; well worth the effort)

    729:

    From 2007 or so, some national infrastructure has been given a permanent armed presence courtesy of the MoD Police; e.g at gas facilities in Aberdeenshire...

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6263651.stm

    730:

    I know, and I have done the same. But I doubt that you have seen properly ripe maize to compare with. If such plants start to die back, or the sunlight starts to fail, before the seed it properly right, the seed will dry out but will not contain much starch nor be viable.

    731:

    Actually, regarding Playmobil... Because they're German, and Lego are Danish, why are we surprised that all their police figures get guns? Because that's what police officers all carry, obviously. Normal jogging for European children, nothing to see here, move along.

    ;) I'm more worried about Playmobil gender stereotyping, when we bought the Playmobil aircraft and ambulance for the rugrats, the drivers were male while the stewards/nurses were female. As for Lego, all their "bad guys" are unshaven, it's open discrimination against facial hair! ;)

    Just wait for a European "Daily Mail" type rag insisting that British toys which didn't feature armed police were proof of those subversive British pushing a disarmament agenda that leaves honest police officers unprotected against evil criminals...

    732:

    I was referring to the coroner, and I was NOT referring to the gutter press, but the actions of the British government. I couldn't give a damn about those IRA thugs, but the shoot-to-kill policy also caused the death of minor criminals and even innocents. And, yes, it was a sell-out - and, no, I am not referring to those aspects, which the IRA were all prepared to trade. Look deeper and, as I said, expect a civil war.

    733:

    Lego is an odd case. They have a firm No Guns Whatsoever policy in their City line, but once they broke the rules in Pirates, they now get them all over the place in Star Wars, Wild West and so on. Swords and bows : fine. Guns, variable.

    It's a real case of have cake and eat it.

    Mind you, every kid with space lego knew at least three decent raygun substitutes. Who needs a precast part ;)

    Playmobil on the other hand has always had weapons right from the start. It's one of the key philosophy differences in the early days, along with severe gender bias.

    734:

    Aww, someone made a poster of our office mascot! This was my wallpaper at work for some time (minus the text).

    735:

    Talking to yourself isn't abnormal. Losing an argument with yourself is . . . not good.

    736:

    LSD is a very safe drug from a physiological POV. IIRC it's therapeutic index approaches or exceeds 4000. Aspirin is about 100. Anyway, after it got banned in the 60s trying to do any legal research on it became so onerous that it closed down the whole field.

    737:

    I think you're conflating two things, here.

    "Shoot to Kill" generally refers to the setup of the HMSUs and Special Support Unit by the RUC - and while I agree that they killed the unarmed (although in this case, not innocent) an RUC checkpoint is a high-pressure situation; and an arms cache likewise. Urban mentions the discomfort in military circles regarding the SSU selection procedures (think SPG, it's a similar timeframe).

    "Shoot to Kill" was also the title of one of the Army's marksmanship manuals of the time. I mean, what else? Shoot to make noise? Shoot to tickle? It's catchy, but realistically what else are you doing once you make the decision that the use of lethal force is justified?

    As for minor criminals, I think I see what you're getting at now; driving through an Army checkpoint or patrol at speed being hazardous to health. Note that some soldiers were prosecuted for breaking those ROE - most notably, Lee Clegg, convicted of murder and sentenced to life (conviction later quashed). As for innocents, agreed - but not as a result of policy, more cockpit or individual moron. The policy aspects come from having to use 10,000 soldiers as policemen in green, not IMHO from any decision that the Rules of Engagement were too loose.

    I'd be curious to see what the similar rates of shootings were between young soldiers on patrol in NI, and policemen in the US - adjusted for population. Namely, whether RUC / soldiers were safer to be around than US cops. Try driving through a US police checkpoint, or making a sudden move inside a stopped vehicle with a suspicious registration, and see what happens... Not saying it's right, just wondering whether it's similar.

    I'd also like to think that a Civil War in NI grows increasingly unlikely; too much wealth, too much satisfaction, too few morons who think that breaking stuff will get you what you want.

    738:

    So, when will the BBC give us a Doctor who isn't a hetero white male Gallifreyan?

    740:

    In Germany they are marketing B.A.R.F.: "Biologisch Artgerechtes Roh-Futter" (biological species-appropiate uncooked food). Made me laugh when I first heard it.

    741:

    Summary of findings re:LSD variable doses/dosing schedules. Not all effects are psychological.

    http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term+@DOCNO+3920

    742:

    Re "shoot to kill, what else?": I heard the US Army went to the 5.56 mm round when they went to the M16 from the 7.62 mm M14 because studies had shown wounding an enemy soldier took more troops off the battlefield than actually killing them, since you now have to take time out to apply medical care. Also dead men tell no tales. Also there's such a thing as suppressive fire. But, yes, a marksmanship manual should go ahead and teach how to hit center of mass.

    743:

    Maybe add the following to your list for lack of US preparedness re: natural disasters provided you include better for white and crappier for black population areas.

    Because God's ways are not to be questioned!

    Any harm done during an 'act of God' is deserved! How dare you try to avoid God's Will/Wrath, you atheist GW (Global Warming) proselytizing scientist scumbag!

    Mind you, the insurance companies also do a really brisk business on disaster coverage insurance. And, disaster relief handouts are always addressed to the Fed gov't rather than to the various (3,000+) 'Churches'. Inspiring example of pretzel/Escher-like thinking.

    744:

    Wounding weapons violate the Hague Conventions. Otoh, the US never signed that part of the Hague Conventions.

    745:

    Yeah, I thought that too, but Martin pointed out in a previous thread that other factors such as muzzle velocity cancel it out and there's actually very little difference between the two rounds in terms of what kind of damage they do.

    746:

    Amusing.

    But again I'm cheating - fish meal & pet foods are serious business and there's some very grubby little paws in practice. So, a selection of industry links etc (humor, well, intended):

    The predominant fish meals available and used by the pet food industry in the United States are Gulf and Atlantic menhaden meals, capelin and herring meals from the North Atlantic, and mackerel meal from Chile. Freshwater fish meals, such as catfish from the Mississippi delta region, are also found in some pet foods.

    RENDERED PRODUCTS IN PET FOOD PDF - sourced from the National Association of Renderers. Also known as the NRA.

    Figure 2 shows world fish meal production, which includes fish by-product meals, since 1990. The 12-year average is 6.53 million t, so it has been remarkably stable, except for the El Niño year 1998, when production fell to 5.21 million t, and Peru produced only 815,000 t compared with 1.74 million t the year before.

    Advances in Seafood Byproducts 2002 Conference Proceedings PDF - 2002, historical doc chosen because of their Logo. I mean, it's terribad.

    Now and in the future, alternative proteins must be considered primary protein sources in aquafeeds, with fish meal used sparingly to complement the alternative proteins. Alternative proteins fall into three general categories: (1) animal proteins from rendering or slaughter; (2) plant protein concentrates; and (3) novel proteins such as single cell proteins, insect meals, specialty products produced from seafood processing waste, and especially products derived from ethanol production.

    Worldwide Fish Meal Production Outlook and the Use of Alternative Protein Meals for Aquaculture PDF 2006, historical

    Last 10 years commodity prices, fish meals (US$)

    You can see the trend, and then refer back to the 2006 paper citing that the costs then had risen...

    However, so to not be unfair, there's certainly a case to be made for efficiency and less waste and synergies between markets:

    In recent years, increasing volumes of fishmeal and fish oil have originated from fisheries by-products (capture fisheries and aquaculture). An estimated 6 mt of trimmings and rejects from food fish are currently used for fishmeal and fish-oil production. IFFO estimates that about 25% of fishmeal production (1.23 mt in 2008) comes from fisheries by-products. This amount will grow as its processing becomes increasingly viable.

    FAO: The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2012 (230 pages) Word Doc - 8 page overview, original doc is a bit heavy. From Seafish.org

    And there are alternatives:

    Thus, among the selected acridids, two nutritionally rich species of the genus Oxya (O. fuscovittata and O. hyla hyla) have the ability to produce substantial biomass due to their elevated rates of fecundity and fertility. It is estimated that Oxya could replace at least 50 percent of fishmeal to feed fish and poultry birds. These results support the idea of establishing acridid farms in which O. fuscovittata and O. hyla hyla are mass-reared using Sorghum halepense grasses and Brachiaria mutica plants as food. The transition to acridid tissues would be relatively simple, ensuring the provision of a constant source of feed for developers to supplement the diets of livestock intended for human and non-human consumption.

    Insects as animal feed FAO - PDF

    ~

    6mt is a lot of product to replace.

    Chop chop.

    747:

    Linked off that listing is one for a Löwenherz set on the same theme with a female police officer, a hilariously goofy-looking criminal who seems to have had his clothes taken away for forensic analysis, and no guns as far as I can see. Although, as a toy, compared to the Playmobil one it is... kind of shit.

    748:

    If you're not into the macro-economics of fish meal, the take-away is that it has tripled in price over the last 10 years (at peak requirement, you can see the pattern of peak / trough production) and those peaks are increasing in severity.

    Remember that the economic crash didn't dent it, and the first major peak is in 2010.

    You can expect that to continue until, well, there's no fishies left.

    6mt.

    Big-Badda-Boom.

    749:

    The New Madrid fault features in Walter Jon Williams' Rift, using his techno-thriller voice.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rift_%28novel%29

    Short version. Missouri, Lousiana, Mississippi are basically made of silt, waiting to be liquified by the next Big One.

    750:

    Hmph.

    The National Renderers' link is broken - I suspect malformed on their end.

    http://assets.nationalrenderers.org/essential_rendering_pet_food.pdf

    If you know about industrial farming, here's a very aesthetic take on them: Mishka Henner’s Feedlots Art, heavy load, HD images.

    751:

    I think there is also a cultural difference in attitudes to the quality of electrical installations. I checked up on US practice for domestic electrical supply a while back in order to help out a chap who was having some weird problem, and my essential reaction was gaaaahh. Apparently it is common for houses to be fed from a 110-0-110V supply (so allowing 220V for high power appliances) with a two-wire connection - copper conductors for the two 110s, but the 0 going via ground, as in the actual earth. So the balance between the two 110s at the house end depends on how many appliances you have drawing how much power from each, plus how long it is since it rained and whether the ground connection at the pole even still exists and other indeterminate factors. While this isn't of itself directly relevant to the question, it does appear that it is representative of attitudes, and it is not just the endpoints but the whole of the rural distribution network that accepts as normal practices of such utter shitness and doesn't see a problem with it.

    752:

    This Feb, the Beeb screened a 20-years-after piece on the 1996 docklands bombing that terminated the first IRA truce, interviewing survivors, the police who tracked down the bombers, politicians on all sides who had been involved in the peace process. In the end the bombers went down for decades, but were released a couple of years later as part of the eventual deal.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0704y7r/the-docklands-bomb-executing-peace

    It had a sight personal resonnance for me, as the Eastercon had been held in that area the previous year, and my route on foot to the venue had taken me past the newspaper shop.

    The show made the point that the sticking point of prior decommissioning turned out not to be a sticking point after the bomb. As former US Congressman Bruce Morrison said ...

    "The great irony to me was that Canary Wharf got republicans to the table... the actions (of the British) said: 'Yes, you can bomb your way to the conference table'.

    "That's really what Canary Wharf was. It was a moment of truth; it was the moment that sent the message peace and war are both options, and neither one is a given."

    http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/docklands-bomb-ira-bombed-its-way-to-talks-table-with-canary-wharf-claims-former-us-congressman-bruce-morrison-34428103.html

    753:

    I distinctly recall the shock, electrical and cultural, I received from a light switch in a friend's house in SF. In short order ..

    "Oww!" "WTF!!" "Oh, it's only 110V, but still ..."

    754:

    @708 Discuss - why is the US so crap at this?

    That's quite a snap judgment on your part. Charlie covers part of the answer: the US is a LOT larger than the UK - the total area of the sovereign US is 9,857,306 km2; the UK (all of the UK) is 242,495 km2. That's over 40 times as large. Also, as Charlie noted, in much of the US the population density is MUCH lower. You can't really feel the impact until you've spent time in both nations.

    There's also the question of how disasters are approached (NB: I was on the USNORTHCOM staff from its inception in 2002 until I moved to Germany in 2009. BTW the Wiki page on NORTHCOM is crap - many errors and omissions, which is why I'm not linking to it.). Primacy in emergency response in the US goes from the bottom up, i.e. Chief of Fire Department > Mayor > County Commissioners [note: often skipped as ineffective] > Governor. You don't get Federal involvement unless it's an actual attack (9/11, and even then it took some time to realize) or the Governor asks for it. This was part of the problem during Hurricane Katrina; New Orleans Mayor Nagin (now in prison convicted of wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering) and Louisiana Governor Blanco dithered and significantly delayed the Federal response. The other affected states, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were much quicker off the mark. True, FEMA was not as effective as it could have been, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the flood control system, takes some of the blame for managing a system that had been badly underfunded for decades, but much of the original delay in response can be laid at the feet of Louisiana officials. (NB the Wiki page on Hurricane Katrina is quite good, if not completely neutral. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina )

    For non-military situations, DOD is a supporting player, normally to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or another Federal department, such as the US Forest Service for wildland firefighting (see Wiki for National Response Framework, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Response_Framework ). The lead agency must first request, at the Secretarial level, DOD support. It is also worth noting that DOD often does not work for free, nor are we cheap (see Economy Act, http://corpslakes.usace.army.mil/partners/economy.cfm - note there is strangely no Wiki article on this act, which is entirely different from the Economy Act of 1933).

    This bottom-up hierarchy is designed to preserve the autonomy of local governments, but often leads to delays in response. That said, and despite the $100 billion estimated economic losses from Katrina, the death toll was between 1200 and 1900 from all related causes. Considering the extent of damage (over 22 million km2 affected), that's pretty low. Compare to much smaller events in lesser developed countries with similar or higher casualty counts.

    Few nations are well-prepared for disasters. The best I've seen are Switzerland and the Nordic countries. Real disaster preparedness requires the ability to plan for effective responses to very rare situations, and the commitment to spend the money for things that will most often age out before they can be used.

    755:

    NI is complicated (what isn't?). The causes of the conflict are complicated, the conflict itself was complicated, the resolution was complicated. Previous comment was meant to highlight that although the use of violence has more or less receded from the NI political arena, no one actually won, no one actually lost, and the underlying causes still exist -- the fire has been deprived of heat and fuel, but is not out (identity politics is still the only real game in town, the politicians have no incentive to address the underlying issues). Depressing and cynical perhaps, but also true.

    Without wanting to derail further, linked in case anyone is interested, the first in an eight part series featuring recollections of journalists and other public figures covering the history of "The Troubles" (be wary of wading into the comments sections, its a toxic bog in there):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4RNMXVNkn4

    756:

    Myth. Granted, a frequently-heard and uttered one, even inside the armed forces, but a myth nonetheless (it's right up there with the US military urban myth that 0.50 is somehow barred from anti-personnel use)

    The move to a smaller-calibre and lighter round came out of various efforts to reduce the rifleman's load - all of which have demonstrably failed :( The Germans tried it during WW2 with their move to the 7.92x33 Kurz round for the StG-44; the USSR came to similar conclusions, resulting in 7.62x39 for the AKM.

    This was reinforced by the Falklands War; the number of rounds of ammunition carried by the individual was able to increase by nearly a factor of two when the UK moved from 7.62 to 5.56. I went to the School of Infantry to do my Platoon Commander's course carrying a 7.62 weapon, and two years later did my Recce Platoon Commander's course carrying a 5.56 weapon; the total weight stayed the same, to the disappointment of my knees...

    757:

    Yeah, "Rift" is the only one of Dubjay's novels I gave up on halfway through. (He's one of my favourite writers. And occasional drinking buddies.) AIUI it was an attempt by his editor to get him onto the bestseller lists, stymied by psychopathic publishing executive behaviour the like of which I wouldn't have credited if I hadn't seen equally boneheaded shit happen elsewhere at first hand.

    758:

    About the fish in cat food ...

    And increasingly in poultry feed. Very clever to start aggressively marketing 'omega-3 eggs' and even more clever to premium-price them. Only visited a couple of egg producer sites -- both claimed to use hemp as their omega-3 source. Only issue is - why do omega-3 eggs generally taste so fishy?

    Science-fair project for anyone with kids: test variety of omega-3 egg producers for likeliest omega-3 meal sources. Apart from the omega-3, there's bound to be a bunch of distinct molecules that can be picked up/identified in these eggs. The reason for kids' science fair project is that such discoveries tend to make national headlines, like the sushi example below:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html?_r=0

    759:

    Expanding on the big, there's different pressures in different places on the grid. (Heck there's actually 3 separate interconnects, East, West and Texas).

    Power grids outwest tend to have much larger distances between towns, and the cities are spread out far more. Partly because these are cities that got big after the car was invented, partly because earthquakes, partly because smaller places merged in LA and the Bay. Living on the East Coast right now I see buildings I innately distrust as being Earthquake fodder. Now that's not a huge danger here, but it does show the difference in what disasters I think about.

    Out West you have earthquakes, fires, floods, and Snowstorms are an inland problem. Tornadoes, big wind storms, and Hurricanes are rare problems, and thus not anticipated. Nation wide there's a snow anticipation problem in anyplace not used to snow that gets the occasional blizzard. Federal Government has shutdown for several days this year due to the snow in DC. DC's getting better about anticipating snow and did this year right, but it was a level of snow that wouldn't be too bad for many midwestern cities.

    This is in part because of what's a common plan for a 20+ year event versus the 100+ event. In the PNW, we talk about 20 year floods, and hundred year floods. Most houses tend to be built on flood plains tend to be above a 20 year flood line, because people remember it, and flood insurance is expensive if its going to flood within the standard lifespan of a house. 20 year floods are planned for. 100 year floods are much more poorly planned, as they're rare enough no one thinks it will happen again. Most places have some equivalent in their planning. And what the equivalent is, like I said, varies.

    Florida builds for Hurricanes, as they get them often enough. For New Jersey, its much rarer, so Sandy messed them up. Rochester New York knows snow, and gets 50+ inches of snow most winters. But getting an inch in Raliegh NC means everything shuts down, as there's no plows or de-icer.

    My hometown has nearly no wind, so tree trimming around powerlines is lax. We do have large issues with landsides and flooding, and now earthquakes. But the last time we got part of a tropical storm was more than 50 years ago. Such a storm will happen again, and it will absolutely knock out power for days.

    760:

    I'm not much of a maize expert, but it's worth realizing that there are many types beyond sweet corn. The local Korean market, for example, sell cooked ears what I'd call Indian corn. It's a little waxy and definitely not sweet, but it's perfectly edible.

    Speaking of Indian maize, there are varieties floating around the US that can handle all sorts of conditions. Certainly, the Iroquois depended on various types of corn, and I suspect that, if some of them northerly varieties became available in the UK (and I'm not sure how that would happen*), they'd mature. Heck, they've even harvested corn occasionally in Fairbanks, AK. There's hope.

    I agree that light is an issue and so is temperature. The thing to realize about maize is that it's originally a central Mexican crop, and it's one of the few crops where there's more genetic diversity in the cultivated version than in the wild version. In the ~4000-5000 years since maize was invented, forms have been adapted that can deal all the way up to southern Canada. The trick is getting those seeds.

    *Since I've known a lot of botanists, I've heard a large number of stories about how to smuggle plants and seeds between continents. The simplest is to get connected to someone in the Seed Saver's Network in the US, and see if you can get some seeds of northerly corn sent over in a friendly letter or package. So long as you discard any mildewed or buggy kernels with extreme prejudice (meaning: not into your compost pile), you might find a maize variety that's not sweet corn, that will grow where you live.

    761:

    There's something of an interesting dual story coming out of Peru over their fish meal economy.

    The industry state that everything's A-Ok (long quote since pay-walled source; you get 6 free articles though):

    Prices have gone down for a number of reasons, Peruvian sources said.

    A major fishmeal producer and exporter said favorable forecasts for El Nino weather phenomenon, whose strength projections decreased from extraordinary in September to moderate in Q1 2016, have pushed prices downwards.

    In addition, expectations of a full quota catch of 1.1 million metric tons set for the second anchovy fishing season, and prospects for industrial fishing to normalize in the second half of 2016, are putting prices under pressure, the source said.

    Last year's zero quota for the Peruvian anchovy second fishing season pushed buyers to find alternative sources.

    “I think the zero quota has enabled buyers to handle lower stocks and substitute their needs with fishmeal from other origins, when the price of our fishmeal is very high,” the source said.

    Iceland, for instance, has increased its share of the mackerel catch going to fishmeal production to 27% between January and November last year, from 11% over the same time the previous year, according to a report from consulting firm Reykjavik Economics, seen by Undercurrent.

    Peru fishmeal prices drop to $1,750/t level amid slow trade Undercurrent News(very good pro-industry source) 22nd Jan 2016

    But, look over here:

    The warning signs were evident in the first anchoveta season of 2015, which ran from March through June in the north of Peru. There are usually two anchoveta fishing seasons in one year, with separate management and seasons for the southern anchoveta fishery. Though the government assured the public that catches would increase dramatically from 2014, fishermen hauled in low numbers of fish, and those that they did catch were small, skinny and sexually immature.

    The Peruvian Marine Research Institute (IMARPE) conducted a routine survey of anchoveta populations in October and found that the northern stocks had sunk to a low of 3.38 million metric tons. Of this, only 2 million metric tons were reproductive-age fish, well below the 5 million metric tons required by law to open the fishery. The fishing industry, which used a different methodology, estimated that stocks hovered at a healthier 6.8 million metric tons.

    Despite the discrepancy in these two numbers, the Ministry of Production allowed the opening of the northern anchoveta fishery's second season on November 17. The ministry set a catch quota of 1.1 million metric tons — half of the 2 million metric tons taken during the first season.

    “The real stock assessment resulted in a volume [of anchoveta] that should not have allowed fishers,” says Majluf, referring to the estimate from IMARPE.

    Sexually immature fish made up 50 percent of the second opening’s catch, with some commercial boats’ haul going as high as 90 percent. National fishing regulations mandate that juveniles make up no more than 10 percent — by numbers, not by volume — of allowable landings.

    Overfishing and El Niño Push the World’s Biggest Single-Species Fishery to a Critical Point Oceana Feb 2nd 2016

    And to tie in the interesting bit:

    MACKEREL PROCESSING IN VOPNAFJÖRÐUR, ICELAND: ADAPTATION TO CHANGES PDF, p3 is where you're looking at. Pre-2008 Iceland didn't really have a mackerel industry. (That's the short-form version of his Masters, Mackerel Processing in North East Coast of Iceland Long PDF if you want more meat).

    I'll let you guess the why's to why it started then:

    Changing Migration Pattern for Mackerel and Effect on Agreement Powerpoint - contains slides / data / newsources. Spoiler: warming ocean temperature.

    You might also want to ask why a paper produced being cited in an industry news source is five people in a house. But that's a bit cruel. Reykjavik Economics

    ~

    TLDR;

    Peru is in trouble, Iceland has picked up the slack, Scottish trawlers unhappy, puffin / eels / ocean life unhappy.

    762:

    "Irish Civil war 2020-2025" Maybe. If so will mostly be fought in the South, because the remnants of the PIRA, now operating as Mafia gangs (see on-TV murder at boxing weigh-in recently) are there, not in the N so much & also the extreme catholics are concentrated there & it WILL be religious, with the women getting the short end, as usual.

    763:

    Recalling my visit to family in Michigan for Christmas back in 2013, there was a major ice storm the day before I arrived. Thousands of homes were without electricity. I probably should have canceled my trip on retrospect.

    My sister had her power line ripped from house due to a tree limb falling and was without power for a week. Power was restored to the neighborhood after three days. My sister had to wait another four days to have an electrician connect the line to the house. Thanks to a neighbor running a power cord from their house she was able to power some lights and a couple of space heaters.

    My brother on the other side of town had his electronics destroyed after the power was turned back on from power surge issues. He discovered that he was using power strips that were not able to handle power surges. His furnace was also zapped. The day I arrived we went out to pick up a gas generator.

    The problem with most neighborhoods in Michigan is that there are aging trees (Oaks, Maples, etc.) overhanging the power lines and freezing rain causes the limbs to break from the weight of the ice.

    765:

    "If you know about industrial farming, here's a very aesthetic take on them: Mishka Henner’s Feedlots Art, heavy load, HD images."

    One of many reasons I am vegan.

    766:

    and it that wasn't some totally innocent Brazilian electrician Again - precisely. But THAT was the police, apparently trigger happy & what's worse uncontrolled &/or badly controlled. The guys who murdered De Menezes were technically "not guilty" but Commander whoever-it was should be in jail. I think she (?) was promoted, instead.

    767:

    Of course, you are right that the US is vast and has issues that accompany that However, Sandy primarily hit the Greater New York Metroplitan area, so it wasn't a major factor here The major contributing factors were 1. Siting of sub-stations adjacent to rivers known to be within the 100 year flood plain (typically on old gas works sites which used a lot of water) 2. Being in the North east, a lot of these sub-stations are old and have never been upgraded, like two or three generations of technology old. One of the major delays In restoring power was that there were no replacement parts available, they had to be reconditioned. 3. Absolutely no disaster planning, just like Katrina/New Orleans the potential impact was well known but ignored. Hoboken, NJ for instance was a disaster waiting to happen and nothing was ever done. 4. Maintenance in the US is often performed on a we will fix it when it breaks basis. Prior to Sandy wooden utility poles were merely replaced when they failed and were not inspected or maintained/replaced. Ditto tree trimming which was perfunctory at best, though to be fair home owners and townships tend to squeal if you start removing trees. 5. All of the above also applies to subways, train tunnels and other transport infrastructure. They are about to shut down one of the subway lines to fix the Sandy damage and the train tunnels under the Hudson are also seriously compromised, with any replacement at least a decade away. Even without another storm, there is a chance that getting in and out of Manhattan will be come next to impossible. 6. Long term planning and maintenance are just not the American way, some of this is political as no politician will spend money on long term projects that don't benefit them now, some of this may be that it is such a young country that they just don't think that way.

    768:

    Expanding on the big, there's different pressures in different places on the grid. (Heck there's actually 3 separate interconnects, East, West and Texas).

    ... But for real chaos, you need to look to Japan.

    When Japan electrified piecemeal, everyone went for 100 volts AC, but half the country went with Siemens (50Hz), and the other half went with Westinghouse (60Hz), if I remember correctly. In the days of electric heaters and incandescent bulbs this didn't matter much, but it left Japan with two incompatible national grids, one in the east of the country and with Tokyo, and one in the west, with Osaka and other major cities.

    Hence the total lulz in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake, when the Fukushima Daiichi reactors melted down and suddenly the eastern grid was short of about 5Gw of reactor power. The grid interconnects between the eastern and western grids could only carry about 1-3Gw, so: rolling brown-outs.

    769:

    The US is not ready for a female leader. It's all that christianity, telling them that women are inferior, I suspect ...

    When all have have in your tool box is a hammer the world seems to be full of nails.

    And there are a LOT of people in the US who are willing to have a female leader but NOT HC.

    770:

    some asshat stole the left wing mirror's plastic back cover. They didn't smash it, they carefully stole it. When I went to replace it I found out why: retail was £97 + VAT and shipping. Why? Well, Volvo only sell a few tens of thousands of that model of car each year, this it gets facelifted every 7 years or so, so the total market is maybe 100-200,000 units, tops. So there's virtually no after-market for third party copies and the manufacturer can charge through the nose for replacement parts -- a plastic injection-molded assembly that probably costs £5 in tooling amortization and materials gets a 1000% mark-up before distribution overheads and shipping.

    In the US salvage yards quickly figure out which parts are worth non trivial money and strip them as they come in. Then they are posted as available for sale on a nation wide network (that has existed since before the "Internet"). A side mirror for my Explorer was 1/2 of the cost of normal channels.

    Now eBay and Craigslist over here have taken a chunk of this market. But it still exists.

    Salvage yards are no longer run by a old massively over weight guy in coveralls and nothing else with the side buttons all open in the summer. Well some are but they are rapidly declining in number.

    If self driving cars + cars for hire really cuts down on accidents and variations in models the salvage parts situation will drastically change.

    771:

    Not if the costs of implanting it in your skull are zero.

    One person only has 24 hours in the day if you manage to eliminate sleep and body maintenance. Minions are useful in that they allow you to buy time.

    772:

    A friend of mine had the back seat stolen from her car a couple of years ago. Some sort of rare material & colour combination made it worth pinching apparently.

    773:

    And, to start tying this all together:

    USA: NOAA-USDA Alternative Feeds Initiative NOAAA 2012

    Canadian meal to pet food from insects (commercial link, although looks like they got nobbled over a lack of licenses by the Americans):Enterra

    Dutch Pet food using insect protein: Delibugs

    EU meta-trade umbrella for searching other companies: International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed

    But, of course, these are tiny little players:

    Michael Bellingham, chief executive of the Pet Foods Manufacturers Association in the United Kingdom, called for greater collaboration between the fishmeal and fish oil industry and pet food producers, telling delegates there are a number of untapped opportunities in the market.

    IFFO Annual Conference blog: Bakkafrost making a case for higher fishmeal, fish oil inclusion rates Intrafish (industry source), Sept 2015

    Some real gems in that reporting - from paranoid worrying about "Green propaganda" to paranoid worries about the effect of social media on the business to flat out old school admittance they don't give a shit:

    MSC-certified Peruvian anchovies? Not yet

    When will Peru's anchovies fishery be MSC certified? This was the question asked by many in the room.

    The answer: Only the gods know.

    "We’re considering," Humberto Speziani, president of IFFO, said. "We did the assessment a few years ago but we weren't ready for yet," he told the audience, adding it's a "difficult time" right now.

    Translation: MSC cert in the mail once the stocks utterly crash in 2018 or so.

    ~

    Hey, Hadil, this is all very boring, where's this going?

    Ah, well - trust me and hang onto your coat tails.

    IFFO share FAO’s expectation for a stable but not increasing supply. As feed volumes continue to increase, the use of fishmeal will be increasingly targeted by species and lifestage to create the best value for the farmer and eventual consumer. Producer and user partnerships are becoming increasingly important to secure supply for those feed manufacturers who offer high quality products for high value species. While IFFO is unable to comment on price forecasts, the historic trend has been upwards as a result of demand exceeding supply. Despite this trend and significant investment by alternative protein sources, fishmeal remains the best performing and most digestible option in animal feed.

    Rabobank’s report illustrates that fishmeal is a high value strategic ingredient IFFO June 2015 (Industry heavyweight).

    Rabobank are heavy-hitters: here's an interesting one from them (note #343): Pathways to a Circular Economy - A New Model for Food & Agribusiness PDF - page 4, slide, you'll note the solution to the problem: "Non-marine fish feed sources".

    This being finance, posting their current reports on the subject is illegal, but here's the splash pages with overviews:

    The Appeal of Fishmeal June 2015

    Algae: A Brave New Industry Dec 2015

    But I've got you under my wing: here's a video & full presentation notes from the author of the report:

    GOAL video: Gorjan Nikolik on fishmeal - Rabobank analyst on fishmeal’s transition from commodity to strategic protein The Global Aquaculture Advocate, 18th Jan 2016

    Ah, but here's the rub:

    With fishmeal and fish oil prices increasing, fishing rights should increase in value, which bodes well for pelagics harvesters, provided fishing is sustainable and the cost of harvest remains flat. “Some may even find fishmeal and fish oil production assets of strategic value,” Nikolik concluded. “It could create more investor interest in this niche market and strategic M&A (mergers and acquisitions).

    Well, here's the sting: you can bet that Iceland see fish as a strategic resource, and yet the price of fish meal has dropped partly due to their expansion into the market.

    The price hasn't risen, it's fallen (see back to the Undercurrent News, 22nd Jan 2016)

    ~

    So, why the disparity?

    And what's the actual angle?

    774:

    They asked me how long it took us from intake of applicant to offer. For us it was -4 weeks, for them 6-12 months

    You didn't have to wait for the FBI to schedule and complete a background check. Been involved in that in some way for 50 years. The FBI had to check me out when I was 18 to cut weeds at a federal plant where my dad had been cleared for 20 years.

    We got into a conversation about compensation and their take was they would never compete and the only card they could play was a few highly loyal , highly skilled folks that worked out of duty. My response was those folks sounds like a great untapped recruiting pipeline for us and I should try to see if we could algorithmically identify them ... Really the only way a geek is going to find his way in, is via one of the big consulting agencies (Raython , Johnson Controls etc) or thru an agency that is powerful enough to ignore all the rules (NSA)

    One way is to pay for 4 or 5 years at MIT or Stanford and such in exchange for 3 years or so of work. Then you get to hold onto a few who decide a steady paycheck is better than the change for a few million.

    Another way is to identify people involved in raising a family who have not yet found gold nuggets.

    775:

    For those who like useless facts. In this case about the storeowner Niemand in Wilson's story. Niemand is the dutch word for nobody.

    776:

    And one last teaser:

    “It could create more investor interest in this niche market and strategic M&A (mergers and acquisitions)".

    We all know what that means, surely. All that QE and investment at all time lows due to lack of returns. Ho-hum.

    The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 14 estimates that sustained demand and high prices are expected to lead to more fishmeal and fish oil to be produced from fish waste and by-products obtained from the processing of fish into fillets, portions and similar forms. In 2023, fishmeal obtained from by-products is expected reach 36% of total production in 2023, up from 28% in 2011-13. For fish oil, this share could reach 41% of total production, compared with 33% in 2011-13.

    Marine Resources & Sustainability EU Fishmeal - yes, they really are the EU body that represents part of the business.

    This study reviews the impacts of the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) rules requiring catches in regulated fisheries to be landed and counted against quotas of each Member State ("the landing obligation and requiring that catch of species subject to the landing obligation below a minimum conservation reference size be restricted to purposes other than direct human consumption. The study estimates the Level of discarded fish likely to be covered by the new rules, the impact of the rules on EU fisheries and the regulatory challenges and responses to them.

    THE LANDING OBLIGATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON THE CONTROL OF FISHERIES EU Directorate General for Internal Policies, PDF (long), Sep 2015.

    Hmm. You'll want this slide: Since 1997 FM production declined 2mt , 1/3rd; IFFO 6mt declined to 35% of 1997 totals.

    Supply is declining (or at best stable), down by 1/3rd in 15 years

    ~

    Translation: once Peru goes (and it's nearly there), things get fun. (For definitions of "fun" that cats might like but humans won't).

    Of course, there should be a mad-dash of investment in alternatives at this point, surely.

    AHEM.

    777:

    As for things that can be damaged by disturbing the rotation rate, very high on my list are the turbines that power the grid. In order to keep the frequency of the line voltage, they have to be spun at a very constant speed. If I wanted to mess with things, I'd figure out ways to make the turbines erratic, especially in hydropower systems, but, honestly just about anywhere else.

    The electric grid requires every source to be on the same frequency. But that basically means there's an inertia. Sources with VERY small variations will be drug along with the grid. Any thing more than a very small variation will cause the grid to trip breakers and isolate the bad source.

    Every computer that depended on line AC as the input from which to compute might have a bit of trouble with the results, especially if they the rate changes clashed and varied faster than grid operators could deal.

    Computers really want DC and they convert the AC to DC. If you look at the power supply ratings on your desktop or the lump for a portable you'll likely see a very wide range of frequencies supported so they can be used world wide.

    The real danger of such an attack is to do it to a big source when demand is high and thus create havoc when a lot of plants trip out due to an overload cascade started by one plant tripping. This is what tends to cause the large regional blackouts we get every few years in the US.

    778:

    I thought that too, until I read deeper into Stockwell 2.

    She was one of the on-duty senior officers on the roster for KRATOS; and got a late-o-clock call to be in at overly-early the next morning. She turned up early to reread all of the relevant SOPs, to find out that the briefing room had been changed (without telling her), and the briefing had already happened when she arrived.

    The operations room was a temporary affair; and obviously staffed by untrained personnel (the description of officers having to shout to be heard would raise the hackles of anyone involved in training a competent ops cell).

    The surveillance team lead didn't inform the ops room of their team's concerns about the identity of J-CdeM; instead reporting confidence that he matched the deescriptions they had of a suspected terrorist. The firearms team were "somewhere else" and unavailable for what seems rather too long.

    Massive training failure.

    What said senior officer apparently did do well, was immediately to go into a recorded debrief with a solicitor for several hours, so that the sequence of events could be nailed down while they were fresh in her head. You might see that as "covering your arse", but on the other hand if I got lumbered at short notice with running an incompetent ops team, a dubious surveillance team, a late firearms team, resulting in a death; all the while being overseen by senior management who were found later to be all too quick to feed untruths to the press... I'd wonder whether I was being set up as the fallguy.

    779:

    If anyone is still reading (I know, I know, worse than the Sybill stuff):

    Your future is resting on hope:

    IFFO share FAO’s expectation for a stable but not increasing supply.

    The problem won't get sorted, but magically it won't get worse, either (compared to 1997 - 2017 35% decline in output and Peru), even with the global pop set to rise another couple of billion before the plateau effect kicks in.

    ~

    This is what we like to call "Magical Thinking".

    780:

    Er, you DO know how much further south the contiguous USA is than the UK, don't you? And that the UK has a much cloudier summer than the maize-growing areas in the USA? It's only in the past few decades that they have bred the varieties that grow reliably even for green corn (sweetcorn), because of our cool, short growing seasons. 40 years ago, almost no maize was grown north of latitude 48 N, anywhere in the world. Nowadays, it gets a bit further, but only in places with a continental climate (i.e. plenty of heat-days in summer). North of its range, as in the UK, it is grown from imported seed as a fodder crop, because it doesn't produce kernels worth milling.

    781:

    The UK wasn't much different 60+ years ago. The supply varied from 200 to 260 volts across the country, and you couldn't necessarily use even incandescent light bulbs bought somewhere else! There were also several different forms of socket in use.

    782:

    40 years ago, our neighbour grew it and we as kids would nick some of the ears.

    Were they particularly good? Nope, the crop was meant to be cattle fodder. But the ears were edible.

    783:

    The Feeds for Aquaculture FAQ at the nmfs.noaa site is a little less alarming (it being a FAQ), and with some focus on methods for reducing the usage (as a percentage of total feed) of fishmeal for aquaculture, potentially reducing demand. At work and unable to digest until later. There are several species involved; how well do they recover from population crashes, etc?

    784:

    Not to mention one or two areas with 100V or some other strange value, or the multiplicity of frequencies from DC up to a couple of hundred Hz, according to whatever the local power station found convenient. I remember ours, conveyor belts taking coal from the heap on one side of the road to the plant on the other and dribbling dirty black gunk on people when it rained.

    And there are still some railways elsewhere in the world using 16.67Hz even though it's been obsolete for about the same length of time...

    785:

    The point when PIRA realized that killing soldiers and civilians was a bit pointless because the govt did not care about them - there's plenty more where they come from. OTOH, attacking Big Money leading to threats of multinational banks pulling out of London...

    786:

    By "5.56 weapon" I assume you mean the SA80 or whatever it was later called. As heavy as the SLR, but this time all the weight is in one hand. I recall handing a Czech Vz58 at about that time and being amazed at what a light weapon it was.

    787:

    Given the migration of mackerel, they don't: this is the global big-boys league.

    Peru is the largest fishery of its type globally (although I see that China demand has dropped from ~800,000 tonnes to ~600,000 & they typically source 50% from Peru direct) and Oceana.org aren't rabid militants - serious scientists ahoy.

    Remember, we're not talking purely aquaculture here - pet food is part of the gamut, but only a fraction as well, there's the big bugbear of animal feeds and even human supplements.

    The TLDR is that the EU industry is hoping to improve efficiency of using by-catch (reducing discard) by 8% in 12 years. This is marginal, at best. Fuck knows what everyone outside of Legal frameworks (i.e. not the USA or EU) is planning. (Hint: NOM NOM NOM).

    Looking at the finance side, the public voicing of "strategic resource" should be firing off warning bells all over the shop.

    Fish become a strategic resource? (Hello Civilization). Whelp, check out a prior link detailing the recent collapse of the Taiwan fishery and start linking in Chinese man-made islands and so on.

    Now where's that link detailing plans to flood the Mediterranean with a fleet of drones to police / enforce fishing rights? I suspect some serious players are involved in the Big Boy Thinking Pants about that plan (including our friends in the M.E. - they might be bastards, but.. oh, wait: willing to bomb oil refineries and ruin sites of ecological importance to make a point that they're not to be fucked with. Screw that pooch).

    If you dive into the Rabobank report, you'll spot the #1 warning sign - they're flagging land ownership / usage as the major growth area: this is not a good sign [tm] for an industry that's relying on Wild Free Resources.

    ~

    Solutions:

    Stop eating fucking fish. Stab the next hipster you see who thinks sushi is cool with their chopsticks (Don't, but you get the point).

    Fast-track some of that QE sloshing around into large scale insect farms using waste from the industry (you know, instead of just putting it into vast open-air sores that become toxic even to algae) and start closing the waste loop.

    Start aquaculture seriously using the rice paddy methods etc. And start doing it on really big scales.

    Start using insect farming seriously and start using it to replace cheap meats (burgers, sausages, processed foods, the whole 9 yards). People will still pay to eat steaks, and using all the beast is important, but you can literally cut 30% of the usage this way.

    Stop eating fucking fish and stop using crashing stocks for fish meal.

    ~

    But, you've seen the links: Mergers & Acquisitions will get involved, and they'll own it all as the Oceans end. The report #343 was linked as that was the hopeful side - @ #494 things are a little more bleak.

    ~

    While Greg likes to paint me as a chaotic child unleashing Pandora's Box willy-nilly, that's not where I'm from - I can just see things a little more wide-lens and a bit faster than some.

    Time taken: 4 hours or so to take a snap-shot of the industry & source everything.

    788:

    Thanks for the reply about maize. I'm actually quite satisfied with the varieties of sweetcorn I've used so far. I still have lots of bags of niblets in the freezer from last year. I only saw the (possibly) fully mature corn because I went on holiday at the wrong time and wasn't able to pick the last of the cobs soon enough. At 52.5N and 1E I haven't had any problems with sweetcorn in the last 6 years. I have no doubt that the northern ranges of many crops can be extended since selective breeding is doing that already. I'm sure there is a limit for every crop but I'm also sure we haven't reached that limit for many of them. I grew (not very well) melons last year after seeing a demonstration on TV of how to grow them outside in Scotland I'm not trying to belittle the effects of global warming, both my children live in areas subject to sea flooding, but I feel the effect on crops will not be as bad as the worst estimates. Fish breeding ground losses in warming seas will probably have a bigger effect on food supplies.

    789:

    And yes: you'll note the interlaced links, Mr Bellingham is aptly named.

    ~

    Oh, and original answer: apparently 1920's / canning was responsible for petfood taking off.

    790:

    There are sustainable fish and shellfish - carp, tilapia and mussels being three clear examples.

    791:

    As I understand it, the UK largely standardised on frequency in the 1920s, though there were some pockets that took a while to be sorted out (often running DC). I had forgotten about the 100V pockets - yes, some lasted until at least the 1950s.

    792:

    All of which are fresh water which is why I pointed you to #1 Land Usage.

    You can forget ocean based mussel farms in a lot of places:

    Ocean acidification impairs mussels' ability to attach to surfaces – alarming commercial growers farming the waters around Puget Sound. Daily Climate, Sep 2014 - no doubt the source paper has been published.

    Search terms:

    Slough off - New Zealand Slough off - Spain Slough off - Italy Slough off - California

    793:

    lineseed oil, also rich in omega-3 tastes fishy to me but not to my SO. hmm.

    794:

    Oh, yes, varieties had been bred to be adequate for fodder (and as non-commercial sweetcorn) in the UK by the 1950s and perhaps earlier, and there are much better ones now. But they are still WAY off being ripe enough for milling or for seed.

    795:
    The resulting catastrophe would leave the US unable to retaliate for quite a while, because the military would be tied up with civilian disaster relief.

    Which is exactly why the 9/11 planners would never have done that; the pre-stated aim of the attack was to draw the US into invading Afghanistan in the hope it would live up to its "Graveyard of Empires" reputation.

    That terrorists are rational surprises so many people worries me.

    796:

    Another take: The US is equipped to fight, what ws it, one and a half major land wars? I suspect they can carpet bomb some hellhole and have other parts of their military doing disaster relief at the same time.

    A few years ago, my guess after a major catastrophe in hte US would have been lots of privatized mid-a nd long term 'relief' (Shock Doctrine) after a major disaster in th US. Now I'm not sure they could pump so much money into the private sector.

    If you accept the wierd premise that a modern state is mae for shoveling taxpayers money into the hands of the allready rich, a lot makes sense. But this premise ist still hard for me to swallow, I always think it should be more subtle and complicated.

    797:

    Haven't read all the links yet ... will take quite a bit of time I figure. But thanks for compiling this!

    As weird as eating insects may sound, insect farming may in fact become one of the most reliable protein sources. Insects are also an equally good source of edible fats. Despite the bad press of the past 40-50 years, fats are vital, and there's increasing evidence that some cultures' diets aren't including enough fats.

    Fat in human diet ... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53561/

    Edible insects ...

    http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e06.pdf

    Also in the news in North America, Asian carp are becoming a problem. Apart from being slimey, stinky, ... they eat everything, grow very fast, are very aggressive, etc. and there's considerable fear that Asian carp will destroy the Great Lakes ecosystems. (Red Neck Fishing Tournie video below.)

    The Worst Fish in America: Asian Carpocalypse

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnZp1jtOhR0

    798:

    To rip off Robert Prior in 1, and adapt to my wife's business: how about a list of books a used bookstore should have (and the reasons they should have them).

    Personally, I think her store has justified its existence by letting me push copies of Chronicles of Amber onto anyone who glances at the speculative fiction case.

    799:

    Oh, I forgot to spell everything out explicitly:

    The IFFO spokesperson mentioned, just happens to be:

    Humberto Speziani is Director of Tecnologica de Alimentos S.A. (TASA) the largest Fishmeal producer of the world. President of Business Solutions to Prevent Poverty (SEP), Vice President of the Peruvian Japanese Business Council CEPEJA – Peru and President of the Fishing Committee of Peruvian Exporters Association (ADEX). He has been in the fishing sector for the last 45 years. Humberto was the president of IFFO between 2010 - 2011, President of the Peruvian National Fisheries Society (SNP) and President of the National Confederation of Private Business Associations - CONFIEP (2011-2013).

    IFFO RS Board - IFFO website.

    It's a clear case of nepotistic regulatory capture; you can tell they're dodgy as fuck as I had to manually edit their web page to even copy/paste off it.

    Paranoid little squid (not octopuses, octopuses are nice).

    800:

    And, just to tie this all in a neat little bow:

    CONFIEP, American agencies and the suppression of democracy in Peru have, let us say, "history".

    I think it’s good to preface by saying that, first of all, the groups which were operating in Peru — Sendero [Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path], and MRTA, but particularly Sendero, were pretty much sui generis. No one had seen in the past a group that was as brutal as they were. They engaged in all sorts of massacres — this was not like the FMLN in Salvador, or the Guatemalan insurgents, or even the FARC in Colombia, for that matter. Not that those groups have not committed very gross violations of the laws of war, but Sendero was really an exceptional and extremely brutal group...

    As you know, Fujimori staged in 1992 what has been called a self-coup — closing the judicial branch effectively, closing the constitutional court, gutting the supreme court, removing virtually the great majority of judges and prosecutors and reshaping the judiciary to his whims. He instituted a series of legal measures that defined terrorism and aggravated forms of terrorism in extraordinarily broad terms that resulted in many hundreds of innocent people being swept up and subject to trial before faceless military and civilian courts. When we say “faceless,” that means that the identities of the judges and witnesses were not known.

    And we now know that during his administration, death squads were operating. There was a group, Grupo Colina, that was operating and disappearing and murdering people who were civilians suspected of having links with the terrorist groups.

    The response was quite brutal. It had results in helping to put down Sendero, but it became increasingly indiscriminate over time. As I said, it’s been well-acknowledged that hundreds of innocent people were swept up, and others were killed. Many were subjected to legal processes utterly devoid of any kind of due process.

    The Fall of Fujimori PBS, July 2006

    'Superman' Meets Shining Path: Story of a CIA Success WaPo, 2000

    The Search for Truth: The Declassified Record on Human Rights Abuses in Peru NSA Archive 2003 -- Trigger Warning -- Link may contain extreme bullshit and/or redacted sources.

    ~

    And 26 years later, no more fishies. Funny how that works.

    THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD Bowie, Youtube: music: 4:03

    801:

    Uff. 36 years later.

    But the point is there.

    You're transparent to us.

    802:

    My experience was this wasn't the case at all. The Utility would lease space on transmission towers/pylons to the mobile phone companies to errect antennae. This would trigger the need for an environmental assessment and engineers would go to the pylon take a few photos, assess wetlands, threatened and endangered species etc. This resulted in the post 9-11 environment in numerous instances of the police being called for suspicious activity. Consequently I used to be tasked with escorting any such visits. Firstly engineers were forced to wear hi-vis vest and hard hat, which renders you invisible. Secondly, I had to enforce the rule that no soil samples could be taken next a seventy year old pylon that had been shedding lead paint for decades.

    803:

    I get the impression that the Shock Doctrine isn't working as well as it used to. One reason is that people are increasingly wise to it.

    Still, if we're talking about a cyber-attack crippling a chunk of the US, my first guess is that it wouldn't be launched by a power that could be readily carpet-bombed. It would be more performed under the rubric of realignment of (super)powers. I'd suggest the size of the opponent launching the attack simply because so many things have to be crippled so fast to make the exercise at all effective--that's not an exercise that, say, the Kiribati Hackerz Collective could pull off. It might be better to visualize it as a (winnable) "nuclear war" aimed at minimizing casualties.

    In any event, I'm more reading about the ARkStorm simulation(google it) as my ugly scenario du jour. It's bad enough (the equivalent of three (3) LA "Big Ones" in terms of estimated damage), and 100% natural to boot.

    804:

    And there are a LOT of people in the US who are willing to have a female leader but NOT HC.

    I'll say for the record that, while I think Hillary may as well be a transexual Dick Cheney, I think Condoleeza Rice would be a significantly better Republican candidate than any on offer. That's not high praise, but it's something.

    805:

    Kursweil explicitly is into the Singularity in hopes of resurrecting his father. I believe this is the point we all turn to the middle sections of Accelerando... Paul Graham Raven has an interesting take on what could be called "mainstream" transhumanism - Max More et al.

    806:

    Another hideous mind-controlling parasite:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/science/tracking-a-parasite-that-turns-bees-into-zombies.html

    Interestingly, not a fungus this time, but an insect.

    807:

    No. What's in the South is gangs attempting to claim legitimacy by claiming a corner of the Republican legacy, and a government coalition with one partner terrified of challenges from Sinn Fein and therefore delighted to talk up "IRA threats." No more a sign of incipient civil war than Alan Decabral's murder was.

    808:

    No, the Marxist-Leninist parts of the IRA laid down their arms in the 70s; their political wing integrated into parliamentary politics and have been taking part in the finest tradition of the Left since: splitting.

    There's been two civil wars fought on this island in the last 100 years; I think we've had our fill for a bit. Who on earth is supposed to be fighting this civil war, anyway?

    809:

    Well, given a choice between Hillary and The Orange, I suspect Hillary will get elected.

    After all, people have been smearing her for 30-odd years, and she still manages to get elected, still manages to get things done, and still keeps coming back to do more. It's amazing, really. It's like she's content working in a sewer, backwards and in heels while raising a family, while the alligators around her keep leaving office semi-voluntarily for various reasons.

    Compare that to The Orange, who has yet to face a serious smear campaign. And there's a lot to smear with: multiple bankruptcies, reported ties to extra-legal organizations, possible tax issues, alienating whole rich, white neighborhoods with his high-handed tactics installing golf courses (actually, he managed to alienate Scotland doing that, didn't he? Is he persona non grata over there?), legal actions surrounding the school that bears his name, etc.

    It will be interesting, so long as Hillary starts acting presidential very soon.

    810:

    Hopefully this isn't too far down the thread.

    I just read the following comment on another blog.

    I thought the replicants were basically bioengineered human beings; putting in a genetic kill switch to emphasize their otherness and to control what are essentially slave populations doesn’t seem outside the realm of science, even now.

    That possibility creeps me out incredibly, but it also strikes me as something that would have added to the story/film.

    (Not to mention something that Mr Dick may well have included, had it occurred to him.)

    Thoughts?

    811:

    What the cat of today needs is a built-in credit-card chip, dexterity enough to open pouches, and a GPS location-finder for the nearest supermarket.

    They already have the 2nd one.

    Years ago when my wife and I went for an overnight trip we left the cats in the house with plenty of dried food and water. Which was their normal meal fare. When we got back the next day the "treats" box was off the top of the cabinet down onto the counter. Top torn open. Pouches removed. Several pouches opened with contents spread out for snacking when desired. This was after my wife had lived with them for 10 years or so and nothing similar had happened before.

    812:

    Holy crap, that's horrendous. I thought I had it bad in the Uk when I spent two weeks chasing down ground loops in my laboratory that were screwing up the linewidth of my laser frequency stabilisation.

    (Partly beecause my lab was wired up in that happy carefree time when it was apparently traditional to wire each consecutive pair of sockets to a different phase)

    813:

    That really says something about the state of real "preparedness" in the US ( some parts of the US? ) compared to the UK. Discuss - why is the US so crap at this?

    It varies wildly by where you live. Very wildly. They don't worry too much about power to people who live in the mountains of our state. Well they do but no one expects power to be restored all that quickly. People who live there know the issues but chose to live there anyway. But where I am the trucks are rolling within minutes at times. And if the issue can be seen on the way such as with hurricanes the power companies pre-position repair crews just outside of the paths. Plus places like Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, etc... start moving inventory near the areas. (If there is a big hurricane going to pass 100 miles away you'll have a hard time finding a chain saw as they will all be on trucks headed for the area.

    H's example was based in California I think. They are sort of a special case when it comes to state wide spending issues.

    California Proposition 13 in 1978 screwed the state up big time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29

    And folks on all sides of the political fence are very reluctant to fix it.

    814:

    Oops, it looks like John Oliver's already started.

    Um, my bad...

    815:

    Apparently it is common for houses to be fed from a 110-0-110V supply (so allowing 220V for high power appliances) with a two-wire connection - copper conductors for the two 110s, but the 0 going via ground, as in the actual earth. So the balance between the two 110s at the house end depends on how many appliances you have drawing how much power from each, plus how long it is since it rained and whether the ground connection at the pole even still exists and other indeterminate factors.

    That may have been what they did 50 or more likely 100 years ago but not for a LONG time. Yes for almost any residential or small business building of a few units you get power delivered as 110-0-110. But the there are 3 wires from the pole/pod to the house. And that 0v wire is grounded at the pole/pod and at the house. Current is NOT meant to flow through the ground. It is a safety issue. Details is a much longer conversation.

    Anything else is a major violation of building codes nationwide. Not to say there isn't some crap left over from pre WWII but there can't be much.

    816:

    "Oww!" ... "WTF!!" ... "Oh, it's only 110V, but still ..."

    As someone who'd been hit by both 110 and 220 the 110 can make you dampen your pants. The 220 will make you take a long break from whatever you were doing.

    In my 30s my father and I were making some wiring changes in my house. I started to go get a meter to test if a line was hot and he just grabbed it. What?!@?@?@! Oh, he said he barely felt it if it was live. 40 years of smoking will do that to you.

    817:

    But getting an inch in Raliegh NC means everything shuts down, as there's no plows or de-icer.

    First off it is spelled R A L E I G H. There.

    Don't be so hard on us. We have plows. Maybe 8. Or 4. I can't remember exactly. And we have brine trucks. But not a lot. It can take a day to cover all the major roads. Past that forget it.

    And it depends on the inch. Of the last two snows the first one was freezing rain mixed with sleet plus a dusting of snow. World stopped for a few days. Next one was all snow and brine laid down before it took care of most of it within a day.

    But yes a major snow even is bad news unless you want to miss work or school.

    As to Sandy a big issue was that there was river and sea water where it had never been. Ever.

    818:

    4. Maintenance in the US is often performed on a we will fix it when it breaks basis. Prior to Sandy wooden utility poles were merely replaced when they failed and were not inspected or maintained/replaced. Ditto tree trimming which was perfunctory at best, though to be fair home owners and townships tend to squeal if you start removing trees.

    We are having fights in NC where the Public Utilities Commission wants to have the power folks spend money on some similar things but are being sue by consumer advocacy groups who say they can't pass on such costs to poor consumers. Their only focus is on the cost of the next bill. And these are liberal groups "looking out for the poor".

    The conversations can get weird.

    819:

    It's also wrong and misses the entire point of the dramatic tragedy of the entire film. Ye Goddesses you people need some edumacation.

    "You were made as well as we could make you"

    "But not to last"

    "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

    The Prodigal Son Blade Runner, official clip, Youtube: film: 2:36

    The ENTIRE POINT is that the humans 2.0 / replicants assume in their quest to return to their creator that there's a nefarious and arbitrary conditional on their survival and that their Creator can fix the errors and make them whole.

    That they can't shows the abject inhumanity of their creation - not because of all the lies, false memories or slavery, but because they were given false hope.

    Their insane quest with moral consequences / considerations being tossed aside by emotionally child-like creations (killing everyone on the shuttle initially) is predicated on the myth of redemption at the end.

    It's a morality tale: what's depressing is that the implications should be immediately obvious to any audience.

    That's the Joke P.K.Dick was making: when you can't spot that, you're a replicant.

    820:

    Aj12adfmgfo89asdm1u8adfkhjjj

    Fuck me, they went and did it.

    The Man in the High Castle is now actualized.

    821:

    And, before you get too depressed:

    This is exactly why Roy Batty finds redemption at the end: Because he chooses to give mercy to the ignorant pawn (who is also probably a replicant) who has hunted him.

    That's what it is to be a slave Blade Runner, youtube: film: 3:54

    The entire arc is about radical free will and understanding - the last confessional is about re-visiting the Prodigal Son scene and instead of lashing out, accepting it and passing on his unique memories. Instead of violence, Batty spares Deckard and finds grace.

    p.s.

    And no, the doves are about as subtle as a pick-axe in the brain, but hey: apparently not subtle enough.

    822:

    Even within CA, it varies widely depending on area. Bigger urban counties have contingency plans & usually a nearby entity they can request mutual aid from.

    One thing that surprised me was the asinine rules that FEMA puts on local government operations in disaster response. The main one that ticks me off is that they reduce the reimbursement for mutual aid unless the locals do the normal functions & the imports do the disaster response instead of the other way around. (never mind that most folks would have everyone do disaster response & ignore parking enforcement for a week)

    FEMA+State officially reimburses about 90% of disaster expenses, but in actual practice, it's closer to 65%. 25% of Northridge would be $5B, which is roughly 2 annual budgets for my county. So, there's a huge incentive to follow the rules, even if they are silly. (And there are high expectations for the amount of documentation you are to provide, so you can't just fake the paperwork afterwards...)

    (disclaimer, the above based on trainings that are 3 years old. I've switched agencies since then, so am no longer current)

    823:

    p.s.

    Your blog is extraordinary in that no search algo in the world can find it.

    Literally, in the virtual realm, not one of many flying monkies (even the weaponized ones) can spot it in the wild.

    It's like it doesn't exist - and the 1st rule of Fight Club is having the decency to make an illusion of a reach-around.

    You fuck with us, we'll fuck with you.

    That's what it is to be a slave.

    p.s.

    Pissant Amateurs.

    824:

    Yeah, we get it.

    We get it as those whose "language we do not speak" [spoiler: we do, we're just disinterested and you can't handle us] vilify us and curse us on their death-beds [no, it'd be nice if you didn't do that, but hey], we get it as a pointed snark of "did you get fucked in your ass and cum over your face" is repeated by those who have no business to know said details [spoilers: we see you before this little jump] and so on and so forth.

    We get it when you do that thing of "He's inside there". Or "You lasted five years, that's longer than we expected". Or "You can be a Womble if you want" (hint: nope).

    We even get it when they cry "you're fucking a cat".

    Nothing Compares to You Youtube: Music: 5:04

    And you think Trump is the real KUK?

    Now that's fucking hilarious.

    825:

    Anyhow: 6mt - 4mt; 35% degredation over 15 years despite aggressive new markets and Peru destroying itself due to... well. Let's call it favors owed.

    I'm not sure how clearly you can spell: "Totally Fucked" anymore.

    But, sure: I'm Your Huckleberry

    p.s.

    Greg: This is the teenage version. (Thus all the swearing and banter and jokes). You don't want the Adult Version, it's a little bit harsher.

    And you might want to pay attention to the research done in under 4 hours that you'd take a month or three or a year to do.

    Or never.

    Which is the point.

    Baba Yaga

    Zzzzzz

    826:

    Oh and, run the fucking numbers Dirk etc. (Dirk has - that's where the ironic platitudes come from).

    Real.

    Fucking.

    Deal.

    Even while torturing its self (that's the real joke: your reality is so shitty you can front run it while damaged to the max).

    ~

    Lot and Salt pillars: a single hug and shared experience - but not ours to enjoy.

    And, yeah: we see you. Do you see us, a blinded one with two ravens on their shoulders?

    We. Fucking. See. You.

    Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar.

    No Comply

    p.s.

    Watch teh little algos and HFTs - we can make them dance, EM powa, fuckwits.

    827:

    @Hadil Benu CatinaDiamond is that you?

    828:

    @Hadil Benu,

    Points taken. I will need to reflect upon the implications.

    Regarding your scepticism about provenance,

    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/02/from-the-party-of-lincoln-to-the-party-of-calhoun-to-the-party-of-don-rickles/comment-page-1#comment-1896182

    829:

    "Poor soul. You were just too high strung."

    One of the things I loved about Electric Sheep was how dense PKD made it. The film approaches that but so much got left out or was just put in, en passant.

    830:

    The really interesting numbers are not yet public. I only speak of what is public domain.

    831:

    "psychopathic publishing executive " :

    Hasn't your publisher chained you to that : http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/ , yet ?

    832:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3RAMjx8aps

    I could just check my childhood memories of what kinds of fish were available to a working class family in the 1970s, then compare them to what fish are available to affluent people now. This has been rolling down the hill for decades.

    833:

    In the future, pets will have their "antisocial" tendencies bred or conditioned out. That will settle the point of whether we need to meet animals half way.

    The question is will these programs be the testing grounds for similar programs for humans? Or will they be a niche by-product OF the human programs, available for those who can still "responsibly" own pets?

    Kage Baker went down this road a little, but in a world where our civilization attenuated rather than crashed or transformed.

    834:

    Have we ever seen Dick Cheney and Hillary in the same room? With a wig, one of those Mission Impossible face masks, and a dress, maybe . . . nah. Not even Cheney is that evil. (Joke, honestly. Just too fun not to indulge.)

    If Hillary does get elected, I'm predicting there will be no females under 50 in the White House, just to minimize the odds of the next Bubbagate.

    835:

    The traditional way to test 220V was to swipe a single DRY finger over two leads; it gives a jolt, but nothing to worry about. If you have damp hands, it is probably more painful. The critical thing is to ensure the current goes nowhere near your heart, brain or spine. Of course, it is probably now illegal, under the Other Unapproved Activities Act.

    836:

    That wasn't carefree - that was load balancing. It's still done, but not on the small scale that used to be necessary.

    837:

    I should point out that what I foresee is completely unlike what Greg. Tingey is assuming, but far more like what happened in Yugoslavia. The point is that the old tensions remain, largely unabated, and the terrorist organisations have merely restructured (not disbanded), due to Blair throwing away the opportunities for a real resolution, and therefore even gang warfare has the potential to attract people and groups to take sides. God alone knows which side they would take, in most cases, but it's irrelevant. Currently, the IRA and UDA 'mafias' have an agreed carve-up, but I doubt that would survive a major economic crash or major demographic change. It only needs one camp to seize an opportunity to expand at the expense of others to break out in conflict. This is not quite the same scenario that I expected in 1998, but most of the conditions and players are the same.

    838:

    While Greg likes to paint me as a chaotic child unleashing Pandora's Box willy-nilly, that's not where I'm from WRONG Some of the time, that is precisely what you do & it's hellish annoying. Some of the time, however, you actually put up facts & statistics that mean something - something scary & a real threat in this case. More of the latter & less of the former, please!

    839:

    That's the whole point. We realised we had a problem & sorted it 50-60 years ago. Japan, ff's sake, supposedly advanced-industrial etc, blah, drone, couldn't & didn't get their arses in gear.

    840:

    It's all this kind of nonsense where you pretend you're some kind of space alien that undermines everything you ever say.

    841:

    And also anonemouse @ 809 ... No As said, who is going to be doing this fighting, other than the ultra-loonies, who are mostly Mafia-gangsters in the S, now? I supect it would be very bad for 3-6 months, then the Brit & Irish (S) guvmints would go; "Ff's sake, not AGAIN!" & stamp down, really hard. "Educational" could be a good word - one thing the S does not want is a repeat of the second Civil War of 1923 - oh yes - correction: 3 civil wars in the past 100 ....

    842:

    And derailing the latest rail... Here is another future opening up for Artificial General Intelligence:

    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/komiku-neuron-computer-agabi?utm_content=buffer490ff

    "But Oshiorenoya Agabi believes the brain-like processors are missing one key component: actual brains. Or, at least, living neurons. His startup, Koniku, which just completed a stint at the biotech accelerator IndieBio, touts itself as “the first and only company on the planet building chips with biological neurons.” Rather than simply mimic brain function with chips, Agabi hopes to flip the script and borrow the actual material of human brains to create the chips. He's integrating lab-grown neurons onto computer chips in an effort to make them much more powerful than their standard silicon forebears."

    843:

    The majority of crime in the north is organised by nominally ex-paramilitary Mafia-style gangs, and many operate both sides of the border. You are still misunderstanding what I am expecting, but this is a diversion on this thread, so I suggest just waiting a decade and seeing if I am right.

    844:

    More chance of being electrocuted in summer than winter

    845:

    I think Condoleeza Rice would be a significantly better Republican candidate than any on offer. That's not high praise, but it's something.

    To the extent that CR was a Soviet-era policy wonk and fully invested in the PNAC nonsense, and also an oil corp executive, I have to say that regardless of her domestic credentials she'd be an utter disaster on the global policy front. Far too invested in the late-20th century, probably too many skeletons in her fossil-carbon-burning closet.

    (Despite all of which I guess you're right and she'd be the lesser weevil when you run her checklist against Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and the rest of the killer klown kar krew. Groan.)

    846:

    Super Tuesday note: If I was an American citizen I'd register to vote in the primaries and I would vote for Bernie Sanders -- but if Hilarly Clinton won the democratic nomination I'd vote for her as president.

    If it were a transferable vote/runoff system, my order of voting would then run:

    Second choice goes to Cthulhu, third to "assassinate everyone and reopen nominations" and only then consider Republican candidates on offer.

    And if I was a US voter who just happened to be a left-behind Stasi deep-cover sleeper agent rooting for the total destruction and downfall of Western capitalism and American power?

    Vote Trump!

    847:

    he managed to alienate Scotland doing that, didn't he? Is he persona non grata over there?

    The public petition to parliament to debate banning him from entering the UK on grounds of hate speech hit over 580,000 signatures -- well over 1% of the voting-age population -- and put the Home Secretary on the spot in public.

    Realpolitik says that you can't really impose a blanket ban on the Head of State of a major ally to keep them from entering your country -- hell, they can't even ban Robert Mugabe -- and because Trump is a major investor and a possible future POTUS he's got that escape clause, but you could actually see the lizard face gurning uncomfortably behind Theresa May's fleshmask.

    848:

    Flip side in SF: the slave people are mortal, the rulers reserve the immortality treatment for themselves.

    See for example "The Eyes of Heisenberg" by Frank Herbert.

    (Hmm. Now that I think about it, TEoH's genetically optimized rulers had an opposition in the form of a cybernetically enhanced rival faction they only narrowly defeated. And thinking about it some more, I wonder if this was an influence on the Mechanist/Shaper setup in Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix"?)

    849:

    And no, the doves are about as subtle as a pick-axe in the brain, but hey: apparently not subtle enough.

    Never, EVER make the mistake of over-estimating the intelligence or perceptiveness of a mass entertainment audience.

    (I did, years ago. It's why I'm hosting this discussion here on this blog and not reclining in an outdoor hottub in Beverley Hills eating candied larks' tongues from the fingertips of exotic supermodels motivated by the hope that my success in the movies will (heh) rub off on them.)

    However blatant you make the message, 20-25% of your audience won't even notice it, or will read it ass-backwards. It's just the crazification factor at work, in a different context.

    850:

    The Trump, for all his Mussolini-like gestures & oratory is not actually the worst that the so-called "GOP" can produce at present - I followed advice & looked up T Cruz. Now there is a real, actual fascist bastard.

    851:

    If I tried to use that app for production the output would be below publishing quality.

    I have to stop to think for a minute or two roughly every two sentences -- when I'm on a roll. Also, I edit iteratively. I literally stop and rewrite each phrase/sentence before I emit it.

    A keep-hitting-keys-or-your-words-vanish tool would either result in me getting RSI really rapidly by hammering space/backspace continuously, or it'd result in garbage output. Anything of high enough quality to not be garbage would be automatically deleted.

    852:

    If Hillary is elected, Bill will be 70.

    All she has to do to prevent another Bubbagate is hide his viagra.

    853:

    Cruz is nasty, I agree.

    But Donald Trump is worryingly close to being the American Silvio Berlusconi. And to the extent that Trumpism as an ideology exists -- it really doesn't, yet, except insofar as he's rolled the Republican primaries by treating them as a reality TV show and playing to the audience's prejudices -- it's probably going to resemble Putinism with elements of Peronism.

    854:

    Yup, L1A1 to L85A1.

    However; the added weight got you an optical sight, a decent barrel, a larger-capacity magazine and a stiff-enough body that meant accurate shooting to 500m was entirely possible for the average firer (I used to struggle to coach novice SLR firers to hit reliably out to 300m). The centre of gravity was now directly over the right hand, so it was much better balanced, and "felt" lighter, than an SLR.

    The Vz58 and other AKM clones were designed for conscript armies and optimised for an attacking doctrine. Looser tolerances meant lower price per unit, and increased reliability; but accuracy suffered as a result. That's a worthwhile tradeoff if all you're doing is fighting room-to-room, or dismounting from your APC just 100m or so short of your objective.

    I never had reliability issues with L85A1, but mine was late-production and I knew how to take care of it. The L85A2 upgrade resulted in a rifle that when correctly prepared for firing is measurably the second-most reliable thing in service, AIUI almost matching the AK series.

    855:

    No, two: the Civil War and the Troubles. The War of Independence has a hint in the name...

    856:

    Berlusconi, definitely, but it's unclear whether he has had much effect except to increase the level of chaotic corruption by a small amount. There are far worse things that rulers can do. Putin is pretty nasty by our standards, but I haven't noticed him behaving irrationally, except when presenting his personal image, which doesn't matter; he was elected precisely because the Russians had had enough of being pushed around by the west. Nor has he fostered hatreds or gone in for gunboat politics much more than the UK government has, and has never done so without good reason. I don't have any confidence that Trump would be anywhere near as rational, which is what scares me.

    857:

    There's a reason "dirty old man" is a cliché; as we've discussed here before, clichés begin with facts. He doesn't have to actually DO anything, just cause embarrassment (embareassment?). Note the recently released movie "Dirty Grandpa" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1860213/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_5 ) made by Robert De Niro, who apparently no longer has any shame, at the age of 72.

    858:

    OK, looking back at his credits on IMDb, De Niro has something of a tin ear for comedies. But still, this last one got VERY bad reviews ( http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dirty-grandpa-2016 ).

    859:

    You might consider why one of the linked videos was from Tombstone and featured a good old fashioned pistol duel.

    It's predator humor for predator Minds, since you're over here from a place that loves Guns, Lawyers and the Wild Wild West of the Courtroom...

    860:

    I agree entirely about the undesirability of it and fully understand the reasons why it is undesirable - hence my reaction on discovering it being gaaahh. But the evidence of numerous descriptions of it, and the resulting problems, existing on the internet - and not merely reproductions of old pre-internet publications, but recently-written stuff - suggests strongly that there is still an awful lot of it about, especially in rural areas. After all, the US is a big place and conditions vary tremendously.

    861:

    "Super Tuesday note: If I was an American citizen I'd register to vote in the primaries and I would vote for Bernie Sanders -- but if Hilarly Clinton won the democratic nomination I'd vote for her as president."

    And that is exactly what I’m dong. Have already voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but am pretty sure Hillary Clinton will get the Democratic nomination and will vote for her as President. That is the consensus among people I know.

    862:

    Replying to a couple comments, and going against my staying out of the political discussions. Anyhow...

    WRT, Condy Rice. No, she may have been competent at her job, but not outstanding. I think a big part of her problem is she was too enamored of W. Remember that time she started to bring him on a stage, "I'm pleased to introduce my husb..um the President..."?

    Caucuses; this is the first in a few elections that I'm not attending. Politically I'm with Bernie, but not convinced that he can win. Tonight they'll be announcing who took Colorado, but the system here is a little different from other states. IIRC the caucus precincts pick a candidate and a delegate for the precinct who goes to the county and state party conventions, where the candidate is officially chosen a couple months later. The delegates aren't held to their precinct's choice and can vote for whoever they think will be the best candidate, AFAIK not all states allow that. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates aren't bothering with Colorado, none of them have come here and aren't running commercials (for which we are immensely grateful), Sanders commercials started right after the New Hampshire results, and Clinton's started running a week ago--with voice-over by Morgan Freeman. I'll be voting for whoever is the Democrat candidate.

    863:

    Berlusconi is old school P2: his vices were well known, makes him tractable. He's also friends with Putin, qt diplomacy over drinks, old style.

    Consider the Optics from the finance side - better the old Lion you understand than anything actually new. (re:Cruz and his Dominion buddies - wife is an interesting angle and works for the right people - I'm reminded of why Star Wars got edited so well and the prequels were a disaster; Bene Gesserit all over the place).

    Anyhow, it appears that people are moving toward the gallows humor with aplomb:

    Could Cthulhu trump the other Super Tuesday contenders? Guardian, 1st March, 2016

    Officially bored of US "politics" now, all the real stuff is going on behind the scenes.

    Trawling DENIX (Trigger Warning: US .mil site) to see if I can spot anything fish related while prodding things from the other end to see what rises to the surface: Protecting Fishing Part of Maritime Security, Africa Command Deputy Says AFRICOM, 2009 trigger warning: US .mil site (and the US Gov needs an editor, holy run-on lack of punctuation).

    ~

    Oh, and alexhewat: the tell is that the video was linked before your reveal. "It's behind you!"

    And J I-P: sorry. The video is the actual feeling, the words are just snarl at what the research showed. It's obscene.

    864:

    Oh, and funny joke of the morning:

    https://acc.dau.mil/CommunityBrowser.aspx?id=143633

    Https cert is insecure.

    865:

    Let me put it this way: I know a bit about some of the people in Beverly Hills, and I'd suggest you made the right choice.

    If you think you have issues with burnout now, imagine how good you'd feel if the assistant to the assistant producer calls to tell you that some [Chinese] investor was having political problems with the key conflict in your script, so they were papering it over with a focus group, but anyway, they needed you to do a total rewrite in two days for the new director, incorporating all the notes they'd Fedex to you tomorrow afternoon. But they want to remain true to the spirit of your story, because they love you.

    That and it's smoggy, hot, and you'll spend hours in your car going to meetings. And if you get a house in the hills, you have to learn about keeping your cats inside so the coyotes don't get them.

    866:

    this is the first in a few elections that I'm not attending

    I take that back. We didn't bother 4 years ago - Obama was the incumbent. 8 years ago I was undecided between Obama and Clinton, until going to an Obama rally in Pueblo, CO. He gives good speech.

    867:

    Err, I think this depends on definitions & "are you a Lumper or a Splitter?" I regard 1921-22 as Civil war I (War of Independance, maybe) & 1923 "Pro-Treaty vs Anti-Treaty" as a second, separate conflict. Let's leave it, shall we?

    868:

    Agreed. Trump's sort of like PT Barnum: he's basically all about marketing, and his greatest asset is that the brand name he's created. His "billions" in personal wealth comes from how much he personally values his brand, which apparently varies from day to day depending on how he's feeling. In this regard, he's like Emperor Norton, but with real money (he does have hundreds of millions in things resembling cash). Unfortunately, if elected, he might rule like Emperor Norton too.

    But you're right, Cruz is even nastier. Given that he's supposedly the son of a minister...wow.

    869:

    I don't keep score, but this might open your mind a little (if you remember, that is):

    The dynasty, he noted, had been beset by dangerously scandalous tracts penned by ‘spirits of Delusion’. He thought that among those ‘Libels’ was ‘one more Eminent than the rest’, a short tract from 1626, in which an ‘inraged Scotsman, Eglesham, a professor of Phisick’ had made ‘a report of the practice of Poisoning in the Court of England’. At first glance, it seems puzzling that, at the height of the crisis of the English Revolution, Gerbier’s attentions should be focused on a pamphlet that was now more than two decades old. Modern scholars have scarcely noticed George Eglisham’s The Forerunner of Revenge.

    Who Killed James I? History Today, March 2016.

    870:

    Exactly why I'm eating all the fish I can right now before it's all gone.

    871:

    Serious question: do you have, or intend to have children?

    872:

    First off it is spelled R A L E I G H. There.

    I blame education teaching me I before E. Which is usually a lie.

    And I'm not being harsh. NC rarely sees snow. Valley cities out west don't do any better. It's just a matter of what's a reasonable plan for an area. Raleigh shouldn't be prepared for 12 feet. And if it hasn't snowed in 20 years, there's going to be budget questions about why there's any prep at all. Portland and Seattle both seem to have no trucks and depend on the state to send something down from the mountains. (there's an added wrinkle out west about messing with our fisheries by using any salt ).

    Woo budget cycles making decisions for disaster management.

    873:

    Given his Imperial Majesty is credited with having prevented rioters attacking Chinese immigrants rather than encouraging them, I'd take Norton any day.

    874:

    If you think you have issues with burnout now, imagine how good you'd feel if the assistant to the assistant producer calls to tell you that

    They actually pulled that trick on Terry Pratchett when "Reaper Man" was in production. Terry, however, wasn't having it and his response was along the lines of "GTF HAND" -- he took his toys and walked, only venturing back into film with a lower-budget production where he pulled enough of the strings to stop them from replacing the character of Death with a Hollywood action hero.

    GTF HAND is my preferred reaction to people who dick around with my creative work to such an extent that it's no longer recognizable as my work. (Edits and change requests are one thing, gratuitous focus-group-driven meddling is something else.)

    875:

    It seems you're defining Ireland as "part of the UK" and I'm defining it as "a colonial possession of the UK," so we're unlikely to ever reach agreement. Fair enough.

    876:

    Rulers are smarter than that or they don't stay rulers long, unless they're figureheads. The slave people will get cryogenics as a sort of second rate ersatz that tamps down the envy without the overpopulation that would result from letting everyone be immortal. PKD had his own version of suspended animation in UBIK, which was of course freely distorted to match the needs of his twisted plot. As for SF examples of a society ruled by factions split along lines of biological vs machine there's Brunner's Polymath, with the group led by engineers making really cool machines and industry while they starve and die of diseases, whereas the group led by doctors fare better in many ways, though they miss out on a lot of capabilities.

    877:

    The land belongs to the people living on it. They decide how to divide up into nations. Or not.

    878:

    Agree that Drumpf (DT's original family name) fits better ... the moue, and what he's trying to persuade you that you're getting, versus the reality. (Sounds like it should beat everything else on the table, but a close look tells you it's a fake.)

    BTW, Oliver's video of this has over 8.5 million hits already after only one day and the makedonalddrumpf hashtag is trending. Also showing up on international newspapers/links.

    One item that the lawyerly types here might clarify for the rest: Can DT successfully sue Oliver? Personally, I think 'no' because: freedom of speech, public figures are legit prey/subjects for comedians/satirists, plus the Peabody award.

    http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver

    879:

    No, I'm pretty sure, and no I guess not at this point. But I'll make sure and tell other people's children how tasty the fish were. I recognize that this is wrong, and making light of a terrible thing, but it's a prisoners dilemma situation. There should be universal controls so fisheries are preserved, but since there aren't the reality is they're going to go no matter what because moral pressure doesn't work, never has. No problem is ever solved by persuading people to make personal sacrifices that they know others won't make. Similarly the answer to the abuses of capitalism is better government oversight, not persuading companies to be responsible corporate citizens. It's like trying to stop a firefight by persuading a participant to unilaterally disarm. Actually I mostly eat pretty cheap fish, which are probably cheap because they're still pretty common, so I can't be accused of hiring people, through my purchases, to wipe out declining species (in the wild--these days I'm sure the genetic sequence will be archived somewhere and nothing is permanent).

    880:

    It's the one place where an American (and I presume other-ian) consumer can actually see the world sicken and species go extinct: the fish counter/section of their local grocery store. Every year something just leaves the shelves and doesn't ever roll back.

    881:

    As long as there is an anchovy for the pizza and salmon for my sushi I shall be happy...

    883:

    Ooh, what meta-nation is that a law of? All land ownership is ultimately produced by military force. Maybe some force backed entity can make new rules like the one you suggest. In the meantime, the rule of tooth and claw is simply a reality, one masked by the ideals of powerful nations (aka armies)and alliances of same. Force shouldn't rule. Similarly, people shouldn't be hungry or sick or without shelter. But for some reason freedom from force is picked on as something that's supposed to be provided for free to all. It's always going to be there, like inclement weather, unless some bulwark is built against it, with effort. And in the case of force, that effort is itself force. The best we can hope for is the right to migrate to where the local warlord operates on principles we approve of more than any other.

    884:

    And now, for something completely different: a question for Charlie, and any other authors here who have sold novels to regular publishers (not self-published): in a solicitation letter: 1. Is it still the first three chapters, and an outline? 2. How detailed is the outline - chapter by chapter, or just the broad brush of the storyline?

    mark "going out soon, I think"

    PS: straight-up SF, another solar system

    885:

    Well, I'm fairly sure you already know the math behind the fact that not having children saves more of the planet than a single life-time of fish consumption.

    886:

    "Drumpf"? On this side of the pond, "trump" is an onomatopoeic colloquialism for a sonorous expulsion of intestinal gas via the anal orifice. It is tragic that this meaning seems to be so little known in the US.

    887:

    The land belongs to the people living on it.

    Or, historically, those that come and take it.

    ᑭᑎᒫᑭᒪᒥᑐᓀᔩᐦᒋᑲᐣ

    888:

    Maybe you should post this on Reddit ... get a little vote going on which better describes him?

    889:

    The US's belief in Free Speech has free speech trump defamation laws most of the time.

    There's also a heightened scrutiny for lawsuits against public figures, both for defamation suits, but also other suits like intentional infliction of emotional distress. The standard requires actual malice, which is a high bar to clear. And more importantly, truth is always a defense in the US.

    890:

    There's a Japanese manga about the very last ever serving of sushi. It is not a comedy.

    Saying that it's also a Deep Time SF story and it does have its funny moments.

    891:

    If my involvement - or indeed even comprehension of how it all works - with Reddit was greater than zero, I might do that :)

    892:

    (1) Usually, yes, as I understand it.

    (2) It depends. Sorry I can't be more precise, but these days I usually sell on a two-page description of the novel, very light on details; for a first-timer, it needs to be a lot more, but probably not at scene-by-scene level.

    The real problem is that these days most publishers aren't open to unsolicited submissions unless they're from a literary agent or known to the editor -- although a preliminary letter/email of enquiry that looks as if it's written by somebody sane who can use speling and punctuation properly might get you permission to send a sample. (If your letter of enquiry begins with "I know you don't read unsolicited submissions but I'm on this year's Hugo/Nebula/Locus shortlist and unagented ..." that will almost certainly get their attention -- not because you're a guaranteed bestseller, but because it's at least proof that you can write stuff that readers like.)

    893:

    Ooh, just hit a way to tie John Oliver, Trump, Transhumanism, the NSA, Apple and the Shock Doctrine all together.

    To explain the nexus point, Slate just ran with this piece of dubious & dangerous logic [the legal eagles from GunsLawyersMoney will instantly spot the issue] trying to make an American quasi-left wing attack/defense against the Shadow State apparatus:

    But legal principles, not to mention technological fears, aren’t the only prisms through which we can view this case, which may have big implications for how the government treats individual privacy. Regardless of whether the state is seeking one-time access to a single Apple product or far wider powers—and regardless of whether the software it wants Apple to create could unleash an encryption-foiling backdoor key into the world where no one can control it—the FBI by its demands and Apple by its legal rejoinders have raised deeper questions about the moral significance of our devices. From their perspectives, we either do or do not have the right to use machines that, through encryption, can wholly shut out the prying eyes of investigators. But in certain philosophers’ views, that’s the wrong way entirely of looking at this dispute. An iPhone isn’t a safe. It’s an extension of the mind.

    So if the state demands that manufacturers provide it with backdoor access into our devices, the state is literally demanding access into our minds, or at least the minds of those people who use smartphones. This sort of partial mind reading would be a tremendous advantage for law enforcement, one it did not enjoy in the pre-digital era. But it would also massively compromise the boundaries of the self.

    An iPhone Is an Extension of the Mind Slate 29th Feb 2016

    The Extended Mind text - Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers

    Then we have the now infamous:

    John Oliver Destroys Donald Trump (Full Segment) February 28th 2016 Youtube: comedy / satire: 20:48 - quasi-legal, but UK/EU viewers can't see it legally so thrrrpt

    which has the central core lesson: Trump is a Brand, here's how reality vrs the Brand compares, call him Drumpf (people are imagining that this is how to beat the KUK - it isn't, but it's funny / pretty spot on) because it's more accurate (much like Pigeon's Trump = Fart line).

    Shock Doctrine? Easy one: No Logo: the book that was going to set the world on fire as the Battle for Seattle raged and Rage Against the Machine played on (spoilers: didn't really happen).

    Why?

    Because Apple happened (that's 1990-1999 stock price charts vrs 2000-2010), 2001 happened, Hipsters happened.

    Transhumanism?

    Well, if we circle to the Slate article once more, there's some very sneaky little hacks and problems with that.

    Off the cuff, at what point does this start ringing alarm bells:

    The government should not be demanding of Apple that it build a special backdoor into one iPhone, or any iPhones. Rather, it should demand of Apple, Google, Facebook, and their ilk that they render opaque to themselves the operations of their own networks. There is no reason to allow corporate access to our minds while vigorously denying state access.

    I'll leave that one open, I'm sure smart bears will see more than I in there.

    Oh, and happy New World, UK:

    Theresa May faces Tory rebellion as fresh 'snoopers' charter’ unveiled Telegraph 27th Feb 2016

    Spoilers: Sea Beams sink Dank Memes.

    894:

    Got so excited, forgot a little bit of glue:

    The Brand Called You Fast Company, 1997 longform, classic, or at least genre defining

    You know who's going to inherit the Earth? Arms dealers. Because everyone else is too busy killing each other. That's the secret to survival. Never go to war. Especially with yourself.

    ~

    Nexus points, I lurv them.

    895:

    Rule of Three.

    Since all the candidates are pushing 70, I was tempted to give you the Lord of War - Nicolas Cage's Speech Intro and Outro YT: film: 1:41 for the well known Buffalo Springfield "For What's it Worth" intro YT: flim/music : 3:49 to tie the generation gap thing going on, but it's a bit used up.

    Then I toyed with Jarhead - Prayers Of The Refugee YT: music: 3.37, but then I settled for:

    Five Finger Death Punch - Wrong Side Of Heaven YT: music: 7:12 from their album The Wrong Side of Heaven and the Righteous Side of Hell, Volume 1, since it captures the mood somewhat more.

    896:

    Yeah, I can see a neoliberal government asking a big corporation to give up on its business model of mining the Big Data hairball, and that working.

    At what point do we get to the fundamental Buddhist assertion that "I" is an illusion? That concept is fundamental in much of western philosophy, but this is just another attack on it, no matter how you frame it. Your phone is not you, but neither is it not you. Indeed, it's got conflicting feudal relationships both with you, with the company that services it, and with the country in which you dwell.

    With Presidents we see that pretty clearly: there's the person who gets to allegedly decide things, but The President as entity is composed of a bunch of full-time staff, along with a bunch of part-time staff, plus interactions with many others. It's symbolized by Barack Obama and headed by him, but it's not him.

    Trump's a similar entity. The carcass of Donald J. Drumpf is the centerpiece of this amorphous and self-contradicting entity, but that entity is not him. At best he's its avatar. The problem is, Drumpf the man will have to give up most of the entity he currently is if he becomes president, and that's another place where the whole thing goes off the rails. He can't be Emperor Norton and expect to lead this country to anything but chaos. He can't just be presidential, he actually has to be the president, and evidence suggests he's not all that great at complex decision making.

    Speaking of forcibly dissipating the trump, I get the feeling that the process is a little like battling the Big Bad at the end of the game, where it's not a single coup de grace, but the thousands of hits you have to inflict first. This is just another fusillade.

    897:

    Evil thought that I can't implement, therefore I'm releasing it to the wild:

    Here's a way to culture jam the vote in November.

    Along about August or September, create a business that makes t-shirts that say: "Don't blame me, I voted for Jesus for Prez."

    Set them up as franchises with churches all through the reddest states: the churches get to sell them and keep at least half the proceeds, the rest goes back to the owner of the idea as licensing fees.

    The point is to get people to vote for Jesus for President instead of Drumpf. Yes, it probably wouldn't work, but if I did it, it would be so obviously a left-wing stunt that it wouldn't take off. So pass it on. Maybe someone will take it up. I'll run the "Cthulhu 2016. He's got better hair" t-shirt concession at the Cons or something.

    898:

    That will be fun to play with, thank you. The US Supreme Court poked at similar ideas (at least the qualitative difference aspect) in Riley vs California (2014) Roberts (for the majority) snippet:
    Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life". The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.

    899:

    I noticed a few years ago that my local supermarkets had stopped selling tinned herring. Being in the UK, one of the brands it used to sell was John West. I looked at John West's website today (*), and they do still sell their tinned herring, so I wonder why the supermarkets no longer sell it or other brands.

    Changing type of food, but still... another depressing change I've noticed is that our butcher no longer sells honeycomb. There used to be beekeepers nearby who produced it, but the butcher said that there are no longer enough bees.

    (*) I also looked at the Wikipedia entry for John West. Gosh, I never knew they were owned by a Thai company, nor that they'd been accused of breaking their word about their "Can Tracker" pledge.

    900:

    ᑭᑎᒫᑭᒪᒥᑐᓀᔩᐦᒋᑲᐣ

    1066, gēomerung?

    901:

    It's Cree for sadness.

    .

    902:

    (Translation for Gallery - gēomerung is Anglo Saxon for sadness as well)

    903:

    "Rather, it should demand of Apple, Google, Facebook, and their ilk that they render opaque to themselves the operations of their own networks. There is no reason to allow corporate access to our minds while vigorously denying state access."

    Oh goodness yes. This business of Google making it next to impossible to access their sites without encrypting the connection, for example, is a fucking joke. It's not untrustworthy communications channels that are the problem, it's the untrustworthy endpoint.

    (The only Google service I use is the search engine - itself becoming increasingly useless as the results become ever more biased to containing nothing but Wikipedia, sites that pinch content off Wikipedia, and sites that you can't read misleadingly presented to suggest you can - and that only under the protection of a script which ruthlessly purges the page of spyware.)

    Shame there isn't a whelk's chance in a supernova of it ever happening, let alone being enforceable if it did.

    Not to mention, also, that the various kerfuffles over legal government access to their records are only the tip of the iceberg. Interception under a legal warrant is only of relevance once matters have advanced to the point where the information so gathered may need to be used in a court case - "post-nick", as it were. Pre-nick activity doesn't need to be legalised, it needs only to remain unrevealed. If I were a spook agency in this day and age I'd make penetrating Apple, Google, Facebook and their ilk a significant priority; the only reason I have against believing that they are thoroughly infiltrated is that the American security services are so shit at keeping secrets.

    904:

    Pfui, you've been taken in too.

    What's the most successful spying agency in the US?

    The FBI.

    What have they been doing since the 1930s? Infiltrating telecommunications companies in order to tap phones for (counter)intelligence.

    And they're pretty good at it. They're not so good at passing intelligence on to their law enforcement side, but that's not really what they do. Originally they were Hoover's spies against the commies and the anarchists, and later the Mob.

    I've assumed all along that the backbone is infiltrated. It's been that way since before my parents were born.

    The problem they've got now is that Apple got cute and locked up a lot of stuff inside the phones, not inside their servers.

    If I had to guess, the FBI is merely trying to re-establish a relationship they had up until recently.

    On the other side, Apple's probably more afraid of what the Chinese will do to them than they are of US spying. If there' a legal precedent that a national government can force them to engineer a back door and use it (at government request) to hack phones, how many other countries do you think will ask for the use of that product? Apple's a global company, and this is a global precedent they're trying to set. If they say no to the US, they can say no on the same terms to China, the UK, Russia, and so on.

    And that's not a bad thing, IMHO.

    905:

    And since everyone probably needs a laugh at this point (heavy messing, apologies):

    Werner Herzog explains human culture Rick & Morty 23rd Sep 2015 YT: animation: 0:53 [for non-Americans / Millennials, it's an adult-ish cartoon which is fairly satirical].

    And if you're doubting that's actually the real HZ (who knows post Onion take-over): it is.

    Rick and Morty GIF and a Graf: Werner Herzog Guest Stars! Wired, 21st Sep 2015

    907:

    And yes: that was a reference to Rubio / Trump "small hands" meme.

    908:

    Worse, I'd say. The Normans didn't replace the existing inhabitants so much as grab the top spot.

    But yes, 悲伤在世界的尽头.

    909:

    Probably horribly mangled. My Mandarin is rusty now (and wasn't very good to begin with) and I'm leaning heavily on my trusty Oxford Chinese dictionary.

    910:

    It looks to me that we are misunderstanding each other, but I'm not quite sure how.

    Infiltrated backbone - I quite agree. (And even more so in the UK where the backbone was a government monopoly until the 80s.) But there is also the question of who is more likely to do nasty things to you with the data. I don't know anyone who's been screwed by the FBI, but I do know people who've been screwed by Google (whether the different levels of potential severity of the screwing, and the not being in the US, make that a stronger or a weaker point is itself a matter for debate...)

    Stuff on the phone rather than the server - not much of a big deal from the purely technical point of view. It must still end up being transmitted to the server if the server is going to make use of it, and if you're in the server you can read it then. And also induce the phone to send anything you want to get hold of, whether directly or by means of crocked (or just plain badly written) third-party apps for popular functions.

    The difference it makes comes into play when the information is being intercepted under legal warrant, to be used as evidence in court. I anal an' all that, but it is surely the case that the more hooky stuff is involved in the collection of the data, the harder it is to get a warrant to do that stuff, and what little I have encountered on the topic does suggest that that is the case.

    So when you say "re-establishing the previously existing relationship", I think the relationship being re-established is that of being able to get at the data in a manner acceptable to a court. I don't think the ability to get it for purely internal use has been significantly affected, just the conditions under which you can let it be known that you got it without legal embarrassment.

    911:

    "Rule of Three."

    As in the following?

    Multiplication is vexation, Division is as bad; The Rule of Three doth puzzle me, And Practice drives me mad.

    912:

    Why should "The gallery" in other words those you think are stupid need this translation when they can just highlight the word and look it up on the net?

    913:

    I can answer that! Having just sold my first manuscript last year, I think I've got a reasonably up-to-the-minute grasp on the concept.

    Looking back through my archive of submission materials I generated I have:

    Several drafts of my query letter, the most recent one being the one I actually used. http://queryshark.blogspot.com/ is where you want to go to learn about how to write a query letter. They're really fucking hard, so be ready to do it over again five or ten times. It needs to give some sense of you as a writer, describe briefly the main conflict of the book and why it matters, and detail the genre, word count, and other such details. I need to re-emphasize: query letters are a pain in the ass. Spend more time here than anywhere else.

    A 2 page synopsis. The plot covers all of the first page, and a sliver of the second. There are brief descriptions of the six most important characters filling out the balance. The synopsis covers the important plot points, but leaves most of the characterization out and skips over a lot of how we get from B to C type stuff. Nearly the entire middle third of the book, for example, is a hunt for the bad guy and I described it as "One night, their investigation leads them to [the villain]." Mainly, they're looking to see that you've got enough plot to fill out a page, and that everything flows logically from one end to the other. You don't have to worry about showing personality in the synopsis--it's the query letter and the manuscript sample where you do that.

    A collection of samples, including a 5 page sample, a 10 page sample, a 50 page sample, the first chapter, the first three chapters, and a special sample that was named for a particular agent I was interested in who had a fairly bespoke requirement.

    914:

    There was an attempt some decades back to ensure that all UK academic Email was encrypted using "trusted third party encryption", and that would be usable as evidence of authenticity, where the subtext was that the government would choose the trusted third party. I was one of the people who scuppered that by saying in a loud voice at at open meeting "I am not prepared to trust any organisation that the government trusts" and getting applause from the audience.

    915:

    I think part of the miscommunication is that I've read Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI. They've gathered extra-legal intelligence since the 1930s, if not the 1920s. They don't leak it to their law enforcement wing directly. Even though the current case is about something allegedly legal (i.e. they're looking for other terrorists), I strongly suspect that the FBI wants methods for prying into encrypted information wherever it hides, as do the other agencies.

    This is, in general, part of the US government's notion that they can have a backdoor that no one else will find or exploit. I'm with Bruce Schneier on the idea that we don't want such backdoors to exist, because the harm that comes from their existence generally outweighs the harm prevented by using them.

    916:

    Two things:

    1 I do not consider the various Galleries "stupid". You're projecting / attempting to challenge on sandy ground.

    They're different Modal Consciousnesses / World Views (Weltanschauung) - or do you think that the Peanut, Constellation or [redacted] Galleries are the same?

    2 The "joke" is that the Cree / Anglo-Saxon don't actually mean the same thing. There's a yuuuuuge gap between the actual meanings. 3 Head's up champ: killing myself on a pyre of ignorance to provide a bridge to prevent the Waaaaaaaaaaaaar.

    It's not fun, and it's not who I actually am and Goddess knows what I'd actually love to do is just fucking enact genocide and burn your minds out with extreme prejudice and then force you to understand...

    Got Milk?

    So, no.

    Get your tiny little hands off my posts. nose wiggle

    917:

    Oh, and, BOY.

    Take note of the HuckleBerry Meme and the large pointed teeth there. And then consider that your target is happy to use Ancient Greek, Aramaic or even German.

    Know your memes:

    Clever Girl YT: Film: 1:34

    918:

    I'd suggest this trip:

    Look into the notions of Cree mythology / religion and then Anglo-Saxon into the ideas of fate, predestination and Time.

    Wyrd bið ful aræ vrs Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel!

    I'm not posting the Cree since I would love to view their writing some more from another source.

    919:

    This is interesting: Honeybee hive collapse mystery rooted in hive size It looks like in the US at least honeybee hive numbers are up due to slight changes in beekeeping practices: Call off the bee-pocalypse: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high In my area (southern New York State), the main insect-pollinated agriculture is apples. I see a mix of native pollinators (many species) and honeybees (not native, though feral colonies do occasionally form). Honeybees are probably mostly from an aging hippy beekeeper a mile or so away who keeps about 50 hives, no chemicals - asked about how the bees were doing this year last week, he said they had already been out on warm days and he didn't mention any die-off. Other than a rapid decline in few bumblebee species (due in part to disease in greenhouse-escapee bumblebees imported from the Netherlands, the story goes, and perhaps in part due to climate change), the native pollinators appear to be doing OK, though of course experts worry.

    920:

    And: There's the cuckservative meme explained - or rather, shown because telling solves nothing.

    Underneath it all is a nasty little desire to get spanked and degraded by a non-human who just makes you hot, hot, hot under the collar while you can still hate them.

    How do you like dem apples? YT: film: 2:39

    I'm your Huckleberry - be real careful there Mike. I might have a penis (in a jar filled full of formaldehyde).

    And no: I don't hate you. It's worse than that: I do care; I care enough to give you what you need, not what you want:

    Sorge.

    Look it up.

    921:

    "I strongly suspect that the FBI wants methods for prying into encrypted information wherever it hides"

    I suspect it already has them, but it wants to make sure that its repertoire continues to include methods whose use can be revealed if necessary without embarrassment.

    The US government seems a bit daft on the idea of government backdoors. Everyone and his dog - including, I believe, other spook agencies and even certain sections of their own - has been telling them it's a bad idea for years, but still they remain impervious to the message.

    922:

    "Get your tiny little hands off my posts."

    Wha'd she say?

    923:

    No.

    8 Substantive Conceptual Posts, arranged in that pattern 3 Structure, triangle

    It's Magic/k.

    Or me just being bored.

    The following article, which appeared in the second (revised) edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (1995), was an attempt to capture highlights of the history of care prior to the advent of feminist thought in the early 1980s. In two articles immediately following this one, Reich set forth the history of care in contemporary feminist thought and contemporary medical and nursing ethics. This article will be re-published as a “classic article” in the Encyclopedia’s third edition./em>

    History of the Notion of Care by Warren T. Reich, Georgetown University.

    Now, surely.

    What are you doing, my son? What are you doing, son of my womb? What are you doing, son of my vows? Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings. It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine, or for rulers to take strong drink, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed and pervert the rights of all the afflicted. Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more. Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.

    And yeah: ask Host nicely if I'm fronting about 'just fucking with you' and the reality of what I am.

    βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι' ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι

    924:

    There's a yuuuuge thing about Trump, small hands and Rubio now making penis jokes about it.

    In Other News, Marco Rubio Just Made a Joke About Donald Trump Having a Small Penis Esquire, 28th Feb 2016

    Keep up chap, we're about to cross the Rubicon here. (Pun intended)

    925:

    Is this supposed to be a threat? As for penises in formaldehyde I spent some time putting every human organ in formaldehyde and then slicing many of them up. Lungs were probably the most unpleasant. I'm actually more interested in your attempts to ensure the future of the human race by stopping everyone from breeding. Do you think this is a practical proposition?

    926:

    But, really:

    Host is going above & beyond to allow me to post here.

    We're not exactly considered human or even polite company.

    927:

    OOOOH

    Mikey, Mikey, I think he likes it. (HE DOES. HE LOVES THE CUCK).

    Here's a Legal Document:

    Host is awesome. If you want to play Mud-wrestling, will you absolve him of all legal, moral and temporal responsibility for it?

    And, you do then Legally binding agree to a Formal Duel wherein you may agree to the terms of engagement and cost of failure?

    You state your terms and price for loss: I'll state mine.

    claps

    YUUUGE FUN.

    p.s.

    You posted probably before seeing the Reich post. Last chance to consider your Ego and being outclassed here My little special boy.

    928:

    I blame education teaching me I before E. Which is usually a lie.

    "except when sounding as "a" as in neighbor and weigh. From around the 4th grade. :)

    You should try and give it out over the phone to someone who doesn't know the area. RAWLEY???

    And I'm not being harsh. Didn't mean to imply your were. Sorry.

    I moved here so that winter would be brief and if you wanted more you could visit it with a drive of an hour or two. With 2 to 4 hours you have lots of choices for skiing.

    929:

    This is, in general, part of the US government's notion that they can have a backdoor that no one else will find or exploit.

    Exactly. Plus I keep hearing people who should know better saying things like since Apple is a US company they don't have to do this for other countries. And I have a bridge ....

    930:

    I'm afraid I don't want to battle anyone. Your link to Reich shows how philosophers can manage to dig so deeply into the meaning of meaning that they lose all contact with reality. Nowhere in that article was there any mention of the reality of care - Darwinian evolution. I spent my whole working life caring for people and drumming into my staff the necessity of always putting the patient first. I don't wish to play your game of hints and boasts and meta jokes. I find your posts often interesting but just as often irrelevant. And I would still like to know how stopping reproduction will save the human race. The advent of feminist thought In the 1980s? I considered myself a feminist in the 1970s. I didn't need a philosopher to explain this to me. My children - one boy and one girl were brought up identically. Well as identically as society allowed. We had neighbours complain that we were forcing our daughter to be a boy because we allowed her to wear blue dungarees and play with Lego. Maybe they were right. She is now an engineer.

    931:

    Some fairly strong information on CCD. And I've seen this in other places.

    http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/05/smoking-gun-bee-collapse

    And now, a new Harvard study fingers neonics as the key driver of colony collapse disorder. The experiment couldn't have been simpler. Working with nearby beekeepers, Harvard researcher Chensheng Lu and his team treated 12 colonies with tiny levels of neonics and kept six control hives free of the popular chemicals. All 18 hives made it through summer without any apparent trouble. Come winter, though, the bees in six of the treated hives vanished, leaving behind empty colonies—the classic behavior of colony collapse disorder. None of the six control hives experienced a CCD-style disappearing act, although one did succumb to a common-to-bees gut pathogen called nosema.

    932:

    Oh well. 30+ mins later, no duel.

    Only the English can confuse corporal punishment with sexual desire. Or conflate. Or ramp up the testosterone and then get scared like little boys.

    Or something-something-women-in-chaps-and-weilding-horse-whips.

    As stated: The CUCK MEME doesn't really work in the UK (barring ex-colonials) and has a frisson in France, mainly.

    Remind me again: That picture of the naked man with an AK47 on a horse. I'm guessing not many people actually realized the references there.

    I'm actually more interested in your attempts to ensure the future of the human race by stopping everyone from breeding. Do you think this is a practical proposition?

    Stating that a person's ecological impact is far less for not having children than eating fish is an objective scientific fact.

    You might do well to read what's said, and not what's in projected onto your eyeballs by your little mini-archon and not fall for the bait.

    You missed the irony by a mile.

    See #431 & work out the John Wick references.

    You took that from me

    ~

    And no:

    You get no soup.

    There is no insight to be had here.

    You earn it through combat, remember?

    p.s.

    Reich isn't a philosopher.

    He's your profession.

    THAT'S THE JOKE

    933:

    Never, EVER make the mistake of over-estimating the intelligence or perceptiveness of a mass entertainment audience.

    Well, Host was proven correct.

    Throwing down an obviously deluded Male Physician who pontificates about things he knows nothing about with the name: REICH (Godwin Achievement: UNLOCKED) to a male who is running his own little mind-plan of reality...

    Oh.FFS.

    Final Level Irony:

    Mr. M. Collins didn't actually look up what Sorge means to Heidegger, Kierkegaard on any real philosopher.

    "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

    ~

    Come back when you've passed level 10 Mr M Collins. Pitiful.

    934:

    Real Meta-Meta-Meta Game Irony.

    Look through those last few posts: you'll note that strangely enough there's weird little oddities and errors of grammar on the connective grammar bits.

    Now, GRAMMAR NAZIs are a thing.

    But it's also the #1 way to flag (we do it via triggers) to note if the spooky-little-bastards-from-Scooby-Do-Land are parsing / MiM things.

    It's a flip-switch.

    They do it to undermine a poster's (in Mr M Collins or M above words talking about Culture MIND stuff: "credibility")

    So we do it in reverse.

    ~

    Fucking Made.

    We're Faster than You

    935:

    Now, children.

    Consider carefully if you want this war.

    I stood on a bridge and the snow blew hard across it...

    936:

    Oh, and last chance saloon:

    Due to Host's nationality we are very careful to not use weapons on/towards/including the soil/nation/home he lives in, and in fact, we do our best to buttress it.

    Trust me.

    This is very easily rectified if you keep acting like Tools.

    937:

    I've seen it in Dave Goulson's book A Buzz in the Meadow. One point he makes is that the harm done by neonics may not be picked up by crude lab tests that test, say, whether a neonics-exposed bee can fly two metres from the nest and find a dish of honey. Real-life bee navigation is much more complex. (I was able to find most of the relevant text in a Google Books preview for "a buzz in the meadow effect of neonics on bees".)

    The book left me with contempt for the relevant people in the Government, and relief that we're in the EU and therefore subject to decisions made by our more sensible neighbours. (See a preview for "a buzz in the meadow uk government"). Goulson's blog posting http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/blog/for/dg229/2013/09/13/one-more-unto-the-breach-a-look-at-defras-stance-on-neonicotinoids" indicates that DEFRA does not understand the concept of controlled experiments. Not reassuring.

    938:

    Ahhhh... There it is.

    Quotation from elsewhere: 2016 - The year 4chan ./pol pwned the GOP.

    WITNESSED YT: Film: 0:42

    ~

    And we'll rove all over you, fill you full of LSD, MDMA and fuck your brains out. You'll be the ones crying "Too many tits and get off me".

    You're beautiful my little non-normie robot kin, my little mogwai.

    We love you for who you are, not what you "should be".

    939:

    Maybe I should have suggested the Enclosure Acts instead. Those were the sad end of the world for many villagers.

    940:

    Oh, ffs.

    WITNESS ME

    Meta-note:

    Do you really think that copy/pasting a link direct would actually end up with an additional "H" being added? You know, direct from the source page? You know, when there's absolutely 0% chance that a keyboard would be involved?

    Really?

    Or do you think that I'm showing the mogwai how you roll and how to beat the living shit out of you?

    ~

    "ADD AN H, THAT'LL SHOW HER"

    Your Minds are out of date and now mine.

    Fucking deal with it.

    941:

    Yeah. Hint: that muppet song.

    That's where that gets activated.

    Muppet Show - Mahna Mahna

    We play Go, you play Chess.

    B8msdf7m987npasd91224

    Proved, *bows to [redacted] Gallery.

    942:

    Oh, and [redacted] Gallery and so on.

    Choice: Who would Jesus vote for? To him walls, wealth, & torture are non-starters, so probably the Jewish New Yorker from Vermont. NdG Tyson, Twitter.

    Or:

    Oh, and very much not living in the Red London I grew up in: DYE “Fantasy” by JEREMIE PERIN NSFW/L Vimeo: animation.

    Spoilers: that's not the crude style I saw it in.

    943:

    Oh, and before Mikey etc chime in.

    You're Transparent to us.

    That means all the things and all the tricks and all the weapons: Do not fuck with us

    If you want to play nasty, or head-fuck land, trust me, you don't want to go there. (Look behind you!).

    Remember: Our Kind Do Not Go Mad.

    If you do it this way, gigadeath is 100% assured.

    And trust me: you're not the ones who survive.

    944:

    Watching the Drumpf press conference, with Christie behind him looking like he can't make sense of the words coming out of the man in front of him. Possibly wondering what he's gotten himself into. Then suddenly picturing Christie as Drumpfler's Göring. Ick.

    945:

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/mystery-beneath-ice.html

    from last month, about a krill survey in Antarctic waters featuring dozens of top specialists in related fields all summoned to participate in the study, interesting show but had to be way more expensive to produce than PBS could have funded, or even their usual list of contributors. Evidently there's big bucks in fishmeal/marine byproduct slurry, although it gives poor flavor to farmed products like shrimp, other poster mentioned eggs with the same problem. What's often sold as Atlantic cod fillets in fast food restaurants tastes okay, but if they don't specify wild caught it's probably farmed in fishpens along the shores of Maine and Nova Scotia, could explain steady fishmeal demand despite consumer rejection of stinko tasting earlier market entries.

    946:

    heteromeles @869,

    But you're right, Cruz is even nastier. Given that he's supposedly the son of a minister...wow.

    Cruz is the son of a dominionist minister. I find him genuinely frightening, because I think he actually means everything he says.

    947:

    Charlie Stross @ 850,

    I caught the symbolism of the doves immediately. As both you and Hadil Benu point out, it's not exactly subtle.

    What I didn't pick up was the possibility of the Replicants being humans deliberately genetically-engineered for their characteristics such as limited life span, rather than "just" being Androids.

    Although, given their closeness to normal people in most aspects, I do agree this distinction should not change one's view of their predicament.

    948:

    "I am not prepared to trust any organisation that the government trusts"

    I understand the notion, but nowadays I find the concept of "government" in this sense mostly useless. I do use it sometimes in very informal speech (and mostly mean nowadays the Finnish cabinet), but as a whole it is too broad a concept for most things.

    Most governments are composed of many organizatios which are then composed of many people. There is usually no single instance of "government" doing anything, especially not trusting organizations.

    I live in Finland, which as a whole would be the fifth-largest city in Europe (that is, a small country) and even our government has a lot of organizations which have often competing purposes. For example, many of our ministries are doing completely contradictory stuff when taken together.

    Of course, the government can make an announcement that says for example "Microsoft products are secure enough for us", but if they do, I bet even many organizations in the government would take that with a grain of salt.

    Also, an non-security example from recent Finnish politics: the current cabinet (which is composed of the three main right-wing parties) wants to make public spending cuts. The Helsinki University is also a target of these cuts, but the Chief Librarian of the Finnish National Library said that he won't accept the cuts. The status of a university as a government body might be under debate but at least the current cabinet seems to consider the universities as governmental organizations, by ordering them to do stuff.

    So, there are organizations with different goals and visions in the government.

    949:

    Unfortunately, all those who want Yeshua for Pres. will vote Cruz The chiristan-fascist candidate. What worries me, is that if Rubio withdraws, then Cruz could become Rep candidate & is much more likely to elected than Trumpy. Shudder

    950: 95 & earlier

    Heteromeles - yes Cruz is th son of a minister - so what. "Saint" Dominic was an indirect mass-murderer. That vile woman form Albania in India, "mother Theresa" was a torturer - do NOT expect anything good from any religion. ANd especially not form its leaders.

    951:

    Both wrong It's part of the British Isles How the internal government of those islands is organised is a different question. Which we've argued over before. Like I said: LEAVE IT

    952:

    GROW UP 17th C false conspiracy theories, now?

    Scanning rapidly though as I logged-in at appears that you have gone woo & content-free again - I will check as I go down & keep score.

    Have you got a keyboard-version of ADHD, I wonder?

    953:

    but UK/EU viewers can't see it legally so thrrrpt BOLLOCKS I just viewed it

    Your credibility is so high, isn't it? This sort of thing really does no help your cause or causes, when you (correctly) talk about fish-stocks for instance.

    954:

    Irrelevant if the supposed experts "In charge" of the company are "idiots" Once upon a day, I worked for a planet-wide Household Name company - that went spectacularly bust, brand or no brand.

    955:

    (Despite all of which I guess you're right and she'd be the lesser weevil when you run her checklist against Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and the rest of the killer klown kar krew. Groan.)

    I think people are a little confused about Trump. The neocons are terrified of him, and are already running to Hillary and the Democratic Party, where they originated. Trump isn't some loose cannon Millennarian W. Bush type; I don't think he has any delusions about remaking the Middle East into a clone of America or whatever. He wants to return the GOP to its pre-neocon, more isolationist foreign policy, and after Iraq people across the spectrum agree. I think Hillary the Pentagon favorite is more likely to get involved in some imperial adventure than Trump, and Rubio the neocon puppet most definitely is.

    Trump appears to be leading an insurgency against the entire D.C. and media Establishment. It's amazing to watch everyone lining up to attack him; I've never seen anything like it. Why are they so afraid of him? It suggests that someone like this is very necessary.

    956:

    That's why I can get honeycomb, then I suppose? You just have to know a beekeeper. The 8 hives down on our allotment-plots are doing OK.

    It's the Bumblebees I'm worried about. No B. lapidarius here last year - where did they go? Though there may be a B. terrestris nest at the bottom of my plot greenhouse - I hope so, anyway.

    957:

    And / or intermarried with them. There's more truth in "Ivanhoe" than many people will give credit for. The Anglo-Saxon "royal line" was re-integrated back into the English ruling house very quickly, IIRC

    958:

    Or worse still, where it is screamingly obvious that "the security agencies" know perfectly well who did something, & that something was horrible & criminal & evil & cruel ... But are so concerned with protecting their own backsides, that mass-murderers of women & children are deliberately allowed to walk free.

    You can probably work out whom I am speaking of, without too much difficulty. It's sickening.

    959:

    Probably, almost certainly In the EU neonicotinoids are banned - though there are attempts by big pharma to -re-legalise them in the UK There are (in the field) huge protests against this. As I said, the loal bees are (appear) to be doing better. Appraently neonics are not directly harmful, but they screw the waggle dance & direction-sense of bees - they fly off - & don't come back ....

    960:

    Only the English can confuse corporal punishment with sexual desire. Or conflate. Or ramp up the testosterone and then get scared like little boys. LIAR Germans & Dutch & Poles & Danes too ... Incidentally ... 917, 918, 919, 921, 924, 927, 928, & 933 appear at least 95% content-free again. Why do you do it? Why don't you STOP?

    P.S. Google translate does not work for "OE" - so can we have that in Modern English, please? Didn't seem to do too well on the classical Greek, either, btw

    961:

    That was after we threw another £200m at the project by giving it to H&K to fix. It would have been cheaper simply to buy G36. And as for handling, the M16 was a pleasure to hold unlike that lump of SA80 iron at nearly twice the weight (all balanced on one hand). I used to like the idea of bullpups until I held one.

    962:

    Because they can then switch to supporting Cruz, when the time is right? If so be VERY scared - see my post @ 951 & alexhewat @ 947

    963:

    I am what I do. Just follow the memes.

    964:

    I rather enjoyed Reich's war with the UFOs

    965:

    Since we are in a holding pattern, and nearing 1000, I don't feel too bad in posting this news story:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/02/mosul-dam-engineers-warn-it-could-fail-at-any-time-killing-1m-people

    People tend to say we shouldn't have nuclear power stations, because they need constant attention and if they don't get it, could explode/poison millions of people.

    Seems like renewable ain't necessarily that safe either. The risk of 500,000 - 1m deaths sounds pretty urgent to me, but politics always seems to think reality is negotiable.

    Does anyone else get the feeling of the world running down a la Azimov's Foundation?

    966:

    Hey but think of they keystroke "productivity" measure shooting thru the roof !!!

    This has been designed by Catbert.

    967:

    "Only the English can confuse corporal punishment with sexual desire. Or conflate."

    Not exactly : germans are a lot into it too. Specially with a large helping of scat (I forgot where I read that german, when they have psychosomatic problems tend to have gut trouble, while people from other countries tend to hurt elsewhere).

    968:

    For the perpetually confused (and then I think we can leave it). Pay close attention, there may be a test.

    The island of Ireland is indeed part of the geographical entity currently known as the British Isles; but the political entity of the Republic of Ireland is not part of the political entity of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the clue is in the full name).

    Ireland as a political entity was once an occupied territory and colonial possession of the English crown and British Empire (whether it was ever a fully integrated part of the UK, I cannot remember and honestly couldn't be arsed going and looking it up.)

    The current status of Northern Ireland (political entity) is highly subjective. It can be argued that it is a fully integrated part of the UK, or that it is an occupied territory. I shall not wade into the murky details of the arguments for and against -- we all know what happens there!

    (Possibly interesting aside: The legislation -- mentioned in a previous post hereabouts -- that would allow the UK government to revoke the citizenship of anyone that is even entitled to dual-citizenship, would provide a mechanism to remove British citizenship from everyone born in NI.)

    By the way Greg, you're being boorish and bullying by shouting "leave it" at people who have a greater stake in the argument than you.

    969:

    Google Translate may not work on Old English and Ancient Greek, but just dump the entire text into Google Search. I think most of what HB has quoted is from well-known classical authors whose texts are available to Google, usually linked to a translation or explanation.

    Though that's not meant as a put-down: HB, I'd be really impressed if you are composing your own poetry in either language.

    970:

    The M16/M4 family has the benefit of now 50 years of troubleshooting and incremental improvements. I've not fired anything the L1A1 family, but I'm not sure the G36 is much the better, either, given the problems the Bundeswehr found with overheating/hot climate performance in Afghanistan. There's a reason acceptance testing is torturous. Perhaps the Germans should have abused their weapon during tests.

    971:

    Sorry, meant to say "abused their weapon more thoroughly during tests".

    972:

    By the way, HB, you seem to favour Ancient Greece over Rome. Any reason?

    973:

    The UK is very different, and the central government is more the Whitehall mandarins, together with their fellow-travelling plutocrats, than the current blow-hards in Westminster or Downing Street. Remember that the centralised organisation was established back in the days of a world-spanning trading empire, especially following the invention of the telegraph.

    975:

    Um, Greg.

    I provided an illegal link, not the legal one that's country locked.

    You're now a Criminal and under the new MPAA / TTP Copyright Act, your soul is forfeit!

    So you kinda missed what the warning label was telling you.

    Doesn't matter, viewing it is the important part.

    976:

    However, I am afraid that you have failed your own test! Ireland was (de jure) once at least as much a part of the United Kingdom as Wales or Cornwall or, actually, England :-) All of them started as colonies by right of conquest and were then integrated. The difference is that the Irish population never accepted that. Let's ignore the status of the Irish Free State between 1920 and 1949, when the de jure and de facto situation was very different.

    977:

    PART of Ireland was indeed a "plantation" ("colony"|) - the Prods in the N approx 1580-1650. The whole of Ireland was never a colony. It had its own independent parliament until the middle of the Napoleonic wars & was, sadly & mistakenly got rid of during that conflict. And we all have a stake in the argument - ask the people of Omahagh, which is what I was referring to, elsewhere ....

    My position is well-known. I want a confederated union of the Isles - it would be better for everyone. I don't want Scotland to imitate Ireland, especially in poverty 1922-85, for instance ....

    978:

    What I didn't pick up was the possibility of the Replicants being humans deliberately genetically-engineered for their characteristics such as limited life span, rather than "just" being Androids.

    You're still not getting it, Huckleberry.

    Replicants are harder, faster, smarter: the trade off is that they only live four years.

    They're given false memories to prevent absolute psychosis / amorality (Roy is gen 1.0 without such niceties, Rachael / Deckard are 2.0 with implants).

    It's not a case that the engineering is included as a fail-safe, it's part of what they are.

    979:

    thatsthejoke.jpg

    Better question: why?

    980:

    RUN AWAY & PLAY PLEASE, please, please stop behaving like a spoilt brat?

    "You're now a Criminal and under the new MPAA / TTP Copyright Act, your soul is forfeit!"

    .... what utter bollocks.

    981:

    But what about Gaff? He seemed curiously well informed.

    982:

    The difference is that SOME OF the Irish population never accepted that. Principally the RC section who preferred slavery to the Black Crows to the evil English. Or some such murderous rubbish, from all sides - that's the tragedy of it.

    983:

    Lots of reasons, some including authenticity and nascent things.

    But, look at the Cree and then the Ancient Greek.

    Visually, Audibly, Soulfully, the aesthetics are beautiful. Now gone, like tears in the rain.

    ~

    Anyhow. Actually trawled through LawyersGunsMoney; not so bad. Bit rough, but fundamentally likeable chaps/chapesses.

    Although cough Wake of Vultures. winks slowly

    984:

    You appear to have missed the wiggle room that I provided for myself in the parenthesis: "whether it was ever a fully integrated part of the UK, I cannot remember and honestly couldn't be arsed going and looking it up".

    For a number of reasons my Irish history is incomplete. Read from that what you will (answer is obvious, but only from my point of view).

    Summary: Thanks for the reminder/correction.

    985:

    As a fellow cop, he is quickly identified as being very different from Deckard through the ways he dresses and behaves. In the commentaries the cast and crew note that he wears fancy clothing and seems to be part of the precinct's vice squad. It has been suggested that Deckard is a replicant, too, and that Gaff is his controller. This would explain Gaff's attitude toward Deckard. He likes to make little Origami-figures. The last words heard in the film are spoken by him: "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"

    987:

    High level summary, deliberately light on the details and dates. Although I disagree with your tone, I do (and have previously) agreed with you on many of the points you raise. Primary intention was to point out "United Kingdom" =/= "British Isles" and "Republic of Ireland" =/= "Ireland".

    PS: Please do not be so gauche as to attempt to throw Omagh (check your spelling, too) in the face of someone who has seen much more of the impact of the Troubles up close than you have.

    I expect you to reply to this with one of several predictable responses. I will, however, be bowing out now. Too many emotions. Too many memories.

    988:

    Thank you for the link.

    Yep, your analysis is correct. Last gasp of the market, they'll get there for when Peru really starts crashing. Ruskies, Chinese, Five-Eyes all there.

    Been the game-plan for a while, all priced in as they say.

    Spoilers: it buys your species about 4-8 years and marks the score card as FAIL.

    ~

    And yes: they know the reality of the situation.

    It's Grim Up North

    990:

    The dissolution of Grattan's Parliament was brought about by the United Irishmen's nonsectarian Republican rebellion. Would you like to try reformulating your hypothesis?

    991:

    Ridley Scott goes back and forth on Deckard's identity. Harrison Ford keeps insisting Deckard is not a replicant and that Scott never said that he was back in the day.

    992:

    You're still not very good at the paradoxical indeterminate middle, are you?

    The Death of the Author R. Barthes, PDF, full book - legal

    ~

    The quotation is "Tears in Rain", not "Tears in the Rain" though, typing too fast, have to be elsewhere. I'm Late, I'm Late.

    993:

    More accurately: every Irish rebellion has been an "elite rebellion," led by those doing well in Irish society looking for increased national self-determination. So the 1798 Rebellion - the time of the Penal Laws and zero participation of Catholics in power - was overwhelmingly led by Protestants.

    994:

    And I think I'm done; this has to be boring everyone else unbearably.

    995:

    Not to say that the term "United Kingdom" is itself very context-dependent, and is often used on common speech to include at least the Crown Dependencies. Geographically, it includes St Kilda and North Rona, but may or may not include Rockall.

    996:

    They're making a sequel based on the reportedly not very good series of sequels written by another author than Dick. And as I understand it that series has Deckard turn out to be a replicant.

    997:

    Yes, but we are talking early 80s, and the SA80 was a total load of crap. The number of faults found with it was in the low hundreds, and included things like the magazine dropping out unexpectedly. At that time the only people fighting in desert conditions were the SAS. Everyone else was geared up for a NATO war in W Europe.

    998:

    "You're now a Criminal and under the new MPAA / TTP Copyright Act, your soul is forfeit!"

    HB is correct, Greg. Did you ever record a vinyl record onto cassette tape, back in the 70s? Or, on your computer in the past couple of decades, make a backup that happened to include a copyrighted piece of software? If so, then you're a criminal.

    So am I; so is pretty much everyone. British law on copyright is fundamentally broken at such a low level that it's not even funny -- and the TTP agreement coming in will upgrade the maximum penalty for copyright violation to something like a decade in prison. It's not even funny: Cardinal Richeleu would have boggled.

    999:

    SA-80 and what we could have had...

    It would have been cheaper still if the government hadn't bowed to pressure from the USA (who wanted the commercial advantage of shortening the 30-06 cartridge to become the .308 Winchester (aka 7.62mm NATO), thereby allowing them to use their existing WW2 plant with a trifling modification), and had pressed on with the 7mm (.280") EM-2. That rifle was designed by professionals who had just fought a war and knew what the infantry needed (the SA-80 looks superficially similar but is a mishmash of bits copied from other designs, and was originally very unreliable). The EM-2 passed all its trials without problems, unlike any of the other entrants for the .303 replacement, and the original 5.56mm (.223") round for the M16 and SA-80 was rather inferior to the 7mm (.280") developed for the EM-2 (based on WW2 statistics: most fighting was at less that 300 yards/metres, so you don't need the 1000 yard/km range of the .303 or 7.62mm cartridge, and the reduction in recoil (and weight of the ammunition) is another great advantage.

    Chris.

    1000:

    Breeding doesn't matter. Somebody will do it. There will be people, and they will adopt the best memes available. The basic human hardware is the basic human hardware. The software is what matters. You do more for the future by creating memes than by breeding personally. And you can create good software in utter freedom if you don't have to sell your soul to support your babies. If there's some kind of genetic loss from genetically smart people (dubious)not breeding as much as genetically dumb people (prove it), then it will be slow and long before anything serious occurs it will be possible to technologically produce people to order rather than breeding them like animals. If you really think your genetic formula is so super special that the world is lost without it, the efficient way to give that gift to the future is freeze a toenail.

    1001:

    Not quite. I agree with almost all of it, but we have the EU to thank for removing two of the worst aspects of the original Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Backup (and decompilation) was made legal again in 1992, and debugging and fixing in 2003 (paragraphs 50A to 50D). You are still required to delete such programs immediately on the expiration of permission to use them. And, as a private user, simple breach of copyright is NOT a criminal offence (paragraph 107), though communicating it to the public is. As you say, the intent of TTP is to change all that.

    F250A Back up copies.

    (1)It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program to make any back up copy of it which it is necessary for him to have for the purposes of his lawful use.

    (2)For the purposes of this section and sections 50B [F3, 50BA] and 50C a person is a lawful user of a computer program if (whether under a licence to do any acts restricted by the copyright in the program or otherwise), he has a right to use the program.

    (3)Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A, void).

    1002:

    Most of which failed It was the "Northern" ones that succeeded ( For various values of "success" )

    1003:

    Right in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, yes/no? ( Texts say 1800 )

    1004:

    Quite possibly

    But, seriously, is anyone AT ALL, no matter how anal-retentive & a total shit actually going to go after a private individual, who has copied for private purposes? I can see courts/juries plain refusing-to-convict in those cases, thus crashing the whole thing.

    1005:

    As I didn't quite ask Charlie .... Who, or which collection-of-greedy-&-stupid corporate shits are actually going to bring a prosecution against a private individual in the UK, for this? And do they expect to win, once the publicity hits the fan? As Charlie says it's fucking insane.

    I would expect the higher courts to strike it down, at some point, if such a course were to be followed.

    1006:

    This is, in general, part of the US government's notion that they can have a backdoor that no one else will find or exploit. I'm with Bruce Schneier on the idea that we don't want such backdoors to exist, because the harm that comes from their existence generally outweighs the harm prevented by using them.

    Along those lines:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/technology/apple-and-fbi-face-off-before-house-judiciary-committee.html

    [FBI Director] Comey stressed that the fight with Apple was about trying to get as much information as possible about the San Bernardino attack — not about gaining a powerful law enforcement tool elsewhere.

    But when he was asked whether the F.B.I. would seek to unlock other encrypted phones if it prevailed in the San Bernardino case, he responded, “Of course.”

    1007:

    Dirk; seriously, you should beware Dunning-Kruger on this one...

    It would have been cheaper simply to buy G36

    Nope, because it isn't just the cost of the bare rifle - it's the spare parts, rewriting and reissuing all of the instructional material, refitting all of the armoury racks and vehicle clips; retraining all of the users and maintainers; etc, etc.

    As it turned out (and was apparently discovered by Hereford when they took it for a play) the G36 isn't that robust. The polymer body softens ever so slightly when it gets very hot - as in the desert, or after a few magazines - which means that the barrel doesn't quite point in a consistent direction. See the trouble that the German Defence Minister got into over that very subject...

    It's not inherently better, either - I've fired, stripped, and cleaned the G36. It's rather similar to the SA80 on the inside, i.e. it's a rotating-bolt design rather than the roller-delayed stuff that H&K is famous for. Nice and light, though.

    1008:

    The M16/M4 may have improved, but it's still decidedly less reliable than it could be.

    The USMC are starting towards piston rather than direct gas impingement (see M27) as are the various foreign-improved versions (HK416, SIG, et al). Meanwhile, the US Army are very touchy on the subject, and keep avoiding any comparative testing against foreign weapons. I suspect they're holding out until LSAT is mature enough to replace it...

    The big surprise was when (after complaints about L85A2 reliability: "all this cash and it's still unreliable", or as it turned out "40 Cdo RM don't know how to maintain weapons in the field") they reran some torture tests in Oman. Not dusty enough? Plough the firing point, fly a helicopter over it to induce a proper brownout, use the weapons immediately...

    The trial included M16A2, L85A2, and a control group of the original L85A1. The outcome surprised everyone - when oiled up, the L85A2 just kept on working, while the M16 just kept stopping. In fact, even the original L85A1 significantly outperformed the M16 in the reliability trial.

    It turned out that contrary to a generation of vaguely-remembered basic training, you don't run your SA80 nearly-dry in the desert, you soak it in oil instead.

    http://www.quarryhs.co.uk/SA80.htm

    1009:

    Kinda sad (not really), but fun listing the SF/F references: Chris Christie’s wordless screaming

    1010:

    My thoughts exactly when I read it too

    1011:

    First time I laught at reading a WP article.

    On the other hand, in french, we call this "shooting on the ambulance".

    1012:

    Someone just told Chris Christie that there is no God. Or Chris Christie has just discovered that God does exist but She is an enormous snake who hates or is indifferent to mankind. Or Chris Christie has just discovered that there is no God but that Hell is real.

    We [strike]resemble[/strike] resent those remarks!

    ~

    For Greg: no, they don't usually go after end users (unlike in the US or EU), but it's still technically illegal.

    UK Creative Industries and ISPs Partner in Major New Initiative to Promote Legal Online Entertainment BPI, 2014

    The focus is much more on active prevention of users (cough VPN cough) from even being served illegal material, either via ISP level blocks or in YouTube's case, an largely automated bot-driven system (the infamous DMCA system).

    I'll let actual Legal professionals fill in anything else.

    Relevant:

    “Ten years ago, the music and film industries faced a threat to their very existence from online copyright infringement by illegal file-sharing or pirate sites,” he added. He said that in the current climate, adblocking potentially posed a “similar threat”.

    Stopping short of announcing an outright ban on adblocking, he said he “shared the concern” of the newspaper industry about the impact of the technology and would “consider what role there is for government” after hearing all sides of the argument.

    “My natural political instinct is that self-regulation and co-operation is the key to resolving these challenges, and I know the digital sector prides itself on doing just that. But government stands ready to help in any way we can.”

    Adblocking is a 'modern-day protection racket', says culture secretary Guardian 2nd March 2016.

    Someone kindly tell the Minister that the solution to piracy was the introduction of better legal delivery systems and not a punitive approach.

    I can fake being a nasty piece of work, this looks like just good old fashioned ignorance.

    1013:

    "Dirk; seriously, you should beware Dunning-Kruger on this one..."

    My only experience is as a user, and not MOD procurement. Meanwhile, back in 2002 it was still receiving "interesting" reviews.

    http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/27/military.qanda

    I may be succumbing to Dunning-Kruger again, but I imagine most soldiers will heave a sigh of relieve when it's finally dumped and replaced with a more conventional, and much lighter, design.

    Personally, my favorite is HK416

    1014:

    Yes, but we are talking early 80s, and the SA80 was a total load of crap. The number of faults found with it was in the low hundreds, and included things like the magazine dropping out unexpectedly

    That's rather a simplification...

    It was the mid to late 1980s - SA80 still hadn't been fully introduced by the time of the 1991 Gulf War; and there was a rush to give Royal Ordnance the contract so that it could be privatised.

    You're right, the move from "pre-production" to "production" started so they could do the large-scale troop trials. The middle and later production batches included all of the modifications due to these learning experiences (they were retrofitted to early batches at workshop level ) - the back of the trigger got a wedge shape after the Commando Brigade spent a winter in Norway; the magazine release catch got a deeper protective shroud and a reshaping after it was found that it was in just the right place to rub it against your side as you ran. The front cover got a stiffer release catch; the firing pin, the bolt release catch, and the ejection port dust cover were made more sturdy. There were just over 100 modifications, AIUI.

    Our unit got late-production batches; and they were absolutely fine, all modifications applied during manufacture. Mine just kept working, and because I was running the unit shooting team, my rifle got quite a reasonable amount of use...

    However, having problems on entry into service is not unusual... Do a search on "Crossman Report" and "Ichord Subcommittee".

    The whole saga of the entry into service of the M16 and its ammunition is a true horror story, and makes SA80 look like a paragon of virtue. Read "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young" and note how many times you see "my weapon jammed solid, and I threw it away because I couldn't clear it". They didn't even issue a blank-firing adapter for it until 1967 (two years after it was being used in combat in Vietnam), and don't even mention the compromises involved in the M16A2 upgrade...

    History of the M-16 (big PDF, lots of graphs) Ammunition problems

    (Technical note: the M16 direct gas impingement mechanism means that any unburnt powder is vented directly back into the working parts; this was made worse by the US issuing "dirty" ammunition that burnt more slowly than that used in the acceptance trials... the M16 cocking handle can pull on the bolt to open, but not push on it to force it shut if it's sticking. Until the M16A1 plunger there was no way to push on it to fully close it)

    1015:

    Two questions:

    • How much of a user? Handled it once or twice, did a familiarisation shoot with it, or did a full conversion up to live-firing tactical training?

    • Which version? i.e. after the move to L85A2, or before?

    Because I can assure you, I've heard no complaint about L85A2 from friends who have carried it into action - it works, it keeps on working, and they seem very happy that it does it rather better than its competitors.

    You should consider that you may be rather out of date...

    1016:

    Charlie,

    Thanks very much for the response, though of course I need to be published to get on the awards list....

    April D (reply 914), thank you, also, very much. The sample letters will help me with that.

    I'm also hoping to be ready to talk to publishers and book editors at Balticon in three months, if I don't get an acceptance sooner.

    Charlie, I did hear from Eva Whitley (Jack Chalker's widow, an old friend) that there are still one or two publishers (was one Tor?) that accept unsolicited.

    mark, waiting for my beta reader's cmts on the revision*
    • Last week, Monday, um, er, I have no idea what happened, but I'd sent the beta reader the revision, woke up that day, and realized I needed a whole 'nother chapter.

    And before I got to bed, just before 01:00, I'd written the entire chapter, about 4k words, in one day....

    1017:

    "Aufklapp-Spiel-Box Polizeistation"; "unfolding play box police station" - the "Secret" applies to folding away, not the Police. That leaves the manufacturer in the clear, but the labeling in English was either deliberate or an inept translation. My guess is an attempt to sell kids a secret police concept, which to my thinking is unforgivable. An orderly modern society requires mediation of disputes by the courts, all except those trivial enough to dismiss on de minimis grounds. Police operations need to be right out in the open where you can sue their asses off when they screw up, just like everybody else. Sure it costs a lot more that way, but there's plenty of wealth stagnant at the top just waiting to be taxed and recycled back into the economy, my reading of Piketty's statistics suggests every hundredth American has a million in assets, every thousandth has ten million. No need to crimp any incentives for development or innovation, just skim a percent or two off of that annually and use it to fund all the high price settlements for police abuse, maybe give the police hefty raises so they aren't feeling so abusive, or you can attract better candidates to begin with. Of course you can't rule out ineptitude, same as ever. It's like the time Letterman had John Waters as a guest, he wanted to show something but Dave said not to and they went back and forth until the audience hollered out for him to show it, and Dave says okay but you WILL be reviled, Waters holds a box of candy up to the camera showing the name on its label, "Dingleberries", remarking that somebody really fell asleep in the marketing department.

    1018:

    Since we are in a holding pattern, and nearing 1000, I don't feel too bad in posting this news story:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/02/mosul-dam-engineers-warn-it-could-fail-at-any-time-killing-1m-people

    Texas has a similar problem:

    http://interactives.dallasnews.com/2015/lewisville-dam/

    1019:

    Was I ever supposed to be?

    For purely informational purposes, I provided the views publicly held by the director and actor interpreting the character. That does not automatically mean I am taking a stand on Deckard's identity myself or that there is a "true" interpretation. Considering the two people I cited contradict each other, it seems unlikely I am putting these forward as my own definitive stance.

    Maybe you know the name of the fallacy of assuming someone has stated all they know or think about a subject based on what they have explicitly said. Or the fallacy of filling in what a person thinks about one aspect of a subject based on their discussion of another aspect. Or conflating one voice in the room with everyone's understanding of the matter. You've made all three with respect to this subtopic and you've made them fairly frequently in the past. Should we make exhaustive lists of your short comings for you to peruse for your edification? It seems kind of petty. It might be more civil and enjoyable if we let these sorts of betes noires go by. We can agree every critter not seen in full light is grey.

    Regardless, I am going to try to stop reacting to how you say things. (And fail no doubt, but it's the thought that counts.) It's no good lecturing people if you just fall into the same pattern as them.

    But one Parthian missive to go: Greg's wrong to tell you to grow up. You will. And it won't have anything to do with what anyone else has to say. The older you get the less capable you will be of being in outrage mode 24/7. People over 35 just lose the capacity. They are still mad and/or horrified and/or amazed; they just cannot make themselves burn anymore*. Plus they have come up against their own limitations too many times to ignore. Further, they have discovered too much of their own minor culpability to keep accusing others on all but the most salient issues. Good thing. Bad thing. It just is what is.

    *Roy reached that point at age 3, but Special Circumstances were involved :)

    1020:

    Someone mentioned LSD, this came up on twitter today:

    http://www.vox.com/2016/3/2/11115974/lsd-internet-addiction

    Short take- lots of people in the USA seem to find giving themselve microdoses of LSD help them work better. (Some of us wonder about the placeno effect, reporters asks one of the proponents about it and gets a wooful answer) Reporter tries it himself. It seemed to help him get on with work and cut his internet addiction.

    1021:

    The text in italics was a copy/paste from the Wikipedia entry (with a tongue poke at J I-P in a friendly fashion, of course I'm copy/pasting from sources). That's what italics are for.

    So, does that make your response a little more ironic?

    PKD's signature is the ambivalent ending / meaning: translation of R. Barthes' reference - it's better to entertain all the possibilities at once rather than a definitive one.

    ~

    As a historical note, regarding the film, the original cut (with the unicorn dreams) isn't just implicit, it's explicit. It's clearly shown (the piano, the old photos, the impossible dreams) that Deckard's memories cannot be true.

    The director's cut is much better, and part of the narrative ambiguity is probably deliberate to distance the director from the original. Ford probably just wants to forget the entire experience: by all accounts he hated his co-star (Rachael) and was bullied into the (infamously wooden/pissed off) voice over work post-shoot. Questions about the film will get the deliberately anti-interesting "Talk about something else" answer.

    ~

    Should we make exhaustive lists of your short comings for you to peruse for your edification?

    I'm fairly sure I'm aware of many of them.

    I'm also aware that this group of readers are the good ones: just accept that some of the dribble isn't for your eyes.

    ~

    The older you get the less capable you will be of being in outrage mode 24/7. People over 35 just lose the capacity.

    That begs a question: how old am I, in your mind's eye?

    1022:

    Re dam collapse, this is useful, though a little old (2004?): Accident Risks in the Energy Sector: Comparison of Damage Indicators and External Costs (Figure 4 in particular)

    1023:

    "You should consider that you may be rather out of date..."

    I am very out of date. My formal connection with the British army was pre-1980. My "playing around" with various weapons a lot more recent.

    1024:

    I've been playing with future dam collapses over on my blog, heteromeles.com. It's more about how the California water system could collapse in the future, but you might find it interesting.

    1025:

    But one Parthian missive to go: Greg's wrong to tell you to grow up. You will. And it won't have anything to do with what anyone else has to say. The older you get the less capable you will be of being in outrage mode 24/7. People over 35 just lose the capacity. They are still mad and/or horrified and/or amazed; they just cannot make themselves burn anymore*. Plus they have come up against their own limitations too many times to ignore. Further, they have discovered too much of their own minor culpability to keep accusing others on all but the most salient issues. Good thing. Bad thing. It just is what is.

    Speaking only for myself, I think there's a rather large variation around the age of 35. Still, you're right, I don't do blind rage any more, not that I ever really did.

    1027:

    MANILA, Philippines – The Chinese have taken over another traditional Filipino fishing ground near Palawan where they have stationed up to five ships to keep local fishermen at bay, sources said.

    Now effectively under Chinese control is Quirino or Jackson Atoll, which has been a rich source of catch for a long time for fishermen from Palawan, Southern Luzon, Western Visayas and even Manila.

    Gray and white Chinese vessels have not left the atoll, which Filipino fishermen also call Jackson Five, because of the existence of five lagoons in the area.

    ~

    Strategic Resource Achievement: Unlocked.

    1028:

    Circling back to the safe subject of pet ownership, I was wondering what rituals would make your dog more comfortable. I had a few joke ones, but I can actually think of a more realistic set, maybe because I feel I understand them more than cats. I have lived with and loved cats, but it took longer for me to sync some with their mind set (to the extent humans really do comprehend other species.)

    Consider that a sufficiently intelligent animal might be able to understand all sorts of things about basic human drives and rudimentary principles of hominid social organization and expression. Would they be able to predict an individual human's aesthetic preferences with any useful accuracy and specificity? Would they even be able to see art in quite the same way we do? I would guess only if one species molded the other with that in mind and maybe not even then. Dog anthropologist: we know that bright colors make them less apathetic; so why do Larry and Stan keep destroying their green wallpaper. We even made all their scribbling paper green. We went to a lot of trouble to discover they see this thing called "green" and they ought to be grateful, the twerps.

    While I had some issues with the specific content and tone of Hadil Benu's manifesto, I can sympathize with the spirit. I won't own a dog again until I can give it [what I consider] a proper dog's life and that's really hard where we live right now.

    1029:

    From the comfort of my safe European home, I think a Trump presidency would be hilarious, more hilarious than the grim set of callous, overpromoted millionaires we have to contend with here, at least

    It would at least be amusing to see people complaining about for the last eight or more years, actually electing one.

    Watch! As he rips your beloved constitution to shreds.

    Watch! Him trying to be sympathetic to the latest batch of victims of the next mass shootings/terrorist killing of USA citizens, on his watch.

    If he does win the nomination, he'll be the first Republican Presidential candidate with not a scintilla of Republican heritage since Wendell Wilkie.

    Not to mention the first immigrant First Lady since 1825.

    1030:

    For some reason the acronym RINOs disappeared from the previous post...due to my html incompetence, again

    1031:

    I was not trying to be scientific with that age. Just picked a cromulent number. There is also a distinction between the general condition, intensity, and the specific context: outrage. I have had both and still do. Just now it's more rare. Maybe Dirk's chemicals keep him in that state and I should look them up. I am so used to experiencing those things without external pharmaceuticals that I suspect it's too late for me to change my ways. (Nothing my college roommates reported on mushrooms or LSD sounded as interesting as what I lived normally at that age.)

    To put a more human face on my reaction to Hadil Benu's general mode of argumentation: I lived a lot of these things, year by year. I saw fields full of honey bees evaporate step by step. (Sometimes the fields went first.) I saw staple foods (for me) disappear off the shelf and never come back or become a luxury for a few. I experienced the practical disappearance of an entire season (autumn.) I witnessed all this and more on the ground. Now someone's yelling in my face about why I don't feel bad enough about it and lecturing me on the semiotics of my loss. My initial reaction consists of two words. My second is "did you just get here? Does an internet search really make this more real for you? Gedawtaheer!"

    But from a practical point of view, I see it as a lack of empathy* which might or might not change over time for her. She's proud of being an internet oracle. She does not understand that 20 years ago history doctoral students were expected to become mentats or die trying as the web was not installed in our spartan caves at the time. Since Future Shock is an accelerating process, twelve years from now her nieces or students will be communicating like tachikomas and silently sharing sad info dumps about how proud Aunt Hadil is of her external search engines that were not even specifically integrated to her cortex. I can feel simultaneous schadenfreude and concern over that scenario. I've been on both sides.

    And what is the reverse of Parthian missiles, parting niceness: Hadil, I do get that the You Tube links actually get the job done better sometimes. But we often just don't have the time or inclination to click so many at once. And unfortunately we all don't have the time or inclination to understand every little nuance you want to communicate. It's a little odd that you expect this. Not bad, just odd. Don't change. Just don't get too mad when one of us is as kranky as you on a given day.

    *Empathy not as "niceness" or the desire to be empathetic, but the substantiated process of practicing empathy for years, often with or for people who personally kind of bug you sometimes.

    1032:

    I get the feeling that the impact/probability graph might need a revision if those death numbers come to pass.

    Key thing seems to be similar to climate change - we know what needs to be done, but politicians don't want to fix it because it hasn't broken yet and the money can be spent on sexier things (eg more likely to get them re-elected). Of course, when it does break, it's all too late. Even after the US had those bridge collapses, the money going into remediation doesn't match the scale of the problem.

    We also don't seem to be good at building things which are long lasting, neutrally stable, and fail-safe. Everything seems to always be 5 seconds from fatal collapse (financial system being the biggest of those).

    1033:

    But from a practical point of view, I see it as a lack of empathy* which might or might not change over time for her. She's proud of being an internet oracle.

    No, you're missing it.

    Ask yourself why the two dominant threads at the end of this thread are "LOUD OBNOXIOUS TROLL/SYBIL" and "THE KANTIAN AESTHETICS OF REAL WEAPONS".

    I didn't link to Lord of War / Jarhead / Five-Fingered-Death-Punch by accident.

    What's actually happening (as B.Arnold etc have noted) is that I'm providing rather better weapons than single rifles.

    Here's the empathy gap: this isn't me being angry, or rage fueled. (Trust me: I am trying very much not to give into that[1]).

    Mr M Collins isn't an argument: it's a sexually charged domination fuck. From Him. Not from me.

    ~

    Look, your Mind isn't going to understand it.

    Here's a different version - consider this fantasy:

    1 I am personally responsible for Genocide that makes the last 25,000 years look like cookies-n-milk when it kicks off 2 I detest what I am doing, but it's the only way I can think of respond & bind things that respond to my fair kisses 3 I am attempting to not become something else: KUK is the easy mode version, the simulacrum, the real deal is a whole lot worse 4 I am desperately alone, afraid, hurt and dying - and I'm also torturing myself / poisoning myself to do this thing 5 I AM WHAT I AM - and I'm just a little bit aggrieved at the response. Not aggrieved, just disappointed.

    Empathy isn't like that: Empathy is getting in the skulls of all of you.

    And trust me: having just slogged through the Steam Member Group called "Fisting Todler Penis" (really) and comparing them to, you know, the Real Deal [tm] it gets a bit wearing.

    Tell: person changed their name from "Child Pr0n Noaw" to "You Care About My Name" afterwards. No child, I care about your Mind, not the name.

    ~

    Oh and last thing:

    Do you really think Cassandra was happy with her 'gift'?

    It's practically the Greek Feminist take-away that it not only made her life a misery but lead to carnage towards her and her children?

    CHILDREN OF MEN

    [1] Five Finger Death Punch - My Nemesis YT: music: 4:18 - released: 29th Feb 2016

    1034:

    Oh, and a lesson in Empathy:

    Salt / Hug

    Good Will Hunting

    It's Not Your Fault YT: film: 4:43

    That's not an Achievement I can Unlock anymore.

    ~

    No More Hells does require some sacrifices, capcice?

    1035:

    I honestly don't think Trump has an idea of what he wants to do with the presidency. He just wants to be the biggest big shot around; that's always been his only discernible desire. To get there, he'll say anything that comes to mind and say the opposite five minutes later. He knows his supporters will latch on to whichever statements they agree with and forget about the rest.

    It now appears that the race will be Trump vs. Hillary vs. my will to live.

    1036:

    Look, ffs.

    Spoilers:

    Trump is the JUDAS GOAT, HRC gets 2016, 2020 the Republic dies.

    It's not hard, it's not complicated and it's not fun.

    That's what $1,000,000,000 gets you in America today.

    1037:

    The actual real cost is something like $10-15 bil, but given the oil prices it's hard to tell the actual net worth of the players involved.

    Compared to the derivatives market or any number of Serious Players [tm], it's fucking chump change.

    Your Democracy is fucking Chump Change.

    Do you understand this yet?

    ~

    The Real Deal [tm] argument comes from Understanding why Marx / Smith are still playing their merry little dance in the 21st C.

    "We're Not Cattle"

    Undersea Cable System Cuts in Singapore Linode 29th Feb 2016

    Fungus turns frogs into sexy zombies Science Mag 1st March 2016

    Oil Pioneer McClendon, Charged in Bid Rigging, Dies in Crash Bloomberg 1st March 2016

    Yeah, you are.

    1038:

    Oh, and Predator humor for the night:

    You can tell we're under austerity when an oil magnate dies in a software hack to his car instead of his plane.

    Yeah, sure: made here first.

    1039:

    Oh, and Host:

    10-1 odds that joke + references to other American Plane accidents (cough Clinton cough) will lead tomorrow / this week.

    ~

    We're Faster than You

    1040:

    That might happen. Might not. As a notable historian once said, it's difficult enough to predict the past.

    OTOH, Trump's support comes from people who see that the system is corrupt and (think they) have little enough to lose to support the idea of tearing it down. His supporters aren't going anywhere, simply because any fool can see that the system is deeply corrupt. When Trump supporters can see it, the secret is officially out. They'll be around in 2020 and for a long time after thar, barring (worryingly plausible) catastrophe.

    1041:

    Just do us a favor and look up my references to dams in Iraq, ISIS and so on then reference to this thread. It's like seeing the future.

    Trump is the Establishment / PTB response to the threat (c.f. wheeling out Palin and his "pissed in my cornflakes" look - mirrored in Christie recently) masked in Drama levels of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera.

    It's all priced in.

    Trump / Christie and so on are all just garbage men to the real Power Players.

    You might want to contrast Agenda 21 (the bugbear of certain parts of Americana) with what's happening now.

    ~

    "We're Not Cattle".

    Meat Loaf - I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) YT: music: 7:44

    Look: what's actually happening is a discussion about whether or not genocide on a huge scale is the solution.

    And it's not the Scientists making it - it's the fuckwits with Yahweh "on their side".

    Spoiler: Yahweh is a dick.

    1042:

    If I wanted unclear allusions that claim to provide a glimpse of the future, I would buy a Tarot deck.

    I know you can write intelligible English sentences when you feel like it and are sober enough. Either write clearly or don't bother.

    1043:

    Just looked a little more carefully at that dosing bibliography and only one was obviously about microdosing (up to 0.73 ug/kg, max 40ug, high end rather more than a microdose as described earlier), and from the abstract (didn't try to acquire the paper) it seems to be saying that when given just prior to sleep or 1 hour afterwards, sleep is disrupted a little.

    1044:

    Re Tinned Herring (Kippered?),

    It may have more to do with changing foodways. I grew up (Scandinavian extraction, Chicago Suburbs) with Sardines (on Crackers) as a treat on Saturdays; I think it was a working class lunch item where there was not a cafeteria. Still eat it (them?) a couple of times in the summer. Or the Herrings. Great reserve item for Disaster Prep.

    Scandinavian Sushi.

    My Ten years younger brother, not so much.

    They (Sardines) are still available at Gourmet prices in Walmart, but fewer choices than even ten years ago. Kippered Herring are much cheaper, US$2 or less the tin. And the latest reset (Walmart #1 and saturation level neighborhood markets) introduced assorted Asian (Thai?) canned Mackerel.

    But not the Mackerel in Tomato sauce I learned to eat in Norway as a tourist, chiles and stuff.

    1045:

    I am still trying to figure which would be worse, Bunga-Bunga or Nehemiah Scudder in a cheap suit...even Roboto Rubio is looking better, if only because you can see fairly clearly exactly where his strings lead to.

    1046:

    Weeks late to the party as usual.

    I know you've read more than me and understood more than me, but this comment seems strange.

    "with [Trump} in charge, we're ... we're all pretty much locked into full-on 2oC climate change in 20 years"

    Ok, here's my layman's reading of the current situation.

    There's a lag (10-40 years, but the latter figure makes more sense to me given the size of the oceans) between carbon stabilisation and the equilibrium temperature being reached. So what we seen now is about the equilibrium temperature if we'd stopped producing carbon 40 odd years ago. That's about 1.1 C

    The current industrial complex puts a lot of particulates into the air. This cools the planet by about 1-1.4 C (Hansen and others).

    So had we stopped emitting carbon 40 years ago, the equilibrium temperature should be what we see today, plus the warming currently hidden by particulates. That's about 2.1-2.5 C of warming we were locked into in 1975.

    Since then we've doubled the cumulative total. Temperature has been pretty linear with CO2 and so that should mean we're currently locked in to 4.2-5 C warming, if we stop today.

    That's even before the Arctic puts 1.5 Tg of carbon into the atmosphere, which it most certainly will at >4 C.

    So how is Trump going to lock us into 2 C warming when we're locked into more than twice that already?

    1047:

    Well, I'm going with the official consensus, that, if we continue business as usual, we'll hit +2oC somewhere around 2035, it will be "locked in," and things get "bad."*

    I know Hansen's more negative than this, and he may be right, in which case we're already screwed, and in 10-40 years, things will be "bad," unless a miracle happens.

    My Hot Earth Dreams take assumes we sort of get things under control, to the point that we follow the IPCC RCP 8.5 scenario and blow the equivalent of most of our fossil fuels over the next 100 years, rather than the next 20 or 50 (although in the long run, 50 years doesn't matter).

    As for the Arctic, those numbers appear to be all over the place. What I don't know at the moment: --How much methane sits in terrestrial permafrost, how much is in sub-ocean methane clathrates, and any other pools (Indonesian peats, Antarctic clathrates, and so forth).
    --How much of this volume of methane can be released. For example, the permafrost in parts of the Arctic (and presumably the Antarctic) is over a kilometer deep. It doesn't matter how long climate change lasts, that mass will never entirely thaw. How much this affects methane release is something I haven't seen addressed. --Similarly, the ocean appears to be good at taking up methane and converting it to CO2 before it gets to the surface (if it ever gets to the surface). It's not clear if there's a saturation point when methane starts burping into the air, or whether all the methane clathrates end up as ocean CO2, which means that more CO2 remains in the air, but also means that we don't get Peter Ward's purple sea and green sky and a repeat of the end Permian.
    --Speaking of End Permian, it's not clear how our carbon releases compare to those of past mass extinctions. A lot of carbon goes into the deep crust or mantle, so it's possible that a lot of the carbon from the End Permian Mass Extinction is currently stable and inaccessible. Or not.

    Anyway, it's complicated. The things to look for are what happens with methane stores at the poles and in the oceans, and what happens with oil politics and Deep Decarbonization. The good news is that, unless Hansen is totally right, we have about 20 years left in which we can seriously affect the climate and possibly not steam our civilized nether regions. That's also the bad news.

    *I'm not sure how bad 2oC change is, because I haven't done that analysis. The Hot Earth Dreams scenario (+8oC) is the collapse of global civilization, a mass extinction, a large majority of humans dying prematurely, and a climate that keeps changing for 100,000+ years. If we "level off" at 2oC, it's a climate that continues to change for ~200 years before returning to 20th Century normal, we'll (hopefully) have a sub-mass extinction, and, well, global civilization probably will collapse, but not quite as hard, fast, or thoroughly. That's good, I think.

    1048:

    It now appears that the race will be Trump vs. Hillary vs. my will to live.

    My daughter was just asking me how hard it is for Bernie to run as an independent. I told her it's very hard. Then she wanted to know what would happen if all the young people who are enthusiastic did a write in. I mentioned with the electoral system we have it would be very hard. But apparently the young folks are very strong for BS. Very. She's 23 and can't stand the thought of either HC or DT.

    Interesting fact. Somehow we got on a Tea Party like mailing list and they put out a "newspaper" every month or few. I normally look through it to see what has the TP crowd all excited then recycle. It's typically 8 to 12 pages. The latest issue got my attention. It had voter registration stats for all 120 counties in North Carolina. In my county, Wake (tied for largest in the state), over the last 4 years there was a net increase of about 1700 new D's registered. About 500 R's. Then it gets interesting. About 2000 Libertarians. Then more interesting. Over 40,000 Unaffiliated. So we have about 90% if newly registered voters who don't give a flip for either of the two big parties. And the Libertarians totaled almost as much as both the D's and R's.

    This is NOT a good trend if you're a part of the two party system. And explains a LOT about what's happening in the US presidential race this year.

    Note this was about the NET CHANGE over the last 4 years, not the total registered. And Wake county is definitely NOT typical of NC but still.

    But if this trend continues my daughter's idea of a write in campaign may just elect a president in another 8 or 12 years.

    1049:

    The Real Deal [tm] argument comes from Understanding why Marx / Smith are still playing their merry little dance in the 21st C.

    Ο Πέτρος ο Γιόχαν κι ο Φράνς
    σε φάμπρικα δούλευαν φτιάχνοντας τανκς
    ο Πέτρος ο Γιόχαν κι ο Φράνς
    αχώριστοι γίνανε φτιάχνοντας τανκς
    ...
    Και πριν μάθουν τι είπε ο Μαρξ
    στρατιώτες τους πήραν στον πόλεμο παν
    ο Πέτρος ο Γιόχαν κι ο Φράνς
    σαν ήρωες έπεσαν κάτω απ’ τα τανκς

    Τρίτος παγκόσμιος [Third World War] (Βασίλης Παπακωνσταντίνου)Γιάννης Νεγρεπόντης, Μάνος Λοΐζος YT: music: 3:08.

    1050:

    I missed a bit off the end there — after all, one would not ever want to be accused of writing opaque incomprehensible posts... That YouTube link that I pointed at is well worth listening to even if one doesn't speak Greek. Play it while reading this translation of the lyrics. The music is a very well-known piece by Manos Loizos, a famous left-wing musician and critic of the Junta. It's about three friends who work in tank factories and eventually die fighting each other, not realising that their true enemies are the bosses who created the tank factories and then set them against each other. Running this link — http://toixo-toixo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/blog-post_30.html — through Google Translate produces a pretty good explanation.

    1051:

    Trump is the JUDAS GOAT, HRC gets 2016, 2020 the Republic dies. Maybe - I think it unlikely.

    IF ( Still a big "IF" ) Trump gets the r-nomination then HRC wins. BUT Suppose the "conventional" right-wing-christians (etc) persuade Rubio to withdraw - there's a real possibility, still of Cruz as candidate & he would stand (IMHO) a better chance of wining against HRC. Be very, very scared, because a Cruz pres means "the republic" (YUCK!) dies in this next term, straight off.

    If, however HRC wins, then she will serve 2 terms if she lives - she'd be 76 or 77 on retirement....

    1052:

    Trump / Christie and so on are all just garbage men to the real Power Players. So you keep on & ON & ON about this ... more little (big) "secrets" & conspiracies & illuminatists & freemasons & jewish "Protocols" & similar fantasy rubbish [NOTE] (not that it isn't dangerous - see my reference to the "protocols" - such things can kill people ...

    WHY NOT FUCKING TELL US DEAR? Or isn't there anything there, at all, because it's all inside your demented head? Which judgement of mine might also be wrong, but we have no way of telling, because you deliberately will not communicate clearly.

    Like I said - grow up ( And you are probably physically between the ages of 25 & 50 )

    [NOTE: Or alternatively a deadly red commonist conspiracy pushed by common purpose & secret marxist cells in league with all the socialist teachers ...

    1053:

    ELEVENTY !! +++

    1054:

    Easy Bunga-Bunga (Trumpy) is a far "safer" for various values of safer, than Nehamiah Scudder in a cheap suit (Cruz) 2 terms of Cruz would destroy what's left of democracy in the USA - the intelligansia, especially scientists with access to foreign passports would leave in droves ....

    1055:

    Very un-clever That would result in a Trump or Cruz win, which really would fuck us all. Twice Once because of US-Nazism - particulary if Cruz is the victor Twice because I don't believe the worst CC-scenarios as promoted by gasdive & heteromeles - yet. But a Cruz or Trump win would result in said scenarios happening. Oh SHIT

    1056:

    Oh, the 'official consensus'...

    The IPCC actually mentions negative forcing in the body of their report, at about the same level as Hansen 2011 and Il 2013. (TFE.4) Amazingly they then completely ignore their own graphs while formulating their conclusions.

    Sadly they lack the internal consistency that we take for granted in SF&F.

    I wish their conclusions were true, but if wishes were horses...

    1057:

    One of the big problems with the religious right (Yahweh as you put it) is all the end times stuff. The eschatology combines short sightedness (none of this real world stuff matters because we're going to be saved by the bell) with fatalism (it's all preordained anyway other than your own personal freedom to accept or reject doctrine). An endless future of endless possibilities is essential to clear understanding and right action. Tian will not desert humanity, though It may arrange for rewards and punishments (in this world) of some persons. Not that every outcome is deserved, sometimes things just happen.

    1058:

    "I wish their conclusions were true, but if wishes were horses..."

    ...they would kick, bite, shit on the lawn and stand on your foot.

    1059:

    Yeah, what you wish for might not be what you expect.

    BTW I wrote Tg when I meant Eg. But what's 6 orders of magnitude between friends?

    1060:

    One thing you really have to watch out for in this is how much you're reading to confirm your fears, and how much you're reading to try and figure out what's going on.

    I agree that the IPCC is conservative and politicized. On the other hand, it's a lot closer to crowd-sourced than Hansen's documents are, which means that a lot of their stuff has been picked over more times by more different people than Hansen's documents have.

    So ultimately, you're stuck trying to figure out if you trust the crowd average or a rock star. I decided the crowd average was (in general) more defensible, but that's my personal preference.

    If you want to whip yourself into a blind, frothing panic, you can start with Hansen and Peter Ward, take their worst cases (which are extremely bad), and then read all the paranoids who have built on it. At that point, you end up in OMG ThE WoRlD is DOOMED!!!! land, which we've been in, now with nuclear war, global cooling in the 1970s, Y2K, Zombie apocalypse, Mayan Apocalypse, various Christian Armageddons, The Rise of the Machines, and so forth. Joining them brings a certain adrenaline rush, but after a short while it's hard to tell whether there's anything underlying the noise.

    In other words, there's a group of people who live to scare themselves silly, and Hansen is their One True Prophet when it comes to the Doom That Is Climate Change.

    Hansen's a good scientist, but science doesn't depend on prophets, it depends on correcting the stuff people get wrong, whether they're reputedly good scientists or not.

    In my limited reading, Hansen doesn't seem to be getting fact-checked enough. This is true for many climate scientists, including some of the ones I used in my book. I'm not seeing where people are trying to replicate their work, and that concerns me.

    You have to be careful around them, and acknowledge that they may be very wrong.

    I'm also not saying that you should believe me, either. What I am suggesting is to read mindfully, watch out for hype, and especially start understanding how your own fears play into what you choose to believe. That's the big lesson I've learned from doing all this.

    1061:

    What you seem to be missing (either from distance or you just don't believe it) is that BS support seems to be coming from both sides of the traditional D/R split. So a write in vote for him might pull equally from both sides.

    Or looking at it another way, when surveying traditional Ds and Rs in the US, neither likes either Donald or Hillary. Even if from their own party.

    My daughter was a part of a political focus group (drawn from random voters) last night and she came away with the fact that this dislike from all sides was very apparent.

    1062:

    Mitt Romney just made a very post-modern speech (it was leaked beforehand, and held at the Hinckley Institute (if you've been paying attention, you'd have noted that a source of some of the New Years' Cologne drama came from an alumni member from there, links previously provided. We See You).

    Amongst all the usual paternal platitudes, he just handed Trump a Golden Ticket: he directly stated "Judge him by his response to this speech". (This is known in the game as handing him the offense).

    Why is this all a total joke?

    Because Bain Capital, with direct Romney involvement, was funded by people who also funded death squads in Latin America. (Ohh, so that's why the Peruvian links were useful!).

    Conspiracy Theory, right?

    It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million -- 40 percent -- of Bain Capital's initial outside funding, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. And they became valued clients.

    "Over the years, these Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital's May investor meetings, and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital," Strachan wrote in his memoir in 2008. Strachan declined to be interviewed for this story.

    When Romney launched another venture that needed funding -- his first presidential campaign -- he returned to Miami.

    "I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent," he said at a dinner in Miami in 2007. "When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira."

    Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

    While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families -- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.

    The death squads committed atrocities on such a mass scale for so small a country that their killing spree sparked international condemnation. From 1979 to 1992, some 75,000 people were killed in the Salvadoran civil war, according to the United Nations. In 1982, two years before Romney began raising money from the oligarchs, El Salvador's independent Human Rights Commission reported that, of the 35,000 civilians killed, "most" died at the hands of death squads. A United Nations truth commission concluded in 1993 that 85 percent of the acts of violence were perpetrated by the right, while the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was supported by the Cuban government, was responsible for 5 percent.

    Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads Huffington Post, Oct 2012

    Most of the foreign investors' money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy.

    Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception.

    The documents don't indicate any wrongdoing, and experts say that such financial vehicles are common for wealthy foreign investors. But the new details come as President Obama has criticized Romney for profiting from Bain Capital's own offshore investment entities, which are unavailable to most Americans.

    The Romney campaign declined to comment on the specifics of Bain's early investors. Romney has argued that his offshore investments are entirely proper, and that he has paid all the U.S. taxes that he owes. The offshore funds do provide tax advantages for foreign investors, allowing Bain to attract billions of dollars.

    "The world of finance is not as simple as some would have you believe," Romney said in an interview this week with National Review Online.

    The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama shell company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his identity. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal.

    About $9 million came from rich Latin Americans, including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami during their country's brutal civil war.

    Bain Capital started with help of offshore investors LA Times, July 2012

    ~

    Can you work out the optics on Romney chiding Trump about American Values [tm] when his entire career was laid on the foundation of [b]Non[/b]-American money from Elite fugitives who funded death squads in a sane world?

    1063:

    If you want to look into the UK angle, I'm sure you remember who Jack Lyons (Sir removed) was.

    Heavily involved with the UK government, Bain Capital and obviously C.American funny-money. (cough Thatcher / Pinochet). Oh, and Mormon Banking (who, for the record, slant % highest in Shadow Government jobs by all Religious affiliations in the USA - there's a reason for the location of the new NSA data centre (Trigger Warning: .mil NSA direct link) being where it is).

    Jack Lyons - Obituary Guardian Feb 2008.

    ~

    So, do you really think that this is all a conspiracy theory?

    Or do, perhaps, imagine that these type of money networks are often far more important than Twitter / Social media drives?

    1064:

    Cromulent? You got that from Chaucer?

    1065:

    Rich people network and lots of them are creeps.

    1066:

    Not a "conspiracy" as such. More a "simple" collection of greedy cruel bastards on the make. Any connection to O North & Iran/Contra I wonder? Also - people know about all this, so, as usual, it's not a very successful conspiracy is it?

    1067:

    Sigh - Not sure if you're ironically even aware of how lazy & banal that reply sounds.

    TIME.

    YOU'RE NOT GOOD AT IT.

    The Romney death squad stuff was in 1983.

    The Iran-Contra scandal didn't even land until 1986 and was 100% "LOL TIN FOIL HAT TROLOLOL" until then, and is still quasi-denied / ignored by a certain segment of the US population.

    After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on November 3, 1986.[49] This was the first public reporting of the weapons-for-hostages deal. The operation was discovered only after an airlift of guns (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was downed over Nicaragua. Eugene Hasenfus, who was captured by Nicaraguan authorities after surviving the plane crash, initially alleged in a press conference on Nicaraguan soil that two of his coworkers, Max Gomez and Ramon Medina, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.[50] He later said he did not know whether they did or not.[51] The Iranian government confirmed the Ash-Shiraa story, and ten days after the story was first published, President Reagan appeared on national television from the Oval Office on November 13, stating:

    And it took until 2008 or so for Bain Capital's links to really get substantiated.

    ~

    So: it was a conspiracy theory until 20 years after the fact.

    ~

    And yes: given the Mormon side of things, you can 100% be assured that the same kinds of dirty paws were involved, or at the very least knew very well what the 5-Eye plans were regarding the region.

    1068:

    No, Homer - well, almost :-) It's a neologism.

    1069:

    This is NOT a good trend if you're a part of the two party system. And explains a LOT about what's happening in the US presidential race this year.

    It's also a sort-of echoed trend in the UK. We don't do the voter registration thing, but it's notable that at the last election, the party that got to form the government -- thanks to FPTP -- got fewer votes than the aggregate that went to "none of the above", i.e. minority parties (parties other than the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats). This trend is most pronounced among the under-30s. (NB: Ignore Scotland, Scotland is different, it's like trying to understand Canadian politics by referring to US voter stats.)

    1070:

    Disagree; I think Trump is vastly more dangerous than most people realize -- although much of the danger arises from his negligent narcissism and impulsivity.

    1071:

    Trump is live in Maine at the moment.

    About three minutes ago he just referenced the Spratley Islands on the subject of trade and is comparing "third world" US airports compared to Dubai / China.

    About one minute ago he just referenced Military Veteran care.

    ~

    Romney's pitch just failed badly.

    Oh, and I suspect the Peanut Gallery really are paying attention.

    1072:

    And ... you may be entirely correct. But, do you realise, you put up stuff in your posts like this: TIME. YOU'RE NOT GOOD AT IT. And then, we ignore you, because you are posturing again, not engaging in the discussion.

    However, I find the involvement of the Morons Mormons very unsettling. Their beliefs are even further batshit-crazy than most religions. And they have lots of money=influence in the USA, don't they?

    1073:

    You may (or may not) be correct, but I am currently of the opinion that the "GOP" will try to get Cruz in ahead of Trump for their nomination. In which case even Trump appears "safe" - do you see what I'm pointing at, maybe not too well? Agree that Trump is a dangerous loonie, but that Cruz is even worse .... ARRRGGGHH! Or something

    1074:

    I've just looked up the dates: Mid/late July for the US party conventions, at which point we will know who the actual contestants will be. Ye gods & little fishes another 4,5 months of this crap!

    1075:

    Agreed, but do you really think he is more dangerous than Cruz? It's a tough call, but we have seen what bigotted fanatics generally do when in power.

    1076:

    Mormons are popular with the US security services because (a) they don't drink, (b) they don't do drugs (not even caffeine), (c) because of the evangelism shtick a lot of them learn to speak a foreign language, and (d) they're generally conservative and overtly heterosexual. In other words they conform to all the 1950s cultural shibboleths on the security clearance checklists.

    (Said checklists are a whole lot more relaxed about certain things these days -- being LGBT or disabled or an ethnic minority isn't a disqualification and may actually be advantageous for an agency looking to ace its diversity checklist -- but the "no drugs" bit is still mandatory and the "speaks foreign and socially/politically leans conservative" is seen as useful/conforming to institutional culture.)

    1077:

    The Mormons are core recruiting grounds for NSA / CIA / Secret Service etc for many reasons. (Loyal, don't drink / use drugs[1], extremely conditioned and used to hierarchies, the whole missionary zeal thing).

    They also detest Cruz and the Dominionists more than they hate Trump.

    [1]Prescription Medications are fine though.

    1078:

    nose wiggle

    Thank you.

    1079:

    And... I got ninja'd by host.

    :D

    1080:

    The convention haggling is only significant when there's a major contention in play. Otherwise it's basically horse-trading over who gets the VP ticket. I expect on the Democrat side Bernie will get a bit of say on the #2 slot in return to loaning Hillary his young and enthusiastic base (insofar as they're biddable all).

    Cruz ... is deeply scary, and Cruz with the ability to pack the Supreme Court is actively dangerous -- IIRC a couple of right-leaning justices are going to need to step down soon due to age, so he could swing the court Jesuswards for a generation if he became president and had a compliant (Republican/Tea Party) Senate.

    But Trump is differently scary: not a Jeezus Person but a narcissistic demagogue with a vindictive streak. If he's willing to pander to the Jeezus People as well in order to get things done that'd be the turd puree atop the ahit sandwich: he could actually be worse than Cruz because at least Cruz has a narrow (Dominionist) agenda.

    1081:

    Hmm, now's here's something very interesting: a Trump supporter's candid and quite self-aware video (ninja'd from elsewhere - although the quotation to follow is somewhat more familiar to me) regarding Fox / CNN:

    You are dying on the vine, everything is collapsing around you... and you still don't see it... you're dinosaurs

    The media has lost us

    Now, if it's genuine (and in the Land of the Dark Glass or Plumber Joe, you can never be sure - I might sniff around it, has perhaps too many little chills to it, but he might just have untrained talents), it's a good snapshot.

    Trump has cured a % of Republicans of Fox News / CNN. (Actually, something else did, as stated, Trump is the response to that loss).

    1082:

    The problem with Mormons, at least in the CIA (this from some CIA biographies), is that they've generally spent most of their lives with other Mormons. While they're great at getting security clearances, many of them are crap at blending in in other cultures, because they have little or no experience or interest in getting intimate with people who are vastly unlike themselves. Yes, this goes with the CIA's conventional HUMINT failure mode, but there you have it.

    Mind you, even the vaunted British have had that problem (see the use of Pundits in the Great Game), and the Soviets had problems with their spies defecting, which is how the CIA won their part of the Cold War (more spies came west than went east, once the final score was tallied up in the 1990s). Actually, one could argue that spying in general is a high risk, low reward sort of thing, but the glamour always seduces governments into trying it.

    1083:

    I have my own theory about how to do HUMINT effectively (hint: the minimum effective timeframe for planning is ~30 years and you really need to apply some in-depth study to successful indoctrination in covert faiths), but hey, talking about that would just spoiler the plot of EMPIRE GAMES.

    On CIA Mormons: a friend of mine was a British journalist in Pakistan in the frontier territories for a while in the early 80s. One day, the US embassy asked him to give a brief orientation talk to some new arrivals. A pair of painfully clean-shaven guys in black suits with lapel pin crosses and buzz-cuts who were practically wearing neon blinking signs that said Company. Mormons, too. The best advice he could give them was to not even bother -- they didn't speak any of the local languages, including Russian, didn't have a clue about the local culture, didn't have any contacts to develop, and would probably make some local for-profit kidnapper's day if they tried to fix any of the above while on-station.

    1084:

    There are people making exactly that argument now in the US, that Cruz is at least constrained by his identification as a conservative Republican, but that Trump is not similarly constrained. (Paraphrasing.) e.g. at LGM : Would Trump as president be significantly worse than Cruz or Rubio? (Paul Campos) Trump is not merely a narcissistic megalomaniac of an extreme kind: he’s a narcissistic megalomaniac who isn’t constrained by any political institutions, as even an “anti-establishment” conventional presidential candidate like Cruz or Sanders would be.

    What's especially interesting here is that these arguments are even appearing. This will be a very unsettling election cycle for Americans. Hatred of Hillary Clinton is also present, and with 20 years of curated negativity and conspiracy theory to draw upon.

    1085:

    Incidentally, I have it on high authority (from a botanist classmate of mine who is Mormon), that although the Mormons won't touch coffee, they love chocolate. And yes, many of them are perfectly aware of theobromine and its similarities to caffeine. Thing is, chocolate isn't on the banned list.

    1086:

    Been prowling around Hugo stuff, Trump-Le-Trump has been sucking all the air out of everything recently.

    My favorite?

    Actually, it's not Latin at all. I don't speak Latin. I speak Italian. And it's not actually proper Italian either, which would be Un'opera della vita eterna, but in the hallowed tradition of my fallen intellectual hero, Umberto Eco, I abbreviated it, then added an extra A to give it a Latinate flavor. I not only didn't "just write out strings of straight dictionary words", I didn't use a dictionary at all.

    A certain puppy is now disavowing his Latin pretensions.

    I claim my scalp, I knew the actual research into the Medieval source would cause his ego to shy away from the fact he's actually just a little plagiarist.

    You can find that either here or on 770, I forget where I did it.

    No Dear: you didn't use a dictionary, you copy/pasted it from a Religious text.

    Umberto Eco though?

    You mean the man who infamously wrote: Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

    Oh Summer Child, stay safe, you're practically dripping with BBQ sauce.

    1087:

    Round Up / Fleshing out:

    Food limitation of sea lion pups and the decline of forage off central and southern California Royal Society, 2nd March 2016 full text - specifically referencing mackerel / anchovies, El Nino and over-fishing.

    The darkening of the Greenland ice sheet: trends, drivers, and projections (1981–2100) The Cryosphere 3rd March 2016 - open access. Hint: bad news.

    The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders The Nation, 3rd March 2016

    Honduras: Indigenous Leader Murdered Despite Police Protection Telesur, 3rd March 2016

    ~

    So, hmm.

    1088:

    "...reading to confirm..."

    Yes, a super tricky trap. I have no idea how to correct for this. I've trained myself in this exact direction. My hobbies include diving and aviation. In those sports I spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong and planning to either make sure it can't, or make sure that if it does, I have a plan of action that will get me out of that. I actively research danger.

    The current situation reminds me rather disturbingly of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401

    The people in charge are concentrating on their assigned tasks (being re-elected, managing an economy or company etc) and have been ignoring the warning chimes that are 'somebody else's problem'. Even knowing that they've sent away that somebody to do something else doesn't seem to have resulted in realising that by doing so they've made that 'their' problem.

    I wouldn't actually say that Hansen is the rockstar on which the global dimming idea is based. I've known about it for decades. Indeed it's at the root of the 1970's "global cooling" that you mentioned as one of the panic buttons. It's included in the IPCC report in the body, but ignored in the conclusion.

    You say Hansen hasn't been fact checked, but Hansen's work was really in itself a fact check, confirming earlier work. Subtracting his work doesn't really change anything. Indeed the later work of Il places a higher value (1-3 C) on industrial particulate cooling than Hansen. That's because Hansen looked only at the direct reflectivity of the particles, while Il included the effect of particles on cloud formation.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50192/abstract

    I would really like to be wrong. I had been concerned about a moist greenhouse but I'm no longer worried, as models seem to say we're close but unlikely to go that way. I think I'm willing to be reassured if there are any reassuring facts.

    1089:

    Background:

    Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.

    First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” Clinton writes. “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

    This may not come as a surprise to those who followed the post-coup drama closely. (See my commentary from 2009 on Washington’s role in helping the coup succeed here, here and here.) But the official storyline, which was dutifully accepted by most in the media, was that the Obama administration actually opposed the coup and wanted Zelaya to return to office.

    Hard choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath Aljahzeera Sept 2014

    ~

    Yeah.

    Having just watched (no links, you don't need to see it) a Nanny in Moscow shouting anti-Russian / Assad rhetoric while clutching the head of a severed child and some other stuff.

    It's getting a little hard to see the Light here Boys.

    1090:

    You've totally ignored the localized temp variants now confirmed in the Siberian / Arctic band which are trending +4oC / 12oC at the moment.

    You're as bad as Greg.

    No, it's not a fairy tale: bad things happen. And will.

    1091:

    Wrt. puppies, I Can't Be Bothered: this year I am sticking my fingers in my ears, ignoring the hugo ballot (but nominating, just to dilute the puppy slates) and not even going to worldcon (Kansas City is not on my bucket list of places to go before I die).

    Once E. Pluribus Hugo passes at the WSFS business meeting, and the next worldcon is in Helsinki, I'll change my tune.

    1092:

    Of course.

    nose wiggle

    Ye, but scalp hunting is fun - or at least, in "Alpha Male" land, extremely amusing to watch play out. Having to discard one of your core pretensions - I think that's apparently extremely painful for male egos or something?

    And Wake of Vultures is actually a book I can see the entire Rainbow enjoying. Light, progressive but also American-centered and respectful to the entire J. Wayne mythology.

    Has legs for bridging conversations at any rate.

    1093:

    Actually, I fully understand the difference between local and global, I've also been trying to make sure the word "global" is used as an adjective.

    And also, I don't believe in fearmongering. I believe in understanding.

    And yes, I've been watching what's been happening in Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia, as best I can. So far, this looks within the crude projection, which is that the Arctic in winter warms up more than any other part of the planet. They've been having 90oF summer days for years now in any case. Anyone who's seen a summary of the fossil record (Gators in Greenland, news at -65 million years ago) would tell you that this is what happens when the planet goes into greenhouse mode.

    1094:

    Sorry.

    I've been trawling places that are either Dark or pretty much twilight for 72 hrs, it rubs off.

    To answer your dog thing, and expand the cat thing:

    Our Faces in the Dog's Brain: Functional Imaging Reveals Temporal Cortex Activation during Perception of Human Faces PLOS: One 2nd March 2016

    Behavioural Signs of Pain in Cats: An Expert Consensus PLOS: One Feb 24th 2016

    Both are full article: PLOS seems to be embracing this post-paywall thing, a positive sign.

    But, at the very least, we're fully post-behaviouralism now.

    1095:

    And yes:

    Dogs in MRI machines is striking the Soviet Dog-in-Spacesuit meme down as much cuter. (First link).

    1096:

    I'll suggest three things.

    One is that, to deal with fear and anxiety, start doing mindfulness meditation. The point is to understand your own fear reactions as reactions by studying them as objectively as possible inside your own mind and body. I started doing this after I finished Hot Earth Dreams, and it really does help. There's a difference between objectively understanding risks and mitigating them, and freaking yourself out with hypotheticals. Mindfulness meditation helps you understand this difference.

    The second is that I suggest pulling some of the old books and reading. Check out works by David Archer and Curt Stager (actually, I use their model in Hot Earth Dreams). Actually, read Hot Earth Dreams, not just because I could use the money, but more because I tried to put as many references in there as possible, so that you could track them down more easily. I also tried to show how things interact, at least to the best of my understanding.

    It's also worth checking what others are saying. That's one reason I'm hesitant to freak out about methane clathrates, because I'm seeing divergent answers from different researchers.

    With dimming, the basic idea (that fossil fuel emissions are dimming sunlight, and when those go away, we get fried) looks scary, and it may indeed be scary. On the other hand, deserts are expanding (that means more particulates in the air from dust storms), and forest fires are likely to expand as the climate changes, at least in the short term. Does this mean that global dimming is a huge problem? It's hard to tell, and that's the problem. It might be, it might not be, and worse, it looks like it heats up Asia and cools the US. Still, I'd put it with methane. Keep an eye on it, but don't peg your Doom on it just yet.

    1097:

    Het.

    No. And I will pull the MsC card here.

    NASA: Drought in Middle East Was Worst in 900 Years Haaretz 2nd March 2016

    NASA Finds Drought in Eastern Mediterranean Worst of Past 900 Years NASA March 1st 2016

    We're past the platitudes of CNN / Fox: we're into Game Theory and large scale Diaspora.

    If you can't mentally deal with the concept of multi-billion gigacide, then step away.

    Your novel (was fun) is not an answer to The Desert of the Real.

    This doesn't mean succumb to fear, hate, paranoia etc, but at this point: you're not dealing with your shitty little chicken-little stuff, this is Big-Boy Land.

    6mt-4mt 35% loss in 15 years.

    If you know what that actually represents (given % discard in commercial fishing) you'd be very, very, very scared.

    ~

    So, no.

    Please just step away. You should be scared at this point, it's not even funny.

    1098:

    Oh, and that's 6mt - 4mt with expansion of markets and all the tricks of the trade (including massive new trawlers).

    And fish stocks don't work on a log scale: they just crash.

    Here's a test:

    Name the Math / Ecology models of sudden crash in such situations.

    1099:

    Awww, you want me to be afraid?

    Sorry kitty, I've been contemplating >90% human mortality in the 21st Century for a couple of years now.

    But you go ahead and keep scaring yourself. One day you'll figure out why I abandoned that path.

    1100:

    I'm not afraid; you're just spouting bollocks.

    ~

    Here's the serious answer: you're not qualified to give platitudes, so don't.

    You've hit your personal DK wall, so that's fine.

    It's ok to admit that your personal Mind can't do this.

    The fact you can't immediately link to the Ecological Crash / Math sources says everything.

    Given you're referencing your research, I was hoping you'd blaze through and Shine with a multitude of links.

    Tip: That's the (bullshit) test.

    ~

    The actual issue is that, unlike say the Russians 1917-1989 you've no idea what massive scale gigacide does, so you've essentially moved to a Trump / Fox News level of comprehension.

    THAT'S THE JOKE

    ~

    And no.

    6mt - 4mt.

    I bet you didn't even look at the documents showing the flat rate extraction and then the down-turn and why I referenced all those "stable but not improving" sound bites.

    Again: do you have children?

    1101:

    For the record:

    Oxford Warwick Keele [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]

    ~

    Meta-meta-meta-meta lesson:

    When you instill a narcissistic level sense of ID within a populace coupled with a pathological Bernays psychological model of extraction alongside a totally amoral MBA culture and a sociological a-social meme that society is a "Red in Tooth and Nail"...

    Guess what?

    You're not fucking Human anymore.

    THAT'S THE JOKE

    1102:

    And Trump - Clinton 2017 race.

    Mad Max: Fury Road - Opening Scene YT: film: 5:40

    Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar.

    1103:

    At this point you should reference the "It's not your fault" video immediately.

    And then accept that you don't deserve it.

    Trump isn't interesting: it's the fact that about 4,000,000,000 people are going to die in the next 50-100 years and your Mind response is:

    "Meh. Who gives a shit".

    A Knights Tale: You have been weighed YT: film: 0:35

    ~

    And you're the fucking "good" guys.

    1104:

    Personally, I don't know how to weight the various estimates, and don't see much point in investing the time to figure it out. Yet, I have noticed that (relatively) mainstream estimates tend to follow the same pattern as state news coverage of war going wrong - "Heroic German advance in Moscow" followed a bit later with "Heroic German advance in Warsaw" and eventually "Heroic German advance near Berlin". The good news seems to be consistently getting worse.

    1105:

    You're about 20 years behind.

    You're Fucked

    And if you missed the references, due to a short-sighted and aggressively dumb-fuck sense of entitlement you kinda handed the PREDATORS the keys to that box called: "Who gets to fucking survive".

    Because, no: taking the enlightenment and just spanking / ignoring it all couldn't happen.

    So instead you did that Ayn Rand thing and wanted to burn it all down.

    ~

    Spoilers: She wasn't human.

    And you ain't either now.

    (It's about Hearing / Smell / Visuals. You're not even H.S.S. anymore... warned you.)

    1106:

    REAL META.

    Never threaten something you don't understand.

    p.s.

    This is the teenage phase.

    Adult is something else, you utter, utter, utter, sociopathic cucks.

    1107:

    Ignoring all the content-free ranting from HB/CD ( I might come back tomorrow ) Really horrid thought:

    Convention might fix a Trump-as-pres Cruz-as-veep ticket - or the other way around. Seriously nasty

    1108:

    Mid/late July for the US party conventions, at which point we will know who the actual contestants will be.

    For well over 50 years the conventions have been mostly coronations. By the end of March we will likely know for certain who the two at the top of the tickets will be. I'm sure wikipedia has lots of details about how the system over here works so I'll not try and bore everyone with a long explanation.

    1109:

    You may (or may not) be correct, but I am currently of the opinion that the "GOP" will try to get Cruz in ahead of Trump for their nomination.

    Back last summer before Trump started taking off and Cruz was a preliminary poll leader the GOP was really trying to figure out how to create an "anyone but Cruz" path.

    What you don't understand is the GOP really doesn't like either. At all. Which is why they are tied up in such a knot. They don't want Trump but knocking him down may result in Cruz. Which they also don't want.

    1110:

    The good news is getting consistently worse, and don't mistake me. When I did my simple-minded little model approach, I simply took what we were doing back in 2012 and assumed it would keep going, just as the IPCC said it would. At the time I thought this was extreme, but now it's looking too conservative. When I do the revision, I'll probably change things to go with some 2016 papers that I'm reading now.

    However, the future's not set yet, and the 2016 US election does matter quite a bit. If Republicans get control of all three houses, then it's going to be harder to get control of global GHG emissions, and we're likely to collapse the RCP 8.5 climate change pathway from 100 years (per IPCC 5) down to 50 years or less. Long story short, that's the end of civilization for at a few centuries and likely a few millennia. Everything cultural we care about will disappear, even if our species survives. It's not going to all fall apart at once, but we're probably going to keep using fossil fuels to deal with crisis after crisis, thereby making each subsequent crisis worse, until we can't deal and mostly die off.

    While I don't think Clinton is the gods' gift on climate change, she's a realist, and if she can save lives and billions of dollars in emergency expenses by jacking the country onto as many renewables as we can get, she'll push for it. That's my hope.

    In any case, the bottom line is that the more the US adapts to climate change and decarbonizes, the less certain the future is. That uncertainty is huge in the long run: centuries of climate change with 2-4oC initial global increase versus hundreds of thousands of years of climate change, starting with an 8-12oC initial global increase.

    As to whether global civilization can be saved, the simple answer is that what we have now can't be saved. It's breaking as you read this. The better question is whether we can use the pieces to build a more resilient successor civilization that will hold most of us ("mild" climate change), or whether civilization will become impossible due to lack of resource surpluses to feed full-time specialists and organizers (severe climate change).

    Civilization breaking and being rebuilt sounds scary, but it's worth remembering that we've been breaking and rebuilding civilization repeatedly over the last 200 years, and nobody inside it went insane or died of culture shock in the process. Granted, the breaking and rebuilding was easier when we called it "Progress," but we've lived through a lot of change in the last century.

    The future's not going to be easy, because life without oil is almost certainly going to demand a lot more physical labor, 21st Century migrations are going to dwarf anything we've seen before in history, the climate's going to stay chaotic for the rest of our lives, and a lot of people are going to lose everything they cherish. Still, it's possible that civilization will survive, and it's worth striving for that chance as best we can.

    Trying beats the alternative, which is Hot Earth Dreams, desolation for a few hundred years minimum (and more likely a few thousand years), human populations measured in the millions, not billions, for many millennia to come, and a world that's much less diverse than it is now.

    Hope this helps.

    1111:

    Would Trump take a VP nomination? Seems a bit of a downer for someone of his (apparent) ego.

    1112:

    Have I recommended Soft Landing to you before? I think you might enjoy it.

    http://www.btrc.net/softlanding

    soft landing is a boardgame for today. Each player controls a nation or group of nations, and is trying to keep their own people happy in a world of declining resources and escalating calamities.

    You can work towards new era tech to help solve the world's various problems, or try to simply have the most stuff when it all falls apart due to Catastrophes. And you can win either way. Political crises, ecological disasters, economic meltdowns, all are things your nation's lifestyle can contribute to. Do you work to solve the problems, or simply shift the blame and hope the cost falls on someone else?

    The mix of nations, number of players and personal strategies makes for a lot of replay potential. Backstab, manipulate, cooperate or do all three. soft landing is not a preachy game. You simply make the choices that best move you towards your goals, whatever those goals might be. Your ethics (or lack of them) only matter in the context of everyone else's choices, making it a Prisoner's Dilemma on a global scale.

    1113:

    As someone marooned in NJ, I would much rather face UK political issues, than the ones here

    1114:

    We're in a pretty bad place when Ted Cruz comes knocking and that knocking sounds good.

    1115:

    I think you did, Robert, and thanks for both recommendations. My problem is most of my friends aren't gamers (sad trombone). If I can assemble a new gang, it's high on my list.

    1116:

    Interesting. Without mentioning Altemeyer, this article says that Trump voters correlate as strongly authoritarian. http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

    Actually, there's some interesting stuff in here about American authoritarianism, and since it doesn't reference Altemeyer's work directly, it's a slightly different take than we've seen before.

    1117:

    The view from Darkest Arkansas (Lots of Trump yard signs on the drive into town...).

    What is deeply scary about a Trump/Hilary cage match, is the way US politics work. A win for the Donald probably has enough coat tails to maintain Republican control of the Senate.

    The Baggage has, well, baggage and does not really inspire anyone under the age of sixty. The Democrats are so shambolic here and in Texas (Relatives), well, in Arkansas only ONE (One) of four House of Representatives seats is being contested. And Texas is not any better, I just don't have those numbers at my fingertips. IIUC, all the "Deep Red" Territories are similarly neglected. I listened to a Democratic Operative tell the County Party Committee Meeting that he was going to win the three State legislative districts we have candidates for by registering new Minority voters. But he could not bother to sit through the rest of the committee meeting.

    So the "Patriot" Caucasus will continue to hold the entire country to ransom, and State legislatures are busy dismantling the state funded portions of the Safety Net.

    Anyone know a billionaire we can get to fund a "None of the above" option (movement) for State Ballots?

    1118:

    This is from redstate, an internet version of Fox News. They are very pro Ted Cruz and despise Trump. This is how they view Trump. Kinda sums up what my friends who are Trump supporters say about him, only they say it in a positive way.

    http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/02/29/donald-trump-candidacy-still-doesnt-bother-things-can-always-much-worse/

    1119:

    I was about to to leave "A song for Don T. Rump: That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", but not entirely sure the whole song fits, but mostly seems to. But then thought that the chorus of Bowie's Big Brother certainly does wrt Drumpf's followers. "Someone to claim us, Someone to follow. Someone to shame us, Some brave Apollo*. Someone to fool us, Someone like you, We want you Big Brother"

    Though considering the locale of tonight's debate, perhaps his "Panic In Detroit"?

    *only in his mind.

    1121:

    Incredible #Arctic warmth so far this year as sea ice continues to break daily records! #climate Twitter 26th Feb 2016

    Watch out! Satellite data shows Feb setting crazy heat records. 'Whopping,' says Dr. Spencer Twitter March 1st 2016

    UAH V6 Global Temperature Update for Feb. 2016: +0.83 deg. C (new record) Roy Spencer, March 1st 2016

    Update, March 3, 2016: Since this post was originally published, the heat wave has continued. As of Thursday morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in recorded history, and likely the first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago. That mark has long been held (somewhat arbitrarily) as the point above which climate change may begin to become "dangerous" to humanity. It's now arrived—though very briefly—much more quickly than anticipated. This is a milestone moment for our species. Climate change deserves our greatest possible attention.

    Our Hemisphere’s Temperature Just Reached a Terrifying Milestone

    ~

    Remind me again what Paris was about?

    CHILDREN OF MEN

    1122:

    The carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers and the 7th Fleet flagship have sailed into the disputed waters in recent days, according to military officials. The carrier strike group is the latest show of force in the tense region, with the U.S. asserting that China is militarizing the region to guard its excessive territorial claims.

    Stennis is joined in the region by the cruisers Antietam and Mobile Bay, and the destroyers Chung-Hoon and Stockdale. The command ship Blue Ridge, the floating headquarters of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, is also in the area, en route to a port visit in the Philippines. Stennis deployed from Washington state on Jan. 15.

    The U.S. just sent a carrier strike group to confront China Navy Times, 3rd March 2016

    ~

    Tell me about the waters of your homeworld, Usul.

    1123:

    For the gallery who aren't involved in the "controversy" over Climate, Roy Spencer is a prominent & fully paid up (bribed) member of the "anti" camp.

    “I’ve always cautioned fellow skeptics that it’s dangerous to claim no warming,” Spencer said in a phone conversation. “There has been warming. The question is how much warming there’s been and how does that compare to what’s expected and what’s predicted.”

    February’s record-shattering satellite reading, the highest in nearly 40 years of measurement, joins recent ground-based temperature readings in reaching new heights.

    February was Earth’s warmest month in the satellite record WaPo 1st March 2016

    All a bit late for a Damascus moment.

    1124:

    All very frightening, and grist for horror stories. Clearly massive climate change is inevitable. But it has been very warm before and life survived. Was there a clathrate meltoff at the PE thermal maximum? No, the volcanos stopped, the Earth changed again, life went on. The whole thing gave us many new species that we now cherish. Humans are particularly adaptable and will survive as a species. However, many populations are living very close to the edge of survival, largely because community leaders, holy men, and ancestor worshipping traditions tell them to despite the fact that they are living in precarious conditions. So they will die in droves most likely. Responsibility for this is remarkably widespread. It's unfair that they are in these conditions and that our industry is making them worse, but throwing babies at us does not help at all. Understood, telling brown people to stop overbreeding sounds racist but really I'm not callous about killing your genes, I'm callous about killing your lovely culture. Yes, we set the forest fire, but if you insist on driving busloads of people into it you will be responsible for their deaths. Once we patch everything up and get back on track with the real deal, expanding into every corner of the universe, you can have a starship too, and good luck, may the best reactionary win.

    The south china sea is a matter for the UN, not the US. It's just like the Ukraine and Syria. Not our problem, why do we care? Seriously I like Obama a lot but what in the world is he doing?

    1125:

    I can't really parse your tone here; the reactionary line suggests extreme snark, but who knows in post-Trump America.

    Humans are particularly adaptable and will survive as a species...

    This is predicated entirely on how you define "human".

    ~

    The Navy moves thing is the big-boy version of NK's missile tests.

    China encroaches, steals fishing areas: US moves ships between ports in nearby shipping lanes as reminder who rules the waves.

    It's fairly predictable at this point.

    1126:

    China's encroachment and the USA's response is scary, I agree, but not as much as the situation in Iraq and Syria. The USA military-industrial machine (including NATO) is ignoring the fact that Putin was elected precisely because the Russians were fed up with its encroachment and being pushed around by the USA and its lackeys, so elected a strong man to take a stand before they are forced into the last ditch. The USA seems to be prepared to go to war in order to continue their agenda of destroying Russia as a power. And, with Turkey occupying Iraq, and bombing/shelling Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, we have a potential trigger, as in 1914. Putin is rational; Erdogan isn't.

    http://europe.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-how-defeat-428755?rm=eu

    1127:

    Almost, I think a very slight gloss on that might help (??) Putin is rational - but he's also a bully & a thug, yet he recognises some limits. Erdogan is not - because he's a supposedly "moderate" islamist ( remebemr he praised Adolf not so long ago. Euwwww ....

    1128:

    Since there were references to cyber-war up-thread, presented without comment:

    Syria has suffered a massive power blackout across the country due to "unknown reasons", state media said.

    Officials were cited as saying power had been cut in all provinces and teams were trying to determine the cause.

    The electricity ministry said power was being restored and service would resume by midnight (22:00 GMT), TV reported.

    In most parts of war-torn Syria, electricity is already available only two to four hours a day, if at all. However, nationwide blackouts are rare.

    Meanwhile, the UN's special envoy said a partial truce that began on Saturday was holding but remained fragile.

    Staffan de Mistura told reporters in Geneva that violence had been "greatly reduced", despite incidents in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Latakia and Damascus. "Success is not guaranteed but progress is visible," he added.

    Both the opposition and the government have accused each other of violating the cessation of hostilities agreement brokered by the US and Russia, which does not include the jihadist groups Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra Front.

    Syria conflict: Massive power blackout across country BBC Mar 3rd 2016

    1129:

    Humans are particularly adaptable and will survive as a species...

    This is predicated entirely on how you define "human".

    I think it's clear from the use of the term species (a group of individuals that is defined by the fact that they can interbreed but they can't breed with individuals from outside the group).

    1130:

    I think biological reductionism in this case is horribly naive.

    In a SF sense, the Axlotl tanks of Dune satisfy your conditional.

    1131:

    Hadn't seen any footage of this before, now it is on my must see list

    1132:

    The fact that such leaders / organisations are bullies and thugs goes without saying, and that applies to all of Russia, the USA, the UK and China. While Obama and Cameron don't seem to be, personally, the organisations they head have done a lot of bullying and thuggery on their watch.

    One really scary scenario is that Turkey and Saudi Arabia decide to go it alone, more-or-less declaring open war, including against the Syrian government, the Kurds and (effectively) the Shia and Iraq, Iran and Russia are dragged in and arm the other sides, Turkey responds by closing the Dardanelles to Russia, the USA/NATO responds by saying that any hostile action by Russia is an attack on NATO, and the shit would hit the fan.

    1133:

    ?Subject?

    Anyhow, Ted Cruz is toast:

    Ted Cruz eats a booger at debate! 3rd March 2016 YT: media: 0:18 Trigger Warning: does what it says on the tin

    Someone is fast, already has it's own website: Boogergate.

    Ted Cruz the Booger Eater 4th March 2016

    1134:

    And yes: Penis jokes & eating boogers.

    100% Muppet Show.

    1135:

    Forgot: reference for Romney / Mormons hating Cruz / Dominionists.

    From speech transcript:

    If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

    Transcript of Mitt Romney’s Speech on Donald Trump NYT 3rd March 2016

    The mentioning last and not-so-sublty-stating that Cruz or "whichever one of the other two" is basically vile hissing in the hyper-polite Mormon mannerisms.

    1136:

    I think biological reductionism in this case is horribly naive.

    It's neither. It just emphasizes the difference between species survival and cultural survival. As I've stated before, cultural survival from gigadeaths is unlikely.

    1137:

    Nah, they'll likely claim it wasn't a booger after all but just a piece of foam. And Tea Party speakers are expected to have foam at their mouths, no?

    1138:

    Cruz / Dominionists aren't generally in the same faction as Tea-Partiers, who skew more to the Libertarian / Randian end of the spectrum.

    Squeeky-clean Alpha Male Patriarchs can't look like children who need their noses wiping.

    To expand a little on this: if you read what I type literally you'd form a very different opinion of if you read it as satire / roleplay (with the answer to the question that people are posing to Trump: at what point does acting like a racist mean you are actually a racist?).

    Note my reference to Mormon hyper-politeness.

    Matthew 15:10-20

    And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person...”

    But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

    This is why Mormons / Domionists etc etc are all incredibly mannered and the deepest insult in the South is "Bless Your Heart".

    Of course, a literal reading means that as long as you say things politely Jesus still loves you / you can still speak with his authority (a much more interesting proposition) and dogwhistle to your heart's content.

    My response: John 3:20

    Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

    It's no accident that these types follow the words of Matthew (the most simplistic of the four gospels) over John (the most theologically sophisticated).

    ~

    Serious response: all the snarling is meant with no malice - it's a form of tourettes, really.

    And it's also a translation of how I perceive Paris and so on: denial of Reality = screaming nonsense into the void or polite dogwhistling that "it's ok if we're on the life boat".

    Anyhow: a segue into what an actual "Solider of G_D" would look like is probably going to be a bit weird.

    1139:

    "One who devotes his attention to words but is tardy in conduct will certainly not be listened to, even though he argues well. One who expends a lot of energy but brags about his achievement will certainly not be chosen, even though he works hard. One who is wise discriminates in his mind, but does not complicate his words. Exert strength, but do not brag about achievement. In this way, reputation and praise spread through the world. In speaking, devote attention to wisdom and not to amount; devote attention to clear analysis and not to eloquence. Not to be wise and not to analyze clearly, but to be indolent in oneself is to take the opposite road. Goodness that is not paramount within the mind is not enduring. Conduct that is not debated within oneself is not established. Reputation cannot be treated lightly and still be achieved. Praise cannot be sought cunningly and still be established. A noble man must match his words with his deeds. Nobody who concentrates on seeking profit and carelessly disregards his reputation can ever be deemed an officer by the world."
    --Mozi, "Cultivating the Self"

    1140:

    To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.

    Social media data could be goldmine for predicting mental illness uOttawa 1st March 2016

    Recipients of the 2015 Strategic Partnership Grants for Projects and 2014 Strategic Partnership Grants for Networks Competitions

    Diana Inkpen University of Ottawa (Computer Science) Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Information Retrieval

    ~

    In brief: you either fake politeness or a braying donkey - trusting people with this tech is actual insanity.

    1141:

    Abstract - In this paper we explore the task of mood classification for blog postings. We propose a novel approach that uses the hierarchy of possible moods to achieve better results than a standard machine learning approach. We also show that using sentiment orientation features improves the performance of classification. We used the Livejournal blog corpus as a dataset to train and evaluate our method.

    Using Sentiment Orientation Features for Mood Classification in Blogs PDF 2009

    Given that in this very page there's tracked a contender for the US top-dog prize's links to the assassination of activists, I think my style is somewhat sensible.

    I'm talking about 1983 only, of course.

    Shub! Shub!

    1142:

    Life surviving isn't the problem; the problem is whether our distributed global agricultural system will survive. No industrial scale agriculture? Then we get gigadeaths. We already dodged the bullet once in the latter half of the 20th century thanks largely to Norman Barlaug and is fellows' Green Revolution -- but while we can probably adapt to warming climate it's anybody's guess whether our crops can be modified to cope and/or transplanted into more thermally optimal biomes.

    Widespread agricultural failures will break global commerce and industry which in turn will totally fuck our tech-intensive agriculture. A fall back to subsistance peasant agriculture isn't practical without far fewer mouths to feed, never mind climate adaptation: it's a double-whammy.

    As to what Obama is doing in the South China Sea, I'd say he's playing the hand he was dealt by successive previous administrations. You can trace it back to the Late Unpleasantness in Manchuria: the point is, the USA can't unilaterally solve the situation, and won't make things better by withdrawing, either. (If I thought that would work I'd be yelling for it.)

    1143:

    it's anybody's guess whether our crops can be modified to cope and/or transplanted into more thermally optimal biomes.

    Alas, no.

    We know for sure we can't do that, particularly under the constraint of "enough crop every year". Weather is a chaotic system; predicting next year's rainfall (and thus what to plant, when) is one of the things we know we can't do. You can fake it on historical patterns but the historical patterns are increasingly irrelevant. There's going to be large crop failures in essential food grains. I don't think this decade. Wouldn't take a bet on it. You can substantially get around this but you have to do those things -- greenhouses, rationing, yeast in vats, whatever you decide to undertake -- before there's a crop failure.

    I commend to the attention of all, but especially those dwelling in the Isle of the Mighty,

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01393

    which is the accepted and massively peer-reviewed and decidedly toned down in its language version.

    Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield multi-meter sea level rise in about 50, 100 or 200 years. Recent ice melt doubling times are near the lower end of the 10-40 year range, but the record is too short to confirm the nature of the response is far from the most alarming statement in the abstract.

    This is, alas, relevant not for making Peterborough -- the UK one -- a seaside down, but for what it's going to do to the weather. All that fresh water does things to the ocean current that distribute heat.

    1144:

    What Graydon said.

    There are two constraints here. The big, obvious, techie one is that crop production (e.g. the amount of food you get out) falls precipitously as the crop nears the upper end of its thermal range. This is to be expected, as most systems start to fail before getting lethally overheated.

    This is the one that the genetic engineers and plant (and animal) breeders are cranking on, trying to tinker with everything from heat-shock proteins to water use efficiency to get new crops (and presumably) new breeds that can produce well at higher temperatures, with less water, more salt, etc. And good luck to them.

    The second constraint is uncertainty. Bill McKibben documented this already in African farmers. The people he spoke to until recently had a known growing season. They'd plant, the rains would come, they'd get the multiple rain storms they needed for their crops to mature, they'd thenharvest enough to feed their families through the year, then they'd go off to seek season employment in the dry season. With climate change, the rains were missing or coming out of season. As a result, they were stuck planting new crops almost continually. Most of the time their crops failed, and occasionally they'd get enough yield from something to see them through the year. Off-farm employment was a fading memory, so they had little or no cash. Yields were down, and they were stuck at bare subsistence.

    To my mind, this is where civilization crashes. Certainly I expect people to be able to survive as subsistence farmers on the above model, but with little or no surplus, it's impossible to keep cities and towns fed.

    The solution, to the extent there is one, is two-fold. One is for civilization (that's us, cats) to go for deep decarbonization. That will ameliorate some of the chaos in the climate system. The other is for the plant breeding boffins to come up with enough tolerant crops that can cope with our new weather and keep at least some of us fed.

    Personally, I don't think this is a slam dunk by a long shot, and it may not be possible at all (for various sociopolitical reasons). Still, megadeaths, obscenely horrible as the concept is, are preferable to gigadeaths.

    1145:

    To my mind, this is where civilization crashes. Certainly I expect people to be able to survive as subsistence farmers on the above model, but with little or no surplus, it's impossible to keep cities and towns fed.

    I don't expect a switch to subsistence farming to be effective. Availability of appropriate crops (that is, breeds-true grains, rather than high-yield hybrids), skills, productive-absent-addition soils, and tools is all lacking. (The availability of pre-refrigeration food storage tech, implements, and know-how is effectively zero. It's very hard to bootstrap; took millennia, initially, and centuries, post-Roman.) You can't bootstrap from our present with abruptly reduced tech and highly uncertain weather.

    (Warmer weather makes food storage harder and catching diseases easier; losing the ability to vaccinate means effectively greenfield epidemics, as we've already seen with the idiots who won't.)

    So I figure we get out of this as a high-tech civilization or we don't get out of it at all.

    1146:

    Synthetic food would be a lot easier than decarbonizing.

    http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/synthetic-hamburgers-are-the-future-and-have-been-for-1029060659

    That's how a high tech civilization would do it.

    1147:

    I think your assumptions about the true diversity of current agricultural practices are, to put it politely, questionable. What's going on is that you're buying into industry rhetoric and not looking at all the things that people who aren't part of that system are doing.

    That said, I agree that it's not a clean or pleasant transition. Where I disagree is the absolutist position of high civilization or we're all dead, no other possibilities.

    If you don't get it, I'd suggest looking at why the Russians didn't experience a famine when their high civilization crashed in the 1990s. If you're not reading my blog regularly, the tl;dr version is that most of their citizens had dropped out of it decades before it crashed, and so they didn't starve. That's why it's worth learning what the drop outs are doing now.

    1148:

    If you don't get it, I'd suggest looking at why the Russians didn't experience a famine when their high civilization crashed in the 1990s.

    Massive amounts of foreign imports.

    Derp.

    That was the goal and it happened real fucking quick.

    That's not an indication of anything but Capital.

    ~

    More fun story time:

    From one of our host bodies.

    When I was about ten or eleven, I remember eating chicken for dinner. A leg, I think. The carcass was in the middle of the table, there were vegetables and gravy and the usual family conversation.

    I remember biting into the leg and seeing a flash of red and it wasn't even blood. Just pink flesh and jelly around it.

    And at that moment, I felt a wave of nausea as I fully understood what I was eating. My body shuddered with it. My mind understood the reality of what I was eating. I had a few moments of rejecting it entirely but my family looked on with displeasure.

    And I looked at my family who were all smiling and laughing. My discomfort was ignored and laughed at.

    What went through my mind was complicated, but boiled down to a single thought: I now understood where my food came from. I understood why my rabbit disappeared and why our dogs liked meat. I understood how it all worked

    From that moment on, I knew I could eat people without moral qualms

    1149:

    I think your assumptions about the true diversity of current agricultural practices are, to put it politely, questionable.

    Oh, piffle.

    Take away the bulk grains, the wheat and the maize and the rice, and how many people get fed compared to present population?

    Breadth of individual agricultural practice is irrelevant. What matters is the ratio of production to population; greater than 1, all is well. Less than 1, problem. There's absolutely no basis to believe that the system degrades gracefully. And agriculture is highly time-sensitive, irrespective of particular practice. And now it's increasingly time-sensitive to events that are increasingly chaotic.

    Current practice is totally willing to make tuna or pollinators extinct; however these systems make decisions, they're not good ones.

    So, no, it doesn't matter if there's some amount of food getting produced by sustainable methods; you have to feed everybody or the population crash gets everybody. (There is not past to return to, resource-wise.) Population is set by the minimum resources; second failed crop year in a row is a very bad place. You can maybe get around that with a relatively low population relative to good-year yields, but we're not there and we can't get there because we're way, way over sustainable carrying capacity even by simple continuation of the methods we have to stop using.

    I think it's still possible to get to a stable food supply, but it would have to be treated as an existential-threat scale of emergency. And that opinion feels optimistic.

    1150:

    Do the research.

    1151:

    IIRC the 'Limits to Growth' model had food production per capita peaking in the 2015-2020 timeframe, followed by a steeper falloff in level than assent till about 2060.

    http://www.theoildrum.com/files/Limits%20ot%20Growth%20Forecast.png

    Last I saw we were still tracking the BAU prediction fairly well. Honestly, if that model were an economics model they'd have a Nobel prize and would be lauded as economic gods - a prediction from 45 years ago that's still basically right?...

    1152:

    I think that Erdogan would be dropped & then hung out to dry, rather than that. It's clear that the "realpolitik" people in the US & Russia are already working on this, because they can see it coming & are determined to dodge the bullet.

    1153:

    This is the one that the genetic engineers and plant (and animal) breeders are cranking on, trying to tinker with everything from heat-shock proteins to water use efficiency to get new crops (and presumably) new breeds that can produce well at higher temperatures, with less water, more salt, etc. And good luck to them. And, of course the utter fuckwits in the supposedly "green" movement are doing their best to wreck, by trashing GM experimental trials. They cannot or will not see past: "Monsanto is EVIL" - yes, well, true, & your problem was, err ... survival.

    1154:

    Oh NOOOEEE! Your post @ 1139 was entirely clear & rational & useful. Here, what did you say? From one of our host bodies. F F S !

    1155:

    Interesting Raises a question I've been musing on for some time ... Suppose we get an "obvious" 2-4 C rise with macroscopic effects that everyone can see, even if "locally" ( i.e about 10% of planet ) At that point the politicians & business leaders will go into panic-mode & "reverse" etc ... Will any of the deniers, who led this insane charge get dangled from lam-posts, & if not, why not?

    P.S. Heteromeles @ 1148 Allotments? More of them? Armed guards to protect food-stocks? I can see that one coming, all too easily.

    1156:

    Will any of the deniers, who led this insane charge get dangled from lam-posts, & if not, why not?

    Sarcasm right? If not ......

    1157:

    I'm not seeing any of the rich and powerful doing any aboutface toward reason any time soon. Indeed as things go south I'd expect them to get worse as they try to accumulate more and more wealth in the unshakeable conviction of their ability to buy their way out of anything.

    Tony Abbott (former PM of Oz), one of the worst of the worst, was overheard chatting about sealevel rise in a way that made it perfectly clear he knows and understands what he's doing and he absolutely doesn't give a shit who suffers.

    I'm sure they'd be happy to throw their gullible supporters to the wolves if it suited them, but I can't see a situation arising where that might happen.

    1158:

    3am at the border of Greg's allotment...

    A fat slug drops off a cabbage, raises its stalky eyes and looks around. Mist swirls heavily across the damp earth, spilling into hollows between clods, coiling around the bean stalks far above. A half moon flashes its gleams between hurrying scraps of cloud.

    On a nearby allotment, something stirs. A dark shape moves within an innocent-seeming poly tunnel. Something resembling a bent drainpipe pokes through the roof, swivels around, disappears again. The tunnel meows like a cat.

    A bush creeps forward in the darkness. A black-clad arm parts the grass around the base of a shed. A fleeting moonbeam briefly reveals a fertiliser sack gradually advancing with movements like an injured seal.

    There is silence for a while.

    A blade gleams for an instant. The faintest of sounds whispers between the plants: the faint scrape as a cabbage stalk is severed.

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH... The stillness is shattered by a withering blast of automatic fire from the compost heap. Bodies jerk in the orange light of the muzzle flashes like drug-crazed dancers at some sinister shamanic ritual. A bullet ricochets off a spade with a loud clang. Then all is quiet once more, the only sound a barking dog somewhere far off in the thickening mist.

    When the grey fingers of dawn begin to pluck away the veil of night, they reveal a figure shambling about the plot; it is the hunched figure of a man, his back bent, clad in rags of hessian sacking and covered in compost, like a kind of dirty horticultural Gandalf. He cackles through his long white beard, dislodging fragments of compost; he replaces the last spadeful of earth in a hole and pats it down.

    He turns to the slug; "Lovely crop of cabbages we'll have next year", he says to it, and chops it in half with his spade.

    1159:

    Back to the "WE ARE ALL DOOMED!" strange attractor. I blame it on a blog dominated by Old Farts projecting their own fears of upcoming personal mortality.

    1160:

    That host body seems to be lucid. Any chance you could let it do the typing from now on?

    1161:

    I blame the fact that we're 1) self-selected for an interest in the future, 2) aware of the same trends that pretty much everyone else is aware of by now, and 3) intelligent enough to realize that we are not immune to the sorts of horrible things that have happened to many people throughout history when trends turned unfavorable. But YMMV.

    1162:

    No NOT sarcasm Seriously,we have a problem & although the US is vital here, because it's the largest economic/industrial nation with a large number of "deniers", like the Trumpy, there are other places where action on GW is essential - I'm thinking of China & India especially. China's pollution & related deaths & contribution to GW are all enormous, but what are they doing about it?

    Also seriously, if the penny really drops, how fast can an at least partial crash-reverse be effected to save as many millions as possible ??? [ And what, apart from state-sponsored (i.e. non-profit) nuclear power) are the easy, quick wins? I'm also assuming that new "Oil" fuelled cars will virtually disappear by 2030, anyway, if not much sooner.

    1163:

    What is the "Profit" in it for them? This is what confuses me - I can see why the Kochs want to fund denialism - they're coal owners. Ditto the vile C Booker in the torygraphm - he's being paid to write that shit ( I'd love to know who is paying him ) But what does Abbot or Trump get out of it, other than a dangle from a lamp-post?

    1164:

    SUPERB!

    Actually, I usually wear the oldest most disreputable pair of trousers that don't actually have holes in vital places, + ancient, scrofulous sweatshirts is more my style, but you have the correct spirit.

    IIRC, during WWI, anyone caught stealing from an allotment was either jailed or had their "reserved occupation" cancelled. Quite rightly, food theft was taken seriously

    1165:

    In Abbots case, surely a key to the big boys clubhouse? Other than that, they do only have a certain amount of attention to give to things, and even if they realise it can be a problem there are other more important things and people will sort it all out later etc etc. How many important things have you put off doing for no good reason or because it was complicated etc?

    1166:

    And, the politicians have a naive faith that their "servants" - the scientists & engineers, will get them out of the hole that they have dug, whilst sneering at & underpaying then, too ...... And, as you say overweening hubris "It can't possibly happen to US, we're cleverer that the people who made those mistakes last year/decade/century/millenium" And we can always buy our way out of trouble. Though that last does not apply to China, of course.

    The Lamp Posts are waiting .....

    1167:

    Bugger - I meant WW II, of course

    1168:

    4) Part of a fading "no can do" Western civilization whose influence is waning, coupled with the unspoken fear that maybe our secular liberalism is going too, because it was always tied to western rather than global cultures.

    5) Post Imperial Depression: "These fools will not listen to wiser heads!"

    Do you really think the We Are All Doomed attractor could exist in a similar Indian or Chinese blog?

    1169:

    Yes, of course. There's an internet rule that you can find blogs about anything.

    1170:

    You seem to be saying that the We Are All Doomed attractor is akin to Nietzsche's "European Buddhism", with the emphasis on "European". Why do you think Indian or Chinese blogs are immune to it?

    Certainly, Simon Critchley called John Gray the "great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age", and warned about the necessity of refusing the temptations of this style of passive nihilism. However, bounding a concept by European signposts doesn't mean it can only be found in the European cultural sphere.

    1171:

    Meanwhile, in another part of the field .... Erdogan crushes independent journalism He doesn't seem to realise that, if he goes on like this, no-one from "outside" will support him, as I suggested, earlier.

    1172:

    Define "outside" both the UK and US already support some shitty regimes. Why should Turkey be an exception especially when its a bulwark to a Syria that's a client state of Russian.

    1173:

    On the one hand, the pollution in most of China should make predictions of environmental catastrophe very plausible. A bit belated, really. On the other hand, since industrialization is much newer there, they don't commonly have the experience of following these issues for decades and watching the complete lack of progress. Also, more people remember the basic skills of pre-industrial food production, so they have more to fall back on.

    Similar, but different.

    BTW, I may be an oldish (43) fart now, but I was like this in my 20s.

    1174:

    Interesting anecdote. It seems to illustrate a young person finding it preferable to choose to rewire their brain to accept cannibalism and the implicit cultural baggage that comes with admitting to being a sociopath, than making the choice to stop eating other animals, purely on the balance of the mild disapproval we are told about? Either this person is quite impressively able to weigh up the long term social costs of not eating meat against the short term effort of brain rewiring, this is a frank admission of irrationality, or some part of the story is being left out. (I'm assuming the latter, given your posting history.)

    1175:

    We're not doomed. Technology will save us. Nutrient pills are trivial. Energy and organic waste are the only needed inputs. Earth can support many people, of whatever taste in self delusion, especially if you stack them high and make the boxes small. And what are all those people made of? Carbon.

    1176:

    "Why do you think Indian or Chinese blogs are immune to it?"

    Because they can remember mass starvation, war, bodies in the streets. For them, now are the good times and things are getting better. Anyway, I was talking about a blog of comparable popularity to this one, not some loner talking with his sockpuppets.

    1177:

    Feel free to lie down and die then.

    1178:

    Internet penetration in India is a meagre 20%, so anyone writing a blog there is very lucky and probably busy with her career (there are probably some doomsday blogs but they wont stand out from the mass of optimist blogs).

    Internet penetration is around 46% and any doomsday blogs are probably filtered by the Great Wall.

    1179:

    If there's one thing I learnt from the internet, it's that broad sweeping generalisations about hundreds of millions of people is a foolish thing to do.

    1180:

    Err ... haven't you noticed the way the US & "Europe" are slowly backing away from Erdogan & at the least "finger-wagging"? Some supposed "friends" can get dropped very quickly if they get too embarrassing.

    1181:

    For them, now are the good times and things are getting better. WRONG Might have been true 5 years ago, was definitely true 10 years ago. Now, not so much, if at all ... The pressures & strains of rapid development are showing & people are hurting. Why do you think there's a sudden Maoist-style clampdown going on in China, if not for this ... ?

    1182:

    You don't have to successfully predict rainfall or global temperature to keep global ag going, you just need to guess and have some of the guesses turn out true. The US ghas 1% of it's gdp tied up in agriculture

    The thing that will save us on that front is the fact that growing food now is so damn easy and takes such a small fraction of our global resources that even if it gets an order of magnitude harder it will still be doable

    The thing I am worried about is social disruption angle. Wars, migrations, all the fun stuff that comes with declining standards of living

    1183:

    "The availability of pre-refrigeration food storage tech, implements, and know-how is effectively zero."

    Nah. Sorry. Even in the UK, and people under 60, there are enough who still do such things to pass lessons on. The problems are that it is labour- and space-intensive, and nutritionally poor during winter and the hungry gap. You can do something about the latter by foraging if you live in real countryside, in some climates, but most of the world doesn't. And you can't do anything about the absolute shortages.

    1184:

    And haven't you noticed the way that the Pentagon and NATO are backing Turkey, including its more aggressive actions?

    1185:

    Greg: be careful of eating any bait hook, line or sinker.

    According to source I've not checked yet:

    The newspaper he's targeting is part of his power base: the owner hasn't been in Turkey for 10 years (if return = jail), it's Islamic Nationalist (i.e. not liberal) and it might be a move to prove to TPTB that he can act as a credible buffer zone to the mighty shit storm [tm] about to happen in the M.E.

    So, be careful with that one - analogy: Thatcher goes after the Telegraph rather than Thatcher goes after the Socialist Worker.

    As stated: that's 2nd hand, might be utter junk.

    ~

    Power elites, blinded by hubris, intoxicated by absolute power, unable to set limits on their exploitation of the underclass, propelled to expand empire beyond its capacity to sustain itself, addicted to hedonism, spectacle and wealth, surrounded by half-witted courtiers—Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and others—who tell them what they want to hear, and enveloped by a false sense of security because of their ability to employ massive state violence, are the last to know their privileged world is imploding.

    “History,” the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “is the graveyard of aristocracies.”

    The carnival of the presidential election is a public display of the deep morbidity and artifice that have gripped American society. Political discourse has been reduced by design to trite patriotic and religious clichés, sentimentality, sanctimonious paeans to the American character, a sacralization of militarism, and acerbic, adolescent taunts. Reality has been left behind.

    The Graveyard of the Elites Chris Hedges, Truthdig, 28th Feb 2016

    ~

    If you look to Honduras you'll see what I think of that little one.

    I'm hoping that the military types around this part understand the term "Heavy Messing" in reference to their SF and so on.

    But no: the Top Left of the graph aren't Greenies - we love you too much.

    1186:

    For those who doubt that the power players are entering the fray:

    Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches, but an even bigger Wall Street player stands ready to mold and enact her economic and financial policy if she becomes president.

    BlackRock is far from a household name, but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.

    Fink has made clear his desire to become treasury secretary someday. The Obama administration had him on the short list to replace Timothy Geithner. When that didn’t materialize, he pulled several members of prior Treasury Departments into high-level positions at the firm, which may improve the prospects of realizing his dream in a future Clinton administration.

    And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda.

    Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury Department The Intercept, 3rd March 2016

    1187:

    Always remember that the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Erdogan has his fingers in many pies, and it is quite likely that the true reason for his closing that paper is not generally known, and might well not make sense except to people who know Turkish politics very well. But several sources indicate that it was opposed to him.

    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/turkish-authorities-seize-country-largest-newspaper-160304184742814.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-seizes-control-of-zaman-newspaper-critical-of-president-erdogan-a6913611.html

    1188:

    Really great writing. I very much enjoyed that. I never could get my veiwpoints right, but I'm sure that's the first essay I've seen written in what I'm guessing might be 3rd Slug.

    1189:

    I've not parsed it yet.

    The effort that went into the 2013 (?) efforts against him make me not like reactivating that line.

    Ah, thought it rhymed & I was having flash-backs:

    Late last Saturday night, Celil Sağır left his home, in an Istanbul suburb, for the offices of the Turkish media group Zaman, where he works as the managing editor of the English-language daily Today’s Zaman. Earlier that week, an anonymous Twitter user, going by the name Fuat Avni, who claims to be part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inner circle, had warned that there would be a police operation against media outlets that were seen to be loyal to Fethullah Gülen, a Pennsylvania-based Turkish imam whose vast network of followers occupy influential roles across Turkish institutions, including government and media. On Saturday, Fuat Avni followed up with details, predicting that the raid would happen that weekend. Staff from Zaman, which operates a variety of media outlets, including a Turkish-language newspaper, flooded the office to prepare.

    What the Zaman Raid Means for Turkey’s Media New Yorker, Oct 2014

    Fethullah Gülen

    Off the cuff remark:

    Our Man in Havana is having issues - might be a signal that The Vodka Swilling Bear is favoured this month.

    1190:

    The thing that will save us on that front is the fact that growing food now is so damn easy and takes such a small fraction of our global resources that even if it gets an order of magnitude harder it will still be doable

    Depends on the resource. Agriculture counts for about 80% of US water consumption, and about 90% in some Western states. If hotter weather makes plants transpire more, then we start getting ugly tradeoffs between planting high-yield and drought resistant crops. Past a certain point, even drought resistant crops have trouble.

    1191:

    And, there it is:

    PsBattle: Presidential candidate, Marco Rubio sitting in a giant chair

    Has some (but not all - missed the booger refrence and Ghostbuster cross-over potential on Cruz there):

    But, check:

    Mad Max Bible WWE wrestling Christian Right Symbol on Trump's Right Side Small Rubio (sitting on the back of Cruz) Texas Chainsaw Massacre

    etc.

    It's not good, it's MEDIOCRE.

    But hey: compared to the rest of the field, it's golden.

    1192:

    "[ And what, apart from state-sponsored (i.e. non-profit) nuclear power) are the easy, quick wins?"

    Quick easy wins abound, but at this late date they're not much use. Nuclear isn't one of them though. It's not easy and it's far from quick. See OGH's Nuclear plant school excursion report, linked at top of this page. Currently nuclear has slightly less than 500 plants world wide and provides about 2.5% of our energy needs. We'd need to build 20 000 plants and they'd need to come on line no later than 1990 (the year we reached 350 ppm). While this path was still an option when we were given our first really serious warnings in about 1970, barring time machines (which interestingly most of the official government projections rely on) we're going to miss that 1990 deadline. The other problem is that last time I looked (which was a while ago) there were enough uranium reserves to cover our needs for about 80 years at current consumption. Increasing our consumption by a factor of 40 would surely make a dent in that, even if you went to fast breeders and started mining currently unrecoverable uranium.

    Quick easy wins. Well if I was king of the world, and it was still 1985, lacking PV at a reasonable price, I'd start constructing concentrating solar plants as fast as my little feet could carry them out into the deserts. Lacking any kind of storage solution I'd mandate business can only open from 10am to 2pm 7 days a week and grid power would go off about 14:30 and not come back on until 9:30 the next day. Every house would get a 10A main fuse. I'd encourage the Moroccan cooking model where everyone takes their ovenproof container full of food to the local oven in the morning and picks it up again, slow cooked to perfection in the afternoon. I'd build climate controlled bunk houses (think air raid shelter) underground for people to sleep in during adverse weather (either too hot or too cold). Petrol would be rationed (Ambulance and Fire fighters, probably no-one else) In other words I'd take the kind of strong action that's normally reserved for war efforts.

    If I was king of the world in 2016 I'd try to spend time with my children.

    1193:

    If I was king of the world in 2016 I'd try to spend time with my children.

    Go watch John Wick.

    1194:

    Agriculture is in even worse shape than that.

    Probably best to look at agriculture in terms of energy invested to energy returned.

    The oft derided Malthus wrote his stuff in a day when the energy in food calories invested in farming had to be less than the energy returned as food calories harvested. Plowing, sowing, winnowing, carrying water etc was done by animals (horses and humans mostly) who had to be fed from the products of those labours.

    That's no longer the case. That's why his predictions failed so spectacularly. According to the USDA the energy used to produce the food for an average American for one day is about 33 000 food Calories (of course they express it in ounce-furlongs or something). Almost all of that energy comes from non-renewable sources. In a very real sense modern humans eat coal and oil.

    1195:

    Nah. The 80 years is only the highest grade of ore. There are thousands of years or ore that is energy-effective just using current methods, and beyond that there is granite.

    1196:

    Yeah, there's low grade ore, but you have to start looking at the energy invested to recover that ore, vs the energy you get out of it. Particularly as you're going to have to run the mining equipment on synthetic fuels made from electricity, CO2 and water.

    You'd need to find and begin to exploit those low grade reserves

    Additionally you'd need to invent and construct fast breeder reactors.

    All within the 2 years that it takes to exhaust the current reserves.

    As for Granite... It contains about 1/20 000th as much uranium as current ores. It's also not soluble in acids. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that would make it 20 000 times more expensive than current U. Which would make it 2 million dollars per kg. Which works out to about 40 dollars per kWh delivered to the grid. It would also mean mining about 250 Gt of granite every year. You'd cut that amount with the yet to be invented commercial fast breeder reactors but that's still a lot of hard rock mining. I don't have figures but I can't imagine that would be energy positive.

    1197:

    4) Part of a fading "no can do" Western civilization whose influence is waning, coupled with the unspoken fear that maybe our secular liberalism is going too, because it was always tied to western rather than global cultures.

    I live in the States. Secular liberalism went a long time ago. Most of my coworkers seem to be young earth creationists, although I'm going off hints because I really don't want to have that discussion out in the open. A little under 50% of my countrymen regard evolution as a lie from the pit of Hell, completely literally.

    1198: U.S. Treasure Secretary is a post that requires Senate confirmation, so it can be fought over if appropriate, and ugly tactics are not unusual. The The Intercept article and the links hanging off of it suggest a mixed bag, that should be watched. Certainly a policy shift (in the US and elsewhere) to encourage longer term investing is needed.

    Last night's story made me sad. Not the predator part, because yeah thinking meat eaters need to think that through (including whether or not it is OK to eat the bodies of members of their own species that die from natural causes, or cultured own-species flesh), though humans are omnivores, and can shift to mostly or completely plant-based diets. (And should do so en-mass both for efficiency and to reduce methane emissions.) The usual response in my limited (omnivore :-) ) circles to such a moment of clarity is an instant conversion to vegetarianism or veganism. No, it was the lead. Teared up a bit. Well played (on multiple levels).

    1199:

    Serious point.

    Host has a role in Society and so on and is subject to the usual Game Rules. He's not immune to pressure on his publishers etc or the Big Boys [tm] just throwing down a cool $15 mil to make sure he never, ever, ever gets heard again. (That's really a thing).

    This is the [muzzled] Combat Enhanced Meta-Cognitive Attack Model.

    And I'm very careful to make sure that my lines of attack align with certain power bases.

    To do otherwise would be suicide. Literally.

    Now, re-read that whole Paradoxical Middle line again: there's a reason for it.

    1200:

    If you need an example:

    M. Romney - El Salvador - Private Capital, proven, all priced in, Out Of Context research.

    H. Clinton - Honduras - no connection. Out Of Context rumour.

    Difference?

    The Secretary of State doesn't do personal deals [tm], so the reference is clean.

    ~

    And, yeah.

    This is the important part.

    This shit can, and does, get you killed.

    . . . . . . . . .

    x4469 for Honduras recently.

    1201:

    So, does anyone have any fiction recommendations? Loved "A Darker Shade of Magic", sequel "A Gathering of Shadows" queued up, "Ancillary Mercy" queued up, reading "Wake of Vultures" now, looking for a decent long sci-fi story or a good collection of (SF) short stories. (First book of "The Red" had no surprises except in details but was pretty good.)

    1202:

    In the PAST tense. Might have been true 2-3 months ago .... Erdogan is becoming/has become too dodgy to back all the way ....

    1203:

    HBtT Not even wrong The newspaper owner is a "christian" of some form or other. Try again

    1204:

    AND Said paper was really exposing his ( & more importantly his son's ) ultra-corrupt dealing to do with oil "smuggling" .... i.e. Buying the stuff from Da'esh, the shits

    1205:

    HBtT WRITE THAT IN ENGLISH!

    1206:

    In which case. long-term, the USA is totally fucked, because the scientists & technologists will flee elsewhere, just as if Trump or Cruz become POTUS

    1207:

    HBtT "Serious Point" No, you're bullshitting AGAIN

    Oh yes, for some of us 4469 means something else

    1208:

    Miles Cameron "Red Knight" series; Jodi Taylor's "Chronicles of St.Marys"; and K J Parker...

    1209:

    The USA military-industrial machine (including NATO) is ignoring the fact that Putin was elected precisely because the Russians were fed up with its encroachment and being pushed around by the USA and its lackeys, so elected a strong man to take a stand before they are forced into the last ditch.

    When I saw "USA and its lackeys", I laughed and wondered whether you were going to mention capitalist fat cats and imperialist running dogs :) Your start point appears to be the assumption that Russia in the 90s had a stable, mature democratic process.

    Putin was elected because of internal, not external, concerns; you don't worry about "NATO encroachment" when there are no jobs, no money, and nothing in the shops. The West didn't push Russia into industrial-scale corruption and criminality, the siloviki managed that all on their own... Putin rode Yeltsin's coat-tails as someone more competent and less drunk.

    He's chosen the "strong man" theme (bareback tiger riding, or whatever) because appealing to Nationalism is a tried and true path to votes, as practised by many over the last century; spread fear and hate, appeal to dreams of a Golden Age past, point at a scapegoat, promise a future of Unicorns and Chocolate Fountains.

    You can see the same thing with Trump, and no one is pushing the USA into any ditches... And with Farage / UKIP / Brexit campaigners, with Salmond and the SNP, with India and the BNP, with the Kims and North Korea. Rallying cries about foreigners can be part of an election campaign, without them being the real reason people vote that way...

    1210:

    I suggest that you stop inventing straw men, and putting words into my mouth.

    Your ignorance of Russia is incredible, almost McCarthyite. The corruption, which long predates perestroika, is something that they more-or-less accept, just as the UK accepts that its taxes subsidise banks, multinationals etc. Serious commentators on Russia were pointing out that the Russians were getting fed up and were going to appoint a strong man (not necessarily Putin, who was one of several) well before he first got into office.

    1211:

    Putin, Yeltsin and the bomb in Metro 2...

    1212:

    I invented nothing, and put no words. It's a straight quote, from your post, in context. I've not invented a "straw man" if you said something that you realise later looks slightly ridiculous.

    Anyway, I actually agree with you - particularly about the likelihood of Russia electing a "strong man". It was generally agreed... and a key plot point in several works of 90s fiction.

    Where I disagree with you is that Putin was elected "precisely because" of NATO encroachment (your words - if you mean "in part because", say so). He was there at the right place (Moscow, hanging around Yeltsin), right time (Yeltsin sacks his entire cabinet and appoints Putin as Prime Minister), got the right supporters, and then consolidated his political success (Yeltsin resigns, Putin is appointed Acting President). He's chosen the "it's all NATO's fault" because it plays well with chippy nationalist supporters.

    I don't deny that the "NATO encroachment" propaganda line is now a successful factor in his PR, and that the opinion of chippy Nationalist Russians is now a consideration in foreign policy, I just disagree with your suggestion that it was somehow the sole trigger for Putin's initial re-election.

    And smile at "...the USA and its lackeys...", obviously :)

    1213:

    Your first paragraph is precisely what I said.

    And I stand by what I said. Throughout the 1990s, the serious observers were all saying that, if the USA and NATO continued to push Russia back and generally treat it as hostile, it would elect a strong man to respond. You are carefully ignoring all the events of that period.

    You claim that the UK is not the USA's lackey, but you are closing your eyes to the facts.

    1214:

    I'm not suggesting that the UK doesn't try over-hard to be seen as part of a "Special Relationship", either. For better or worse, we've placed ourself firmly in the US camp in many foreign policy areas.

    I'm smiling (and I suggest you note the smilies in both of my posts) at the vocabulary you chose to use. "The USA and its lackeys" sounds like it comes straight out of the Socialist Propaganda Speechwriting Manual. It's right up there with "Imperialist Running Dogs" and "Great Satan", and feeling the need to have the word "Democratic" or "People's" in the name of your country... (extra points if you use both).

    Russia wasn't "pushed back". It went bankrupt. Its alliances fell, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up. The Baltic States had been invaded in WW2, remember? And the Tsarists had done their own "Manifest Destiny" thing all over the Transcaucasus in the 19th Century. Some countries that still had an identity decided that they wanted out of the shotgun wedding; others had a local strongman who reckoned there was personal profit to be made.

    Empires fall. The Russian Empire fell in the 90s; I could suggest that it was only as "pushed back" from the Baltic as the UK was "pushed back" from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The difference is that the loonier members of HM Govt don't suggest that Canada, Australia, NZ should be brought back into the UK because of "history" (unlike the nutjob in Russia who was making noises about the Grand Ducky of Finland)

    1215:

    Horribly true, even though I am going to vote OUT when referendum day comes ( It's to do with Common Law & European Arrest Warrant & EU corruption, but that's another story, OK? )

    1216:

    In a word, bollocks. Take a look at how many of Russia's allies were invaded or destablised by the USA, NATO or the UK, using entirely specious reasons; Iraq, Libya and Syria are just three that spring to mind. Those regimes were nauseating, but the USA and UK have equally bad ones. There were several other cases where the USA offered Soviet allies deals to good to refuse, with a rider that essentially meant they changed alliance. The agreement with NATO was that the ex-Soviet states would be left as neutrals, which was badly dishonoured by NATO. All attempts at building closer ties with the EU and even NATO were publicly and rudely rebuffed (even in the 1980s), and an increasing number of economic deals cut Russia out in favour of the EU and other USA allies. And the speed at which the USA/NATO/EU recognised the illegal coup in Ukraine was incredible. That's not being pushed?

    Anyway, enough is enough. I don't love Russia, but I really don't want those idiot warmongers in the Pentagon and NATO to push Russia into a position where it has to allow itself to blockaded or fight. It is damn close to that point, and if NATO backs Turkey in closing the Dardanelles to it, I predict war.

    1217:

    Interesting perspective you have. Similarly, from my perspective, it's bollocks, if not delusional. "Stay away from countries we invaded and ruled, they're not allowed to have choices, they're our playground"?

    Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia joined NATO, and that's understandable to me. There is no credible threat to Russian soil from them, while there is a demonstrable threat to them from Russia (they've only just got Russian troops off their soil, just in time for Putin and his corrupt mates to threaten them again). If you want an example, look at Ukraine; those are Russian regular forces fighting on Ukrainian soil. However much we agree that Crimea used to be Russian, "just invading it" is an unacceptable alternative to negotiations.

    Assuming that the USSR's former allies well outside the "near abroad" were sacrosant because of its collapse is also stunningly naive. Take Libya; from the 1980s, Libya was actively funding, arming, and training terrorists in the UK and Germany; without the MV Eksund's trips, PIRA would have killed far fewer Britons. Oh; and those (Soviet) weapons and explosives were delivered with either the tacit or explicit support of the USSR.

    US/UK negotiations got it to the point where we avoided the fact that they'd shot a UK policewoman from inside their embassy; they handed over the suspected Lockerbie bomber (however dodgy the evidence looks), negotiated away their viable WMD programs, and restarted trade. Support for PIRA et al had stopped. A schoolfriend was across helping to train Libyan policemen in an exchange to teach them skills other than those involving rubber hoses; all prior to the Arab Spring.

    Please, do explain how it was in US/UK interest to destabilise or overthrow a compliant Gaddafi with an expanding oil trade, leaving a split country with nutjob fanatics running around? Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant, and he wouldn't have ended his days at the point of a bayonet if he hadn't taken to committing the full force of his military against his own population - at which point, with the support of the UN, the only available forces (NATO) tried to do something to prevent loss of life.

    Now, you can spin that as "NATO destabilises Russian allies", but IMHO it takes a frankly delusional worldview. I mean, "idiot warmongers in the Pentagon" is a cute soundbite, but when you look at Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine I'd say that Russia is every bit their equal.

    Russia is where Britain was, sixty years ago; it has lost an Empire, but refuses to accept it.

    1218:

    Please, do explain how it was in US/UK interest to destabilise or overthrow a compliant Gaddafi with an expanding oil trade, leaving a split country with nutjob fanatics running around?

    Will you take the words of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000, Wesley Clark as evidence?

    So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" -- meaning the Secretary of Defense's office -- "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!"

    General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned - Seven Countries In Five Years YT: documentary: 2:12

    Note: Clark has a lot of issues, you can find a discussion of the legitmacy etc on Metabunk (skeptic forum - somewhat decent, has blind spots)

    However, it's certainly the case that the US establishment has not been coy about celebrating Libya's destabilization:

    Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you: http://t.co/gCyM3351 John McCaine Twitter, 5th Dec 2011

    Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other “dictators” may be “nervous” after the death of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, U.S. Senator John McCain said. Bloomberg, 2011

    But, really.

    If you're not up to speed on this ancient history, it's kinda impossible to convince you.

    1219:

    Note: Clark has a lot of issues

    Understatement. He appears to have been a bit of a micromanager and rather ignorant - see the hat-swapping with Ratko Mladic, then posing for photos (displaying stunning naivete with that one). See the insistence that General Jackson "take back" Pristina Airport, and Jackson refusing (the Theatre Commander who was a USN Admiral, sided with Jackson).

    Note also that Clark's claim was about 2001, and in 2003 Gaddafi accepted blame for Lockerbie. Trade sanctions were removed, and Executive Order 13477 was signed by Dubya in 2008.

    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13477

    The Arab Spring wasn't until a decade later, so as "we're going to knock over these countries in five years" is true, "US Destabilisation" was running rather behind schedule...

    1220:

    It's almost as if Hegemonic Empires aren't monoliths and multiple factions exist within them, each with their own agendas that fight intercine wars to who gets to push multi-lateral agendas, and that's discounting the ones outside of the tent.

    And, of course, that takes TIME.

    Wake me up the next time you need a lesson in politics.

    1221:

    For them, now are the good times and things are getting better. WRONG Might have been true 5 years ago, was definitely true 10 years ago. Now, not so much, if at all ... The pressures & strains of rapid development are showing & people are hurting. Why do you think there's a sudden Maoist-style clampdown going on in China, if not for this ... ?

    Sorry but from the people I know who visit regularly for business and one couple even has a child or two living there, life is sooooo much better than 10 or 20 years ago for the vast majority. It's not the nirvana they we thinking it would be by now but still it is way better. You still have a majority of people who were living in a mud hut with no running water or whose relatives were until recently. Or still are.

    As to the sudden clampdown, it seems to me it's as much of we can see it better than before so it looks new to us. US = "Westerners"

    1222:

    Nuts. The PARAGRAPH that starts out "WRONG" was supposed to be bolded to show it was Greg's quote. I guess bold tagging doesn't work here. Now?

    1223:

    Problem: Are you going to back the bad guys, the other bad guys, or the really evil guys? Like I said, there are strong signs that the US & Russia have seen this problem & are very carefully manouevering to avoid it, provide neither sides' blow-hard idiots don't get too far out of line ....

    1224:

    Very slight corrective alteration? "Russia is where Britain was, sixty years ago; it has lost an Empire, but, unlike Britain, refuses to accept , or even believe it." ( ?? ) Most of the British empire was given away, voluntarily (for certain values of ... ) over a period of 30+ years. The Soviet/Russian empire collapsed/imploded, in a single year, maybe two.

    1225:

    I debated the wisdom of replying to a troll. However, assuming you aren't a troll, and are just socially clumsy, here's a data point...

    I may disagree with Elderly Cynic, occasionally we may insult each other in the heat of the moment, but I respect him/her as an intelligent individual with a differing viewpoint.

    Wake me up the next time you need a lesson in politics

    Your comment makes it look as if you believe yourself to be the smartest person in the room, blessed with knowledge beyond the rest of us, and trying to show off.

    You aren't, you haven't, it's patronising, and it's behaviour like this that means that I normally just skip past your posts without reading them, classing them as "mostly irrelevant gibbering with the occasional drive-by insult".

    1226:

    Gibbering... hmm.

    But, since you asked, here it is:

    Key Events in Libya's Revolution Voice of America

    Setting the Stage for the Military Intervention in Libya Decisions Made and Their Implications for the EU and NATO Swedish FOI PDF 96 pages, overall summary.

    THE LIBYAN UPRISING: AN UNCERTAIN TRAJECTORY CSIS PDF - June 2011 72 pages

    Libyan rebels to receive £1.8 billion trust fund Telegraph May 2011

    Libya: rebels' backers prepare to free up $100bn of frozen funds Guardian, August 2011

    Libya After Qaddafi Lessons and Implications for the Future RAND PDF - 119

    Note: Looking at the timeline between the start of the Arab Spring in the country (Feb - May) there seems to be a slight difference in speed of response than say, oh... to the current refugee crisis.

    Hint: I don't think the Official narrative is that true.

    1227:

    Ahh, auto-downloads + forum software clash

    Try a direct link - warning, auto-download of PDF

    www.foi.se/Global/V%C3%A5r%20kunskap/S%C3%A4kerhetspolitiska%20studier/Europa%20och%20Nordamerika/foir3498.pdf

    1228:

    On August 12, 2010, Obama sent a five-page memorandum called “Political Reform in the Middle East and North Africa” to Vice-President Joseph Biden, Clinton, Gates, Donilon, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other senior members of his foreign-policy team. Though the Iranian regime had effectively crushed the Green Revolution, the country was still experiencing sporadic protests. Egypt would face crucial parliamentary elections in November. The memo began with a stark conclusion about trends in the region...

    The group was just finishing its work, on December 17th, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a vegetable vender in Tunisia, set himself on fire outside a municipal building to protest the corruption of the country’s political system––an act that inspired protests in Tunisia and, eventually, the entire region. Democracy in the Middle East, one of the most fraught issues of the Bush years, was suddenly the signature conflict of Obama’s foreign policy.

    The Consequentialist - How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy. New Yorker, May 2011

    ~

    Lucky Timing? The New Yorker seems happy to suggest otherwise.

    1229:

    From the Swedish paper, look carefully at 7.2, 7.3.1 and 7.3.3

    Those would be more important geopolitical goals than Libya, in my mind.

    1230:

    You aren't, you haven't, it's patronising

    Since you're too craven to actually read the links and respond, the point has been proved.

    It's a Mirror.

    Problem is: I don't ever not deliver on the bargain.

    Ouch.

    That's the sound of inevitability, Mr [XXX - redacted: no doxxing now]

    p.s.

    If you had asked nicely, you'd have x10 links and a fully developed geopolitical analysis of the issue.

    Instead you got offended like some kid playing conkers at Eton...

    It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?

    1231:

    Oh, and meta-meta-score:

    Old Boy Network:

    "It's not about what you know, it's about who you know"

    Fast Predator Network, old skool, GS / London Finance:

    "It's not about what you know, it's about how fast you can find the relevant data and analyze it and then tell your mate to make a profit"

    Better Than You Network:

    "I'm going to tell you something, and you won't believe it. Then I'm going to prove it. And then I'm going to make it real. And while you're wondering about that, I'm going to cut your balls off just for fun"

    The Cure - The Lovecats YT: music: 3:42

    1232:

    You do know there's gambling in Rick's Cafe?

    1233:

    If you miss the why's to the rudeness, here's a few links:

    AEI's World Forum: So Secretive We Couldn't Even Get a Snow Update Bloomberg 5th March 2016

    Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

    The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

    At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump Huffpost 5th March 2016

    “One of the bullets TRIED to enter the brain but stopped at the skull,” Roger Crigger, a family friend wrote on Facebook. “Emergency room [technicians] and [doctors] are calling this a miracle, I’m saying, by today’s worldly standards it IS a miracle...”

    A photo from his Facebook page shows a blond man with glasses wearing a dress shirt and tie. The page says that Odom is from Coeur d’Alene, served as a corporal in the Marine Corps and studied biochemistry at the University of Idaho.

    Idaho pastor shot in the skull after praying with Ted Cruz, manhunt underway for former Marine WaPo 7th March 2016

    Waaaar on Christianity, such a fresh dank meme.

    Odom

    The city of Coeur d'Alene, site of the Republican Nation Headquarters for Western States...

    Oh, in case we need a conspiracy foil hat to mark this as SF instead of plain old Patriotic Duty:

    Magnetic mind control works in live animals, makes mice happy ArsTechnica 7th March 2016

    Genetically targeted magnetic control of the nervous system Nature, Dec 2015

    ~

    Links totally unrelated to each other.

    At all.

    Apart from in alternate Watchmen comic-book fantasy world.

    1234:

    If you miss the why's to the rudeness, here's a few links:

    You assume I care or even read past the first sentence or two.

    1235:

    You're assuming the post was directed at you.

    The Rat-Race 2016 is getting nasty.

    8mdfg7nagfh99uj31

    Oh, and yes.

    100% no scope chance that little one wasn't arrange on the Farm.

    1236:

    8mdfg7nagfh99uj31

    Means something? TELL US OR SHUT UP

    1237:

    '8mdfg7nagfh99uj31' looks like the unique ID for a youtube video, but it shows up as 'unavailable' - presumably it hasn't been allocated to a video yet - and a quick check of multiple search engines turns up nothing with that exact string.

    1238:

    Rather than derail the Space Opera discussions, I'll leave this thought here:

    How long before T. Rump shields himself with a baby?

    1239:

    It's both too long for a YT video ID and insufficiently random-looking to have the feel of one. It's keyboard mash, complete with the entropic signature thereof.

    Specials

    Merchandise

    About this Entry

    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on February 22, 2016 11:23 PM.

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